India’s most renowned investigative journalist and novelist Tarun Tejpal meets us at a coffee shop in Knightsbridge flanked only by his literary publicist, rather than the 24 armed policemen he’s grown used to following his every move over the last decade. After his investigate news organisation Tehelka  published an investigation into government corruption in 2001, a foiled assassination attempt on Tejpal’s life led to a security detail following his every move. While battling to keep Tehelka alive in the face of political interference, Tejpal somehow also found the time and space to write his first novel, The Alchemy Of Desire in 2006.For his second book, The Story Of My Assassins, he used the assassination attempt as the fictional starting point for a novel which explores the many faces and stories of contemporary India. Dressed in black with long hair slicked back, he cuts a swashbuckling and eloquent figure. Here, GQ India’s 2011 Writer Of The Year sets forth about empathising with his would-be killers, the challenges facing journalism and what the future holds for his endlessly complicated country.

GQ: How did you learn that a contract had been taken out to assassinate you?
Tarun Tejpal: In May 2001 I received a call to tell me that five killers had been arrested by the Delhi police. The police told me, and I have no reason to doubt it despite the fact that it sounds so outlandish, that they had picked up five boys who had been given a contract in Nepal by the ISI of Pakistan. The perverse reckoning was that if there was a hit on me, the Indian government of the day, which was then assaulting me, would have to take the rap. The ISI of Pakistan was trying to hit me so that the Indian government would fall. In other words, even as it was assaulting me the Indian government had a great interest in protecting me. I came under heavy security cover which lasted nine years. For about six years there were 24 armed policemen guarding me around the clock. Anywhere I travelled in India I would be met at the airport by armedcops. I would be escorted day and night. My house was sandbagged. My office was sandbagged. It was a bit hysterical. That became the conceit for the novel.

Why had the Indian government been assaulting you?
I started Tehelka in 2000 as India’s first serious online journalistic platform. We broke some really big stories, including match-fixing in cricket. Then in 2001 we broke this huge story which is known as the “Watergate of Indian journalism”. We called it “Operation West End” and it was an exposé into corruption in arms procurements. It almost led to the downfall of the Indian government of the time. It led to the resignation of the defence minister of India and the president of the ruling party. It also led to a huge extra-constitutional assault on all our lives. Tehelka was shut down for close to four years. We were fighting a completely out of control state.

Why did you choose to write a novel rather than writing a memoir about your experiences?
What interested me was using this conceit to open up the lives of the killers. I was fascinated by the thought that five guys who didn’t know me at all had taken a contract to kill me. How does one arrive at such a place? One scene which is true to life is the scene in the courtroom. That was a very difficult scene for me to write because I wanted to capture the peculiar mix of Kafka and Chaplin in that tableau. I really was summoned to a lower court where these five guys were paraded out in chains and I was asked to identify them if I knew them. Of course I didn’t know them! It was just five guys. I remember one of them looked tough and unconcerned, so he became themodel for [one particular character] the hammer killer. The rest were nondescript guys. I saw them once and then I forgot about them and imagined the stories of five likely killers. When I finished the book I realised that the five killers subliminally represented five of the biggest fault lines of India: caste, religion, class, language and feudalism. I didn’t set out to do that, but I found I could pull in all the things I wanted to say about an unbelievably complex country.

How close is the narrator’s voice to your own?
The trouble with trying to wrestle down the material was trying to find the tone. Until I found the tone of the highly dislikeable narrator, who is acidic, acerbic and dyspeptic, I couldn’t enter the material. This is not material you can enter with an earnest, sincere voice. You would just heap up the banalities. When I found the voice and wrote the first line I was on a roll. Most of the book is obviously imagined, but there are some seed incidents which are true to life.

What did you learn about your assassins from writing the novel?
That business of telling the story of every assassin from the start of his life helped to establish the fact that in the beginning there is a kind of innocence to all things. Then the world happens to us and we become other things. I wanted to make a far more complex moral judgement of the assassins than we would normally make. I almost wanted to say that fundamentally the killers and the man they wanted to kill may have very little to choose between them morally. Neither is morally superior or inferior.

The narrator’s mistress sides more with the assassins than with him.
I loved Sara! She came out of nowhere. I’m constantly being asked by my wife who this woman is! She was the perfect foil to open up thestories. You do meet people like her: the well-meaning, misguided do-gooders. She was gorgeous. She was driven to do the right thing but didn’t know what the f*** she was doing.

What motivates you to write?
For me, what’s exciting about literature and good writing is that fundamentally it should have the stomach to look evil in the eye. I understand the vocation of both literary writing and journalism as being fundamentally subversive. To subvert the status quo and received notions. Somebody once told me that after reading The Story Of My Assassins they couldn’t sleep all night. I said: “I love it!” That’s wonderful. I don’t want my readers to sleep after reading my books. My job is to provide you with discomfiture. I’m not here to provide you comfort. That’s the job of television, cinema and mass media. There’s way too much of it. We live in an age of amusement. I don’t think the job of a serious writer is to amuse you.

What’s your favourite James Bond moment?
I actually really like Daniel Craig. I’m from the Sean Connery generation, but I really think the way Craig redefined Bond from the beginning of Casino Royale is fantastic. I like the way he plays him with that peculiar, hard-nosed intensity rather than the fey, playboy charm.

Who’s your best-dressed British man?
Most Indians would probably say David Beckham, but I feel like I should say VS Naipaul. I like the way he dresses.

Do you worry that news agencies are losing the ability to fund in-depth investigative journalism?
It’s a huge challenge, and the problem is that India needs so much of it. There is so much bigotry, injustice, inequality and corruption to fight. You need the sort of hard journalism that we do at Tehelka, but nobody wants to pay for it. Sustaining it costs a lot of money. You have to be very smart and use a lot of sleight of hand. You have to be very seductive. You have to convince men of means that you’re a worthy cause and that they should back you. A lot of my work goes into that: ensuring that rich men fund the journalism which will finally hurt them! [Laughs] What we need to fear in free societies is monolithic media, like Murdoch. The more media you have the more insulated you are against control.

What keeps you awake at night?
Actually I sleep really well. It’s one of the things I do well. I think if there’s something I worry about all the time it’s India, which is crazy given that it’s gone on quite alright for 6000 years. There is a kind of racial commitment to the country I was born into and its complicated miseries. If there’s something that really bothers me and gets me exercised it’s the struggle for India. The incredible poverty and deprivations, the really unequal society, the state of justice, these are things that really bother me.

Are you optimistic for the future of India?
I think India is going through an historical curve right now. It was the dominant civilisation 1500 years ago. It’s been on a great decline but now it’s coming back. I think history is on our side but our challenges are huge. I’m a great believer in politics and its enabling potential. I’m not among those who knock it, I really believe in it but I think we need some great visionary politics to see us through our next 20 years. The idea of India was created out of absolutely visionary politics. Men like Gandhi and Nehru were extraordinary but to protect their idea we need a second generation of great leaders. I don’t see it right now, but I hope for it.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
My father told me: “Don’t be afraid”. I’ve found that invaluable. Most people are crippled by fear. The potentiality of their lives and what they can be and do is all linked to fear. Fear of failure, fear ofcriticism, fear of society, fear of tradition, fear of the church, fear of the temple, fear of priest, fear of the teacher, fear of the parent: it’s crippling. My father was fantastic. He’s probably the wisest man I’ve known in my life. One of the earliest things he taught me was not to be afraid. When all hellbroke loose, there was a murder attempt on my life and the whole government was on our ass, everybody was running for cover around us. The television channels in India were full of it. Everyone was calling me and telling me to be careful, including my mother. The only person who called me and said, “It’s going to be alright, stop worrying,” was my father. No matter what happened, he was completely sanguine. I find that a source of great strength.

Originally published by British GQ.

From Winston Churchill to Snoop Dogg, whether you’re rolling around Long Beach or defeating Hitler, it pays to know your XOs from your VSOPs. The world of cognac can be an intimidating one, filled as it is with esoteric nomenclature, so we’ll start with the basics. All cognac comes from a small and highly protected area of southwest France, so while it’s true to say that it is a type of brandy, not all brandies are cognacs. Among serious drinkers, calling a bottle of Hennessy XO a brandy will get you the same sort of looks that you’d get if you called Bollinger a “sparkling wine”.

There are four main cognac houses who dominate the world market:

Hennessy, Remy Martin, Martell and Courvoisier. For the connoisseur, there’s also a wide range of small family-owned distilleries producing cognac to suit individual taste. Cognac is made by distilling wine for a second time to make a clear 70 per cent alcohol known as the “eau de vie” (French for “spirit”). This is then aged in oak barrels. As a general rule, the longer the spirit stays in the barrel the smokier and woodier the drink tastes. Cognac only ages while it’s in the barrel, so buying a 20-year-old bottle and putting it away at the back of a cupboard to “mature” is senseless. If you’ve got a bottle gathering dust somewhere, you’re better off just drinking it.

Of the most common cognac designations, VS (“Very Special”) is the youngest blend and will have been aged for at least two years in the barrel. VSOP (“Very Superior Old Pale”) has to have been aged for at least four years, but commonly it will be much longer.

XO (now commonly referred to as “Extra Old” but the symbols originally stood for “Age Unknown”) must have been aged for at least six years, but in reality tends to have been aged for around 20 years for the finest blends.

A cognac connoisseur will balk if you start diluting the older stuff, so if you’re looking to make cocktails we’d recommend going for a younger blend like the Courvoisier Exclusif, which has been specifically designed to capitalise on the brand’s surge popularity in clubs over the last decade. As you’d imagine, Busta Rhymes is a popular man in the south of France.

If you want a more traditional cognac, the sort of drink you can reach for to accompany a soul-bearing after-dinner conversation, then a good place to start is with a Hennessy XO. This is a strong, smoky drink with the classic cognac taste. If you’re looking for something more niche, then Delamain produce a true wine drinkers’ cognac. Aged only in barrels which have already been used to produce cognac many times in the past, the drink retains a fruity wine taste even as it ages to become an XO. Our personal favourite of the smaller distillers is the peerless Pierre Ferrand. If you want to really impress a cognac drinker, produce a bottle of Cognac Pierre Ferrand Selection des Anges.

Once you’ve chosen your cognac, the only remaining question is how to drink it. Traditionally cognac should be savoured slowly, allowing time to enjoy the aroma, but as with somuch in life if you’re looking for something more adventurous then follow Ernest Hemingway’s advice.

They called this technique “Carburetion”, based on the science of an engine’s carburettor, and you’d imagine it must have raised just as many eyebrows in 1930s Havana as it did when we tried it in the sedate town of Cognac. However you drink it, if it’s good enough for Hemingway, Churchill and Snoop Dogg, then it’s got to be worth reaching for a cognac the next time you finish a moveable feast.

Originally published by British GQ.

No Doubt must have a portrait in the attic. In the eleven years since the ska-punk rockers’ last album, age has not wearied them – in fact, their new record Push And Shove is fresher than ever. “It says: this is who we are, this is who we’ve always been since we were 17 years old,” says lead singer Gwen Stefani. “But yet this is us right now.”

The record picks up right where 2001’s dub-heavy Rock Steady left off. For the new album, production duo Major Lazer collaborated with Jamaican dancehall artist Busy Signal. While Stefani is delighted with the results, she never actually met the man himself after his real-life exploits caught up with him: earlier this year he was extradited to America to face cocaine-dealing charges. “The day we finished the track we got an e-mail telling us he’d been arrested,” says Stefani. “We were like: ‘Oh, guess he won’t be in the video!’ He had been an outlaw for ten years and written all these songs about it – actually, it was a challenge for me to make his song fit into my life. I’m not a gangster!”

For Stefani, playing with No Doubt again marks a change in musical direction from the two solo records which transformed the ska singer, from California’s Orange County, into a bona fide all-conquering pop star. “Those records were never meant to be taken too seriously,” she says now. “It was kind of an art project. It was my chance to be girly and indulge in my theatrical side. It was fun to live a fantasy life, but being on stage with the band is what I’ve been doing since I was 15 years old. It’s so comfortable and natural. It feels great to be home.”

Speaking of home, in the last decade Stefani also married Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale and had two children – not exactly conducive to making a record. “This album took us about a year of writing and a year of recording because I had these two babies to take care of. It’s crazy, there’s no way to do it all!”

So why now? Stefani shoots down the idea that the band is returning to cash in on Nineties revivalism. While No Doubt have been plotting a return for a couple of years, she says, it was a 2009 greatest-hits tour that rejuvenated their song writing and galvanised them back into action. “For a while I didn’t know what was good any more. So going on tour and singing all those songs that we had written together was electric.”

Originally published in British GQ, October 2012. 

We never thought we’d enjoy an LMFAO show. It seems implausible, like having a really fun colonoscopy, but it happened. It must have been something to do with watching them while taking a trip on a Ferris wheel high above one of the most beautiful cities in Eastern Europe as the neon crowd ebbed and flowed below us. From that vantage point, even “Sorry For Party Rocking” has a sort of undeniable charm to it.

Ned Beauman’s two novels don’t read like the work of an author in his mid-twenties. At 27 he is by some margin the youngest author on the longlist for this year’s Booker Prize, yet he seems to have emerged already fully-formed as a mature and wildly inventive storyteller.  His debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, which simultaneously told the tale of Nazi memorabilia hunters and a eugenics-obsessed scientist, was published in 2010 and picked up a clutch of awards. His new book, The Teleportation Accident, takes as its starting point the plight of the Weimar émigrés fleeing Nazi Germany, but resolutely refuses to take itself as seriously as that subject matter mightsuggest. The protagonist, Egon Loeser, is more concerned with finding someone to have sex with him than political upheavals and eventually leaves Berlin in pursuit of a girl named Adele Hitler (no relation). Over chamomile tea in a hotel bar in Clerkenwell, Beauman discusses the parts of his books guaranteed to embarrass his friends, his love of Terrence Malick and how earplugs changed his life.

GQ: Your first book featured Nazi sympathisers while this book centres around a German character in the Thirties who’s completely politically oblivious. What is it about those morally dubious characters that appeals?
Ned Beauman: The main thing is that I still haven’t written about a character who’s on the right side. Either they’re on the wrong side or they’re not on any side. I wouldn’t find it as interesting. It’s like the fact that it’s impossible to write an interesting Superman story. I would find it really difficult to write a good story about a French resistance hero or a George Orwell-figure. There’s no contradictory pull of contempt at the same time as attention.

Your Thirties Berlin is really a thinly-veiled version of East London in 2009, right down to the anachronistic ketamine that everyone’s taking. Did you decide early on that you would have to knowingly acknowledge this piece of teleportation to the reader?
It’s acknowledged in the sense that it’s clear to the reader, but it’s not actually acknowledged in the world of the book. What I quite enjoy doing is writing things which really press up against the membrane of the fourth wall without actually breaking it. I like seeing how close I can come to being explicitly self-referential while still not breaking any of the rules of the ontic coherence of the narrative world.

If The Teleportation Accident had a soundtrack, what would it be?
The music that Drabsfahren writes is meant to be very much from that atonal Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern school, as are the soundtracks to Loeser’s place. There’d also be a lot of scratchy Thirties dance hall music. If you were trying to be a bit more multi-levelled you’d presumably put in The Big Pink or some comparable East London band of the 2010s to get the Dalston aspect. I didn’t listen to anything in particular while I was writing it, but my new one is set in London in the present day and is more explicitly music-influenced. I’ve been listening to a lot of Burial, Koreless and Holy Other.

Did writing your second novel feel like going back to square one, or were you better equipped this time around?
I definitely felt better equipped. I’d had an extra 80,000 words of practice at the technical stuff like sentences, characterisation and structure and so on. It was different though in that it didn’t come together quite as easily as Boxer, Beetle did. I didn’t really know what it was going to be about and I was very ambivalent about writing another novel about the Thirties. It doesn’t have a strong central relationship so I wasn’t sure what the emotional core would be. I’d resigned myself to people not really liking it so I wasn’t sure what my incentive was. It felt like more of a chore to write than the first one, until the end where I cut loose a little bit.

Which film has inspired you?
Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s second film. Malick’s an incredibly philosophical filmmaker. Arguably Tree Of Life is the most extensive presentation of his metaphysics and Thin Red Line is the most effectively articulated, but Days of Heaven is just the most beautiful, wordless painting of what he believes about God and the world. It’s ceaselessly beautiful.

You have a flair for writing similes. Do you collect them?
Not really. I collect a few when I see a particularly weird face or sunset or whatever, and I’ll occasionally put them in a notebook, but more often I have to come up with them while I’m writing. The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn’t funny on some level is quite hard. A better writer wouldn’t use as many similes as I do – if possible you want to subsume your similes in metaphor. The major 20^th Century stylists like Nabokov and Updike don’t use “as” or “like” as much as I do. They have a much more fluid way of bringing in comparisons, but I also like the Proustian approach of making a simile 500 per cent as long as the thing it’s describing. It’s kind of disingenuous – you as the narrative voice put in a simile under thepretext that you’re helping the reader to understand better what something looks like or feels like. In fact, it’s just an excuse to put in a little espresso shot of what you hope is lyrical beauty. It’s like putting a little flower arrangement in the sentence.

Can you recommend a good book?
I just read this great novel called Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson. It’s from the late Eighties. It’s about the last surviving woman on earth. David Foster Wallace said that it was the high-water mark for experimental fiction in the US. It’s really funny, as well as being bleak and deep. It’s quite Beckett-y.

What’s the best advice you’ve everreceived?
Somebody told me to start wearing earplugs and it completely changed my life. On planes, in the library, trying to get to sleep, on trains, when your flatmate’s playing the guitar, all the time. There’s never a bad time to put earplugs in. They’re the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.

Are you good at holding court in the pub?
No, I’m not. I’m reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don’t think has anything to do with fiction. The most fun I’ve had in the pub with my books is people trying to read out the sex scenes from beginning to end without giggling or having to stop. I’d have no problem with doing it but some people find it surprisingly hard. The gay sex in Boxer, Beetle really makes people blush.

Originally published by British GQ.

A psychological profile of Ian Fleming’s literary James Bond.

Bond as Swordsman
As countless adversaries have learned, James Bond is not a man easily bested. He skis, fights, drives, plays golf and swims underwater with prodigious ease, and is somehow able to give relentless chase to foes on land or sea while still smoking 60 Morland’s cigarettes a day – that is until he visits a health farm in Thunderball and cuts down to a more circumspect 25. Fleming knew that his hero must be the most alpha of alpha males, but there’s at least a nod to his fallible humanity in the fact that he is occasionally beaten. While he’s the best marksman in the Secret Service, for example, he’s still outshot by his instructor. Beyond all his other talents, it’s with women that he really comes into his own. In Moonraker Fleming writes that while not on assignment Bond makes love “with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women”, but while on the job things get rather more interesting. Part of Bond’s appeal is that his charms belong to a simpler time: one in which women are to be “softly wooed or brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued”. His success breeds a sort of contempt. In Casino Royale he reflects on the “conventional parabola” of a relationship and confesses that it bores him. He’s only happy facing a challenge, and the women he does woo are often initially distrustful of men only to be entirely won over by Bond’s sheer force of character. He appeals to the male fantasy that if you were just a little more suave no woman would ever remain tantalisingly out of reach for long. For 007, it seems, there is simply no such thing as an unattainable woman. At the conclusion of Goldfinger he ends up in bed with Pussy Galore, a lesbian. “They told me you only liked women,” he says, to which she replies: “I never met a man before.”

Bond as Outsider
While the name “James Bond” is now synonymous with adventure in far-flung locations, Ian Fleming said in 1958 that he had chosen it because it was “the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name” he could find. The reason? “Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure—an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.” For all his insubordination, that’s exactly what Bond is – a tool of the Establishment. Yet at the same time he appeals to us precisely because he manages to remain an outsider. Bond enjoys his proximity to power, and the licence to kill and unlimited expense account that come with it, but he’s simultaneously straining at the leash. In the post-war Fifties he combined a sense of loyalty to his country with the individual’s desire to cast off the shackles of rationing and austerity. Today, his appeal remains for anyone who’s ever wanted to tell their meddling boss that they know best how to do their own job. Even Bond can cross the line, however, and in You Only Live Twice his 00-status is revoked by M when his drinking and gambling gets out of hand. Before dismissing him, M reassigns him and hands him a final, seemingly impossible mission. In the end, Bond is relied upon by the Establishment that he refuses to ever entirely become a part of it. At the conclusion of The Man with the Golden Gun, Bond learns that the Prime Minister wishes to offer him a knighthood. He tells his companion Mary Goodnight to send a refusal, pointing out that he is “a Scottish peasant and will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant.” He adds: “I just refuse to call myself Sir James Bond. I’d laugh at myself every time I looked in the mirror to shave.”

Originally published in the GQ Men Of The Year issue, October 2012.

Jet-lagged amid a gruelling promotional schedule, Nick Cave is so relieved that our interview is taking place off camera that he relaxes and makes a wanking motion. Then he sighs with a sudden realisation. “Your opening line is: ‘He relaxes and makes a wanking motion’, isn’t it?” he says. “I can see it now.”

Cave, it seems, is always writing. Since the release of his 14th record with the Bad Seeds, 2008’s Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, the prolific rock polymath has published his second novel, The Death of Bunny Monro, released a second album with his incendiary side-project Grinderman and written the screenplay and score for the brutal moonshine gangster drama Lawless. John Hillcoat, the film’s director, still appears faintly bewildered by his friend’s work rate despite over 20 years of collaboration. Having met on the Australian post-punk scene in the late Eighties, Hillcoat cast Cave as a violent inmate in his 1988 debut Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead about a privately-run maximum security prison. It was 2005’s stunning outback western The Proposition, from an original screenplay by Cave, that grabbed Hollywood’s attention and led to Hillcoat landing the job of directing the big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

When Hillcoat read Matt Bondurant’s 2008 novel The Wettest County in the World, about his family’s past as outlaw bootleggers, there was really only one name in the frame to adapt the savage yet cerebral tale for the screen (albeit with the new title Lawless). Today, Cave is dressed in a three-piece Chris Kerr pinstripe suit, golden shades dangling from his waistcoat, while Hillcoat is more understated, pairing a navy t-shirt with a double-breasted blazer. Together, the pair discuss Tom Hardy’s lesbian tendencies, why it’s easier to write a screenplay than a song and which of the Lawless  cast is their best-dressed British man.

GQ.com: Going right back to Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead, your work together tends to be characterised by a preoccupation with brutal violence and specifically with…
Nick Cave: Blokes.

So it was surprising to learn that Tom Hardy apparently decided to play his character as if he was an “old lesbian”. Was that something you envisioned?
NC: Yes, in fact I thought all the characters were all old lesbians. [Laughs] No, he had a habit of coming up to you during rehearsals and whispering in your ear: “I’m going to play it like an old lesbian.” Then he’d walk off and you’d be left there going: “Did he just say ‘old lesbian’?” At first we didn’t know if he would be the best possible actor or the worst possible actor for the part because of all these ideas he had, but it became very clear that he had the long game in mind. He knew his character really well and he knew how effective it would be.
John Hillcoat: His character, Forrest, has all this physical power and is like a snake when he strikes: lethal and fast. What I think Tom wanted to explore was the family side and the female, matriarchal qualities that he had to take on as opposed to the obvious hitman stuff.
NC: He wanted scenes put in where he was darning socks, sitting on the porch knitting, all that sort of thing…
JH: We had to draw the line somewhere!

There’s an anachronistic bluegrass cover of the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat” on the soundtrack. Was that a deliberate decision to draw a parallel between the failure of prohibition and the contemporary war on drugs?
NC: Yeah, for sure. We weren’t doing it with the story, but that was our way of making those issues contemporary as well. We did feel that we were sometimes in danger of pulling the audience out of the story by putting contemporary songs in, so we had them done ‘of the time’ by people who have one foot in that era like Ralph Stanley.

The history of cinema is littered with mediocre literary adaptations. Did you have any particular concerns about tackling Bondurant’s novel?
NC: Not when I was actually writing it, but now that I’ve seen the sorts of things that didn’t make it from the script into the final version I would have been more concerned. There were details of the book that were so beautiful and lyrical and were just there as elements of the story. In the end, they weren’t seen as serving the thrust of the tale so they were slowly cut away. That would have worried me much more when I was writing it if I’d known that. It’s very much that detail that reverberates around the characters that makes that book so special. The story is a basic sort of revenge story, tit for tat, and losing some of that stuff tipped the balance slightly – but all screenwriters are going to say that!

If rights were no issue and you could adapt any book for the screen, which would it be?
NC: I’ve got a book in mind but I don’t want to say what it is because it might actually happen. The problem with books, now that I’ve written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new. People send me books all the time that they want adapting but there is one great book out there – I just can’t say what it is.
JH: I’d still like a stab at Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but there’s a long queue on that one.

Nick, you’ve also just finished making a new Bad Seeds record. Do you think script-writing has changed your song-writing?
NC: Look, it totally keeps it alive because once you’ve been involved in Hollywood you just run screaming back to music where you can just sit in a room and deal with your band. When you’re making a film there are so many people involved that you get opinions and notes from people and you don’t even know who they are. I find that quite difficult and it wears you down. It’s a joyful experience to go back to making music. It keeps it energised and I don’t think without doing other stuff I’d have been able to make 15 or 16 Bad Seeds records.

But has writing screenplays actually informed the way you write narratives in song?
JH: Didn’t you say that writing songs is much tougher?
NC: Oh, it is. Writing songs is actually difficult. Writing a script is…
JH: …a no-brainer!
NC: It’s relatively easy and actually really exciting. Writing The Proposition was probably the most fun thing I’ve ever done in terms of writing because I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know what you could do and couldn’t do in a film. I was like a kid with a box of crayons: “Oh, let’s have this happen!” We did get away with a lot withThe Proposition,but sadly I think the more you learn about the art of script-writing the less attractive the whole process becomes.

You don’t want to see how the sausage is made.
NC: Can I use that for the next interview? Exactly. You know when you write something down that probably no-one’s ever going to do it, but you try to get away with it. There are things which aren’t there just to push the story along and it’s often those things in films which are so amazing and rare. Next time I’m going to write a film with no story at all, just a collection of random details.
JH: I’m attached to direct…

Guy Pearce told us that The Proposition is his favourite film that he’s worked on. What made you cast him in such a wildly different role in Lawless?
JH: I think he disappears into so many roles because he’s so remarkably nuanced and subtle. He kind of vanishes. I think all three of us were very keen on him doing something where he actually does the opposite and doesn’t hold back. It was inspired by these Cagney-like characters who are larger-than-life, and also of course by Nick’s suits and hair colour. [laughs]
NC: There’s something so tightly-wound about Guy and that’s what really drew us to him initially. The way he was in LA Confidential and Rules of Engagement  or any of those roles where he has a grinding jaw and looks like he’s set to go off. He never actually does go off and that’s an incredible thing to watch. He was first in our minds for The Proposition. WithLawless, in the script that we sent him initially his character Rakes was a small-town country cop, as he is in the book. Guy wanted to play something different and more memorable, so we played around with Rakes quite a lot.

Finally, who would you say is the best-dressed British man?
JH: I’d nominate Nick but I guess he’s not actually British. Maybe Tom Hardy for his cardigan. The team have been calling it the “Hardigan”. Or Gary Oldman, when he suits up.
NC: The British can’t dress for s***. That’s just a general observation from an Australian. That ought to endear me to everyone in this country. I’ll be up there with Germaine Greer!

Originally published by British GQ.

“Heavens to Betsy!” exclaims Snoop Dogg as he stumbles into the brightly-lit press room backstage at Sziget festival in Budapest, Hungary. The rap legend was still on a metaphorical high after finishing a headlining set which included classics like “Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang” and “Gin & Juice”, as well as more recent tracks such as his Wiz Khalifa collaboration “Young, Wild & Free” and a mumbled version of his Katy Perry hook-up “California Gurls”. Despite his much discussed rebranding as “Snoop Lion” he performed wearing shades bearing the name “Snoop Dogg” and played just one reggae track, “La La La”, the first single from his forthcoming album Reincarnated. Settling down and sparking up, Snoop opened up about the influence of Bob Marley, collaborating with Diplo and the secret of his longevity.

Snoop Dogg on…

The reaction to changing his name to “Snoop Lion”…
“I’m gonna always be Snoop Dogg, because that’s who I am. Snoop Lion is for when I’m making reggae music and is a progression of Snoop Dogg. I do believe that any time you’re doing what I’m doing, you have to have progression and growth. I feel like my fans have grown with me and understand what I’m going through. They don’t get mad when I make decisions to change, to add on or to enlighten. I believe they know who I am as a person because I’ve been so personal with them since day one. They never react with surprise, but with excitement.”

The legend of Bob Marley
“The reason Bob Marley is such a heavy influence is that I feel like we have the same spirit and way of life. His kids are like my brothers. It’s like we all grew up together. That reassures me that I’m a part of the seed that he planted. When he started making music and putting out songs it reached all the way to me during my upbringing. Even now, 20 years later, it’s still influencing me. I feel like I have to make a reggae album. I feel like I have to go through what I’m going through because I’ve done so much in the rap world, in terms of changing the rap game and elevating it. Now this other genre is calling me because it needs a spotlight. It needs to be talked about and it needs to be glamourised.

Converting to Rastafarianism
“The thing about the spirit is that when it calls you, its not that you have to wake up and put a plan together about what you’re going to do or who you’re going to be. The spirit is who I was anyway. The spirit was in my way of life and my liberty. It was always me anyway, it was just a matter of me waking up to that. I found out about my origins and learning about it made me change my lifestyle a little.”

The best advice he got from the Rastafarian priests
“Just to be strong. Rastafari has always been under scrutiny and it’s always been criticised. It’s always been an ‘outcast’, so to speak. When I embrace it I have to take on all that: those years of struggle and Rastafari not being respected. They’ve been held as villains and bad guys. I have to put a whole new look, feel and style on it because its grown to a point where its reached me. I know I have a lot of influence and a lot of people following me. I’m not trying to convert nobody, I’m just trying to live a righteous life. Hopefully if I put a clean glass next to a dirty glass, and I drink from the clean glass… you know the rest.”

Working with Diplo
“Diplo, or Major Lazer, has been heavy in the reggae scene for years. They’ve brought some old school cats back to life and given them the chance to sing again and do their thing. They’ve put a lot of attention on reggae music and Jamaica. They have a foot in the streets and understood what I was looking for. As producers, I felt that they would put the right team around me to project the sound that I was looking for. I wasn’t looking to make a Snoop Dogg album and then make it sound reggae. I was looking to make a reggae record with no Snoop Dogg, no rapping, just straight reggae. Putting the right team together was important, and I felt that a strong producer like Diplo would be able to give me the world. It turns out awesome. I can’t wait to play it for everyone.”

His connection to his fans
“One thing about my music, I love to keep it up close and personal. I love to be up close and personal with the people who follow me. Giving interviews means a lot. Sometimes record labels say not to but personally I love to do it because that way you get the story directly from me. Whenever I’m in Europe, or in other parts of the world where people don’t get the chance to see me all the time, I like to make it special. I want it to be an experience that they’re going to be talking about for years and years. I want them to feel like it’s their show. It’s not me coming to town and stealing, it’s me coming to town and leaving a piece of me behind.”

Originally published by British GQ.

“That’s a nice t-shirt!” Chuck D is admiring the image of Brian Jones on GQ.com’s chest backstage at the Heineken Open’er Festival in Gdynia, northern Poland. “They call us the Rolling Stones of the rap game. I don’t know if I’m Mick and Flavor’s Keith. I think we switch back and forth!” Public Enemy have just come offstage after a storming set which included the first ever performance of their new single “I Shall Not Be Moved” as well as a host of songs from their canonical albums It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back and Fear of A Black Planet. Despite the high-intensity performance we’ve just witnessed, Chuck D, now aged 51, exudes a Zen-like state of calm. All around us people are cracking open drinks and digging into food while main-stage headliners Franz Ferdinand have shyly snuck in to hang out with the hip-hop legends. It’s 25 years since Public Enemy dropped their debut record Yo! Bum Rush the Show and to mark the anniversary they’re currently preparing two new albums, Most Of My Heroes Still Don’t Appear On No Stamp and The Evil Empire Of Everything. Here, Chuck D and Flavor Flav tell us about staying politically aware on tour and share their advice for life in typically righteous fashion.

GQ: When you’re on tour here in Europe are you very aware of the history of the countries you visit?
Chuck D: That’s very important. In Belgium, we dedicated “Fight The Power” to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The memory of Patrice Lumumba will not be in vain. You always have to be aware where you’re going to when you step into somebody’s home. That’s the thing that sets us apart as different. We’re not the normal rap group.

Do you think young rappers should be more politically conscious?
CD: Everybody can do whatever they’ve got to do. Younger generations can have a good time or whatever. There’s no obligation that they’ve got to do something, but every party has security. Public Enemy is the security of the hip-hop party.

Flavor Flav said onstage that this is your 81^st tour. How do you keep things fresh?
CD: Just travelling the world. Look! He’s consumed by that sandwich!
[Flavor Flav walks in eating a ham sandwich bigger than his own head.]

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
CD: There’s been plenty of advice. I would say: “Do what you like to do well, so that you can do it for a long time.”
Flavor Flav: Best advice that I ever got is to do whatever it takes to make myself happy, so that I’ll be able to make others happy. If I’m not happy, I can’t make other people happy.
CD: That’s what he told me the other day. Trust me. We had a conversation about this.
FF: That’s real talk. I’ll tell you one thing you can’t do: you can’t put your shoes on, then your socks on.
[Chuck D starts laughing]
FF: That’s what I was taught! I was taught never to be an asshole, because an asshole gets nothing but a good wipe. Do you know what I mean? That’s exactly what I teach in America. If you’re an asshole, then you’re gonna get wiped. If you’re in a situation where you’re being forced to be an asshole, then you have to change it to make it work for yourself. You get what I’m saying? I love you, baby!

Originally published by British GQ.

When we meet Stanley Booth in a drawing room at Durrants Hotel in London’s Marylebone he immediately apologises for his persistent runny nose.  “I don’t know why,” he says by way of an opener, “I haven’t done any cocaine.”

He may be a slight 70-year-old with snow-white hair now, but in his time Booth has hoovered up more than his fair share of high-grade narcotics. A music writer who knew every American great from BB King to Otis Redding, Booth somehow talked himself onboard the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1969 American tour and ended up becoming friends and late-night sparring partners with Keith Richards himself.

He didn’t just live to tell the tale, he wrote the book on it: The True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones, a stone-cold classic of music writing which took him 15 years to complete. For his part, Keith Richards called Booth the band’s “writer-in-residence” and said of the report, “Stanley Booth’s book is the only one I can read and say, “Yeah, that’s how it was””. Here, Booth talks frankly about witnessing the murder of a Stones fan at Altamont, the difference between Mick and Keith’s attitude to women and the iconic jewellery he unintentionally inspired.

GQ.com: How did you first meet the Stones?
Stanley Booth: I had an editor at Eye magazine who commissioned me to do a piece about them in 1968. I came over here to London and went to the Stones’ office. I told them I was from Memphis and that I knew people like BB King and Furry Lewis, so they never thought of me as a critic. At first I wasn’t interested in writing a book about a rock’n’roll band, but then Brian Jones died and I found that compelling. Brian was 27 and his death was a mystery. I wanted to get to the bottom of that.

You’d already written about a host of legendary artists before you came to England. How did you end up in the studio with Otis Redding?
I got a commission from the Saturday Evening Post, of all places, to do a piece about the Memphis soul sound. I went over to Stax and I remember I was outside taking some notes when this white Lincoln limousine pulled up at the curb. Otis Redding got out of the back. I introduced myself to him and then we went into Stax together. I spent the whole week with him. I’ll never forget watching him and Steve Cropper record “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”. I was there for the writing and recording – they cut ‘Hard To Handle’ and half a dozen others as well. It was thrilling.

Unlike most music books, yours reads like a novel. What inspired you to write it that way?
I was a great fan of Capote’s In Cold Blood and also Gay Talese. He was the guy who really taught me how to do what I do. I don’t find him very morally appealing, but he was a hell of a writer. He had a beautiful, wise and talented wife but when he wrote Thy Neighbour’s Wife he was going around screwing 19-year-olds in massage parlours. I found that very unappetising.

What was it like to be on tour with the Stones in 1969?
It was exhilarating! Those shows were just awesome. I watched the Stones play live every night You couldn’t do it today. In those days everybody was together. We were one little force, maybe eight or ten of us altogether. We all trusted each other and we didn’t have personal problems. We developed personal problems later. When they started having people like Capote on the tour in 1972, he said, [In whiny Capote voice] “There’s no story!” I thought: “Oh, thou fool!” I knew there was a story, because I was writing it. Capote was not equipped to understand or deal with the Rolling Stones.

William S Burroughs was supposed to join that tour as well, wasn’t he?
Burroughs was really above the fray, but he was very helpful to me. He lived in London at Duke Street, St James and I’d go and see him at his flat. He gave me a lot of good advice. We talked about Scott Fitzgerald, whose work he valued very highl, and he told me to read Carlos Baker’s book about Hemingway. He also told me not to smoke hash in front of the window. Those were both pieces of good advice. Uncle Bill was aware that he was a very famous junky, probably the most famous junky in the world at that time.

What was the biggest misconception about the Stones?
That they were motivated by some sort of satanic influence. People think they hired the Hell’s Angels for the concert at Altamont. Nobody hired the Hell’s Angels. There were half-a-million people there and 500 of them happened to be Angels. It was a hopeless situation as far as security was concerned. It was really one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I was right behind Keith’s amps when I saw this Angel kill Meredith Hunter. This 18-year-old black man was right in front of the stage with his white girlfriend. The Angels don’t like black people anyway. Some Angels kept pushing Meredith away from the stage. At some point he reached into his coat and pulled out a nickel-plated revolver. He signed his own death warrant. That was not the right thing to do. He didn’t live another five minutes after he pulled that gun out.

Did the Stones know immediately what had happened?
No, I don’t think they had any idea. They just knew it was a very bad scene with a lot of violence. We saw Angels hitting people over the head with lead-weighted pool cues, using them like baseball bats. After Meredith died the Stones played for another hour-and-a-half and they played a brilliant, brilliant show. It was an heroic performance on the part of the Stones. At that point we assumed that several people had died. We saw so many people knocked down and pounded on.

What was a typical night with Keith like?
It depended on what we had. If we had cocaine, we’d do cocaine. If we had heroin, we’d do heroin. Not injecting, but snorting the light brown powder. It was most gratifying. Speedballs were good stuff. I don’t look for inspiration in drugs anymore. I still smoke grass, but that’s different. Grass is a vegetable. Keith and I spent a lot of time together with nobody else around. He had a tape-recorder that looked like a World War II radio. He had blues songs that I’d never heard, like “Shave ‘Em Dry” by Lucille Bogan. “Oh Daddy, won’t you shave me dry / you can grind me, Papa / grind me ’til I cry.”

Would Keith have been as inspired without drugs?
He used drugs to stay awake. The Stones would work for days on end, and you couldn’t do that without some kind of fuel. Keith wouldn’t have been the same without them, of course.

What’s your favourite memory from that time?
I had some very pleasant days at Keith’s house in the south of England. After a certain amount of time Anita would throw you out, which I never particularly appreciated, but she was really hot in those days. Really fucking beautiful.

What did you learn from being in the studio with the Stones?
They inspired me by example. I’d never seen any band work as hard as the Rolling Stones. They really inspired me to work harder as an artist, or in my attempt to be an artist. At Muscle Shoals they cut three tracks: “Wild Horses”, “You Gotta Move” and “Brown Sugar” and they played for three days straight. At the end of the session Charlie went back to the drum-set and started playing again. Keith said, “Look at that! That’s a rock’n’roller.” At one point [Atlantic Records President] Ahmet Ertegun called me at my motel room at the Holiday Inn and said, “If you guys have any dope you better flush it because the cops are going to try and bust the session.” That was a shame. I wasn’t about to flush no dope away!

After Keith’s Life, do you think Mick will ever write a book?
Fuck no! When I was working on my book my editor, a fatuous and callow young man, called me and told me that Mick had signed a contract for $2m to write a book. I told him that Mick wouldn’t do it. Sure enough, a few months later Mick gave the money back. I didn’t consider it possible for one minute that Mick would write a book. He’s got too much womanising to hide.

Was Keith’s attitude different?
Keith was not a womaniser. He would show up with a girl occasionally but Mick indulged himself in fornication to an unpleasant degree.

As well as the music, the Stones have had a huge influence on men’s style. What did you think of the way they looked?
Well, I had the original skull ring! I was walking down the King’s Road one day in about 1970. There used to be all these wonderful shops and I passed this little store that had a lot of silver in the window. It reminded me that when I was a little kid I’d had a cowboy comic book with a skull ring advertised on the back page. It had stones in its eyes that glowed red like fire in the daytime and blue like the stars at night. So I bought the skull ring and wore it that night to a Stones session. Keith saw it and immediately copped the idea. I’ve never gotten any credit for that! I don’t have the original one anymore. [Pause] I broke it on the head of a whore.[laughs]

Originally published by British GQ.

Like Bono, Jason Pierce is rarely seen onstage without sunglasses. Mercifully, that’s about as far as U2/Spiritualized comparisons go. Over seven albums spanning more than two decades, Pierce’s experiments with sound and pharmaceuticals have taken him from the platinum-selling highs of 1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space to the gruelling lows of last year’s battle with a degenerative liver disease. Now fighting fit again, the 46-year-old meets GQ.com at Fergus Henderson’s restaurant St John in east London, wearing a baggy MC5 T-shirt, black jeans and, of course, a pair of reflective aviators. As we settle into a quiet corner, he removes his glasses to reveal glacial blue eyes and opens up about new album Sweet Heart Sweet Light, the treatment that saved his life and wanting to snuggle down with Iggy Pop…

GQ.com: Do you think people make too much of the drugs influence on your songwriting?
Jason Pierce: Yes. It’s funny, I read Keith Richards’autobiography and I don’t think it reads like someone doing drugs because the drugs he got were the finest in the world. When they weren’t available, he stopped. Very few people have that kind of safety net. It’s a different world. The other thing about drugs is that they’re everywhere. I know plumbers and window cleaners who do more drugs than anyone I know in the music industry. Sure, drugs can help with songwriting, but no more so than language or music. The most psychedelic record in the world is Buddy Holly’s “Slipping And Sliding”. It reminds me of taking LSD but the author couldn’t have been more removed from that world. When music tried to describe the inner workings of the mind it lost its way quite dreadfully. When the world was full of people who wanted to sound like the Rolling Stones and they were chewing acid, loads of great music came out, but when it became more introverted and tried to actually explain the trip it got awful. I met [One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest author] Ken Kesey and we did shows with him and the Pranksters. He was really not very psychedelic. I knew him through Tom Wolfe’s book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but when I met him he was hanging out with these “New Pranksters” who were into staring at crystals. It was just awful.

What’s the biggest misconception about Spiritualized?
I don’t know and I don’t really care! Reading your own press is dangerous. The good is usually better than the reality, and the bad is so bad.

What made you want to start writing music?
The records that I like the most are the ones where you’re the only audience. It’s just you and the record. Those records that seem to elevate you aren’t just foot-tapping pop music, they demand that you are listening and taking it in. I want to make records like that. We live in an age now where you can type “Neu” or “Patsy Cline” into a search engine and get the whole back catalogue: all the bootlegs and the live recordings and everything. That’s not the same as listening to the music or having that music become part of your life, where you only have to hear two notes and it takes you back to a certain time.

Which lyric are you proudest of writing?
I like a lot of them. They’ve all been laboured over. I quite like “Broken Heart” for its real, blatant simplicity. It’s not trying to be clever. Things like “Out Of Sight” and “I Think I’m In Love” have more obvious plays on words and language, but “Broken Heart” is so starkly simple.

Is the religious language you use just the language of rock’n’roll?
It comes from gospel, blues and even doo-wop. It’s a shortcut to explaining what you’re talking about. When I wrote “Walking With Jesus” people knew that I was dealing with issues of mortality and what it means to be human. You don’t have a conversation with Jesus about trivia.

Can you recommend a good book?
The last book I read was Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock. It’s set in Ohio and it reminded me of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. It’s a book of shocking stories from the Midwest, but written with such an elegance that you can just appreciate it for that. Pollock is from the town of Knockemstiff himself – it’s a real place – and even though he’s writing about outcasts and retards, there’s still a sense that he’s one of those people. It’s an amazing book. I don’t read as much as I should but I think books have had an influence on me. “Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space” is a quote from Sophie’s World  by Jostein Gaarder. It’s an introduction to philosophy but written like Alice In Wonderland.

What is it that attracts you to America?
Every part of it’s like a B-movie. Anywhere else on tour you’re just on motorways, but in America you’re in a movie. When you go to San Francisco, you already know your way around. I went to the book depository area in Dallas and it really is like a film set. You’ve seen it so many times that you could draw a picture of the layout. The thing about America is the whole country is like a juvenile: big, powerful and full of its own strength. The whole of its musical history is on record. That’s so rare.

What’s the best thing you can cook?
Cheese on toast is about the limit. It’s good cheese on toast though, just because I make it. Even cereal is better if you make it than if anyone else does. I think I’m at my happiest touring and there’s not much opportunity for cooking on the road. I went to Italy a few years ago and learned some of that style of cooking. It basically just involved chopping things really finely, which appealed to me in an OCD kind of way. I kind of got into that for a while, just smoking joints and chopping things up into miniscule bits.

What was your favourite record in your parent’s collection?
We didn’t have many records! We did have the Seekers who did “Morningtown Ride”, “Georgy Girl” and “The Carnival Is Over”. I don’t think they’re that far removed from Spiritualized, actually. We had Holst’s The Planets  suite as well. Maybe there’s something in that as well.

What’s your drink of choice?
I absolutely adore wine. Fortunately I can drink it again because my liver is properly cured. It’s amazing. Given how bad it was, I can’t believe it’s back to how it started. The treatment is incredible. In some cases it’s even cured cirrhosis, which used to be untreatable. It meant scarring beyond redemption, but even that now seems to be curable. Which is good news if you like drinking.

When were you last starstruck?
I get this sort of rictus smile whenever I meet anybody who’s a big part of my life. Iggy Pop probably the most. I grew up listening to Iggy and I’ve met him a few times now. Last time he gave me a hug and part of me just wanted to snuggle down forever. The other part of my head was saying: “Just hold on tight – don’t let go.” I didn’t sleep at all that night.

Are you a perfectionist?
No, because I’m not seeking the perfect sound. There isn’t a scale with all the great music at one end and all the bad music at the other end. The finest music in the world is so close to the most awful music. It might be a change of production, or a slightly different voice. You can hear it in adequate cover versions of songs that don’t have any magic. It might be a slight difference in the voice or just the placement of the snare drum. It’s such a fine line. Most of my job is just making sure that the needle is on the right side to satisfy me; that it’s always rock’n’roll and it has some kind of ragged glory that satisfies what I like about music. Things like “Freedom” and “Too Late” are a few slips away from being quite middle-of-the-road, or worse: white soul. I don’t have a bag of tricks. It just takes time to make sure that it’s all right.

Originally published by British GQ.

Plan B’s smooth transition from hoody-clad rapper to crisp-suited soul singer may have raised eyebrows but his directorial debut seems intent on grabbing the country by the throat. Made under his real name, Ben Drew, Ill Manors is both structurally inventive and bruisingly frank, following eight characters as their lives interweave in an inner-city cycle of drug-dealing, prostitution and poverty. Having grown up in east London’s Forest Gate where the film is set, Drew, who was sent to a pupil referral unit at 16, has watched these stories play out in real life. When GQ.com meet him in central London he’s wearing a hoody again – and, seemingly, the weight of the world on his shoulders. After flicking his Zippo to spark up a cigarette, he soon begins setting forth his views on the environment that shaped him, the films that influenced him and the style that inspires him.

GQ: You wrote Ill Manors in 2007. Did you make any changes to it after last year’s riots?
Ben Drew: No. The song “Ill Manors” and its video are a response to the riots, but we’d already shot the bulk of the film by September 2010. Really the riots were a response to the issues depicted in the film, so it’s the other way around. These issues have been around since I left school in 2000 and longer than that. People don’t believe that they exist, so they don’t try to change them. Unfortunately the people in charge of fixing these problems are politicians who don’t come from that world. I don’t think the film glamorises anything. The only fiction in this film is that all this stuff is happening at the same time, involving so many characters. That’s the only artistic licence.

What do you think of Kanye West and Jay-Z showing rioting in their video for “No Church In The Wild”?
The problem is when people do that is that it gives others an excuse to be cynical about why people like me are doing things, but I haven’t actually seen the video so I would in no way want to disrespect anybody or talk about their motives. They’re artists themselves so I would never speak for them. When it comes to film and music like that though, the only people who need to be worried are the well-off. It’s only their kids who are going to be influenced negatively by that. The kids that I’m talking about are living that life already. They’re not going to be influenced by Top Boy or Kidulthood to go out in the street and sell crack because they’re already doing it.

Why do you think people get drawn into that life?
They’re doing it because society tells them that they need to have the newest trainers and widescreen TVs and PS3s. In that respect we all have something in common, no matter what walk of life you come from. We’re all consumers: difference is, some people can afford it and some people can’t. There’s so much importance put on these things that the kids who can’t afford them will go and sell crack to be able to afford them. These little kids on the street are prepared to sell crack and ruin another kid’s life so that they can afford a pair of trainers. What made them think it was that important? TV, adverts, magazines and rich kids walking around wearing that stuff and looking down on the kids who can’t afford it and calling them tramps and chavs.

What’s the impact of dismissing people as “chavs”?
It’s a class war perpetuated by journalists. There are so many people walking around with opinions that aren’t their own. How can you judge people that you never come into contact with? You can’t. It’s got so bad now that when you do come in contact with someone of a different class you act a certain way towards them because this war has been created and perpetuated. We’re all falling for it. I had to find a way of dealing with it because I used to get picked on and robbed at school. I was minority white in a multicultural school and I was a target. Not because the kids were racist: that’s just what bullies do. I had to ask the question as to why these kids thought it was OK to pick on people. Then you see where they live and see that they ain’t got s***. They’re just doing what they’ve got to do to get the things that all of us put so much importance on. If you look at life that way it means you ain’t got to fear them, or hate them, or put it down to colour. You put it down to money. The most vile things that we as human beings do to each other is for money. Governments go into other countries and bomb them for oil, power and money. Girls get prostituted and sex-trafficked for money. It’s all to do with class, and nothing to do with religion or race. It all boils down to money.

Could you ever see yourself becoming an MP?
I’m not going to try and be a politician. It would compromise everything that I stand for. These guys get into it with the best intentions and then when they get into power they see the mess they have to deal with. We can’t change the system. As people we just need to be aware of it and make it work for us. Each one of us can teach one other person something that they’re lacking. It’s about taking the time to engage with someone and having patience. These kids need to be able to call someone at two o’clock in the morning and tell them that they’re about to do something really stupid. They need someone to talk to. That goes beyond social work. I was lucky enough to have social workers like that in my life.

Which other films and directors were you influenced by?
I’d say Pusher by Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s not a beautiful film, by any means. It’s shot handheld, almost documentary-style, but the story is strong and the characters are really interesting. I took a leaf out of his book. I also looked at how Shane Meadows works. He’ll write a treatment and then cast the film. Then he’ll get the actors to improv to come up with the dialogue. We did that with bits and pieces. Sometimes we stuck to the script, but sometimes when it was wooden and it felt like they were “acting” I threw the script away and said: “Remember the beats, remember when you’re supposed to walk into the room, remember when you’re supposed to get offended by this person.” It made it difficult to cut and edit the film, but that’s what produced the magic.

Can you recommend a good book?
The last book I read was Premiership Psycho by CM Taylor. It’s about a Premiership footballer who’s a serial killer. He calls himself a “Customer Service Vigilante”. He’s completely obsessed with labels and material things and he hates people that work within customer service who don’t respect the fact that he’s spending money. It’s a black comedy, but for me it says a lot about the society that we live in. It’s hilarious.

What’s your style rule?
The cut is so important, but it doesn’t really matter about the name to me. I really like Armani suits but it’s not because they’ve got Armani written on them: I love the cut of their suits and I think they drop well on me. I get a lot of my denim from Topman. It’s nice, it’s affordable – not that I have to worry about things being affordable – again, I just like the cut. I’d buy jeans from Mr Byrite if I liked the cut. I’ve bought stuff from Primark before. My tip is to know how clothes hang on you and what suits you. If you’re short and you’ve got a round head there are certain things that won’t work for you. If you’re tall and slim and you’ve got a long face there are certain things that will.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Always take insults in the same breath as praise. If someone tells you you’re a piece of shit, you’re not. If someone says you’re the best thing since sliced bread, don’t believe that either. You’re not Jesus or Mother Theresa, but you’re all right. I think that’s how you keep the balance and keep your feet on the ground.

Originally published by British GQ.