The other day I found myself watching Central Intelligence, a 2016 goofball action romp starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as a unicorn-loving super-spy who saves the world by teaming up—for reasons which are still not altogether clear to me—with his old schoolmate, an accountant played by Kevin Hart. Look, I know it’s not going to win any Oscars but I was on a plane at the time. Nobody wants to strap in to 12 Years A Slave at 35,000 feet. Anyway, there’s a scene where the pair jump out of a skyscraper together through a plate glass window in a hail of bullets. I’m sure you know the type, whether or not you’ve had the pleasure of Central Intelligence. As the glass shatters and they burst into the air, the voice you hear isn’t The Rock’s or Kevin Hart’s, but the sheer, uncut exhilaration of Damon Albarn screaming: “WOOOO-HOOOOO!” It’s a dumb moment in a dumb film, but hearing “Song 2” in a Hollywood blockbuster almost exactly 20 years after it first came out was a weird and timely reminder of what a transformative impact that song, and the self-titled album it appears on, had on Blur’s relationship with America and their whole career.
All posts by Kevin EG Perry
Vampires, magic and Bob Marley: Calling Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
If the history of reggae was the Old Testament, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry would be God. He was there, making it happen. In 1968 he released ‘People Funny Boy’, one of the first ever reggae tunes. Two years later he was approached by Bob Marley to produce the second and third Wailers albums. From that moment, musicians from Perry’s house band The Upsetters, named after his song ‘I Am The Upsetter’, became part of the definitive line-up of Marley’s band.
Perry himself went on to record with everyone from The Clash to Paul McCartney, and he was more than just a producer. He was a guide and a friend in times of need. In 1980, when Macca was arrested in Japan for possession of 7.7 ounces of cannabis, Perry sent a letter to Tokyo’s Minister of Justice, pointing out “the Herbal powers of marijuana in its widely recognized abilities to relax, calm and generate positive feeling”. Perry made it clear he was writing in his personal capacity as a “creator of nature’s LOVE, light, life and all things under the creation sun, positive feelings through songs, good times and no problems.” McCartney was later released.
On March 5, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is coming to London’s Village Underground to play a dub reggae DJ set. I called him up at his home in Jamaica to find out how preparations were going, and received the following transmission from the mountain top:
Hi Lee. What should we expect when you play in London in March?
“Say to people in London that God is coming. God is coming. God is coming to save all the people that love God. If you love God, share in that. We will conquer. Conquer the Roman Empire. Conquer politicians. Conquer kings and conquer queens. Conquer princes and conquer princesses. Rastafari!”
I will tell the people of London. Do you have good memories from when you’ve come here before?
“I conquered. I conquered the markets. I conquered bread markets. I conquered chicken markets. I conquered blood-suckers and I conquered vampires. In the name of Jah and the golden lion. Jamaica! Are you ready?”
I’m ready.
“By the God of thunder. By the God of lightning. By the God of Christ. God will conquer. In the name of Marcus Garvey. I am in Jamaica now. Jamaica is the country of magic. Jamaica is the country of science. It’s the confluence of magic. Give that magic to American rappers. Give that magic to Aleister Crowley. [Singing:] ‘Follow me, I’m the pied piper.’”
You’ve had a long career – 60 years – but who’s the most talented musician you ever worked with?
“A bass player named Boris Gardiner. A drummer named Mikey. A guitarist named Chinna. A guitarist named Ernest Ranglin. A piano player named Winston, Winston is dead now. They played in my band The Upsetters, after the others went to play with Bob Marley.”
Your London show will be a couple of weeks before your 81st birthday. How do you plan to celebrate?
“Smoke it up.”
Inside the Criminal Trend of Stealing Laughing Gas from Hospitals
You can get a lot of things for free on the NHS, but a five foot cylinder of nitrous oxide isn’t supposed to be one them. Mind you, that hasn’t stopped plenty of people figuring out that stealing NOS cylinders from hospitals in order to sell the gas in balloons at parties, festivals and raves can be a highly lucrative venture. With punters happy to spend £2 to £5 on each balloon, even a smaller 3ft cylinder can be converted into about £700 of pure profit.
Great Escape: Arizona
1. Phoenix and Scottsdale
Discover why Frank Lloyd Wright found inspiration in these twin cities – and see the architect’s influence writ large
At dusk, downtown Scottsdale’s Valley Ho Hotel looks like the sort of place Don Draper would come to get away from it all. As the sun sets, guests sip cocktails by the patio fire pit, reclining on loungers that mix retro and modern design as if they were drawn for The Jetsons, then magicked into reality.
Yet this is no ersatz recreation of ’50s cool – it’s the real thing. Opened in 1956, the Valley Ho was a magnet for the likes of Bing Crosby, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. In 1957 it hosted the wedding reception of Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood, and it’s said that Zsa Zsa Gabor and her daughter Francesca rode horses around the hotel. Presumably not while the wedding was still going on.
‘We were a resort community back then, so Hollywood stars came here, because the paparazzi wouldn’t follow them,’ explains Ace Bailey, who runs an art and architecture tour in Scottsdale. ‘They could come here for “recreation” and maintain their anonymity.’
That much hasn’t changed. ‘To this day, the hotel will not release its current guest list to anybody except hotel staff, so it’s very discreet,’ adds Bailey, before reeling off a list of contemporary Hollywood stars she’s spotted hanging around the lobby recently.
The Valley Ho is not alone. Scottsdale and Phoenix are dotted with superb examples of mid-century architecture and design, much of which displays the fingerprints of the man generally regarded as America’s greatest architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
Wright came to Phoenix in 1928 to work as a consultant on the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. A decade later, he returned to build Taliesin West, his winter home, school and studio 26 miles from Phoenix. The real genius of Wright’s design is his ability to ‘bring the outside in’. In the living room, the sunlight streaming through the glass walls and translucent roof makes the garden feel like just another part of one contiguous space.
In the drafting room where Wright created perhaps his best-known work, New York’s Guggenheim Museum, a group of young architects scratches away. They are students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture and just as in Wright’s day, they are encouraged to get their hands dirty. They have to build their own rudimentary abode in the nearby desert to ensure they truly understand the basics of designing shelter.
And the students are spoilt for inspiration. Phoenix Art Museum sprawls over 26,500 square metres, housing work from the Renaissance to today. In one hallway, adults and children alike lose themselves in their distorted reflections in the polished surface of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture Upside Down, Inside Out. Further on, they wander through American art history from an iconic portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart to modernist work by Georgia O’Keeffe.
Across town at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, visitors gaze at Knight Rise, an installation by the Californian artist James Turrell that frames the sky in a disorientating fashion. Upon leaving, they’re hit by a riot of colour from graffiti artist James Marshall, also known as Dalek.
Even public buildings, like the Scottsdale City Hall and Library, are prime examples of Southwestern architecture, influenced by the clay adobe dwellings once built by the native Hopi people. ‘It’s minimalist, without any froufrou,’ says Bailey. ‘We’ve got great neighbourhoods full of mid-century architecture, as well as structures that are true adobe compounds. It’s quite a mix.’
The blurring of past and present is still going on back at the Valley Ho, where the drinkers are determinedly stretching the cocktail hour into the night. They’ve moved indoors to sit beneath concrete block walls that show Frank Lloyd Wright’s undying influence. While they toast to the future, the music in the air is pure Rat Pack.
From central Scottsdale, follow the Arizona 101 Loop north for 35 minutes to reach the edge of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve.
2. McDowell Sonoran Preserve
Hit the dusty trail between majestic saguaro cactuses as you explore the archetypal desert of the American West
Like the wagon trains that once traversed this desert, the sun is heading west. As the light moves, the shape of the huge boulder known as Cathedral Rock seems also to warp and mutate as shadows pass across its face. In the foreground, giant saguaro cactuses stand proud and tall. Instantly familiar from their appearance in many hundreds of Westerns, they are also ancient markers. The saguaro grow an average of a foot per decade, so those towering 20 or 30 feet will have stood on that spot for around 250 years. They are the constant watchmen in the ever-changing landscape, yet adventure guide Phil Richards has a more immediate concern.
The ground is scattered with balls of jumping cholla, a cactus that looks so cuddly it has earned the nickname ‘teddy bear cactus’. Phil has just lightly placed one of these balls onto his arm to demonstrate their strength and he’s already struggling to prise it free from his flesh with a length of wood.
‘They may look soft, but if they get onto you they won’t let go,’ he explains, pointing out the strong barbs that cover the plants. They’re known as “jumping” because they latch on so hard even when brushed past that cyclists and hikers will swear they jumped out at them. Their real purpose is to hook themselves onto passing rodents and when the poor creatures try to burrow down, they’ll find themselves stuck to the cactus and inadvertently doing the job of planting it. Invariably, the animal is killed in the process. ‘This gives rise to their other name,’ says Phil darkly. ‘The “skeleton cactus”.’
For a desert, the Sonoran has a relatively lush terrain and is covered in plant life that blooms in spring. However, that doesn’t make it an easy place to survive. Phil takes issue with John Ford’s 1948 western 3 Godfathers, in which John Wayne finds himself stranded in this very desert. In need of water, he hacks the top off a barrelhead cactus and squeezes the pulp into his flask.
Sadly, this sort of thing only works in the movies. In truth, the moisture in a barrelhead is so filled with acids that it will most likely give you diarrhoea – not useful if you’re already dehydrated and stranded in a desert.
‘This is a unique desert,’ says Phil. ‘We’ve got about 3,500 varieties of plant out here, including a number of cactuses found nowhere else, and that’s because of the climate. We don’t get a hard freeze.’
The desert, ranging from Sonora in Mexico to the south of California, covers a swathe of Arizona. Here in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, there are 30,200 acres of protected land: nothing can be built and no motorised vehicles may travel its 146 miles of trails.
‘It’s very peaceful here,’ says Phil, whose transport of choice is the mountain bike. ‘The only things you hear are your gears shifting and your wheels on the gravel.’ His quiet progress provides many opportunities to spot desert wildlife – he points out Gila monsters (venomous lizards), tusked, pig-like javelinas and grazing mule deer.
He says that it’s the beauty of the land itself, though, that keeps him coming back day after day, whether he’s guiding a group or not. ‘You can never get enough of the desert,’ he says, ‘so the best way to get more is just to ride out to a different spot.’
With that, he’s off again, dashing along a sandy trail, but still mindful enough to keep clear of the jumping cholla.
Take Interstate 17 north until you reach Flagstaff, then US-180 onwards to Grand Canyon National Park. It’s about a four-hour drive.
3. The Grand Canyon
Bear witness to the USA’s greatest landscape of all, then clamber down into it
The Grand Canyon gives no warning. Approaching from the south through the great thickets of ponderosa pine that make up the Kaibab National Forest, there is no indication of the spectacle to come. Deer dance between the trees, seemingly oblivious to their proximity to the void. Only at the precipice does the canyon reveal itself, the earth simply dropping away to reveal one of nature’s most audacious wonders. It is a mile deep and 18 miles across at its widest point. Gazing out at this great chasm of red rock shifts your perspective in a skipped heartbeat. The scale of it humbles man’s greatest constructions: stack three Empire State Buildings on top of one another and you still wouldn’t reach the rim. One lookout stop says it all: The Abyss.
It is not just the size of the canyon that startles but the sweep of history it illustrates. It is six million years since the Colorado River first found this route to the Gulf of California, and began slicing down through the soft top layers of dirt and rock. On it went, patiently cutting through sandstone and limestone before it reached its current level more than 1,500 metres below the rim. It is still getting deeper, although at a slower rate now that it has reached the hard basement rock. The river is now 730 metres above sea level and scientists believe it will keep going down, millimetre by millimetre, year after year, until it reaches the level of the sea, where all rivers stop.
To better understand the canyon, it’s necessary to leave your perch on the brink and descend into it. Hikers Katie and Nic Hawbaker, from nearby Flagstaff, have done so several times. Today, they’re climbing the Bright Angel Trail, the Grand Canyon’s most popular, which descends 1,370 metres to the Colorado River. From there, it joins the River Trail leading to Phantom Ranch in the canyon base, where they camped last night.
‘It’s totally different at the bottom,’ says Katie. ‘It’s magical. We can’t imagine how long it took to carve out the canyon or where the river was initially. It’s just so deep.’
Another way to attempt to get to grips with the sheer scale of the place is to get over it. From a Maverick Helicopters’ chopper, it’s possible to see the Painted Desert and follow the Colorado River before diving through the Dragon Corridor, the widest and deepest part of the canyon. For peak impact, though, it’s hard to beat the early moment when you’re ambling along 15 metres above the treeline of the ponderosas, then suddenly you’re 1,500 metres over the rushing waters.
It’s all a far cry from 1893, when hotelier Pete Berry first opened a crude cabin at Grandview. Berry had come to the canyon in 1890 as a prospector and staked the Last Chance copper claim 915 metres below. The ore was rich, but the vast cost of transporting it to the rim doomed the whole operation.
Before long, President Theodore Roosevelt realised the canyon needed to be protected. He made it a national monument in 1908, having declared: ‘Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.’
Leave Grand Canyon National Park by the East Gate and continue along Arizona 64 until you reach Cameron. Then take US-89 north towards Page. Allow two hours in total.
4. Antelope Canyon & the Navajo Nation
Watch the sunlight paint pictures in Antelope Canyon, teeter on the edge of Horseshoe
Bend and get close to the land in a traditional Navajo hogan
It is a cool, still morning and Baya Diné is awake early to tend to her flock. As the curly horned Navajo-Churro sheep graze across the wide-open plains, her big white Maremma sheepdog Elvis keeps the stragglers in check. Baya knows every inch of this land as if it were a part of her, from the spectacular curve of Horseshoe Bend a few miles north to Antelope Canyon in the east.
Baya’s family has farmed here for 15 generations. Her ancestors lived in hogans, homes built with cedar and juniper logs, and packed with earth, which could be taken down and moved seasonally. Baya herself grew up in her grandmother’s hogan, a permanent wooden structure which still stands and was, improbably, built with pieces of the set left over from the making of the 1965 epic The Greatest Story Ever Told, after her grandfather appeared in the film as an extra. Baya’s grandmother, who had always lived in buildings made of earth, considered it a palace.
‘My grandmother lived here the way the Navajo had lived for many generations,’ Baya explains. ‘She herded her sheep through this land and then down the ridge all along to where the town of Page is now. This is a harsh environment and they were just trying to survive, foraging and living off the land. They were one with it, really. This was part of them and their way of life.’
Baya’s land is in the west of the Navajo Nation, which at 16 million acres is the largest Native American reservation in the US. Although her ancestors moved their homes to different spots regularly, they have left no trace beyond a few petroglyphs, arrowheads and shards of broken pottery.
‘You’d never know now where their homes were,’ says Baya. ‘These days there are buzzwords, like “sustainable” and “green-built”, but that was just a way of life for Native Americans. They reused and recycled way before it was the thing to do.’
On the land where Baya now stands, the ancient Navajo stories say there was an antelope birthing area. The animals also gave their name to the nearby Antelope Canyon, although the Navajo refer to the area as ‘Tsé Bighánílíní’, which translates as ‘the place where water runs through rocks’.
Entering the now-dry canyon on a Navajo-run tour, visitors are awed into hushed tones when they see how water has sliced a narrow crevasse through the sandstone. Inside the slot canyon there’s an otherworldly atmosphere, as the only light comes from sunbeams playing tricks upon the canyon walls as they fall 40 metres. Flash flooding is still a danger and tour guides with torches pause to point out where previous floods have lodged trees high between the canyon walls.
Photographers jostle each other for the best spots and angles – no surprise considering the world’s most expensive photograph was taken here. Landscape photographer Peter Lik sold Phantom, an image of dust in the canyon appearing to take the form of a ghost, for $6.5m in November 2014.
West of Antelope Canyon, on the other side of the small town of Page, sits Horseshoe Bend, where photographers have no such problem competing for a spot. The only danger here is getting too close to the 300-metre drop that overlooks the meandering path of the Colorado River as it travels west from Lake Powell to the start of the Grand Canyon itself. This is that same canyon on a more intimate scale and among the tourists taking selfies there are also joggers from Page who come simply to marvel at nature’s signature, carved deep into the earth. Standing on the precipice, it’s easy to understand what Baya means when she explains why the Navajo have stayed in this place for so long. ‘This land,’ she says, ‘has its own special power.’
Take US-89 south to Flagstaff and then switch to US-89A for the scenic drive through the valley to Sedona. The trip will take around three hours.
5. Sedona & the Verde Valley
Reap the harvest of Arizona’s growing wine scene and dine beneath majestic red rocks
It’s early on Sunday afternoon and winemaker Eric Glomski is welcoming guests to Page Springs Cellars. Some have come to enjoy the sunshine on a stroll through the vineyards, but most are here to while away the hours on the top deck of the cellar, uncorking bottles to taste the fruits of the fields that stretch out below.
Eric is something of a viticultural celebrity in these parts. He used to run the Arizona Stronghold winery with an actual rock star, Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan, and he bought the Page Springs Cellars site in 2003. Wandering into the vineyards past the fast-flowing brook which gives the winery its name, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in Burgundy in France or Portugal’s Douro Valley.
‘Everyone asks, isn’t it too hot and dry in Arizona to grow grapes?’ says Eric. ‘I remind them that grapes originated in the Middle East, Lebanon and Syria, so they’re very adaptive. There are different microclimates throughout the state. If I were to liken us to anywhere, in terms of climate, we’re closest to parts of Spain, France and Italy – some of the homelands of grape growing.’
So, here in the Verde Valley, Eric finds terroir to suit the grapes. One side has limestone soil, just as at Châteauneuf-du- Pape in France, while the other side is volcanic, like on Sicily’s Mount Etna. ‘We’re also trying new things,’ he says. ‘Just because it works somewhere else doesn’t mean it will work here.’
So far, something is working. This is just one of 22 vineyards that have sprung up in the valley to feed Arizona’s burgeoning wine scene. Perhaps the most scenic is Barbara Predmore’s Alcantara vineyard at the confluence of the Verde River and Oak Creek, where she also hosts weddings at a palatial villa that looks like it’s been transported wholesale from Ancient Rome.
While the grapes may be grown down here, most of it seems to get drunk up the valley in Sedona. Here the landscape changes again, adding imposing red rock formations that rise from the earth like Martian mountains and have attracted ambitious climbers for decades.
It’s not just the scenery that brings people to this laid-back town. New Age types have also long been attracted by the belief that benevolent swirling vortexes of ‘subtle energy’ emanate from the land. The result is a town with a thriving arts scene and plenty of vegetarian cafés, including Chocola Tree, where you can pick up a kale smoothie while recharging your crystals. The emphasis on organic, locally grown food extends to high-end restaurants, the star of the scene being Mariposa, a Latininspired grill. Chef Lisa Dahl has grown used to hearing about the impact Sedona’s panoramic views have on her customers. ‘I’ll never forget one guy telling me that sitting on the patio is like being on the ocean,’ she says. ‘There’s a level of serenity you feel here that’s overwhelming.’ As Lisa heads back to the kitchen, burgers, tostadas, cocktails and local wine appear. Maybe there’s something to these swirling energy vortexes after all.
Published in Lonely Planet Traveller, March 2017.
Kind Of Blues
The Jazz Funeral Of Lady Liberty
Inauguration Day in The Big Easy… Dancing to reclaim the streets in Trump’s America… Rallying cries in front of City Hall… Six-foot vagina in the nightclub… Hope in the dark…
“New Orleans is a glorious mutation.” — Anthony Bourdain, quoted on the marquee of The Joy Theater, Canal Street.
In the beginning, the coffin holds hopes and dreams. It’s half past ten on the morning of Donald Trump’s inauguration. New Orleans is hot and sticky and only getting hotter. In front of the arched gateway of Louis Armstrong Park, the open casket is filling up with notes from mourners putting their fears for the next four years into words:
“I am scared my future as a woman is over.”
“Equal rights are not extra rights.”
“RIP: Free Appropriate Public Education”
Watching over the couple of hundred protesters is an eight-foot papier-mâché Statue of Liberty, a tear streaked down her cheek. A group of older women pose in front of it, chanting: “Upbeat and defiant.” At eleven o’clock, the marching band strike up a mournful tune and Lady Liberty is lowered into her resting place.
The parade sets off down North Rampart Street and soon the music becomes celebratory, like Live And Let Die told me a New Orleans funeral should be. (“Whose funeral is it?” “Yours.”) Umbrellas and parasols punch the air. Just as in a film, people run out of their houses to join in.
Cops on motorbikes clear the route, blocking the traffic on busy Canal Street to allow the procession to pass down the main road past the front of the Ritz Carlton. People are still joining the parade, whether for the politics or just the marching brass, but not everyone is impressed. In front of the Marriott, a big man in an even bigger blue t-shirt turns to his buddy: “Like the dude isn’t going to give his inauguration speech because of a few protesters!”
A little further down the road I meet Jeff Saunders, a volunteer with The Next Right Thing, the group who organised the funeral. He explains why the big blue man was missing the point:
“Most of the people I’ve talked to in the crowd are talking about getting more involved in local politics. There’s no negativity at all. People are feeling energised.”
The procession stops for a while on the Moon Walk, the riverside promenade created in the 1970s by Mayor Moon Landrieu. Just before one in the afternoon there’s an announcement to the waiting crowd that they’re “not gonna throw her in the drink”. Instead, the flowers from her casket are distributed to be thrown symbolically into the river. They drift away on the brown murk.
Lowering Lady Liberty into the Mississippi wouldn’t have been quite in keeping with the mood of the day. Americans are a naturally optimistic people, and they’re big on symbolism. Another announcement is made:
“We’re going to keep marching. The band will start playing ‘Didn’t She Ramble’, because she did, didn’t she? She had a good run. As we walk towards Frenchmen Street her arm will go back up and her torch will be lit. She will rise again!”
Going down Decatur Street, just in front of the statue of Joan of Arc, the parade meets its first vocal Trump supporter. He’s the archetype, the Platonic ideal of a Trump fan in a coordinated colour scheme: White ‘Trump’ t-shirt, red ‘Make America Great Again’ hat. White arms, red face. Tiny stars and stripes waving above his head. He chants: “Trump not hate! Trump not hate!” The funeral procession responds only by vigorously dancing at him.
Later on, another man shouts: “Let’s hear it for Donald!” but these were the only two individuals I heard protesting the protesters all day. This is not all that surprising. While Louisiana backed Trump, giving him 1,178,638 million votes, only 24,292 of those came from New Orleans. By contrast, Hillary pulled in 134,000 votes from the city. One New Orleans voting precinct didn’t receive any Trump votes at all.
Political puns have made me cringe ever since ‘Bliar’, but grudging respect to the lady with the ‘Hair Twitler’ sign for wringing three puns out of two words.
The funeral procession comes to a halt at Washington Square Park around two o’clock, but this is not the end for Lady Liberty. “She’s still alive, we just need to fight for her!” someone shouts.
It’s not even the end for the day. Statue and coffin are taken across town to Duncan Plaza, in front of City Hall, where the day’s main protest rally begins at three. On the way, teenage drug dealers mingle with the couple of thousand protesters heading into the park. Their sales pitch suggests they’ve either misunderstood the purpose of the rally or are mocking the anti-capitalists:
“I got those Donald Trump bags. Smoke this shit and it’ll get you rich.”
On stage in Duncan Plaza, beneath a banner reading ‘Power To The People’, fifteen different speakers explain in turn how the issues closest to them will be affected by Trump entering the White House. Housing. Health. Mass Incarceration. Immigration. The environment. The list goes on and on. The repeated message is one of solidarity: “We are here to inaugurate our own unity.”
Worst sign of the day: “1984 — Orwell Rising From His Tomb — 2017.” Poor old George. Fight Franco and try to warn people about the rise of surveillance fascism and they still treat your name like a zombie dictator’s.
The rally becomes another march, many times the size of the funeral procession. As it passes the Sheraton, the windows crowd with hotel workers on their phones filming the crowd’s chants: “No Trump. No KKK. No fascist USA.” I see Lady Liberty pass by in her coffin again. Sure enough, her flame is now glowing orange again.
After seven, walking alone down Frenchmen Street, I pass a man with a soundsystem hooked up to the back of his bike. He’s playing a rap tune on a loop that just repeats the line: ‘Fuck Donald Trump.’ I ask him what it is. He says: “It’s called ‘Fuck Donald Trump’.” Someone else passes and high-fives him.
Sun down, yellow moon. They’re throwing an ‘Anti-Inaugural Dance Party’ at Poor Boys Bar on St Bernard Avenue. On Facebook they quote the writer Michael Ventura, who wrote during the Reagan era:
“It can be a beautiful thing to dance all night during evil times.”
When I first walk in, I notice a woman sat at the bar with a Guy Fawkes mask in front of her. Earlier in the day, someone with a Guy Fawkes avatar responded to my tweet about Lady Liberty’s jazz funeral:
@KevinEGPerry lame!
— Anonymous America (@KORANISBURNING) January 20, 2017
I mention this to her. “People are anti-government from all sides,” she says. These days, everyone wants to burn down parliament.
There’s a stall in the corner of Poor Boys being manned by a woman in a six-foot vagina costume. She is Amy Irvin, founder of the New Orleans Abortion Fund. I’d seen her earlier at the jazz funeral too. “It’s protest, but it’s a satirical protest,” she says. “This is very New Orleans, it’s very us. Trump’s policies threaten all of us, and this is a way for folks who are supporters of these issues to come together.”
I ask her about the work she does at the NOAF and she explains, with memorised statistics and figures, exactly how limited abortion access is in Louisiana. I nod and scribble notes, trying to ignore the fact that her face is poking out from between cushioned labia.
Outside, there’s another stall where a woman is giving away free trigger locks. These are padlocks that you place around your gun to stop your kids picking them up and accidentally shooting themselves. I tell her it’s mad she lives in a country where these things are needed. She doesn’t smile.
On the final stall I meet the fabulous Nathalie Nia Faulk, the spokesperson for the New Orleans LGBT Community Center. After she tells me about the work the Center does, I ask her about Trump. She’s not concerned.
“We’ve been in this fight already. We’ve been organising. Nothing’s changed. I’m not scared. Trump doesn’t worry me. We’ve been doing this already, and now we’re going to do it better and we’re going to do it stronger.”
After the jazz funeral, the rally, the march and the party, I tell her it seems to me that today isn’t just about Trump. When I was a teenager and marched against the Iraq war, I might have been naïve to believe we’d actually stop the war but I don’t think I was the only one who thought that’s why we were doing it. This is different. Nobody actually thinks they’re going to impeach Trump today. Rather these marches are about the protesters themselves turning to one another and saying: ‘Look, I know we’ve been complacent but we’re in for a fight now and I’m here for it.’
Nathalie nods enthusiastically, and says:
“Isn’t that glorious, though? People are actually getting involved. At some point, people were saying: ‘I don’t vote, that doesn’t fit me.’ Half of our generation were like that. At some point we all have to come together, and I think these demonstrations are that place, right? If you vote, that’s cool, if you don’t vote, that’s cool, but we all know that this is not okay, so what are we gonna do about it?”
I expected fear and despondency on Inauguration Day. Instead there was jazz, and dancing, and a lot of people telling each other it’s going to be alright. ‘Trump’s in the White House?’ says New Orleans. ‘We’re on the streets.’
Laissez les bon temps rouler.
Diamond Geezers
This week, Donald Trump will place one of his tiny hands on the Bible and his puckered lips will accept the US presidency: the first Twitter troll with a nuclear arsenal. Holed up at a secret location in Nashville, preparing for a tour that’s due to come to the UK and Europe at the end of March, firebrand rap duo Run The Jewels are somehow managing to see the funny side.
“As a guy who grew up on dystopian science fiction you can’t help but be morbidly amused,” says El-P, looking for a chink of light in the darkness. “It’s scary but hilarious, in a fucked-up way. It’s the folly of man. It’s also incredibly dangerous and deadly. The stakes themselves make the gallows humour that much more potent. But that’s me. If I had an executioner’s gun to the back of my head and he farted, I’d laugh.”
Beside him, his sparring partner Killer Mike leans in. “I’ve watched every inauguration since Reagan,” he says, in that Deep South baritone. “But this is the first time the President is gonna be sitting there tweeting: ‘I told y’all, fools.’”
Published in NME, 20 January 2017.
Dominant
In the Showtime drama Billions, about a US Attorney going after a corrupt hedge fund manager, the very first shot of the pilot episode shows Paul Giamatti bound and gagged on the floor. A dominatrix appears, putting out a cigarette on his chest and then helpfully alleviating the burn by pissing on him. By the end of the episode, we’ve learned that this woman is his wife.
It’s a hell of a way to make a first impression. For Maggie Siff, who plays the psychiatrist-turned-dominatrix, it presented both a challenge and an opportunity. “The sex stuff I was nervous about,” she says. “I’m not really an exhibitionist, yet I thought it was a really interesting component of their marriage. It felt smart. It made me want to know about that marriage, who those people were to each other and how they arrived there.”
It also makes her – in a show full of macho characters – quite literally the boss?
“And in a very literal sense it makes her the boss, yes,” she laughs. “She’s comfortable in that role.”
Siff and I are having breakfast in a hotel in Lower Manhattan, and over fruit and coffee she’s lamenting how rare it is to be offered such a powerful and complex female role. As an actress she’s become accustomed to being presented with barely-sketched stereotypes. “There’s the bitchy wife, the bitchy ex-wife, the sardonic best friend… there’s a lot of those tropes,” she says. “There’s just a disproportionate number of male writers, and directors, and producers, so the stories that are getting told are slanted that way. You get so used to that as a woman.”
It’s a particularly challenging situation for young actresses who are so keen to find work when they’re starting out that they find themselves playing roles they may inwardly cringe at. Siff, who grew up in the Bronx before studying English at Bryn Mawr, a women’s liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, and theatre at NYU’s Tisch School of the arts, remembers this time of her life well. “When you start out as a scrappy theatre artist just trying to pay back your student loans, you go through several years where you’re panning for gold,” she says. “I wasn’t picky at all. Your standard for what is acceptable goes down because you have to do things just to survive.”
After years working in regional theatre her television break came in her early 30s when she was cast to play department store heiress Rachel Menken in Mad Men. It was a role close to her heart. “Somehow I just knew that part was mine, no matter how many times I went back to audition for it,” she says “I just had this feeling like I knew who that person was. She reminded me of my grandmother, who grew up in the Lower East Side as a Jewish woman. I just thought: ‘Nobody else knows this character as much as I do.’ That’s a very unusual feeling, but it does happen rarely.”
Just as Mad Men was taking off, Siff won her next major part in biker drama Sons of Anarchy. It turned into a six-year job, filming for six months a year in California. She spent her summers there and her winters back in New York with her first love, theatre.
“I never think about quitting acting, but sometimes I do think: ‘When can I just go back to theatre?’” she says, pointing out that on the stage there’s less of a struggle to find great female roles. “It’s nice to go back to jobs where it’s purely an artistic exercise and not a commercial enterprise. I feel like that’s really where you get into the trouble spots. I’d also like to do more teaching, or things where the love that I have for the craft doesn’t have to be constantly slimed by the sexism that is really hard to avoid.”
Finding good roles is a perennial problem for actresses, and one that exacerbates off-screen problems of gender inequality too. When there are fewer great female roles to go around – and fewer female roles in general – it places actresses in a difficult bargaining position which in turn leads to the pay gap that’s recently been such a heated topic of debate in Hollywood. So – I ask Siff – what’s the solution?
“I don’t know, I’m trying to figure it out!” she laughs. “I go round and round because as a working actor you have to figure out how much power you actually have and how to use it. I’m not Scarlett Johansson, I’m not a box office draw in mainstream movies, so I feel like all I can do is be very selective about the kind of jobs that I choose to take. It’s about the kind of stories that I’m choosing to tell.”
The challenge for actresses continues even after they’ve won roles. Often, Siff says, they find themselves having to battle for how their character’s stories will develop. “You have to cross your fingers, especially when you sign on to do television, that the creators and directors are going to stay true to the course of what is promised from the outset,” she says. “Within creative projects you have to fight for the character continuing to have an interesting voice, and also fight for things like how many women are in the writers’ room. I do all that. I try to talk to people about that and make people conscious of it.”
One of the things which drew her to Billions was the chance to play a woman who’s on an equal footing with a cast of powerful men which includes Paul Giamatti as a US Attorney and Damian Lewis’ charismatic hedge fund manager. Siff’s character, Wendy Rhoades, is caught between the two as the wife of Giamatti’s character and a colleague of Lewis’.
“In the pilot the thing that was apparent to me was that she was this strong, unusually smart woman,” says Siff. “She’s really her own woman, and that’s really what attracted me. In terms of the story, yes she is married to somebody, she is somebody’s wife – as a woman you get used to being somebody’s wife, or somebody’s girlfriend, or somebody’s paramour or whatever – but she’s also in the workplace. What she does is of interest to people. She holds power in a similar way to which men do, and that’s interesting.”
Alongside her television work, Siff has also turned to independent films with the hope of telling more nuanced stories about women. This includes 2016’s A Woman, a Part, written and directed by the avant-garde filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin. “She approached me about it and told me what the story was and I thought: ‘Oh, that sounds interesting,’” says Siff, “and familiar.”
The film follows a successful television actress who has a nervous breakdown and returns to New York from Los Angeles to try and reclaim her old friendships and her theatre roots. For Siff, her only concern was that the film might be a little too close to the bone. “It was terrifying because it felt too close,” she says. “I thought: ‘Are people going to think this is me?’ It’s not me, but it’s a story that I’m really interested in telling and when else am I going to get the opportunity to tell this story? Elisabeth calls herself a feminist filmmaker and 50% of the crew were women, so the whole ethos behind the making of the film really had that at its heart.”
One positive change that Siff has observed has been the move of so much talent and money from film to television, where she argues there are more opportunities for actresses, particularly older women. “Films is a shrinking industry, and I think the energy of that has gone over to television,” she says. “The gift of that is there’s this ever-expanding opportunity for women, and for people of colour. You don’t need to get an audience of 16 million people for it to be a hit, so it’s more artisanal. Look at Orange Is The New Black, which has Blair Brown, an amazing theatre actress who’s 70 years old. She has this great arc on that show right now. I look at people like her and think that things are changing.”
In the decade Siff has spent working in television since she was first cast opposite Jon Hamm in Mad Men, she’s seen first-hand how women’s roles have slowly grown more powerful. Where once she had to contend with Don Draper storming out of a board room because he wouldn’t be spoken back to by a woman, now she’s crunching a stiletto’d heel onto Paul Giamatti’s chest. Even so, she points out there’s still some way to go before we see more strong female-led stories on our screens.
“The thing I find myself grappling with is how many macho shows I’ve been on,” she says. “You get to be a certain age, and as a 40 year-old woman you look back on your career and think: ‘How much of it has been spent shining a light on a man?’, you know?”
Sam Rockwell: The Artist
Sam Rockwell wants to dance. He’s having his photograph taken in a 120-year-old warehouse in Brooklyn but it’s a warm day and he’s starting to feel lethargy creep through his bones. “What music have we got?” he asks. “We need to wake up. Have you got any James Brown?”
Somebody fiddles with an iPhone and soon the godfather of soul is echoing off the exposed brickwork. This is Rockwell’s jam. He starts rolling his shoulders and then his feet follow, moonwalking him across the dusty floor. If you’ve seen a Sam Rockwell film in the past 20 years you’ve probably noticed the way he moves. He danced his way from his indie breakthrough in 1997’s Lawn Dogs to blockbusters such as Iron Man 2. He danced to wind-up Nicholas Cage in Matchstick Men and to impress George Clooney in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Even when his character was sick and depressed in Moon he still managed to throw some shapes to Walking on Sunshine.
Like a lot of teenage boys, he started dancing to impress a girl. Her name was Michaela, and he met her at a school dance. Until then he’d been a shy kid who smoked a lot of weed, but that changed when his friends Leroy and Charles started taking him to parties. “I tried to get over my shyness by dancing, and that’s what happened,” he says. He runs a hand through his beard and smiles at the memory. “I’ve been dancing ever since.”
—
Acting was the family business. When Sam Rockwell was born on 5 November 1968 in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, both his parents Pete and Penny were actors. “It was in the blood,” he says.
After his parents separated, when he was five, their lives took different paths on opposite coasts. His father, raising his only son in San Francisco, took a series of blue collar jobs to support them. He was a postman, a taxi driver, a union organiser and finally a printer. Years later, when he started acting again, it was in small roles in his son’s films like Frost/Nixon and Better Living Through Chemistry. His mother lived in New York and entrenched herself in the city’s bohemian theatre scene. Her son would visit during the summers and his first appearance on the stage, aged 10, was playing Humphrey Bogart opposite his mother in a skit that riffed on Casablanca at a small theatre in the East Village.
Back west, Rockwell attended the San Francisco School of the Arts where he joined an improv group called Batwing Lubricant along with Margaret Cho, who would become a stand-up, and Aisha Tyler, who Rockwell dated for a while and who now voices Lana Kane in Archer. There’s video online of them all making their first tentative steps into performance and even a moment where they must sit and tell the camera what they want from life. A voice echoes over the tannoy: “Sam, what do you want to be?” Rockwell – 18 years old, a long earring dangling from his left ear – shrugs. “I want to go out and, I don’t know, seek adventure,” he replies.
Thirty years later, he winces at his wide-eyed younger self. “Oh my God, so terrible,” he mutters, but he concedes he got what he wished for. “Oh absolutely, there’s been a lot of adventures.”
—
The adventures began with a move to New York to enrol at the William Esper Studio in Manhattan, met he Terry Knickerbocker, the acting coach he still works with to this day. It was there that Rockwell really began to approach acting as an art and to think seriously about his craft. “That was when I got it,” says. “When I studied Meisner that’s when it kicked in.”
The Meisner technique is an approach which focuses on getting actors out of their own heads so they can react instinctively to the scene. It’s something Rockwell still applies to his roles, and so that I can understand his process he guides me through a simple Meisner exercise.
“You’re wearing a grey shirt,” he says.
“I’m wearing a grey shirt,” I reply.
“You’re wearing a grey shirt?”
“I’m wearing a grey shirt.”
Through this repetition we’re quickly responding simply to tone of voice, inflections and emphasis. “It’s a very naked exercise,” he explains. “You have to just be. Everything percolates to the surface. It’s peculiar. It’s about listening to your subtext and staying in tune with what your vibe is. It’s great training for life.”
Armed with a newfound confidence in his ability to act and live in the moment, Rockwell began to win small parts in films like Last Exit To Brooklyn and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He illegally sublet a room on Thompson Street in Manhattan from some other actors, paying them $484 a month, and supported himself working as a waiter, or delivering burritos by bicycle, and briefly as an assistant to a private investigator. In 1992 he became one of the founder members of the Labyrinth Theater Company. He was part of a scene of up-and-coming actors that included Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, Ethan Hawke and, most influentially, Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
“Phil directed me in a play and I learned a lot from him,” says Rockwell. “In the theatre, it has to cost you something. You have to get up there and lose a little piece of yourself every night. He demanded a lot of us, but you knew that he could walk the walk.”
Although they were the same age, Rockwell considered Hoffman a mentor. He took the actor’s death in February 2014 hard. “We all miss Phil,” he says. “Phil was the guy. It was really a big hit for me.”
I apologise for making him talk about something that’s clearly still so raw, but he waves his hand. “That’s alright. That’s real,” he says. “What are you going to do? You’ve got to keep living, and doing it the way Phil used to do it. He didn’t phone it in, that’s for sure.”
—
Rockwell got his break with stand-out roles in 1996’s Box of Moonlight and 1997’s Lawn Dogs which led to a part in his first major production, The Green Mile, in 1999. “It took me 10 years before I started to make a living,” he says. “It can be tough. Even when you’re successful it’s always precarious. Everybody has goals. Hopefully they’re more artistic goals rather than being famous or being big on Twitter or whatever the hell else.”
Immediately after The Green Mile Rockwell was cast in Galaxy Quest, but he was initially hesitant to take a role in a comedy. “I was reluctant because I really wanted to do what Sean Penn or Daniel Day Lewis were doing,” he says. “Then I realised: Sean Penn did Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It was an amazing movie, and it meant I met Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver.”
Those contacts paid off when he was cast as the villain in the 2000 remake of Charlie’s Angels. With the script going through constant rewrites, Rickman was one of the actors Rockwell asked help him punch up the role. Another was Kevin Spacey: “I had this cheesy line, and he said: ‘Why don’t you put the gun to your head when you say it?’ That really helped. Liev Schreiber came up with a funny line, and Mitch Glazer, Bill Murray’s writer, helped too.”
This is a theme Rockwell returns to when talking about building his characters. He’ll soak up as many influences as he can. He’s not afraid to ask for help. As he puts it: “Sometimes it takes a village, you know?”
—
Rockwell will also totally immerse himself in his subject, as he did before playing former The Gong Show host Chuck Barris in 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. “I hung out with Chuck all the time,” he says. “I had him tape my lines and I learned a Baltimore accent.”
It was a perfect lead role for Rockwell, a chance for his irreverent energy to shine where another actor might have turned in a mechanical impersonation. However, it nearly didn’t happen. Rockwell was director George Clooney’s first choice but studio boss Harvey Weinstein wanted somebody else.
“I was at the Chateau Marmont and bumped into Ben Stiller,” recalls Rockwell. “He was a little shy around me. He said: ‘You’re going in tomorrow, right?’ I said: ‘For what?’ ‘For the movie, for George, for Confessions.’ I said: ‘Yeah, how’d you know?’ He went: ‘I went in today.’ So I found out the night before my screen-test that Ben Stiller was up for it too. I freaked out. I couldn’t sleep.”
Rockwell dealt with his nerves the same way he’s done since that school dance all those years earlier. “George had a boom box and we put some James Brown on,” he remembers. “I started dancing to try and shake out the nerves. George filmed it, we started improvising and he kept it in the screen test. I’ve always danced to relax.”
Rockwell won the part, although only after Clooney embedded his golf club in an office wall arguing with Weinstein. Clooney’s passion was well-founded: Rockwell shone, and his dancing stayed in the picture.
—
Rockwell could now take his pick of roles. Having grown up on a diet of movies like Taxi Driver, Badlands and Midnight Cowboy, his taste led him towards darker independent films like Choke and Moon. The latter, featuring his bravura performance as a pair of lunar-mining clones, came about after director Duncan Jones offered him the role of a child molester in a film he was trying to get made called Mute. Rockwell turned the part down but the two fell into conversation about their favourite science-fiction films.
“We talked about the working-class aspect of Alien and Outland,” Rockwell remembers. “In Alien, Harry Dean Stanton rolling cigarettes in a Hawaiian shirt grounds you, so when the monster shows up you sort of believe it. Duncan took that conversation and had Nathan Parker write this script about these clones. Then we infused a little humour into it, because it’s such a dark story.”
To build his cloned characters, Rockwell decided the film needed a touch of De Niro. He often incorporates his favourite films into his own performances. “Taxi Driver is very prevalent in Moon,” he says. “And also very much in Seven Psychopaths, where there’s a conscious nod to Travis Bickle.”
—
When we see Sam Rockwell on screen, his performances look as effortless as his dancing. What we can’t see is the work that has gone in to crafting every moment. For Rockwell, work starts with his coach Terry Knickerbocker and then he’ll look for great performances to incorporate. Moon, for example, blends not just Taxi Driver but also Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy and Jeremy Irons’ dual role in Dead Ringers. Then he’ll immerse himself in the knowledge and skills his character needs, whether riding with police for his upcoming role as a cop in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or learning to speak the Sioux language Lakota for this year’s Sitting Bull drama Woman Walks Ahead. What ends up on screen is his unique take on everything he’s absorbed, brought to life with his own sense of adventure.
In 2014 Rockwell played a cowboy stuntman on stage in Sam Shepard’s Fool For Love and had to lasso a chair every night. He thinks of this when I ask him to place his finger on what it is that makes him so good at what he does.
“I would hope it’s a little bit of talent, but mostly hard work,” he says. “I think it’s true that if you do something over and over again then practise makes perfect. There were some days with the lasso where I’d be lassoing like shit. I’d take a break, come back to it, clear my mind. If you put in that time, an hour a day, it does pay off. It’s got to pay off.”
The Other Side Of The Coyne
It’s almost a surprise that Wayne Coyne doesn’t roll up to our interview in his giant hamster ball. The Flaming Lips frontman is so defined in his Wayne Coyne-ness that, waiting around, it’s hard not to picture him as he appears onstage: an intergalactic pirate smothered with fake blood and confetti, flanked by dancing pandas, his boulder-sized fists raised aloft to shoot green lasers into the sky. This is a man whose life is such a carnival of oddness that he’ll sometimes forget he’s carrying a solid gold hand grenade, which didn’t go over well when he took it through customs at Oklahoma City’s airport back in 2012. When he wanders into the lounge of his Clerkenwell hotel engulfed in a baggy hoodie, he can’t help but seem down to earth measured against his reputation. Despite the glitter in his snowy ringlets and the glue-on plastic diamonds studded around his right eye, he’s human after all.
Joe Fox: Street Writer
Published in British GQ, February 2017.
Ruby Rose: Keyed Up
Published in British GQ, February 2017.
2016 Was The Year The Tabloids Won The War On Drugs
We live in a “post-truth” world now, don’t we? You know it, Donald Trump knows it, even the lexicographers charged with keeping dictionaries hip know it. But while we might know it, many of us still don’t fully understand it. How can such a large chunk of the voting population just not give a fuck about the facts?
One lucky set of people who’ve at least had a little more time to comprehend this concept are those who follow British law. Drug legislators were “post-truth” before it was cool, very much leading the way when it came to ignoring experts and just reacting to whatever the red tops were making a fuss about. And this year was a big win for the tabloids: when the Psychoactive Substances Act came into force on the 26th of May, making it illegal to sell hitherto “legal highs” or nitrous oxide, it was a direct result of the moral panic they’d started themselves.
Adam Driver: “To hear that Scorsese wants to talk… it’s surreal”
There are certain moments that can change the course of a person’s life. For Adam Driver, it was being asked to kill Han Solo.
“That’s a big event!” he says, hunching his rangy 6ft 3in frame forward in his chair in a secluded backroom of a Mayfair hotel. The 33-year-old actor made his name playing Lena Dunham’s reliably unreliable boyfriend in her HBO series Girls, has since gone on to work with cult director Jim Jarmusch and will soon be seen in Martin Scorsese’s epic religious drama Silence. Yet despite his success he still sounds incredulous at the memory of those early discussions with JJ Abrams about Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
“It was the first or second meeting, when there was no script to read, so JJ was just outlining what happens in the story,” Driver recalls. “That plot point came up very soon as something that would happen. I wanted to think about it for a couple of months just to make sure.”
To make sure you wanted to become the man who killed Han Solo?
“Not just about that, but that played a huge part in my thinking – I love Han Solo,” he says. “But also, the thing as a whole. The scale of it. It’s a huge franchise, and I’d never worked on anything that big.”
One of the factors that helped Driver make the decision was the knowledge that it would put him in the position every actor covets: being able to pick and choose his roles freely.
“I can say no to whatever I don’t want to do,” he confirms. “The director then becomes the biggest part of it. If I’m lucky enough to get the chance to work with a particular director then the part I’m playing is kind of secondary.”
At the very top of Driver’s directorial wishlist has always been the name ‘Martin Scorsese’. When the opportunity came four years ago to audition for Silence, the director’s longterm passion project, Driver leapt at it. Production was delayed, but eventually Driver was invited to meet Scorsese at his home.
“I thought it was still between a few different people,” says Driver. “I didn’t know that at the end of the meeting he was going to offer me the part. It was surreal. He’s a filmmaker who in my mind is the tip of the pyramid to work with. To hear that he wants to talk to you about a role made it a formality on my part. I would have said yes regardless of what it was.”
What it was turned out to be the part of a Portuguese Jesuit missionary in Scorsese’s adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel. He plays the doubting counterpoint to Andrew Garfield’s lead as the pair travel to Japan to seek their teacher, played by Liam Neeson, who is rumoured to have apostatised. Driver threw himself into the role by losing nearly a third of his weight, undertaking a week-long silent retreat at St. Beuno’s Jesuit house in Wales, and immersing himself in the novel.
“I latched on to this idea of the crisis of faith,” says Driver. “All the characters have a different relationship to it. I based my character on St Peter, because I loved the idea of someone who has committed their life to something but at the same time they’re openly doubtful of what it is they’re doing and questioning why they wanted to do it to begin with. I think that’s a healthy part of creating something and something that I understand.”
It’s also a role that spoke to Driver’s childhood. He was born in California, on 19 November 1983, but when he was seven his mother Nancy took him and his older sister April to her hometown of Mishawaka, Indiana. When his mother remarried it was to Rodney G. Wright, a Baptist minister, but Driver experienced a crisis of faith of his own. “I was raised in a religious household,” he says, “but now I don’t subscribe to any religion.”
Rather than the church, it was film that helped Driver find his place in the world. “My grandfather – my mom’s dad – recorded movies on VHS,” he remembers. “He catalogued them and wrote the title and a brief description and kept them in a laminated book that me and my sister could look through. He kept 500 movies, and 100 tapes were by his bed. It made me realise that these are important artefacts.”
After getting a taste of theatre at high school, Driver applied for a place at the prestigious New York drama school Juilliard but his application was rejected. Then 9/11 happened. Driver was 17 years old and still living with his parents when he decided to enlist. He served as a Marine for two years and eight months, but before his unit deployed to Iraq he broke his sternum mountain biking and was medically discharged. He applied to Juilliard once more. This time he was accepted.
“I thought civilian problems compared to the military would be small and easily manageable, which is an illusion,” he laughs. “It’s hard to be alive regardless what your job is. It gave me this false sense of confidence that I could manage being an actor.”
It was three years after graduating from Juilliard that he won his breakthrough part in Girls, although he remembers at the time simply being happy to have found “steady employment”. “The job turned out so much better than I expected,” he says. “I was just happy to be making more money than I had in the theatre.”
His kinetic physical presence and awkward charisma caught the eye of the sorts of directors he’d always dreamed of acting for. Stephen Spielberg cast him in Lincoln and the Coen Brothers even got him singing in Inside Llewyn Davis. Most recently, he played the eponymous lead in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, a paean to the New York School poets and the beauty of everyday romance. “Jim reached out to me and, again, only as kind of a formality I read the script,” says Driver. “I think he’s brilliant, and his movies are.”
Joining the cast of Star Wars and working with Jim Jarmusch and Martin Scorsese is the sort of fantasy wishlist any young actor might draw up. Is Driver living the dream?
“Yeah, but I definitely had no masterplan,” he laughs. “I’ve been kind of spoiled by it. I’m very aware it’s a director’s medium, so if I can be lucky enough to still keep working with great directors then that’s the only game plan I have.”
The Ady Experience
Published in British GQ, January 2017.
Jim Jarmusch: Not For Turning
There’s a line in Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 film Down By Law that seems apposite in November 2016. It goes: “My mama used to say that America’s the big melting pot. You bring it to a boil and all the scum rises to the top.”
Over tea in a Paris hotel, Jarmusch considers whether he’d agree. “Kind of appropriate, but also kind of cynical,” he says finally. “But it’s a scary and sad time with these creeps coming to the top. I think we all have to be vigilant around the world now with Brexit, and Marine Le Pen in France. There’s a lot of scary shit, you know?”
Jarmusch is 63 but looks exactly as he has for the last 30 years. He’s wearing dark glasses indoors and is dressed as if he may at any moment be called on to play guitar with the Velvet Underground. His hair is that crown of pure white that makes him look like David Lynch’s beatnik brother. It turned that way when he was 15 due to an inherited condition. Tom Waits once said it must have made him an “immigrant in the teenage world”, casting Jarmusch as a lifelong outsider.
He made his first film, 1980’s Permanent Vacation, with a grant he was supposed to use to pay his tuition fees. Ever since, his meditative stories about society’s waifs and strays have blurred the line between mainstream movies and arthouse cinema. Films such as 1995’s “psychedelic western” Dead Man and 1999’s Ghost Dog, about a mafia hitman who follows the code of the samurai, established him as a singular voice in US film with a taste for subverting genre. He remains fiercely independent and has never made a film for a major studio. The only thing that’s changed over the years are his vices. The director of Coffee And Cigarettes no longer touches either. He quit coffee in 1986, and cigarettes followed a few years ago.
“I have caffeine in tea – and sugar, that’s a vice,” he says. “I drink only dry white wine and very dry champagne, but not daily. I don’t drink hard alcohol and I don’t drink any other stuff. I love weed, but I don’t smoke now. Maybe I will again. I’m just trying to be, you know, clear.”
I Tried Every Legal High Left On The Market
A lot of us have had a rough time in 2016, but spare a thought this Christmas for the families of the poor men and women of the once proud legal highs industry. There’ll be no presents under the tree for their kids this year, not since the Roflcopter factories were shuttered and all the Meow Meow labs closed down. Things just haven’t been the same since the 26th of May this year, when the Psychoactive Substances Act came into effect, banning the sale of legal highs in the UK.
When the law was introduced, some police chiefs said it would be impossible to enforce. And at first glance it looks like they were right. Go online and you’ll still find products being sold that look very similar to all of the formerly legal party powders that are now illegal to sell in the UK. However, my first thought is that, to be sold, they must be legal, meaning they also must not have any kind of “psychoactive effect” on the human brain, because otherwise they’d be blocked under the act.
There was only one way to find out: buy a load of them and review them one by one. So I set off for Camden, spiritual home of the British head shop, to find out what had managed to slip through the ban.
“We don’t sell that stuff any more – all banned now,” one shopkeeper on the high street told me. “Stop taking that shit!” shouted another, which was a bit rich considering his shop was 90 percent bongs. I think they thought I was a narc, and you can’t blame them for being wary given that police raided those same shops as the ban was coming in.
The last place still promising you “a one stop shop for all your party needs” this side of the dark web is the online ICE head shop, which will still deliver a range of “research chemicals” straight to your door. I ordered the lot.
Gizzy wizzy, let’s get busy
What with all the time-consuming acid trips and having to grow your hair long, psych-rock hasn’t generally attracted a lot of people with a strong Protestant work ethic. That’s at least until bizarrely titled Melbourne seven-piece King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard gave the genre a shot in the arm and made everyone else look downright idle by releasing eight records in the last four years. Now they’ve upped the ante even further, announcing that in 2017 they’ll release no fewer than five new albums.
“I figured I’m no good at chilling,” says Stu Mackenzie, frontman, flautist and master of understatement. “Over the years I’ve tried to keep myself super busy so I don’t go insane. If I’m going to be a musician and a creative person, I may as well be a productive creative person.”
As anyone who’s seen King Gizzard live can attest, they’re not the sorts to do things half-arsed. At Green Man this year their extensive lineup meant they had two drummers firing like twin engines and still had manpower left over for three guitars, a harmonica, a theremin and even the odd bit of Mackenzie’s flute. Everything was played very loud at 1,000mph, and the effect on the crowd was to create a circle pit of sweaty bodies who swirled into a vortex as if they were being sucked down a festival-sized plughole.
Hey, That’s The Way To Say Goodbye
Death is an impossible idea to stare at for too long. “The mind blanks at the glare,” as Larkin wrote. We can spend our lives trying to ignore the knowledge of our sure extinction but it will wait on the horizon either way. It lurks out of sight unless we muster the courage to raise our eyes from our lives to see it.
Leonard Cohen was brave enough to look up. It will be said that his death at the age of 82, which was reported this morning, is another tragedy in a year that appears to have been mainly constructed from disasters. I’m not so sure that it should be called a tragedy to die with such grace and wisdom. If there is such a thing as a good death, it appears at least from a distance that Cohen found it.
He was doing good work until the very end. Just three weeks ago today, on his birthday, Cohen released his fourteenth record ‘You Want It Darker’. It is a remarkable record, full of poetry, black humour and, of course, intimations of mortality. On the title track he uses the word ‘Hineni’, the Hebrew word meaning ‘Here I am’. He sings: “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my lord.” Cohen’s songs were always touched by death but by the end, after a lifetime of contemplation and Zen meditation, they’d achieved a state of humble acceptance when facing the abyss.
There is more evidence of his grace in the letter he wrote this July to Marianne Ihlen, his former lover and muse, who was then on her deathbed. In the face of death it is easy to slip into inanities or meaningless platitudes, but that was not Cohen’s way. He wrote: “Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”
He saw clearly what was coming. A few months ago, after reciting the words of a new song to the New Yorker editor David Remnick, Cohen told him: “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know. But I don’t dare attach myself to a spiritual strategy. I don’t dare do that. I’ve got some work to do. Take care of business. I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable. That’s about it for me.”
He was right of course. It is hard to speak so plainly about death, but he achieved it. The simplicity of Cohen’s language – both in speech and in song – is thoroughly deceptive. Kris Kristofferson once told him that he wanted to have the opening lines of ‘Bird of the Wire’ inscribed on his tombstone. They are simple, short and perfect: “Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”
Cohen would work on songs and poems for months, turning sentences patiently. ‘Hallelujah’ took him five years. He was wise but he was also fucking funny. Just put on ‘The Future’ or ‘Everybody Knows’ or ‘Tower of Song’. I once asked him for advice about writing – or at least I tried. He was in London to release his album ‘Old Ideas’ in January 2012, a masterfully crafted record that felt like the return of old truths and forgotten melodies. In front of a room full of music journalists I was allowed the microphone to speak. At those sorts of events there’s always one: the babbling fool who just starts talking and never gets close to a question or a point. Mortifyingly, in front of the great poet, that was me. I think eventually he just gathered that I needed some help. “I’m reminded of the advice my old friend Irving Layton, who has passed away now but probably is the greatest Canadian poet that we’ve ever produced, and a very close friend,” he said. “I would confide in him, and after I’d told him what I planned to do and what my deepest aspirations were, he’d always say to me, ‘Leonard, are you sure you’re doing the wrong thing?’”
Take Leonard’s advice. Do the wrong thing instead of the ordinary thing, which is to call his death a tragedy, dash off a Facebook update or a tweet about how sad it is, post a meme comparing him to Bowie and Harambe and then carry on regardless. The harder thing to do, the wrong thing, is to look death as squarely in the eye as Cohen managed and to meet it with his clarity, his humour, and his grace. Then ring the bells, that still can ring…
“I got the girl and won all the fights. What more can you ask for?”
Because of you I grew up wanting to drink martinis in exotic locations. Was being James Bond as much fun as it looked?
I’ve been lucky all my life. From the time I started making movies and television I played heroes. Never had to say too much, got the girl, won all the fights, got to keep the clothes. What more can you ask for?
Not a lot. What is being a man all about, in your book?
It occurs to me that the first three letters of ‘manners’ is ‘man’, and manners maketh the man. It’s about how you’re brought up. Don’t be afraid of people thinking you’re too nice. If people mock you, well, as my friend Tony Curtis would say: ‘Fuck ’em, feed ’em fish.’ That’s a great philosophy in life.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever got?
My first week in theatre when I came out of the army, the director said to me: ‘You’re not very good. Smile when you come on.’ So I smiled, and I’ve spent my life smiling.
You’ve said your favourite of your Bonds is The Spy Who Loved Me. Why?
Obviously the song: ‘Nobody Does It Better’. I mean, modesty forbids me…
It was your idea to drop the fish out of the window of the Lotus after you drive out of the sea, wasn’t it?
That’s right. Cubby [Broccoli, Bond producer] said: ‘Roger, you’re in a car that’s underwater and watertight. How does the fish get in there?’ I said: ‘It’s a movie, Cubby.’ It stayed in, and it gets a big laugh.
You’re always self-deprecating about your acting but there’s a great scene in that film where you tell Anya you killed her boyfriend. You quickly turn from charming to ice cold.
It’s funny you say that, the director Lewis Gilbert always mentioned that scene. Maybe it was lit right! It’s easier to joke about yourself than to go on about having to work hard as an actor. Bullshit. Get up, say the line, don’t bump into the furniture. In the 70s there was an article criticising Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando for thinking of themselves as ‘great artists’. It finished by saying the only actors who made the profession acceptable, through their self-deprecating humour, were David Niven and Roger Moore. The next morning there was a letter from Niven with the article attached. Across the top he’d written: ‘It pays to be a cunt!’
You got all the best lines as Bond: ‘Sheer magnetism’, ‘Keeping the British end up, sir’. Which was your favourite?
In The Man With The Golden Gun when I’m – when Bond – is asking the gunsmith where something or other is. I line up a rifle right at his balls and say: ‘Speak now, or forever hold your piece.’
What’s the key to delivering a one-liner?
Timing. A great example of that is Jack Benny. The villain says: ‘Your money or your life!… Well?’ ‘I’m thinking it over!’
Forget ‘shaken, not stirred’, how do you make a perfect vodka martini?
I prefer gin. The way to make a proper gin martini is you take a martini glass and rim it with the zest of a lemon. As much zest as you can get. Then put it in the deep freeze. Take a teaspoon full of Vermouth, Noilly Prat, put it in a glass, shake it around and then throw it away. Into that glass you put two jiggers of gin. Take that, put that in the deep freeze. When the time comes, take the glasses out and pour the liquid into the martini glass. There should be a slight film on it, like oil. Put it to your lips and drink it, with three olives on the side.
That sounds quite time consuming, frankly.
If a drink’s worth having it’s worth doing properly. If you’re going to have vodka, by the way, have Grey Goose.
Are you on commission?
No. Jesus, I wish I were. With gin, I like Gordon’s.
You’re a British icon – the spy with the Union Jack parachute – but since Brexit we seem to be a country struggling to figure out who we are. How do you see Britain’s place in the world?
I hope we continue to be important contributors to alleviating the effects of poverty. I don’t like the newspaper campaigns taking the government to task for the amount of money it gives other countries.
Should we be taking in more refugees?
I drive around England quite a lot. We have an awful lot of space, we really do. It’s because we’re a fortunate society that people want to come here. If they’re coming here for non-economic reasons then that’s all the more reason to take them. If they’re coming for economic reasons and have something to contribute then I don’t blame the poor bastards for getting out. They’re doing exactly what the British did 400 years ago.
You recently turned 89 – what’s the secret of your longevity?
Good doctors.
How would you like to be remembered?
‘He never left a bill unpaid.’
Soul Power
Published in British GQ, December 2016.
Yukon: After The Gold Rush
If the bulldozers on Tony Beets’ gold mine ever break down he could just use his bare hands. They are gigantic and caked in dirt, the way God’s must have looked the day he created the mountains. Tony came to the Yukon in 1982 for the same reason thousands before him did during the Gold Rush of 1896–1899, but the old stories don’t interest him much.
‘The history is the least of my concerns, to be honest with ya,’ he drawls. ‘It’s nice, but they could have left a little more.’
Despite a century’s worth of miners striking it lucky, there is still enough gold in these hills to have made Tony a rich man. His straggly hair and beard may disguise it but his net worth is estimated at over $5 million. ‘We strictly came here for the money,’ he says. ‘Let’s say that worked. We’re a little spoiled now, but like I always say…’ He holds up those dusty articulated fists. ‘It was earned.’
Tony mines near the Klondike River, where gold was first discovered on Rabbit Creek by Skookum Jim, George Carmack and Tagish Charlie in August 1896. The area proved so rich that when the first prospectors arrived back in San Francisco in July 1897 their ship’s cargo was worth over a million dollars. The news sparked a Gold Rush which led 100,000 people to attempt the long, punishing journey to the Klondike. Realising that these stampeders would be even easier to mine than the hills, a barkeeper named Joseph Ladue built a sawmill and staked out a townsite on the mud flats at the confluence of the Klondike and the Yukon. He named the new town Dawson, and it became home to the miners, and to the pimps, hustlers and dancing girls who followed in their wake.
Dawson City remains an outlaw town. ‘You can do things the way you want here,’ says Tony. ‘A lot of places are regulated and over-regulated, but here you can still tell the odd guy to go fuck himself and it works just fine.’
Wandering Dawson at dusk the only thing missing from the scene is a pair of dueling gunslingers. The buildings of wood and tin haven’t changed since the 1900s, the saloons still have swing doors and the streets are little more than dirt tracks. Dawson is still the end of the road. Keep going north and the only towns you’ll find are in the Arctic Circle. That means a certain breed of character washes up here like nuggets in the bend of a river. On any given night in bars like The Pit at the Westminster Hotel you’re likely to hear tall tales from guys like Duncan Spriggs, the former landlord who’ll tell you about the time he rode a horse from Vancouver to San Francisco. Or Dana Meise, who walked across Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific and claims to have fought no less than three grizzly bears along the way.
No bar sums up the spirit of Dawson quite like the Downtown Hotel. Their signature drink is the ‘Sourtoe Cocktail’, served with a genuine severed human toe resting in it. Dawson is not a place concerned with Health and Safety regulations. The story goes that in the early 1970s a man named Captain Dick Stevenson came across the toe of a Prohibition-era bootlegger pickled in a jar of overproof rum. Yukoners refer to anyone who hasn’t spent the harsh winter here as a ‘cheechako’, while anyone who has survived one becomes a ‘sourdough’. Captain Dick decreed that in order to become an honorary ‘sourdough’, one must kiss the ‘sourtoe’. To date, over 67,000 have.
Like the miners, the dancing girls are still here too. Most nights in Dawson end at Diamond Tooth Gertie’s, Canada’s oldest casino and home, three times a night, to a Can-Can show hosted by the eponymous ‘Gertie’. One of the most famous dance hall stars of the Gold Rush era, she’s currently played by Amy Soloway, a singer from Nova Scotia who moved to Dawson eight summers ago to take the role. ‘Gertie was a very smart lady, and she knew what men liked, especially lonely men: liquor, gambling and ladies. She was the baddest chick in 1898,’ says Amy. ‘When I go and mingle after the shows I meet miners and feel transported back. It’s still very much alive.’
Not everybody comes here for the gold, but it has a way of pulling you in. Leslie Chapman and her husband Bill just wanted to live off the grid when they moved from Calgary in 1974 and built a cabin near the Alaskan border. Soon they started finding gold dust and after staking their claims they built a house in Dawson where Leslie now works as a goldsmith making jewellery mostly from the spoils of their own mine. She has an electronic scale on the counter, accurate to 1/100th of a gram, and often miners pay her directly with dust pulled from their pockets. That’s not what keeps her here though. ‘The Yukon means freedom,’ she says. ‘That’s the reason I came. We still have so much open, unclaimed land in its natural state. So many people in the world can’t even see the stars anymore. That’s not a problem here.’
The Yukon is a good place for people who like space. The territory stretches over a slice of land twice the size of Great Britain but its total population is just 37,000. Over 27,000 of those live in the capital Whitehorse, leaving the rest to scatter themselves thinly in small towns, tiny villages or self-sufficient cabins in the wilderness. The roads that cut through the Yukon stretch for mile after mile through seemingly endless woods of spruce, pine and fir and it’s rare to see more than a handful of fellow travellers. It’s only when you reach higher ground, above the tree line, that you can really get a sense of the scale of the place and just how remote the few cabins you pass are from anything resembling a town or city.
It’s the same across the border. Heading west from Dawson takes you over the Top of the World Highway to Chicken, Alaska, another gold-mining town that settlers initially planned to name after the many ptarmigan that lived in the area. However, none of them could agree how to spell ‘ptarmigan’, so ‘chicken’ was chosen to avoid embarrassment. It now has a population of 50 in the summer, although that drops to just four in the winter.
Susan Wiren owns and runs Downtown Chicken, a miniature high street consisting of a shop, a saloon and the Chicken Creek Cafe. She came here 28 years ago after growing up in New Jersey and laughs at the RV drivers who pass through complaining about the road conditions and expecting to find phone signal, wi-fi or ATMs. ‘They have no idea what it’s like,’ she says. ‘We have a generator that makes our own electricity and we drive a 150 mile round-trip to get supplies. When you live out here, everything logistically is difficult.’
Nobody will claim that life here is easy, but it does offer the opportunity to live in a place still largely unchanged by human hands. 350 miles south from Chicken, following the Alaska Highway back into the Yukon you’ll find Kluane National Park. It’s 8,500 square miles of protected land is home to black and grizzly bears, bald eagles, caribou and Brent Liddle, a naturalist and trail guide. The park has been Brent’s natural habitat since he was posted to the small town of Haines Junction in 1975 by Parks Canada and he has dedicated his life to exploring it. ‘When I first came here I really had the sense of being at the end of the world,’ he says, ‘but the more you live here you lose that sense of isolation. You’re busier in a remote community than you would be in a city where everything is provided for you. There are a lot of lonely people in cities.’
In Kluane, you get a sense of how untouched the whole of the Yukon would still be if nobody had ever struck gold here. The mountains that tower over the glacial lakes look just as they must have done when the pioneers first made their way among them. Kluane is home to Canada’s highest peak, the snow-engulfed Mount Logan which rises 19,525 feet in the midst of the largest non-polar icefield in the world, a glacial area where mankind still rarely treads. The only way to understand the vastness of this unforgiving land is from the air. There are peaks in Kluane that were never glimpsed by human eyes until the first National Geographic flight over the icefields in 1935, and many are still unnamed. Occasionally the ice offers up preserved artifacts of the area’s earliest human inhabitants, such as throwing spears, stone tools and even human bones belonging to the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations. ‘People who think the Yukon is all about the Gold Rush are looking at it through a very narrow lens,’ points out Brent. ‘It was an interesting period, but the First Nations history preceded it by 10,000 years.’
However, even in Kluane the Gold Rush left its mark. Unsignposted near the banks of Kluane Lake is Silver City, once a staging post for stampeders travelling north to Dawson. Now it’s a true ghost town, where rusty tin cans and broken glass litter the ground and trees twist through the tumbledown cabins as nature unhurriedly reclaims the land.
Silver City was just one stop on a journey that would have taken months in 1898. Most of those who joined the Gold Rush took steam ships from San Francisco and Seattle up to the port of Skagway, Alaska, now overrun by cruise ship tourists. From there, they faced a treacherous hike over to Bennett in British Columbia. There they built boats and began the 500 mile journey along the lakes, rivers and rapids which lead all the way to Dawson.
There were plenty of opportunistic hoteliers and saloon keepers in Bennett who, like Joseph Ladue, set out to profit from the influx of people. Among them was a German immigrant named Frederick Trump, grandfather of Donald, whose family had changed their surname from the rather less auspicious Drumpf. He ran the Arctic Hotel, which was described in letters to the Yukon Sun newspaper as being rife with prostitution. Its popularity helped make Trump his fortune. ‘It’s a shame,’ observes Brent wryly, ‘that nobody robbed him back then.’
These days, the crowds that made Trump rich are long gone. Brent leads hikes through parts of Kluane where it is not humans but bears, scratching their backs on trees to mark their passage, who have left their mark. Along the way he stops to demonstrate which mushrooms and berries can be eaten safely.
When the sun disappears behind the mountains to the west the only light for miles around comes from his own solar-powered cabin in the woods. In the cool, still evening it is easy to understand why the writer Jack London named one of his Yukon novels The Call of the Wild. More than gold, it is that call that still draws those who hear it to live here. ‘The Yukon,’ as Brent puts it, ‘picks its own people.’
As the night draws in the cabin is shrouded in the perfect darkness impossible in towns or cities. There are no lights visible anywhere on the earth, but the sky above glitters with gold dust.
Originally published in Lonely Planet Traveller, December 2016.
I visited the Black Mirror set to ask Charlie Brooker if the future is fucked
George Orwell once wrote: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
Now we know that’s a GIF, endlessly looping.
I’ve heard about another guy cursed with visions of the future so I’ve come to a haunted house to find him. It looks like the one you probably had nightmares about as a kid: gothic architecture, vines creeping up the walls and floorboards that creak like escaping ghouls. Bad news, friend. That nightmare haunted house is real and it’s in Henley-on-Thames.
In the dimly lit hall is one of those eerily realistic paintings of the house itself that you keep peering at, half expecting to see yourself trapped in a window. Beneath it stands the man I’m looking for, supervising as one of his stories is brought to life. “I suppose you’re like a guide,” he says of his role here. “Like someone who’s seen these fabulous visions, and then the people from the village are asking: ‘What did you see beyond the mist?’ And you’re telling them.” Charlie Brooker pauses for a beat. “That’s the cuntiest way I could think of to describe it.”
In its five years on our screens Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror has given us a string of dead-on predictions. They range from the expected – people filming their entire lives in 2011 episode The Entire History of You two years before Google Glass – to the rather less expected. “Who would have thought,” asks Brooker, “That the [prime minister] pig-fucking episode would be the most accurate one?”
After two series and a Christmas special for Channel 4, Brooker and fellow producer Annabel Jones will premiere the third series of Black Mirror exclusively on Netflix tomorrow. It’s a move that granted the pair an increased budget, which Brooker says has all been put to good use. “There’s more things you can do with it,” he says. “We have episodes set in California, and a bit of CGI. The scale of it is different. The fact that the actors are clothed and have shoes. That it was written on a golden typewriter…”
Our supposed soothsayer is taking the absolute piss. What they’ve actually been spending the money on is stars like Bryce Dallas Howard and Kelly MacDonald and directors like Atonement’s Joe Wright and 10 Cloverfield Lane’s Dan Trachtenberg. In fact, Trachtenberg is hard at work right now upstairs in this haunted house. We can hear the echoing screams of Wyatt Russell – son of Kurt, last seen in Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some – being dragged around unsure of what’s real and what’s not.
When the scene is over, Trachtenberg explains how Brooker has managed to become so attuned at bringing our fears to life. “You can see the show in his personality,” he points out. “He’s observational, and he’s always finding the irony in things. He’s a concerned guy but his worries are often very funny. They’re not funny to him! He’s really worried, but the way he expresses them are funny for us.”
Trachtenberg is directing an episode called Playtest, which sees Russell’s character thrown into a terrifyingly immersive computer game. It’s one of six new episodes and, as Brooker explains on-set, he’s relished the freedom the new format has afforded him:
Now that you’re off conventional TV, were you tempted to indulge yourself in sprawling episodes?
Brooker: “We could make it eight hours long! If I could come up with a story where someone is stuck in a short time-loop we could keep them there for eight hours.”
Like those LPs with a circular groove at the end?
“Exactly. You could do that with ‘White Bear’. You could loop that episode again and again and again and just change the date that he crosses off. I’ll have to do that sometime… a little art installation for someone…”
Have Netflix been hands on?
“They’re very supportive and they’ve been very involved in that they’ve got an opinion on everything. I would say 99% of the time I agree with what they say, but they don’t impose things or give you instructions, it’s more suggestions. Most of the time what they’re saying is irritatingly well thought out and cogent and clever. You can’t go: ‘Bloody execs coming in and tinkering with my art!'”
Having six episodes this time must’ve given you more scope to explore different genres?
“Yeah, you kind of have to. Over six you need a wider variance in tone, otherwise it just becomes predictable. We’re not always necessarily going to have bleak endings, which is historically what we have had.”
So are we in for happy endings?
“Well, this is Black Mirror so… we don’t want people getting up and showing shoes at the screen because…”
Because you’ve made them happy and they’re furious?
“…because they smiled. Well, hopefully they will smile, occasionally, through the anguish. It’s a weird one. What people think the show is slightly depends on which episodes they’ve seen, obviously. If you’ve watched ‘Entire History Of You’ it feels like its commentary on personal relationships and technology, if you’re looking at ’15 Million Merits’ it’s more a satirical, cheerful dystopia. That’s a sarcastic version of now.”
Was that episode autobiographical?
“It turned out that way. We did jokingly refer to it as ‘The Screenwipe Story’, just in that the guy is railing against stuff and then ends up on TV. The original ending was slightly different, and I thought it was quite neat. Because he was constantly having to look at how many merits they were generating, in the original ending he ended up looking at how many ratings his show was generating. It was difficult to shoehorn that in, although it’s implied. It’s all allegorical. I was thinking of weird old Plays for Today that used to be on in the 80s, which probably happened by accident and wouldn’t be on today anywhere. There was this thing called ‘The Year of the Sex Olympics’, which was by Nigel Kneale, who did ‘Quatermass’. It’s not what it sounds like!”
That’s on Channel 5 now, I think.
“It probably is! It’s from 1968 and it’s got Leonard Rossiter in it and Brian Cox, not the physicist the actor, obviously. It predicts reality TV with quite a bizarre degree of accuracy. I watched it with my wife and we were going: ‘This is… now?’ There’s a bit of it which sort of predicts TV execs looking at Twitter, in a weird way. The entire population is kept dull by watching shows called things like the Tittedy Bum Dance Hour, and The Sex Olympics, and Fat People Falling Down, and that sort of thing… or is that our world? I’m getting mixed up. Anyway, to gauge how the shows are going down the producers have a panel of viewers who are sitting there constantly with a camera on their face, there’s about nine people on this panel, and they look at their facial expressions and go: ‘Oh no, they’re not liking it!’ That’s people looking at Twitter! Then they basically invent Big Brother in it. They say: ‘What we need is a show that’s completely unscripted. We’ll just get some people and put them in a house.’ It’s a bit like Survivor because they say: ‘Let’s put them on an unihabitated island and just have cameras on them 24 hours a day.’ They do that within the show. Obviously, there are all sorts of elements that seem quite clunky or old and creaky by today’s standards, but it was really ahead if its time. At the time I saw it I was thinking that you don’t really get those weird, one-off Plays for Today anymore where it’s just set in a giant onion because someone’s had the notion of doing that. You don’t get that sort of weirdness happening so much anymore, certainly not for one episode. So it was a very deliberate attempt to make something set in a bizarre universe that doesn’t really make sense and is just sort of ‘allegory land’. It felt like a statement of intent to do that early on. Some of these new episodes are set in quite odd environments.”
Does having a bit more budget help with that?
“Generally you can although often restrictions are quite good. You still have to approach it practically. We don’t have $50 million, but there’s definitely more you can do. There’s an episode called ‘Hated In The Nation’, which is a 90 minuter… roughly, we haven’t seen the first cut yet. It might be six minutes! It won’t be six minutes… That’s got a relatively large cast and lots of locations, and is on a scale that we probably couldn’t have done before. It’s got a pain-in-the-arse driverless car in it. It’s about two female police officers, not Cagney and Lacey or Rosemary and Thyme. They’re played by Kelly Macdonald and Faye Marsay.”
Is that your crime procedural episode?
“Kind of. It’s might start off like that. It’s closer to Scandi-noir than it is to… Rosemary and Thyme, for instance. It’s Scandi-noir meets Black Mirror, set in Britain. It becomes apparent quite quickly that it’s a bit odd. All the new episodes are atypical, but that one in particular is very different to anything we’ve done before because doing a police procedural is different. It’s sort of plot-driven rather than character-driven. You’re not focusing so much on a protagonist, which I guess is where the ‘procedure’ comes in.”
Is it strange for you to be on set like this and just oversee the director?
“I’m not always on set, but when I am I often tend to be chipping in on a logic point. Sometimes I’ll notice something and think: ‘Oh shit, I should change that line.’ Sometimes I’ll watch something and think: ‘That’s not how I interpreted it’ so you’ll go and have a conversation with the director. Generally if I’m here and there’s an issue it’s to do with logic. ‘We can’t do that, because this is a world where no-one has a phone!’ or that sort of thing. In this episode there was a debate about the level of reality that was going on. It was to do with whether an object would break. Could that object break? We worked out that it couldn’t, then we decided that actually, given the wider logic, it could. I can’t really explain it better than that! It’s ‘Inception’ levels of… hang on, that wouldn’t happen because that person isn’t really there. It’s that sort of thing, which is always the case. It was the case on ‘White Bear’, and the Christmas special was a nightmare in terms of the fucking levels of reality going on in that. It was imperative in that episode that you could see the blocking when you jumped in to someone’s head to see their point of view. It quite quickly became a mindfuck. There are scenes where people are walking around as blurred out silhouettes, and to do that we had to get all the extras to wear replicas of the clothes they’d worn in the other scene but in chroma key blue.”
Chroma key blue replicas of everything they’re wearing?
“Yeah. There’s a guy in a turban so he had to get a blue one. They were all wearing blue masks and gloves. Then we also had to have John Hamm for the reverse, so we had a blue John Hamm wandering around. It was quite a headache, and that tends to happen a lot.”
I’m sure someone will be swiftly along on Twitter to point out any logic errors
“They quite often do. Sometimes they identify a plot hole and they genuinely have and you think: ‘Oh, shit’ but sometimes they’re identifing something that you knew but went: ‘Oh, fuck it. Most people won’t notice or care and if they do it won’t matter.’ That happened with ‘The National Anthem’ a lot. There are a few little plot holes, which I think are addressed within it, but that are kind of implausible. Broadly it works, but that’s probably the most divisive episode we’ve done, I’d say. That’s why we’re going to do a sequel where he has to make a pig cum. No, we’re not going to do that.”
Do you write with an audience in mind, particularly now that the show has become an international success?
“No, I don’t really know who they’re aimed at. Sometimes you sort of think… well, the cliche is that you aim it at yourself, because you can’t really second guess who’s going to watch it. I don’t know that people are different around the world. I always concentrate more when I’m watching a show with subtitles, so I think lots of foreign TV is brilliant. That’s just because you can’t get distracted and go on Twitter when you’re reading this book that just happens to have people and furniture behind it.”
How do you think this series will be received?
“I can’t work it out. It’s the same but different. You don’t want it to be ‘the same’ because that’s the same, but you don’t want it to be too different. I’m probably not the best judge of how different it is. We’ve got more playful episodes than we’ve done before, and we’ve got heavier episodes than we’ve done before as well. We haven’t seen the final cut yet, so God knows what they’ll be like!”
As a writer, do you feel like you’ve already seen the episodes?
“You see them when you’re writing them, weirdly. I always think of writing as a bit like programming, which is a really unromantic way of looking at it, but it’s similar, I think, not that I’ve ever programmed anything, in that I’ll sometimes notice bugs later and think: ‘Oh fuck!’ Quite often I’ll slightly overwrite it and then when I go back and edit it and start hacking away at the stage directions I’ll realise I forgot to mention something and I’ve broken the logic of something completely. When I’m writing things, when you get on a roll with it, you tend to be seeing it so you’re sort of describing what’s happening, in some way. Getting to that state is the tricky bit. I tend to write very quickly once I know what I’m doing, and generally speaking… one of them this time round was a real pig to do. I kept rewriting and rewriting it, but otherwise they’ve come out relatively easily. I tend to now plans things a bit more than I used to, because it saves you time in the long run. I’ll write up the treatment firstwhere I broadly outline what’s going to happen, kind of the bullet point version of it. Then I’ll plot it out and write the scenes. It always massively changes, but if you didn’t have that road map to start with you’d go mental. I tend to go nocturnal when I’m writing. I tend to write at night… standing up, now, which is probably the biggest change!”
Didn’t Donald Rumsfeld have a standing desk?
“I don’t have a standing desk, I just got a cheap thing off Amazon which is like a stand that you put a laptop on because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to commit to the whole standing desk thing. What’s good about it is you just waste less time. You don’t sit there and think: ‘I’ve got to write a scene with a helicopter in it’ and then go on Wikipedia and look up helicopters, and then before you know it you’re watching episodes of Airwolf on YouTube.”
So you’re tricking yourself into writing quickly because you want to sit down?
“Yeah, you’re slightly uncomfortable the whole time but nowhere near as uncomfortable as you’d think. You’re writing, and then you go and sit down for a little rest.”
Do you have to unplug the internet?
“I tried that for a while. Standing up is better. It’s when you’re sat there slouching that you end up going on the internet constantly. I tried it before. I had a bit of software called Freedom that cuts off your internet connection. I discovered that it would work but a bit, but what’s terrifying about it is how often you would forget. You’d go to check your email and it would say: ‘Connection Error’ and you’d think: ‘What? Oh yeah, of course, I switched the internet off’ and then later you’d go back to it again, like a lab rat. You’d keep going back looking for that little dopamine hit. So I was using it for a bit, and it just cuts off your internet connection, so then I’d just start using my phone. I’d be sitting there staring at my phone, so that didn’t work either. I was talking to the novelist Ned Beauman, who might be doing something with us for the second season. He locks his phone in a kitchen safe, which is a perspex box with a timer on it. He locks it in there for hours and then goes off and works, so he can’t get to it. I haven’t tried that because I worry there’ll be an emergency.”
Ned’s also an advocate of wearing ear plugs to help you work.
“That’s a bit much. I’ll play music, but I can’t listen to anything with lyrics. I suppose it’s a similar thing to going nocturnal. There’s just fewer distractions. During the day you slightly feel like you should be outside, or you feel that time is ticking away, whereas at night you should either be asleep or doing that. I plot things out using Scrivener. I’m evangelical about using Scrivener to start with, and then I somehow segue into using Final Draft at some point in the process. I don’t do any of those things like having a system… I scarcely know what the first, second and third acts are, but I guess when you look back you go: ‘Oh, that’s adhered to that structure.’ I can’t keep all that stuff in my head about the hero’s quest or whatever. I think it’s masturbation, basically, or it’s interesting but it’s like music theory. Being told why a song is catchy isn’t the same. You kind of intrinsically know when something has gelled. Where we are in the cycle at the moment is that after we’ve done the last few days of shooting I’m about to start getting back into the writing process.”
Have you written the next six episodes yet?
“No.”
Not at all?
“I know what some of them are. I know what quite a few of them are. It’s partly balancing. There was one that I wanted to do in this series but there was a similarity with something we’d done in the second season. Now I think enough water has gone under the bridge that we can do it. There’s quite a few ideas that have got the same sort of technological underpinning, so I know I can’t do all of those unless I come up with something like the Christmas special which is a portmanteau. That was a clearing house for lots of ideas I’d had that weren’t long enough to sustain a full episode, but I realised they could fit together. I’ve got a clear idea of what quite a few of them are. As for the others, they often start from a germ of an idea that it would be good if there was something a bit like this… but I don’t know quite what it is. Here’s a thing I’ve noticed, and then extrapolate from that. That’s slightly terrifying, because if it doesn’t happen we’re fucked!”
You’re not tempted to bring in other writers?
“Well, I said about Ned. For this run of six, two of them were written with other writers. There’s a guy called Will Bridges, who’s been writing on one of the episodes, and Mike Schur and Rashida Jones writing on one of the other ones. We’ve done that, and we’ll do that again for the second batch. It’s a difficult one for people to come in and slot into, because it’s probably a more idiosyncratic show than I realised when I first set it up. They are all different, and you could have almost anything happen in it, and it does have technology, but it doesn’t tend to be… I find it hard to articulate what a Black Mirror story is, but I know it when I think of it. The thing that lets me know I’ve hit on a good idea is when I start getting worried that someone else is going to do it. We’ve been quite lucky that that hasn’t quite happened yet. I start getting a real panic that I’ll see a trailer for a film with the same premise. It’s all a very different muscle to doing comedy stuff. It’s a completely different mode of thinking.”
Have the episodes you’ve made before measured up to how you first imagined them?
“Generally they’re better. It’s weird because they’re often really similar, but better because along the way you work out all sorts of ways of doing things. Sometimes things happen which are not what you envisioned at all, but which turn out to work and be a better idea. Generally speaking, bits that don’t work are things that didn’t work on the page, I always find. It’s pretty close. We’re involved in every aspect, including the edit, dubbing, all the designs… I get very nerdy about the typeface used on the phones, and all that sort of stuff. We don’t tend to do too much of that stuff that you get in Hollywood movies, which is getting better, but it always used to be that if the hero received an email there’d be a giant animation of an envelope spinning around. We don’t tend to do those kind of histrionic computers. We want our technology to feel real, or basically magic. In that respect, because I’m chipping in at every stage, it’s close to what I envisioned. That’s really what you’re being asked about: is this what you pictured? It’s amazing what difference things can make. Even at the stage of the audio mix you can alter something which massively affects a scene, for better or worse. Continuing to be involved in that stage does make a difference. That’s the thing I always forget about how long the gestation period is. From the inception of the idea through pre-production, production, post-production there’s a constant barrage of questions and decisions. Then people watch it and go: ‘Huh!’ It’s very different to doing topical comedy shows. That’s very intense for a very short period of time, and then its done and nobody is ever going to watch it again. Who’s still watching 2013 Wipe now? No-one. It’s a very different discipline.”
Does that make a difference to how much pressure you feel?
“It’s the same amount of pressure compressed into less time. The pressure is about the same. When you’re doing topical stuff… the weirdest one was when I was doing the live thing. That was immense pressure in an afternoon. Terrifying, and then it would be over in three or five minutes, my chunk. Then there’d be another fifty minutes on air. It was always a bit surreal when it finished. I was done for the week. I didn’t know what to do with myself. With this, it’s a constant low-level pressure. It’s enjoyable. It’s problem solving, a lot of the time.”
Has Black Mirror become your main job now?
“Certainly at the moment. We’ve postponed doing Weekly Wipe and stuff like that because you can’t really do it at the same time. We’ve postponed that for a bit. I’m doing the end of year show. It’s all-consuming, which means you can’t consume anything else…”
Is this what you feel happiest doing?
“I’m not happy doing anything. What is happiness? No… um… yeah, I think so. It’s a constant challenge.”
[Someone comes to announce that catering has arrived…]
“Shall we go and get some soup? He said, hungrily. We’ve set up a soup kitchen outside. I’d say it’s… It’s fucking cold. Jesus. Who broke the bloody weather?… I’ve got to stop swearing. I swear all the time… In terms of what I’m happiest doing, I like variety. Which is stupid, because generally all the things I’ve ever done have either been short runs or… Dead Set was one story, but it was a short one. Black Mirror is a different story each episode. Topical shows again are different every week. It’s bloody stupid, really, because it’s difficult! It means you don’t get many recurring characters… Philomena Cunk, I guess would be one. It seems to be the way I’m wired, for whatever reason.”
Even TV Go Home had that variety.
“Yeah. I started doing that specifically because I wanted to do something with comic strips. I did a website where I put comic strips up. But comic strips take so long to do, and are such a pain in the arse, and I wasn’t the world’s greatest cartoonist, so I thought that I should be doing something that I could just regularly update. So I started doing that because it was easy and bitty. I set myself the goal of doing it once a fortnight. At the time it was probably the most disciplined I’d ever been. It became quite popular, and that was what got me the job on The Guardian and things like that.”
What made you decide to do spoof TV listings?
“It wasn’t really my idea. It’s a thing that’s been done in novelty comedy books since year dot. I’d forgotten but rediscovered recently that when I was about 16 I was doing stuff for a comic called Oink and I’d written a Radio Times parody for that. So I’d been doing it for yonks. That was the prototype, I suppose. At the time I started doing TV Go Home it felt like TV was in a slightly transitional period. There were things that overtook the listings, like Touch The Truck. Also, if you think about… it was pre-I’m A Celebrity. When you’ve got Matt Willis from Busted eating a kangaroo anus on TV, what’s the point of writing a satirical listing? You can’t really outdo that.”
Does Donald Trump make you feel the same way about political satire? Where can you go?
“Hes terrifying, because he’s shameless. Literally shameless, in that you cannot shame him. He’ll just come out with a blizzard of lies. There’s that old saying that the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it. What he does is comes out with a constant confetti of little lies so he never really gets called out, because there’s always another one… as soon as you start to go: ‘Hang on a minute, that didn’t happen you fucking liar!’ he’s come out with another ten lies. What do you do when it’s someone who just lies all the time? You’ve got no idea what he really believes, or really represents. He’s a terrifying, weird, comb-overed blank. He’s kind of like the nightmare vision of a President. He’s the guy from the fucking Deadzone, but you can also see that he’s appealing because he’s none-of-the-above. He’s the anti-candidate, but he’s the worst possible person to step into that role. Maybe it’s all a situationist art prank, I don’t know. I feel like I won’t sleep soundly until after November, even though the election is nothing to do with me. It may be happening overseas, but you kinda feel like… I don’t really want to have to start digging a bunker.”
How do you feel about Hillary Clinton?
“I don’t know much about her, but I know she’s not particuarly popular. It’s almost a perfect storm. There are few people I can imagine would do a worse job than Trump, so I would be inclined to look at it in that reductive way. I don’t know too much about her, but I understand that she’s not well liked in the States, to put it mildy. It’s not exactly a popularity contest. I keep telling myself that sanity and pragmitism will prevail, and people will go: ‘I hate Hillary, but at least she’s not him.’ I read PJ O’Rourke say he’ll vote for Hillary, because he thinks she’s wrong on every issue, but she’s wrong within normal parameters. I feel like I won’t be able to watch the news on the night of the election, because I’ll worry too much about it. I’m nothing if not a worrier. The Black Mirror version of that reality is that you wake up and Trump’s won, so maybe it’s good for business.”
How do you rate Nathan Barley, looking back now?
“I think, apart from anything else, the fucking cast we had on it… Benedict Cumberbatch is in it, Ben Whishaw… And it was weirdly prescient. It was slightly informed by my experiences writing in the video games world in the 90s. I wanted to transition from that to writing for newspapers but I didn’t know how to do it.”
“Dutch wine”?
“Dutch wine. That was what I felt like. I wouldn’t know how to begin writing for a Sunday newspaper because I don’t have that whole… It’s like everyone else knows something I don’t. Dan Ashcroft’s desperation was informed by that lack of a sense of direction. We predicted a lot of things by accident. In Nathan Barley he’s got that phone he carries around with him all the time, the Wasp T12. I remember at the time we thought it should have all sorts of different functions. It’s sort of got apps, but they’re physical. He could open it up and it had DJ decks, and it could project things. If we’d thought of apps you could use on a screen we could have made a fortune. It basically is an iPhone isn’t it. At the time it came out I remember people going: ‘Oh, this is a bit two-years-ago. The dot com bubble has burst. That moment’s passed. Now it looks like an alternate reality where everyone has slightly older technology.”
Do you find yourself reading and watching a lot of near-future satire? Have you read things like Super Sad True Love Story?
“No. I try not to read things or watch things, generally. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll watch and read things that are not in the same ballpark, but for instance I haven’t seen the film Her because loads of people have said to me: ‘That’s quite Black Mirror, you should watch that.’ I don’t want to watch it because I’ll be too angsty. If it’s brilliant I’ll get twisted up. If I think it’s rubbish I’ll get twisted up. If I think it’s just okay I probably won’t like that either. I kind of can’t. Although I did watch Ex Machina, which I enjoyed. I tend to avoid sci-fi near-future things if I can, partly because I’ll see something and go: ‘We’re trying to do something like that!'”
Do you worry it would end up in your writing?
“Not so much. We’ve done episodes that are ostensibly in a similar world to other things. There have been stories before about nightmarish Orwellian futures, so I don’t worry too much about overlap. Her came out around the same time as our episode Be Right Back, but they’ll have been in production for ages. People always gleefully tweet me these things, and horrible news stories as well. ‘Someone was killed by an iPhone falling on their head, that’s a bit Black Mirror isn’t it?’ I’m the first to be informed of all of that shit. Increasingly it’s product launches. People tweet me saying: ‘Apple have launched a thing that’s just like the home-controlling egg from the Christmas special!’ or the Samsung contact lenses. I think a lot of our stuff is quite out there, so I don’t think anything like that will happen this time…”
You say that now…
“I say that now. That’s true. Who’d have thought the pig fucking episode would be the most accurate one? I didn’t know anything about that. It’s the one thing people always ask me. I didn’t. I’d never heard that rumour. When that story broke I was quite weirded out. I was quite worried, for a short period, that maybe reality is a simulation designed to confuse me. It was so weird. It was such a weird thing. The day before someone had sent me a link to an article that was: ‘Look at all these things Black Mirror predicted’ and it said in the article: ‘Obviously not the prime minister one…’ I genuinely thought it was too weird a coincidence. It was too specific. If I’d known about it I wouldn’t have bothered writing a thing about it, I’d have just run around yelling it at people.”
What do you think really happened with Cameron? Did they just want to make him deny it?
“It was a weird old story, wasn’t it? There was supposed to be one source. You would think, that if the logic follows that he always felt he was born to rule even at Bullingdon, then you’d think he would have the wherewithal to think: ‘Maybe I shouldn’t fuck a pig’s head in front of everyone.’ I could imagine some tomfoolery, but actually putting your knob in a pig’s mouth? I find that hard to believe. I would image it’s an embroidered version of something. God knows. It seemed to be motivated as a revenge story. I felt quite sorry for him, although it was funny. In The National Anthem the Prime Minister is the most sympathetic person in it. It was too funny for people not to enjoy. It was like a carnival on social media. It was eerie how it did play out on the news as it did in our episode, in that they pussyfooted around it and how they would even manage to describe it. That really did play out exactly as it did in the episode, which is bizarre because they must have been having the same conversations in the newsrooms. ‘Everyone on the internet is talking about, how do we describe it? It’s breakfast, we can’t have people choking on their bacon.’ I don’t know. I’m hoping that doesn’t happen again. I don’t want to predict more things. It would be quite bleak.”
Do you ever get those tweets about things being a bit Black Mirror and think: ‘God that is quite a good idea’?
“Occasionally, but it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that originally the point of the series wasn’t to be technological. I’ve discovered that if we sit there trying to think of stories on the basis that: ‘Oh, Google are doing a thing…’ it’s hard to come up with. It tends to be more broad ‘What if?’ ideas that lend themselves to some sort of technological element. Really, we use technology in this show in the same way that The Twilight Zone would use magic or the supernatural, it’s a means by which magical things happen. Which is sort of how it happens in real life. When the show first came out there was a period when I’d have believed anything. The first time you use Uber it’s like magic. What I just do this and the car appears? That’s amazing. I did a show a couple of years ago for the BBC called How TV Ruined Your Life. As part of that, one of the things we did was went out and vox-popped people. One episode was on progress. We went and showed people a promotional video we’d mocked up for a mobile phone that let you call through time so that you could ring yourself in the future so you could remind yourself of something. We showed it to people and a surprising number took that at face value, because you’re so accustomed to believing miracles. The Time Phone allowed you to call through time and it also had a laser so you could boil a cup of tea in seconds. People went: ‘That’s clever, when’s it out?’ because why wouldn’t it be? In fact, you could ring yourself in the future. I could imagine a service that you call and record a voice message and then it’s timed to call you back in the future: ‘Hey Charlie, remember that you’re living in a dystopian nightmare?’ So the ideas for Black Mirror either tend to be a funny ‘What if?’ about a situation or things like The National Anthem that take a ridiculous scenario and treats it seriously. All the thematic layers were secondary. You realise that if you commit to it then there’s all sorts of other things you can be saying. When people talk to me about Black Mirror ideas they’re often coming at it from a worthy, issues point of view, whereas I usually start with a popcorny idea, a hooky premise, that means people will say: ‘I’ve just watched this mental thing where a man fucked a pig.’ Well, hopefully not that, that’s a spoiler. Hopefully we’re adhering to that. It’s weird when you look at the episodes across the series. You go: we’ve got a poignant one, we’ve got a lighter one… now we need an absolutely devastating one.”
‘What’s the worst thing you can possibly imagine?’
“Yeah, often it’s that kind of thing. Here’s a set-up, now what’s the worst thing that could happen now? What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone? We’ve had a couple of examples of that. In White Christmas, what happens to Raph Spall’s character is pretty much the worst thing that could happen to anyone. Living for eternity experiencing Christmas Day in a house that isn’t there, on your own, with the body of a child whose death you were responsible for, while Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ plays on an eternal loop and every time you smash the radio it gets louder.”
“LOL!”
“Yeah, it always makes me laugh. Whenever we come up with an endpoint like that I always fucking piss myself. That’s when you know it’s perfect. That would be horrendous! Let’s have a good laugh about it!”
Anyone can play guitar
Published in British GQ, November 2016.
Malawi’s Lake of Stars festival: banging the drum for Africa’s musical heritage
For most pilgrims it is a long way to Lake of Stars festival. This year the event returned to its original site at Chintheche Inn in northern Malawi, seven hours by bus from the capital Lilongwe. Many artists come from further afield still, across Africa and Europe. Alongside them this year were groups of refugees making their own journey from Malawi’s Dzaleka camp.
These included the Amahoro Drummers, a traditional Burundian group who perform with the tall karyenda drums balanced precariously on their heads. And yet most of the two dozen drummers have lived in exile their whole lives, member Simon Nzigamasabo tells me. “Maybe 95% of us – including myself – have never seen Burundi,” he says. “I was born in Tanzania in 1985 and learned how to play this drum there. Our leaders in the camps always wanted the children to see a positive side of their country.”
Alexander Skarsgård: ‘I still wake up shivering in the foetal position’
A few years ago, Alexander Skarsgård turned up at a Hammarby football match in Stockholm noticeably… what’s a polite way of putting this? Worse for wear? “I was shitfaced,” says Skarsgård. “I went up in front of the crowd and started doing this chant. Someone put it on YouTube. I’m very drunk, going: ‘You fucking cunts, listen to me!’ I thought: ‘This is real embarrassing.’”
During the bleak hangover that followed, the 40-year-old Swedish actor thought he might have torpedoed a career that had just seen him get the part of Tarzan in this summer’s blockbuster. In fact it made him an even more perfect fit for the role. “Warner Bros had said they needed someone primal and animalistic,” he says. “So my agent sent them the video, saying: ‘Isn’t this motherfucker primal enough for you?’”
Another one of the half-million people who watched it was John Michael McDonagh, writer-director of The Guard and Calvary, who was on the lookout for a hard-drinking detective for his pitch-black buddy comedy War On Everyone. “He saw the video and went: ‘That’s the guy,’” says Skarsgård. “It got me the job. The moral of the story is: Make a fool of yourself and people will love you. Remember that, kids.”
Daniel Radcliffe on God, flatuent corpses and not being a dick
In Imperium you play an FBI agent undercover with white supremacists. What’s the most disturbing thing you learned?
It’s all fairly disturbing. I was more surprised by the mundane stuff. I imagined that white supremacists would go on internet forums and say horrible things about black people and Jews. I didn’t imagine they’d be swapping poems.
Which conspiracy theories are you a fan of?
I love the idea that aliens might have built the Pyramids or interceded in our progress as a civilisation. I don’t believe that, but I love hearing people talk about it.
What did you think when you read the Swiss Army Man script and realised you’d be playing a flatulent corpse?
That it was, yeah, kinda weird, but mostly what struck me was how funny and inventive it was. There was something really exciting about the levels of imagination at work. I immediately thought: “Holy shit, this is going to be something cool.”
‘Don’t drink from a rubber chicken’ – and other student advice from our writers
I wish I’d known… not to be ‘vibey’
Look, here’s a bit of hard-won wisdom for you: Rocking up on your first day in student halls wearing a belt buckle with a slide-out Zippo lighter in it and immediately pinning up a Fear and Loathing poster does not make you look as cool and dangerous as you think it does. You are not ‘vibey’. Put out the joss sticks, the whole floor can still smell the soapbar spliffs you smuggled up from Devon. In time your German roommate will learn that no, it isn’t all “totally legal” here since “they changed the law”. He won’t be glücklich. Oh, and apparently no one else has brought a desktop computer to uni with them since 1998.
Read more student advice from other writers at The Guardian.
Judge Rules to Extradite Alleged UK Hacker Lauri Love
Lauri Love will be extradited to the US to face charges related to his alleged involvement in #OpLastResort, a UK judge has ruled today.
Speaking at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this afternoon, Judge Nina Tempia said: “I will be extraditing Mr Love, by which I mean I will be passing the case to the Secretary of State.”
The ruling, which lasted under five minutes, was attended by Love, his parents, and around 40 supporters. Leaving court, some of his supporters derided the decision, shouting: “Bullshit, kangaroo court!”
Love, a 31-year-old electrical engineering student, is set to face three separate trials in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. #OpLastResort was a series of online protests that followed the death of Aaron Swartz in early 2013. Love is accused of hacking US systems including some belonging to NASA and the FBI and could face a prison sentence of up to 99 years in the US.
Love was advised that he has a 14-day leave to appeal, which would see the case go to the High Court. Outside court, Love’s legal team confirmed they would be lodging an appeal.
Love himself said, “I’m not going to comment too much, because I haven’t read [the full ruling], and I have to. I want to thank everyone for their support, and to thank the judge for giving us the opportunity to win at a higher court and set a stronger precedent. I think this only helps the cause of supporting better justice, but it’s unfortunate for me and my family that we have to go through another six months or a year of legal stuff, but it’s what we have to do.”
Be Here Then
Just after 9pm on Sunday 11 August 1996, Noel Gallagher stepped on stage in front of 125,000 people for the second night running, jabbed his index finger at them and bellowed:
‘This is history. Right here. Right now. This is history!
“I thought this was Knebworth,” deadpanned brother Liam, standing front and centre. “What are you on about? ‘Ah, we’re all going to History for the weekend to watch Oasis.’ It’s not on the map, our kid…”
Both brothers were, for once, right. Oasis at Knebworth was history in the making. Those two nights in a muddy field near Stevenage were the high-water mark not just for their band but for a wave of British culture that transformed the country at the end of the last century. For better or for worse, the energy of a whole generation was coming to a head.
Major Lazer: 24 Hour Party People
Luton isn’t the most glamorous airport in the world. It isn’t even the most glamorous airport around London, but it’s where Major Lazer find themselves at 1:20pm on Friday 15 July, piling out of a private jet and into the first of a fleet of blacked-out minivans waiting on the tarmac. They’re already an hour behind schedule. Even private jets have their drawbacks. Nobody ever tells you about the delays.
“When we fly from Burbank to Las Vegas on Southwest airlines we’ve only had one delay ever,” Diplo reminds Jillionaire and Walshy Fire as they pull away, bleary-eyed but sipping on nothing stronger than bottled water. “On private jets I’ve had like 30 delays. What the fuck is the point?”
Talk about First World problems, but these are the things that might concern you too if you flew more often than a commercial airline pilot (Diplo estimates he took 300 flights last year) and your entire life was planned out minute by minute. Last night the trio, who’ve been performing together since 2011, headlined Benicassim in Spain. Tonight they’ll do the same at London’s Lovebox, then tomorrow it’s Longitude in Ireland and then on to Vieilles Charrues in France. Four straight nights of headline shows. More pressingly, Diplo needs to get to a meeting with his management and then to his own solo DJ set at Lovebox this afternoon. From the outside, Major Lazer looks like a non-stop carnival of debauchery, basslines and booty shaking. From the inside, it’s run with military precision.
Hence the bottled water. Their rider is more Gwyneth Paltrow than Mötley Crüe, all coconut water, green smoothies and Kombucha, although Diplo says he “drank a whole bottle of rum in Cuba.” That was back in March, when Major Lazer played the biggest show of their career – one of the biggest shows of anyone’s career – in front of an estimated 400,000 people in Havana. “I might drink a whole bottle of rum once every six months,” he says. “Then I can’t drink rum again. We’re too old to party too hard.”
So far, stuck on the road between Luton and London, the reality of life in Major Lazer isn’t quite living up to billing. “As you can see, it’s pretty lame,” says Diplo. “The three of us in a car drinking water. Every once in a while we might meet a girl, but we usually don’t because we have to go to the airplane.”
He shrugs. “We’re pretty normal guys, you know?”
At 2:45pm, we arrive at their hotel in Fitzrovia and Diplo runs in for his meeting with his management. Despite what he says, there’s nothing normal about his workload. As well as Major Lazer’s relentless tour schedule, recording with Skrillex as Jack Ü and producing for the likes of Beyoncé and Madonna, he’s also still hands-on running his label Mad Decent. He has other investments in companies like Snapchat, and his total net worth is estimated at around $15 million. On top of all that, in a week’s time Major Lazer will release ‘Cold Water’, intended as the first of a series of big singles leading up to their new album next January.
Featuring Justin Bieber and Mø, the laidback dancehall of ‘Cold Water’ is a sort of coming together of Diplo’s two biggest tracks of last year: Jack Ü and Bieber’s ‘Where Are Ü Now’ and Major Lazer and Mø’s ‘Lean On’. Weirdly, given that it’s now racked up over 1.49 billion views (making it the ninth most-watched YouTube video of all time) and helped push Major Lazer up to the status of major festival headliners, they originally didn’t intend to release ‘Lean On’ themselves. It was offered to both Rihanna and Nicki Minaj who each turned it down.
“We felt like any song we did would be bigger with a Beyoncé or a Nicki Minaj on it,” explains Diplo. “I’m a producer at heart, but I realised that it’s way better to do it ourselves. I think the power of the superstar has significantly gone down in the last ten years. I’ve always worked in an industry where your goal is to give it to the biggest star. That’s gone now. I tried to shop that record around and people didn’t understand it. Now, every song on the radio sounds like ‘Lean On’.”
Before ‘Lean On’, it was Beyoncé’s sampling of their track ‘Pon De Floor’ on 2011’s ‘Run The World’ that convinced them that they could have mainstream radio success without compromising their sound. “‘Pon de Floor’ was never a big hit, it was kinda underground,” says Diplo. “It took two years for somebody else to put it on the radio. It made us think: ‘Why are we doing all this stuff for other people and then waiting a year to get sampled? Let’s just be trend-setters on the radio.’ We realised that no-one’s got an edge with reggae and dancehall, and it’s such a massive undercurrent.”
At a time when the divisive, racist politics espoused by the likes of Donald Trump are running rampant, its significant that the music Major Lazer make is a truly global soundclash, drawing on Caribbean and African beats but also working in European, Indian and North and South American influences. For Diplo, this all stems from his childhood growing up as little Wes Pentz in southern Florida, where, he says: “Haitians, Latinos, Cubans, white kids, Jewish kids and hood kids were all in the same neighbourhood and the same schools. Miami is the most diverse place for human beings I’ve ever been to.”
As a white man, he’s been accused of cultural appropriation for profiting from all these varied traditions. He argues he’s simply responding to the music around him. “When I grew up no-one told me what I was supposed to listen to,” he says. “On the radio, Miami bass was always the thing for me, and heavy metal, that was big in Florida too. My parents listened to country. Rap was on the radio. I grew up and I loved music. I didn’t think: ‘Oh, I’m white I’ve got to play a guitar.’ I never had a guitar.”
He laughs. “I really fucked that up. I only had turn-tables. I wish I got a guitar, then I wouldn’t have so much criticism. For me, the band that is most influential to us is The Clash. Nobody said: ‘You’re culturally appropriating’ when they made ‘Rock The Casbah’. It was just music. That was 30 years ago. How are we that weird? I think what makes a great artist is someone who can change the direction of music, not someone who stays in the same position all the time. Otherwise music would be so fucking boring.”
It was in Miami too that he learned how artists could build an audience by hustling mixtapes, not by signing to a major label. He’s recently worked again with his once girlfriend MIA on a new track ‘Bird Song’, although she’s struggled to release it due to interference from her label. “Even from back in the day I told her not to sign that deal with Interscope,” he says. “I was like: ‘What’s the point?’ The point was to become bigger and more popular and work with Timbaland and all that stuff, but none of that matters if you own your own music. We’re independent. We do our music on our own in America. I think what you learn in the underground is how to make money out of nothing.”
Diplo arrives at Lovebox just after 4pm, the first of the trio to arrive at Major Lazer’s backstage village. It’s a VIP section within the VIP section, a little enclave with security at the entrance, separate dressing rooms for them and their dancers, offices for their crew and even their own catering and toilet. Huge steel flight boxes have been upended and opened up to create wardrobes for the dancers. In the main dressing room, a set of decks have been set up so that Diplo can DJ – and not just to keep him entertained.
“We’re always working on music on tour,” he explains. “We have these set-ups backstage so we can play music and fine-tune mixes, work on new music and try different ideas. We cut vocals on tour sometimes. We never waste any time. We don’t have any time to waste.”
A little after 5pm he jumps on to a chauffeured golf buggy which careens off around Victoria Park in search of his DJ set, except nobody’s actually quite sure where it’s supposed to be. Somebody told Diplo he was on after Chronixx, but we can hear him disappearing in the distance. Eventually we find the West Stage, one of the festival’s smaller venues. “Damn, they’re getting smaller all the time,” he jokes.
Backstage his decks are being readied. They’re on wheels so they can be pushed out into centre stage when he goes on. Diplo is bouncing around, apparently untroubled by his lack of sleep. Just before his decks are wheeled on he dives underneath them so he can be wheeled on unseen. When he jumps out, the crowd erupts and he rewards them with a set that features everything from Kanye and Beyoncé to snatches of Whitney Houston and the Lion King soundtrack. He finishes the set standing up on the decks, arms outstretched as the crowd bounces to ‘Where Are Ü Now’.
The set feels rehearsed and faultless, but afterwards he says it was entirely spontaneous. In fact, he’s a little annoyed that he couldn’t find everything he wanted to play. “I fucked up and couldn’t find a couple of tunes,” he admits. “I usually try not to play any Major Lazer, but I dropped one in.”
With their headline set just a few hours away, it raises the question of why he bothers – most performers would probably be happy just to take the pay cheque for the main slot and kick back in the afternoon. Back in the golf buggy, he shrugs it off, saying: “Why not? I’m here anyway, I might as well get paid for a Diplo set. What else am I gonna do, sit in my hotel room?”
He adds, though, that he’s driven by the desire to cram as much as he physically can into his career. He spends half his week in LA with his two young sons, Lockett and Lazer, and says he has: “no social life, it’s only my kids. I probably won’t do this so much when they’re older. You only get a short window so I want to do as much as I can.”
Back inside Major Lazer’s VIP area, Jillionaire and Walshy Fire have arrived and are hanging out with Mø, who’ll come on to close the show with them tonight. Just before they go on, Diplo is pogoing around his dressing room, Djing topless. “Building vibes,” as Jillionaire puts it. “It’s a family atmosphere,” he explains. “Our whole crew is here, and we’re going to make it an even bigger family with everyone who’s here today.”
They huddle backstage dressed in full cricket whites, an outfit they picked up after touring in India. It takes less than 20 seconds from Diplo shouting: “London” until the first volley of pyrotechnics, and soon all you can smell onstage is the metallic scent of fireworks. In front of them, thousands of Londoners lose their shit to a set that’s euphoric and totally unpretentious, concerned only with the making and having of good times.
Even after the set, their work is never over. They head straight from Lovebox to Tape, a 250 capacity club in Mayfair, for Diplo’s third set of the day. He takes back what he said about not partying hard. “I mean, we do,” he says. “We sleep like three hours a night. On tour we do everything we can. We want to take advantage of every moment we’re out here alive. That’s our high.”
Shooting the impossible dream
There are dark storm clouds gathering… F-16 fighter jets boom overhead, the thunderous sound of their engines interspersed with all-too-real thunderclaps. Johnny Depp is locked in a chain gang, scuttling sideways across the stark desert of the Bardenas Reales, in north-eastern Spain, but the microphones can’t pick up what he’s saying over the noise. The group approach the veteran French actor Jean Rochefort, poised atop a horse that refuses to move even when a member of the film crew gives a weighty push to its buttocks. Rochefort shifts uncomfortably in the saddle, feeling pain shoot through him from a herniated disc in his back. Finally, the storm breaks. It’s the only thing on this film set working on cue. As the rain lashes down, transforming the desert into a pit of quicksand, the director tilts his head back and roars into the heavens. “Which is it?” Terry Gilliam demands of the storm, “King Lear or The Wizard of Oz?”
That was just the second day of shooting during Gilliam’s attempt to film his epic The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in September 2000. Although millions of dollars had already been spent on the film-maker’s adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s classic Spanish novel, the hobbling production didn’t last much longer.
Two men who saw the whole sorry mess unfold were Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe. They thought they’d be working on a behind-the-scenes ‘making-of’ feature about Gilliam’s film and instead ended up making Lost in La Mancha, an excruciating documentary about a film falling apart at the seams.
“We were slow on the uptake, because it was hard to believe a production of that scale was going to come to its knees,” says Fulton now and Pepe agrees: “We were somewhat blinded to it, because Terry was a bit of a hero to us. As a young film-maker, you’re not taught about all the movies that don’t get made.”
Since that time, Lost in La Mancha has itself become a cult classic, while Gilliam’s pet project has become a byword for blighted film productions. But, 16 years on, he may finally turn his Quixotic dream into a reality. In May, at the Cannes Film Festival, the director announced he was going at it again with an all-new cast featuring Star Wars villain Adam Driver as his lead and his old Monty Python compadre Michael Palin as Don Quixote. He vowed to return to the festival next year with the finished film.
If he does, it will be a Herculean achievement. Indeed, Gilliam’s attempts to bring Quixote to the screen has been a story almost as epic as that of Cervantes’s protagonist. In total, he has now been working on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote for 27 years, over twice as long as the 12 years it took Richard Linklater to make Boyhood – and that featured a boy growing up in real time. In that period, Gilliam has found and lost a galaxy of stars – Depp and Rochefort, Ewan McGregor and Robert Duvall, Jack O’Connell and John Hurt – and seen seven iterations of the story ground into the dust. If he finally pulls it off this year, he may at least avoid the unwanted record of overtaking the 28 years it took Canadian animator Richard Williams to make his passion project, The Thief and the Cobbler.
He’s not even the first director to struggle to bring Don Quixote to the screen. Orson Welles began filming test footage for his own film version back in 1955, yet was met with so many setbacks along the way that the film remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1985, although a version of it was cobbled together by the Spanish director Jesús Franco and released in 1992.
Gilliam’s own journey began when he was still a wide-eyed 48-year-old in 1989, fresh from steeringThe Adventures of Baron Munchausen through its own wildly overbudget production. He’d called producer Jake Eberts, of Goldcrest Films, and said: “I’ve got two names for you and I want $20 million. One of the names is Don Quixote and the other is Terry Gilliam.” Eberts replied, “You’ve got your money.”
It seemed like a natural fit. Miguel De Cervantes’s sprawling 1605 novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, is concerned with the same questions of madness vs sanity, and fantasy vs reality, that have defined Gilliam’s films. The book tells the tale of an old man so obsessed with reading romantic stories about brave and noble knights that he sets out to live as one, gathering together a suit of armour from the things he finds around his house. His helmet is a shaving basin. His horse, Rocinante, is an old nag. His squire, Sancho Panza, is a fat peasant. Undaunted, Quixote sets off in pursuit of adventure and believes he finds it, regardless of what’s really going on. Where others see windmills, he sees giants to battle. Instead of whirling sails, he sees flailing arms.
“I think he’s heroic because he refuses to accept the limitations of reality,” explained Gilliam in Cannes. “He’s determined to see the world in a heroic, magical, spectacular way.”
Faced with the challenge of adapting the whole of Cervantes’s 900-page work for the screen, Gilliam decided instead to write a new story which would bring Quixote into the contemporary world – or at least send a representative back into his. Inspired by Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, he wrote a screenplay with his collaborator, Tony Grisoni, in which an advertising executive also named Toby Grisoni was sent back to the 17th century and mistaken by Quixote for Sancho Panza – and thus The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was born.
The first disaster struck quickly, when Eberts’s promised $20 million fell though. It would be 11 years before filming began, a period in which Gilliam made The Fisher King (1991), Twelve Monkeys(1995) and Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (1998). It was on the latter that Gilliam believed he’d found his leading man. After his Gonzo odyssey as Raoul Duke, Johnny Depp was lined up to play Grisoni. His then partner, Vanessa Paradis, was cast as his love interest and Rochefort was Gilliam’s Quixote. With Depp as the lead, the film secured a budget of $32.1m and began shooting in Spain.
Everything that could go wrong went wrong. Preproduction was dogged by financial and scheduling problems and then, on the day that filming was due to start, Rochefort, who has been learning English for seven months in order to take this role, failed to board his flight to the set. He had severe prostate pain, with it only later emerging that he had an infection that would prevent him riding a horse – crucial for playing Quixote. They weren’t helped by their choice of location. The desert of the Bardenas Reales was chosen by Gilliam to double for La Mancha, but the storm that halted filming also transformed the sun-bleached location he’d picked into a quagmire. As the delays piled up and the money disappeared, first assistant director Phil Patterson told Gilliam, “We can’t make the film – not the film you want to make.”
After the collapse of that production, the film’s screenplay ended up in the hands of the insurance company. Some directors would have written off the project then and there – and for a time, Gilliam did, working on The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, both released in 2005. Yet behind the scenes, he refused to give up on Quixote and by 2008, he had won back legal ownership of his story. With Depp still attached and Robert Duvall replacing Rochefort, it seemed the project was back on. The film went back into preproduction and in an interview with The Independent, Gilliam said, “We’re going to completely reshoot it. The intervening years have taught me that I can actually write a much better film. I’m so excited it’s going to get done at last.”
It wasn’t to be. The money evaporated once more, leaving Gilliam clutching at air. As the years slid by, Depp was himself replaced by McGregor, but once again funding fell through. In 2013, Gilliam was still struggling along with his quest. He told Deadline, “Certain things just possess you and this has been like a demonic possession I have suffered through all these years. The very nature of Quixote is that he’s going against reality, trying to say things aren’t what they are, but how he interprets them. In a sense, there is an autobiographical aspect to the whole piece.” In November of the following year, Gilliam announced he was trying to drum up support once again with a whole new cast attached: Jack O’Connell as Grisoni, and John Hurt as Quixote. By now, the sound of the sky falling in must have been as familiar as birdsong.
You could be forgiven, then, for taking this May’s announcement that production is back on with a spadeful of salt. Yet Gilliam is more positive about the film than at any point since 2000. This seems to be down to Portuguese producer Paulo Branco, a frequent Wim Wenders collaborator who is known in the European film industry for being the man who can make the impossible real.
“I first met Terry in February and very fast we decided to do the film together,” Branco tells me from his base in Lisbon. “It’s a real pleasure to take on this mythic project. Terry, like all artists, is a dreamer. That’s why he’s completely fascinated by Don Quixote. I think the dreamers of this world sometimes want their dreams to come true. That’s why he’s so keen to make this film a reality.”
Working together, the pair have raised a budget of €17m and secured what Gilliam calls “the perfect cast”. He says lead Adam Driver is “the first actor involved in this project who’s actually reading the book”, while adding, “Thank God for Star Wars”, for transforming the former Girls actor into a bankable leading man. He adds that Palin will be ideal for Quixote because, while the character is “old, ridiculous, foolish [and] a pain in the ass… You’ve got to love him…”.
Wisely, filming – scheduled to begin this month – will move from the blighted location in La Bardenas Reales to new ones in Portugal, Spain and the Canary Islands. “In Spain, we’ll shoot near Madrid, in La Mancha and near Toledo,” says Branco. “In Portugal, in Tomar, near the Convento de Cristo. It’s a beautiful place and when the film opens, I hope people will want to come and see the places we shot.”
Will the curse of Don Quixote finally be lifted in 2016, exactly 400 years since the death of Cervantes? Gilliam is now 75, nearly 30 years older than he was when he began his quest, but his refusal to abandon his dream has not surprised those who’ve worked with him. “I hope he can pull it off,” says Lou Pepe, “but at the same time, pulling it off isn’t the point. The striving is the point. In the larger human context, the fact that there are people out there like Terry, who don’t give up on big visions, is important for inspiring the rest of us.”
Tellingly, Gilliam has now written his own struggles into the story. The latest synopsis reveals that his protagonist Toby Grisoni once shot his own film version of Don Quixote in a pretty Spanish village as a young and idealistic film student, and it is only when he returns as a jaded publicist that his strange journey begins.
“People used to say I was Don Quixote, because I was a fantasist and a dreamer and I’d go up against reality, fail, and then get up again,” reflected Gilliam in Cannes. “I don’t think I’m Don Quixote. I’m actually Sancho Panza. Don Quixote is the film and I’m following it. It’s like one of those dream-nightmares that never leaves you until you kill the thing.”
‘It’s Been Harrowing’: Alleged Hacker Lauri Love Awaits Extradition Decision
Early in the evening of 25 October 2013, a man dressed as a UPS delivery guy arrived at Lauri Love’s family home in Suffolk holding a box. When Love’s mum answered the door, she was told that only her son could sign for the delivery. She called him downstairs, and when he emerged wearing his dressing gown, he was told that the man was in fact an officer of the National Crime Agency, and that he was being arrested on suspicion of hacking into a long list of systems, including those controlled by the US Federal Reserve, NASA, and the FBI. Love asked if he still got to keep the box.
Almost three years later, on 25 July 2016, 31-year-old Love and his parents were at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London for the final arguments in his extradition hearing. Judge Nina Tempia is hearing the case, and will rule on 16 September as to whether the UK will allow Love to be extradited to the US where he would face three separate trials in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia.
“It’s been harrowing, this whole process,” said Love, speaking to me a couple of days later. “The US didn’t even really make any arguments, they were just casting doubt on the evidence from us.”
Jared Leto: Funny How?
Most lines of work would reward sending live rats, anal beads and “used condoms” to your colleagues with a chat in a quiet room with Jane from HR as she slowly reads you your rights.
If you are Jared Leto, and your job is to play The Joker, normal rules do not apply. The world simply imagines Margot Robbie letting out a shrill scream as she drops the little package with protruding claws and whiskers and thinks: “Well, what do you expect?”
The Joker is the defining comic-book villain, cruel and unhinged – and from the actors who play the part we also demand a certain mad intensity. Jack Nicholson had it, Heath Ledger had it and Jared Leto has it, too.
The first time I meet him we’re in Las Vegas, in a suite at Caesars Palace along with Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Cara Delevingne and half a dozen other people who are also in Suicide Squad. There are some big personalities in the room, but Jared Leto isn’t one of them. While Smith whoops and hollers, Leto almost melts into the sofa. He’s dressed in all black, down to the North Face hiking shoes on his feet. His short hair, also black, is scraped sharply back.
The press has been full of stories about all those weird gifts he’s been sending his cast-mates, and how he never broke character on set, so I ask him if he knows that old actor’s story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, where Hoffman has gone full ‘method’ and Olivier turns to him and says…
“Why don’t you just act?” says Leto, finishing the story. He nods, then says: “I don’t use the term ‘method’. I think it’s kind of a polluted word. What I do is just try to focus and commit as much as possible so that I can do the story, the film, the character and everybody else justice. That’s it.”
But is there something about playing The Joker – I ask, trying to get him to open up – that demands this intensity from you?
“Yes,” he says.
There’s nervous laughter around the room at this monosyllabic reply. We all wait for him to continue but he eyeballs me and says: “What d’you think?”
This is too much tension for a pro like Will Smith to bear, so he breaks in with that 1,000-watt Fresh Prince charisma and starts going: “I mean, I didn’t meet him until two days ago! I literally did not! We worked together for six or seven months, and two days ago was really the first time we ever had a conversation!” It’s a line that Smith has wheeled out to the world’s media several times recently, probably in an attempt to defuse similarly awkward silences.
Leto is still quiet, so I turn and ask: “How did you feel when you got the live rat, Margot?”
“I was… surprised,” says Robbie, and Smith claps and laughs and quotes her back: “’I was surprised!’ There’s an understatement!”
“I loved that stuff,” continues Robbie. “Jared was doing half my work for me. Harley is very much a part of a relationship. To have such commitment from the other half made my job a thousand times easier, and a thousand times more fun. I didn’t know what was going to happen when we got on set. It’s exciting to act opposite that.”
Then Joel Kinnaman starts telling this story about the day Leto had one of his henchmen deliver a dead pig to their rehearsal, so the rest of the cast kidnapped the henchman and tied him up and sent photos back to ‘Mr J’, as they call Leto, or The Joker, or both. Everyone starts piling in with extra details, until Kinnaman gets to the punchline where Robbie scrawled ‘SS’ on the guy’s head with a marker pen and someone had to point out the Nazi connotations. By this point everyone’s howling with laughter, all except Leto who’s just sitting back listening and slightly smirking at the chaos he unleashed.
Later on, just before I leave, Leto comes over to me again. He doesn’t say a word, just extends his fist and waits for me to bump it, which I do in awkward silence. Is this because he froze me out earlier? His face is unreadable. He’d make a killing at the poker tables downstairs.
The next time I speak to Leto, he’s much more forthcoming. There’s a lot to talk about. Since we first met, the US has seen Donald Trump confirmed as the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, while in Britain we’ve voted to leave the EU and the prime minister has resigned. Nobody seems to have the faintest clue where we’re all heading. The return of a villain like The Joker, who deals in the terror of chaos, couldn’t be better timed.
“I understand what you’re saying,” says Leto when I put this to him. “The Joker doesn’t have any rules. He says and does whatever he wants. I had a lot of fun having that freedom to say and do anything and everything. I think that’s compelling, because a lot of us are so restrained in life.”
When he first won the part, Leto made the decision not to rewatch Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn in The Dark Knight, but instead delved into the comic-book source material and researched Mexican narco gangs. “There was some consideration to the times we’re living in,” he says. “Cartel leaders are the closest thing we have, on this side of the pond at least, to complete anarchy and chaos. They’re people who have – or feel like they have – ultimate power. If you look at El Chapo, he probably has as many fans as he does enemies. It’s a similar kind of thing with The Joker.”
Having painstakingly built his own take on the character, Leto lived inside it for so long that he still finds himself “making jokes with The Joker’s sense of humour”. While he won’t be drawn on whether he’s signed up to play the part again, he does say it’d “be a blast if it happens”.
The Joker could become the defining role of a career that’s so far refused easy categorisation. Leto is 44 and has been famous for exactly half his life. In 1994 he was pretty-boy Jordan Catalano in My So-Called Life, but by the end of the decade Ed Norton had destroyed his beautiful face in Fight Club, and Christian Bale had introduced him to both Huey Lewis & The News and the sharp end of an axe in American Psycho.
In 2002, 30 Seconds To Mars, the band he formed with his older brother Shannon, released their self-titled debut record to little fanfare. Their 2005 follow-up A Beautiful Lie went platinum and made Leto one of the very few who’ve had real success as both an actor and a rock frontman.
If you ever want a reminder that you’re wasting your life, consider that Jared Leto has both an Oscar and the Guinness World Record for ‘Longest Concert Tour By A Rock Band’.
He’s been so busy with the band, not to mention extra-curricular activities such as interviewing Edward Snowden for his documentary series Beyond The Horizon, that Leto’s only acted in two films since 2009. One is Suicide Squad, the other was Dallas
Buyers’ Club, which won him that Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2014.
“You know, the Oscar was unexpected. A total surprise,” he says. “I hadn’t made a movie in almost six years and I almost didn’t do that film. I remember we were on tour in Berlin. The last thing I was thinking about was making films. I wasn’t sure that I would ever make a film again.”
This is the key to Leto. He’s all or nothing. He’s either never going to make a film again, or he’s going to win an Oscar and then so immerse himself in The Joker that he finds himself Googling postage prices for live rodents. He’s not content to form a band as a side-project, he’s going to push it so hard that they end up spending a record-breaking two years solid on the road.
When I ask him what he does to unwind, he says he’s just come back from Majorca where he was doing a type of rock climbing known as deep-water soloing, or psicobloc, where, as he explains: “You climb over the water so you don’t need ropes. If you fall you just jump into the ocean. You can really fuck yourself up badly.”
Not exactly Netflix and chill, is it? The time I’ve spent with Leto, and the stories I’ve heard, have left me with a question. I try to phrase it as delicately as possible.
“Jared,” I say, “are you a bit weird?”
He pauses, mulling this over, then gives an answer about how “we’re all probably a little weird” then stops and really considers it.
“I’m aware that a lot of people don’t approach their work in the same way I do,” he says finally. “But that’s OK. Everybody has a different process, and I respect other people’s processes. I guess when you get the call to play The Joker, or certain other roles I’ve
played, it’s kind of great that you’re getting thought about for these transformational opportunities, these roles that are really challenging… I don’t think I’m at the top of anyone’s lists for the next romantic comedy…”
Which is why they’ll never make You’ve Got Anal Beads. Not that you’d want him to
be any different from how he actually is. Gloriously and intensely weird with an unnerving (and occasionally inappropriate) sense of commitment to his roles. In a world of conformity and uncertainty, Leto’s Joker could be the villain we need.
Ed Harcourt on ‘Furnaces’
Ed Harcourt returns this year with ‘Furnaces’, the most ambitious and fully-realised album of his career. It’s a record shot through with an eloquent fury that stares deeply into the modern world and asks where we’re all heading.
“These are songs about the menace and the threat that men in general pose to everything and everyone: women, children, nature,” says Harcourt. “We’ve tried to mess with Mother Nature and completely plunder it and destroy it, but it will always come back and bite us on the arse. The earth will be around forever, but we won’t. We’re just so arrogant. That was my catalyst for this album.”
The record was produced by Flood, a long-time ally of Harcourt, who has previously worked with the likes of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey and Nine Inch Nails. “He’s an unbelievable producer, he totally made me up my game,” says Harcourt, who explains that the pair would volley songs and ideas back and forth as they changed and warped into unexpected shapes. “That’s how we worked,” he says. “We were violently courting each other.”
The first songs Harcourt wrote for this record were ‘The World Is On Fire’, which now opens the album, and penultimate track ‘Immoral’. “I played those two songs to Flood and he said: ‘I see where you’re going with this, I think I can help you,’” says Harcourt, who says this album is intended as a broadside to the contemporary status quo: “I think someone needs to come along with a record like this. It feels like there are a lot of very bland, dull, safe artists out there at the moment. They could be the CEOs of record companies. I’m looking out at this world and not really liking what I’m seeing.”
Harcourt will tell you that the album isn’t a personal one, yet in writing an album of savage social commentary he’s also bared a little of his own soul. When he writes about protecting the environment, he’s also thinking about his own role as a father. When he writes about the male ego, he’s turning his forensic gaze on himself. It’s as if the prism he’s constructed to see the world has also allowed him a better view of himself.
Take for example the exuberant second track ‘Loup Garou’, which is named for the French legend of the werewolf and was inspired by Charles Mackay’s 19th century book ‘Extraordinary Delusions & The Madness Of Crowds’. “I guess I feel like the Loup Garou sometimes,” says Harcourt. “I’m a red-blooded male and have a tendency to be aggressive without meaning to be. Men like me should try to be less reactionary. I’ve always felt women shape the world — they can save it from the pugnacious man.”
The title track, ‘Furnaces’, is a satirical portrait of the havoc that mankind is wreaking on the environment, and takes issue with fracking and society’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for oil. “That song came from looking back at the speeches Cameron was making before he was elected, when he was talking about renewable energy,” explains Harcourt. “He was like a Pinocchio made of spam. He said all these things to get elected and then did a massive U-turn. I think the older you get, and once you have children, you bring them into the world and you realise: ‘We’re destroying the future.’ I think writing songs is my way of dealing with that stuff.”
While certain themes and ideas run through the album like red cords, Harcourt laughs that the protagonist of ‘Nothing But A Bad Trip’ is “purely on his own… probably grabbing at imaginary bats in the desert.” The song was inspired by the titular ‘bad trip’, and it rings with the experience that can only be gained through perpetually being the last man standing after long nights of excess. “I decided to turn it into a nightmarish joke,” he says, “because what happened wasn’t very fun at the time.”
While the issues that the album deals with are very real, it’s a canvas painted with vivid and hallucinogenic language. “In ‘Last Of Your Kind’ all of London is just falling into the river,” says Harcourt. “There are these fires going up everywhere, but you’re with the person who you’re so into that you’re just unaware of anything that’s going on around you. There’s mayhem and chaos, and there’s a thousand white horses running through, knocking over the Royal Family, and David Cameron is hiding in his bunker. It’s what I imagine would happen in the apocalypse. It’s very hopeful, in a screwed up way.”
Fittingly, the album’s artwork was created by the legendary Gonzo artist and Hunter S Thompson collaborator Ralph Steadman. “It’s a dream come true,” says Harcourt. “I went down to his house and he said: ‘What do you want?’ I looked through all his books, and the weirdest thing is he has an actual painting called ‘The World Is On Fire’, which was so bizarre. Sadly it was too dark to use as the cover, but I asked him for something like that. I think maybe he heard the line in ‘The World Is On Fire’ where I say: “I think I’m spitting out my heart.” It looks like a cross between a tsunami of fire and someone coughing up blood.”
As well as working with Steadman, Harcourt was also able to put together a dream line-up to record the album. Joining him and Flood in the studio were drummer Stella Mozgawa, of Warpaint, bassist Tom Herbert, of The Invisible, vocalist Hannah Lou Clark and percussionist Michael Blair, a frequent Tom Waits collaborator. “It was so much fun watching him,” says Harcourt. “I could see and hear why ‘Frank’s Wild Years’ sounds like it does. I’ve been very lucky with this record, everything I’ve wanted to get I’ve got.”
The result is an album that, for all it’s fire and brimstone, is also euphoric and celebratory. “I said to Flood: ‘Let’s make a record that people can cry and f*ck and fight to,’” says Harcourt. “I don’t think there are many records out like that at the moment, but all my favourite records have that, whether it’s Prince or Nine Inch Nails or Tom Waits. I hadn’t made a record before that has this kind of danger to it.”
‘Furnaces’ is Harcourt’s seventh album, and arrives 15 years after his Mercury Prize nominated debut ‘Here Be Monsters’. As well as his own records, Harcourt has produced and co-written for artists including James Bay, Paloma Faith and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and played live with The Libertines in 2015 at Glastonbury and Reading & Leeds and with Marianne Faithfull on her recent European tours. His single ‘The Way That I Live’ soundtracked Burberry’s Christmas campaign in 2014 and amassed 25 million YouTube views and 1 million Spotify streams.
“I feel like everything else before this record has just been a dress rehearsal,” says Harcourt. “Someone said that this record sounds truly like me, like the record I’ve always wanted to make, and I think that’s true.”
‘Furnaces’ is an album unlike any other you’ll hear this year. It is pure and true, and Harcourt performs it with a fierce kind of joy in his heart. “I don’t want to give too much else away,” he concludes. “Just dive in, I hope you enjoy it.”
“The police need to say they made a mistake”
If a riot is the language of the unheard, as Martin Luther King Jnr put it, then what happened across England in August 2011 needs to be listened to and understood. The violence, looting and arson that spread across the country resulted in five deaths and caused some £200 million worth of damage to businesses and property, but the police argued that it was first instigated by one man: Marcus Knox-Hooke.
Knox-Hooke and his friend Kurtis Henville grew up on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham along with Mark Duggan, who had been shot dead by police on 4 August. Two days later they were attending a protest outside Tottenham Police Station asking for answers and justice for their friend when violence broke out. Their story is now being told in a new documentary called ‘The Hard Stop’. Filmmaker George Amponsah first met Knox-Hooke and Henville in 2012, and he followed them over the next two years as Knox-Hooke faced trial.
“When I first met Marcus, he had an electronic ankle tag and was being accused of being the man who started the riots,” explains Amponsah. “Given that at the time people were being sentenced to two years in prison for stealing a bottle of water in the riots it looked like they were going to throw the book at him. It felt like I was filming the last wishes and confessions of a condemned man, and he really wanted to set the record straight before he went and did his time.”
In the end, the accusation that Knox-Hooke started the riot was eventually dropped but he was found guilty of four other charges, including burglary and robbery, and sentenced to 32 months in prison. As well as following his trail, Amponsah the film was motived by trying to understand more about the life of Mark Duggan. Amponsah’s background is in making documentaries about ‘hard men’, like Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men, Macintyre’s Toughest Towns and Ross Kemp’s Extreme Gangs. However, he says that meeting people like Knox-Hooke and Henville was a very different experience. “The first time I met Marcus and asked him to tell me what happened when Mark died he started crying,” he says. “My question was: if Mark Duggan was such a menace to society, so much so that the police had to use lethal force, then how come he was loved so much by his community?”
In the film, Knox-Hooke himself describes most of the rioters and looters as “opportunists”. What becomes very clear though is that those who were there on the initial protest had legitimate grievances about the way Duggan’s death – during the ‘hard stop’ by police that gives the film its title – and its aftermath was handled. Initially the police told the press that Duggan had died while shooting at them, which was not true. While an inquest later decided that he did have a gun in his possession when he was stopped, it was inside a sock and did not have any trace of his DNA on it. They concluded that he was unarmed at the time of his death.
“The police simply need to say they made a mistake,” says Amponsah. “Two things were concluded by the jury on that inquest: that he was unarmed, and that he was lawfully killed. It’s that ‘lawfully’ part that a lot of people have a problem with, including the coroner. That was why people took to the streets in Tottenham in 2011, and that was the spark that ignited a feeling that a lot of people had even if didn’t know Mark Duggan at all. They had all sorts of grievances about the state of the nation, the state of their lives and the state of society.”
In ‘The Hard Stop’, Amponsah traces the history of distrust between the police and the Broadwater Farm community back to the riots that happened on the estate in 1985, when Duggan, Knox-Hooke and Henville were all still children. Those riots occured a week after a woman named Dorothy ‘Cherry’ Groce was shot by police in Brixton, and were themselves sparked by the death of Cynthia Jarrett of heart failure during a police search of her home. In the resulting violence, PC Keith Blakelock was stabbed to death at Broadwater Farm.
It took until 2014 for the Metropolitan Police to apologise for the shooting of Cherry Groce, and Amponsah argues that Mark Duggan’s case needs to be handled much more swiftly if there’s to be any hope of resolving the breakdown between the police and the community they’re supposed to serve. “Can we wait 20 years for that apology?” he asks. “These events are cyclical. History repeats itself. What are we facing in terms of potential escalation when the next riot happens in five, ten or fifteen years time? My question is, can we afford to wait that long for the police to apologise?”
The larger issue is that even if it was Duggan’s death that sparked the protests that led to the riots in 2011, they could well have happened anyway. The kindling was already there, built by years of anger, frustration and resentment about the perceived unaccountability of the police. ‘The Hard Stop’ concludes with the statistic that in Britain since 1990 there have been over 1500 deaths either in custody or following police contact, but not a single conviction related to them.
It will take real change to restore trust in the police, and in a Britain now divided even further by the result of the EU referendum it’s more important than ever than we listen to the voices of the unheard.
“In 2011, there was a community in Tottenham who saw a member of their community killed in highly contentious circumstances by the police and it reopened a psychic, emotional scar that goes back to 1985 and the Broadwater Farm riot,” says Amponsah. “But then, after that happened in Tottenham it spread across London and then to other cities in England. Those people who were rioting had no knowledge of Mark Duggan. My point is, there were a lot of people rioting who were just pissed off with things in Britain, and with their lives in Britain. They felt a sense of unfairness and injustice and inequality and disillusionment. As of last week and our decision to exit Europe, I think we can clearly see that that is a widespread feeling. If you voted to leave, you’re very dissatisfied with the situation. If you voted for remain, you’re now very dissatisfied with the situation. So we’ve got a lot of very dissatisfied and disillusioned people in Britain, which are the same adjectives I was using to describe the people who took to the streets in 2011. It just takes a spark.”
Originally published in Shortlist, 14 July 2016.
How Craig David Became The People’s Champ Again
I meet Craig David on a Monday, but there’s no offer of a drink on Tuesday. He may have promised as much on 2000 single “7 Days,” one of a string of hits that polished the U.K. garage sound into a winning chart formula, but he’s a busy guy these days. Too busy for week-long dating sprees, sadly. When I first see the British artist in a conference room at Sony’s offices the 35-year-old is sorting through boxes of promotional headphones, but stops and greets me with a lottery-winner smile. He’s wearing black jeans and a plain white T over his famously gym-built physique. On his wrist is a watch that doesn’t tell the time, it just says “now.” It’s as if he has taken the philosophy of mindfulness and made it into a tangible, wearable object, and he tells me it reminds him to “align himself” and that life is “not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”
No one could have predicted the journey Craig David has been on in the past 12 months. Ever since a video of him freestyling his 2000 hit “Fill Me In” over Justin Bieber and Jack Ü’s “Where Are Ü Now” instrumental on BBC Radio 1Xtra went viral in September 2015, David has been all over your timeline. It’s a level of fame that harks back to his breakout moment in 1999, when his debut single, the Artful Dodger collaboration “Re-Rewind,” made him the face of U.K. garage’s mainstream crossover. That single marked the point when 2-step garage announced itself as a genre with the potential to cross over from being a pirate radio staple to a serious Top 40 concern, with David as both its leading MC and poster boy. His debut album Born To Do It, released in 2000 when he was still just 19, sold seven million copies worldwide, and subsequently earned him two Grammy nominations for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. It opened the door for garage acts like So Solid Crew and DJ Pied Piper to break through with U.K. number one hits of their own, and it made David seriously famous — the focal point of what he retrospectively calls “Justin Bieber pandemonium.”
But the hype didn’t last. David’s second album, 2002’s Slicker Than Your Average, was led by the single “What’s Your Flava?,” which made a play for American audiences with it’s millennial R&B snap and the repeated lyric, It cost me 20 bucks. The track failed to connect in the U.S. though, and before long, his star was on the wane. Some have put this turn of fate down to David being caricatured on the U.K.’s toilet humor sketch show Bo’ Selecta!, which first aired in 2002. But, as “What’s Your Flava?” had proved, he was also less sure of his own musical direction. In the following years, he drifted further away, buying a palatial all-white pad in Miami in 2009, bulking up at the gym, and flying to Dubai to play private functions for lucrative fees. For a time, it seemed his career as a hit-making musician was over.
Yet, the love for Craig David never went away. For a generation now in their late 20s, whose first nights out were spent listening to U.K. garage in the early ‘00s, David’s music is a welcome breeze of nostalgia. For many contemporary British artists, he’s a trailblazer who set a blueprint for how to take underground sounds mainstream — which might be one reason why grime’s heavy hitters like Stormzy and JME are paying respect to him, and why scene stalwart Big Narstie was keen to collaborate with him on “When The Bassline Drops” in November 2015. David followed that in May by dropping the U.K. garage-celebrating solo single “One More Time,” and appearing on a stand-out track on Kaytranada’s debut album. He’s now gearing up to release his sixth album, Following My Intuition, later this year.
When we sit down to talk, David gives me his completely undivided attention, barely turning his face away for the hour, coming across as both gracious and slightly intense. His excitement about his recent return to music and the limelight is tinged with relief, giving him the air of a man who was convinced all his mates had forgotten his birthday, but has just walked into the mother of all surprise parties.
NOS Alive 2016: Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell on ‘Bros’ and their next record
Open’er 2016: LCD Soundsystem play first gig in Poland in nine years
LCD Soundsystem played their first show in Poland in nine years as they headlined Open’er festival in Gdynia tonight (July 1).
After the opening trio of ‘Us v Them’, ‘Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’ and ‘I Can Change’, LCD’s James Murphy addressed the audience, saying: “It’s been a long time since we played here… 2007. That’s almost ten years. So you’re ten years older now, there’s no escaping it.”
The band’s last appearance in the country was also at Open’er, when they performed on the Main Stage ahead of Björk. Later in the set, after a moving performance of ‘Someone Great’ and an ecstatic ‘Losing My Edge’, Murphy told the crowd: “You guys have been tremendously great. It’s been nine years and we didn’t know what to expect, but it’s been really fun.”
As fans roared their appreciation, Murphy added wryly: “We’re going to meet your enthusiasm with a slow song…” before ‘New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’. They closed their set with ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ and ‘All My Friends’.
Glastonbury 2016: Meet The Spider-Men
Ziggy Stardust had his Spiders from Mars, and here at Glastonbury there’s a nest of mechanical spiders that are every bit as otherworldly. They live in Arcadia, which also doubles as a home for DJ sets, hi-tech high-wire acts and enough pyrotechnics to flame-grill a small country. The creature’s masters and designers are Pip Rush and Bertie Cole, who’ve both been coming to Glastonbury since they were kids and have been running an area at the festival since 2008. Arcadia now operates with a full-time staff of 50 and an on-site team of several hundred. We headed backstage to meet them and learn more about our giant arachnid friend.
Glastonbury 2016: Festival-goers react to Brexit
Are Representations of the Italian Mafia in Film Actually Realistic?
For almost a century, our screens have been filled with wise guys and goodfellas. Whether it’s The Godfather or Tony Soprano, we love to watch guys in Italian restaurants taking care of business; the Mafia film becoming a trope as well-worn as the Western.
But, these days, is any of it still true to reality? In 2016, are Italian family men actually putting decapitated horses’ heads in the beds of their rivals and making offers you can’t refuse?
To find out, I’ve come to Italy to a visit an area of Rome that, in Roman times, was known as Suburra. It’s where the wealthy would come to mix with the lower classes in taverns and brothels, often looking for prostitutes or professional killers. It’s also the name of a new film by Gomorrah director Stefano Sollima, because it turns out that 2,000 years later, the city’s political classes still like to come here to make deals with the illegal underworld.
Kills. Thrills. Spills.
Jamie Hince is giving me the finger, but he swears he can’t help it. Three years ago, just after work had begun on the new record by The Kills, the duo he formed with American singer Alison Mosshart in 2000, Hince slammed a car door shut on the middle digit of his left hand. His doctor then gave him a shot of cortisone for a pre-existing case of ‘trigger finger’, a common guitarist’s ailment that affects the tendons. When Hince went on holiday to Morocco, he managed to contract a deep bone infection that rotted the inside of his hand.
“At one point, I was pulling my tendon out of my hand,” explains Hince, as Mosshart grimaces beside him. We’re sat in a restaurant underneath the brutalist towers of London’s Barbican watching Hince ditch his red wine so he can waggle an imaginary tendon at us. “It was,” he adds, somewhat unnecessarily, “a nasty scene.”
The upshot is he can no longer bend that middle digit, so he’s had to relearn how to play guitar while giving a permanent one-fingered salute. You imagine Johnny Cash would be proud. While Hince now shrugs off the setback – “It doesn’t make too much difference, really” – there was a time when he thought he may have to give up the instrument. It was out of that adversity that The Kills’ fifth record took shape. Limitations, as Mosshart sagely points out, “set you free sometimes”.
Keeping things simple has worked for The Kills before. Their lo-fi debut, 2003’s ‘Keep On Your Mean Side’, was recorded in Hackney’s Toe Rag Studios in just two weeks. Mosshart and Hince had first met when she was the singer in Florida punk band Discount and he, 10 years older and with a series of band splits behind him, was almost ready to quit music. They bonded over a shared love of poetry, obscure novels and The Velvet Underground. Musically, they kept things sparse and primal: just her voice, his guitar and a drum machine.
This time around, Hince’s damaged finger led him to buy synths and keyboards that he could play one-handed. “I felt like maybe I wouldn’t be a guitar player any more,” he explains. “That absolutely changed the way I was writing. We’d get together and Alison’s demos would be on acoustic guitar, like mine used to be, and mine would have all this electronic stuff going on.”
That coming together of guitars and Kraftwerk-indebted electronics is all over the resulting record, which was recorded at a rented house in Los Angeles and then at New York’s Electric Lady Studios. It got the name ‘Ash & Ice’ after Hince put a cigarette out in a drinks glass at some late-night party. It’s a suitably debauched image for a man who was a fixture in the Primrose Hill party set even before his marriage to Kate Moss in 2011.
Hince and Moss have reportedly now split, and the guitarist began the writing process for this record by setting off to ride the Trans-Siberian Railway alone. “On that trip my imagination was going crazy,” he says. Onboard he wrote ‘Siberian Nights’, a song about “a homoerotic version of Vladimir Putin where he’s taken a day off and he just wants a cuddle from a man. He’s going: ‘I can’t keep this up.’ He just wants some warmth from a masculine body.” Expect to see Putin waving a rainbow flag at a Kills show soon.
Mosshart found her own measure of solitude when she ensconced herself at Hedgebrook, a women’s writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle. “You live in a cabin for 10 days. There’s no one there. You have no phone, no internet and you work,” she explains. “I think that kind of thing used to be far more common, but in the modern world it just doesn’t happen.”
It led Mosshart to write some of the most brutally frank songs of her life. ‘Heart Of A Dog’, named after the Mikhail Bulgakov novel she was reading at Hedgebrook, is a desperate declaration of loyalty to a lover, while she says her gut-wrenching vocal performance on ‘Hum For Your Buzz’ was born out of “total frustration”.
Mosshart is something of a creative whirlwind. Both she and Hince agree she writes and works at a faster pace than he does, so she found another creative outlet working with Jack White. They formed The Dead Weather in 2009 and released three albums in the following six years. On top of that, on the road she turns the band’s dressing rooms into private art studios and last year she held her first show at the Joseph Gross Gallery in New York.
She’ll have to pack up her paints again now as The Kills are heading back out on tour across America this month. They return to Europe in June, including a stop at the Isle of Wight Festival, and then the following month they’re due to visit Moscow. Assuming Putin lets them leave the country, they’ll play a full UK tour in October.
For a band as famed for their electrifying live shows as their records, Hince’s injury could have stopped them in their tracks. However, having come through warm-up shows in Amsterdam, Paris and London unscathed, they’re itching to get back on the road. “At the moment, playing shows just feels right,” says Hince.
After five years away, The Kills are back. They’ve dealt with injuries and setbacks in the best possible way: by learning to play music with one middle finger raised.
“For me, everything starts in Guinea”
Moh Kouyaté’s chic, white-walled apartment in Paris’ 10th arrondissement contains a treasure trove of West African instruments brought from his home in Guinea. Among the 39-year- old singer and guitarist’s prized possessions are a ngoni, a centuries-old forerunner of the banjo; and a kora, a type of 21-string harp. He cracks a wide smile as he shows me his beautifully crafted toys. “I might live here now,” he says, “but I keep my traditions.”
There are also, of course, a couple of guitars and an iMac. The key to Kouyaté’s music is that – like his home – it effortlessly combines rich musical history with the very modern. His debut album Loundo, which was released this February, blends blues, Afrobeat, funk and jazz with the Mandingo tradition that has been passed down in his family from generation to generation. “I love to make people dance, and then in the next moment to take my acoustic guitar and give them something spiritual,” he says.
The most impressive instrument Kouyaté shows me is a full-size balafon: a long wooden xylophone made from bamboo and dried calabash gourds. It’s an instrument that’s been around since at least 1352, and learning to play it was Kouyaté’s inheritance. “My father’s father was a very good player,” he explains, “And my father too.”
As he says this we’re being watched over by a black and white photograph of the man in question, Bambo Kouyaté, playing guitar on the streets of the Guinean capital Conakry. The Kouyatés are from a long line of travelling musicians and story-tellers known as griots, although they prefer a different term.
“I like the word ‘djéli’,” Kouyaté explains. “Griots is a colonial word. ‘Djéli’ means ‘blood’. You have to be born djéli, you can’t become djéli. We’re keepers of a tradition which goes a long way back. My father taught me our history and our stories, and I have a responsibility to pass them on to my son and my brothers. I have many sisters and brothers who sing and play guitar, and because I’m the oldest I was their teacher. I taught them guitar and balafon to keep that tradition going.”
Kouyaté has been playing guitar since he was big enough to hold one. Born in Conakry, by 16 he had formed his first band in order to play sabar parties – the idea of which is the same as teenage parties all over the world: making music that girls want to dance to.
It was a local guitar hero named Amadou Sadio Diallo who recognised Kouyaté’s burgeoning talent and persuaded him to turn his attention to more highbrow pursuits. “He said: ‘Hey, small brother, come here. You play very well, but try to learn more. Come to my home, I’ll show you something.’ I was very happy about that, so I took my guitar to his home.”
What Diallo wanted to show him was George Benson’s 1989 record Tenderly. At first, Kouyaté wasn’t sure what to make of it. “I said to him: ‘This music is difficult, I can’t understand anything’,” he remembers. “He said: ‘This is jazz! George Benson is a master guitar player!’ I kept trying to understand, and in one or two months I became a fan. I learned just by listening to him and playing.”
Hearing Benson sent Kouyaté on a journey of musical discovery through the greats of blues and rock from BB King to Jimi Hendrix. It’s a journey he’s still on today. “That’s my history,” says Kouyaté. “I try to take things from modern guitar players and put it into my traditional guitar.”
After making a name for himself playing in the bars and hotels of Conakry, Kouyaté was invited by the Guinean singer Doura Barry to join him on a tour of Europe in 2003. It was on tour with Barry that his talent impressed the American bluesman Corey Harris, and soon Kouyaté found himself being invited to join further tours of America and Europe.
He met and married a Frenchwoman, and together they decided to settle in Paris in 2007. Living in France has finally given Kouyaté the chance to record his own album, and to play with a host of talented musicians. On Loundo, his collaborations include ‘Darré’, a sublime duet with the Sierra Leonean singer Mariama, and the beautiful ‘Gassata’ with Ango-Italian singer Piers Faccini.
However, Kouyaté’s home will always be Guinea. “I go back every year,” he says with a grin. “I’m from a big family so I have many small brothers who are waiting for me. I go back every year. I have to be in Conakry because it’s the place where I get my inspiration. I start everything there.”
As we sit at his kitchen table sipping espressos, he turns and indicates the grey skies that we can see gathering over the city. “When I’m here in Paris it’s good, but I miss the sunshine,” he laughs. “I’m a sunshine boy!”
His family’s djéli heritage is still present in the topics he chooses to write and sing about. “In Mandingo society, the djéli is there to say if something is good or not,” he explains. “They give inspiration and direction to people so they know what is good and what is not.”
For that reason, Kouyaté’s songs are more than romantic ballads. “I do write about love, but I also write about society and the problems we face,” he says. “In Guinea, we have many problems that come from political instability. Sometimes you can hear about that in my songs, and also about racism. We can find racism everywhere – even in Africa. I write about how people must stay together. We all have the same blood.”
When he returns to Guinea, he sees a country that has been changing, slowly, for the better since Alpha Condé became the country’s first freely elected president in 2010. Last year, Condé was re-elected for a second term with almost 58% of the vote.
“We’ve had problems with instability, but people from Guinea want now just to be happy and live good lives,” says Kouyaté. “We’re a little bit happier because the new President is trying to do something good. At least now with democracy we have the opportunity to say: ‘This has been good, this has not been good, try to do more.’ The people are very tired. They just want the opportunity to progress.”
For Kouyaté himself, progress means taking Guinea’s music to as many listeners as possible. As well as his own album and tours, he’s currently working to establish a cultural association which would give young Guinean musicians the benefit of his experiences and help them to record and tour around the world. “I’m not just a guitar player,” he says.
“I’m a brother too. When I go back to the village, they have another vision of me and I have to live up to that responsibility!”
Spoken like a true djéli. You can take the musician out of Guinea, but Moh Kouyaté is set on taking Guinea’s music to the world.
Published by Brussels Airlines’ b inspired, June 2016.
Twice As Nice
A lot of people liked Shane Black’s 2005 directorial debut, the self-referential neo-noir romp Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but Russell Crowe wasn’t one of them. “I think it’s too aware of itself,” he says. “It feels like there’s an in-joke going on in that movie, and I don’t connect to that. It’s not funny for me if the guy thinks he’s being funny.”
Luckily for Crowe, Black’s new comedy drops the meta shtick in favour of outright ineptitude. In The Nice Guys, Crowe and Ryan Gosling are a pair of schmucks bungling their way through a private eye case in 1977 Los Angeles. It’s not just that they don’t know they’re being funny, it’s that they don’t know what they’re doing at all. In one early scene, Gosling’s booze-soaked sleuth Holland March messes up a bar break-in so badly he ends up in an ambulance, while Jackson Healy, Crowe’s burly enforcer, is more interested in beating up small-time creeps than following any lead they might give up. The film works because Black’s dialogue is sharper than broken glass, but there’s plenty of the latter, too; he can barely look at a window without wanting to send a character flying through it. It’s an old-fashioned Raymond Chandler crime caper repainted with 70s sleaze.
Champions! Leicester have won the league, Kasabian are having a party
“So it’s a no to ‘Chat Shit, Get Banged’, then?”
It’s Monday May 16, a couple of hours before Kasabian play a surprise set at Leicester City’s Premier League victory parade, and frontman Tom Meighan is on the phone trying to sort out his stage outfit. His first choice was an unofficial T-shirt emblazoned with star striker Jamie Vardy’s infamous motto, but the club have just stepped in and nixed it. Somebody’s obviously decided that ‘Chat Shit, Get Banged’ is a bit aggro for a family-friendly party.
The thing is, there aren’t any adults around. A whole city’s childhood dreams have come true and the air is full of pure, unadulterated chaos. Nobody expected to be here. Leicester City started the season as 5,000-1 outsiders to win the title. To put that in context, around the same time the odds of LMFAO headlining Glastonbury this year were only 100-1. Leicester were a club that had never won England’s top flight in the entirety of their 132-year history, so even the most passionate of fans – a category that includes both Meighan and guitarist Serge Pizzorno – would never have dared to dream this day would come.
“It’s all or nothing – that’s why it works”
“Three margaritas!” Jamie Hince exclaims to a waiter, his voice filled with joy. It is Cinco de Mayo after all, or close enough. Mayo, at least. Either way, The Kills are celebrating. We’re in a hotel bar near Covent Garden and Hince and bandmate Alison Mosshart are toasting the impending release of their fifth album, Ash & Ice.
It’s a fittingly louche title for a Kills record, named by Hince after he dropped a fag end into a cocktail glass at the end of a long night of hard partying. In the 14 years they’ve played together as a garage rock duo, Hince, 47, and Mosshart, 37, have garnered a reputation for both incendiary live shows and being the last standing at the end of any given night. Strangely, they’re both arguably now more famous for their extracurricular activities: Mosshart for fronting Jack White side-project The Dead Weather; and Hince for marrying, and now separating from, Kate Moss.
Not that all the tabloid attention has helped the band much. “All it’s done is made people who I could have told in advance they’re not going to like my band, listen to a song and then say: ‘This is shit!’,” says Hince, to Mosshart’s amusement.
“If you go on YouTube and look at the likes on our videos, we’ve got an amazing amount of thumbs down,” continues Hince. “I think that’s all those people who are checking us out because they’ve seen me in the paper going: ‘This is shit!’ Then again, we did say at the start that we wanted to be a polarising band of idiots.”
Under cover pop
The bedroom is where our pop dreams began. Backlit by a bedside lamp, we honed our dance routines and made our pact with S Club 7: we won’t stop moving. We can’t. For most of us, the bedroom is also where those dreams died. Probably for the best.
That wasn’t the case for Oscar, a mononymous 25-year-old from Harlesden, north-west London, who has just released his debut album. While still at art school, Oscar began writing and recording music inspired by lo-fi dream-pop artists such as the Radio Dept, using GarageBand and “a cracked version of Logic Express”. The 10 patchworked tracks he uploaded to SoundCloud got him signed by indie label Wichita, but Oscar always intended to make pop. “I’ve tried writing darker, more serious songs but they don’t go anywhere,” he says. “Everything revolves around the chorus for me.”
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 