Steampunk Cyclegeography - The Wayward Journey Of David Byrne

The Name of This Man Is
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Recognising David Byrne was the easy bit. He was the guy in the checked shirt and matching shorts, looking as if he was on day release from Sesame Street. The outfit, he said, was an impulse buy. “Then it became one of those things where I wondered if I could ever wear it.” But he had. And, teamed with white sneakers, a white digital watch, and a professorial shock of white hair, it seemed to make sense. It was strange, but neat.
Finding a quiet place to talk in the Roundhouse wasn’t so simple. First Byrne led me to the bar, which was empty, apart from the man drilling holes in the counter. Then he suggested we sit outside at a table, except that the rain was falling through the umbrellas. Byrne examined the cloudburst, then ambled back into the belly of the building, where two men were fiddling with a keyboard in the middle of the floor. He led me to a dressing room door, which he tried to open with a swipe card three times before it yielded. The room was tiny, windowless, and smelled strongly of perfume. There were folding chairs, so we sat down, facing the wall. “Mmm,” Byrne said. “This is cosy.”
Byrne’s familiarity with the Roundhouse should not have been a surprise. He appeared there in 1976 with his band Talking Heads, on a bill with the Ramones and the Stranglers. It was Talking Heads’ first show in London. His abiding memory is of “gobbing.” The show took place at the height of punk, when spitting was in vogue. “I’m glad it’s gone out of fashion,” he says drily.
Byrne’s fortunes have fluctuated over the last 30 years, but his reputation now is higher than at any time since Talking Heads split. Earlier this week, the live show celebrating his on-off musical collaborations with Brian Eno made its second visit to London, this time at the Barbican, where the after-show meet-and-greet attracted Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, who was delighted to meet Byrne’s girlfriend, photographer Cindy Sherman. (“I guess from his art school days, she was (is) an icon of sorts,” Byrne wrote in his online journal.) I asked Byrne whether his relationship with Sherman had affected his art. “Wow!” he replied. “I don’t know. Our tastes overlap quite a bit. Which is good! Not 100%, but that’s’ helpful.
“But our ways of working are miles apart. That just amazes me too. She doesn’t work for a long period; maybe collects bits and pieces of things, then thinks about it – and then has a burst of activity, really focused, and boom! It’s done.
“I’ll go from a music project to a book to an installation. Everything moves along at its own pace incrementally.”
And has she influenced him? “Yeah,” he says, laughing. “I don’t know how. It’s not like she says, ‘Let’s play dress-up.’”
Byrne is at the Roundhouse to install Playing The Building, which turns the fabric of the former locomotive turning shed into an (un)musical instrument. He has done it before, in Stockholm and New York, but the Roundhouse brings its own challenges.
The fabric of the building is wired to an old organ, and as the keys are played, the building groans in response. “You can’t change it radically. It changes a little bit, depending on what girders there are, or how much ping you get out of the pillars. But buildings from this era all have very similar elements – cast iron pillars, cast metal girder supports, some old plumbing.”
Since the Roundhouse’s expensive refit, gobbing is no longer encouraged, but perhaps the management should be wary. In a sense, this is punk art.
“I like that it kicks away some of the preciousness of art. I thought people might be more timid. Once one person starts, and they see that nobody’s better at it than anybody else, then they jump right in.”
Byrne’s other business in the capital is the launch of Bicycle Diaries, an intellectual travelogue recording the in-between moments of his travels, which he crams with visits to galleries and discussions with interesting people. The London chapter includes a cycle ride to Whitechapel to meet curator Iwona Blazwick, and he also finds time to admire the eccentricities of the hairy potter, Grayson Perry.
Byrne seems well-informed about BritArt, and is diplomatic about the talents of that other punk artist, Damien Hirst, calling him clever. “Maybe not great art, but it’s great something-or-other else.
“I once went to the Pharmacy restaurant, which was incredible. It was really perfect and clever and witty. I don’t know if it was art. It was the sort of thing that a great designer could do as well.”
This visit to the capital has been no less productive. He and Sherman cycled to the V&A to see the design exhibition Telling Tales (a qualified thumbs up), and yesterday (Thursday) they biked to Southwark to see Roger Hiorns’ Seizure, in which a council house has been coated in copper sulphate. “It’s like the JG Ballard story where everything turns to crystal. The whole ceiling, doors walls – everything’s covered with pretty sizable crystals – pretty amazing! Pretty amazing! And finding it was not easy at all.”
And this, really, is the essence of David Byrne. He could, we may assume, afford to take a taxi, but, armed with his free maps from the London Cycle Campaign, he chooses to bike it, even when his journey involves an encounter with the Elephant and Castle roundabout.
“Oh my God! Yes. I’ve heard that roundabouts are good for traffic, better than stoplights. Some guy [Tom Vanderbilt] has a book out called Traffic; there was a study, and there are fewer accidents on roundabouts than traffic lights because on roundabouts, it’s so precarious, you have to really be aware, and stop texting on your cellphone. Whereas with stoplights, people feel like the light does the job for them. So they’ll pull out when it turns green, and not think that someone else may have missed the light.”
Byrne eschews Lycra, and has been known to tie a raccoon tail to his helmet, but he is a serious cyclist. He has been an effective campaigner in New York: the city adopted his half-serious proposal for bespoke bicycle racks (dollar-bill shaped for Wall Street, bottle-shaped for The Bowery).
Much of his thinking about cycling has been influenced by the visionary approach of Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogota, in Colombia. Peñalosa brought his city centre back to life by maximising public transport and returning the streets to pedestrians and cyclists. He also stated that unless a cycle lane is safe for an eight year-old, it isn’t a cycle lane. So what does Byrne think about London?
“Cycling in London is kinda weird. There’s a group I contacted a year or so ago, the Warrington Cycle Campaign. They have pictures of poor urban planning where the bike lane goes straight into a wall, or steers you into traffic. I thought, maybe that’s the suburbs. But, I have to say, London has its share of that too - look how many of these bike lanes only last 10 metres. You’ll think, ‘Oh good, it’s going my way,’ and the next thing you know, it’s gone.”
It was Sherman who pointed out to him that, unlike New York, London comprises a collection of villages. “You really sense that when you’re cycling around. Cars and taxis will tend to take the big, busy streets. When you’re cycling you take little back roads, and you really get a sense of this being one village and then it’s a transition and you’re in another village – where people really identify with working or living in that place.”
This emphasis on community is one of the underlying themes in Byrne’s journal. He’s never happier than when cycling through a mixed community full of mom-and-pop stores, with no sign of corporate chains. (His Baltimore childhood memories predate the arrival of malls). But while the book gives a good account of his thinking, there are only a few fragments of significant autobiography.
One is that in the early 1970s, Byrne headed to California to follow the hippie dream. “That’s hard to imagine,” he agrees, “but it was The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand version of hippiedom, that was more into computers and that sort of thing, as opposed to the ‘let’s get fucked up’ side. This was more about ‘let’s build a little utopia with some new technology that we can use.’ That was really attractive, but not as attractive as New York.”
I suggest to him that now, in his mid-fifties, on his bicycle, or rigging up his steampunk organ, he’s back on that road, pursuing a modest utopia.
“There’s definitely a link to that,” he says. “Maybe now I’ve found a part of all that that seems like it might actually happen, or where people are ready for some sort of change, whereas nobody was really ready to move out of their flats into bubble-shaped homes.”
He lead me back out into the heart of the Roundhouse, where the rain drums on the glass roof, and the kling-klang of the girders grows increasingly anguished. It doesn’t sound like music at all. It sounds like the end of industry.

Omar, The Wire, and the Baltimore Fairytale of Fran Boyd and Donnie Andrews

In one of the stranger moments of the American presidential election campaign, a reporter from the Las Vegas Sun asked Barack Obama to name his favourite television programme. Without hesitation, he mentioned The Wire, which was understandable because, a) David Simon’s drama is almost monotonously described as the best television show ever and, b) it shows life in the blue-collar city of Baltimore in all its tough reality. But Obama went further, suggesting also that his favourite character was Omar Little. “He’s not my favourite person,” Obama said, prompting some nervous chuckling from his interviewer, “but he’s a fascinating character. He’s this gay gangster who only robs drug dealers, and then gives back.” Omar, said the future President, was “sort of a Robin Hood. And he’s the toughest, baddest guy on this show.”
It says something about The Wire, and something more about Barack Obama, that this remark was not considered a gaffe. But Omar is an interesting character, not least because Simon is a journalist who bases his dramas in reality. And Omar is modelled on Donnie Andrews, a Baltimore stick-up man whose real-life story of redemption made the court pages of the New York Times in August 2007, when he married Fran Boyd, a former heroin addict, whose life had been the basis of an earlier David Simon HBO drama, The Corner, the book of which has just been published by Canongate.
Knowing all of this, meeting Fran and Donnie in the bar of the Groucho Club in London is a slightly disconcerting experience, not least because Lenny Henry is seated in another corner of the club, looking conspicuous. The couple are quite wary at first, and apparently shy, offering small-talk about their weekend activities: trips to see Buckingham Palace, photos of Big Ben, and on to Leicester Square to watch Drag Me To Hell. (“It had me jumping,” Donnie confesses. Fran kept her eyes shut.)
“The first Omar was in NYPD Blue,” Donnie explains in a low drawl, flashing a gold-toothed smile. “Giancarlo Esposito played him, in an episode called Hollie and the Goldfish. He did a thing where I had robbed some Cubans.”
“Did you rob some Cubans?” Fran asks. Her smile is also punctuated by gold.
“Yeah,” says Donnie. “And I told David. That was an episode he wrote. But he killed off Esposito. He had AIDS, but he got shot.”
Omar was reborn as one of The Wire’s core characters; a robber armed with an almost supernatural survival instinct. “The first time I knew it was Donnie,” says Fran, “I was watching an episode; there were three drug dealers in a house. They had trash bags full of money and drugs, and Omar walks up to the house with a shotgun, knocking on the door. And the guy peeps out, whispering, ‘Hey man, Omar’s here.’ And they’re sitting in there, wondering what they’re gonna do. And Omar turns his back and says ‘I’m giving you all 10 seconds’. These people in the house have guns, all they have to do is come through the window and blow his brains out; the next thing you know, these bags come flying out the window. It clicked, because I remembered Donnie telling me that story. I said: ‘David, the motherfucker!’ And I jumped on the phone and I said, ‘David, is Omar really Donnie?’ He said ‘No, that’s not Donnie, what you talking about?’ I said; ‘You’re a damn liar.’ He finally broke down and told me it was Donnie.”
**
The curious fairytale of Fran Boyd, Donnie Andrews, and the amoral Robin Hood called Omar, begins in Baltimore, sometime in 1993, when reporter David Simon pitches up with former homicide cop Ed Burns to tell the story of the junction between the city’s West Fayette Street and Monroe Street, which operated as a drug market in a dying neighbourhood.
Simon and Burns’s style is a novelistic brand of journalism. When they make television, it feels like cinema, infused with the manners of documentary. Their stories are a kind of truth, and a sort of art. Before The Corner, there was Homicide, a book which became the naturalistic television drama Homicide: Life on the Street, which made Hill Street Blues look Hamish Macbeth. In their joint projects, Burns uses the instincts he gained during a 20-year career as a detective, while Simon employs his journalistic training. For The Corner, they studied the neighbourhood for a year, with the intention of depicting the failure, and the consequences, of the US War on Drugs.
“When they started writing The Corner,” Fran recalls, “David and Ed had met my son’s father, then they met my son. They put the connection together, and they wanted a story based around one family. They knew they had to find the mother. Which I didn’t want nothing to do with. Every time they’d come around, I’d cuss ’em out: ‘Get away from my door!’, you know? I just knew they were the po-lice. Then one day David came around he brought me a paperback of Homicide, and it still wasn’t convincing enough to me. I said, ‘OK, so you wrote a book. I still think you’re police.’”
Some time later, Fran began to notice that, although Simon and Burns had been in the neighbourhood for a while, nobody had been arrested. “My game plan was: all right, so these white people want my story, well they’re gonna pay me. Ed wasn’t all that happy. So what I had to try to do was get David by himself. David didn’t have a clue what was going on. But Ed was always there to snatch David back: ‘No you can’t go down there by yourself.’ But if I could get David by hisself, I could get anything I wanted.”
Fran’s descent into heroin addiction had been slow and tragic. “Oh man,” she says, laughing sardonically, “it’s a family tradition. My mother didn’t use [drugs], but my father was an abusive alcoholic. I can remember hitting the drink as early as five years old. Back then, parents used to give children beer. ‘Look at ’em acting crazy, ain’t they cute?’ Keeping me and my three sisters up, giving us beer, making us dance all night. And we had to go to school the next day. We were so afraid of them that we did it. So I think that was the beginning of my addiction.
“Then as I became a teenager the marijuana came in, and taking acid and sniffing glue, pills, stuff like that. It wasn’t until I was 23 that I first tried heroin. It was the night that we buried my older sister. She got burnt up in a fire that was started by my brother, who was high off of heroin. He dropped a cigarette, which burned the house down, and on the night of her funeral one of my brother’s friends gave me some heroin. First time I’d tried it, and I didn’t know that what he was doing was making me a customer. I thought he was just being nice.
“So he came past three days in a row, and it was good. As a matter of fact, the first time I had heroin, everything else I was doing, I automatically stopped doing. It seemed that this was something I had been looking for a long time. It took everything away. I forgot about my sister’s funeral. That’s how good I felt. But after the third day he didn’t come around anymore, so I went looking for him. That’s when I realised he was making me just another customer.”
Donnie, meanwhile was in prison, serving three life sentences. His recollection of the whys and the wherefores of his past life is blurrier. If Fran has the clarity of a reformed addict, Donnie’s stories are shaped like parables. The most brutal fact in his story is that on September 23, 1986, he was ordered by one drug dealer to kill another. At the time, he was able to reason that it was part of the job. The story has subsequently been reinterpreted in the soft light of redemption, and he finds himself focusing on the moment when his gun jammed, and the target, a man called Zach Roach, looked up at him and asked ‘Why?’”
There is, of course, a whole life of tragedy before that moment. To explain how it started, Donnie tells me a story from when he was nine or 10 years old, and was sent with his younger brother to the Laundromat at 2am.
“They used to have a wino watching the machines. Me and my brother go in there, and we’re washing clothes. Three guys come in, and they ask the wino for 15 cents so they can catch the bus. He was drunk, he had his Wild Irish Rover bottle in his hand, and he said ‘15 cents? I ain’t got no goddamn 15 cents! You punks better get the fuck outta my face, I give you 15 seconds to get the fuck outta here.’
“He got to cussin’ ’em off. He reached in his pocket, and said ‘I got 15 cents, but I wouldn’t give you the sweat off my balls.’ Next thing you know, I hear something go boom, and all the change flies everywhere, and they beat this guy. They beat him with the bottle, the chairs, the trash can. They killed him. And me and my brother was trapped, cos the back door had a big padlock on it. So once they finished beating him, they looked up and they walked back towards us, and they said ‘Shorty, gimme 15 cents.’ I said, ‘I ain’t got no 15 cents. This is my mother’s money. Back then, people respected the mother. Once you said it was your mother’s money, they were like, ‘All right, but if you had 15 cents., you’d give me it?’
“They left, and we had to crawl over the top of the washing machines and jump down on the fence to keep from jumping in the blood. And as I was going out the door, the guy let out a deep breath and one of those starting-gun farts. I looked down, and laying right by his head was a nickel and a dime. Fifteen cents. I made a vow to myself, that night, that that would never happen to me. I would never be a victim. So even after I did some stuff I shouldn’t have done, I’d go back and sit down and think about it, and go ‘fuck it’.”
Donnie laughs long enough for me to remember Omar’s saying, “You come at the king, you better not miss.” Or, as the character also put it, “Omar don’t scare.” Those, though, are Simon’s words. Donnie is more prosaic, suggesting he was merely looking after himself. “But then again, I just liked the excitement.”
Donnie was some way towards rehabilitation – if not freedom – when Simon and Burns decided to put him in touch with Fran. “Once I did start talking to David and Ed, I still wasn’t given them the information that they wanted,” says Fran. “They thought I was too hard, and they said, ‘OK, we got somebody that can calm you down.’ I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ So they gave Donnie my phone number, and when Donnie called, I’m like, ‘Hell, who is this? What you calling me for?’ I was still trying to put on this hard image.
“The thing that got me was he wouldn’t give in to my arguments. It was like Donnie found good in anything that I did. Even though what I was doing was wrong, he would tell me how I could turn it around.”
Fran talked to Donnie for four or five months before she found out why he was in prison. She assumed he was serving time for drug-related offences. Eventually, Simon showed her a newspaper article he had written about Donnie. “I was crying, thinking, ‘No this can’t be the same man.’ It just didn’t seem like this was the same person. That’s when I really wanted to change. Because I saw where he came from, and I was like, ‘Shit, what I’m doing ain’t nothing.’”
Fran’s heroin use went on for 17 years. She says she took the drug for ten years before admitting she had a habit. At first, her tolerance was high, and she didn’t use every day. She never got sick. She had enough money. “I used to look at the things that women were doing to get drugs; I didn’t do that. I looked at how they were dressed; I wasn’t dressed like that.
“Somewhere in the back of your mind you know you have a problem, but you don’t want to put yourself in that category. To me, that was ‘those people’.”
There was, she says, a moment when everything became clear. “I found myself with a little TV sitting on a milk crate, a mattress on the floor, and my two children; all of us in this one little room. Coming from owning a cathedral home, driving a Mercedes-Benz, wearing business suits; this was how far down I went.
“It’s like you get to a point where you just don’t care anymore. But I can remember one day sitting in the middle of the floor, wondering, ‘How in the hell did I get here?”
Donnie called Fran on the phone every day, 365 days a year, at 4pm. Over time, her feelings grew stronger, “which is what I didn’t want. This man had triple-life, and I didn’t want to sit at home waiting for him.”
“When Ed told me he had somebody he wanted me to talk to, it was a challenge,” says Donnie. “And I’m always up for a challenge. Even back in the day when I was out there sticking up and a guy come boosting, and tries to stick me up, boom boom, I’m looking at him going, ‘Well, just give it to me then.’
“And when I called her there was something in her voice that was crying out for help. I heard it and I just couldn’t turn my back to her. We talked for four or five hours and it was like we knew each other for all our lives. The more I talked to her, the more I felt like I could help her.
“I never judged her, because of my past. To this day I judge nobody. Because of what I done, I can’t judge nobody.”
Donnie won Fran’s trust by asking Simon to help out: delivering a Playstation for her son after Christmas, and sending groceries when she had no food, so Fran began to accept that Donnie wasn’t going to be a burden. They talked for four years before meeting face-to-face, and then struggled through three disappointments with the parole board before his eventual release in 2004, after 18 years inside.
Looking at them now, they seem well-matched. Fran is the more talkative, but as she speaks, Donnie looks on with obvious affection. When he speaks, he has a habit of separating his life into then and now, sometimes referring to his previous self as “Omar”.
“It worries me when I see his mind wandering back,” Fran says. “I don’t know what he’s thinking, but to me it’s like he’s always back there. I’m like, ‘Where you at? Come back – wherever you going I’m going with you.’ And he’ll get mad, but it takes him out of where he’s at. The things that Donnie’s been through, it takes a lot of time to just try to have a normal day. So I try my best to just keep him in the now.
“Then there’s the part of him gettin’ mad and thinking it’s funny. Donnie told me this story when he was in jail, and I always said when he comes home I’m gonna watch out for his smile. I’m gonna see if I can separate the happy smile from the bad smile. Because he would always say that the smile he gave you could be the same smile that he’d kill you with. He was telling me that he could be mad at you, but he’d still smile. I promised myself I don’t want to see that smile.”
“Where I come from, you never show your emotions,” says Donnie. “You always got to hide that part of you. I will get mad, and I cannot do anything mad. I can’t think - I’ll make mistakes.” He says that just as Omar whistles to cool himself down, he used to sing songs. “I still do – when I get upset about something I just start singing.”
“I might stop sometimes and look at him,” says Fran, “and try to picture him in the Seventies or the Eighties, and I can’t see it. I can see him maybe fighting somebody, but to get to that space, of what he went to prison for, or that lifestyle, I still can’t see it.
“It just don’t seem like that was his character. But it was, and I just try to keep it resting.”
These days, Fran and Donnie work in Baltimore trying to help in the community. Donnie works with gang members, trying to dissuade them from a life of violence, and Fran has plans to establish Fran’s House Of Joy, to care for women with HIV. But funds are scarce, and Fran wistfully suggests that they may not be able to achieve their aims until they have made money of their own. Whoever got rich from The Wire, it wasn’t them, but Donnie is working on a memoir, and David Simon is working on the film of his life story.
“Omar is Donnie’s past life,” Fran says. “It’s probably easier for him to accept it now, and know that it’s not him anymore. It’s like a different person. I think if Donnie was still Omar and David came up with that, David would probably have hell on his hands.”
“It’s like he’s buried,” Donnie says. “And I keep him there.”

Dressing For Pleasure (1977) by John Samson

If the strange brilliance of John Samson’s career as a filmmaker could be reduced to one scene, it would be a sequence from his 1977 documentary, Dressing For Pleasure. The scene would involve Jordan – the original Jordan, the suburban punk with the beehive and the kohl-slash eyes – squeezing the ample milkiness of her hourglass frame into a rubber twin set and stockings, a buttock here, a breast there, while talking sweetly about silliness of wearing latex during a heatwave. Or, it would be the scene involving Jordan, Malcolm McLaren, and an inflatable helmet: the Sex Pistols’ manager is fully-enclosed inside the pneumatic outfit, looking like a perverted deep sea diver, as Jordan squeezes the pump. Soon enough, McLaren is transformed into a Year Zero Michelin man.
Certainly, these are the most widely-seen moments of Samson’s oeuvre. When Vivienne Westwood had her 2004 career retrospective, Dressing For Pleasure ran on a loop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, as a record of Westwood and McLaren’s punk boutique Sex. And Julien Temple included the sequence in his Pistols’ documentary The Filth And The Fury. “It was a very powerful illustration of Malcolm’s vision of that shop at the time,” Temple says.
Watching these sequences today is a matter of nostalgia, but they are no less peculiar now than they seemed in 1977. Back then, McLaren and Westwood were exploiting subcultures to make a point; or possibly just blow raspberries in the direction of British hypocrisy about sex. It was an act of mischief, designed to annoy as much as it stimulated. As a rubber nun observes in Dressing For Pleasure, it was “queer material.” But observe it now, sniff the elastomer, and what you inhale is the spent jet-fuel of an accelerated culture. The 1970s now look like the 1950s – a drab decade struggling to emerge from the shadow of the war. There’s something charming, too, about Jordan, the Sex shopgirl. For all her kinkiness, she seems wedded to a very British tradition of titillation. What was branded then as anarchy, now seems close to being something of a Carry On.
“It wasn’t fetishism,” says Temple. “It was a provocative art statement, which people like Jordan were very much into. I don’t think she would have considered herself a rubber-club type person. It was approaching it with a wilder sense of fun.”
If Samson had done nothing else, Dressing For Pleasure would earned him a worthy footnote in the annals of punk. But gradually, posthumously – he died in 2004 - the Scottish filmmaker’s reputation is beginning to emerge from decades of neglect. Last year, a Hoxton gallery showed his work as an art installation, which led to Samson being selected for a retrospective at the 2009 London International Documentary Festival. As well as Dressing For Pleasure, the festival will show Arrows, his brilliant study of the darts player Eric Bristow; Tattoo, which investigates the cult of body decoration; Britannia – The First And Last, which documents the activities of stream railway preservationists; and The Skin Horse, a more traditional documentary from the early years of Channel 4, which explores attitudes to disability in collaboration with Nigel Evans.
Samson didn’t start out as a filmmaker. Born in Ayrshire in 1946, he grew up in Paisley, and left school to become an apprentice in the Clyde shipyards. He was quickly politicised, and acted as the spokesman for the first Glasgow apprentices’ strike. He became involved with the Anarchist movement and the Committee of 100, which advocated civil disobedience against the establishment of the US nuclear base at the Holy Loch in 1961. Anarchist activist Stuart Christie – later jailed for an assassination attempt on General Franco - encountered Samson around that time. “Remember you’re talking about a time, especially in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when we thought the whole world was going to be destroyed – it was a countdown to the cataclysm.
“It was just part of the radical milieu. It was a time where you were encouraged to use your imagination.”
There is a photograph of Christie and Samson in Queen’s Park, Glasgow, on the famous day – May Day 1962 - when Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell was confronted by anti-nuclear protestors, and responded by saying: “Let them go to the Kremlin and tell Mr. Khrushchev to ban his bomb. Go and march with the goose-stepping Nazis in East Germany.”
“The whole audience erupted, says Christie, “and we ran to storm the platform and try to drag him off. It was absolute pandemonium. I’m convinced it triggered the death of Gaitskell a year later.”
Samson’s life also changed in 1963, when he met his wife Linda. “He worked in Easterhouse as a social worker after he left the shipyards,” says his producer, Mike Wallington. “Somewhere in there Linda met him. He was highly politicised. He had seen films all his life, and comics and popular music, but I don’t think he’d seen what you get away with in the art game. Linda was studying at the Glasgow School of Art. So he chose photography.”
Samson fell in with a crowd which included Alasdair Gray. “Both John and Linda were friendly with a very beautiful woman who I was very keen on,” Gray recalls. “She was used to having a certain effect on men, and wasn’t particularly interested in being anything more of a friend.”
Gray drew the woman, and John and Linda, and wasn’t surprised when Samson’s creativity found an outlet in film. His first short, Charlie, was made for a BBC competition in 1973. From the start, the principles of Samson’s filmmaking were in place. The subject, Charlie Williamson, was a Glasgow busker.
“He was somebody who had given up a married life,” says Gray, “and the film was basically him speaking of the life he led. John wasn’t the kind of filmmaker who condescends by taking a character and trying to expose him. He let the man speak for himself, and that was what was so interesting and good about it.”
Mike Wallington recalls that although Charlie came second in the contest, one of the judges, director Joseph Losey, advised Samson to call Colin Young, the founding head of the new National Film School. Samson had no qualifications, but was admitted on the strength of Charlie. Tattoo and Dressing For Pleasure were made with Wallington at Beaconsfield.
“It wasn’t a period of celebrity,” says Wallington. “What we developed was a style of documentary filmmaking that didn’t use voiceover or commentary.”
Temple was younger than Samson, but remembers him from film school. “He was a bit of an enigma to me. He certainly wasn’t a punk – he was older, with longer hair. He had a perspective that was different, but understood the curiosity and the impact that punk went on to have before other people did.”
Film school, says Temple, was documentary-oriented because of Young’s influence. “They had the usual TV documentary guys teaching, which seemed very boring to me, and John seemed not to be part of that school at all.
“I always had this sense that he stood apart and had a cooler, less didactic approach to telling documentary stories, and he had visual flair as well. Dressing For Pleasure was beautifully-lit. There’s an almost Kenneth Anger-like feel to it.”
Actually, time has done a strange thing to Samson’s documentaries. He was, according to Wallington, uninterested in nostalgia, but the cumulative effect of his films is wistful. They capture the unreported margins of a Britain that was about to be destroyed – she would say transformed – by Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes, the symbolism is overt. Britannia splices excitable footage of the launch of the steam train Britannia in 1951 (a voiceover boasts that “Britain still leads the world with the steam locomotive”) against the efforts of enthusiasts to restore the rusting hulk of the train. It is more John Betjeman than Kenneth Anger, but Samson’s hands-off style conceals a deep concern for the decline of a skilled trade.
“John never looked back,” says Wallington. “But his idea of a really great time would be to sit down in the pub next to someone he’d never met before and find out that they were a piemaker. He really used to go on about the end of the apprenticeship system, where working class people could no longer even hand their sons and daughters their trade; which at least kept a lot of self-respect alive. We used to talk about how in all these working men’s clubs where we filmed Arrows, they’d have huge libraries. That’s the nostalgia – for an uncompromised working class that was willing to fight.”
Punk is actually just a sidebar in Dressing For Pleasure. The film presents rubberists and leatherists, and those to whom very heaven was the suggestive rustle of a belted Mackintosh, as quiet types who enhanced their lives with fantasy.
“There was a certain friendly boyish brightness about John,” says Gray. “A kind of guileless openness. You’d a feeling that he found life in general quite an interesting adventure. He’d sympathy for folk who might be regarded as eccentrics.”
“The whole thing is so well-judged,” says Wallington. “That’s John for you, because it could have gone another way. And don’t forget that fetishists don’t talk to each other. A rubberist has nothing in common with a leatherist! And the sado-masochists never talk to each other, because of the contractual basis of what they’re into. Yet we got them to share a stage. We mixed the Mackintosh brigade with the leather guys, and amongst the leather guys you’ve got the motorcycle guys, you’ve got the transvestites, and the more straightforward power thing where if you put the leather on it gives you added status and ties you into a master-slave relationship. They all mixed so well with the guy from the BBC, with the all-over rubber suits with the gas masks. He was remarkable – he had dozens and dozens of those kits. It was like he was a comic book superhero in each one.”
Tattoo is similarly egalitarian, observing no hierarchy between Britain’s Most Tattooed Lady (an oddly pragmatic and unassuming woman) and a chap with an erect penis etched in his armpit. The film has the poetic choreography of a dance, treating its subjects as still sculptures to be observed in a mood of curious contemplation. An element of sex is unavoidable, but when the camera zooms slowly towards a tattooed butterfly above a pair of breasts, the gaze is anatomical, with not a hint of Suicide Girls. The participants are so studied and polite, and presented with such an absence of sensation, that they resemble the waking dreams of Gilbert and George, except that Gilbert and George tend to make normalcy seem strange. Samson’s camera makes strangeness normal.
Arrows is a more conventional piece, following Eric Bristow on a winding tour of working men’s clubs on the road to being anointed the first superstar of darts. The sense of period is intoxicating, from Simon shirts to pub carpets, and Bristow’s rise – which has yet to take him out of a modest terraced house – is accompanied by the distinct sense that Britain is flushing down the pan. Even so, there is an odd majesty about it, and the quirks of realism – the can of McEwan’s Export on the train, the “star” mirror with three lightbulbs - are spliced between artistic shots of darts being released from nicotine-stained fingers. The film is a slow-motion bullseye.
It was the start of a brilliant career for Bristow, and it might have been for Samson. Instead, he and Wallington embarked to Paris, where they made “frivolous” propaganda films for Iran (not long before the fall of the Shah) and Libya, which was easier, as anti-imperialism came as second-nature.
The coming of Channel 4, with its hunger for the marginal, should have been a god-send, but Samson’s contribution was limited to his work on The Skin Horse, and a lengthy list of unmade great films. A plan to film Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam came to nothing, as did the film about a bare knuckle boxer, and the documentary on Oor Wullie. There was talk of collaborating with Alasdair Gray, and grand plans for a film exploring the sex lives of the disabled. In the late 1990s, Samson and Wallington made a documentary about people living in the London Underground, but it never got beyond a rough cut.
Aside from the Iranian and Libyan adventures, there is one completed short film missing from Samson and Wallington’s catalogue – a spin-off from Dressing For Pleasure, which investigated the subculture of genital appendages. It was shown once, then disappeared. The broader tragedy is that the style of documentary embraced by Samson and Wallington – poetic and without commentary - has been lost too, replaced by talking heads and celebrity presenters.
“John was visionary, very visual, and yet he had the common touch,” says Wallington. “People liked him, so he could get close to them, and at the same time draw back and put them into a metaphor.
“I thought we had changed something back there in the 1970s, but it proved to be a golden age. Commentary’s easy, and weak, and pernicious. Finally, if one really wanted to put a word on it, it’s authoritarian and almost fascist. And it’s the given aesthetic mode in 2009.”
Originally published in Product magazine. Samson’s films can be seen on Stuart Christie’s website: www.christiebooks.com

Dark Eyes And A Sardonic Smile: Patti Smith On Working With Bob Dylan

I asked Patti Smith to talk about the time she worked with Bob Dylan. This is what she said.

I had finished Gone Again in memory of Fred [‘Sonic’ Smith, her late husband], and I really didn’t think about touring at all, since my children were in school, but I heard from Dylan in 1995, and he asked whether I wanted to do a series of East coast dates with him. And because they were very local I could easily take my kids or just be away for a night, so I decided to do that. It was my first tour in 16 years. We had my band, and Michael Stipe came with us to give us some moral support, because I hadn’t performed in so long I was a bit nervous. But Bob and I also had a mutual friend in Allen Ginsberg, who also encouraged me to go out to the world and get strong and receive the people’s energy, because I was at a very low point in my life.
Bob and I spoke privately and I thanked him for giving me the opportunity, and he really encouraged me to come back into the fold. He said the people would be happy to see me. I truthfully wasn’t certain how I would be received, or what I should do, and being encouraged by him was very important to me. I mean, Bob – the man I know – is a man of few words, but the words are always meaningful. And so that was very important. He was very encouraging to me about my place in the community of rock’n’roll.
Also, he gave me the opportunity to choose any song from his catalogue and we could do it together. So I looked through his lyric book, and I realised what a profound opportunity this was. This was somebody that I had adored and admired since I was 15 years old, giving me the opportunity to sing any one of his songs with him. So I chose Dark Eyes, and Bob and I sang it for the next several days. Ending, I believe, in Philadelphia, where I’m from.
It was really one of the great experiences of my life, singing the song with him. The people were so electric, and the concentration of the two of us on this very beautiful song under very hot lights – the sweat was dripping from our noses – and he’s so charismatic; he has so much mental and physical energy that performing with him is very special.
We didn’t rehearse. We just went over the song quickly in his dressing room, just to find a key. We just sort of did it on stage. We mapped it out, and he said ‘I’ll come in, and I’ll do a little guitar break, and come back in.’ On the last night, I doubled the end of the last chorus, without saying anything to him. And he looked at me, and said [sardonically] ‘good ending’.
I chose Dark Eyes because its one of his lesser known songs, and I just think the lyrics are very beautiful. They’re sort of in the tradition of Milton and Blake; the lyrics stand as a poem. Also, it’s a good song for my voice. It’s tonally dark. It would have been very obvious to do Highway 61 or something, or Like A Rolling Stone. It would have been fun, but I wanted to experience doing something beautiful with him. And it was beautiful.
I saw him occasionally on tour. He’s very private on the road and his organisation works very different to mine. I only have five band people and four crew, and we’re all a brotherhood. We all have the same tour-bus, we use the same dressing room. So our situation is a lot different than his, where there are a lot of rules, and people have their duties and their place, and it’s very complex and exact.
When you’re opening for any band, doesn’t matter who it is, I always respect the ground rules of the headlining person. But I saw him occasionally. We spoke when we needed to speak, and it was always a pleasure, and then we toured again in Australia, which was also a pleasure.
I saw him play most nights on the tour. I’m not much of a spectator, and after you perform you have a lot of adrenaline, but I watched a lot of his shows. He’s a charismatic performer. I mean, I saw Bob in 1963, with Joan Baez. I’ve seen him in many incarnations. I saw him in ’65, I’ve seen him many times, and he’s always interesting.
He changes his set each night, and he often changes the key or the rhythm of a song. He’s a singer-songwriter … I mean, he has a lot of magnetism, but we’re not similar in the way that we perform. I perform directly to the people and interact with the people, and he more concentrates on the music. And because he concentrates on the music, he’ll take a song, and in the same week, he’ll do it two or three different ways, because he’s highly creative and always restless. He doesn’t like the repetition of his own things. He often changes them up or finds a different way to present them. He doesn’t do the shows by rote. He shifts his set list. The people are interested anyway, and his other task is to keep things interesting for himself.
One of my favourite records he’s ever done is World Gone Wrong, which he did right before we toured. In fact I told him that his acoustic guitar playing on World Gone Wrong was just as good as anybody. The authenticity and the clarity of his playing, and the choice of songs, were beautiful. So, I love that album as much as I’ve love John Wesley Harding.

The Actor As Wrestler As Prostitute: Mickey Rourke Throws His Ego On The Canvas

Mickey Rourke
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

As Mickey Rourke positions himself on a chair in a West London hotel, with his Chihuahua, Loki, snoring on a cushion beside him, he does not look like a changed man. True, he is the favourite to add the Best Actor Oscar to the prizes he won recently at the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes, completing a dramatic comeback for a man whose self-destructive urges seemed to have ruined a brilliant career. And true, he is a surrounded by everything an Oscar-contender might expect. There is a plate of fancy biscuits, a bowl of berries, and bottled water. And in person, he is sweet charm itself, offering small talk about Loki, who is 16 ½ years old, and recovering from a stroke.
But still, Rourke looks like a visitor to unfamiliar shores. How changed is he? Well, not entirely. He shifts uncomfortably on the soft furnishings before telling the story of a recent night out in London, to illustrate how “there always going to be that little mad hatter inside of me with the axe.”
It is a long tale, and he tells it slowly, relishing the confessional tone. He was out, he says, with his two minders, one of whom (“a big black hulk of a man”) is waiting in the other room of Rourke’s suite. The other, an East End geezer, “who can handle himself ”, has presumably been given the day off. So, the three of them are standing in the street, when a man walks past with his girlfriend. The man, says Rourke, is “real flash, and he says ‘Excuse me ladies’. Now, ten years ago, I woulda hit ’im right on the chin for saying something like that. Because then I did not deal with consequences. The world that I lived in, there were no rules. He would have been missing nine teeth for what he said.
“So, I said to the boys, ‘he got a pass’. But I watched him all the way down the block, wishing he would come back. You know what? He turned around. I’m watching him walk up the street, and I took off my jacket so I just had a vest on, so I could move, and I thought, ‘I’m going to do him right now.’ And there’s a part of me that’s going…” - he starts whispering – “‘it’s still there, goddamit’, and he comes walking up, and I turned my back right in front of him. And he said: ‘Excuse me. Do you know where such and such a place is, and he was really polite. I said, ‘No, ma’am, I don’t know where it is.’ And he walked along the kerb and left.”
Rourke takes a moment to enjoy his moment of restraint. He removes his glasses, and cleans them pensively. “I mean, there was no point to him saying: ‘Excuse me, ladies’. I wouldn’t say it to the guy I was standing with, much less a stranger. But there’s always going to be the jerk-off that tries it. So I gotta work at it all the time. Also, I kinda knew I was going to give him a pass, because he wasn’t a hard man, he was just an arrogant rich asshole.”
This, then, is the new Mickey Rourke. And it’s his good fortune to have found a filmmaker (Darren Aronofsky) and a film (The Wrestler) to dramatise the struggles that derailed his career.
The Wrestler is no Citizen Kane, but thanks to Rourke, it works. It is a film about old age and decrepitude in which a once pretty actor is portrayed as a battered, emotionally-constipated wreck. Aronofksy employs the manners of a horror movie, taking an age to reveal the monster – so that when the camera finally does take cognisance of Rourke’s bruised potato face, the moment is played for shock. It’s not a deep film, but the shallows are heavily pebbled, not least by the suggestion that show-business – represented here by wrestling – is just another version of prostitution, in which the wrestler, Rourke, is a one-trick pony trapped in the dark alley of his own limitations.
“I’m an old broken down piece of meat and I’m alone, and I deserve to be alone,” Rourke says, as Randy the Ram. “I just don’t need you to hate me.”
It helps when you know that Rourke rewrote his dialogue: the sense that this is autobiography is no accident. Rourke based Randy on a retired wrestler called Magic, who lived in a bus outside Gold’s gym in Los Angeles, but the film is about the actor. And it works, because in a world of identikit stars with perfect teeth, he is a survivor from more interesting times.
Partly, this is a matter of style. He wears a red pinstriped jacket over a grey undershirt which struggles to cover his stomach. There are two turquoise rings on his left hand, and a tattoo on the middle finger of his right. His hair is streaked; there is a moustache, and a rumour of a goatee. He wears studious glasses, and golden shoes. He looks like a bohemian from another planet. Or Johnny Depp’s dad.
I suggest to Rourke that the film is more about loneliness than wrestling. Was that what he was thinking of?
“Not thinking of. Existing in for many years. I wasn’t a little bit bad, I was horrible for 15, 16 years. I was out of control, I was out of my mind. I had to lose my house, my wife, my money, my career, everything, for me to fall all the way down to the bottom. And somebody advised me I needed to talk to somebody. I resisted, but I went, because everything was gone.”
In the 1980s, in films such as 9 ½ Weeks, Rumblefish and Angel Heart, Rourke sparred on equal terms with De Niro and Pacino. But in 1991, he returned to his first career as a boxer, before edging back into acting in the 2000s. He says he made more than $1m in 5 ½ years of fighting, “but a million dollars isn’t really a million dollars anymore.” He had no job, and was living in a $500 a month room in Venice Beach, with Loki and five other dogs. He ate by selling off his motorcycles, and was down to his last bike when Sylvester Stallone gave him a part in the remake of Get Carter, and paid over the odds, encouraging Rourke to contemplate a comeback.
He says his acting was improved by his 5 ½ years as a boxer. “Because one of the qualities I lacked as an actor was focus and concentration. But in boxing, when the bell rang, I had to be right there. You can’t say, ‘Hold on I need a minute’. When you hear the bell, you gotta go. Also, when you’re hurt, you learn to survive by being defensive. When you’re fighting a guy that’s much stronger than you, you don’t go to war, you let him shoot his load, and weaken, and then you get him later with angles and speed.
“Of course, I regret that I had to leave everything and fall so far from grace, but I needed to change, and I have. When I was little I was really quiet and shy and all the other boys were very tough in the neighbourhood, so I thought ‘I gotta be like that’. I was about 11 when some bully was beating me up in the schoolyard, and I finally got up and beat the piss out of him. From that day on, I noticed I got treated a different way.”
Rourke says that his recovery is due to seven years of therapy, in which he ran up a debt of $60,000. “I needed to go three times a week or I was going to suck on a bullet.” He came to understand that he had thrown his acting career away because he felt that he didn’t deserve his success.
“I came from a very violent background. I let go of that when I was a student, but when I started to be really successful, it came back again. It came back because I resented the fact that people treated me special for being in movies. I’d go to a restaurant that was very expensive, and they wouldn’t let me pay the bill – they’d throw people out of tables to give me a seat, or I’d go to a shop and some guy wouldn’t even let me pay for a coat. I’d think, fuck, I remember when I washed dishes; I collected money for gamblers, and I did security in whorehouses, and transvestite bars. I worked my whole ass off my whole life, and now I couldn’t even pay for something, and I had money. I had a big house, and pussy and anything anybody could want. And people treated me different, and kissed my ass. I wound up getting really upset about it and I just didn’t want any of it.
“I had some shit happen when I was little, that I was terribly ashamed of, and I had issues of physical abuse and abandonment issues, that made me feel very insignificant and very small. I masked that by becoming hard. That was where the change had to take place, because I had to come to terms with these people - authority figures, producers, or anybody that looked at me crooked – it wasn’t this man that was kicking the fuck out of me and my little brother. So I had to say, wait a minute, I can’t blame the rest of the world for something one guy did, and my mother allowed him to do, when I was this big.
“I didn’t have the knowledge to fix what was broke. I needed to talk to somebody that knew what makes one go mad.”
I ask whether the violent man was his father. He checks himself, saying this is not something he wants to talk about. “It wasn’t my dad, it was somebody else. I only met my dad once, in a bar. I introduced myself to him when I was 25.” (The New York Times attributed unspecified abuse to Rourke’s stepfather, who denied it).
Rourke is, he admits, a work in progress, and it remains to be seen how he will react to a second shot at success.
“But it’s new now. It’s almost like I never really had a career before. And let’s face it, my career was over almost before it began.
“I was ashamed I lost my wife [Wild Orchid co-star Carre Otis] more than anything else. Not the money. It’s the other things that come along when you become a failure, because you self-destruct.”
Whatever happens, the love of Rourke’s life won’t be around to congratulate him. Loki died on Tuesday.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, But The Coup Attempt May Be Sexed Up: The Trouble With Filming Chavez

Watching Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised unspool, what emerges at first is a fairly traditional, slightly romantic portrait of a Latin American revolutionary leader. Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain’s film casts a benign light on the president of Venezuela. There’s less soft-soap involved than there was in Oliver Stone’s Fidel Castro fanzine, Comandante, but very little that would startle your average tango-dancing Euro-leftist.
As with Stone and Castro, there are glimpses into the politician’s romantic self-regard, such as the interview in which he tells the story about how his grandmother had told him he had “murderer’s blood in him”, a genetic gift from his grandfather, who would arrive in a village and decapitate everyone with machetes. In Chavez’s reworking of this dire parable, he investigates his grandfather’s life, and discovers he was a revolutionary who fought with a poncho on his shoulders and a fur cobijo on his head.
And then dear Hugo turns poetic. This was no psycho with a machete! His grandfather had a revolver and an ammunition belt. There was, he notes atmospherically, a “cloud of tobacco, and clouds overhead. Horses neighing, and herons could be heard. Milk drops from the sky at night. That’s the rain. The rebel horsemen. Songs, silence and song.”
So Chavez decides that his grandfather wasn’t a murderer after all. He was a fighter who had been given a bad rap.
All of which is interesting, if only partially illuminating. It displays a magical realist turn of phrase which would be unimaginable, and probably ruinous, in a British politician. And it works as a piece of self-serving mythology. It’s hard not to be moved when even the sky is weeping lactic tears.
The documentary opens in September 2001, three years after Chavez won a landslide election victory. It begins by sketching the president’s plans to cast himself as the reincarnation of Simón Bolívar, the 19th Century liberator of Venezuela. His plan is to free the country, and the region, from the domination of Washington and the market. There is, says Chavez, an argument about globalisation: the neo-liberals, who claim to support this idea, are actually anti-global, and it’s they who are destroying the world. He draws his support from the poor, and promises to redistribute wealth and engage the people in the political process. “The oil wealth never reached the campesinos,” he notes, and those same peasants are invited to call him on his weekly television show, Alo Presidente, and chew the fat.
He tells his lieutenants they must communicate on television and radio, to negate the influence of Venezuela’s hostile private TV stations. “Get up early,” Chavez commands. “Talk about the revolution – communicate.” This being September 2001, one of the things Chavez communicates about is 9/11 and the War on Terror. “We support the fight against terrorism – but not just carte blanche to do anything”. He says this while holding up photographs of children killed in Afghanistan by American bombs.
There are, you may have noticed, milky clouds forming in the sky of this narrative. And true enough, the private TV stations start comparing Chavez to Hitler and Mussolini, and the CIA hovers ominously; aware, no doubt, of the strategic importance of Venezuela’s oil. The film show anxious white people in the oil-rich suburbs of Caracas learning how to shoot, and being urged to keep an eye on their servants. And lo, an opposition march is heading towards the presidential palace to confront a pro-Chavez demonstration. The two crowds meet, snipers pick out innocent demonstrators. The deaths are blamed on Chavez, and when the president’s people attempt to communicate their version of events on the state TV channel, the signal is cut. A coup is underway, and Chavez is ousted from the Palacio de Miraflores.
The camera is inside the palace as the coup unfolds. It catches Chavez being marched out, and when a counter-coup takes place, it shows the triumphant Chavistas marching back in. It is, by any standards, a remarkable piece of cinema. It won many awards, including best documentary at the Chicago film festival and best current affairs programme at the Banff television festival in Canada.
Then the trouble started. A petition of 11,000 signatures denounced the film in Venezuela. It was withdrawn from an Amnesty International film festival in November 2003, after threats towards Amnesty staff in Caracas.
The complaints were many and various. Essentially, the film’s detractors saw it as pro-Chavez propaganda. The chronology was questioned, as was the use of archive film. The scene in which upper-middle-class women were shown learning self-defence was presented as part of the build up to the coup, but had actually been filmed months later. The film’s assertion that Chavez never resigned is doubted, and the key sequence in which pro-Chavez demonstrators on a bridge were said to be defending themselves from a sniper attack (and not, as was claimed on Venezuelan TV, shooting at anti-Chavez demonstrators) was subjected to the kind of analysis usually practised by moon-landing sceptics. This was no longer a question of truth – it was about shadows on the ground. The film may have been vérité, but was it true?
Rod Stoneman, the film’s executive producer, has now examined the case against the film, and his book, Chavez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, broadly absolves the filmmakers. (Firstly, he has to clarify that his billing as executive producer was a grace and favour title: he was head of the Irish film board).
“There were some relatively small examples of slippage in the grammar of the piece, but overall the film was made with honesty and integrity. Of the 18 objections made, 15, if not 17, were wrong. The filmmakers spent a long time assembling evidence to show why they’d done what they’d done in the film and mostly it’s true.”
Stoneman’s book is a work of film studies rather than politics, but it does illuminate some points about documentary filmmaking which might be surprising to casual viewers. The film’s editor Angel Hernandez Zoido explains the process of whittling 200 hours of footage into a digestible film by saying: “To me there’s no difference between fiction and documentary. When I’m editing a film I never forget that it’s entertainment.” And O’Briain notes that the decision to opt for cinema vérité was a response to the kind of material the filmmakers had: “To argue for vérité is not to suggest that it’s more truthful; really it’s more direct, a more powerful short circuit to the emotional.”
Venezuelan film director Jonathan Jakubowicz, whose 2005 film Secuestro Express angered Chavez with its depiction of corruption and kidnap in Venezuela - is considerably less charitable. “I’ve seen the film. It’s definitely a propaganda masterpiece. But I wouldn’t call it a documentary. Any shootout looks completely different from one side than it does from the other. A real documentary would show both sides with fairness. These guys, following the Leni Riefenstahl school, only show the beauty of the revolution. And like The Jew Süss, they portray the opposition to their beloved leader as gritty, rich, selfish and power thirsty.
“Our society is complicated to understand even for Venezuelans, I’m not surprised how hard it was to grasp by a group of talented Irish filmmakers.”
Jakubowicz’s first film, Ships of Hope, was a documentary about the exodus of Jewish refugees to Venezuela, but the fictional Secuestro Express offered a more direct and populist evocation of life in Caracas, making a dramatic thrill-ride from the social inequalities in the country. Even so, it began with a montage of news footage, including the sequence which was central to the coup attempt, of Rafael Cabrices firing from a road bridge. The pro-coup media’s interpretation of this footage was accepted without question by the world’s media during the first hours of the coup. But subsequent analysis has tended to favour what is now the reverse view: that the Chavez supporters were defending themselves against sniper fire designed to provoke a reaction which would give impetus to the coup attempt.
Jakubowicz’s use of the footage angered Cabrices, who sued, claiming Secuestro Express offended his dignity, but he died before the case could be heard. At his funeral, Venezuela’s vice-president Jose Vicente Rangel condemned Jakubowicz’s “miserable film” and the director was charged with showing the authorities in a negative light. Chavez accused him of “undermining our revolution, and our soldiers”. So while Jakubowicz has his reasons for disliking Chavez, his comparison of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised to a notorious Nazi propaganda film gives some indication of the heat inside this argument.
On one level, this is an argument about the impossibility of objectivity, and since the directors of the Irish documentary are aspiring only to tell the truth of what they witnessed, rather than an overall truth about the politics of Venezuela, they are, to an extent, immune from many of the attacks made on them.
“It’s also true that the film doesn’t actually explain what Chavez has done with his oil money or his mission schemes,” says Stoneman. “Because it’s cinéma vérité it is quite an emotional journey. If you want to look at Chavez politically, probably reading a book is a better way to do it.”
Of course, critics would probably question the suitability of Stoneman as judge and jury on the merits of the film. He was involved in the production at an early stage, and argued against the inclusion of material offering a broader political context. In an early cut, the filmmakers had included a series of “witness statements”. He persuaded them to drop them, because “other people can make historical documentaries. These are filmmakers who were there at the time – they didn’t need to get other people to talk about it.”
Stoneman also takes issues with the BBC’s response to the controversy surrounding the documentary, saying they “dropped it like a hot potato” after articles in the Columbia Journalism Review and the Sunday Times criticised it journalistically.
“They were quite wary about it, but I can understand that,” Stoneman says. “Part of my angle of approach is having my formative years in early Channel 4, which had an open notion of hearing from people and trying to get different versions of a story; and all that’s dropped away again now.
“It’s a climate change. The BBC has a defensive tone which comes from being battered a lot, all the time, and that’s why they overreact.”
Of course, the controversy over the Chavez film coincided with the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly and the “sexed-up” dossiers which were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the Corporation was in a cautious mood.
Stoneman quotes Kim Bartley saying that Nick Fraser, the editor of the BBC’s documentary strand, Storyville, requested a more sceptical tone be added to the voiceover, “to put the boot into Chavez”. After the veracity of the film was questioned, Fraser suspended further screenings on the BBC until an investigation was completed, noting his disappointment with its dubious chronology. Fraser says now he was not influenced by the campaign against the film, even though the BBC received 4000 emails asking for him to be fired. “The film was very good in many respects, but also misleading,” says Fraser. “They thought Chavez was a right-on person; but having written a book about Peronism, I didn’t.
“But I don’t think the film qualifies as propaganda, though it was used for propagandistic purposes in Venezuelan embassies. We at the BBC changed the title: it was called Inside The Coup, because I didn’t find all the TV stuff as interesting as they did. I liked the filmmakers, and expect to work with lefties anyhow. My quarrel is with the ignorant middle-aged [media professionals], who should know better, or in fact do and won’t come clean. I exclude professional naifs like Rod.
“I still think it’s a good film, because of the coup sequence. It should be seen as a Venezuelan West Wing - biased, of course, but highly entertaining. Should I have told the film-makers to include at least one interview with someone not a Chavez supporter? Well, I did. However, as the Rolling Stones said, you can’t always get what you want.”
Fraser’s critique of the film’s concentration on the importance of media in the coup – particularly the role of privately-owned television stations – highlights a key problem. It may be acceptable within an argument about filmmaking to argue that documentary is just another kind of storytelling, and it may even be true, but it leaves the uninformed viewer in a bewildering position.
Jakubowicz says the British edit of the film is “more effective” than the Venezuelan cut. “It’s also a lot more manipulative, which is why it can’t be shown at home, since many of us were there. Even the subtitles are manipulated in the British version.
“The piece does have amazing footage and they had truly privileged access to key figures. But if you see, for example, how Lucas Rincón Romero, the General who announces that Chavez has resigned, ended up being Minister of Defence for Chavez for three years after the coup, it’s not hard to realise that something is up: the reality is not as simple as it is portrayed in the flick.”
Still, there is something undeniably alluring about the film’s proximity to the sex and violence of power, and it’s hard not to be moved by the triumphant scenes of Chavez’s return from exile. At 2.30am on April 1, 2002, his helicopter touches down on the roof of the presidential palace, apparently in the midst of a carnival. Chavez is pulled through the crowds like a weary pugilist being led back into the ring, his left arm aloft, his fist clenched. He is wearing a striped top.
Moments later, he is in the corridor of the palace, bearing down on the camera, his charisma on full-beam. “Show me the video of the night they took me away,” he says. “I couldn’t talk to you that night, but I knew we’d be back.”
In this scene, he has changed clothes. He wears army green now.
[A version of this article is published in the current issue of Product magazine]

Dollywood Is Brash And Irrepressibly Cheerful, Just Like Its Patron, Dolly Parton, Who Was Designed As If For The Nose Cone Of A B-17 Bomber

Dolly fans, Dollywood
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Do country singers resemble their theme parks? Sadly, the vogue for musicians to represent themselves as tourist attractions seems to have waned, but I did once stand outside the gates of Twitty City, the resort/home of the country crooner Conway Twitty, and can confirm that Mr Twitty (real name: Harold Jenkins) sold himself short when he adopted the logo of the Twitty City Tweety Bird. The House Of Cash, in which Johnny Cash displayed his wife’s collection of antique bedsteads, was more representative of The Man In Black’s practical side, a feeling which was amplified by the presence in the souvenir shop of Johnny’s mum, who did not look thrilled with a life of selling fridge magnets.
But Dollywood is something else. It is strident and cheap and almost hysterically cheerful. It is America in all its brash glory, a place dedicated to thrills and consumption. Its pleasures are democratic. You can ride the wooden rollercoaster and experience double G-force; a sensation akin to an explosion of sherbet in the brain, which is eased only by the certain knowledge that one is about to be decapitated.
Or you can eat funnel cake. (The result is similar).
Dollywood is the architectural embodiment of Ms Parton’s old joke that “it cost a lot of money to look this cheap”: a section of the park is dedicated to a re-creation of 1950s’ America, with a diner, and a garage with a lot full of old Cadillacs, and a theatre. The air is heavy with syrup and rock’n’roll.
Meanwhile, over in Craftmen’s Valley, men in dungarees whittle as if the 20th century never happened. A modest horse-drawn wagon can be had for under $3000, while the Brakeman Station serves shaved ice and frosted nuts (a mix best ordered sober). There are demonstrations of sheep-shearing and wheat-weaving, and dachshunds made of tin. For those in search of a novelty porch decoration, it is very heaven. There are T-shirts pledging allegiance to God, John Deere, and Turtletown, Tennessee.
Of course, not all of this is down to Dolly. The park has existed at the gateway to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee since 1961, when it was called Railroad Junction, and consisted of a steam train, a general store, a saloon, and a blacksmith’s. In 1966, it was renamed Goldrush Junction. In 1977, the Western theme expanded, as the park was twinned with Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. Dolly’s involvement – a matter of investment, marketing, and rebranding – occurred in 1986, when Parton bought into the business.
Unlike the late Conway and his beloved Twitty City, Parton does not live on the premises. She visits once or twice a year, playing charity shows and announcing her presence with a regal procession through the park. Fortunately, my visit coincided with one of Dolly’s, so I took up a position behind the plastic tape which marked her route, and waited. The crowd wasn’t quite a full cross-section of the American South - I counted only two black people, and one transvestite – but there was a broad spectrum, from bikers and Christians and extended clans of overweight hillbillies with mullets and ballcaps and chubby children in vests, to wiry senior citizens and a great many women of a certain age. As we waited – this glad patchwork of pop-drinking humanity - a scarecrow walked past holding a flower. A woman called “Tracey” – she wore a nametag – flitted by in a flowery vintage dress. Banjo music wafted from inside a fibre-glass rock. A train whistle blew.
Finally, Dolly appeared, waving from the red banquette of a vintage car driven by a man in a brown top hat. Parton has often said that her look was a country girl’s idea of glamour, but up close she seemed oddly cartoonish, like a Hanna-Barbera version of a forces sweetheart. She would look good painted on the nose cone of a B-17 bomber. She is pretty, but tough.
I caught up with Dolly at one of the Dollywood theatres, where she was soundchecking for her evening performance. By now she was dressed more formally, in expensive rags. It wasn’t the hair which caught the eye, or even the famous bosom. It was the legs. They were the legs of an 18-year old. (Dolly Parton is 62.)
“Where I was born and raised is probably not more than 10 miles from here,” she said, crossing those disconcerting pins for emphasis. “Country miles! Ten to 15 country miles!” She uncrossed the legs, then coiled them together again. “That’s like sayin’ ‘wider than the mountains’. It seems like you’re in another world, but it’s very close.”
Somewhere beneath the hair and the feisty chat, there may be an ordinary woman, but the extraordinary Dolly is smart enough to know that being humble is the key to her success. She was humble before she was successful, so has it down to a fine art. Her Tennessee mountain home was the subject of a 1973 album, embroidering her mythology, from being “a little bitty child” in a family of 12, to global stardom. That sense of geography. Since turning 60, her thoughts have been turning to memories of home.
“I love this area. To me the Smokey Mountains is just the most beautiful place in the world. It’s natural for people to feel that way about their home, but I really do, and I’ve been all over the world.
“I love the fact that I came from a great place where there are great people. And then to see what Dollywood has become: to see how it has added so much to the area, and to know that I had some small part in that does make me feel good.
“As you get older, you tend to want to migrate back to home. I find myself spending so much more time here now than I did in the past. Mom and dad passed away not long ago, and I got their old farm, so I’m just kind of fixing up all the old family places. I buy up all the old stuff, where any of our family lived, and I share it with the rest of my family. So it’s real special to me, and I find that I spend a lot of time here. Maybe I’ll wind up moving back.”
She added – not, perhaps, for the first time – that if she hadn’t been a singer she would still have been in the people business. “I would have been a prostitute or a missionary. But if I’d been a prostitute I would have got in the missionary position!”
With that though weighing heavily on my mind, I went in search of the reproduction of Dolly’s Tennessee mountain home which is hidden in the centre of the park. Parton was raised on Locust Ridge in the Smoky Mountains, where her father tended a tobacco patch. The replica house is life-size, but tiny, crammed with beds and patchwork quilts, and far from the romantic picture evoked by Parton in the song, of chasing fireflies in the evening shadows, and a “life as a peaceful as a baby’s sigh”. But then, Parton has always been an optimist and a romantic. My guide, Ruth Miller, pointed to the soap by the sink in the Spartan kitchen. “Do you have lye soap? That’s made from when you would kill your hog in the fall. It’s made from the pig fat. It’s supposed to be good for if you’ve got poison ivy or any kind of athlete’s foot.”
I walked the park some more, past the clothes shops: Dolly’s Wardrobe for adults (specialising in the whorehouse madam look), Lil’ Dolly’s for children (with racks full of Betty Belle dresses). There was a queue at Aunt Granny’s restaurant, and a group from the New Beginning Church, with T-shirts reading “He’s The Way, the Truth and The Life”, pondering fried green tomatoes at the Tater Patch.
Over in Craftmen’s Village, I bumped into Dollywood’s master carver, Lee Warren, a self-assured character who started out as a stuntman in Ford Lauderdale, Miami. Fist-fights, knife fights, he did them all. He then progressed to gunfights in western theme parks, and came to Tennessee to help build the flooded mine in the park’s Silver Dollar City period. One day he walked past the wood-carving shop, saw a wooden cowboy, and switched careers.
Dollywood, he said, is different from other theme parks. “Other theme parks don’t tend to think of dad. It’s mainly the children or mom, doing rides or shows, or getting something to eat. Dollywood is unique in that the crafts are something for dad to do. He can look at woodcarving, wagon-making, blacksmithing, and it can interest the kids as well.
“One of the best compliments I ever got was from a guy from Louisiana. I was carving on the porch and he walked up, and his children collected around, numbering in the tens, and he says: ‘You know, y’all impress me with my own children.’ I says, ‘Is that right?’ He says: ‘Yeah, I thought they would just be on the rides and going to shows. They actually want to watch you guys make something.’ He says ‘You’ve impressed me with my own children.’ What’s better than that?”
And it’s true. Dollywood does have fairground rides, with river rafts and abandoned mines, and, by 2009, Adventure Mountain, with a waterfall, a gorge, mountain trails and canoeing. But it is memorable more for the way it exists in an uncertain time. You can meet a hillbilly and a shepherd and remain unsure which, if either, of them was in fancy dress. It is a patchwork quilt of a theme park in which the only coherent idea is nostalgia for a kinder, gentler America.
The mission statement of the craft village is “to recapture the experience of a simpler time, when working with the hands was a way of life which provided both the necessities of life and the pride in their creation.” The vague sense of religion comes wrapped in the flag. Dollywood also hosts an Eagle Mountain Sanctuary, which looks after injured bald eagles – the American national bird.
You can quibble. Or you can shave your ice and frost your nuts and get on with it.

Parliamo Stanley: The Comedic Importance of Banana And Marmalade Sandwiches

Stanley Baxter has been doing funny voices all his life, or at least since his mother Bessie persuaded him to mimic Harry Lauder. Young Stanley had never seen the bandy-legged music hall legend, but stepped forward while his mother – he occasionally forgets himself and calls her maw – knocked out Roamin’ in the Gloamin’ on the piano. From there, it was but a short hop to Mae West, who Stanley understood to be a movie star. Soon enough, this wee boy was entertaining church hall audiences with his impersonation of the Hollywood siren.
Telling the story now, 75 years later, Baxter slips into the voice, but it is a precise impression. When he purrs “come up and see me sometime”, he isn’t taking off Mae West – he is remembering himself, aged seven, copying his mother, dreaming of Hollywood. “I reproduced that noise, and the audience thought, ‘oh, a boy of seven able to do that, how clever.’ Of course it was my mother’s tutoring that got me to do it.”
This sense of dislocation occurs quite frequently. As Baxter’s conversation warms up, his speech slips into various accents and voices. They’re not impressions, but little landslides in a personality that is never more than a few seconds away from caricature. He can’t resist pulling the rug from under himself. Even in our opening exchange, as he explains the benefits of his fitness regimen – three times to the gym every week, with a bit of treadmill, some rowing, and ten lengths of the pool – his features freeze, and his voice becomes possessed with the grim fatalism of a London cabbie: “It’s quite enough, mate,” he says, in antique cockney. Still, he is, he concedes, “remarkably well for an old one”.
For the generations that are old enough to remember television before alternative comedy, Baxter will need no introduction. His shows were great Broadway spectaculars full of singing, dancing, and funny voices, all of it informed by Stanley’s Glaswegian wit. His is a sense of humour that embraces grandiosity, while simultaneously bringing it back to earth; full of mockery, but devoid of cruelty. Search YouTube, and you’ll find him kissing off treble entendres in a send-up of Upstairs, Downstairs, or – less dated, and still brilliant – mocking the dialect of his hometown in Parliamo Glasgow.
With the shrinking of television budgets, and the fracturing of audiences, Baxter’s style fell from favour, but as the cruelties of alternative comedy drain into the mud, his genius is being appreciated anew. On Christmas Day, ITV is showing Stanley Baxter: Now and Then, a compendium of clips and tributes. The show includes a newly-recorded Christmas message from Baxter, as the Queen. The sketch is based on last year’s Christmas message. “She didn’t just sit on her sofie. She got out and about a wee bit more so I had to as well.”
Baxter is said to have been the first person to impersonate the Queen on television, and his name for the character, The Duchess of Brendagh, has since been adopted by Private Eye. He has met Her Majesty twice. “‘Met’ is an exaggeration. She didn’t invite me to tea at Buck House. The first time was in her line-up at the Scottish Royal Variety performance, at the Glasgow Alhambra. The second time was a little more, because I’d been having threats of being horsewhipped by colonels when I did her as the Duchess of Brendagh, although they knew f***in’ well who it was meant to be. And then the Queen agreed to meet in a line-up at the Odeon Leicester Square for a Barbra Streisand film called Funny Lady. After that, the complaints stopped. HM got me off the hook. Gawd bless you, ma’am!”
It’s instructive to remember that Baxter’s comedy was once deemed controversial.
“Oh, I was considered a wee bit risqué,” he recalls. “At one time Mary Whitehouse had a go at me about something: I cannae mind what it was. But my God, when you think what she complained of – what’d she be doing now with Jonathan Ross and these people? She’d be doing back flips.” Of Ross, Baxter diplomatically notes that he is “an enormously talented man” who “just went far too far. He pushed the boundaries of what you can get away with.
“Comedy does have to be anarchic, I think. It has to break boundaries. It’s what comedy’s about. But it mustn’t shatter everything.”
The roots of Baxter’s career as a performer are obvious enough. His mother, he says, “would have loved to have been theatrical. But my mother’s generation, it was the same as prostitution if you went into the theatre. Oh God, yes. You were a lost woman.
“My father was dragged to see me in church halls. He got pissed off with it. Of course it wasn’t just seeing his son, which he might have been proud of – he might not – but he’d to sit through a lot of fat ladies singing with tartan stuff on, and he got fed up of that: people that couldnae sing at all. One time he left a church hall and said ‘If I ever go back and see that boy perform, you can certify me insane.’
“I didn’t like school. I hated it. But when I went on at a church hall and people were on their feet applauding, I thought, ‘Well, now I’m getting approval. Maybe this is what I should be doing.’”
Young Stanley’s creativity was fuelled by the cinemas of his Glasgow childhood. “It was fourpence if you got in before 4.30 at Hillhead, fivepence at the Grosvenor. Or ‘Gruvner’ as we called it.
“I had to get back eventually for my tea, but my mother used to give me sandwiches in my satchel. Usually banana with marmalade on bread, and I would sit and munch that through Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
“It was in that very cinema, the Grosvenor, that my maw and I were trapped, all night during the first Clydeside Blitz. I said ‘Come on mother, we’re leaving,’ and the air raid warden shouted ‘Get back in there! Bombs falling!’ so we just went back and sat. After we came out, I thought snow had fallen. The street was all white. But it was the plate glass windows all up the Byres Road that had been blown out.
“When we got back to Wilton Street, the tenement at the very foot of Wilton Street on Queen Margaret Drive had been blown away by a landmine. And my father was just up the hill, at 150 Wilton Street. I said, ‘my father, my father.’ ‘Och,’ said my mother, ‘he’ll be all right’.” Baxter laughs at the memory. “She was much more interested in my career than my father’s problem…”
By the age of 14, Baxter was a regular on the radio, but it was his stint in the Combined Services Entertainment troupe, entertaining the troops throughout the Far East alongside Kenneth Williams, the playwright Peter Nichols, and the film director John Schlesinger, that sealed his professional fate. “I got a real taste for it then. So instead of going to Glasgow University to teach Senior English, as my father had hoped, I came back and said ‘I want to give it a go’. And the colour drained from father’s face. He was a fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries, and he looked up his actuarial tables, to see what hope I had of earning a living, and he went ‘Oh Christ’… Of course, my mother was delighted – it was what she had planned.”
Prior to his time with the CSE, Baxter endured a stint picking dirt from the coal on the conveyor belt at Shotts. “I remember still being asked to do stuff at the BBC, and I was trying to hide my cut fingers beneath the scripts.”
An ear problem meant Baxter’s fitness was downgraded to B1, making him unfit for the mines. While waiting for his posting, he joined the Unity Theatre. “I was very left wing at that time. I thought of myself as a young communist. I was rehearsing the part of a lifetime playing a boy that had been blinded in the war and come back to his girlfriend. I thought, ‘Oh God – this’ll really be a womb trembler!’” He slips into the role. “I was rehearsing: ‘Oh, is that you Jeannie? It’s me.’ I thought, ‘the tears’ll flow here.’ I was moving into drama! Except I was called up for the army in the middle of rehearsals. Russell Hunter got the part! I’ve never forgiven him!”
Oddly, more than 60 years later, Baxter’s frustration at his inability to move into straight acting seems like a fresh hurt. He recalls his attempts to join the Old Vic theatre school on finishing National Service – “I wanted to get rid of all that frivolity” – and his annoyance at being rejected because he was too experienced. His break came when an old actor friend got him an audition in the 1948 Edinburgh Festival production of The Three Estates, and from there he auditioned for the Citizens’ in Glasgow, and became a stalwart in the 1949 production, The Tintock Cup, which revolutionised Scottish pantomime.
Eventually, he decided to stretch himself by moving to London. He decided not to rely on being a Scots comic. “To begin with, I wanted all my sketches to be written in American, Irish, foreign, anything but Scots. That gave me a wider canvas.”
Audiences, he says, would have been unable to detect that he was Scottish. “Because eh can do posh, of course eh can! I’ve got a good ear. It was why I was able to speak French with a lovely accent, except when people replied, I didnae know what the f*** they were talking about!”
Still, the roots of Baxter’s act were planted in those church halls (the impressions), the army revues (the broad-brush humour), and the pantos (where he perfected the Kelvinside woman). “Apart from the fact that you had to wear padding and high heels, it didn’t matter whether I was playing a woman or a man. It was a character.
“I always started with the voice, and once I’d got the voice, everything else I could do. I even found I was quite happy in high heels, to my own surprise. Until this time – I found it a wee bit more awkward, getting back in the Queen’s shoes!”
He’s reluctant to agree that his humour is Glaswegian, saying he was more influenced by American movies. “It’s obvious in my work – all the musicals. It was an escape from the dreich winters in Glasgow before the clean air act: all that fog and ice in Belmont Street going to school, and then suddenly you’re going to this magical world of the Grosvenor and the Hillhead.”
He looks suddenly wistful. “I was just about to tell you my favourite actor – so favourite I cannae mind the name. Eh…. Spencer Tracy, the greatest movie actor that ever lived! Inherit The Wind – wonderful!”
When I ask him what he thinks of his TV specials, he seems oddly unmoved.
“Thank God I got away with it all! And very successfully. It was nice. And I’m glad I don’t have to do it all over again!”
I tell him I am surprised it doesn’t mean more to him. “I never watch my own stuff,” he says. “The only thing I might sit and watch is Very Important Person, my first film. I loved doing that, because I had been brought up with movies, and here I was actually making a movie. That was a big thrill.”
Baxter played two parts in the film, a POW camp comedy with James Robertson Justice. He was a German, and a Scots boy doing a bad impersonation of the same man. “They made me do the first three days as the German, and then they were going to look at the rushes and if it didn’t work, I’d only be playing the Scot. Well it worked. I was so proud of that, and I’m still proud of that.”

Clarksdale, Mississippi: Where The Blues Had A Baby And Named It Rocket 88

Delta Karate
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

It takes a while for the eyes to adjust from the blue brightness of a Mississippi afternoon to the gloom in the hallway of Clarksdale’s Riverside Hotel. But eventually the shadows lighten to reveal a sullen piano, and walls pasted with a jumble of flyers and posters for the blues. On the floor, lining the wall of the corridor, are packets of tiles, as if the place is in a state of constant refurbishment. Looking oddly out of place among this cheerful chaos is an arrangement of photographs recording the 1991 visit made to Riverside by the late John F Kennedy Jr, and, ominously – to the right, under the ceiling fan in the front office – a sign reading “Be Nice or Leave”.

The Riverside’s proprietor, Frank Ratliff, appears. He is a wiry man with a strong handshake and a quick smile. “Call me Rat,” he commands, gesturing into the darkness. “Sam Cooke’s room is gone,” he says, pointing towards the closed door of Room 7. Room 11 – named after Pops Staples - is also unavailable, though a glimpse inside reveals a glittering disco ball suspended from the ceiling. (It used to hang in the Subway Lounge, the club Rat ran in the basement). The door to Muddy Waters’ room remains stubbornly closed.

Rat pauses for a moment to survey the scene. He has met my travelling companion before, so she is ushered into Bessie’s room, Room 2 – an honour, and a mixed blessing, perhaps, as it’s the room in which the great Bessie Smith died, when the Riverside was the only black hospital in Clarksdale. I get the consolation prize of John Lee Hooker’s room; a compact space with tinfoil over the window, and a plastic sheet on the bed. The view isn’t much, and the communal wash room is some way along the hall, but then nobody comes to the Riverside expecting Egyptian cotton or the airlocked convenience of a Holiday Inn.

The sign at the front of the hotel tells part of the story, boasting that the Riverside is “the home of the delta blues”. The hotel’s historic importance has also been recognised by its inclusion on the Mississippi Blues Trail, which plots the important sites in the evolution of the blues, from the Dockery Plantation – the former residence of Charley Patton, between Ruleville and Cleveland, and often viewed as the birthplace of the delta blues – to the grave of Robert Johnson.

Actually, Johnson was buried in an unmarked grave at an uncertain location outside Greenwood, Mississippi, but such is the interest in his story that he now has three gravestones in three different places, though an unprepossessing site along Money Road at the Little Zion Church currently holds sway amongst musicologists. Still, even 70 years after his death, Johnson remains a controversial figure locally. The first blues marker at the Little Zion site had to be replaced after someone shot bullets through it. The next two markers were stolen.

There are also several opinions as to the location of the crossroads where Johnson sold his soul to the devil, an even less verifiable claim. Clarksdale has one, marked by crossed guitars hung over the junction between highways 49 and 61. The plausibility of this is in no way diminished by the fact that there was no crossroads at this point in Johnson’s day. Still, carnivores in search of authentic Robert Johnson experience could do worse than stopping to sample some of Abe’s barbecue or – a Mississippi speciality – tamales: ground meat rolled in cornmeal and boiled in the leaves from a shuck of corn. It’s conceivable that Johnson did the same. He died on 16 August 1938. Abe’s has been serving Bar-B-Q since 1924 (at this location since 1937), and the great bluesman thought enough about tamales to write a fruity song about them. The ragtime chorus, “Hot tamales, and they’re red hot,” is one of his more uplifting reveries, though he omits any mention of Abe’s famous Comeback Sauce.

On the porch outside the Riverside, looking down Sunflower Avenue, Rat gives me a history of the hotel. “I’m working on mother’s dream,” he says, proudly. It’s a complicated story, but the long and the short of it is that Rat was born on 8th Street in Clarksdale, and then his mother, ZL Hill, moved to a little shotgun house on 4th Street, at the site now occupied by the Church of God in Christ. During the war, ZL rented a funeral home, renting the rooms to soldiers, which gave her the idea of running a hotel. “During that time,” Rat says, “we had trains, buses, everything running here, taxi cabs. Clubs on every corner just about – we called ’em cafes. Grocery stores on every corner. And churches. So you could go both sides. You could work all week, party on weekends, and go to church on Sundays.”

Before the war, the building which is now the Riverside housed the GT Thomas Afro-American Hospital, which earned its moment of notoriety on the morning of 26 September, 1937, when Bessie Smith died after an automobile accident on Highway 61. Like many delta stories, the story of Smith’s death is available in several versions. The incident inspired a play by Edward Albee, The Death of Bessie Smith, which suggests that the singer died because she was refused treatment at a whites-only hospital. The accepted version now is that Smith wasn’t turned away from a white hospital, but died at the Afro-American hospital after having her arm amputated.

Clearly, guests in Room 2 of the Riverside may prefer to concentrate on less maudlin aspects of Smith’s career, but segregation is the reason for the hotel’s historical significance. “It was only in the ’70s that segregation went out here in the State,” Rat explains. “But all the old blues singers, that’s why they had to stay here, because they couldn’t stay in the white businesses and hotels. There wasn’t but a few hotels in this town. This was the only black hotel.”

The Riverside was opened on 11 August, 1944. “Ike Turner moved in here, Robert Nighthawk moved in here, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy (Williamson) and all them, they played different towns, and whenever they came through, this is where they stayed.”

In fact, quite apart from its importance as a dormitory for the blues, the Riverside made a more specific contribution to musical history. In the basement, early in 1951, Ike Turner wrote Rocket 88, a thunderous song in praise of the Oldsmobile 88, which has as good a claim as any to be the first rock’n’roll record. As well as cranking up the rhythm of jump blues, the song had a gloriously distorted guitar sound, possibly because rainwater leaked into the amplifier on the way to record it at Sam Phillips’ Sun studio in Memphis.

Rat was a boy when much of this musical history was unfurling, but he did meet many of the musicians. “At the age of six, seven, eight years old I began to know who a lot of them were. I didn’t know they were singers at that age, but they all played with me. I grew up with all the blues singers; that’s why I love the blues.”

As I am talking to Rat, two of his guests check out of the Riverside. They are twentysomethings from Barcelona. They speak little English, but have rock’n’roll haircuts. Rat tries for some time to ascertain whether they had a good night’s sleep, but the two men show no sign of understanding what he is saying. He changes tack as they load up their rental car. “Where now?” he asks. “Memphis,” says one of the Catalans. “Elvis,” says the other.

A large percentage of the guests at the Riverside are embarked on a similar journey, trying to inhale some of the blues air from the towns up and down Highway 61. Ironically, the economic blues never left Clarksdale, even if most of the juke joints have closed, and the music is harder to find. “The town is much quieter,” says Rat. “You’d walk out of one club, into the next one in the ’50s, the ’60s, up to the ’70s, in this town. Then the jobs started playing out. Clubs started dying out. People started moving out and going elsewhere. Just like the blues singers. They started in Mississippi, they went to Tennessee, St Louis, Chicago, then they went abroad. That’s what happened. The blues spread.”

Evidence of economic collapse isn’t hard to find. There are rows of empty shops, and the establishment of the blues as a tourist currency can’t quite disguise the sense of a town which is struggling to hang on to a sense of itself. The street now called Blues Alley lies in an area once occupied by the freight train depot, and houses the homely Delta Blues Museum and actor Morgan Freeman’s club Ground Zero, a kind of town hall for the blues. Ground Zero and the upmarket restaurant Madidi represent Freeman’s commitment to his home town, and it is possible, with very little effort, to have a great night without leaving the comfort of the club’s porch. It was there that my eligible friend Tom and I were propositioned with the irresistible line: “Do you guys want to hang out on a porch and smoke dope with some weird girls?” That long night of the weird girls extended from porch, to gas station for more supplies, and on, at an absurdly late hour, to Red’s (395 Sunflower Ave) – more of a living room than a lounge, where a left-handed guitarist was squeezing the lifeblood out of a right-handed Stratocaster.

The morning after the night before, I walked around the town centre, pausing at Cat Head (252 Delta Ave), a shop specialising in outsider art, and admiring the mural of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Bessie Smith on the wall of Frank’s Liquor Store on Sunflower Avenue. I was heading back towards the Delta Blues Museum to inspect the lifelike waxwork of Muddy Waters, when a pink car drew over to the kerb and the driver - a black man in a yellow shirt and a pork-pie hat, and gaps where his teeth used to be – threw open his door. “My name is Razor Blade,” he declaimed, “do you want to hear the real blues?”

The invitation carried a faint hint of danger, but this was no crossroads confrontation. It was the middle of the month, Razor Blade explained, and he was trying to hawk his live CD. I asked Mr Blade if I could take his photograph, and he agreed, with one condition. “Not in the car,” he said. “Cos then everybody’ll see that I drive a Toyota!”

The Baader Meinhof Complex - Euro-Terror Meets Bonnie And Clyde

The international success of The Lives of Others and Downfall may have encouraged those involved in the production of The Baader Meinhof Complex that the wider world is uncommonly interested in recent German history. Much has been made of the involvement of Downfall producer Bernd Eichinger, who writes the story, from the book by Stefan Aust. But it’s probably more instructive to see it in relation to his previous work with director Uli Edel – on that gritty tale of druggy Berlin, Christiane F, and Last Exit To Brooklyn. Edel also directed several episodes of that pre-Wire tale of Baltimore cops, Homicide: Life On The Street, and the Madonna clunker, Body of Evidence, but we’ll put the latter down to misplaced ambition.

The film tells the story of the German terrorist group – also known as the Red Army Faction – which grew out the radical politics of 1968, the anti-Vietnam movement, and the perceived authoritarianism of the West German state. The echoes of their brutal campaign live on in Germany, but here – such is our shallow understanding of recent European history – if the Baader Meinhof gang is remembered at all, it is as a vague symbol of rebellion. (Joe Strummer’s punk wardrobe included an RAF t-shirt.)

Eichinger favours a fragmented brand of storytelling rather than a rounded narrative, and Edel is happy to avoid the moral judgments that a Hollywood film on terrorism would be forced to make. That said, if the film isn’t exactly on the side of the RAF, it does a splendid job of making them sexy. This isn’t necessarily a fabrication – they were, in the main, young and good-looking and, in the spirit of the times, advocated sexual liberation. So it is that Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) is pictured naked on the roof of a Lebanese terrorist training camp, taunting her Palestinian hosts: “What’s the matter? Fucking and shooting; it’s the same thing!”

By contrast, the authorities are characterless figures, with the exception of their main adversary Horst Herold (the reliable Bruno Ganz), and though the futility and the brutality of the campaign eventually become clear, the filmmakers are at risk of being seen as too sympathetic to these beautiful terrorists. Eichenger’s back is covered slightly by a subplot about the power of martyrdom and myths, and the sense of period is beautifully captured. It sprawls messily towards the end, and the violence becomes banal, but the overall effect is explosive: a Molotov cocktail of sex, violence, and dangerous ideals.

The Frieze Art Fair Is A Supermarket Full Of Things Nobody Needs

Frieze
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

I went to the Frieze Art Fair in Regent's Park. Frieze is an art supermarket, but they don't sell anything useful. The art is mostly derivative, dyspeptic, or just bad. I saw Jack Vettriano there. I have met Jack Vettriano before. He knows who I am. I wanted to ask him what he thought of the art, because Vettriano's art is popular, and expensive, but critically derided. (His collectors include Jim Davidson and Sir Alex Ferguson). "Jack," I said, but he didn't turn around. I walked up beside him and tried again. "Jack!" I shouted in his ear. Still he didn't turn around. In fact he started to walk more quickly. When he was about 10 feet away, he turned around to look and see who he was running away from. I met his gaze for half a second, and walked away, embarrassed.
Later, I saw Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand. I didn't say anything to him.

One-eighth Japanese

One-eighth Japanese
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Has the BBC's political coverage been dumbed-down? Surely not.

David Cameron's historic address to the Conservative Party Conference: A Tale Of Middle-Age Failures, Drug Addicts And Children Who Can't Spell

Mr David Cameron started his historic address to the massed ranks of the young, modern, multicultural, occasionally brown, and not in the least smug, Conservative Party conference by saying that he was pleased to be in symphony hall, with everyone playing the same tune. This is what passes for a joke in these serious times, which is almost enough to make one nostalgic for the Tory rallies of yore, where Kenny Everett would agitate for nuclear war.
But Mr Cameron was playing it straight. He wore a dark suit and a grim expression. His skin was moisturised. He was flanked by William Hague’s ears, an unambiguous symbol of wisdom and unity.
He made several promises. He promised: “We will not allow what happened in America to happen here,” without mentioning what it was that happened in America. Was it the Boston Tea Party? The OJ Simpson trial? Or the episode of Dallas where Bobby emerged from the shower and declared that the previous series had all been a dream?
He promised to be sober, responsible, measured, proportionate, and responsible (again), which marked him out from those politicians who stand drunk and irresponsible behind the dispatch box. He talked pessimistically about how he was an optimist, which may be why he felt that society was broken, and rife with senseless barbaric violence, and the angry harsh culture of incivility. (His bicycle was stolen recently but, oddly, he didn’t mention that).
This was not a triumphalist address. Serious times call for quiet talk. (Sadly, Mr Iain Duncan Smith, the original Quiet Man, was nowhere to be seen.) Cameron burbled like the under-manager of an aspiring telecoms company, selling widgets to the world. Let’s call him Dave.
“We are a nation at war,” Dave said, optimistically warning that “if we fail in out mission, the Taleban will come back… more terrorists, more bombs, more slaughter on our streets.” He was in favour of soldiers, heroes and Gurkhas. He liked health visitors, but not the nanny state. He wanted to strengthen the family, and to encourage women to work, so – in common with all who decry the nanny state - he was presumably in favour of nannies.
The optimism continued. “These are times of great anxiety,” he said. “The tap marked ‘borrowing’ was turned on and left running for too long,” he warned. “They thought the asset price bubble didn’t matter.”
Since most bankers don’t understand the rudiments of plumbing, the world economy was in a mess. The bankers were to blame, but this was not the time to blame them. Not while the tap was running. “There will be a day of reckoning,” Dave prophesied, using the same formulation as yesterday, “but today is not that day.”
There was some analysis in all this grim chatter. Gordon Brown had made two big mistakes. His worst decision was contained inside his best decision. “He changed the rules of the game. But he took the referee off the pitch.”
That was Mr Brown’s first mistake. His second was to behave like a spendaholic when the cupboard was bare. Mr Cameron would not be doing that. “You shouldn’t spend in the good times,” he said. He didn’t intend to spend in the bad times either.
Instead, he would destroy useless quangos and initiatives. His lack of experience would be no handicap. “Experience means you’re implicated,” he said, sounding increasingly like Miminus, the poetic pig in Animal Farm: “experience is bad…”
Instead, he offered “simple beliefs with profound implications.” These beliefs were various. He was not libertarian. He was in favour of marriage, and not in favour of the unmarried. They were cowardly weasels who deserved to horse-whipped. (This is a slight paraphrase). Michael Howard, he said, stretching credulity in a manner which would have impressed the most hardened of fantabulists, was a very kind man and a great leader of the party.
Cameron then talked about being a parent. All politicians must be parents these days. Unparents are dangerous loners of the type you might meet on a sink estate or in prison.
Dave is a parent, albeit one who boasts about going to bed with an entrepreneur. He talked movingly about watching children walk across the playground with the schoolbag in one hand and the lunch box in the other. Fortunately, this theme was left undeveloped, lest he start to sound like Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman.
But Dave did have some big ideas on education. He was declaring war on schools which say “’all must have prizes’, and the dreadful practice of dumbing down.”
He was in favour of no one getting prizes, and of dumbing up. He was in favour of spelling. “They let a child get marks or writing f--- off in an exam,” he warned darkly. (No wonder the exam results are always getting better).
He talked about patriotism. He was deeply patriotic. “Do you know what?” he asked optimistically. “I don’t want to be prime minister of England. I want to be prime minister of the United Kingdom.” If he is elected Prime Minister, he may get his wish for a short while, until somebody – most likely Mr Alex Salmond – points out that the Conservative mandate stops just after Carlisle.
He talked on like a motivational scoutmaster. Dab followed dib. “The right thing will always be right.” He was in favour of Margaret Thatcher. He would end the something-for-nothing culture. He was not confident about the benefit of benefits.
Then, a bombshell: “This is a country, not a television channel.” (A moment of clarity, this, from a man whose qualification for political office is his stint as a PR for a television channel). But his lack of experience would not be a disadvantage. Inexperience was the very thing for these strange days! “Experience is the excuse of the incumbent down the ages.”
If David Miliband can tear himself away from his banana aversion therapy, he may be flattered that he was deemed important enough to be caricatured for something he didn’t say. Whatever it was, Dave didn’t believe it. You can’t say, Dave said, that there is no such thing as society. The audience applauded, whilst thinking mistily about the blessed Margaret, and her lieutenant Squealer Joseph, whose idea this really was.
The ideas, by now, were tumbling out, amid a hailstorm of clunky metaphors. These were not high-falutin dreams, they were what used to be known as common sense, before the Common Market abolished it. Dave was not in favour of Health and Safety Human Rights Culture. He was not in favour of parents at schools being checked for criminal records. He was against plasma screen TVs on the taxpayer, and – big applause – would offer a Euro referendum.
He also wanted to let people die in dignity, which was nice. “Come with me to Wandsworth prison,” he declared jauntily, “and meet the inmates… the middle-aged failure… the drug addict…” Mr Hague and Mr George Osborne looked on with as much weary gravitas as they could muster, without ever looking moved or convinced. “I am a man with a plan,” Dave concluded, “not a miracle cure.”
He laid no stress on the second point, which was just as well, all things considered.

Heavy Metal, Iraq, And The Dangers Of Headbanging In A Wartorn Country

Eddy Moretti
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

There is, says Eddy Moretti, a thing called “Iraq fatigue”. He was warned about it when he was hawking his documentary, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, at film festivals. He was told that the film wouldn’t sell, and if it did, the distributor would struggle to convince cinemas to book it.
It’s true that films about Iraq have been box office poison. Rendition, with Jake Gyllenhaal getting peevish about the torture of prisoners, bombed. In the Valley of Elah, with Paul Haggis forcing Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron to pout and emote, did little better. Stop-Loss, an MTV version of the troubles facing returning American soldiers, was not of interest to veterans or to viewers of MTV, while Lions For Lambs was a lecture from Dame Robert Redford in the self-righteous pomposity of Hollywood’s liberal conscience. That’s to say nothing of Brian De Palma’s Redacted, which is probably the kindest course of action. If you didn’t have Iraq fatigue before seeing it, you would afterwards.
Well, Heavy Metal in Baghdad is different. It is not a triumph of cinematography: there is much hand-held camerawork, and an introductory sequence in which the travails of the filmmakers are given equal weight to the problems of living in Iraq. But the quiet humanity of the story eventually takes hold. This is Iraq, as experienced by ordinary Iraqis, who just happen to be members of the country’s only heavy metal band, Acrassicauda.
Clearly, heavy metal in Baghdad is not the same as heavy metal in Dusseldorf. In Baghdad, wearing a Slipknot t-shirt is an act of bravery, or foolhardiness, depending on your perspective. Acrassicauda can’t grow their hair or cultivate a beard in the style of their hero, Ozzy sideman Zakk Wilde. Bass player Firas has a tentative goatee, but before the end the side-whiskers have grown in, so that he looks more Islamic.
“When we started following the story, people were looting,” Moretti says. “They were going into government buildings and stealing the toilet. Then it went from that to, oh, 150 people got blown up today. Oh, 30 corpses were found with their heads cut off. And as that happened our interest in the band grew, because it was like we had friends over there who were going through this. We thought: are they OK? What are they doing? What can they tell us? And, ultimately, can we visit them?”
By August 2006, when the filmmakers make their way to Baghdad, the city has settled into a state of permanent hell. Moretti and co-director Suroosh Alvi have to smuggle themselves into Iraq via Kurdistan, where they can buy visas and travel on to Baghdad, including a seven mile zigzag drive along the world’s most dangerous road. On arriving in Baghdad, they hire Iraqi security at $1500 a day, which buys a bulletproof SUV, a car without armour, two drivers, two men with guns, and one translator. (Later, when they venture out for some fresh air, the security detail is expanded to 12 shooters.)
There is, no doubt, an element of gonzo thrill in the reporting of these details, but they are the stuff of everyday life to the members of Acrassicauda. Firas has a succinct description of the horrors of post-war Iraq. “They took Ali Baba and left the 40 thieves.” He also says the idea that there is a Jihad fighting against the coalition forces is “bullshit”: “All the people who are dying are Muslims.”
In post-war Iraq, the band – and ordinary Iraqis – are stuck between the troops and the insurgents. But the film reaches back into the pre-war history of the band, to a time when the authorities were suspicious of headbanging because of its gestural similarity to Jewish prayer. “The headbanging itself could take you to jail forever,” Firas says.
Performing under these strictures required some compromises, and Acrassicauda placated the men from the Culture and Media Ministry by penning a loyal song for Saddam called The Youth of Iraq. The lyrics are: “Living in the dark, shining like a spark, living with pride, so we decide, to fight the evil forces/Yeah, we won’t accept it, you’re never gonna lose/Following our leader, Saddam Hussein/We’ll make them fall, we’ll drive them insane.” They justify this as “just a bunch of fucking lies”, citing an Arabic saying: “To stay away from the devil, sing for him.”
“We got this idea from our teacher,” Firas tells me. “He was in a heavy metal band in the ’90s. There was quite a scene in the mid-90s, up to maybe 1998, with bands like Scarecrew, Agony, and Passage.
“The players are still there, but the bands have vanished, because the atmosphere of that time couldn’t help these bands to stay together. The culture ministry was harder in the ’90s. We managed to stay low profile, and it worked. But another band in the ’90s got thrown into jail, just because they were singing heavy metal. The police couldn’t understand what they were singing because it was English, so they thought it was a devilish Satan-worshipping influence. So when the culture ministry requested that we translate all our lyrics, and they said ‘what have you got for Saddam?’ we told them, ‘OK, we got this song’. So we just managed to stay away from trouble.”
Though Accrasicauda claim to be apolitical, their big song, Massacre, mixes a grinding tune with bleak imagery about the slaughter of a generation: “They stole my kids, they stole my house, they stole my flesh, they stole my bones ... one step for victory, one step for death.”
“We sing in English because English is the international language,” Firas says. “If Chinese was the international language, we’d learn Chinese and speak it. We try to deliver this message, which is: we are just like you, no difference. We are just human beings. We have the same ideas. We can do the same things.
“Everything in the world separates people, even sports. But music gathers them together. I can sing in English and play heavy metal, and people who don’t even speak English can understand what I’m saying. That’s the main point. Heavy metal is an international language.”
At first, there is something comic about watching these four men who have learned English from American movies and listening to bootlegs of Slayer and Metallica, put their faith in a form of music with such a dubious reputation. Headbanging was probably not the American neocons’ definition of the kind of freedom they were hoping to export. But eventually the sincerity of Acrassicauda’s vision, and the tragedy of their plight, overcomes their reliance on Spinal Tap slang. When, shortly after saying that he is ready to die, Firas points to the cover of Iron Maiden’s Death on the Road and says “This is what life here looks like,” you can see his point. The cover image shows the grim reaper, riding away from a fiery horizon with a cart full of skulls.
“We chose heavy metal because it’s true,” Firas explains. “It talks about reality: no bullshit. Nothing about boobs or money or drugs or whatever. It’s the facts, the reality.
“This type of music worked as a kind of therapy for us. Playing this music gets your anger out, you can express yourself, tell people what you think, deliver your message.”
And it does take a degree of single-mindedness and obstinacy for them to even try to play. In July 2005, Acrassicauda stage a show in central Baghdad at a hotel ringed with tanks and barbed wire. Their equipment has to be inspected by coalition troops, and the show must end before 7pm, due to the curfew. The band has to persuade the American soldiers at the checkpoint to admit the crowd, and the soundcheck is interrupted by power failures and the sound of mortars exploding outside. “It’s nothing new,” Firas says flatly.
“There’s one guy in the film and he’s sitting in a chair when they lose electricity,” Moretti recalls. “He’s a little bit older than the rest of the fans there. I don’t know his name, or if he’s still alive, and he has that speech where he’s like: ‘I am of the heavy metal music. In the Iraq. I can’t even grow the long hair because they will think I am the bad guy. We need real freedom.’ That always grabs me – the sense of his frustration. It’s like a barometer of how bad this world is.”
It’s a delicate business, using heavy metal as a barometer of freedom, but Moretti just about pulls it off. But the film’s real strength is the way it documents the plight of Acrassicauda after they flee Iraq to become “heavy metal refugees” in Damascus, Syria. There, they play a show and record three songs, but the broader reality of their lives is bleak. As refugees, they are not allowed to work, and are forced to live in the windowless basements of a housing project, as part of a broader Iraqi exodus. The film may not be overtly political, but the statistics it cites are damning enough. In December 2006, there were 1.2m Iraqi refugees in Syria and 750,000 in Jordan. The US had admitted 466.
“I’ll tell you what Iraq fatigue really is,” Moretti says. “It’s a sublimated guilt complex. Or it’s guilt combined with frustration, like: ‘Yeah, I know we fucked up, but you know what, don’t even talk to me about it.’”
After Syria, Acrassicauda fled to Turkey, where they have been living for almost a year, awaiting resettlement, but unable to work, and unable to leave the country. Gibson sent them some guitars, but Firas says that they will now have to sell them just to get by.
“It’s pretty hard to live down here. The expense is like hell. If you can’t work, you can’t make money, so … imagine.”
They have thought about returning to Iraq but their families, who remain in the country, warn them not to. “Plus,” Firas says, “if we went back, now we are known, everybody would just point at us, and that’s enough to get us killed.”
Firas says he likes the film, but that when he watches it, he feels confused.
“It’s more pointing at the refugee question, than the heavy metal story. Sometimes you feel like you are retarded. And everybody just takes pity on you, which we hate. We like to be dealt with as professionals, as a heavy metal group.
“But I like the film. Every time I watch it it’s like closing your eyes and you get all the flashbacks from your memories. So it’s painful to watch it, but also it reminds you of who you are, what you came from, and what you have been through.”
I ask whether he would prefer that Saddam was in power and the war had never happened, and he says the band never cared about politics. “Not before, not now. If Saddam was in power, or somebody else, we would never care. But, in the sense of being able to perform, and having security, limits for everything: that was a good thing. If we wanted something back, it would be safety, and basic needs for the people.”
Talking to Firas, it seems as if he uses heavy metal as a metaphor for his broader aspirations, and as a release from the difficulties of everyday life. His wife and young son are with him in Turkey, which is some comfort. “We are in a safe place. But sometimes I hate that, because he’s grown up with no family, no friends, other than us. No kids to play with, a language he doesn’t understand. I hate when I think about the future and what I can guarantee for him, which is nothing. As a refugee you got no guarantees. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s really painful. I can’t think about the future.”
He sounds more wistful than defiant when she signs off. “As long as we’re playing music we don’t care about anything else,” he says. “Let me play today. Kill me tomorrow.”

My Dreams, They Fade And Die (Confessions Of An Accidental West Ham fan)

Forever
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

I lost my innocence three years ago, at an evening game between West Ham and Crewe Alexandria. Oddly, for such a prime fixture, my good friend Denis had a spare ticket. But there was an ominous gleam in his eye when he handed me the Season Card in a corner of the Green Street Café. Sipping a milky tea, he fixed my gaze and said: “Welcome to a lifetime of pain.”
At the time, I thought he was joking. Now, after two full seasons of purgatory in the Dr Martens’ Stand, I’m not so sure. All the signs were there on that dank March evening. The football was woeful – Marlon Harewood was having one of his barn door games - until Teddy Sheringham opened the scoring in the 76th minute with a free kick into the top left corner. Game over? Of course not. Several more chances were spurned before Crewe equalised with minutes to go.
Even so, I loved every minute, because some of my earliest football memories were the stories my dad told me of visiting Upton Park in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and singing Bubbles, and being so close to the action that you could reach out and touch the players whenever there was a corner. More than that: although everything about me was Scottish, I was an Essex boy, born in my mother’s bed in Harold Wood, on a Saturday as the football results were being declaimed. How could I not support West Ham?
My family moved back to Scotland before I had any memories of Harold Wood, but I always had a pride in my birthplace, even when I was being threatened with violence for supporting England (a result of my fondness for Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst rather than anything genetic). And, when my primary seven class came on a school trip to London, visiting the zoo, the Tower of London, and standing inside the gates at Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard, the most exciting moment for me was the knowledge that the hostel we were staying in – which had table tennis, girls, and Hot Butter on the radio – was in Chigwell, not far from the home of the sainted Sir Bobby.
A few years ago, I made a pilgrimage back to Harold Wood, to the house where I was born. My mum drew me a map, and I found the place soon enough: turn right out of the station, up past the library and the parade of shops where my Doric-speaking grandmother had baffled the butcher by asking for hough, a meaty Scottish delicacy which has yet to make it to the East End. And there it was. I loitered outside the door, and looked for the place where the neighbours’ chicken coops would have been, but I felt nothing. I had no recollection of the place.
But all that changed, just before kick off, that March evening at Upton Park. The teams came out, the chorus of Bubbles swelled, and I thought about my dad all those years before, singing that sad song about impossible dreams. I felt a sudden surge of emotion. It felt like I had come home, like the players were close enough to touch, and everything was as it should be. And then Crewe Alexandria equalised.

[A version of this was published in the West Ham United programme].

Robert Johnson, RIP: In Heaven Or In Hell, Your Spirit Lives On In The Mississippi Delta

Since 1924
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

In Me And The Devil Blues, Robert Johnson gave the instructions for his own funeral. The song begins with Satan knocking at the singer’s door, and ends in a mood of fatalistic defiance, as Johnson’s explains that he doesn’t care where his body is buried.
“You may bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side/So my old evil spirit, can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.”
Seventy years ago, on 16 August, 1938, Johnson got his wish, and if his evil spirit didn’t catch a Greyhound, its influence echoed down the generations, forming a cornerstone of the rebellious myth of rock’n’roll, and shaping the music of Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin and just about every rock band whose music was coloured by the blues. The latest devotee is Bob Dylan, whose forthcoming album Tell Tale Signs includes a version of Johnson’s 32-20 Blues.
Johnson died on the same date as Elvis Presley, but while Graceland becomes a place of pilgrimage in mid-August, blues fans have a tougher job. Johnson might as well have been buried by the roadside, because there is no certainty about his final resting place. He has three gravestones outside Greenwood, Mississippi, where he died, allegedly after being poisoned by a jealous husband. The first, a modest marker erected in 1991 by the rock group The Tombstones, is located out through the cotton fields at the Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church. The second, an ugly obelisk at the Little Zion MB Church in Morgan City, was paid for by Sony/Columbia, after the success of their Grammy-winning compilation of Johnson’s music in 1990. The third, and currently most reputable grave site, is located out on Money Road at the Little Zion MB church, after blues historian Steven LaVere location coaxed a testimony from an eyewitness, Rose Estridge, who claimed her husband, “Peter Rabbit” dug Johnson’s grave by an old pecan tree in the graveyard.
The veracity of this site was underlined in May 2007, when the Mississippi Blues Commission erected a “blues marker” at the site, celebrating it as a place of cultural importance. The sign was promptly shot at, then stolen.
Johnson’s reputation thrives on the absence of detail about his life, and the posthumous myth that he learned to play the guitar after doing a deal with the devil at a crossroads. This is an irresistible story, but it obscured Johnson’s musical versatility. He may, as the myth suggests, have been a genius, but he was never a primitive, and the stuff about the devil – if he ever said it – was most likely a joke.
“Anyone who sold their soul to the devil, died after drinking poisoned whisky, and has three grave sites is going to attract attention,” says Luther Brown, director of the Delta Centre for Culture and Learning. “And the fact that he wrote music that has been covered in basically every genre from rock to jazz to mountain dulcimer just adds to the story.
“As far as I can tell, Johnson never actually said he’d sold his soul to the devil, although he apparently didn’t deny it either, and the story was part of his persona even during his own lifetime.”
The crossroads, says Brown, is a common folk tale in the Delta. “There is no ‘true crossroads’, despite the desire of tourists to see the place where ‘it really happened’. But crossroads are places of decision, and often of danger, and are associated with choice and risk in many cultures.
“Historians have made a big deal about it, sometimes claiming that the devil isn’t the Christian one, but the Yoruba trickster god Eshu, re-placed in American Voodoo as Papa Legba, the keeper of the ‘crossroads’ between the physical and spirit worlds. Others think the whole story is a metaphor for Johnson’s decision to follow ‘the devil’s music’ instead of the church, and I’m sure there was tension between the preacher and the bluesman since they both relied on their own congregations for support. Crossroads Blues has lyrics that sound simply like someone going to the crossroads to flag a ride, not sell their soul, but it’s clear from Johnson’s songs that he was committed to the devil’s music and the lifestyle that required.”
A proper appreciation of Johnson has been hampered by the habit of comparing him to the musicians he influenced. Even sympathetic listeners hear him as the “real” version of the music which informed the Rolling Stones. “One of the big appeals of black music has been this dangerous primitive ‘other’,” says Elijah Wald, author of Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. “But one of the most striking things is that, compared to the performers in his world, his voice and enunciation are very clear. He sounds less removed from white people and the modern world than someone like Charley Patton, who’s virtually incomprehensible. Or even Leadbelly. There is a clear knowledge of what was happening in the urban blues world: his diction is good and he has a lot of the smoothness of the more commercial urban singers. So it’s funny that he’s been saddled with this myth of the delta primitive.”
Wald is a blues revisionist, arguing both that Johnson’s contribution to the culture is overrated – “It’s as if Eric Clapton were the only musician of British rock in the 1960s, and everything that had been done in that period was thought of as essentially Eric Clapton” – and misunderstood, because his music is considered in relation to its gift to rock.
“The jazz people had been putting him forward as an example of the roots of jazz as early as John Hammond’s Carnegie Hall Spirituals to Swing concert in 1938. Johnson was not even dead six months and they were playing his records on the stage of Carnegie Hall! But he was being played as ‘that deep sound from before jazz’, when in fact it was barely a year old.”
Steven LaVere, who runs the Blues Heritage Museum in Greenwood – and who discovered the two known photographs of Johnson – takes a more traditional view, saying Johnson was a “watershed artist”: who absorbed what had gone before, notably Charley Patton, Leroy Carr, Son House and Skip James, and defined what came after.
“Nobody knew who those people were. Then in the 1950s, many of Johnson’s songs were reborn as Chicago blues classics. Kind Hearted Woman, Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Walking Blues, Sweet Home Chicago, and Dust My Broom; my God, Elmore James made a career out of that guitar lick. And it all came from Robert Johnson. The post-war blues Diaspora was dotted with his music.”
Wald, whose next book is called How The Beatles Destroyed Rock’n’Roll concedes that Johnson was a great talent, while stressing that he wasn’t alone.
“If you had to pick one artist from that period, he’s a good choice. But you don’t. Every single pre-war blues record is available on CD. It’s the best-documented period on the planet. The whole style would be better served if Robert Johnson was seen as a way into this world, rather than as the one person people listen to.”
On a Greyhound bus somewhere in the Mississippi Delta, Robert Johnson is laughing.

Elvis, Memphis, and the Ghosts of Libertyland

Wild Bill's
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

By the time we got to the Zippin’ Pippin it was midnight. My guide, Mike McCarthy, had taken me on a ghost tour of Beale Street – a thoroughfare routinely described as the birthplace of the blues - which ended at the knock-kneed statue of the young Elvis Presley. Then, the real tour began. We drove through midtown in the dark, pausing at the site of the world’s first supermarket, Piggly Wiggly, and again beneath the busted neon of the derelict Lamar Theater, a cinema which gained notoriety during the Deep Throat obscenity trial and had a starring role in Jim Jarmusch’s Memphis film, Mystery Train. Then we rode on to the abandoned state fairgrounds, where the Pippin, the second oldest wooden rollercoaster in the world, was rotting behind a fence.
Why were we there? Because the Pippin has become a kind of accidental symbol of Memphis, Tennessee. It used to sit at the centre of Libertyland, and was Elvis Presley’s favourite rollercoaster. He rented it from 1am to 7am in the week before his death, and rode it endlessly through the night. But Libertyland and Elvis are gone, and what remains is real estate, and an argument about the value of ghosts.
The campaign to save the Zippin’ Pippin is both simple and complicated. The simple bit is that Save Libertyland, a group of campaigners which includes McCarthy, want to revive the magic of their childhood memories on this site. The city of Memphis would like to develop the site. A complicated legal process has arrived at a stalemate: the city owns the land, but the ownership of the coaster – which has now been added to the register of historic landmarks – is disputed. The city claims to own it, but so does Save Libertyland. And nobody has any money to do anything about it.
It is a very Memphis story, and its appeal to someone like Mike McCarthy is obvious. When he wasn’t directing exploitation movies such as Sore Losers (“They Wanted Meat So They Ate The Flower Children”) and Teenage Tupelo (which speculates about what might have happened if Elvis’s stillborn twin had lived) the Tupelo-born artist had a job on a different ghost tour, showing tourists round Sun Studio, the soundproofed room on Union Avenue which gave birth to rock’n’roll.
Memphis is defined by Elvis. But at Sun, McCarthy would explain the history to them, noting quietly that Presley didn’t write Blue Suede Shoes: that was Carl Perkins, who had a car crash and had to watch from a hospital bed while Elvis performed the song on television.
And, McCarthy argues, as much as the flamboyance of Presley, it’s the spirit of Perkins - “the loser’s quality” - which defines Memphis. “People go to Nashville to get famous or make money or lose their artistic integrity. Elvis did. But nothing compares to the art he created at Sun.”
The same goes for Johnny Cash, McCarthy says, and for countless black artists whose contribution to the culture has been overlooked. And it stretches into the visual arts, where the Memphian eccentric William Eggleston redefined colour photography without ever shaking off his status as an outsider.
McCarthy has a few theories about this, some of them coherent, some of them fantastic. His broad contention is that the golden age of American pop culture was encapsulated within Elvis’s 42 years on the planet. “Everything happened within that time frame, everything that’s worthwhile, that becomes retro in retrospect, from Bride of Frankenstein to Star Wars and punk rock.”
Needless to say, this is not a perspective you get at Graceland, the most obvious tourist attraction in Memphis, and a salutary reminder of what happens when you give a truck driver the means to satisfy his every lusty whim. But it remains to be seen whether the shagpile charm of the place will survive the reinvention planned by Robert F.X. Sillerman, who bought Elvis’s name and image from Lisa Marie Presley in 2005.
Sillerman’s plans centre on the development of a Graceland “campus”. The fact that Sillerman’s company CKX is the subject of a buy-out bid by another of his companies, 19X, – a partnership with Simon “Pop Idol” Fuller – may be a portent of what is to come. And it will not be a celebration of the loser aesthetic.
Oddly, it’s Johnny Cash, not Elvis, who has been at the centre of a more interesting renaissance in Memphis. Following the success of Walk The Line, great efforts have been made to emphasise the city’s suitability as a movie location, a plan made more plausible by the decision of local filmmaker Craig Brewer to locate his office on Main Street.
Brewer broke through with a no-budget film called The Poor and Hungry, set in the P and H, an atmospheric café in midtown, and consolidated his reputation with the rap movie Hustle and Flow. His first studio picture, Blake Snake Moan, confused critics who weren’t sure how to respond to an almost-naked Christina Ricci being kept in chains by Samuel L Jackson: this anxiety about the imagery of slavery was, surely, the point, but the film was an honest attempt to capture the sin and guilt which infected the delta blues. When I visited Brewer’s downtown office, he was in a Hollywood edit-suite, but his assistant raised him on the phone, and he explained that he remained dedicated to making films based on a love of Memphis, inspired by childhood trips to the home of the blues, Beale Street, “before Beale Street became Disneyland.”
“There was something very depressing and rather tragic about downtown at that time. Now it’s booming and everybody’s downtown, but back then there were still bluesmen playing out on the street, with a hat.
“So from a very early age I couldn’t help but view Memphis, even in its dilapidation – as a very beautiful city. But even more important was that it had its own soundtrack. I’ll give you it exactly. I remember I was driving over Madison Avenue; if you’re driving westbound on Madison, and you’re just passing Sam Phillips’ recording service [Sun] on your right, and there’s an overpass; when you go over it, there’s a unique skyline view, and the sun was going down, when on the radio, Al Green’s song Jesus is Waiting was playing. It was a wonderful moment. I’d listened to a lot of Al Green, and I’d heard that song before, but I hadn’t been able to cruise in Memphis, when the sun was going down behind the buildings, and listen to that music. And I thought, I don’t think that this music or this city could have existed, separate from each other.”
Brewer has just started work on $5 Cover, a collaboration involving local musicians in a 15-episode series of short films which will help promote Memphis culture to the world. This is the culture beyond Elvis – the garagebands, the b-movies, the denizens of the trash aesthetic.
The feeling you get in Memphis is similar to that which pertains in Austin, Texas, of a city awash with creativity almost despite its surroundings. “I have not been criticised by my city officials,” Brewer says. “They’ve always been very encouraging. I think, the reason is that there’s a history in our city of people pushing the envelope and being criticised, and then later having to name streets after them. [They complained about ] that gyrating pompadoured bolero-wearing guy named Elvis Presley… now people from all over the world come to see his house.”
I asked Brewer to provide a routemap to the Memphis he loved, and he started with Graceland (“You can’t go through life and not see the Jungle Room”), and ended at Wild Bill’s, a vibrant club on Vollintine Avenue run, until his death last year, by Willie ‘Wild Bill’ Storey, who sat on the door with a fistful of dollars.
“There’s also a real set community there,” Brewer said. “They’re dressed up: it’s men taking their ladies out, and they’re gonna dance, damnit. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how skinny or fat you are. If the evening is right, you’ll be bumping into the drummer, right there on the floor.”
I took Brewer’s advice and hitched a ride in the 1955 pink Cadillac driven by Tad Pierson of American Dream Safari tours. Tad makes his living ferrying visitors around the Memphis of their imaginations, and Wild Bill’s is a popular destination, though it sits in a neighbourhood which might ordinarily make a white European nervous. Inside, it was wonderland; a narrow, dark room with red walls and fairy lights, and the band – the Memphis Soul Survivors – playing in the corner.
This was not pub rock. The Soul Survivors are veterans of the Memphis music scene – the keyboard player, Archie “Hubbie” Turner is the stepson of the Hi Records producer Willie Mitchell (best known for his work with Al Green). They were playing Soul Serenade, a fine tune on record, but in this context it sounded far dirtier.
I sat next to James Thompson, an ageless gentleman in a homburg. I asked where he bought his yellow checked suit. “Hollywood,” he replied. There was a pause of 30 seconds before his face cracked. (Hollywood is a district in North Memphis.)
The music in Wild Bill’s is soul in the old sense of the word, meaning the driving dance music which came out of Willie Mitchell’s Royal studio, and Stax (now reborn as a museum). But one of the most influential studios is also one of the least celebrated: Ardent, founded in 1966 by John Fry, who modelled himself on George Martin, and made his studio the Abbey Road of Memphis.
Ardent started out with Sam and Dave and Booker T and the MGs, but soon branched into rock, mixing Led Zeppelin III, recording ZZ Top’s Afterburner, and acting as a home-from-home for Memphis legends Big Star (whose drummer Jody Stephen now manages the studio.) Jack White used Ardent to mix albums by The White Stripes and The Raconteurs.
It’s hard, at first, to see what ZZ Top might have in common with Sam and Dave, but this lack of homogeneity is really the essence of Memphis music. Elvis fused country and rhythm’n’blues, while his later Memphis recordings were great monuments of Southern Soul. Fry compared Memphis to a crossroads where styles overlap: “There’s so much history and tradition. It’s an intangible quality, but it works – if somebody feels like they’re in a place where something special happened, if that puts them in a more creative mood, then it really does change something. It’s not just ju-ju.”
In Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch makes this quality overt: Elvis’s phantom appears in a hotel room and sings Blue Moon. Back at the Zippin’ Pippin, Mike McCarthy had tried to define the essence of this city of ghosts.
“You’re only 19 miles from Mississippi,” McCarthy said. “The blues was created there. Rock’n’roll seeped into Memphis from that mentality – white people trying sound black, white people who were just as poor as black people, and were just as good as indentured servants.”
He embarked again on his riff about Memphis being a city of losers. This, clearly, was a blessing. “It’s a spiritual thing,” he said, adjusting his quiff. “Jesus was a loser.”

Cass: Frodo Baggins, Margaret Thatcher And The Exploitation Of Violence, West Ham-style

Last August, I was contacted by a man called Dan Taylor who was working as the production designer on a film called Cass. Dan had seen photographs I had taken before and after West Ham games, and said that they symbolised the style he was looking for in the film.
I was flattered by this, but also slightly concerned about the film, which was an adaptation of the life story of Cass Pennant, who used to run the ICF (Inter-City Firm), the gang of football hooligans which followed West Ham in the 1980s. The odd thing about Cass as a leader of a group of football hooligans is that, aside from being a giant of a man, he is black. In the past, West Ham fans haven't had the best reputation for racial tolerance, and the thuggish elements were not shy about aligning themselves with the National Front. Which makes Cass's leadership of the ICF remarkable, if not admirable.
Dan explained to me that while the film of Cass's life would contain violence, it wouldn't glamorise it, Instead, it would attempt to "make the audience understand the root and cause of it and how it is attractive to that social class during its most prolific years."
Well, I was intrigued, but not quite convinced. I'd seen Cass outside Upton Park on match days, selling his books, and while he's now a man of peace, he's still an intimidating figure. But a film about West Ham hooligans which didn't exploit the violence would be a novelty. The most recent of this regrettable genre was Rise of the Footsoldier, which was based on Muscle, the autobiography of East End criminal Carlton Leach, who also merited a chapter in Hard Bastards, a book by Kate (wife of Ronnie) Kray.
Leach did his apprenticeship as a “general” in the ICF, graduating to tough-guy jobs bouncing for Essex nightclubs, and moving through the rave scene to various levels of drug-dealing, violence and general act of menace. His criminal career ended when three of his associates were murdered by rivals in their Range Rover in Rettendon in 1995. My memories of that film are not positive, but I believe the character of Cass had a walk-on role. Whatever else it was, Footsoldier wasn't sociology. It was an exercise in the pornography of violence, enlivened momentarily by the scene where the toupee-wearing criminal Tony Tucker (Terry Stone) ordered "a pint of your finest Champagne!"
Before Footsoldier there was Green Street, a very silly film named after the road which runs through Upton Park, in which Elijah Wood plays a Harvard journalism student who accidentally becomes involved with a gang of East End football thugs - as you do. Perhaps there is something fantastic about West Ham's terrace anthem, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, but that doesn't make Frodo Baggins a plausible hard-case.
I've now seen Cass, and while it isn't nearly as execrable as Footsoldier or Green Street, it doesn't quite succeed. The production design is good - the scenes from the '60s and '70s have a washed-out documentary feel which does a decent job of recreating the poverty of the East End in pre-Thatcher Britain. The violence - as is the fashion these days - is done with hand-held cameras, and has a nasty visceral quality. And the performances are good, particularly Nonso Anozie in the lead role, and Tamer Hassan as his criminal mate. (Nathalie Press does a very effective audition for a role in EastEnders).
But still there are doubts. Cass is a film in which the violence is the only drama. The poignancy of Pennant's life - a Barnardo's boy adopted by a middle-aged white woman - is glimpsed, but not in any depth. His family life is pitched somewhere between Alf Garnett and the Dursleys in Harry Potter. He loves his adoptive mum, but still he breaks heads.
Presumably, he had his reasons, but the film doesn't explain the brutality except to suggest that it seemed like a good idea at the time. Yes, there is some stuff about the need to belong, and the fact that Thatcher had her own "firm" bashing up the miners. But that wasn't a justification then, and it isn't one now.

Postcard from Mr Ivor Cutler

Postcard from Mr Ivor Cutler
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

A postcard sent on 21 February, 1992, by the absurdist poet, lapsed teacher, anti-noise campaigner, cyclist, oddball genius Ivor Cutler. It concerns the Scottish poet John Burnside.

Mike Leigh Watches Gavin And Stacey, Is Reminded Of His Younger Self, And Tries To Imagine What It Would Be Like To Be Happy

A few years ago, during an interview about his film Vera Drake, Mike Leigh told me how much he disliked driving sequences. He couldn’t see the point of scenes inside cars; when he watched them, he wished the characters would get where they were going and get on with the action. It’s possible, of course, that Leigh was joking. In the same interview, he mentioned that he had tried to persuade another interviewer that his forthcoming play at the National Theatre would feature a cast of talking dogs.
The dog play never happened, but it remains a surprise to note that much of Happy-Go-Lucky is set inside a vehicle, as Poppy (Sally Hawkins) takes driving lessons from Scott (Eddie Marsan), an instructor whose frustrations are on the verge of boiling over into something quite unpleasant.
After Vera Drake and the much-underrated All Or Nothing, Happy-Go-Lucky marks a significant change of mood. It’s not entirely joyful; apart from Scott’s urban rage, there is a hint of hysteria behind the cheerfulness of his breathless heroine, and a sense that while the director admires the unrelenting optimism of his character, he doesn’t quite accept that it’s a rational response to her circumstances. But after the institutional bleakness of Vera Drake and the bruised humanism of All Or Nothing, even misplaced levity is something of a relief.
As always with Leigh, this is an ensemble film, but it is dominated by Hawkins. When we see her first, she is cycling round London, spraying good cheer behind her. When her bicycle is stolen, she sees it as a matter of sadness – “we didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye” – but not regret. Her driving instructor is a sullen sod, but she shrugs off his negativity, and soon there are signs that Scott’s frustration is a mask for his growing attraction towards Poppy.
The drama is domestic in scale, and while some critics have detected a similarity to the free-spirited French comedies of Eric Rohmer, it is a peculiarly London picture, capturing the dislocations of urban living, and the messy energy of the architecture around Finsbury Park. Compare Happy-Go-Lucky to Woody Allen’s forthcoming London misfire, Cassandra’s Dream – in which Hawkins gives a similar performance – and you’ll get a sense of Leigh’s precision. The look of the film is also very British; the scenes in a Tesco Extra petrol station have the rude beauty of a Martin Parr photograph, and there remains a sense of ambivalence in the way he allows his lower-middle class characters to mock themselves.
Oddly, the cheery tone is reminiscent of Gavin and Stacey, a TV comedy which operates almost as a tribute to Leigh (featuring Alison Steadman – whose turn in Abigail’s Party made Leigh’s reputation – and James “Smithy” Corden, who played the maladjusted chubber in All Or Nothing). Happy-Go-Lucky is Leigh repaying the compliment, though it contains enough darkness to suggest that his journey to the sunny side of the street may not be permanent.

One Nation Under CCTV

One Nation Under CCTV
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

A new work by Banksy has appeared over the weekend, in the car park of the Post Office sorting office in Newman Street, off Oxford St, London. The work shows a security guard taking a photograph of a young graffiti artist, and the site is (ironically) overseen by a CCTV camera, and a Post Office security guard. For more pictures, see my flickr stream.

Sinew and Duracell: Martin Scorsese and the Frightening Endurance of the Rolling Stones

Near the start of Shine A Light, which documents a Rolling Stones concert at the Beacon Theatre, New York in 2006, there is a clip of the young Mick Jagger being interviewed by Michael Parkinson. Parkie, offscreen, asks a question about the long-term prospects of this rock’n’roll band, who have been together for two eventful years. But Jagger, looking impossibly young and pert, is unfazed. “I think we’re pretty well set up for at least another year,” he replies.
Ten million years later, Jagger’s insouciance is played for comic effect. The Rolling Stones – who used to stand for devil-worship, drugs, and the breaking of butterflies on wheels – are now the Duracell bunnies of rock’n’roll. They are about endurance. They keep on keeping on, gathering no Moss.
Martin Scorsese’s film isn’t really a documentary. There are a few fly-on-the-wall moments in a funny, and slightly phoney, introductory piece about the filmmaker’s urgent need to acquire a set-list, and Jagger’s reluctance to provide with one. It’s good comedy, and provides Scorsese with his best onscreen cameo since he hitched a ride in the back of Travis Bickle’s cab in Taxi Driver, but it also suggests a level of cinematic intervention which the film fails to deliver. This isn’t Cocksucker Blues. Unlike Robert Frank’s 1972 documentary, there’s nothing here that would offend the Stones’ images of themselves. Instead, Scorsese reprises the cartoon versions of the band’s personalities. So, Jagger is vain, controlling, and financially astute; Keith Richards is an incorrigible old pirate and, most probably, undead; Charlie Watts is bored; and Ronnie Wood can’t quite believe his luck. These stereotypes have the advantage of being more or less true, at least in the sense that the Stones have been playing the roles for so long that they couldn’t do it any other way. But if they are masks, the film makes no attempt to look behind them. Perhaps that’s what those opening scenes allude too. Scorsese may be the director, but Jagger is the boss.
Instead, you get the live spectacle, and it’s here that Scorsese surpasses himself. Rock music is notoriously hard to film, and most directors try to compensate for their inability to capture the visceral power of the concert experience by going for fast cuts and spectacular sweeps with the camera, cutting to a crowd shot whenever things threaten to get interesting. Scorsese has cameras in all the right places, and gets so close to the action that, on occasion, it’s scary. I saw the film at an IMAX cinema and, friends, it wasn’t pretty. Yes, Keith Richards may advertise Louis Vuitton suitcases in a subconscious nod to the leathery durability of his skin, but an invasion of woolly mammoths would have been less disconcerting than the image of his Jurassic visage blown up to fill a fifty-foot screen. This effect is multiplied when the guitarist sings: off-licenses on sink estates could repel loitering hoodies by playing his warbling attack on You Got The Silver.
If Keith resembles a happy monkfish, Jagger is an even more extraordinary creature. At the first rush of the Stones’ 1960s success, he wore a jumper and shook an imaginary tambourine. Now, in his bus pass years, he is a snakehipped rent-boy cheerleader; a jitterbugging fool dancing in a manner that goes far beyond camp. The fact that this gay imp is singing songs of heterosexual braggadocio is one of the curiosities of the Rolling Stones’ appeal. But then, this is circus.
Musically, they aren’t quite on top form: listen to the soundtrack album without the pictures, and you’ll soon be yearning for the crisp economy of the original recorded versions. (Faraway Eyes has some nice steel guitar from Wood, but is taken beyond parody by Jagger’s vocal; Tumbling Dice doesn’t quite get in the groove; Some Girls goes off into a nasty place as Jagger sings: “Some girls give you children, And I only made love to her once.”) But in the context of the concert experience, it’s interesting to hear how the Stones tug at the rhythms of the tunes, and particularly to appreciate the peculiarities of Richards’ guitar. He’s a sporadic player, drifting in and out of focus. The sound design of the film – which amplifies the contribution of whichever musician is onscreen - is immaculate.
There are guests. Jack White does a decent Jagger impersonation on Loving Cup; Christina Aguilera volunteers to be molested from behind by Jagger on Live With Me; and Buddy Guy brings a welcome reminder of what the Stones used to be about on Champagne And Reefer. And Bill Clinton pops up to bask in reflected glory, and to reassure the audience at this benefit concert that you’re only as old as the Rolling Stone you feel.

Art

Art
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize in 2007 for dressing up as a bear and re-creating Brian Haw's Parliament Square peace protest. The protest, which was seized by the police, included this painting by Banksy, though nobody at the Tate could tell me whether the version in Wallinger's re-created version was by Banksy, or Wallinger. Whatever: I got reprimanded for taking a photo of it, which illustrates how art changes into something precious and remote as soon as it goes into a gallery. Not that Wallinger's piece was art - it was an impersonation of politics

Have You Ever Tasted Moon Pie?

Have You Ever Tasted Moon Pie?
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Last Friday, the day that President Bush Jr did his walkabout on an aircraft carrier, I was in Tupelo, Mississippi, visiting the birthplace of Elvis Presley.
Elvis, you may recall from myth, was born in a shotgun shack in East Tupelo. This type of housing takes its name from the fact that the buildings are so small that it is possible to fire a shotgun through the front door and have the blast fly right out the back wall. The name also implies something about the social situations in which such houses were found. They had guns, and they weren’t afraid to use them. Shotgun logic.
So, I was in the shack, trying hard to feel something about Elvis. There was me, the sweet old lady who runs tours of the property, and a middle-aged couple from England. We were in the second of the two rooms. When Elvis was born, the lady explained, there would have been no electricity or running water. To recreate the atmosphere, the kitchen had been decorated with period items, though these had never been owned by the Presley family. There was an old iron hob, and a few milk bottles. "We still get milk in bottles," the English woman declared. "And," said the English man, "my father used to make hobs like this. He worked in an iron foundry."
We stood there for a moment, thinking about this. The sweet lady who runs the tours spoke again. "In Europe, are the homes still like this?"
I drove downtown and walked around Tupelo, looking for Elvis. There wasn’t much to see. In the window of Tupelo Hardware, where Elvis bought his first guitar (because his mother wouldn’t let him have a toy gun) there was a cardboard cut-out of the King. In the window of the local diner, which was closed, hung a sign: "We serve Elvis fans all year round." There were political posters. A man called Presley was standing for Sheriff. I drove my Japanese rental car a few blocks from Main Street and came across a shop called Modern Barbers. The interior was anything but modern. There were two barbers’ chairs, turned to face the door, with a man in one and a woman in the other. The man introduced himself as Lewis, the woman as Violet, and invited me to choose between them. After much polite negotiation, I chose Violet, and Lewis moved himself around to another chair, below a decomposing stag’s head, so we could talk. Lewis said he had been at school with Elvis, a couple of years below him. In the early 1950s, he had travelled to Memphis to see Presley perform, and concluded that he wouldn’t amount to anything.
We talked on for a while, and then Lewis fixed me with a smile. "I want to thank you," he said, "for helping us out in Iraq."
Immediately, I felt the delicacy of the situation. Violet was buzzing my neck with a strimmer. I was a stranger in a strange land, being shown great hospitality by strangers. "Well," I heard myself say, "somebody had to do it, and it wasn’t going to be the French." Hearing these words was a surprise to me, because they did not reflect my view of the war, but I knew them to be the right words for the time and place.
"Mr Blair is a good-looking man," Violet said.
Lewis agreed. "Him and President Bush look good together. Mr Blair is more, uh, diplomatic."
Yes, I said, President Bush is a little more, well, blunt.
"That’s it," Lewis said. "The President is blunt and Mr Blair is diplomatic. They make a good team."
I thought about my situation. I was sitting in a semi-prone position, having my head sprayed with perfumed water, in a barber shop with decomposing stags’ heads on the wall, and a noticeboard which advertised a meeting of the National Rifle Association. The kindness of the people was making me say things that I didn’t really mean.
Suddenly Lewis stood up and declared that he was going out to buy moon pies. "I bet you never had a moon pie," he said, rushing out into the heat of the afternoon.
I sat in the chair, feeling perfectly at home. We talked about Elvis Presley, Violet and I, as we waited in vain for the moon pies to arrive.

[From The Scotsman, May 2003]

I'm An Ape Man, I'm An Ape-Ape Man: Another Disaster From Roland Emmerich

Roland Emmerich most popular films have been disasters in every sense of the word. In Independence Day, the United States battled an alien invasion with nuclear weapons, computer viruses and Randy Quaid, to devastating effect. If that was meant to be reassuring, it wasn’t. The Day After Tomorrow was even more depressing. This was Emmerich’s green movie, in which the end of the Earth began with the destruction of Scotland, half-observed by some scientists who were also watching a Champions League match in which Celtic were beating Manchester United 3-1: he gives, and then he takes away.
In both those films, Emmerich hitched himself to special effects with such abandon that it seemed churlish to resist. His stories were not over-endowed with subtlety. In fact, they were almost defiantly stupid. But they were big in every other way.
How refreshing to report that Emmerich has excelled himself with 10,000 BC. It is more ambitious than anything he has done before. Happily, it is also stupider.
The action takes place amid the mountains of pre-history, where the Yagahl, a tribe of decent savages, find themselves locked in a dreadful battle for survival. They are a tough people, with dreadlocks and neat goatee beards, who rely on the arrival of giant mammoths for their continued existence. Sometimes the mammoths come, sometimes they don’t. Lately, the narrator (Omar Sharif) notes, they have been coming later and later, “and there were times when they did not come at all”.
The Yagahl may be unsophisticated, but they understand a bad portent when they see one, not least when their mystical leader, Old Mother (Mona Hammond) – Mo from EastEnders with a Ouija board and a suit made of animal bones – issues a grave warning about “four-legged demons who will put an end to our world”. The only hope rests in “the child with blue eyes”.
Moving along several years, the mammoths arrive, and the warriors of the Yagahl rush out to try and snare one, which is tricky, as these are not your standard issue mammoths, they are gigantic beasts with jaggy tusks and a habit of galloping menacingly towards men in loin-cloths. However, they are easily scared. When the great warrior Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis) shouts “arrrrrrrr!”, the herd turns and runs in the opposite direction. The bull mammoth is killed by D’Leh (Steven Strait) a boy who has been shunned by the tribe, because his father abandoned them in heroic circumstances which they have never understood. His prize is the White Spear, and the hand of the blue-eyed girl Evolet (Camilla Belle), who is a refugee from another tribe who have been massacred by the four-legged demons. “Ya!” the tribespeople shout. “Ya!”
But D’Leh and Evolet are destined to be pre-history’s version of Romeo and Juliet, because D’Leh feels unworthy of his prize. (The mammoth ran onto his spear, and he would have run away if his hand hadn’t been caught in the net). So he gives up the girl and the spear, and then the white rain comes and – as Omar notes – “with the white rain came the four-legged demons”. The white rain is snow, and the four-legged demons are Hell’s Angels on horseback. “I like your spirit,” the nastiest one says to Evolet, “but I will have to break it.” (Despite Old Mother’s pre-eminence, feminism has yet to make inroads amongst these primitives). So the four-legged demons kidnap the girl and scarper, leaving the menfolk of the Yagahl, and especially D’Leh, feeling mighty peeved.
It wouldn’t be fair to reveal too much of what happens after that, but it does involve a long and dangerous trek across inhospitable terrain, a fight in the long grass with a flock of carnivorous wolf-dodos, and a perilous negotiation in a flooded pit with a sabre-tooth tiger. D’Leh – whose naivety is his charm – notes that the tiger is about to drown, and tells the cat “do not eat me when I set you free”. Oddly, the tiger obeys, and when he encounters it later – in the midst of a scrap with some African-style natives – D’Leh does a bit of special pleading which earns him the respect of the warriors with the bones through their chins. “You speak to the spear-tooth,” they say, and serve him a hot dinner fit for a king. An alliance is forged, and they set off to look for the home of the Almighty, who has been building pyramids on an industrial scale in the Mountains of the Gods.
It’s all nonsense of course, but it’s nonsense full of stampeding mammoths and bleak landscapes and burning temples and mumbo-jumbo about the power of myth. It’s not about pre-history at all: Emmerich is stuck on re-creating the boyish wonder and the naïve charm of the matinee serial. And – Ya!- he succeeds.

The Other Boleyn Girl: The Filmstar Girlfriends Of King Henry the Hulk

Peter Morgan is a script writer who behaves like a car dealer. He deals in reputations, subtracting mileage from the clock, Tippexing the log book, and generally telling his customers the truth as they would like it to be. The strength of his own reputation (a shelf full of awards for The Queen) is testimony to the popularity of this approach.
Morgan’s standing was cemented by his script for The Deal, which fictionalised the popular myth about the relationship between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, showing Blair to be a vacuous spiv and Brown to be a saturnine grumbler with a grudge. It wasn’t exactly true, but nor was it exactly untrue. Its success was based on it being a plausible impersonation of the actuality, with added spite and a twist of tabloid narrative. The same can be said about Longford (detailing the relationship between the doddery old Lord and the murderer, Myra Hindley) and The Queen, which charmed audiences by presenting the British royal family in crisis, with sprayed-on emotions. Viewed logically, that Oscar-winning performance by Helen Mirren was nothing like the Queen: Her Majesty would do well to impersonate the Dame. And Morgan’s play (soon to be a film) Frost/Nixon makes a drama out of an interview, being a turbo-charged retelling of the WWF bout between David Frost and the disgraced President.
The Other Boleyn Girl is slightly different - being an adaptation of a novel by Philippa Gregory - but substantially the same, in that it takes history, adds wishful thinking, and spins a yarn designed to appeal to contemporary attitudes. Gregory’s suggestion is that Henry VIII had an affair with Ann Boleyn’s prettier younger sister, Mary, fathering the son he always wanted, but was distracted by the scheming of the jealous Ann, who betrayed her sister in order to enhance her own prospects. Ann won the crown, but lost her head. (Parallels to Mr Blair and Mr Brown are not encouraged, but nor can they be entirely discounted).
Morgan has been over this ground before. His television film Henry VIII starred Ray Winstone as the tubby monarch and Helena Bonham Carter as Ann Boleyn. That film was pitched as a love story in which Henry proved his devotion to the insecure Ann by marrying her, ditching the Catholic Church in the process.
A measure of Morgan’s progress – and that of the director, Justin Chadwick (fresh from Bleak House) – can be seen from the cast. Henry is played by Eric Bana, an actor of fearsome, if diminishing reputation, whose main qualification for the role seems to be the torso which expanded to cartoonish dimensions in Ang Lee’s less than incredible Hulk. Nor are the sisters conventional English roses. Ann is played by Natalie Portman, and Mary is Scarlet Johansson. These pretty girls are blessed with a beautiful mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a scheming uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey) who employs their wiles to ensure the advancement of the family. He’s a pompous pimp, which is slightly confusing, as Morrissey plays Norfolk in roughly the same way as he essayed Gordon Brown, though it’s hard to imagine the Prime Minister telling his nieces: “To be mistress of the King of England is in no way to diminish status.” The Boleyns’ mother is more Fife-like in her outlook: “When was it that people stopped thinking of ambition as a sin and started thinking of it as a virtue?” A very Peter Morgan line, as the answer is probably 1979.
Anyway, Ann accepts the challenge, and is quickly shown to be no respecter of royal protocols. She rides her own horse, which confuses our ’enry. “With no man to hold onto, how do you propose to stay on the horse?” he demands. The bold Ann, channelling Mae West, replies: “As you do, your grace. With my thighs.” Unfortunately, Ann’s proto-feminist approach to equestrianism leads Henry into a deep ravine and he falls off his horse, into the arms of Mary, an amoebic beauty with lovely hair. Mary’s face, he says, “is as the sun: one shouldn’t gaze too long.”
That’s his big mistake, because the opportunity to gaze at Johansson’s face is the best thing about The Other Boleyn Girl. The history is hokey, and the ending is never in doubt, so the story’s intrigue rests on the Machiavellian machinations of Morrissey, who is so one-dimensional that he would be improved considerably by the addition of a charcoal moustache. Ann, meanwhile, has the spunk of a Spice Girl and the manners of Alexis Colby, which is fine in Dynasty, but oddly wearing in Tudor England.
Ann is tried for “incest, high treason and offences against God.” If that had happened, the film might have been more exciting.

Putting Britain On The Couch: Hanif Kureishi And The Country's Midlife Crisis

Reading Hanif Kureishi’s new book, Something To Tell You, it’s hard to resist the feeling that it was the product of a midlife crisis. The novel surveys the grand sweep of a lifetime, re-evaluating the politics and culture of the last 50 years. This being Kureishi, it is studded with autobiography. His hero is a middle-aged British-Asian from Bromley, struggling to come to terms with the irresponsibility of his youth. There is incest, murder, and a splash of psycho-analysis, as the history of multi-cultural Britain chunters past, from the industrial disputes of the 1970s, through the materialistic Thatcher years, and on to the moral flabbiness of the Blair-Bush era. His hero, like the author, travels through disappointed radicalism into the podgy compromises of middle age, while sneering at the “trashy media class” of which he is at least a part-time member.
Kureishi, as far as we know, has not committed murder or incest, but he doesn’t disagree with the suggestion that the book was prompted by turning 50. (He’s 53 now). It is his attempt to consider the last half-century, “which is really the history of immigration, and cultural change, and people like my father getting off the boat and coming in to England. And here we are 50 years later arguing about whether they should have Sharia law in Dorset. How could you not be fascinated by that?
“It’s not only a crisis for me but a crisis for the country: ie what sort of Britain is it? What’s the identity of Britain? It’s the midlife crisis of our country.”
I meet Kureishi at his agent’s Notting Hill office. He is dressed soberly, in a dark overcoat, deep indigo jeans and – a hint of rakishness – Al Capone brogues. He is a watchful interviewee; not exactly friendly, sparing with his laughter, and in the habit of describing things he disagrees with as “hilarious”. Some of the things he finds hilarious are funnier than others. The convulsions of the British state over the war on terror are hilarious, as are that morning’s newspaper reports about the side-effects of multiculturalism making Britain “a terror target”.
“It’s hilarious,” Kureishi says haughtily. “I want to cut that out and study it.”
Looking at Kureishi now, with his grey hair and his cold stare, you might not connect him with the taboo-stretching rebel who remoulded his own experience into The Buddha of Suburbia, but the pop sociology of Something To Tell You is welcome after a period of painful – some say exploitative - introspection. There is a sense that the author’s voice has recovered its vitality. Or maybe we’re just ready to hear what he’s been saying all along.
Kureishi was one of the first writers to identify the dangers posed by Islamism, in his 1995 novel The Black Album, and his 1997 film, My Son The Fanatic. But, while shocked by the hateful preaching he encountered in London mosques, he understands the appeal of Muslim extremism. “Radical Islam was a movement of liberation. It came out of colonialism. My father identified with the Muslim League, because this was a way of keeping the Brits out of India, and an identification with other Muslims, who would then create their own state which became Pakistan.
“In Iran the Muslims and the clerics were radicals against the Shah and the United States. It began as a movement of liberation, and has now become, like many liberation movements, a form of fascism.”
The appeal is Islamism to British-born Muslims is, he says, a by-product of racism. “You live in a country where people consider you to be Paki Scum, the idea then that you get some power by identifying with your Muslim brothers is very important.
“But most Muslims are not radical. Most Muslims want exactly the same things that you and I want. They don’t want to live under a cleric. They want to go to school and they want hospitals.
“There’s a lot of fantasising going on about what Muslims are, and that’s where the racism comes in.”
When he was growing up in South London, the National Front was marching through Catford and Peckham – a period he recalled in My Beautiful Laundrette. But a recent visit to Germany shocked him. There, he was repeatedly asked about his experience as an immigrant, and whether he was feeling “settled” in Britain. “In England we don’t even think like that. But they think of this homogenous Teutonic culture with these Pakis round the edge who are trying to take their jobs. That’s like the 1970s to me.
“The good thing about London is it’s not England. It’s like an independent city state. There are even Mongolians living down my street now. The Germans say ‘how are you getting on with the English?’ and you think, I’ve never met any bloody English. There’s nobody English in my street. Not one. The idea that there’s a couple of Pakis and mostly English people – it’s ridiculous.”
London he says, and is an example of how multiculturalism can work. “At the moment, there are no people killing each other for racial motives. They’re killing each other for lots of other reasons, but not for racism. You either make it work, or there’s fascism. Everybody’s identity’s got to change, everybody’s got to be tamed.”
He traces the roots of multiculturalism back to John Stuart Mill. “It’s the idea that people are allowed to do whatever they want, be whatever they want, say whatever they want. As long as they don’t become violent and impose themselves on other people, it’s a fantastic idea.
“And now we’ve really gone back. People go on and on: I heard somebody on the radio saying ‘they don’t integrate’. Well the royal family doesn’t integrate. Rich people don’t integrate. Why is it only the Muslims who are not integrating? It’s so racist.”
While writing Something To Tell You, Kureishi also completed My Ear At His Heart, a memoir about his relationship with his late father, a civil servant in the Pakistani Embassy. The book was Kureishi’s attempt to understand the tensions in the father-son relationship, and their “violent oedipal arguments”. His sister Yasmin objected to what she saw as a Stalinist reworking of family history, calling it “hyped-up twaddle”, but it wasn’t a book which displayed the author in a particularly gorgeous light. Kureishi, who admits the 1970s and 1980s saw him “incapacitated by symptoms, phobias, fears” and a sense of futility and self-absorption, wrote that the death of his father in 1991 prompted him to embark on hedonistic spree of “cocaine, amyl nitrate, Ecstasy, alcohol, grass”. It was, he wrote, “as though I were trying to kill something, or bring something in myself to life.”
The rivalry stemmed from the fact that Kureishi Sr was an unpublished author. “When I became successful, it hurt him. It made it very tricky for me, because here was a boy who was hurting his father for no reason at all.” Yet, “the things that I love now about the world, he taught me, which are to do with literature, to do with music, to do with dissent, to do with hating radical Islam, authority. All of that I got from my father, who grew up during the period of British rule in India. My father was the underdog then, too. He hated the English. So growing up with that sort of dissenting spirit is something I’m grateful for.”
When I ask about Kureishi’s mother, his voice takes on a faraway tone, as if he is trying to remember the contents of a lost shopping list, which is odd, as his mother is still alive. “My mum used to take me to the library. My mother had been an artist. My mother was rather intelligent. My mother was rather depressed because she was a housewife. My mother was the generation just before the feminists. So my mum was at home doing the washing with her hands, lighting the fires, doing all the mother stuff.
“My mum was rather repressed, but she was also very brave, because she married a Pakistani, a brown man. She was very shocked – it didn’t occur to her that people would shout ‘Paki-lover’ at her in the street. There was a lot of casual everyday racism. I remember the neighbours saying, if it was a warm day: ‘You Indians like the warm, don’t you?’ Stuff like that all the time.”
On the optimistic side, he seems contented with his own life, particularly when talking about his children. He has three sons: 14 year-old twins, Sachin and Carlo, by his former partner, Tracey Scoffield, and a younger son, Kier, with his current partner, Monique Proudlove. Kureishi’s appropriation of the break-up of the first relationship in his book Intimacy was not appreciated at the time, but diplomacy seems to have prevailed, and he lives near the twins in Shepherd’s Bush. He notes with some satisfaction that their blurred racial identity has become cool. “My kids would be shocked by racism . They’re not used to it. There was a Russian girl in class at school who said ‘I’m not going to sit next to any Jews or niggers.’ And they’d never heard anything like that before.”
He looks, in these moments, every inch the contented dad. “They’re very good company,” he says. “They haven’t started drinking or smoking. They haven’t moved into the decadent years. They’re in the ‘fuck off’ years. ‘Fuck off. Just fuck off.’ There’s a lot of that. But they haven’t become self-destructive yet.”
And with the wisdom of middle age, how does Kureishi regard his own flirtation with self-destruction?
“I’m still in the hedonism years,” he says, laughing. “I hope.”
Is it still fun?
“It doesn’t save your life, which is what I used to believe. It’s as though I believed that finding a drug, or finding a woman, would suddenly make everything all right about my life and about the world. I had a lot hope in terms of decadence: that I could disappear into this abyss of pleasure, that I wouldn’t have to worry, I wouldn’t have the anxiety of a normal person.
“I know that if I get pissed tonight I’m going to feel awful tomorrow. I know that perfectly well, so I’ll make a decision not to. And that’s both mature and dumb.”
The writer’s midlife crisis seems to be under control. The country’s may take longer.
Something To Tell You is published by Faber on 6 March.

Enter The Dragon, exit Johnny Clarke

John Cooper Clarke
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Recently, someone asked me about the John Cooper Clarke lookalike in the film Control. Of course, the spider-legged beatnik with the Dylan barnet was played by JCC himself, which must have been a relief, as he was last seen in an advert for Sugar Puffs.
So, as a tribute to the Bard of Salford, here he is.

Kenneth Anger: Not Gay, But On Fire Like A Phallic Sparkler In A World Full Of Damp Squibs, Baby

Kenneth Anger’s films may have drawn the template for male eroticism, but he is careful with his words. He doesn’t like the term “gay”.
“It’s a distortion of language. I discussed the term with Christopher Isherwood and he said he hated it. He didn’t like ‘gay’, because it removes a perfectly wonderful descriptive word and distorts it into something else. Nietzsche wrote a book called The Gay Science that has nothing to do with ‘gay’ in a sexual sense. And there’s a wonderful book written by Otis Skinner, when I was growing up, called Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, and that’s the proper meaning of the word gay. Now you can’t even mention the word gay without people doing a double-take. So I don’t use it, I don’t like it applied to myself, even though I certainly like men.”
Anger has earned the right to be curmudgeonly, even if his influence on the culture isn’t always acknowledged. If he is known at all, it’s as the author of two volumes of Hollywood Babylon, which took scurrilous pleasure in debunking the myths of tinseltown. (A third volume is written, but awaits a publisher who is unafraid of the church of Scientology).
Such ignorance is unfair; Anger’s hallucinatory imagery, full of artful juxtaposition and loaded symbolism, invented MTV decades before the advent of pop promos. He was using pop music ironically while David Lynch was still sucking popsicles.
Anger’s obscurity is partly explained by his habit of working outside the system. He has finished fewer films than he started, and the completed ones have not always been easy to find. Now, with his early work restored and collected on a Fantoma DVD (The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol 1), his status as a pioneering artist is made more obvious. The DVD includes Fireworks (1947), a dreamy film he made at the age of 17. The sexual imagery – a sailor with a phallic sparkler – was so powerful that Dr Alfred Kinsey bought a print, and Anger continues to make reports on sexual behaviour to the Kinsey Instutute. A recent trip to London included a visit to a gay porn cinema, which Anger found depressing. “It was just the usual overly-handsome blokes doing obvious things like sticking their fingers in holes.”
Anger prefers suggestion. His biker film Scorpio Rising (1964) became a test-case for cinematic censorship when it was found to have “redeeming social merit” by a California court, and there is no mistaking the eroticism in Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), which applies a fetishistic polish to the behaviour of a group of auto enthusiasts. “They had this way of dressing. It’s not a striptease, it’s the opposite. They’d put on the rings and the leather jacket, a special belt and a chain, in a tribal way, until they felt they were sufficiently geared-up, and then they would go out. It was all very natural. Of course, that was back in the 60s. Now all this fashion – leather and all that - have been opted by fashion, just like tattoos have. You have girls with roses on their butts, and tattoos used to be just bikers and criminals.”
Today, these films would seem obviously camp, but Anger’s subjects had no awareness of the kind of fantasy they were being invited to inhabit.
“They’re not gay. I mean, I never tried to seduce them. I just choose men I find beautiful. So did Rodin. It doesn’t mean I’m trying to yank their clothes off.”
Though his films have always been fiercely independent, Anger has been immersed in Hollywood lore since childhood. He appeared in the 1935 version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and was instantly seduced by the ability of the movies to create fantasy. His films embrace this as keenly as his books debunk the myths of Hollywood’s golden age.
“Between divorces Randolph Scott and Cary Grant were living together, and there were these photographs of them at home which are so campy. You know: with the apron on, making breakfast. Now you’d say: ‘What were they thinking?’ But there have always been stars who had to have an arranged marriage or whatever. [Name removed for legal reasons] used to cruise round in his turquoise blue Cadillac convertible, picking up high school boys – 15, 16 years old. That’s not exactly the thing to do if you’re a Hollywood star. But it never hurt his career.”
Anger’s career as a “film poet” (a usage borrowed from Cocteau) continues at its own erratic pace. He is currently finishing a film on the singer Elliot Smith, and using festival appearances to hawk his DVD. Even so, he seems determined to not to abandon his hard-won obscurity. “I have a phobia about electronics,” he declares. “People can write me a regular letter, but I have no email or website. I don’t want all that.”

Sidney Poitier in The Lost Man

Denzel Washington: From Watching Jimmy Cagney To Playing Frank Lucas As A Gentleman Gangster In A Chinchilla Coat

Is Denzel Washington narked, or is he sparring? He is certainly dressed for action: in white sneakers, track-suit bottoms, and black t-shirt over a slight paunch, he looks like a pugilist between caught between rounds. But his posture – slumped deep in a sofa at the Dorchester Hotel – could barely be more passive.
I have suggested, innocently enough, that Washington had a wild spell in his mid-teens. He has sometimes alluded to this by telling the story of his three teenage friends. One of them died of Aids (from injecting drugs), one was murdered, and the other is in jail. Washington got into a few fights at this time, but was spared the fate of his friends by his mother, who scrimped to send him to a private school, where he excelled and discovered acting.
But he doesn’t tell that story today. When I mention this wayward period, he pushes himself up from the spongy depths of the sofa and offers an incredulous stare.
“Is that something you read?” he says, laughing dismissively.
Well, I say, did you not?
“I was a teenager growing up in New York,” he replies. “Yeah.”
The hostility comes wrapped in laughter, but it feels real enough. Let’s correct the story if it’s wrong, I suggest.
“Well, you’re throwing something out there. I was a teenager for five or six years, what are you asking?”
The truth is: Denzel Washington is both thoughtful and obtuse. He is, we may speculate, bored of carrying out his promotional duties for his leading role in Ridley Scott’s parable of 1970s New York, American Gangster. This is the second-last interview of his second-last day on the promotional charabanc, after which he can get back to editing his next film, which tells the story of Melvin B Tolson, who led the black team at Wiley College, Texas, to success at the 1935 national debating championships.
Washington is the director and the star of The Great Debaters, and it’s easy to see where it fits on his CV. As an actor he rose from a regular role on the hospital drama St Elsewhere to the first rank of Hollywood stars, and – not unlike ER-graduate George Clooney – used his celebrity to make films that were socially-responsible. Washington is most often thought of as a good guy; playing anti-apartheid campaigner Steve Biko in Cry Freedom, or Malcolm X in Spike Lee’s biopic. In 1989 he won an Academy Award (Supporting Actor) for his performance as an ex-slave in one of the US Army’s black regiments during the Civil War in Glory. But his Best Actor Oscar – for Training Day, in which he played a corrupt cop - shows that he sometimes walks on the dark side. It is notable, too, that he won his biggest prize for it.
American Gangster is more controversial entirely. Washington plays Frank Lucas, the heroin dealer who ran organised crime in Harlem during the 1960s and 1970s, and built his fortune by cutting out the middle man, importing drugs directly from South East Asia in the coffins of dead American soldiers.
In the film, Washington spars with Russell Crowe (playing Richie Roberts, the straight-arrow detective who, in an extraordinary twist, later became Lucas’s attorney). Ostensibly the hero, Crowe is scruffy and inarticulate. Washington, as Lucas, is a kind of superfly cowboy, pimped-up and easily charismatic. He is the bad guy but, this being Hollywood, his misdeeds are easy to forgive, and strangely thrilling. I intend to mention this, but before I do, I throw Washington a soft question: what was appealing about this character?
There is a long silence before he answers. “That suggests that’s why I did the movie, because of the character, which is not true. I actually turned the film down, first time I read it.”
He took a second look when Training Day’s Antoine Fuqua was attached to the project, and came back to it a couple of years later when Ridley Scott was confirmed as director. It was, he says, the combination of Scott and Russell Crowe that snagged his interest. “It wasn’t so much: ‘Oh I’m so in love with the character I gotta do it.’”
But, I say, there are moral complexities about the character of Frank Lucas.
“Unlike life!” Washington says quickly, again with the dismissive laugh. “That’s what’s interesting. People say: do you feel bad, glamorising a drug dealer? Well, once you make a film you’re glamorising everybody. It’s a movie. There’s a score, there’s music playing as you walk down the street. But if it’s sending a message, which I’m not sure it is, at the end of the movie he’s a small broken man, alone. He comes out of jail with nothing and nobody’s around to meet him.”
Washington can talk in these circles forever. His speech is an odd mix of ebullience and diplomacy. He speaks forcefully, but often in the service of saying nothing very much. But then, as a leading black actor, he seems to be under greater scrutiny than a white actor in the equivalent position. No one challenged Robert De Niro for making Al Capone attractive in The Untouchables, but Washington’s turn as Lucas has provoked forceful condemnation from both sides of the argument. In the New York Daily News, the columnist Stanley Crouch called American Gangster “a highly crafted piece of poisonous eye candy”. The real Frank Lucas, Crouch wrote, was illiterate and couldn’t count; he plotted to kill his own brother and cried in court.
“I don’t comment on things I haven’t read,” Washington says when I quote the text. “But I know Stanley.”
Well, I suggest, what if I said these things to you?
“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion. And go, if that’s what you feel. I got no problem with that.”
On the other hand, the critic David Thomson has condemned Washington for playing in “garbage” such as American Gangster, and concluded a peculiar attack in The Guardian with the suggestion that: “I’ll believe in progress the day Denzel Washington plays a black man who has a full-blooded physical love affair with a white woman. And it’s promoted as a big picture.”
So, while Crouch condemns Washington for glorifying a bad black man, Thomson condemns him for not kissing white women. Russell Crowe, you can be sure, doesn’t attract brickbats like that.
In which case, let’s back up a little. Washington is, without qualification, one of the leading actors of his time. His easy good looks undoubtedly helped – he looks a decade younger than his 52 years – but he has earned his spurs. His father was a Pentecostal minister, who worked for the Water Department and a New York department store. His mother owned a beauty parlour and was raised in Harlem. Washington has talked about how his mother used to tell him how heroin brought Harlem to its knees, and how “people who once stood proud ended up lying on their backs”.
Today, he is less-expansive. “First of all, understand, Harlem is a great community. There’s millions of people that live in Harlem. And this part of the story is not the Harlem story. A whole lot of things were going on in Harlem other than Frank Lucas and the heroin business.”
Washington says he has “great memories” of growing up. “I love New York. I’m a New Yorker, first, last and always. The same streets that we were filming on for this film, we were on the same block filming Malcolm X. So I know those streets, and a lot of the people in ’em. A lot of fond memories.”
Much has been made of the divorce of Washington’s parents, which occurred when he was 14. Was that not a difficult time?
“You’re reading too much. Don’t base your interview on what you read on the internet, man. It’s not that deep.”
It wasn’t a significant breach in his life?
“I’m not here to talk about that. Come on. Do you wanna talk about the movie? I’m here to talk about the movie. Not what I did at 14 years old. It’s nobody’s business, quite frankly. And I don’t say that because it’s that deep. It’s not that big a deal. It was 40 years ago.”
In which case, we had better get back to American Gangster. It is a typical Ridley Scott film, big and bold, stronger on mood than nuance, but satisfyingly epic. Washington is great, although the aura of goodness he brings to the role probably does make Frank seem a finer fellow than a murderous drug dealer has any right to expect.
In the movie, Frank’s fortunes turn on a moment of over-confidence, when his beauty queen wife persuades him to wear a chinchilla coat to the Ali-Frazier fight at Madison Square Garden. I tell Washington that this seems to be the moment when everything starts to go wrong.
“That’s where you thought he goes wrong? Not when he shot the man in the head?!”
The coat was a tactical error.
“Frank told me that was a big mistake, wearing that coat. It’s a bit of a twist on the story. What he said actually happened was, number one, his wife didn’t give him the coat. There were a lot of big shot gangsters coming to town for the big Ali-Frazier fight and the New York gangsters weren’t going to be outdone. He wasn’t always that flash guy, but for that event, he was going to play the role. So Frank Matthews, who was another big drug dealer, was there at the fight. Frank said: Sinatra was over here, Miles Davis, all these big shots. And Matthews was like: well I’m betting $100,000 on Frazier. Lucas liked Ali – he said I’ve got $200 000 on Ali. They’re yelling. Frank said: ‘Denzel we’re yelling so everybody could hear us.’ Well, little did he know, the Feds were watching Frank Matthews.
“And so, the Feds were like, well who is this guy that can bet half a million dollars, wearing this chinchilla coat? And they thought, he’s probably some small drug-drealer pimp, but wait a minute, this guy’s got better seats than your Mob guys. Who the heck is this guy?
“And Frank’s nature; he said: I had to be the biggest guy in the room. He said to me, if there was a party and I knew you were going, I wouldn’t go. He said his own ego was the beginning.”
Washington grew to know Lucas during filming, and considers him to be “a very interesting, complex man” who “did a lot of damage and paid the price for it”. Yet Lucas was gifted a house by Washington and producer Brian Grazer. Why?
“He asked for a Rolls-Royce. I promised him four years ago. He talked me into it. And I’m a man of my word. So when we came back to shoot the movie, he wouldn’t let me forget.
“And his oldest son said: listen, my father’s dirt poor. He doesn’t need a Roller, he can’t drive it anyway. He needs a roof over his head. So I said: all right, let me see what I can do.”
This rewarding of a criminal seems a more objectionable aspect of American Gangster than convoluted arguments about Washington’s responsibilities as a role model, but he remains unapologetic.
“He’s a criminal who went to jail. So, in theory when you go to jail, you served your time. This is 40 years later. I didn’t give it to him in 1974. I gave it to him in 2006. Why? Can you not help somebody out?”
The other aspect of Stanley Crouch’s argument is a comparison between American Gangster and Brian De Palm’s Scarface. Scarface’s amoral Tony Montana has, Crouch feels, been a pernicious influence on the rap generation, and Washington’s Frank Lucas crackles with the same malign energy.
“I must say that when I was a kid, I loved Cagney movies, Bogart movies,” Washington says. “There’s always been a fascination with gangster movies. There wasn’t an outlet like the hip-hop generation has now.”
On the link between violence and films, Washington says this: “‘Raise your kids,’ is my answer to that. That’s what I’m doing. Raise your own kids.”
Washington has four children, aged between 16 and 23, by his wife, actress Pauletta Pearson, who he met on the set of the 1977 TV movie, Wilma.
“I watched Bogart films, but I watched them at home. Dad was working, mom was upstairs. So the bottom line is, raise your kids. The fundamental problem we have right now is that parents aren’t raising their kids. Fathers aren’t there. That’s more of a crime than which movie you watch. The reason a movie like a Scarface can take hold on a young man or woman’s life is probably because they don’t have any other stronger influence than that. The first thing you hear when you talk to young kids that have joined gangs is that they didn’t have that strong influence at home. They have more of a sense of family with a gang.”
We talk in circles about Lucas, and Washington says that he was an awful man, but that now he is “literally broken in body”, and has had everything taken away from him. At the same time, Washington notes that Lucas is a churchgoer. “Some might argue he’s been overly glamorised, but my record speaks for itself.”
It does. And the fact that so many sparks are flying from American Gangster is a sign of Washington’s significance as an actor. He makes popular cinema of satisfying complexity. Next up is a remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three directed by Ridley’s brother, Tony Scott, with – Washington hopes – John Travolta co-starring.
As Washington’s mood brightens, I tell him that while I was waiting to see him, I listened to the female radio interviewers comparing notes on their time with him. One complimented him on his soft hands, the other replied that he had very white teeth.
He is greatly amused.
“I don’t do any hard work and I brush my teeth every day! People have told me that all along: soft hands and feet. I guess it’s because I don’t do any real hard work. But even when I lift weights I don’t seem to get heavily calloused.”
I tell him that my conversation with him reminded me of the time I interviewed the author Walter Mosley on the day of the OJ Simpson verdict. When I asked Mosley about OJ, the author spent ten minutes explaining why the question was racist. Washington, who starred in the adaptation of Mosley’s Devil In A Blue Dress, nods slowly.
“It is a sensitive thing, and you know, you don’t want to be corralled by what part you can play, or can’t play. Like I said, my record speaks for itself.”
And with that, the great debater sinks back into the sofa to await the man from the Irish Times. “I’m gonna stay right here in this position,” he purrs. “I’m not moving.”

Vic Godard: Dressed Like A Wartime Confectioner, But Still Opposing All Rock'n'Roll

 

I don't really do punk nostalgia, as there's very little to be said for 50 year old men trying to recapture the spit and venom of their misspent youth, but Vic Godard has always been a special case. I saw him twice back then, with the Subway Sect. Once, supporting somebody (Elvis Costello maybe), and it was just at the point where punk became New Wave, and emetic fury became a blow-dried haircut and a skinny tie, and the Subway Sect came out dressed in dustbin grey, with coordinating rips in their jumpers, and they sounded like friction and sparks and art, with little shards of poetry squeezed out between the noise. And then, much later, I was camping in Paris and living on bread and pretending to read Le Monde in the tent and the rain, and I saw a poster for a concert by The Clash, who were playing at the Theatre Mogador, an ancient old wedding cake that was about to be demolished, and it was Sandinista!-era Clash, but that was OK, because I'd never seen them, and if you listen to that record there are enough great moments to make the indulgence worthwhile, and on the bill were The Beat and The Subway Sect, who by that time had turned into a French cafe jazz band, and Vic was crooning like Vic Damone, or Tony Bennett, or somebody, albeit with a less than expert control of the notes, and it was perfect, because this was Paris, and this was punk, and this was youth, and the Clash has a huge backdrop with ladders, and Futura 2000 was up there with his spraycans painting a graffiti skyline while they played. And it was great, a rush, and a thrill. And at the end, I was standing in the foyer, all ripped up with the strangeness of it all, when the Subway Sect came out and started handing out flyers for a jazz show they were doing later, but I didn't go, because the tent in the rain was waiting.
And so, a thousand years later, I go to see Edwyn Collins, who is great, and has a Muttley laugh, and a set full of songs that sound sadder than they ever did - like Falling and Laughing - because of Edwyn's illness. But at 8pm on the dot, out come Vic and the Subway Sect, dressed now like confectioners from a John Boorman movie about England in the war, and they play Ambition, their greatest song, but without the blooping organ, and it sounds rough and broken and spiky, and vital still. Later, on the stairs, Vic Godard walks past me, but I don't see him. I am still shook up, and surprised, and oddly happy. It is raining, obviously.

If You Really Want To Get Straight, Read Norman Mailer, Get A New Tailor (RIP, Norman)

Norman Mailer lives in a brick house on the left side of a wooden street, by the shore in Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod. His house is not hard to find. Drive past it, I was warned, and you'll end up in England.
Mailer was on the phone when I arrived, but he came to the door, walking slowly and heavily like a giant crab. He was wearing a denim shirt, open at the neck to reveal a snatch of white hair on red skin. There were chinos, tightly belted, and lace-up black shoes.
He put me on the sofa. Under a cushion there was a hardback by Zadie Smith and a pair of reading glasses. Mementoes everywhere. To the left, a proud display of family photos, the flashlit grins of the underexposed Mailers. To the right, a small painting of the author, his white hair flecked like surf. I was looking out to sea through the salt-streaked glass when Mailer emerged from the next room. "This," he said, motioning out to the grey brightness, "is as dull as it gets."
Provincetown is a fishing town where no-one fishes. Instead, it relies for its existence on tourism, and the fact that it has become the gay capital of the east coast. Commercial Street, the main drag, is like one of Pat Buchanan's nightmares: a clapboard idyll promenaded by gay couples and gym-toned cruisers riding mountain bikes against the flow of traffic.
Mailer has lived in the town for 15 years, but he first came in 1942. He arrived by train with his girlfriend Beatrice Silverman (who later became his wife, the first of six) and after a good weekend, they pledged that when the war ended they would spenda summer in the town.
That was the summer he started writing The Naked and the Dead, the book that made him a star.
"Agreeable things happened in Provincetown," he says. "It has always been the free-est small town in America. People took it for granted that marriages ended here and new marriages began. People lived together. In those days it didn't matter if you were gay. That you could also do."
Mailer, of course, shows no sign of being gay. Indeed, he may take an amount of pride from the fact that, in a town with such relaxed mores, he remains a misfit, a macho in khakis.
Sex, he calls "the great divide".
"Most women are totally opposed to the idea that being a man is a matter of substance and vigour, and think that they're just all brutes. But I am a great believer in opposition. The idea that you get the men to be exactly like the women is part of the horror right now. They had this women's revolution and they opened up a great deal for themselves, and where did they go? They've all gone to the corporation. There are the women all dressed in those little black uniforms with their laptop computers o n the aeroplane, trying to take over the corporation, which they won't be able to do very well, because it takes a big man to lose.
A mediocre man holds on to what he's got. And most people who work for the corporation lean more toward the mediocre than the huge and impressive.
"Women have sold their revolution for a mess of pottage, the corporation. They are more like men now than they used to be, and less interesting as a result.
"Put it this way: this is very romantic and old-fashioned, but the combination of the fire in a man and the profundity of a woman - human nature finds its best potential in that. Not in two people that are virtually interchangeable."
Mailer's approach to life is founded, he says, in a remark made by Somerset Maugham. "He said that nobody was any better than they ought to be. And I lived with that remark for a while, and then I decided no, that unless people are a little better than they ought to be, or a little worse, then the universe is nothing but an elaborate crock. So, I think you should be a little better than you ought to be. That's what manhood's all about. Being slightly more manly than the role of the dice predicted fo r you."
At the age of 77, with his legs and his hearing fading, Mailer's reputation has reached a plateau. He is the heavyweight champion of literature in a culture where books don't seem to matter. He keeps putting them out, sparring with big themes, but his efforts are grudgingly received and the value of his early work is open to revision.
His career seems to have been a long preparation for the Great American Novel, although none of his books has yet been accepted as that. But still he keeps jabbing away.
Mailer's contribution to the process of re-evaluation, the 1998 greatest hits album The Time of Our Time, was grandiose and brilliant, confusing and frustrating. It mixed Mailer's journalism with his fiction, splicing old material with new. In the end, it was hard to know what was true and what wasn't, which may have been the point. If the muscularity of Mailer's prose is put on one side, it becomes clear that his fiction has been grounded in truth, and his reporting flecked with invention.
It's a small claim, and one he may not care to make, but Mailer's subjectivity makes him the father of New Journalism. In his essay Superman Comes to the Supermarket, he employed a Rolodex of adjectives to conjure up the muddy fug of American politics. In The Naked and the Dead, he conjured the word "fug" to denote an expletive that would otherwise have been deleted. It is a mark of how far we have travelled that the f-word might be deemed too shocking to print (in a book, at least), but in other ar eas,the culture seems to have rolled back from the world of "hip" which Mailer chronicled. Mind-expansion has given way to the war on drugs, Muhammad Ali has been replaced by Mike Tyson, Marilyn Monroe by Madonna, John F Kennedy by Bill Clinton.
Mailer, an evangelist for marijuana, says this about drugs: "America's always spoken of as a puritanical country, but if it were really a puritanical country, everything would be much more clear-cut. You'd be on one side or you'd be on the other. The trouble is, this is a half-puritanical country. Even the people who are puritanical are only half-puritanical. And so, because of that, there's a terrible anxiety to be puritanical about certain things. It's almost as if they divide the pie. You've got to be puritanical about this, and not about that.
"Most of the people who are against drugs have a terrible fear that if they took them they'd become deranged and go out and kill their spouses.
And the other half of the fear is that the blacks are, in their minds, associated with drugs. And that there is" - he adopts a gruff, patrician voice - "this problem that we good Americans have. That's the way they think. So there's nothing they can do about drugs. They'd have to face in to the fact that there are whole groups of people in this country whose lives are so essentially without promise that the only excitement in their lives is the deep promise they feel on drugs. Anyone who has ever taken drugs knows that you realise how extraordinary you are. For a little while. And this feeling of being extraordinary is why people go to drugs. That's why it's so hard to eradicate it, because if you eradicate it, what have you got?"
Mailer's advocacy of drugs is unfashionable and almost quaint, but it is founded on good intentions. It was, he says, part of an effort to get closer to the nature of God in a world where the Holocaust and the gulags and the threat of nuclear destructionmade the possibility of a beneficent all-powerful force hard to believe in. "And when you take drugs you begin to feel closer to huge, numinous forces that you can't quite name, but you feel as if you are in the presence of something much larger than yourself."
Mailer's great subject is fame. He has pondered the curves of Marilyn, taken the temperature of Madonna and looked at Jack Kennedy from both ends of the rifle. In the Executioner's Song, he saw fame refracted through the death wish of a bad man, the killer Gary Gilmore.
I suggest to Mailer that the triumph of fame in our culture is related to a collapse of faith in God.
"Well," he says, "fame: there are black tribes in Africa that believe that if you're successful it's because God either believes in you, or has rewarded you, or likes you. So successful people are immensely admired, And I think that's true here now. There's a feeling of 'Donald Trump is closer to God than I am'. Perhaps Donald feels that."
Norman Mailer's fame began suddenly. It wasn't something he expected, and by the time he got used to it, the light was beginning to dim.
"It started with The Naked and the Dead. I was 25. On the one hand I'd written the book, but on the other I had absolutely no idea what it was like to be a success. I always thought I would be working away. Maybe I could make a success of writing, maybe I couldn't. I hoped I could. And this was a huge success. It was Number 1 on the bestseller list for a long time and I was a celebrity. It was absolutely unthinkable. I made the remark that I felt as if I was secretary to someone named Norman Mailer, andto meet him they had to meet me first.
"It took a long time to realise that fame and celebrity, which I had shunned and disliked in the beginning, got to be an acquired appetite.
As the Marquis De Sade said once, there's no pleasure greater than that obtained from a conquered repugnance. So celebrity and fame became a conquered repugnance, and then I began to want more and more of it.
"Well, about the time I wanted more and more of it, my star was beginning to go over the horizon because my second book was a big failure. I was, say, eight years out from The Naked and the Dead. and people said: 'Oh poor guy, he's a has-been, he's through, he had one book in him', all that.
"About that time I began to realise that celebrity and fame did have their values and their virtue. And one of them was that being a celebrity was great for one-night stands. But it took me, oh, maybe ten years before I really began to feel that when people meet me they are meeting somebody called Norman Mailer. As well. Rather than that the two were separate."
Does that mean he had to live up to the image of himself?
"You have to adopt yourself. And then of course, further down the road, you can begin to realise that you are cut off from normal life now, because people won't look at you the same way. On the other hand, what it had given me was a sense of how ... not tenuous, not fragile... how delicate, perhaps, is identity. And that I now had another identity. And so my experience was now of interest, and I could use it, because I could now write about the identity of people who had a certain amount of power.
"Very slowly over the years you begin to acquire some of the sophistication you need to be a celebrity. It's a very odd position.
Most actors get the bends. I was shot out of a cannon."
Pursuit of fame wasn't his end?
"No. Probably at one point I got much more interested in maintaining my fame. Fame maintenance." He laughs. Ack Ack. "Now there's a new concept.
Fame maintenance. Because although the fame has its disagreeable
aspects: I once said that fame is a microphone in your mouth, that's all it is in most daily situations. It isn't that agreeable having the fame, but it sure is disagreeable losing it."
But fame maintenance is PR.
"But I don't like PR. I've never had public relations. Things were bad enough without having public relations put into the equation. Actually, the worst stories ever told about me were put out by other people's public relations people. People come up to me and say: 'Hey, is that true, what Tallulah Bankhead said to you'? She was reputed to have met me and said: 'Oh, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'f***'.' So, for years people would come up to me, and I would say:
'I've never met Tallulah Bankhead'. I'd say it with gritted teeth."
So we talk about Madonna. Mailer's interview with Madonna is one of the stranger interludes in his career. It happened after Madonna appeared on the David Letterman show and was castigated for swearing several times.
Mailer admired her spunk and was dispatched to meet her. The resulting story is dominated by Mailer's personality. He is bigger and brighter than the star he is supposed to be charting. But he does not accept my suggestion that Madonna is a rough-edged facsimile of Marilyn Monroe.
"They're very different. Madonna's much more of a warrior, much more.
Marilyn lived in a different period and women had to be much more circumspect, but she had a quiet sense of how to promote herself.
Madonna is just angry about a lot of elements, she has ideas, she wants those ideas to prevail and so she pushes them forward. She's much more of an ideological activist than Marilyn was."
But he did compare Madonna to Princess Diana.
"Yeah. That was more a matter of looks. I saw an odd similarity in the looks. You can't see it in all photographs."
We talk about politics. Mailer tells me a story about meeting John McCain, the Arizona senator who ran a populist campaign for the Republican nomination against George W Bush. Mailer was impressed by McCain, so much so that he approached him at a book party, something he rarely does. As he waited to speak to McCain, he noticed he was flexing his neck, bobbing from side to side. Finally, he came face to face with the senator. "After a moment or two," Mailer recalls, "I said to him:
'Senator, did you everdo any boxing?' He said: 'Yes, I did some in the navy.' And then he looked at me and he grinned, and he said: 'I was a mediocre boxer'." Mailer laughs. "And I grinned, and I said: 'So was I'.
"Well, that was the first time in my life that I ever described myself as a mediocre boxer. 'Cause it's not something you do. If you box, you don't speak of yourself as mediocre. It's like, can you imagine a guy saying 'I'm a mediocre lover'? I was struck with the candour. And I was relieved when I said, yes, so was I. Because that put something in place for me forever. Yes, that's what I was. I was a mediocre boxer. That puts a little bit of the ego to rest. The ego needs more sleep than any other part of us."
Had he never said that before?
"Never said it before. And I'd never heard anyone say it before."
The trouble with politics, Mailer says, was that the morals were all eaten out by the termites of political correctness.
"There's a saying on Broadway that if there's anything more obscene than a failure on Broadway, it's a success. And that's also true in politics.
You have to succeed because there's absolutely no second life if you fail. So they do everything they can towin, in such a way that they degrade the political process. In the old days, the political process was corrupt. You had old political bosses who would determine a lot of what would happen. But at least what they had, corrupt as they were, was they ha d acertain kind of practical life wisdom. Whereas now, people are just bending to every new current that's out there. For example, the Democratic Party has been gutted out entirely by women's liberation.
"[Al] Gore, I must say, reminds me prodigiously of Richard Nixon. This is nothing to do with his politics. Gore has the same fatal thing that Nixon had that made people dislike Nixon and distrust him. Which is, Nixon never could say anything spontaneously. The thought 'go f*** yourself' would occur to him, and he'd censor it, and he'd say 'next question'. But you always felt that pause, where he censored it. And Gore's the same way."
I tell Mailer I saw Gore give a speech at the HQ of Timberland, in New Hampshire. He was a vision in oatmeal.
"You're making fun of the food I eat each morning for breakfast."
But he was dressed in Timberland clothes. No politician in Britain would wear the company's clothes.
"Well look at the kids here; they wear logos on their T-shirts to advertise the company they bought it from. I remember when my youngest son was about 13. He was wearin', oh, I forget, one of the people who sell T-shirts. I said to him: 'John, would you wear a T-shirt that said 'Norman Mailer' on it? He said: 'Hey Dad, cut it out'. I said: 'Well, you're wearing this company's name. You not only buy their shirt, but now you advertise them'. He said: 'Dad, you just don't get it'.
"Now he's through college and ... he was marching on Washington with the other people who were opposed to global capitalism. But it's a sign of the brainwashing that's going on with the corporations. So that most people think you're ahead of the game if you're lined up with the corporation. I mean, they talk about how the Russians used to brainwash people. It's nothing compared to how we've brainwashed our young people."
I suggest that it is a voluntary process.
"No, no," he says, meaning "yes, yes". "People really want to join the corporation. They applaud at graduations if they hear you're going to work for some big Wall Street firm. This has truly became a wholly capitalist, market-driven corporate country."
He says this with a smile, and a shrug of resignation. Is the sense of moral disgust which illuminates his work beginning to wane? No, he says, he feels it more strongly the older he gets.
"But people get so weary of hearing you complain. Moral disgust has very little to offer in a period of economic prosperity. Most people never begin to have enough money, so when they finally start beginning to have enough money the last thing they want is for somebody to come along and
say: 'Well, this isn't going to work either.' So in that sense my moral disgust is intense.
"A lot of people," he says, meaning himself, "when they're young think that their ideas are going to have an enormous effect - the shape of what is to come. And then they discover as they get older that, indeed, you have very little effect. You don't getany wiser as you get older.
It's horrendous. The fact is that everything I've hated has triumphed and succeeded.
"Think of it. I hate plastic. It's everywhere now. I hate those high-rise buildings that have about as much architectural distinction as a box of Kleenex. I hate superhighways. I hate the plastic interior of aeroplanes. I hate the whole notion of living your life in the market.
"Everything has won that I contested. So ... I once wrote a line in The Naked and the Dead. 'He felt the kind of merriment that men know when events have ended, in disaster.' I have that kind of merriment. That line is true. One of the pleasures of writing is that you discover that something you wrote, at the moment you wrote it you didn't even know why you were writing it, turns out to be true, 20, 30, 50 years later.
That's not bad. So I'm sort of merry these days."
He straightens up in his cane chair and looks out at the sea.
"Aw, to hell with it, piss on it."
(Published in The Scotsman Weekend, 22 July, 2000)

Banksy, a boy with a pizza slice, and Dudley D Watkins

Banksy boy
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

It was like Piccadilly Circus up at the new Banksy - a woman with a ten billion megapixel camera, a ladder, and a 4x4; a mum phone-picturing her boy; a pensioner stopping to admire the view. Everybody was happy. Up close, you can see that Banksy is deeply indebted to Oor Wullie.

Donovan and David Lynch

Donovan and David Lynch
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Sanderson Hotel, London, 23/10/07. My phone was ringing in my pocket as I took this picture. "Does that feel good?" David Lynch asked in his best Ronald Reagan voice.
For more Lynch wisdom, see Uncut.co.uk

Razor Blade

Razor Blade
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

I was walking round Clarksdale, Mississippi, when this car pulled up and stopped. "My name's Razor Blade," the driver said, "do you want to hear the real blues?" I asked Razor Blade if I could take his picture. "Not in the car," he said, "cos then everyone'll see that I drive a Toyota."

Gas Station Mural

Gas Station Mural
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Warhol, Money, and the Emperor's New Clothes: The Art of Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

The whites of Gavin Turk’s eyes are red. It is the afternoon after the night before, and the artist is wearing the same T-shirt he had on at the opening of his latest exhibition, Me As Him. Monday blurred into Tuesday with a karaoke session to celebrate the fact that all but two of the works in the show had sold at £23,000 each (with another going on Wednesday morning). Not a bad return for a set of screenprints in which Turk pays “homage” to Warhol, putting his own face beneath the fright-wig of the Pop pioneer.
A few days later, I see Turk again, at the Art Car Boot Fair on Brick Lane; a kind of summer fete for Young British Artists, some of whom are younger than others. On one side of the old Truman Brewery car park, Peter Blake is selling inkjet prints for £25. Turk has been more ambitious. He has taken a literal interpretation of the theme, and is hawking signed “Art Car Boots” – the tailgates of wrecked vehicles – at £1000 a go. He sells 15 of these in little more than an hour, which is nice work, if you can get it.
His studio is an unprepossessing shed on a winding industrial road in East London, stuffed with artistic flotsam. There are silkscreens of Turk as Warhol’s Elvis, cabinets loaded with casts of the artist’s face, and a realist bronze, which looks exactly like a box of Boddington’s ale, until you lift it up. In a drawer, you may find chewing gum cufflinks, or bronze polystyrene cups. An almost-completed sculpture of Turk as a Buckingham Palace bandsman, with red tunic and beaver hat, lurks in a side-room, near the marionettes of Warhol, Beuys, Duchamp, and a tastleless art collector called Scratchi, used in his Beckett-inspired puppet show Waiting For Gavo. Scratchi, whose resemblance to any person living or dead is surely coincidental, arrived on stage with the line: “I would not associate with artists such as yourselves unless you were going to make me a great deal of money.”
Turk’s prominence among the YBAs, of course, was cemented by Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition, which included his sculpture Pop (the artist as Sid Vicious) and Cave, the spoof English Heritage plaque he entered as his degree show at the Royal College of Art, reading “Borough of Kensington: Gavin Turk, Sculptor, Worked Here 1989-1991”. (He failed his degree).
Sensation came at the height of the YBA hype, and felt, Turk says, “like Charles Saatchi consolidating his project. It was a bit odd, actually, because it didn’t have anything to do with the art. At that apex moment, I felt absolutely distant from it.”
Since then, Turk has been in the slipstream of the YBA superstars Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, perhaps because he has been less adept at self-promotion. One of Turk’s works was a fake cover of Hello! “The suggestion was that you achieved fame and glory through art, and you’d become a celebrity, so you were inviting people in to look at photographs of you and your house. In a weird way this is more what people want to see – and not the thing that made you famous in the first place. So, it’s almost as if success breeds failure”.
He is quick to point out that he isn’t criticising Hirst or Emin. “They’re massive now. And they’re personalities – probably Tracey more than Damien. But Tracey’s personality and her work are synonymous. Her work is exposing her personality. My project is more distant. I make work which is about being an artist. It’s almost as if I’m not sure whether I am or not.”
It has been a good summer for this Turk. A fortnight ago, his Dumb Candle sculpture – a five-inch section of broom handle carved into the shape of an extinguished candle – won the £25000 Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, earning comparisons with Magritte and Duchamp. That win has boosted his profile and inflated his prices, at a time of astonishing activity in the London art market, headed by the crowning of Damien Hirst as the world’s most expensive living artist, with the sale of a pill cabinet for £9.6m. Over £400m was spent in a record-breaking week of London art auctions last month.
Turk is philosophical about the money which is sloshing around. “The value of Damien’s work is something that a lot of people have been working on, very hard, for many years. The value of an artwork is what people are prepared to pay for it. And yes, it’s all about financial confidence and futures and various kind of esoteric things. It seems fair enough. I’m shocked, but I can understand it.”
Certainly, Turk is smart enough to play the market. The value of those car boots is, if one is generous, in the concept. If one is cynical, it’s a lot of money for an autograph. Before I can frame this question, Turk has started answering it.
“Everyone’s obsessed with the idea of the Emperor’s new clothes, and because there’s this sense that you’re not able to see what it is that makes it art, then people are being cheated. To start with the Emperor’s new clothes: I find it annoying that the Emperor being naked can’t actually be OK. What’s wrong with the birthday suit? And what gets pointed out is that the king is deluded. But he’s perfectly happy in his delusion. Somehow, I don’t really care. If I see something and I’m motivated intellectually, that’s what counts. In that sense, it can’t be a con. It’s got to be good.”
He is not entirely glib about the vast fortunes which are being invested in art. “It’s a sign that there is an apex section of society that has lots of disposable income. That’s rather a scary thought, because as one section of society has all this money, there is a larger section of society which has nothing.”
Art, he says, “has an uneasy relationship to money. On some levels it just doesn’t exist in the same place. I don’t ever go into the situation of making an artwork because I’m going to sell it. I make artworks because I need to feel those things existed in the world for me. That’s on a spiritual level. But if you sell the work, people kind of respect it because it has a financial value.”
This must surely be the case with Turk’s bin bag sculptures, made of bronze, but designed to look exactly like bags of rubbish, with a price tag of £30,000. (Hirst’s agent, Frank Dunphy, keeps one of these at the foot of his stairs, and proclaims them to be “genius”).
“Obviously, in selling a filled bin bag that looks like a filled bin bag, it’s contained within the thing itself that intellectually you, go, ‘Oh, it’s just rubbish,’” says Turk. He compares the process to the Warhol pictures: if the viewer gets the joke straight away, then – he hopes – they will be free to divine some deeper meaning. It does seem to be a circular process, though, as Turk works within the reference points of art. And what is the deeper meaning of those car boots? You might decide that they are to do with the throwaway society, or the power of celebrity, or – and this seems most plausible with Turk’s work – the nature of art itself. Which is possibly more interesting to art students than the broader populace. When I suggest to Turk that his theories sound fuzzy, he replies: “But did you study art history?”
Last year, his contribution to the Art Car Boot Fair was signed Rich Tea biscuits, at £25 a dunk. When I ask him how a biscuit becomes art, he offers a lengthy explanation, to do with the cultural history of Britain as a tea-drinking nation, the landscape, Constable and Henry Moore, William Morris, and Ruskinian romanticism. Importantly, the biscuits had a bite out of them. “The bite was almost like the loss of innocence, it was the bite of the apple. And I liked the circularity of the biscuit.” Possibly noting my bafflement, he concludes: “It seemed to make sense at the time.”
By his own account, Turk became an artist by accident. At school (a grammar in Ashstead, Surrey, followed by Sixth Form college), he had to resit his O-levels. “I ended up with an art A-level and 14 O-levels. My CV’s a bit like I’ve done time.”
Turk’s uncertain journey through the educational process saw him progress through various levels of art school, before washing up in Shoreditch just as the YBA movement was bursting into life. He has happy memories of the time before the hype, when today’s celebrity artists were just students, putting on shows in makeshift galleries. With art prices in the stratosphere, and Shoreditch now operating as a trendy dormitory for the City, all of that seems far away.
“I feel very nostalgic about Shoreditch. I arrived in the mid-90s, and we got this very cheap warehouse apartment. Everything was for rent. The industry that was there had died and it hadn’t picked up. When we arrived, there was nothing there. There was The London Apprentice, which was a big dark weird pub on the corner of Old Street, which has become 333. That was open late. Opposite there was a takeaway pizza place called The Great American Success. There was the Bricklayers’ Arms, which was a little pub, where if you took a cassette in, the guy behind the bar would put it on. There was the Barley Mow. That was it, though. There was no Cantaloupe. No Cargo. No Rivington Bar and Grill.
“But the whole area picked up really fast. On a commercial level, with the bars and the night-time economy it’s become a second West End. I think that maybe it was inevitable – maybe it’s good. It couldn’t really stay as it was.
“Shoreditch was just too close to the City to be a bohemian ghetto. It’s just too convenient. It could never have survived. But London’s becoming one of the most expensive places to live. In the end, it’ll just be the few who can who end up living here. Everyone else will have to go away, to the countryside. But that’s all right. We can go and grow vegetables, and be self-sustained.”
With those vegetables in mind, he goes off to phone his agent.

Hilly Kristal RIP: Patti Smith on the founder of the legendary New York punk club, CBGBs, who has died, aged 75

"In 1974, there was nowhere for a young rock band with any innovative ideas to play in New York City. Sometimes we would get a slot opening a folk act or a cabaret act or a transvestite singer. That’s as much as you could hope for. Max’s Kansas City had a little stage upstairs. Mostly it was folk music. We were lucky ’cause we got a lot of chances ’cause Phil Ochs liked us, ’cause we were all anti-war. Sometimes we’d play in an art gallery or somebody’s rooftop, but there wasn’t really any place to explore what you were doing night after night.
“Then I met Richard Hell and he told me he had this band Television, and he really wanted me to see it, at this place called CBGBs, which was down on the Bowery near where William Burroughs lived. I knew just where it was ’cause I used to visit William all the time. Easter of 1974, I went in there with Lenny Kaye to see this band, not knowing what to expect, ’cause what was CBGBs? It was this crappy little place with a bar and a stage, and there was about nine people there, (CBGBs’ founder) Hilly Kristal bein’ one of them, me and Lenny bein’ two of them. I saw Television. And I said: that’s it. This is what we are doing. This is present-future. Truly, the group was so great. So we traded off – Max’s Kansas City gave us the chance to play for a couple of weeks – we asked Television to come and play with us. People liked it, then we went back to CBGBs. We weren’t the biggest people that came out of CBGBs, but I do know that we were the first band to fill it. After we filled it, it was hardly ever unfilled.
“What Hilly did was give us a place where could do what we wanted – I could explore all the poetry, and rock’n’roll I wanted. I didn’t have to watch my language, I didn’t have to watch my concepts. I could talk about political or poetic or sexual things – whatever excited or interested us. Hilly slept in that place in a cot, lived in the worst circumstances for years. And that was his life. He put up with so much crap, and the place was noisy, smelly, and not much money was made. Our tickets were $2, and he gave us a portion of that.
“Hilly went for years to shepherd us."

"People Make Compromises And Keep Going": The Precarious Life Of Joyce Carol Oates

In the epilogue of The Gravedigger’s Daughter – the epic story of a woman’s life of violence, misery and survival – Joyce Carol Oates abruptly changes course to make a few points about autobiography. Her character, Freyda Morgenstern, a professor who has written a blockbusting memoir of her flight from the Holocaust, confesses that the story which has made her famous is not strictly true. “It was a text I composed of words chosen for ‘effect’.”
At this point, Oates seems to be writing to herself. Because although The Gravedigger’s Daughter is a work of fiction, it is dedicated to the author’s grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, whose father was a gravedigger, and whose life runs parallel to that of her heroine, Rebecca (who later changes her name to Hazel Jones).
Oates’s grandmother was a vital figure in her life. It was Blanche who gifted young Joyce her first serious book, Alice in Wonderland, followed – when Joyce was 14 – by a typewriter. If Oates was writing her life story for Hollywood, the symbolism of this moment would need no elaboration. It was the point at which her childish introversion, and her love of literature, turned into something more serious.
From tapping out those early stories about the animals on the family farm in upstate New York, Oates became one of the pre-eminent writers in the US, winning the National Book Award in 1970 for them, which chronicled a family on the fringes of the 1967 Detroit riots: Oates and her husband, book editor Raymond Smith, lived two blocks from the burning buildings in Detroit. (At this point in the biopic, the camera might fade from the awards ceremony to a sepia image of a waif-child pulling paper from her typewriter, and reading it to her smiling grandma).
Having achieved literary pre-eminence, Oates didn’t relax. At 69, she remains astonishingly prolific, while also working as a professor of humanities at Princeton University. In 1996, her short stories were recognised with the PEN/Malamud lifetime achievement award, and she continues to balance a literary sensibility with mainstream popularity, brilliantly re-imagining the interior life Marilyn Monroe in Blonde in 2000, and plunging deep into the mainstream in 2001, when We Were The Mulvaneys was patronised by Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
Oates has a habit, on completing a manuscript, of filing it away to see how it matures. The Gravedigger’s Daughter stayed in the drawer for longer than usual. “It’s so much personal material,” she says. “And it seemed very important to me and very close to my heart. It’s an ambivalent thing, because when you write you do want people to read it eventually. But you do feel very vulnerable, and almost reluctant to publish it. This is not the case usually.”
Looking back at her grandmother’s life, Oates realised she didn’t know her. “I knew her as someone like Hazel Jones, who is very warm and gracious and generous, but who seemed to have no personal life, no history. She never talked about herself.”
At this point, her voice begins to crack.
“It’s just very hard to talk about. I think I wrote the novel to try to give her the life that I imagined she must have had. And how she dealt with it, and how strong she was. Really determined to survive and take care of my father.”
In the novel, Rebecca/Hazel’s son becomes a concert pianist. Oates’s father was a violinist. “My grandmother’s parents came from Germany. They were German Jews and they settled in upstate New York in the 1890s. Her father was a gravedigger. They were very poor. It seemed so sad and ironic when I found out that they had been Jewish, that my great-grandfather was working in a Christian cemetery. But there all kinds of ironies in life – people make these compromises, and they keep going.”
In the book, the grandfather turns a shotgun on himself. “My great grandfather did commit suicide, in exactly that way. But my grandmother did keep going.
“I don’t want to suggest that the book is about my grandmother,” she says suddenly. “It’s basically a novel with much fiction in it.”
I ask her to think about what traits she inherited from her grandmother and she stays silent for a while. “That’s a good question. I think that we always would try to make the best of something. Everything could have gone so badly and yet it didn’t. My grandmother did come home from school and her father was there, literally with a shotgun, and he didn’t kill her. She was trying to open the front door, and…”
She pauses again. “I don’t know what happened, but he didn’t kill her, he killed himself. If he had killed her, of course, I wouldn’t be born. It was like a shake of the dice, and so you may as well try to be grateful and happy.”
Oates says she is “haunted” by the lives of past generations. “I look at their photographs and I feel they lived in a time that was much more difficult and treacherous than our own time. In the United States at least, there was no social welfare protection; if a person didn’t make money to live, the person would not live. If you couldn’t walk a couple of miles to a school, you couldn’t go to a school.” days.”
The Oates family farm was seven miles outside Lockport in upstate New York. “It was not a prosperous farm; it was just barely getting along. I used to do a lot of walking, just looking around. I wouldn’t say that I was lonely exactly because I was alone.” She agrees that she was self-contained. “Yes, and there wasn’t the emphasis that we have today on girls being very confident in school. None of the things that make life so difficult for adolescents today was operating then. You had family tasks; you had household and farm work to do. People didn’t hang around after school. There was nothing there. There were no extra-curricular activities and there weren’t any sports. All the things that bedevil young people today, and make them very competitive, didn’t exist.”
Oates was able to escape from this world by winning a college scholarship but she looks back “with fascination and a kind of nostalgia, though I would not want to live in that world.”
Her parents survived the Depression, apparently without complaint. “I’m fascinated that my parents did so well, and kept going. They both had to quit school when they were only about 12 years old, and they were so proud of me when I went to college. They were very grateful that they had what they had.
“We live in an era now where people are forced to be resentful and envious, because they can see through television and other media how relatively obscure they are. But decades ago there wasn’t any television. You might listen to the radio, and newspapers were not very international, so you could be quite poor, and not even know it. That’s the world that I came from. We were actually better off than our neighbours; we never knew, on some grand scale that the Carnegies and the Rockefellers were way up at the top, and we were way near the bottom.”
Oates is, by any standards, a peculiar kind of optimist. For, though The Gravedigger’s Daughter is a celebration of resilience and reinvention, and the achievements of her heroine are mirrored by the author’s own successes, Oates’s writing is characterised by self-consciousness and a swirling sense of dread; never more so than in Black Water, her brilliant take on Ted Kennedy’s car crash at Chappaquiddick, viewed from inside the mind of a drowning girl. She concedes that she does have a sense of trepidation, even when things appear to be going well, something she attributes to the hardness of her parents’ upbringing. “Even though one leaves that world, and many decades have gone by, I think one does have a sense that life is more precarious, perhaps, than it would appear.”
Of course, Black Water is also an allegory for the ruthless pragmatism of contemporary politicians. The book viewed Kennedy’s accident through the lens of the Reagan era, and was far from enamoured, but Oates feels politics has deteriorated further since then.
She laughs at her own cynicism. “You wonder how things could go downhill. Things just seem to always be going downhill. I don’t know whether the country’s in the throes of disintegration or deep cynicism. We scarcely have a democracy here anymore. It seems to be controlled by lobbyists. By bribe takers and bribe givers. Every day there is an expose of some corruption which suggests that much more corruption will not be exposed. I’m not even sure that electing a new president is going to make that much difference in terms of the loss of idealism.”
She sounds genuinely bereft at the thought of it. I hesitate to mention the name of the president. She sighs deeply. “I have no comment on Bush. There are some things that are so unspeakable that it might be better to pass by in silence. Wittgenstein says ‘of that which we cannot speak we must be silent’, and that’s the only situation in all of history where George W Bush and Wittgenstein will be in the same sentence.”
She has scant enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton either. “She’s a pragmatic and practical politician. She certainly knows where the bodies are buried. It was the same with [Bill] Clinton. What can one say about these people? They are the people that have the stamina. I don’t know how they do it. I would be exhausted after two hours of giving speeches. Days, weeks, months, years, they’re out there. Who else is going to do that?
“It always used to be said about boxers, by people who don’t know boxing, that the boxers are vicious and mean and they want to hurt people. And I thought, well, who else is going to be a boxer? Jack Dempsey was very vicious in the ring, and so was Muhammad Ali. He was a very nasty opponent to get into the ring with. You’re not going to get a sterling, Christ-like character to be a boxer. So too with politicians.”
She notes, with faint hope, that her students are idealistic about their ability to change the world. “It might be so.”
I suggest that perhaps older generations always feel the world has deteriorated. “Because it has,” she says. “It’s hard to think of an American presidency that will come anywhere near this one. The whole world has sat back in wonderment. It’s like a Shakespearian tragedy that turned into a farce. Except for the fact that people are dying in Iraq and elsewhere and being maimed and crippled. All that’s very real.”
And so she sits, in her office in Princeton, with a photograph of her grandmother by her side, dreaming of harder, better times.

Keith Allen: "Compared to public school, borstal was wonderful."

Keith Allen at the Groucho Club
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

Keith Allen is telling me about the first moments of his daughter Lily’s career as a pop performer. A long story, it begins on a wild night in New York with Joe Strummer, Allen and artists Damien Hirst and Douglas Gordon forming a marching band and busking in the restaurants of Manhattan, and ends with 15 year-old Lily in the basement of the London Astoria, singing backing vocals to a jazz version of Strummer’s punk anthem, White Riot, at the 2000 Poetry Olympics. Jump forward six months, and Allen is in Paris on one end of a mobile phone while Lily waits to go onstage with Strummer in front of 15,000 fans at Wembley Arena. Allen, the concerned dad, asks whether she is nervous, but Lily replies that she is not. “Well,” counsels her father, “phone me back after you’ve been on.”
When the call comes, Lily is revved-up with excitement. Keith tells her: “Remember that moment, because you’re going to spend the rest of your life chasing it.”
When Allen speaks about his popstar daughter, it is with a mixture of pride and concern. He was never worried about her becoming a performer. “You have to remember that Lily went around India on her own when she was 15 ½. I worried then.
“She’s very resilient, but that was before the whole enterprise got hold of her. She’s finding it tough, but I think she’ll get through it.”
His concern arises from the way Lily’s habit of blogging her innermost thoughts can be misinterpreted. Her recent comments about her weight insecurities made national headlines, and her playground spat with Cheryl Tweedy of Girls Aloud rumbles on absurdly (in the latest bulletins, Gordon Ramsay, Beth Ditto and a Kaiser Chief have pledged allegiance with Lily).
“The blogs are personal,” Allen says. “And I think Lily realises that she’s lost sight of that because of the nature of the beast. Then she starts to feed the beast, and to lose the quality of the original blogs. There’s a great danger that you can be too honest.
“I spoke to her before she got on the plane to go back to America, and she was so down. You have to remember that Lily is a girl. She’s a little girl, man. She’s out there on her own with a pick-up band, and they’re all guys. And she’s constantly being used as a comparative figure in the press. They generate this dreadful stuff by comparing her to Kate Moss – and she quite rightly points out: what are you doing comparing me to Kate Moss? It’s ludicrous. Why compare her to Amy Winehouse? They’re two entirely different artists. The media do want to generate this war. And Lily – she’s kind of snapped with this Girls Aloud thing, but there’s a part of me that’s really glad that she did it. What she said was nasty, but if Lily gives it out she’s got to learn to take it. Simple as that.
“I just hate to think that she will lose sight of her songwriting capabilities and get involved with that shit. Lily takes after me in many respects. A lot of my bravado and fun was about insecurity and fear.”
And Allen has had his share of bravado and fun. We meet in the snooker room of the Groucho Club, an institution which has been his second home. He is dressed in a windcheater with jeans, and serious sandals. “That,” he says, peering over red glasses at the green baize, “is the very snooker table I fucked Janet Street-Porter on.” He can do this kind of talk in his sleep, but apart from a gratuitous raising of the middle finger in the direction of AA Gill, showbiz revelations are largely absent from his autobiography.
Perhaps there wasn’t room. Allen’s story is a riot of incident, from a childhood as a petty thief to spells in borstal and prison, as he journeys from the squats of Notting Hill through punk to the birth pangs of alternative comedy. Before his first period of notoriety with a Channel 4 show and the Comic Strip movies (a period which fizzles into hedonistic underachievement with bit parts in Shallow Grave – the corpse - and Trainspotting) he washes up in Glasgow, at the Citizen’s Theatre. Cast as Lady Macduff, he breaks his leg playing poker in his rehearsal skirt, and has to take to the stage wearing a plaster cast. He has a lunch of cottage pie with director Giles Havergal (“a more apt dish you couldn’t have wished for since the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre Company was largely gay”) and manages to blag a temporary Equity card, to allow him to take his part in a show he describes as “pretentious middle class bollocks”.
Disenchanted with theatre, he returns to post-punk Notting Hill, and falls into alternative comedy with a stream-of-consciousness routine at the emerging Comedy Store. He supports the Clash on tour, and is cast as Joe Orton in Stephen Frears’ film Prick Up Your Ears. The cover image on Allen’s book, of a sneering Allen, in trunks, on a deck chair, with oiled torso and legs apart, was done for the film, only for him to be replaced at a later date by “the safer option”, Gary Oldman.
And so it goes. In Allen’s version of his life, he is a kind of punk Oliver Reed, raising hell, never quite fitting in, and self-destructing before his due rewards can be denied him. He has a habit of standing next to success, and isn’t always gracious about it. (He claims to have inspired the Little Britain “only gay in the village” sketch, but hasn’t noticed that he lacks the cartoonish appeal of Matt Lucas and David Walliams). His one incontrovertible success was the World Cup song he recorded with Damien Hirst and Blur’s Alex James. “The only dough I ever got was from Vindaloo. That’s another myth about me, that I’m rich.” He confesses to being “genuinely flabbergasted” when he sees the houses of his former Comic Strip colleagues. “They do commercials. That’s where the money is. I’ve done one. I was the Listerine tooth fairy. I did it because I owed £110,000 in tax.
“Obviously, I’ve evaded the responsibility of money. But the only reason I came to the Groucho for so long is that it’s the only place they would let me drink and eat for no money.”
The central figure in Allen’s story is his father, who is frequently absent – posted abroad on a submarine. He admits he hated him for a while. “I wanted the approval. My dad was very much a man of his generation. He didn’t give it. But that’s nothing new.”
His father hasn’t read the book. “I think he might be appalled by some of the stories. But hopefully he’ll know that I love him.”
I tell Allen that he doesn’t seem to have linked his father’s absence with his own attention-grabbing behaviour. “If I’d come from the most wonderful, warm, open, compassionate liberal environment, I’ve got a feeling I’d be exactly the same.”
His childhood thieving was opportunistic, he says. “The only thing I ever planned to do was to rob the supermarket that I worked in. But I was watching too much Mission Impossible, and there was a telephone relay box on the floor: I thought it was lasers, so I didn’t get into the safe! Me and my mate crawled round the front and just nicked all the fags. Fuckin’ idiot!”
Borstal sorted him out. His physical education teacher, Mr Dennis, put him on an outward bound course, giving him the chance to become a team leader, and began to concentrate on his exams.
“My experience of institutions up to that point had been a comprehensive school, a public school, a detention centre, remand homes, and hostels. And all of them were shit. Compared to public school, borstal was wonderful, and very funny.
“If you just bled out the class, the hierarchical structure of it was very much like boarding school. But they weren’t like me, because I never once felt like a criminal.”
There has been much human wreckage along the way, notably two broken marriages: the first to film producer Alison Owen (mother of Lily and actor Alfie Owen-Allen); the second to producer Nira Park. His BBC biography counts eight children - the latest being his one-year old baby girl, Teddie, with his Bodies co-star Tamzin Malleson.
I attempt an inventory of his offspring, and Allen’s exuberance flattens to a brief sulk. Before he met Alison, he had two children as the result of one-night stands. Kevin’s mother was 18, Allen was 27. She wanted a baby, and he didn’t. Soon after that, another fling produced Grace.
“Alison and me get on fantastically well. Myself, Alfie and Lily are very close. And that’s because of who we were and what we’ve done, not in spite of it. I don’t feel guilty – I just know that if I had my time again I’d do it in a different way.
“Kevin is the only birth I feel bad about. Grace: her mother was a much older woman, she was in her thirties, she wanted another child as company for her son Philip. She got that. She never contacted me, she got on with it, she lived with another guy who brought Grace up. In fact, Grace phoned me the day before yesterday, I’m going to her wedding.”
Allen first met Kevin when Lily invited him and Grace to his 50th birthday party. “She has a sense of drama, Lily.” That meeting “opened negotiations” between him and Kevin. “When we first met, I said ‘I’m going to be brutally honest with you. I’m not going to pretend that I love you. I can’t, it’s impossible. I’m your biological father, and of course I’ll do anything to make your life easier than it is.’ That’s all you can do. He has said it’s just recognition that’s important to him. I can’t do any more than that.”
When I ask about his latest baby, he coos. “I don’t want to sound like Woman’s Own, but it’s fantastic. Of course it’s different this time around. I guess as you get older, you grow up. You come to appreciate and value time. And I spent an inordinate amount of time with my kids – when I was married – partying. And even if you’re sober, you’ve got a hangover. It’s just shit. It’s not real time. It’s not fair on them. It can be so much more fun if it’s just real.”
So, at 53, has Keith Allen grown up? Well, professionally, he is stable, doing good, mainstream work, such as his turn as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the BBC’s Robin Hood. His friend Brian Travers (of UB40) recently reminded him that he had always told him his time would come when he was 50, and Allen is tempted to agree. “I’m much more comfortable about who I am, now, and I’m more complete as a person. I don’t like looking at myself young when I’m acting because I can see all the insecurities. It’s posturing, most of it. Whereas now, I’m so pleased. You must be happier as you get closer to your grave, not sadder. Honestly, as a philosophy, that might be it for me.”
He is, he concedes, a late developer. By his own account he did nothing until he was 28, “apart from have a brilliant time”. He was 34 when he first took cocaine (he would get it out of the way earlier, if he had his time again).
“Sometimes I can’t grasp how Lily copes with it,” he says suddenly, “because I’ve always been an outsider. It took me years to work out that I never went for gold because I was too scared. I could easily argue, coming third, it’s being in the race, not winning it. Whereas Lily – I don’t think I could cope with what she’s got.”

Shrek The Third: Recommended For The Burping And Farting Of The Ogre Babies. And The Wet Cat

Shrek, Leicester Square, London
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey

The first two Shrek films were masterpieces of their kind, but they also carried the seeds of their own destruction. They were knowing, and designed to appeal to adults as much as kids. They did this by playing around with the mythology of fairytales, and particularly the Disney versions of these stories. They were sweet and cynical at the same time, which is a hard recipe to repeat, as those viewers who were attracted by the cynicism will, most likely, be repelled by the familiarity of a film franchise. This could have some small impact on the success of the film in theatres, as adults may be marginally less inclined to buy tickets, but it may not matter, because – unlike the Disney movies at the time of their release – today’s children’s films are watched endlessly on DVD. Though they were amongst the highest-grossing theatrical releases of all time, the DVDs of Shreks 1 and 2 have sold 90 million copies between them. Familiarity, in the end, is the point.
And whatever else it is, Shrek the Third very familiar. The jolly green ogre – a benign cross between Gordon Brown, Alex Salmond and Dumbo the elephant, voiced by Mike Myers – finds himself married to a broody Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz), whose father, the frog king (John Cleese), is on the verge of croaking. Meanwhile, on the dinner theatre circuit, the charmless Prince Charming (Prince Charles, channelled through Barbie’s former escort Ken by Rupert Everett) is acting out his grievances in front of a restless audience of peasants.
The kingdom which Shrek is keen to avoid inheriting is Far Far Away, a cartoon spoof of Hollywood, in which – for example - Versace becomes Versarchery. On its first airing, this joke seemed mildly subversive, particularly when allied with Shrek’s mischievous treatment of Disney’s moral code. Third time around, the joke feels more laboured, not least because Shrek’s status as a happy underdog has been undermined by the social mobility he acquired as a by-product of two happy endings. And, when you put aside the diversion of all those snarky in-jokes, Shrekworld has a fairly conventional moral code itself, in which everyone feels like an underdog, and ogres are beautiful in their own way. Shrek the Third goes a little further than this, and has a Message for the kids (roughly speaking: be yourself, and don’t worry what others say). At the screening I attended, these moments were accompanied by an increased restlessness among the infant audience.
The adult audience is targeted with jokes about Shrek’s reluctance to become a father, including a dream sequence in which he is overrun by mini-ogres, and an emetic moment in which a baby vomits in his face for a very long time.
The film’s Journey is prompted by Shrek’s decision to shirk the responsibilities of becoming king by tracking down the other king’s son, Artie, a dweeb (Justin Timberlake) who is being educated in the art of teenage resentment in Worcestershire. (This storyline suggests that Far Far Away has a peculiarly progressive constitution. In other fairytale monarchies, such as the United Kingdom, Shrek – as the husband of the monarch’s daughter - would have no fear of being crowned).
The school (motto “Just say nay!”) is an Olde Worlde American high school, in which Artie is busy being shunned. He is an obnoxious kid, made worse by the promise of power. He tells the school assembly: “I’m building my city, people, on rock’n’roll.”
It’s not as simple as that, of course. On encountering the dithering wizard Merlin (Eric Idle) – retired from magic after a “level three fatigue” – Donkey and Puss In Boots accidentally swap bodies, giving the animators the challenge of drawing a cat that thinks it is an ass, and vice versa. In another corner of the kingdom, Prince Charming is rounding up all the other fairytale losers – Captain Hook (Ian McShane) the Ugly Sisters, the Three Blind Mice – and asking: “Who wants their happily ever after?” The losers run riot, Ye Olde Bootery is turned into Hooters, and the Gingerbread Man sees his life flashing before him. The ladies of the court burn their bras and embrace girl power, Captain Hook discovers his inner daffodil grower, and – well, you can guess the rest. The best bit is a wet cat.
It’s all good fun, even if the story is less impressive than the burping and farting of the ogre babies, and the soundtrack music is more conservative than previously. Stick around for the closing titles, in which Puss in Boots and Donkey impersonate Sly and the Family Stone.

Ocean's Thirteen: The Manliness of Men Being Manly In Vegas, In Sunglasses

Somewhere towards the end of Ocean’s Thirteen, with Frank Sinatra singing “this town is a lonely town” on the soundtrack, Elliot Gould has a philosophical turn. Before considering the wisdom of his words, it is worth remembering that Gould’s role in the Ocean’s series, as Rueben Tishkoff, is to wear shell suits and medallions, and glasses which are bigger than his face. He is a cartoon, but not a fool, and his every appearance on the screen is a cause of levity. So, what he says, while chewing a stogie on a fine Las Vegas night, is: “The moment you become embarrassed of who you are, you lose yourself.”
Well, Ocean’s Twelve was a bit of an embarrassment, and it showed every sign of being lost, as it traipsed forgettably across Europe. Thirteen – which goes under the tagline “revenge is a funny thing” - is much better. The good humour of Ocean’s Eleven is restored, as is its natural geography. The first film, remember, was a remake of a self-indulgent heist caper with George Clooney (Danny Ocean) and his pals replacing Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. For director Stephen Soderbergh, it was an exercise in nostalgia, not for Vegas, but for movie stars, and for a time when men were men.
The Ocean’s films are, in a very specific sense, buddy movies. They are about friendship and easy chatter and guys being guys as much as they are about diamond robberies and casino cons. Women are peripheral and decorative, though Ellen Barkin makes a memorable contribution here as Abigail Sponder, the generously-cleavaged sidekick to the movie’s Bad Guy, Willy Bank, played in his lower registers by Al Pacino. Pacino and Barkin don’t quite re-create the onscreen chemistry they displayed in Sea of Love, but they wave at its memory, which is a fine thing.
The story is complicated and very simple. The simple part is the motive: the guys (Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac et al) reconvene to exact revenge for Rueben, who has suffered a heart attack after being double-crossed by Bank, who is opening a supercasino, The Bank.
The complicated part is the doing of it. The casino – a CGI tower in the shape of a twisted sail – is designed to be as secure as it is luxurious, so Ocean’s men attack it on both fronts. In a comic side-story, they make ensure that the journalist sent to review the hotel (a hangdog David Paymer) has a hellish stay. Foul smells are pumped into his suite, his food is poisoned, and when he uses his special hotel reviewer’s microscopic spectacles to check for cleanliness, the sheets on the bed are revealed to be a refugee camp for bacteria.
It would be stretching matters to claim that Ocean’s Thirteen has a point, but it does offer a satire of the luxury industry. The Bank is a casino where the silverware is gold, Pacino’s tan has a tan, and, as Miss Sponder, Barkin’s job is to banish ugliness. Only happy faces are to be seen front-of-house, and waitresses are fired when they display a healthy Body Mass Index. (To make this legal, their job title is “models who serve”.)
For Soderbergh (acting as his own Director of Photography under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) it is an exercise in visual dynamism. He uses the camera as if spying on his actors – watching through windows as they eat, creeping across the room like a stalker. He makes nostalgic use of split screens during the action sequences, and uses filters to distort the colours (green on Clooney in the Vegas night, blue on Matt Damon in a London street). Though there is a lot of talk, the funky soundtrack makes sure the viewer has neither the time nor the inclination to consider the more extreme improbabilities of the plot. (Could you really import the Channel Tunnel drill into Nevada and burrow undetected beneath the streets of Las Vegas? Oh, what the hell…)
So, what remains is a witty hymn to suaveness, and to the chiselled beauty of movie stars being movie stars in what may be the most expensive home movie ever made. The character names are comic, and almost irrelevant. This is George and Brad and Matt having fun. Clooney wears a droopy moustache, Pitt a hippie wig, Damon a hooked nose. You know, from a minute in, when Brad Pitt removes his balaclava and throws a sideways smile, that it’s going to be all right. These men are fooling with stardom. They are playing their idealised selves. “You think this is funny,” Andy Garcia asks. “Well,” says George Clooney, “it sure ain’t sad.”
It ends where it begins, with handsome men in sunglasses waiting for a plane.

Meet the new Bob: A new film accompanies DA Pennebaker's classic Dylan documentary Dont Look Back

Scene one: In a room at the Savoy Hotel, in Spring 1965, Bob Dylan meets the British press. The singer holds a giant lightbulb. “What’s the lightbulb for?” a reporter asks, not unreasonably. “I usually carry a lightbulb,” Dylan replies, deadpan.
Scene two: Bob Dylan and his tour manager Bob Neuwirth arrive at the Royal Albert Hall, for a concert with the Beatles. The auditorium makes an immediate impression, and they gaze around in wonder. In a Spinal Tap moment, Neuwirth speaks: “Queen Victoria built it for her dude.”
Thirty years after it was first release, DA Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour of Britain still surprises. The opening sequence, in which Dylan flips cue-cards with phrases from Subterranean Homesick Blues, was inspired by the films on French Scopitone jukeboxes, but came 16 years before the launch of MTV. As a piece of filmmaking, it is a landmark. If the film now carries echoes of Spinal Tap, that’s because it drew the template for rock documentary. Pennebaker was amongst the first filmmakers to use a hand-held camera, and his jerky imagery was thought to be so amateurish that no mainstream distributor would touch it. The film was shown first in a porn cinema, where they were more used to that kind of camerawork.
Watching it now is to see pop culture being born. It was Pennebaker’s good fortune to be in the room at a moment of great significance. (“You could never go back to Cole Porter,” he notes on the commentary.) Dylan was on the cusp: this was his final solo acoustic tour, though he is clearly planning his next move. One scene has him staring wistfully at a shop window full of electric guitars. But the street scenes of a rainy Britain are drab – there is hardly any traffic, and no pop radio, apart from the pirate Radio Caroline.
There’s a sense, too, of the generation gap. Dylan’s fans are smart teenagers. The journalists who are sent to document the whirlwind are squares in suits, asking questions of varying degrees of irrelevance, and receiving gnomic replies for their troubles. Reading a newspaper story about the tour, Dylan remarks, “I’m glad I’m not myself.”
Dont Look Back is about the charisma of Dylan and the circus surrounding him. But for his new film, 65 Revisited, Pennebaker re-examined the footage he had discarded, and discovered the reason for all the hoopla – the music. In the original film, the songs were cut short, to preserve the sense of dramatic flow. Here, he lets the music run, and when you see Dylan sing To Ramona or It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue it’s obvious what the fuss was about. What you see isn’t a protest singer – it’s a romantic balladeer of considerable intensity. The music continues offstage. Pennebaker catches Dylan playing piano, and dueting with Joan Baez on old folk songs. Onstage, doing It’s Alright Ma, It Ain’t Me Babe or She Belongs To Me, the ferocity of the performances is breathtaking. .
Pennebaker was understandably reluctant to return to his discarded footage, and while 65 Revisited has a less coherent narrative than Dont Look Back, it is a fine film. Of the non-musical moments, the best is a peculiar scene inside a Newcastle department store – a real Grace Brothers affair – where Bob tries on a double-breasted suit, and is invited to choose from a selection of psychedelic ties. He opts for the pink one. His manager, Albert Grossman, looks on, impressed. “We can eat in the hotel now,” he growls.
[First published in UNCUT magazine.]

INTERVIEW WITH DA PENNEBAKER
What is the new material?
“We started to call it Outtake, because it was a whole lot of outtakes from Dont Look Back, which I got into a little bit grudgingly. I was dragging my feet because I thought ‘I’ve made a film, here I don’t want to do it again. But when I started looking at it, and particularly listening to it, it got very interesting for me. What I found was that when I did the first film I cut off a lot of the music. I didn’t want it to be a musical film. I wanted it to be about Dylan and not the music. I figured if you wanted the music you could go buy the record. Well when I started watching his performances – particularly of the throwaway songs; the love songs which people didn’t take very seriously, as opposed to the folk songs or the protest songs – as I listened to them in their entirety I felt like I might have made a mistake. I began to see something that I kinda missed, just because I was so tight and inside that group – I hadn’t realised the effect that he was having on people came from listening to all those songs in their entirety. That’s kind of what he put out there. It was revolutionary – it was amazing, and it brought me up with a start. The film is an appraisal of what I missed – of how dumb I was. It's not Dont Look Back because Dont Look Back Was about Byron and not Shelley, you know?

It shows Dylan’s romantic side.
“At the time, everyone was busy saying: ‘He’s no damn poet, so don’t get mixed up’. I thought: he may not be a poet in the accepted sense, but he thinks in lines that are, to me, kind of poetic. He leaves out words, or jumps over words, in a way that takes more than just an attitude or street training. It’s something that he understands. Looking back on the whole thing, he was somebody that put something out that people understood right away was important. Looking at it now, those are some of the most important songs he ever sung. When I hear them now – Don’t Think Twice and whatnot – boy, I tell you they really get to me.
Dylan has changed his opinion about Dont Look Back hasn’t he?
“Well, listen. What Dylan says at breakfast he’s gonna deny at lunch. You’re dealing with a person born in June, the double-head. That’s the way he is. I’m always interested his reaction to things, but I always take it with a grain of salt, Like, once he said to me, ‘All words that rhyme mean the same thing’. I thought, well, that’s interesting. I better tell that to Robert Graves, it might interest him. There’s nothing wrong with that – but it just makes you hang in to see what else he might say.”
You had great access to him. Did you think he was developing a persona?
“I didn’t know too much about him. I knew that he was interesting to me and I wasn’t sure why. I never interviewed him – I never thought I’d find anything that way. I just watched him. But I was pretty tight with him. I was part of that little group.
“I don’t think he had any idea that I was making a film. The camera was not very impressive looking. It was home made and not very big. A lot of times I was all by myself with it, so it didn’t seem like what he must have thought movies were. Whatever I was doing was funny and foolish and that was OK.”
Was he self-conscious with the camera?
“Sometimes. Like anybody, he knew what a camera did. But I don’t care what people do in front of a camera. It’s the action that I’m following and not the self-absorption. That could put you off – but if it's there, continually – on its own merits you’re bound to put it aside and not judge the action by whether or not he’s aware of it or he’s putting something down on you. If he is, that’s his business. I don’t look on that as anti-filmic. The idea of anybody that’s doing something interesting in the world, sitting in the corner watching them – it’s worth doing, because you learn something.”
Where did the idea for the lyric signs come from?
“That was Dylan’s idea. When I first met him down at this bar in the Village, he said ‘Do you think it’s a good idea if I write out the words to the song?’ - his new song was Subterranean Homesick Blues – I said, it’s a great idea. So we got a whole bunch of cardboards and carried them around with us for the whole trip.
Was your new film affected by the Scorsese documentary: the spine of that was your material.
“Yeah. It was mostly stuff I shot. I was happy to see someone re-use it. It was never going to be my film. The arrangement I had with Dylan was I would shoot it but it would be his film. Dont Look Back was my film, he called Dont Look Back “Pennebaker by Dylan”. The Scorsese thing was good. It hinged on a lot on the interviews that Jeff did with Dylan, but it was entertaining. There’s other stuff that isn’t in it that will surface one day.”
Are you surprised by how mythic Dylan has become?
“Sorta. If you’d fled with Byron to Switzerland and Italy, when he was getting thrown out over his divorce, you wouldn’t have imagined that you were watching anything of earth-shaking consequence, except another tired old Brit on the run. Dylan, even though he was just in his thirties, he initiated a kind of Byronic thing that has prevailed down to now. The idea of the artist as ‘fuck you’ is now a savage cry from every gallery, and it was not that way before. Artists didn’t have any rights to the game at all.”
What happened to the film Something is Happening?
“Scorsese used that in his film. Dylan had said ‘I’m going to make a film and I want you to shoot it’. So I said ‘cool’. Dylan didn’t know anything about directing and I didn’t either. So between us we were like a couple of thumbs pointing in the wrong direction. But it still was interesting because he drew people like flies – they would come in through the windows and that set things in motion. And I could only make the film that I knew how to make. He didn’t want to make Dont Look Back, but there wasn’t anything else really. Scorsese saw at least how to put it together.”

Dont Look Back: 65 Tour Deluxe Edition TWO-DISC DVD BOX SET (DOCURAMA)

Jindabyne: All Is Not Well In Tidy Town

The opening scenes of Jindabyne suggest a horror film, or more precisely, the suburban dread of (mainstream period) David Lynch. A girl is driving across country, singing along to a song on the radio. She is watched, and then chased, by a man in a truck, who pulls ahead of her and blocks the road. The action then cuts to Jindabyne –a “tidy town” on the sign outside the civic limits – where everyday life is proceeding, unaffected by the fact that something dreadful has just happened. Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) is teaching his boy to fish, and telling him about the town that exists beneath the lake, and how he once heard the bell of the submerged church ringing from under the surface. At home, with sheep bleating in the background, Stewart’s wife Claire (a glacial Laura Linney) is fixing the sprinkler in the garden, when she suddenly vomits. All is not well in tidy town.
But, although director Ray Lawrence’s last film, Lantana, had an opening that almost quoted Twin Peaks, and his subject is the dread that lurks beneath suburban good manners, the parallel with Lynch is misleading. Lynch believes in disquiet for its own sake. Lawrence wants to unravel its tendrils, and to dissect the logic of midlife dread. Both directors are fascinated by evil, but the shit that happens in Lawrence’s world is more realistic than supernatural.
Jindabyne is based on So Much Water So Close to Home, the short story by Raymond Carver which also found its way into Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. The story concerns a wife who cannot comprehend her husband’s decision to keep fishing after discovering the drowned body of a girl in the water. Carver’s story is spare in its detail. Lawrence and screenwriter Beatrix Christian add the architecture of a small town and, by making the drowned girl an Aborigine and placing the action in New South Wales, bring a distinctly Australian twist to tale which threatens to overpower it.
The film is dominated by disappointment. The imagery of death is everywhere. From the first scenes, Stewart is established as a man in denial. The yellowing cuttings on the wall of his garage show him to be a former rally champion, but he is now reduced to inspecting his hair in the mirror, looking for grey. His mother, Vanessa (Betty Lucas) a domineering Irishwoman whose presence irks Claire, takes one look at his dye job and tells him: “That hair makes you look like the kind of man who visits prostitutes.”
All the characters have secrets, and all seem imprisoned by them. Claire, who is pregnant, seems gripped by fear at the prospect. The unwelcome presence of Betty is caused, we understand, by some kind of breakdown in Claire’s past, and the two women are engaged in an unceasing power-struggle. Claire and Stewart’s young son Tom (Sean Rees-Wemyss), meanwhile, is friends with Caylin-Calandria (Eva Lazzaro), whose morbid curiosity leads her to sacrifice the school guinea pig, and to enquire, on witnessing Claire’s morning sickness: “Are you going to die?”
So oppressive is this environment, that it is hardly surprising that the men have devised a means of escape. Every year, they hike into the woods for a fishing excursion, with no women allowed. Cigars are smoked, jokes told. “Three beautiful women walk into a bar,” says one. “A black, a brunette and a lesbian.” Another replies: “What colour hair has the lesbian got?”
On the first night, Stewart discovers the naked body of the girl floating in the water. After some discussion, the men decide to tether the body to the bank, and report it on their return. In the context – they are in an isolated spot, out of range for mobile phones – this doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable, though Billy (Simon Stone), the youngest member of the group, urges them to cut short their excursion. To soothe their guilt, the men agree a cover story, saying that a sprained ankle prevented them from returning immediately. Even Billy is unaware of the seriousness of what they have done. Phoning home the next morning, he reports: “We found a body. I caught the most amazing fish, though.”
What follows is an examination of the different ways men and women react to tragedy. Stewart is stoical, and bemused by the fuss. Claire is traumatised, telling him that the girl needed his help. “She was beyond help,” Stewart replies. “There was nothing anyone could do for her.”
Would they have reacted differently if the body had been male, or white? Why does Claire become so obsessively involved, raising money for the funeral of the dead girl?
The conclusion is less satisfactory than the terse parable which precedes it, but it is fitting, at least, that the term for an aboriginal funeral is a “sorry business”.

Zodiac: David Fincher Batters America's Innocence (Again) While Indulging His Love Of All The President's Men

Since David Fincher is the man who delivered Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box at the end of Se7en, an elegy to male violence in Fight Club, and essayed a thrill-ride in paranoia in Panic Room, it’s easy to see Zodiac as a softening of his position.
It’s true, the film is about a serial killer. There are nasty moments in which people die horribly. There are also lengthy bouts of jeopardy, including a Psycho-like scene in which Jake Gyllenhaal visits the house of a suspect and finds himself lured into the basement. In a horror film, it wouldn’t be hard to predict what might happen next. In Zodiac, which aims to unravel the fear, no such prediction can be made, but that doesn’t lessen the claustrophobia, heightened by the sound of footsteps upstairs, the light dimming, and the siren call of a whistling kettle. The fact that Gyllenhaal is as pretty as Bambi, and roughly as tough, does nothing to alleviate the dread.
Zodiac is based on two books by Robert Graysmith about the killer who terrorised the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Graysmith (Gyllenhaal) was a cartoonist on the San Francisco Chronicle whose initial fascination with the coded symbols used in letters from the killer grew to an obsession. The cartoonist carried on investigating the crime long after police had closed the file, and became an authority on a killer who achieved pop cultural notoriety. The Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry is loosely based on Zodiac, and Harry, the unconventional cop played by Clint Eastwood, was modelled on Dave Toschi, who investigated the real-life case. Toschi is played here by Mark Ruffalo, as a kind of wisecracking Columbo with a fondness for Animal Crackers.
Fincher’s interest in the story is rooted in personal experience. He recalls Zodiac being a playground bogeyman in his San Francisco childhood, and has memories of his father’s reaction to the news that the school bus was being given a police escort. Fincher Senior explained flatly that a killer had sent a letter to the Chronicle threatening to shoot the tyres of the bus, and then kill the children. In the film, Graysmith experiences a similar moment with his child but, unlike Fincher’s father, he removes him from the bus.
As nostalgia, Zodiac is compelling. Lovers of Americana will be kept entertained by Fincher’s digital rendering of 1970s San Francisco, captured with the director’s customary flair, in shots where the camera swoops over the city with the agility of Spider-man. Those dark, rain-washed streets are patrolled by ship-shaped Fords and yellow cabs to a soundtrack of period pop hits. The first murder follows the 4th of July fireworks, with a young couple spotlit by a stranger’s headlights on a lovers’ lane while Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man plays. “Was that your husband?” asks the boy. “No,” says the girl, seconds before the gun pokes through the passenger side window, “it’s nothing.”
Fincher is a master of little feints of misplaced confidence, and the cranking of tension is made easier by the fact that the killer’s face is never seen. The viewer knows, when the action pauses to show a taxi driver listening to a radio discussion of the Zodiac murders, that the man in the back of the cab is about to contribute to the debate, but the how and the when remain the stuff of guilty pleasure. We appreciate the naivety of the woman who pulls over on the highway when the car behind flashes its headlights, but Fincher stretches the moment so taut that the viewer wills a murderous conclusion.
But Zodiac isn’t really a long film about killing. It is about obsession and procedure, a talk opera in which words speak louder than actions. Fincher’s inspiration wears no disguise. The wood-panelled, striplit office of the Chronicle, with its symphony of ringing phones and its editorial conferences in shirtsleeves, and the fervent click-clack of typewriters, and the reluctant double act between the naïve cartoonist and the hardboiled hack Paul Avery (a splendidly boozy turn by Robert Downey Jr), and the conspiracy of cautious officialdom, make it a sequel of sorts to All The President’s Men, in which America’s innocence gets battered again.
More than murder, it is a story about storytelling. Zodiac succeeds because he feeds the media’s hunger for compelling narratives. His murders are accompanied by coded puzzles, designed to illustrate how much smarter he is than his pursuers, and to magnify his importance. Fincher’s film is a riddle, too, offering more clues than answers to a case which remains unsolved. Still, the soundtrack is a help: when Gyllenhaal – the cartoonist as Sherlock - meets the man most likely to have been Zodiac, the radio plays Baker Street.

The Year Of Tevez

The Year Of Tevez
Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey.

28 Weeks Later: From Simple Fear Of The Dark To Full-On Zombie Splatter, As Canary Wharf Becomes The New Baghdad

Robert Carlyle is cooking dinner. The room is candlelit. There aren’t enough tomatoes, but there are five tins of chick peas. “That should last at least five year,” he jokes. From this, we can deduce several things. After a great national disaster, life goes on. Families and friendships endure. And even if the end of the world is nigh, Bobby Carlyle won’t eat hummus.
This is the opening scene of the sequel to 28 Days Later, the low-budget, British horror by the team that made The Beach; director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, writer Alex Garland. That film had its roots in the disappointments of The Beach, and was preceded by the two digital dramas Boyle shot for television - Vacuuming Completely Nude In Paradise and Strumpet. It’s fair to say that these TV films regenerated Boyle’s creativity: when the director introduced them at the Edinburgh film festival in 2001, he was evangelical about the possibilities of DV; the cameras were small, you could shoot endless footage in bad light, the actors were less precious. All of which he rolled into 28 Days Later, conceived as a treatise on the various forms of rage which were preoccupying newspaper headlines at the time, but which also worked as an ironic commentary on the 57 varieties of dread which followed, notably SARS and bird flu.
28 Days Later was doomed from the moment Christopher Eccleston appeared, but had two things going for it. It’s depiction of a still, deserted London, was eerie and haunting. And the film had a brash immediacy which connected it to a popcorn-eating audience in a manner that is rare in British cinema.
Boyle, Macdonald and Garland are elevated to executive positions for the sequel, and directorial duties are taken on by the Canarian Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, whose debut, Intacto, explored the downsides of luck. Fresnadillo’s skewed outlook has its roots in a childhood memory. At the age of nine, he was in a traffic jam when two planes crashed on the runway at Tenerife, and he has said that he recalls the face of the policeman peering through the car window as being strange and wild, like that of somebody who had been through hell. It is no plot-spoiler to reveal that that face occurs frequently in 28 Weeks Later. Carlyle gets to try it, as he runs guiltily from “the Infected”, and he causes it too, when his own ravenous urges emerge.
The action, which mostly involves running away and screaming, occurs six months after the initial outbreak. The rage virus has, for now, been contained, and the first children are returning to Britain. Carlyle plays a father, welcoming his two kids – Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) - back to an apartment on the 25th floor of Canary Wharf. The Isle of Dogs is a quarantined Green Zone, patrolled by the US-led NATO troops. The Docklands is a perfect backdrop for horror, with its mix of brash tower blocks and post-industrial dereliction. In the post-9/11 world, it is less surprising than it should be to see tanks at City Airport, armed troops lining the walkways, and a woman in fatigues giving a safety demonstration on the Docklands Light Railway.
Needless to say, the kids soon tire of incarceration, and take a trip back to their old home. Observed all the way by snipers, they steal an abandoned pizza delivery moped for a ride across the empty Tower Bridge, and on, through grim estates and graveyards, as the sun sets behind the Millennium Dome. On arriving, they are as shocked as the audience is not to discover that the house isn’t empty.
Plot is less important than the rising waves of horror which drive the film, so it is best to reveal little more about the story. There are moments of incredulity – not least the bit where Carlyle is tempted into an intimate embrace with one of the Infected – but these are merely brakes on the action, which pulsates between a suggestive fear of the dark and full-on zombie splatter.
Fresnadillo’s use of London is expansive. The horror now extends from St Paul’s to Wembley Way. There is a splash of napalm, too, perhaps in tribute to Boyle’s favourite film, Apocalypse Now. The metaphorical target has broadened too: the NATO response to civilian disorder is a Code Red, which is quickly upgraded from selective targeting to “shoot everything”.
After containment comes extermination. Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Other Heads Do Not Gleam In The Dark

Mr Ivor Cutler, performing Herring Heads - a suitable response to the current frenzy of nationalism.

Spider-Man 3: Stuck in 1962, Nostalgic For An Age Yet To Come

Tobey Maguire is 31 years old. At the time of the first Spider-Man picture – in which the ejaculation of jets of web from his wrists was explained as a by-product of pubescence – he was 26. Fortunately, Maguire is a boyish-man, which makes it half-plausible that he is haunted by the problems of someone ten years younger than himself. In this third outing as Peter Parker, the dweeb-with-spiderpowers’ arrested development takes him to the point where he begins to flirt with girls who aren’t his girlfriend.
As an actor, Maguire gets away with this because he is blessed with a face so open that it almost demands sand be kicked into it. But he is aided also by the peculiar timekeeping of the Spider-Man universe, in which the mores of 1962 apply, though the setting is contemporary. There is something reassuring about this contradiction: Spidey-world is futuristic, in an old-fashioned way. It is in love with skyscrapers, and fearful of science, though the Cold War dread of nuclear technology has given way to unease about particle physics.
At this stage in a film’s franchise, familiarity is everything. The last time we heard from Parker, he was living in the shadow of Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), his celebrity girlfriend. This time, the couple’s fortunes have reversed, and Parker’s head is being turned by the growing fame of his alter ego, Spider-Man, while Mary Jane is bombing on Broadway. Happily, he is still a failure at work, unable to wrest a staff job at the Daily Bugle from the irascible editor J Jonah Jameson (JK Simmons), a human inferno whose rages have been doused by strong medication and anger management, but whose instincts are, nevertheless, a plausible caricature of the editorial values of a popular newspaper. A second freelance photographer, Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), has begun to undermine Parker’s position at the Bugle, so Jamieson sets them both a challenge. He wants a picture of Spidey with his hand in the cookie jar.
Sam Raimi’s stewardship of Spider-Man has shown him to be a director whose fondness for the logic of the comic book is matched by an awareness of the absurdities of the superhero genre. After a bruising encounter with Sandman – a granulated adversary who can change shape at the touch of a fist, and whose only weakness is a tendency to dissolve in water - Spider-Man tips the grit from his boots and hair and asks ruefully: “Where do all these guys come from?”
Conveniently, they all come from the dark corners of Parker’s Life. Sandman, aka Flint Marko (an unrecognisably brawny Thomas Haden Church; the randy goat in Sideways) is the man who murdered his Uncle Ben. It is Marko’s great misfortune to escape from prison and, while fleeing the police, to fall into a particle accelerator at a nuclear physics facility. Parker also faces a challenge from his old friend, Harry (James Franco) who believes that Spider-Man killed his father, the Green Goblin, though in reality, he died as a result of Willem Dafoe’s overacting. In what can only be described as a very bad week, Spider-Man also becomes infected by a creepy black goo which emerges from a meteor and attaches itself to his moped, before transforming his personality. Before long, Spider-Man has ditched his traditional red livery for clingy black latex. Parker, meanwhile, is combing his hair like an emo and attracting admiring glances from passing supermodels, having traded his humility for the kind of self-love that makes a man stop in the street to dance the funky chicken. This is funny to observe, but the moral universe of Marvel Comics is oddly old-fashioned, and there is never any doubt that Parker’s experiment with male sexual display is destined to end badly. Yet this black goo is strong stuff, and it duly infects Parker’s rival, Eddie, who gets to utter the line which sums up the temptations of the dark side: “I like being bad. It makes me happy.”
The trick in any cinematic adaptation of a comic is to render the special effects in a way that matches the visual drama of the reader’s imagination. While the fights have their moments, the most remarkable effects involve the dissolves of the Sandman, and – just at the moment that Dunst most resembles Fay Wray – his re-emergence as a kind of evil King Kong. It’s right, of course, that Spider-Man should make hay with the iconic imagery of New York. What’s more surprising is the way the way Raimi chooses to make direct visual references to 9/11. The rain of stationery when a runaway crane knocks out the side of a skyscraper, and the sandstorm which billows along the avenues, are jarring reminders of the world which viewers of Spider-Man are so keen to escape.

This Is England: A Summer Of Tainted Love, Buckaroo and The National Front

Shane Meadows is not a Rock’n’Roll Years director, so it’s surprising to see him open his skinhead odyssey with a montage of nostalgia. To a soundtrack of Toots and the Maytals singing the early reggae hit 54-46 That’s My Number, the screen hosts a nightmarish boot-sale of 1980s’ memories. Roland Rat rubs padded shoulders with Margaret Thatcher, the Greenham Common women meet Duran Duran, an aerobics workout runs into the marriage of Princess Diana. As the reel progresses and the images sink in, other thoughts occur. Was Space Invaders an arcade version of the Cold War? Possibly. And look, there’s Ronald Reagan, the original B-Movie president, from a time when it was possible to laugh at the presence of a cowboy in the White House.
The effect, to viewers old enough to remember these things, will be chastening – how long ago it was, how recent it seems, and how funny it all looks. To those who do not remember – most of the audience – only the last reaction will pertain.
This is England is set in July 1983, in a depressed working class coastal town. The action begins on the last day of school, on which pupils are allowed to wear their own clothes. For 12-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) – a character based on the adolescent Shane Meadows – this is a problem. A kid who is small for his age, he is also condemned to suffer abuse because of his lack of style. “You look like Keith Chegwin’s son,” he is told. “I were picked on three times today,” he laments, “and all because of me trousers.”
Shane soon falls under the influence of a skinhead gang, led by the benign and funny Woody (Joe Gilgun). The gang is destructive, but its misdeeds are largely against property. They characterise their vandalism sprees as hunting, and don fancy dress (Davy Crockett hats, chinoiserie, snorkels) for the purpose. The pecking order is minutely observed. The charming Woody is looked up to, just as the fat kid Gadget (Andrew Ellis) is a magnet for condescension.
Shaun, a precocious kid with a squirrel design on his jumper, is clearly too young to be involved in such activity, but he does not seem to be in danger. His need to obtain the correct skinhead gear is a matter of comedy. In the shoe shop, his mother conspires with the sales assistant to persuade him to accept boots which are not Dr Marten’s. The replacements are just as good, the boy is assured, because they are “from London”. The trauma of “no uniform day” is excised only when Shaun is fully togged out skinhead gear, with drainpipe jeans, Ben Sherman shirt, and braces.
All of this is a harmless, almost wistful examination of a teenage summer; of tower blocks and Tainted Love, of Buckaroo and Culture Club, and graffiti on the Church of Christ reading “Maggie is a Twat”. The period detail is minutely observed, right down to the holes in the woodchip wallpaper, picked, out of boredom, from Shaun’s bedroom wall.
Everything changes with the arrival of Combo (Stephen Graham), a skinhead of 1969 vintage. His allegiance to the racist National Front splits the group, taking Shaun into more dangerous company. The boy’s identification with Combo’s rage is derived from the death of his father in the Falklands war, and he learns how to impose his grief on others – leading a wrecking raid of the local Asian store. The presence in the original gang of a black kid, Milky (Andrew Shim, from Meadows’ second film A Room For Romeo Brass), is another flashpoint, though the tragedy is deferred by a slow dissection of the fractures in Combo’s philosophy. Milky is offered a cricket test: does he feel English or Jamaican? Milky says English, which is enough, for a while.
Meadows has been around the territory of male violence and peer group pressure before, not least in his last film, the brilliant revenge drama Dead Man’s Shoes. But This is England is more precisely personal, stemming from a time when the director’s role model was the unreconstructed Jimmy Boyle. The film’s treatment of teenage tribalism has similarities with Richard Jobson’s 16 Years of Alcohol, but Meadows is most obviously indebted to the late Alan Clarke. While the emotions are tugged by the vulnerability of Shaun (a precocious performance by Turgoose), Stephen Graham’s Combo can stand alongside Ray Winstone in Scum, or Tim Roth in Made in Britain, as a portrait of fractured masculinity.
In the end, the Falklands analogy feels slightly forced, but the scenes of public rejoicing at the docksides are a reminder of how potent English nationalism was during that hiccup of decolonisation. The history is important. But, as the title of this vital film suggests, Meadows has his eyes fixed on the tensions of the present.

Phil Kaufman: Executive Nanny, Corpse-Rustler, Road-Mangler Deluxe

In a long and varied career, Phil Kaufman has been almost famous several times. He appeared in several movies. He drove a pick-up truck on Larry Hagman’s Son of Blob. He’s there, if you look, in Riot in Juvenile Prison, Pork Chop Hill, Spartacus and The Honeymoon Machine.
Sadly, his film career was cut short by the inconvenience of his incarceration in Mexico and Sweden for marijuana smuggling. Kaufman found that Hollywood was intolerant of drug felons in the mid-1960s. "I couldn’t get a job because it was a drug bust. Of course, now, it’s a prerequisite. It’s like you can’t be a country singer till you’ve got a divorce and had an affair with your horse."
In an equally unremembered incident, Kaufman was the camp photographer at the Nude Miss Universe contest, and did his job wearing just a battery belt and a camera: "like a human tripod". More darkly, he was an associate of Charles Manson, sleeping with many of the women in Manson’s "family", and producing an infamous album of the charismatic killer’s songs.
All of these unlikely events are detailed in Kaufman’s 1993 autobiography, Road Mangler Deluxe, which is, without doubt, the best book ever dictated by a rock’n’roll tour manager. But, remarkable as all of the above may be, Kaufman’s notoriety has been sealed by a single incident. In September 1973, fuelled by vodka and regret, he borrowed a hearse and kidnapped the corpse of his dead friend, the country rock singer Gram Parsons, from the airport in Los Angeles, drove it to Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert, and burned it. This unlikely event has long been a fond chapter of rock mythology, and was made into a half-entertaining film, Grand Theft Parsons, with the star of Jackass as Kaufman. "If you expect to see Johnny Knoxville stapling his foreskin to my forehead," Kaufman warns, "that’s not going to happen."
Kaufman’s entry into rock legend was an accident in a chain of accidents. He was unemployed, and apparently unemployable, when a friend told him the Rolling Stones were coming to LA to mix Beggars Banquet. Kaufman, a self-confessed "jazz-bigot", hardly knew who the Stones were, but borrowed money to buy a shirt and a new pair of tennis shoes, and caught the bus to the studio.
"So I started cooking - I’m a pretty good cook - and I started taking care of them. Marianne Faithfull was in bad shape. I got her some Percodans and a masseuse.
"Let me tell you something: I saw Marianne Faithfull naked. The most beautiful woman ever. Even if Venus de Milo had arms, she’d still come in second place to Marianne Faithfull. Oh, what a beautiful woman. I just happened to walk in when the masseuse was masseusing."
At the end of his first day, Kaufman drove Jagger and Faithfull back to their house in a 1969 Cadillac convertible. Jagger gave him the car and $1,500 from his pocket. "I drove back that night, to my old place at Silverlake, and my girlfriend came running out. She said: ‘You crazy sumbitch, you goin’ back to prison. You stole that car.’ I said: ‘No no, look. I got cash, they gave me the car. It’s called rock’n’roll and I’m going to be in it a long time!"
Kaufman had never been to a recording studio, and his unfamiliarity with the etiquette of musicians may, ironically, have made him more suitable for the job. On his first day, he astounded the studio staff by delivering the band on time. He also brought fruit, a novelty in the diet of the Rolling Stones.
"In a recording situation there are hours and hours of smoke. So I was bringing bottled water, and in 1969 who had heard of that? Perrier was the only one. I made sure there were lots of healthy things in there, fruit instead of Twinkies and Ding Dongs. How can you put something in your mouth called a Ding Dong? It sounds like a porno candy bar. I brought salads. I brought a different kind of coffee, just to keep them going, and they liked that.
"Later on, someone asked Mick Jagger: ‘Who’s that guy that’s always bringing the car, and sorting things out?’ Mick said: ‘He’s my executive nanny.’" Ever since, Kaufman’s business card has sported the job title: "Road Mangler Deluxe - Executive Nanny Service".
Kaufman’s impression of the Stones was that though they were uninhibited in their hedonism, they were always businesslike. "Keith [Richards] might get out of control. He might be up till four in the morning, but at seven o’clock he’d be the first guy up and playing his guitar. Keith could eat nails and piss rust. He has the constitution of a cement mixer. What goes in will come out, and he will live."
Kaufman met Parsons through his friendship with Richards. "Keith and Gram had formed a bond. They’d been in the south of France together, they’d been playing together. The Rolling Stones were into blues. Gram told them that the white man’s blues was country music. It ain’t all honky. If you listen to the lyric it’s very soulful.
"We’d sit around, I’d play the records. He’d say, play this, play that. ‘Listen to this, this is Don Rich singing with Buck Owens, listen to him hit the high part.’ George Jones and Merle Haggard. And they would go, ‘Wow, this is like the white man’s blues. Really tellin’ a story.’"
When Kaufman’s parole conditions stopped him from travelling to nursemaid Brian Jones, Parsons asked him to be road manager for his band, the Flying Burrito Brothers. "That was the beginning and end of my life as I know it."
Subsequently, Kaufman worked for dozens of acts, from Joe Cocker and Etta James to Frank Zappa and Hank Williams III. He has a fond association with Emmylou Harris, which dates from his time with Parsons. Both are unflinching in their attention to the singer’s reputation.
Kaufman is pleased that the film is at the centre of a revival of interest in Parsons’ "cosmic American music". But his hostility to Gram’s widow, Gretchen, remains undimmed.
"When I called her to tell her Gram was dead, the first thing she said was ‘where’s his cheque book?’
"When Gram died, he was deaf in one ear, because she had hit him with a wooden coat hanger and he had left her because of the abusiveness. The marriage was over. She leads you to believe that if it wasn’t for me they would be back together. Bullshit. He left her. I didn’t come and take him. He needed a place to stay and he came to my guest house. My girlfriend and I looked after him, and kept him healthy. Guys would bring drugs and I would stop them in the driveway. I was trying to clean him up. And I should have gone to Joshua Tree with him. He said ‘Oh, I’ll be all right.’ Then I got the call the next morning, early, that he was gone, and it was too late to be there, and it was time for me to start honouring our deal."
The deal was a drunken pact, made two months earlier at the funeral of Clarence White of the Byrds, that if either Kaufman or Parsons died, the survivor would burn the body of his friend at Joshua Tree.
"I said OK, I’m going to jail, but a deal’s a deal."
Ultimately, Kaufman didn’t go to jail, because the only crime that could be pinned on him was the theft of the casket, as the body had no intrinsic value.
Kaufman is happy with the portrayal of the incident in the movie, particularly as the more absurd aspects of the story really happened. "We actually did get a cop to help us move the body. We actually did hit the hangar door while driving the hearse."
At this point in the conversation, Kaufman gets a little teary, so I ask him about Charles Manson.
He snaps back. "No. This is about Gram Parsons. I don’t want to taint him with that."
Quickly, though, his good humour is restored.
"Do you know that Jimi Hendrix sat in with the Flying Burrito Brothers, at the teen fair in Hollywood? Janis Joplin came and fainted on top of Gram Parsons in New York. I had to pull her off so we could go on stage. I kicked Jim Morrison out of a limo, physically. He was bein’ obnoxious. He was drunk."
He reaches into his bag and pulls out a frayed denim jacket, with embroidery on the back. It has the embroidered design from the Byrds album Sweetheart of the Rodeo, with "Sin City" above it.
"That’s the jacket I wore when I stole Gram."
A few years ago, Kaufman contracted prostate cancer. As a road manager, he had no insurance, and no income if he wasn’t on the road, so a number of artists held a "Concert for Manglerdesh" to bail him out. His health is now restored. "The doctor said I am now a perfect asshole. He said it didn’t take much examination to come to that conclusion."

Kaufman has tried retirement, diving for gold off the coast of Florida, but has now settled back in Nashville on the fringes of the music business. He is cheerfully dismissive of what has happened to the industry. "When I started off I was a road manager. When I retired I was a tour manager. A tour manager has e-mail, a laptop, a walkie-talkie, cellphones, an iPad. A road manager has a roll of quarters and a yellow pad and a pencil. ‘Stop the bus, I want to use the phone.’ Now there’s an industry you don’t want to invest in: payphones."
The road may be over, but Phil Kaufman still drives a car with the phonetically-rude number plate PH KAUF. He has no plans to die, and - despite his part in the Gram Parsons debacle - has no fancy instructions for his own funeral. "Put me in the blender. Into the incinerator and off I go."

Reign Over Me: Adam Sandler In A Bob Dylan Wig, Waving Not Clowning

In Reign Over Me, Adam Sandler is incapable of acting in a normal adult manner. As casting decisions go, this may not seem surprising. Sandler, a graduate of the Saturday Night Live school of comic sophistication, has made a career of critic-proof comedies in which he plays a doofus, a goofball, a meathead or a dimwit. He is the schlub’s schlub.
Lately, though, Sandler has shown signs of versatility. In Punch Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson cast him as a dimestore retard with a collection of tinned puddings – so far, so Sandler – and then asked him to perform without clowning. He was pathetic, in a good way, which was progress.
Reign Over Me goes further, not least because Sandler is unrecognisable in it, performing from beneath Bob Dylan’s hair. In some circumstances this might seem comic, but it doesn’t here, because writer-director Mike Binder has paired him with Don Cheadle, an actor who transmits likeability without effort.
The two are an odd couple; college roommates who have drifted apart. Alan Johnson (Cheadle) has become a dentist, with a fine home, a wife, and children. Sandler’s character, Charlie Fineman (the name is a clue) has dropped below the radar. He has no job, no friends, and – apparently – no memory of his previous life. He lives entirely in the moment, pursuing the distractions of a male student. At home, he batters the drums in his own practice studio, or plays Shadow of the Colossus on a giant flatscreen television. He eats take-out food, and sidesteps loneliness by riding the empty streets of New York’s East Village on a Go-Ped scooter. When it all gets too much, he seeks cheap laughs at the all-night retrospective of Mel Brooks movies. He does no work, busying himself by endlessly remodelling the kitchen in which he never cooks. In everything he does, he loses himself.
Charlie is a clearly a distant cousin of Taxi Driver's anti-hero Travis Bickle, a character whose moral clarity and charming nihilism have come to haunt filmmakers of a certain age. In recent memory, both Christian Bale (Harsh Times) and Ed Norton (Death in the Valley) have channelled their inner De Niro without ever overcoming a sense of pastiche. Not surprisingly, in a film which patrols the nocturnal streetscapes of Manhattan with a sense of dread and doomed romance, Sandler is given his Travis moment, standing with a loaded gun in front of a diner painted like a yellow checker cab. The way that scene evolves says much about the changing neuroses of New York.
Reign Over Me is a post 9/11 movie, but Binder introduces the subject gently. To Alan, Charlie is “the one from dental school whose family was on the plane”, but he is also a reminder of a life without responsibility. Alan, as much as Charlie, is in need of rescue. He winces almost imperceptibly when his wife Janeane (Jada Pinkett Snith) enrols him for an evening class. His sense of inner stagnation is only slightly more evident when she encourages him to sit down and help her complete a jigsaw. Acute trauma may be absent from Alan’s life, but he is emotionally numb – a condition he signals by fashioning accidental meetings with his angelic psychotherapist friend Angela (Liv Tyler) in which he regales her with minor dissatisfactions, none of which is his real problem.
Reign Over Me would work without reference to the Twin Towers. Perhaps it should. At heart, it is a midlife crisis picture, and an exploration of the emotional inarticulacy of men, which is a bleak enough proposition to be going on with. There is an element of male fantasy, too. It is as convenient as it agreeable that the therapist is Liv Tyler, and that Alan’s peaceful progress as a dentist is almost derailed by the unwanted attentions of Donna (Saffron Burrows) a beautiful, unhinged female patient who wishes to repay his small efforts at cosmetic dentistry by performing oral sex. Binder seems to be aware that he is having his cake and being eaten by it, and tries to atone by taking his guilt out on Charlie, who blames his incompetence as a therapy patient on the beauty of Angela’s breasts. This seems crass, but it is merely ironic: Charlie is being honest at a time when politeness should dictate otherwise.
The film is at its best when exploring the dumbness of men. The broader theme, of a society racked by post-traumatic stress, is less convincing, particularly in a story which puts so much store in therapy and the need to address problems by articulating them. In the end, it turns into a courtroom drama, with Donald Sutherland playing Solomon when asked to decide on Charlie’s fate.
Audience sympathies are with Charlie throughout, but the director can’t resist underscoring the emotions with a plangent electric piano. And Sandler, finally prised from his cocoon, hits a few wrong notes when trying to convey deep emotion to the parents of his dead wife. His hurt has a comic tone, and the film’s bleak outlook is sugared by bathos.
It’s an open question whether Charlie is better off at the end; his brand of denial has its attractions, not least to the Alans of the world, weighed down by the predictable comforts of success. Who wouldn’t rather be Charlie, watching Rita Hayworth and Fred Astaire dance over the widescreen, thinking of nothing?

From Selling Soap To Number One: The Quiet Triumph Of Kate Walsh

In the basement of the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, Kate Walsh can finally take stock of a remarkable month. Today, her album Tim’s House is at number three in the iTunes chart, behind the Kings of Leon and Timbaland, but above Amy Winehouse and Take That. She has been at number one, and her music is now attracting worldwide attention. Tim’s House, the album she recorded in the Brighton home of her producer Tim Bidwell, using velvet curtains from Debenhams as sound insulation, sits just outside the iTunes Top 40 in the USA, and the Top 10 in Canada.
There is nothing predictable about this success. Walsh’s music is unassuming and poetic. To call it lo-fi is slightly misleading, but most of the work is done by her voice; a breathy, bird-like instrument, which sounds conversational, but is actually a model of controlled emotion. When she accompanies herself on guitar, most of the noise is made by the chords she doesn’t play. She sings about heartache, mostly. And, having come this far this quickly, all the signs are that her success will multiply.
It’s fair to say that Walsh hasn’t let all of this go to her head. Though messages of support clog her Myspace inbox, she can still walk the streets unmolested. As a small concession to her sudden popularity, she has handed in her notice from her job “selling posh soap to posh ladies” at Crabtree and Evelyn in Brighton. Today, her manager Jonathan sits at the next table, fielding calls from record companies, anxious to explain how they can take her career to the next level. But Walsh, chastened by a bad experience with the Newcastle label Kitchenware, is in no rush. “It would be silly to jump into anything. We know that people like it regardless of who’s backing it, so we’ll just keep doing it ourselves if we have to. We’ve got the choice. We can do that.”
The speed of Walsh’s arrival would have been scarcely imaginable until recently, and is a further sign of how the internet is revolutionising the music business. A year ago – in circumstances that have been the subject of some dispute - Sandi Thom won a record deal and a worldwide hit by broadcasting a series of concerts from her Tooting basement. Thom’s popularity on the Net may have been exaggerated in order to attract record company interest, but Walsh’s story seems simpler. Her distributor did a deal with iTunes to release the music, and iTunes offered her song Talk of the Town as a free download, thus creating interest in the album, which is available at half-price. “It was an experiment they wanted to try, and it works. Obviously, this must show the labels and the marketing people that instead of raising your price and selling less albums, reduce it and get more people listening to the music.
“It makes sense. People just bought the record. There’s no marketing, no hype. It’s lovely for me because I know that people love the record just because it’s there. They’re not being told it’s good.”
Walsh grew up in a music-loving household in Burnham-on-Crouch on the Essex coast. “I never had to be told to do my piano. I always loved it.” Her two older brothers listened to Orbital, the Utah Saints, and psychedelic 1960s music, and her father like prog rock, and tuned the radio to Classic FM. Her mother played piano, and had a fondness for Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention. “She’s great. About a month ago she came down to Brighton because she was going to go on a shamanic drumming weekend. She’s not a shaman, and she doesn’t drum, but she just thought she’d give it a go.”
Walsh’s memories of Burnham are reflected in the lyrics of Talk of the Town. “It’s like any small town. It’s not that I dislike the place, I just didn’t fit in, and I couldn’t hide the fact that I was frustrated being there.”
I ask her to describe it, and she pulls a face. “There’s a Co-op and a petrol station on the outside of the town. There’s no Dixons or Boots. But it’s very pretty. There’s a couple of bric-a-brac stores. Quite good ones, actually. You can get some nice vases.”
A shy adolescent, she recalls sitting alone in the fields with her black eyeliner on, smoking roll-ups and writing poetry, while listening to Radiohead’s The Bends. She says she “went off the rails” as a teenager and, lacking the discipline to do well at grammar school, elected to go to the local comprehensive, where her grades continued to deteriorate. She got into trouble – “just small town jollies” – and decided to sort herself out by going to boarding school in Bishop’s Stortford.
“You’re locked up you can’t go out, and every night there’s an hour and a half of supervised prep. So you do all your work. My grades were amazing when I left, and I was a more confident person. And I cherished my family. It just changed me. It really started to make me who I was.
“I had no reason to go off the rails. My family are lovely. I grew up in this really pretty town. Maybe it was just my frustration at not having an outlet, or not being with likeminded people. I just rebelled, and it’s always the ones closest to you that you hurt the most.”
Walsh is 24 now, but had her fingers burned by the music business when she 18. A classically-trained pianist, she had deferred her entry to the London College of Music and Media to work on her songs, when a producer called her and asked “what do you want to do with the rest of your life?” She recorded her first album, Clocktower Park in 2001, and spent a fruitless year living in Newcastle, but the album wasn’t released until 2003. She now considers it to be soulless and undeveloped. “I was still learning to be a singer-songwriter. I’m still finding my sound now. Back then I was 18, and it got taken out of my hands. I didn’t trust my own judgement. The production is so polished, and it’s not like anything I listen to.”
She started playing the piano when she was five, and had lessons until she was 16, when her teacher, Sue Hazelton died of cancer. Tim’s House is dedicated to her. “We were very close. She even ended up living next door to me at the end of her life. My piano at home was so out of tune, and she used to listen through the walls to me playing it. I used to go round and show her my poetry when I was 13. She was wonderful. She always said that I reminded her of her when she was my age.”
Walsh says she wasn’t dedicated enough to be a classical pianist. “Classical musicians are playing like a job all day every day. And when you’re 15 you don’t want to be playing piano all day.” Still, hints of her training can be detected in her music. The melodies come from her love of Debussy, she says, and she considers his First Arabesque to be her signature tune. “It takes you somewhere else.”
She imagined she would work on film scores, or songs for other singers, never dreaming that she could use her own voice. “For me, being a singer on stage, was like jumping out of an aeroplane; it was never going to happen. I’d never do public speaking. I’d never jump out of a plane, I’d never bungee jump and I’d never sing on stage. But now I love it.”
On stage, amid the sofas and the lampshades of the Electroacoustic Club, in the basement of the Slaughtered Lamb, Walsh certainly shows few signs of nerves. She closes her show with Your Song, a wispy ode to her “greatest love”, the man broke her heart two years ago.
The song is devastating in its simplicity. On the record, it is augmented by strings. Live, there is just Walsh and her slightly out-of-tune guitar. Tonight, in the silence before the final chorus, someone drops a glass, which smashes loudly. In that moment, as she prepares to share her heartbreak, Kate Walsh can’t help laughing.

Here It Is, Sex. Here It Is, Drink. Here It Is, Gambling: The Singular Vision of Photographer Albert Watson

In Albert Watson's portofolio, the least artistic shot was the most stressful. It was, says the Edinburgh-born, New York-based photographer in his Connery Bond accent, a nightmare. "Before the shooting my beard was quite red. After the shooting, my beard was white."
In a career defined by versatility - "I shot cars, I shot portraits, I shot fashion. I did hospital appliance catalogues" - there is just one wedding, the union of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. The problems were various and mostly to do with protocol. But there was a surreal quality to the job. During a rehearsal, with chambermaids standing in for the royals, Watson was up a ladder when he heard a regal voice saying: "Which one’s me?"
"The last place you want to be when you first meet the Queen is up an 18ft ladder," he says. At the end of the session, Her Majesty disappeared. "I rushed over just as my assistant was helping the Queen up the ladder. I said ‘Ma’am - where are you going?’ She said: ‘I just wanted a quick look.’ Nothing in my life approached the absurdity of that moment."
For much of his career, Watson’s pre- eminence went unnoticed. A commercial photographer, he exists on the cover of magazines (Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, 280 Vogue covers). His advertising work includes the Elizabeth Hurley campaign for Estée Lauder. He did the movie posters for Cold Mountain, The Hours, and Kill Bill. He has made 600 TV commercials.
All of it is fine work, but in the minds of the public, authorless. Watson’s breakthrough towards broader recognition came with the publication of his monograph, Cyclops, in 1994. It was possible to observe the unity in Watson’s pictures: from the thick neck of Tyson to the gold thimble of Tutankhamen, it was a worldview concerned with iconography, whether ancient, or conferred by the new religion of celebrity. But, he says, it's all portraiture.
"You can do a portrait of a fashion shot, you can do a portrait of Clint Eastwood and you can do a portrait of an object. You can do a portrait of a landscape. You can do a portrait of Tutankhamen’s socks."
The beginnings of Watson’s accidental career are well-documented. Born in 1942, he was educated at the Steiner school in Edinburgh and later at Lasswade High. At 18, he and his wife Elizabeth (who now runs his business) moved to London. Watson worked as a scientific assistant at the air ministry before returning to Edinburgh to work at Duncan’s chocolate factory. He studied graphic design in Dundee, then enrolled in the film school at the Royal College of Art. When Elizabeth gave him a camera for his 22nd birthday, he became "an overnight fanatic".
At the RCA, to make money, he photographed shop fronts. In 1969, Elizabeth won an exchange scholarship. The couple relocated to Los Angeles. He called the one person he knew, who called the one person they knew: the creative director at Max Factor. Watson blagged a model, spent all the money he had and shot 110 rolls of film. Max Factor bought five pictures at $1,500 a shot. "My wife’s annual salary was $2,200."
He was a success. He had a house in the Hollywood Hills, but found himself drifting. "I wore Gucci shoes. I thought about surfing. I thought about jogging. I knew it was time to get out of Los Angeles."
He opened a studio in New York and built the business. In 1984 he acquired a 26,000 sq ft studio in the West Village and spent three and a half years remodelling it. He now runs three companies, with an advertising agency alongside his film and photography firms.
Over the years he has photographed almost everybody who aspires to be anybody. The Clintons, he recalls, were charismatic. Bill had seen Cyclops: "He said: ‘Just make me look like Clint Eastwood.’"
Clint was less of a pushover. "A lot of actors have a problem with having their picture taken. They’re more comfortable when they are in character. It gets even worse when you photograph them as who they are. You have Clint Eastwood arriving and he’s wearing a peach tracksuit top, a golfing shirt, and you go, ‘Can you change your shirt?’ and he says, ‘Well, this is really me.’ Then you have to explain, ‘Yeah, but the photograph’s not for your piano. I’m shooting this for a magazine. A magazine’s part of the media and it’s part of the imagising process, so we need to change your shirt. That discussion took 25 minutes."
This explanation suggests that Watson’s work plays on the heroic side of celebrity.
"I didn’t feel like doing a heroic shot of Al Pacino when I shot him, but somehow with Clint Eastwood you did, because you have an image of him. Also, I’ve shot him different ways. But you certainly want to get one shot of him as a Mount Rushmore, because he’s got that kind of face that’s iconographic and monumental. Al Pacino’s a much better actor, but for some reason you wanted him with eye contact, you wanted him to be feeling the camera."
Watson photographed Michael Jackson for his last album sleeve. The set-up involved the performer dancing between 12 mirrors for 90 minutes. "It was remarkable to see him do that: so professionally and so fluid."
Jackson, says Watson, was "one of the oddest characters I’ve photographed, but he treated me with gigantic respect. He seemed to be a wonderful human being."
The approach is roughly the same, whether Watson is photographing a box of matches or a human face. He observes the object, considers its function, tries to analyse what it could do. To illustrate this he rearranged the objects on the coffee table in front of him. "You set fire to it if it’s matches. If it’s a bowl, you try and make it stand up. When you do a portrait you’re always analysing things the same way."
He runs through the checklist: what chair are they sitting on? What’s the background?
The poster for Kill Bill - Uma Thurman with big sword - was dictated by the subject.
"In the film she’s with a sword the whole time, so we shot it with a sword. You then have to figure out, how am I going to shoot this person? You know the problems with the lighting on the face, what way the face looks better, also you know the angle and the correct lens for the body.
"But everybody’s geography is different. Everybody’s a different country.
"You always do your best, but there is some preparation. If you’re setting off on your holidays in your car, you want to make sure you’ve got gas."
There was, he confesses, only one complete failure. The first time he photographed Nicole Kidman, to publicise the aquatic thriller Dead Calm, he decided to spray her with water. The shoot was scheduled to last three hours. Make-up took two hours and 15 minutes.
"I spritzed the make-up. I put her in front of the camera without really looking at her face. I had her in a very good light and I looked into the camera. As I looked, I thought, ‘Oh, she simply looks awful.’ And this is a Nicole Kidman that would be 14 years younger than she is now. I thought: it can’t be as bad as it looks. It can’t be, because the light’s perfect. It’s one of these lights that makes everybody look good and she just looked terrible.
"She’s beautiful, but I realised some of the shortcomings in the face. She doesn’t have a great mouth, Nicole Kidman. She doesn’t have a mouth like Angelina Jolie. And the eyes are not that big. And somehow, with the make-up, the eyes were black. She looked horrendous. And when I peeled the Polaroid, it actually looked worse. So at that point we have a PR person saying she only has 15 minutes. And the art director - who went on to be a very famous art director - Fabien Baron, came into the room. He didn’t say it, but you could tell he was thinking: ‘My god, that looks awful.’ He said: ‘Let’s do the pictures nude’, and he turned and Nicole said: ‘Nude? What do you mean, nude?’"
Kidman was gone. The pictures were never sent to Interview magazine.
"There’s a famous photographer in New York called Hiro. He was very, very good, and very famous. I met him in 1971 when he was at his height and he said to me: ‘If you don’t like the picture, don’t shoot it. Because they can call you a shitty guy, but they can’t call you a shitty photographer.’
"It’s a good word of advice. It’s a bit simplistic. Sometimes it’s not like that. When you’re in the Sahara shooting a job for Sony you can’t say: ‘Sorry, I don’t like that, call me in New York.’ But I know what he meant. He meant: be true to yourself."
Watson’s proposed next book, Shot in Vegas, was designed as a contrast to the classical elegance of his last title, Maroc, which celebrated his second home, Morocco. He says he wanted to do "something that was completely decadent, almost pop arty, neon-y, coloury, exaggerated". The Vegas pictures are full of glorious artifice: fuzzy neon sunsets, the yellow light of a motel car park, the sign in the desert boasting: "In God We Trust".
"You go to Vegas and there’s no disappointment. It is Vegas. Lots of places you go to, they’re not quite what you think they are. Monte Carlo wasn’t what I thought it was. It was tacky, whereas I had an image of it being very chi-chi. And maybe it was, 70 years ago.
"Vegas presents everything. It’s very open. It says: here it is, sex. Here it is, drink. Here it is, gambling. Everything’s open, at you. But sometimes it’s surprising. I’ve eaten some very good meals in Vegas."
You might, if you surfed the iconography and the boastful beauty of Watson’s portfolio, begin to detect a sea-spray of irony. To do so would be a mistake. "I shoot what’s there and you accept it as it is. I don’t make any point about it."
And his style? "You gotta dig deep to find that there is a style there. To me most of the stuff I shoot looks pretty definite. My pictures are not wishy-washy."
[First published in The Scotsman, 2004]

Julie Burchill: The Pick'n'Mix Dorothy Parker, At Home In Brighton, Drinking Vodka Martini

Julie Burchill does not look like a woman in need of protection. She is as blowsy and pneumatic as the heroine of a Donald McGill postcard. But today, she is chaperoned by Mary, her PR. This is not to police the conversation, but to make sure that the interview does not go too well.
Here is what Julie recalls of her last meeting with a journalist. “One minute I was sipping a Diet Coke and telling her about my faith, next minute it was cocaine crosses and vomiting in the street. And I just thought: ‘Where did the time go?’ You know what it was? It was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch.”
It is 11am, in the Hotel Du Vin, a dark space just off the Brighton seafront. It is too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, so Mary is sent to order a vodka martini while Julie drags herself up the stairs to the bar balcony, apologising for the fact that she has recently developed gout: “The rich man’s disease - comes from good living!”
She is in fine fettle, cheerfully admitting that Made In Brighton, the book she is supposed to be publicising, doesn’t do what it says on the tin. The jacket promises ‘a cold, hard look at the changing face of Britain ’, but Burchill had other ideas. She and her husband and co-author, Daniel Raven (brother of previous lover Charlotte) imagined a glorified diary, only to discover that the publisher was expecting something to rival Jeremy Paxman’s The English. They shared the writing, with most of the work going into Dan’s chapters. Burchill’s contributions are remoulds of her old newspaper columns, but still, they offer a reminder of what a great phrase-maker she is, dispensing contrariness like a Pick’n’Mix Dorothy Parker.
In person, she is a jukebox of funny stories and unreasonable opinions, whether it is her boast that she invented the phrase “People’s Princess” for Diana, or her joke that Peter Mandelson is the living proof that politics is showbusiness for ugly people.
“When I see Dale Winton on TV, I do say you’ve got Peter Mandelson’s life, give it back.”
She no longer has an outlet for this stuff. Her column in the Times was dropped, with reassurances that she would still write for the paper, but she says she was sacked. “I was bumped off, but I was so full of myself that it took me six months to notice.”
On the page, Burchill’s words seem angry (“crossness, I’d call it”). In person, she is funnier, and while her soft West Country accent prompts comparisons with Minnie Mouse, she is more like a blend of those other self-curated characters, Russell Brand and Tracey Emin. She has Brand’s peculiarly Victorian diction, and Emin’s emotional honesty.
Of course, in terms of emotional wreckage and chemical abuse, she was living the life before either of them. There is scarcely a taboo she hasn’t broken, but in walking out of two marriages (to writers Tony Parsons and Cosmo Landesman), leaving her first son Bobby with Parsons, and losing custody of Jack to Landesman because (she thinks) she had temporarily become a lesbian, she rewrote the rulebook of public propriety.
But that was then. The news from Planet Burchill is that her retirement from the front-line of journalism has been followed by self-discovery. Just as her body has begun to fail, she has discovered God. Having been “saved” by the Chaplain of Sussex University, Gavin Ashenden, she is planning to study theology. “I’m a protestant who wants to find out more.”
She has also taken to voluntary work, spending Tuesdays and Thursdays at a centre for the mentally handicapped. She looks at Mary, as if for permission: “I’ve got to tell this story. It’s so sad and beautiful and reflects the paradox of what I’m living through.”
The story is that she enjoyed the company of the other ladies at the centre so much that she invited them out for the night, starting the evening at her club, the Hanbury.
It was games night. “We played Jenga, Twister, all those games. It was going beautifully. Then we went for cocktails, and all the girls were going: ‘Oh, Julie, we read all these things about you, but you’re such a nice person.’ I got ’em back to mine and I offered them a line of coke. They ran. I’ve never seen people move so fast. I looked round my empty room and I thought, ‘Damn, I did it wrong again’. I really wanted to be accepted by the volunteer community, and I fucked it up because of my own stupid hedonism.
“I was just trying to give five nice ladies a good time. At the end of the day I can’t see it as being bad. But it is a struggle, as Johnny Cash would say, between the devil and that other thing.”
All this talk of drugs is surprising, and I wonder whether Burchill is playing up to her image. “Everything’s relative,” she says. “I’m not like I used to be. Can’t be. Not with my foot. I live the life of a nun.”
Which nun, I wonder?
She laughs uncontrollably. “Sorry. My nose is running. No, I can’t be like I used to be. It’s only a bit of my life. You should see me limping round the centre. That’s when I have saintly feelings. A terrible thing’s happened, Alastair. I’ve got a satisfaction from working there that I’ve never got from journalism.”
She says the women forgave her cocaine gaffe – a Christian reaction. “Turn the other cheek. Or the other nostril.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise to find the former doyenne of the Groucho Club embracing God and voluntary work. Her rants have always been peppered by humanitarian concern, even if it was sometimes clouded by her iconoclastic tendencies. Her father brought her up a communist, and she supported Stalin long after it was fashionable, or even plausibly arch. She was surprised, then, when he chided her for this on his deathbed. “I said to him, ‘Don’t worry dad, I’ll keep the word alive about Stalin.’ And he said, ‘What terrible rubbish have you been spreading about that evil man?’ He told me off on his own deathbed. That was really sad, but I realised then that if he felt that strongly we’d been wrong all that time. Best gloss over it is what I say!”
She has also found that she is turning into her mother, “with my gout and my provincial instincts. I used to laugh at my mother. But she was fantastic. It was like somebody had made Mariah Carey be a cleaner. She was temperamental, but she was a great broad.”
Burchill’s politics now are a kind of populist British nationalism, inspired by her friend, the writer Michael Collins, who wrote The Likes of Us, about the marginalisation of the white working class. “I voted for Mr Blair last time because of the war. Anything else, no. Blair and his wife, they’re a pair of tossers.”
So who does she like? “I like Gordon Brown. I like Scots men.” But her interest in Brown is not political, it turns out. Nor is it chaste. “I used to have these terrible dreams about him. My husband used to say: you had a nightmare last night. I’d go, ‘what really?’ He’d say, ‘Yes, you sounded like you were being killed.’ Yeah, I was!”
Perhaps, I suggest, she has transferred her affections from Stalin to the Chancellor.
If it’s not his politics, what is the attraction?
“Everything about him. You name it. His glass eye. He’s got it all going on. Hanging on that box – Jesus! Everything about him. But as I say, I don’t think that way anymore. I generally don’t think those kind of thoughts since becoming a Christian.”
She struggles to have a view about David Cameron. “You’d really have to sit and fume in a hot bath drinking gin to get an opinion on him. Basically I don’t want a toff in charge of the country.”
Her communism may have lapsed, but her veins still run red with class consciousness, as becomes clear when the talk turns to Jamie Oliver. He was an old pin-up of hers, but is now a figure of scorn. “He implies that if working class children were not fed Turkey Twizzlers, instantly all the jobs and riches of society would be laid at their feet, whereas it’s about who your parents are, where you went to school, and all that shit. He’s just a lying pig. His children, no matter how dumb they are, will always do well, and bright working class kids will always do badly. That’s the truth of it.
“The class bias in this country is responsible for more deaths than any amount of drinking or drugs. Not being allowed to realise their potential kills people.”
Burchill has joked that she moved from London to the South Coast to retire. In fact, she went there in pursuit of Dan, who she married in 2004. They live in separate houses, but communicate by walkie-talkie. “It’s like Doctor Who! With my gouty foot sometimes I can’t leave the house, so it’s lovely to have a young person looking after you.”
And though she boasts of her laziness, she isn’t entirely idle. Sweet, the sequel to the Emmy-winning lesbian teen story Sugar Rush, is due in October. A musical about Diana is on hold, though she has written the songs. She is doing another book, about hypocrisy. And she is writing a script for the BBC, about the Greenham Common peace women, who she used to support, but now finds “scummy”.
With a powerful sense of her own myth, Burchill has compared herself to Brighton ’s ruined West Pier. But for all her talk of retirement and physical frailty, she is still only 47. I ask whether she sometimes wonders whether she could have achieved more. Her answer is blunt. “Couldn’t be arsed. To be a great writer I think you’ve got to have some sort of agony inside you, and the only agony I’ve got is from me poor feet. And gout’s not going to make me write a good novel.
“Maybe I’ve been too smug to do anything great, but I wouldn’t swap my life and my low level of achievement, if that’s what it is, for a life lived in misery and self-contemplation. I’d end up lonely with a great novel. I’d rather be a game old bird on a spree.”
Another vodka martini is ordered, and Burchill takes off her shoe to rest her swollen foot. She shows me the slogans on her make-up mirrors. One says, says “I am evil” the other “I’m bored, please send drugs”.
“I think I was a godless young person in every way one could be godless,” she says, laughing. It’s a perfect Burchill statement, hovering somewhere between sincerity and self-mockery. I suggest that she still is godless, mostly.
“I don’t think I am, actually,” she says, before launching into a final litany of contradiction. “I’ve become a saint. People know what I’m like. I never pretended to be Mary Poppins.”

Made in Brighton, Virgin Books, £14.99