Benjamin Britten’s very personal response to Len Deighton’s novel, The Ipcress File (1962), later made into the well-known film of the same name(1965) starring Michael Caine. Performed only once in Croydon’s Fairfield Halls the event was immortalised in an early song, All Over Bromley, by the 19-year-old David Bowie, present in the audience that night. Bowie sings: ‘He made us stare at his spectacled eyes / Mr Britten, and Harry now queen of the skies / over Bromley’.
Harry Palmer (1966, Opera)
The Delusionals 