“He’s at the Thiossane for three nights this week,” she said, “don’t miss him.” The club was packed, and N’Dour made us listen to supporting bands until nearly 3am Nobody seemed to mind. As with most of its former colonies, France never really went away, and is in evidence not only on breakfast tables but in street signs, Peugeot show-rooms, and in the brass plates on the doors of medecins and avocats. And, of course, in the availability of good hotels and good food. Like New York, this high-energy city sucks you into the collective sense of aspiration: struggle for it, get it, enjoy it.Many of those doing the enjoying are French. Lightly, like dancers, they withdrew, throwing cautious looks around them. A few days earlier, a crowd had got hold of a thief, and tried to lynch him.This small event made me feel no rancour towards Dakar, but somehow blooded, a sort of honorary local, a participant.

I suddenly realised he was trying to confuse me, and started Penny gripped her bag and yelled Another man was right behind us, ready to grab Penny screamed, I made incoherent grunts. We had set ourselves up like a Christmas present, stepping out of a bank stuffed with the cash for my return ticket to London. A man bent down in front of me, as though he wanted to clean my shoes, then started to shake his hands in a sort of epileptic Abracadabra. Surely, I had been transported to some Mediterranean port?

But this lush isthmus was Europe in Africa, and soon I was drinking aromatic coffee and spreading President butter on a baguette of razor crustiness. Of course, this was Africa, too – Africa colonised, acculturated, but also raw and brilliant I realised that as soon as I walked out of my hotel. Dakar’s streets are said to be West Africa’s most vibrant, vibrancy being defined as extreme poverty expressed in an hysterically-pitched street life.

The pavements of the city’s main street, the Avenue Georges Pompidou, are almost barred by clothing stalls, and the touts are desperately tenacious. I had come to Dakar to meet, and marry, my fiancee Penny, and as we walked the streets, we soon became used to being hailed by every stall-holder as les nouveaux maries. How did they know? Ca se voit, they grinned – you can tell.
We had been there a few days before anyone tried to rob us. Reaching the Senegalese capital Dakar as I did from the east, after crossing thousands of miles of Saharan Africa, felt like coming home.

Home in the sense of back to Europe, back to my own civilisation. I arrived at midnight and awoke at dawn to look out from my 12th-storey window on tall buildings and red-roofed villas, a harbour and a quiet sea. Four exciting new productions should glitter at the London Coliseum from ENO, of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, Puccinile’s Trittico, Massenet’s Manon and Gavin Bryars’ long-awaited Doctor Ox’s Experiment.In February, the new Opera for Europe company gives the young Mozart’s Lucio Silla at the Shaftesbury, whilst a potentially vintage summer at Glyndebourne includes the long-awaited revival of Strauss’ Capriccio, Peter Hall’s new Simon Boccanegra and Handel’s Rodelinda, conducted by William Christie.. That dynamic new ensemble also amazingly celebrates its silver anniversary this January by reprising the first piece they ever played – John Tavener’s The Whale, alongside new compositions. Indeed, much music at the South Bank has an exciting now look: the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s “Sounding the Century” project continues apace; Sir Simon Rattle and his CBSO’s “Towards the Millennium” series reaches the Seventies in February, featuring Lutoslawski, Birtwistle, Messiaen, Takemitsu and more (Takemitsu is granted a festival of his own in the autumn). In April, the oeuvre of Mark-Anthony Turnage is spotlighted, including the opera, Greek; and John Peel is artistic director of this summer’s “Meltdown”.The Royal Festival Hall also plays a large part in the Royal Opera’s schedules, with intriguing concert performances there of operatic rarities, including Tchaikovsky’s The Enchantress, Boito’s Mefistofele, Wagner’s Parsifal (with Placido Domingo) and Strauss’s Egyptian Helen. In the interim, Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Ives, more Bernstein, Copland and Rouse; Andre Previn wields the baton over programmes of his own music and that of Schuman, Barber and Gershwin; and Pierre Boulez presides over a 90th- birthday tribute to modern master Elliott Carter.

Also in the pipeline is a new music theatre piece from Philip Glass (right), to be directed by Robert Wilson. The LSO will also look east, giving under Rostropovich all 15 Shostakovich symphonies.More Carter comes from the London Sinfonietta at the South Bank. The LSO is scheduled to give no fewer than 18 American-themed events, beginning with a concert performance of John Adams’s Nixon in China; and ending, in December, with Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, with both operas conducted by Kent Nagano. That said, it’s very much business as usual, as on a day-to-day concert and opera per square inch basis, London goes on to prove it’s still the musical capital of the world.
At the Barbican, a massive multi-media series entitled Inventing America dominates the centre all year. Despite a fin-de-siecle feeling, London remains the performance capital of music

If 1997 marked a year of mixed fortunes for London’s music scene, the prospects for 1998 might seem equally hazardous.