When they encore with a cover of 5ive's "Everybody Get Up", it makes perfect sense.Terrorvision aren't the only ones with record company strife in their recent past. Last year, The Offspring fought (and lost) a battle with Columbia over the band's plans to their release new album Conspiracy Of One for free over Napster. This is a band who can afford such generosity: their third album, Smash, was the biggest-selling independent album of all time, and since leaving Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz's label Epitaph for Columbia (amid widespread accusations of "selling out"), they've hardly been short of a few bucks. The Offspring have, literally, more money than they know what to do with: they recently gave $1,000,000 to a 14-year-old girl who won a competition on their website.

Singer Dexter Holland (his real name's Bryan) owns a private jet with an anarchy symbol on the tailfin, which is either a heavily ironic statement or a queasy clash of early-Seventies rock dinosaur excess and late-Seventies punk idealism.Although contemporaries Green Day and relative upstarts Blink 182 may argue, The Offspring are currently the biggest punk band in the world. But what, in 2001, does "punk" mean? The word, in its original, American, pre-rock definition, meant a worthless person, a skinny little geek Punk rock was the Revenge Of The Nerds. Since then, however, American "punk" has atrophied to just another musical genre: pretty tunes played loud and sung with mock anger, selling mainly to tattooed jocks with beefy biceps and backwards baseball caps, the accompaniment to baring your backside out of the coach window on a school trip."Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)", in which Holland mocks wiggas, may have dodgy implications (would he have his fans eschew black music altogether?) but nevertheless raises a wry chuckle, as do the "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" soundalike "Why Don't You Get A Job?" and "Original Prankster". The targets of The Offspring's humour, in the main, are their very own audience (although in the chaos of crowdsurfing and moshing, they are unlikely to notice).The Offspring are less smart than they think they are, but still twice as smart as their fans. Which is, of course, a lucrative place for any band to be.The Offspring: Wembley Arena (020 8902 0902), tonight. Terrorvision's album 'Good To Go' is out on Papillon on 5 February.

When I heard that the BBC was devoting a weekend to the music of Alfred Schnittke, my first thought was: why? Two years after Schnittke's death is too soon to mount a re-examination, and his music, while not core repertoire, is not exactly under-played either. But being contemporary, foreign and tonal (a sexy combination to audience-conscious controllers), Schnittke fills the modern music quota without frightening the horses with too much minimalism or weird bleeps and bloops. When I heard that the BBC was devoting a weekend to the music of Alfred Schnittke, my first thought was: why? Two years after Schnittke's death is too soon to mount a re-examination, and his music, while not core repertoire, is not exactly under-played either. But being contemporary, foreign and tonal (a sexy combination to audience-conscious controllers), Schnittke fills the modern music quota without frightening the horses with too much minimalism or weird bleeps and bloops. The concept of several days' immersion into the works and surrounding culture of one composer has proved hugely popular since Sir Roger Norrington's pioneering Experience series. But with more recent composers as the focus, illumination (the principal objective of the traditional weekend) is not as easily achieved. Last year's Tan Dun festival did a great deal to provide a wider artistic context to his Pacific Rim, fusion-cuisine compositions. But in the case of Seeking the Soul there was little, beyond the screening of some of the films Schnittke composed scores for, to lure the unconverted to this panegyric, and no musical context.