In 1998, as a guest on "Have I Got News for You," he accompanied the show's closing theme tune on the xylophone and as a pianist, he once accompanied Albert Einstein playing "The Swan" by Camille Saint-Saëns on the violin (no recording was made). In 1981 he performed a solo xylophone rendition of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the U.K." in a Royal Variety Performance. He did not enjoy most popular music: when played ten modern rock songs by such artists as Hawkwind, Muse and Pink Floyd, in a 2009 interview with journalist Joel McIver, he explained, "To my ear, all these songs are universally awful."