His next project is a film about Wordsworth and Coleridge and the year (1798) of Lyrical Ballads, the prototypical text of English romanticism. The film, Pandemonium, will star Ian Hart as the Daffodils fan and (with luck) Robert Carlyle as the Albatross Man. Before the Oxbridge literary-critical industry throws up its hands in dismay, let me report that Temple is a serious and committed Coleridge fan. He may offer dubious soundbites about the opium-addicted Samuel T being "the first rock'n'roll casualty" and "the first psychonaut", but his approach is sympathetically ad hominem: "Coleridge was the first person to analyse the mind, to make a journey around the imagination, a hundred years before Freud."Temple's father grew up near Coleridge's cottage in Nether Stowey. Julien (and why is it Julien with an "e", not an "a'? "My mother smoked a pipe. Her favourite tobacco was St Julien") himself now lives in Somerset, where his nearest neighbour is Joe Strummer of The Clash.

One of the many pleasing things about meeting this clever, thoughtful and ambitious man is discovering how he preserves a triangulated relationship between literature, rock music and image-making. "We have this biennial conference of global Coleridge scholars in Cannington, down by the Quantock hills," he says, sounding like a bookish antiquarian. "Lots of the things in Richard Holmes's biography were dug out by the industry of these mad Coleridgeans But only he makes it all come alive...". What a long way Mr Temple has come from his callow punk apprenticeship, his days as a filmic absolute beginner.`Vigo: passion for Life' is released 4 June. TOO STRESSED to spend four nights following the tortuous progress of Wagner's Ring cycle? The Pocket Opera Company of Nurnberg has the answer: its chamber version crams it into one evening. Here, the Rhine is a paddling-pool, Nothung an arm stuck through a screen, the Tarnhelm a supermarket plastic bag.

There are moments in the production (part of the BOC Covent Garden Festival) that are played just for laughs, but what makes Peter B Wyrsch's production interesting is that, while it's not afraid to laugh, it also tells the story with an, at times, breathtaking economy. Much of the credit goes to David Seaman, whose reduction for eight singers (doubling and trebling according to voice type) and 12 players ensures that music and drama cohere, just as Wagner insisted. Sometimes Seaman's orchestra sounds like a Looney Tunes caricature, sometimes like Palm Court serenaders, but there is genuine insight in the way he has filleted the structure, then put it back together so that it seems whole. Nor is this simply Wagner's Greatest Hits: out went the Ride of the Valkyries and Siegfried's Rhine Journey, precisely because such passages stop the narrative dead in its tracks.Butchery, some will say, but what emerges has its own integrity. In this telling, Siegfried becomes the moral centre around which orbit corruption, selfishness and godly indifference. James Hancock (who also plays Froh and Siegmund) sings heroically, and captures Siegfried's essential childishness. If the singers are short on Wagnerian weight, each pays proper attention to the declamatory line, although, by the end of what is still a long show, the strain is showing.

However, it's an ingenious, sometimes amusing, often enlightening evening.On Monday, the Festival offered a strongly cast performance, conducted by Ernst Kovacic, of Richard Strauss's opera The Donkey's Shadow, which he composed for performance at his grandson's school. Incomplete when he died in 1949, it was rendered performable by the school's headmaster and music teacher.Here, dialogue was replaced by Peter Ustinov's narration, so wordy that the music became a sequence of interludes in his wanly schoolmasterish performance. It was all reminiscent of Fifties BBC children's radio, and the music proved faceless, old-fashioned and not notably Straussian, except perhaps for a quasi-classical arietta, prettily sung by Mary Nelson. An interesting oddity; but emphatically not a candidate for the repertoire.Nick KimberleyThe Pocket Opera `Ring' is at the Peacock Theatre, WC1 (0171-413 1410), 28, 29 May, and at Theatre Royal, Bath (01225 448844), 31 May, 1 June.

THE DRIVE from Basle to the picturesque Black Forest town of Badenweiler takes in some majestic scenery, though if you arrive at lunchtime, the barrier drops and your car stays put Sorry, but the local folk insist on a car-free lunch-break. Of course, you can always make your entrance on foot, walk past pristine chemists and quaint patisseries, past the Roman baths and town church to one of the many cosy hotels that German pensioners love to visit. It is a deeply conservative, conventionally religious environment that harbours at least one unexpected secret: a prestigious avant-garde musical life. Pierre Boulez has been to Badenweiler; so have Luciano Berio and Gyorgy Kurtg. Every year the Hotel Romerbad hosts a run of important concerts, but the star act springs to life in early summer when Manfred Eicher, the team from his ECM record label and a whole roster of his artists launch a three-day festival of mostly contemporary music.Year after year the same people return, but Eicher's community of listeners continues to grow.