There was a time, not so long ago, when Josh Tillman – best known by his stage name Father John Misty – was almost as famous for his bizarre social media antics as he was for making wry, sardonic folk rock records. In the year that followed the release of his breakout second album, 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear, Tillman would fill his popular Instagram account with all manner of idiosyncratic images: hundreds of stills from virtual world Second Life, dozens of stock photos of men taking selfies, iPhone videos of sunsets and a whole series of himself just staring at his phone.

His Twitter presence was just as trollishly absurd. In June 2016, he claimed to have been responsible for the theft of a crystal from an organic juice bar in Los Angeles. He then released a series of tongue-in-cheek, straight-to-social media songs claiming to be unused Prius jingles, rejected promos for streaming service Pandora and his own “official lyrics” for the theme tune to Netflix’s House of Cards. When President Trump fired FBI chief James Comey in May 2017, there was a jaunty Father John Misty song about the incident on Twitter the very next day.

Always hungry for fresh content, the online pop culture news economy ate it up. Pitchfork placed Father John Misty at the top on their list of “The Top 30 Artists You Need to Follow on Social Media”, writing: “On the one hand, @fatherjohnmisty is an extension of Tillman’s mission to cast a sardonic modern gaze on faded rock’n’roll archetypes; on the other, it’s a great outlet for an incorrigible prankster who gets off when people don’t get it.” It’s true that even many of his most dedicated fans seemed to be left entirely perplexed by the whole performance. Typical comments included: “I don’t understand this page” and “Get off your phone and live brother trust me.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

Fred Armisen was born in Mississippi, grew up on Long Island, lives in Los Angeles and created a hit sketch show about Portland, yet the 55-year-old comedian says there’s nowhere he’d rather while away his days than the English countryside. “Any small town where a street curves a little bit, and it’s all cobblestone, and there’s a little white shop,” he says wistfully, speaking over video call from a hotel room in Manchester. “There’s a Boots nearby, and a coffee shop. You can hear the sound of cars and people talking. It’s a little chilly. I’ve got my jacket on. That’s the perfect spot. That’s where I want to be.”

By luck or design, Armisen has lately found plenty of reasons to keep himself sequestered in his British happy place. He’s just spent the week in Wales filming for the fourth season of Documentary Now!, the mockumentary series he co-created in 2015 with fellow Saturday Night Live alumni Bill Hader and Seth Meyers. It’s previously been announced that the new run will include a parody of 1996 boxing documentary When We Were Kings called How They Threw Rocks, about a fictional Welsh sport, but Armisen is keeping tight-lipped about how production is going so far. “It’s so chaotic and things change so much,” he demurs. “I want to wait until we’re done.”

What he can talk about is The Bubble, Judd Apatow’s new pandemic-set Netflix comedy about the travails of a group of high-profile actors forced to quarantine together as they film Cliff Beasts 6, the latest instalment in a big-budget Hollywood franchise packed with CGI flying dinosaurs. Loosely inspired by the havoc Covid restrictions reportedly played with production of the forthcoming Jurassic World: Dominion, the film’s ensemble cast includes Karen Gillan, David Duchovny, Leslie Mann and Pedro Pascal. It was shot between February and April last year at Shepperton Studios in Surrey and at Cliveden House, a stately home on the border of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire so grand that The Beatles used it to double for Buckingham Palace in Help!.

Continue reading at The Independent.

Early in 1987, producers Larry Gordon and Joel Silver were on the hunt for an action hero. They were working on a rollercoaster tale about terrorists hijacking a high-rise tower in Los Angeles and the script called for a muscle-bound bruiser.

For contractual reasons, Frank Sinatra was top of the list for Die Hard. Ol’ Blue Eyes had first refusal as he’d been the star of 1968’s The Detective, which like Die Hard was based on author Roderick Thorp’s thriller novels.

When the 70-year-old crooner confirmed his terrorist-fighting days were long behind him, producers went straight to the most obvious candidate: Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Terminator, Commando and Predator star said no, preferring to try his hand at comedy alongside Danny DeVito in Twins. The rejections kept coming: Richard Gere, Burt Reynolds, Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, Nick Nolte, Don Johnson and Mel Gibson all passed.

Way down the list was Bruce Willis. He passed too, citing commitments to Moonlighting, the private detective TV show in which he starred opposite Cybill Shepherd. Then, the fates aligned. “As it turns out, a miracle happened,” Willis told Entertainment Weekly in 2007. “Cybill Shepherd got pregnant and they shut down the show for 11 weeks – just the right amount of time for me to run around over at Nakatomi Tower.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

With 672 credits to his name, James Hong has almost certainly appeared in more films and television shows than any other actor in the history of Hollywood. In an extraordinary career that stretches back to the mid-Fifties, the 93-year-old has played everyone from Faye Dunaway’s butler in Chinatown to a designer of replicant eyeballs in Blade Runner.

He was the villainous sorcerer David Lo-Pan in Big Trouble in Little China and Cassandra’s high-kicking, back-flipping dad in Wayne’s World 2. He’s turned up in every sitcom from Seinfeld and Friends to The King of Queens and The Big Bang Theory. You’ve heard his voice in Mulan, every Kung Fu Panda movie, and even Pixar’s latest heartwarming hit Turning Red. If acting can be considered the inhabiting of another life, however briefly, then it’s reasonable to assume that James Hong has lived more lives than just about anybody else.

It’s also therefore fitting and utterly remarkable that the nonagenarian has just made one of the best films of his career, and that it happens to be a story about multiple lives. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a hard movie to describe succinctly. It falls somewhere between a Douglas Adams-penned martial arts flick, a particularly good Rick and Morty episode, and that bit in The Bell Jar where Sylvia Plath writes about a young woman and a fig tree, where the protagonist’s many possible lives branch off in front of her while she sits there starving to death because she can’t choose one for fear of losing all the others.

Continue reading at The Independent.

Can I tell you my Bill Murray story? A decade ago, I got a job working as a copywriter for a whisky company at the Cannes Film Festival. Our office was just off the lobby of the star-packed Hotel Martinez, and to celebrate opening night the hotel had given us a bottle of champagne. The very moment we popped the cork, as if summoned by the sound, Murray materialised in the room and asked: “Are we drinking?” Before we knew it, he was the one filling our glasses and regaling us with his plans to “cause mischief” at the festival. Our bosses at the whisky company were livid, of course. We’d somehow made Bill Murray appear in our office and all he’d drunk was champagne.

It’s been 45 years since Murray first burst into the public consciousness as a cast member of Saturday Night Live and in that time the deadpan comic actor has become almost as well known for turning up in unexpected places in real life as he is for starring in films such as Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation. There are countless Bill Murray stories, like the one about him rocking up to a student’s house party in Scotland and doing all the dirty dishes, or the time he drove a taxi from Oakland to Sausalito while the cab driver serenaded him with a saxophone from the back seat. He has crashed bachelor parties and wedding photo shoots, turning our ideas about the guarded, sheltered life of a celebrity on its head with spontaneous, Dadaist displays of playful curiosity.

Of all the unlikely places he’s appeared, the nearly 2,000-year-old stage of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus might just be the unlikeliest. The theatre, on the southwest slope of the Acropolis of Athens, is the setting for his new concert film, New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization. It opens with footage of Murray clambering over the heads of his audience, a huge bouquet of red roses cradled in one arm as he flings the flowers one by one into the roaring crowd. Filmed in June 2018, at a time when the only thing he risked by impulsively climbing into a crowd of people was falling on his backside, it looks so carefree as to feel like a time capsule.

“It is a time capsule,” says Murray, inhaling sharply. “You just made me take a deep gasp of a breath.” He’s speaking over a video call from some anonymous hotel suite in New York, dressed in a grey button-up shirt and a black woollen beanie reminiscent of the red one he wore as the titular oceanographer in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. There’s nothing quite like a global pandemic, he says, to put the kibosh on spontaneous interaction. “We just went out with our friend to walk the dog, and you’re wearing a mask, everyone’s wearing a mask. The dog is the only one who’s completely alive!” he laments. “He’s living the dog’s life. The rest of us are afraid to die, and afraid to kill, so we’re masked up and we’re injected, and so forth. It’s the most challenging time of this life cycle for us. We didn’t have a world war or a depression, the things our ancestors had. This is the hand we got dealt and if you fold, you can’t win.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

In 2010, self-described “serial entrepreneur” Adam Neumann and architect Miguel McKelvey founded the shared-workspace company WeWork. It seemed they’d found a profitable way to take advantage of two significant trends: the surplus of relatively low-cost office space left vacant following the 2008 financial crisis, and a rise in the number of workers turning to freelancing or creating their own start-ups. The company grew quickly from its first location in New York’s SoHo district, and within a few short years it was being described using the much sought-after name given by investors to any start-up valued at over $1bn. WeWork was a unicorn.

That was only the beginning. As WeWork grew so did the scale and grandiosity of Neumann’s ambitions. They rapidly opened hundreds of new locations across North America, Europe and Israel, as well as expanding into luxury gyms (Rise by We), private schools (WeGrow) and co-living accommodation (WeLive). Neumann pitched his company to excitable investors as more than just a real estate company. WeWork, he claimed, was actually more like a tech start-up, and he was offering the chance to invest in a “physical social network”. By January 2019 the company had achieved a valuation of $47bn, making it the third-highest valued privately-owned company in the world, placed just behind Uber and Airbnb.

In September 2019, that valuation came tumbling down almost overnight. WeWork was preparing for its initial public offering (IPO), when it would begin offering shares on the stock market and transition from private to public ownership. It also meant that for the first time the company would have to make its internal finances public. They weren’t good. WeWork was losing $219,000 every hour it operated, putting it in a position where it was too broke to even lay off staff as it couldn’t afford to pay their severance packages. At least one job loss was guaranteed by these revelations: on 24 September 2019, Adam Neumann was forced to resign as CEO of WeWork.

Continue reading at The Independent.

Early in 2006, the American artist John Lurie finished work on a watercolour he titled Bear Surprise. The painting depicts the animal in a meadow standing on its hind legs in front of a couple having sex on a picnic blanket, with the bear saying: “Surprise!” Within weeks the picture was uploaded to a Russian blog with the speech bubble altered to read “Preved”, a portmanteau that translates as “Hello Bear”.

This strange image captured the imagination of the Russian-language internet and by May that year The Moscow Times reported it had “gained vast popularity with the speed of an avalanche”. Lurie’s wayward bear has gone on to be referenced in Russian films and TV shows and has appeared in countless further memes, even flying improbably through the sky on a poster advertising the Russian edition of Newsweek. Last month, as Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Lurie posted his original artwork on Twitter once again. “Preved!” he wrote. “What the fuck Russia? Let Putin know he is alone in this horror.”

Needless to say, Lurie never expected any of his artworks to go viral on the other side of the planet, least of all that image. “Bear Surprise is a really bad painting,” he declares modestly from his home in the Caribbean. “That that one, of all my paintings, was out there like that – and you cannot believe the level that it was out there – just feels weird.” It goes to show that once you put art out into the world there is no telling where it might end up, a lesson echoed by Lurie’s own peripatetic journey through music, film and, most recently, his deeply contemplative and unconventional HBO series, Painting With John. During the first season, he paired footage of his artistic talents with wild tales about taking cocaine with the musician Rick James and the time Barry White’s speaking voice made his testicles vibrate. Bob Ross, this is not.

Continue reading at The Independent.

David Amram started collaborating with Jack Kerouac before he even knew his name. The celebrated composer first met the novelist in 1956 at an artist’s party in Manhattan. “This guy came up to me in a red and black chequered shirt, looking like a French-Canadian lumberjack,” remembers Amram, now 91, from his New York home, which is littered with souvenirs of an illustrious career spent making music with everyone from Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie to Patti Smith and Bob Dylan. “He said: ‘I’m gonna read, you play.’” Amram took out his French horn and penny whistle and set about accompanying the stranger’s performance. “I just closed my eyes and listened to him,” he recalls. “I had no idea what he was going to do, and it was magical. I’m hesitant to use the phrase ‘ESP’, but not hesitant enough not to use it! That’s the best way to describe what it was like to get the feeling you’d known somebody your whole life, and that they were talking right to you and making sense.”

Afterwards, Amram still didn’t get an introduction. “He ran off to go dance with some fine young woman,” he says with a chuckle. “We were all out there flirting and drinking and having a good time.” It was only when they bumped into each other again at another party a couple of weeks later that Amram learnt Kerouac’s name, and that he was an author whose first major work, the 1950 novel The Town and the City had been published to a chorus of widespread indifference. That all changed in 1957 with the publication of his second book: On The Road.

A poetic and profound account of his years traversing America, often in the company of his irrepressible friend and inspiration Neal Cassady, On The Road made Kerouac a celebrity overnight. Its runaway success helped him to publish another dozen novels before he drank himself to death in 1969, at the age of 47, but he never enjoyed his sudden fame. “Most of the time, he was very quiet and very shy,” says Amram. “That’s one reason he used to drink, so that he could anaesthetise himself enough to be comfortable with people.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

On Thursday 12 March 2020, Kelly Jones, his Stereophonics bandmates and their crew gathered in front of a television screen to watch the prime minister address the nation. “That was the first day Boris Johnson went on telly with those scientist guys, and they said: ‘Nothing’s closing down. Everything continues as it is,’” recalls Jones from his studio in London. The announcement was met with relief, as it meant the band were clear to go ahead with a pair of headline shows at Cardiff’s Motorpoint Arena that weekend.

It was only after the gigs were done that Jones, who doesn’t use social media, realised he’d inadvertently found himself at the centre of a national controversy. “I got back to my house in Wales and someone said: ‘Piers Morgan’s been having a right pop at you, hasn’t he?’” he remembers. “I didn’t know what they meant, because I knew Lewis Capaldi was doing shows, and the West End was still running.”

That same weekend, Premier League fixtures were suspended, as was Wales’s Six Nations rugby match against Scotland, but Jones says even with hindsight he has no regrets about pressing on with his band’s performances. “I stand by what we did,” he says, matter-of-factly. “We followed the advice. I had my own family there, including my parents, my pregnant wife and my five-year-old. If we upset people, we upset people, but we followed the guidelines at the time.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

In 1973, Patrick Haggerty sat down to write a song about how pissed off he was with heterosexual men. “I wanted to write a song about straight white male supremacy and how fucked up it is,” recalls the 77-year-old, speaking over the phone from his home in Bremerton, Washington, across the bay from Seattle. He called the song “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears”, and included it on his band’s eponymous debut Lavender Country, the first country album ever recorded by an openly gay artist. “That song put a scarlet letter on my back and made me untouchable,” he explains. “I had to choose between being a screaming Marxist bitch or going back into the closet and going to Nashville to try to do something with country music. I made my choice with my eyes open and never regretted it.”

Just 1,000 copies of Lavender Country were pressed and sold via adverts in the underground gay press. When they were gone, they were gone. Haggerty spent a couple of years playing his songs to audiences of fellow gay activists, then got a job as a social worker and moved on with his life. “Lavender Country died unsung and unnoticed,” he says. “It was so dead that I was married to my husband for three years before he even knew I made it.”

That all changed in 2014, when Brendan Greaves, an American folklorist and co-founder of the record label Paradise of Bachelors, was forwarded a YouTube upload of “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears”. Greaves was fascinated. “He called me up and offered me a contract to re-release Lavender Country,” remembers Haggerty. “I didn’t believe him. I thought he was selling encyclopaedias and kept waiting for the shoe to fall.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

Beside a vast waterfall, a woman dangles precariously from a frozen cliff face. As the wind whips around her, she leaps and drives a golden spike into the ice. When she looks up, towards the camera, we know in an instant that she will be alright from the look on her CGI-smoothed visage. There is no danger, because nothing here is real. The only place our new hero looks likely to fall is deep into the uncanny valley.

The trailer for Amazon’s much-anticipated new series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power hit screens during the Super Bowl this weekend, giving fans an early glimpse at exactly what the world’s first billion dollar television show looks like. The answer? A cut scene from an old Final Fantasy computer game. It is hard to conjure up a sense of jeopardy when your characters, in this case Swedish-born Welsh actor Morfydd Clark’s young Galadriel, have ended up looking like one of Mark Zuckerberg’s creepy, dead-eyed Meta avatars wrapped in a billowing cloak of special effects. Sure, royal elves aren’t necessarily supposed to look human, but you’d think after spending all that money she’d at least look like she has a pulse.

Continue reading at The Independent.

Not long before his death in November 1991, ailing Queen frontman Freddie Mercury was visited at home in Kensington by his curly-haired bandmate Brian May. The guitarist had brought with him a VHS tape he’d been sent by Saturday Night Live comedian Mike Myers, who was hoping to get approval to use their music in his forthcoming film debut Wayne’s World. The pair sat and watched the tape together, dissolving into fits of laughter at the sight of five young men squeezed into a powder blue AMC Pacer headbanging their way through their operatic 1975 single “Bohemian Rhapsody”. “He loved it,” May told Myers and the rest of the Wayne’s World cast during an episode of Josh Gad’s Reunited Apart in 2020. “He just laughed and laughed. He was very weak, but he just smiled and laughed. How wonderful is that?”

Having received Mercury’s seal of approval, Wayne’s World arrived in US cinemas the following Valentine’s Day, 30 years ago tomorrow, and was an immediate hit. It went straight in at number one at the box office, eventually making over $183m globally against its $20m budget, and it remains the highest-grossing film ever to be made off the back of a Saturday Night Live sketch. Nobody was more surprised at this gargantuan success than the people who made it. “Honestly, we were just hoping it would get a five-theatre release,” recalls director Penelope Spheeris, down the line from her home in Laurel Canyon. “It was a total shock that it did as well as it did on the first weekend, and then the weekends after that, and then around the world. It was lightning in a bottle. We didn’t try to make a cultural phenomenon. We just did it.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

The first thing visitors to Tupac Shakur: Wake Me When I’m Free will see is a towering 12ft bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, the words “2 DIE 4” etched beneath her. Fans of Shakur will recognise this as a larger-than-life reproduction of one of the rapper’s chest tattoos, a tribute to his mother Afeni Shakur, who he referred to as a “Black queen”. On his 1993 track “Something 2 Die 4”, Shakur recalled the words of guidance she once offered him: “You know what my momma used to tell me / If ya can’t find something to live for / then you best find something to die for.”

It’s an apt introduction to the immersive new exhibition in downtown Los Angeles, which has been curated and assembled by Shakur’s estate, because as well as bringing together a remarkable collection of artefacts from the rapper’s short but explosive musical career, the exhibit also serves as a powerful reminder of the formative influence his mother’s experiences in the Black Panther Party had on his life and work. The 20,000sqft exhibition opened last Friday and is set to remain in Los Angeles for a limited time (tickets are currently on sale through to 1 May) with as-yet-unspecified plans for the show to eventually tour North America and cities around the world. Twenty-six years after Shakur was murdered in Las Vegas, the thought-provoking exhibition avoids gimmickry – there’s no sign of the Tupac hologram that appeared at Coachella in 2012, for example – in favour of foregrounding the rapper’s activism and politically conscious art.

Continue reading at The Independent.

When Kiefer Sutherland was two years old, long before anyone had even conceived of the counter-terrorist operative Jack Bauer he would one day play in 24, his family’s home in Beverly Hills was raided by armed government agents. Although he was just a toddler, Sutherland remembers the shock of the moment all too well. “It doesn’t matter what age you are,” he says with a dry laugh, “when the FBI comes running through your house with their guns drawn, you’re gonna remember it.”

Sutherland, now 55, is speaking on a video call from his home in Los Angeles. He’s wearing thick-rimmed glasses and a dark blue T-shirt that shows off his tattooed forearms, while a vase of long-stemmed red roses provides his only backdrop.

One of the most successful actors of the Eighties, with a string of hits that included Stand by Me, The Lost Boys and Young Guns, Sutherland has spent much of the past six years establishing himself as a real-life country singer. After playing hundreds of live shows around the globe he has just released his third album, Bloor Street, the follow up to 2019’s Reckless & Me which bucked the dismal trend for actors-turned-musicians by hitting the Top 10 in the UK charts, a feat the likes of Steven Seagal never quite managed to pull off.

Continue reading at The Independent.

When Jessica Raine joined the cast of Jed Mercurio’s smash-hit police drama Line of Duty for its second season, fans thought they were being introduced to an integral new member of beloved anti-corruption unit AC-12. Instead, her character DC Trotman hadn’t even made it through a single episode before she was unceremoniously bundled out of a hospital window – another surprise onscreen death added to the merciless Mercurio’s ever-lengthening rap sheet.

Fancy yourself ruthless enough to dream up a twist that shocking? If so, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Mercurio has turned teacher and is sharing the hard-won secrets of his 25-year career in a new online “Writing Drama for Television” course from BBC Maestro. For £80, you’ll get your hands on a 115-page PDF of course notes and access to 28 video lessons stretching over a total of seven hours. It’s a similar format to the screenwriting course taught by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin for rival e-learning platform MasterClass, although presumably with much less time dedicated to crafting the perfect walk-and-talk.

Mercurio’s shows – which also include the political thriller Bodyguard and medical drama Bodies – have won him millions of fans, even as critics have grumbled about his breathlessly twisting scripts stretching credulity. The gruff Lancashire bard has become something of a divisive figure, but the pertinent question is whether he can really teach you how to write a riveting top-flight drama in less time than it takes to watch Peter Jackson’s Beatles documentary Get Back. I dug out my notebook, hit record on my annoyingly whiny DIR, and settled in to find out.

Continue reading at The Independent.

Ronnie Spector has died, at the age of 78, but her voice will go on being heard for as long as we have recorded music and a way to play it. The lead singer of The Ronettes, she lent her unforgettable vibrato to their immortal 1963 single “Be My Baby” before marrying the song’s producer, Phil Spector. He was a cruel, macabre and jealous abuser, keeping her locked away from the world and forbidding her from performing. After escaping in 1972, Ronnie was encouraged by many of the musical icons she’d influenced and inspired to return to singing. “So that’s what I did,” she told Vice in 2016. “I went right back, because I had people like Keith Richards and John Lennon and Billy Joel and David Bowie – even Springsteen – telling me ‘Ronnie, you have the voice of all voices.’”

Born Veronica Yvette Bennett on 10 August 1943 in New York’s Spanish Harlem, Spector grew up surrounded by family and music. Her mother had six sisters, all hairdressers, who years later would help create and maintain The Ronettes’ signature towering beehives. On Saturday nights, their extended family would gather at Spector’s grandmother’s house, and the children would sing. “By the time I was eight,” Spector recalled in her 2004 memoir Be My Baby. “I was already working up whole numbers for our family’s little weekend shows.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

Fifteen years ago this Christmas, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men arrived in US cinemas to a deafening roar of indifference. For some reason the idea of visiting a gritty near-future dystopia in which women can inexplicably no longer have babies didn’t exactly entice audiences away from unwrapping their presents. The film bombed, failing to make back its $76m (£57m) budget at the box office. Critics weren’t sold, either. “One small problem: I didn’t believe any of it,” sniffed The Independent’s Anthony Quinn. “Not the fertility cataclysm, not the police state, not Michael Caine as a boho activist.”

Children of Men is harder to disbelieve in 2021, provided you have read the news or looked out of a window. The film has enjoyed a critical resurgence in recent years, at least in part because of how prescient its depiction of an immigration-obsessed, post-apocalyptic Britain now looks. Among the film’s avowed fans is the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama, who has said that Children of Men is “obviously something that should be on people’s minds after Brexit and after the rise of Donald Trump”. According to Cuarón’s writing partner, Timothy J Sexton, the reason many of the film’s predictions have proved so accurate is that they weren’t really predictions at all. “We were very much trying to make a movie about the present,” says Sexton over the phone from Los Angeles. “We weren’t trying to guess our way into some future. We just wanted to make it like the present, only more so.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

Joan Didion, who died today in New York at the age of 87, was a writer all her life. Her work, whether fiction or journalism, was clear-sighted, precise and perceptive, and always peppered with her signature bone-dry wit. “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write,” she explained in her 1976 essay “Why I Write”. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Born on 5 December 1934 in Sacramento, California, Didion was just five years old when she wrote her first story, at her mother’s encouragement. As a teenager she obsessively typed out the works of Ernest Hemingway, learning the rhythm and simplicity of clear, declarative writing. At 21, while studying for a degree in English at Berkeley, she wrote an essay about the San Francisco architect William Wilson Wurster and entered it into a competition sponsored by Vogue. She won first place, and her prize was a job as a research assistant at the magazine and the start of a new life in New York.

Continue reading at The Independent.

At last week’s American Music Awards, K-pop titans BTS were named Artist of the Year. This weekend, in front of 50,000 screaming fans at the Sofi Stadium in Los Angeles, they prove why they deserved it. Over the course of a thrilling two-and-a-half hour show, the band’s seven members deliver a sublime succession of pop hits, combining meticulously choreographed dance routines with clearly unrehearsed moments of heartfelt sincerity. To paraphrase another famous army leader: they came, they sang, they conquered.

BTS’s dedicated fan following, known as the ARMY, have flown in from all over the world to witness their heroes’ long-awaited return. They have been very patient. Due to the pandemic, 760 long days have separated the last BTS show in front of an audience in Seoul on 29 October 2019 and their return in Los Angeles on Saturday, the first of their four shows at the football stadium. During a press conference held at the venue on Sunday afternoon, singer Jimin said the pressure of returning to the stage after so long had left him feeling “very scared and nervous” the previous night, and he vowed that for their second show he would “take it easy” and try to “enjoy the experience” a little more. Judging by the cheeky smile spread across his face by the conclusion, he more than succeeded. He’s not the only one: 50,006 faces grin deliriously back at him.

Continue reading at The Independent.

At a time when reading for pleasure is on the decline, James Patterson knows better than anyone how to keep selling novels. Since his first thriller was published in 1976, the 74-year-old from upstate New York has gone on to sell more than 400 million books worldwide. He holds the record for the most appearances on The New York Times bestseller list, and the record for the most times topping that list. For the past 13 years in a row, Patterson has been the most borrowed author from British libraries. Last year, Forbes estimated he brought in around $80m (£59m), making him America’s highest paid author. He has built this empire on the back of a staggering production rate: this year alone, no fewer than 11 new James Patterson titles will hit bookshelves around the world.

Still, even bestselling authors aren’t averse to the odd publicity stunt. This Wednesday, at Bethnal Green Town Hall in London, Patterson will put his detective hero Alex Cross on trial for a gruesome triple murder in the author’s first ever interactive live event: “The Judge, The Jury and James Patterson.” Given that Cross, who first appeared in 1993’s Along Came A Spider, is now the star of the world’s bestselling detective series, it isn’t hard to guess the verdict his creator will be lobbying for. “I hope he gets off,” says Patterson with a chuckle when we speak over video call from his Mediterranean-style villa in Palm Beach, Florida. The event wasn’t Patterson’s idea, but he immediately saw the appeal. “Courtroom stuff is always really interesting, so the idea of putting Alex on trial and having a live jury there who are gonna vote on it seemed fun… it’s hard to draw attention to books these days.”

The event is being held to promote the publication of Fear No Evil, the 29th instalment in the Alex Cross series. In typical Patterson fashion, his new thriller is a breakneck, globe-trotting adventure that bounces Cross from Washington DC to LA, Paris, Mexico City and finally the wilderness of Montana, where he finds himself caught between a murderous drug cartel and a rogue group of vigilante soldiers who’ve gone to war with them. It’s all faintly implausible, of course, but Patterson argues that’s part of his style, too. “For the most part, I don’t do realism,” he says. “Every once in a while a critic will go: ‘This isn’t very realistic!’ Not that I compare myself to Picasso, but to me that’s like looking at a Picasso and saying: ‘Well, this isn’t very realistic!’ That’s not good criticism. You can say ‘I hate this’ or ‘I think it stinks’, but Fear No Evil is not realism. It’s over the top, more like movies, but you always hope there’s some emotional truth too.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

David Coverdale wanted to retire from touring last year, when he was 69. The flamboyant Whitesnake frontman, blessed with the voice of a golden god and the innuendo-laden sense of humour of a naughty schoolboy, has instead been forced by the pandemic to reschedule his band’s last stand until next spring. “It’s unbelievable to me that I’m still working and active at 70,” he tells me, his rich, sonorous tones singing down the line from Hook City, his home studio on the outskirts of Reno, about 20 minutes from Lake Tahoe. “Reno-by-Sea!” he announces theatrically, then, “He wishes!” He’s in good spirits, despite having had his retirement plans pushed back. “I have bluebirds flying out of every orifice,” he trills happily in a way that suggests the sensation is less painful than it sounds. “That’s not too shabby for a man of my dotage.”

Coverdale didn’t expect to still be squeezing himself into leather trousers at 70 because he thought it was all over four decades ago. Back in 1981 he was living in a rented villa on the Algarve and sleeping in a separate room from his first wife Julia as their relationship crumbled. Whitesnake’s prospects didn’t look much rosier, with tensions rising to the point that within a year Coverdale would sack all his bandmates. Worst of all, he was fast approaching 30, surely over the hill for a rock’n’roll star. He couldn’t have known he was only then coming up with what would become their signature hit. “As I was writing ‘Here I Go Again’ and ‘Crying in the Rain’ about the breakdown of my first marriage, inconsolable, rat-arsed on white port and lemonade – actually, it was white port and 7 Up, let me give credit where it’s due – I thought: ‘The party’s over,’” he recalls. “In those days, nobody thought Jagger would still be touring at 78! Are you kidding? These guys keep raising the bar, the bastards!”

Continue reading at The Independent.

In August 2018, just days after playing a ravey headline set at Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire, the visionary techno artist Jon Hopkins found himself attached to a thin rope being lowered 200ft into an ancient cave system deep in the Amazonian jungle of Ecuador. “I’m not really a rugged outdoors type,” admits the 42-year-old over the phone from his studio in Hackney. “But when I get unusual offers I usually just say ‘yes’ without really thinking. Before you know it, you’re descending on this rope into the abyss. It was really f***ing terrifying!”

Hopkins had been invited to the Tayos Caves by Eileen Hall, whose father Stan Hall led an expedition to explore them in 1976. After he died in 2008 Eileen took up his conservation mission, hoping that by raising awareness of the site’s remarkable biodiversity, it would be granted the protection of UNESCO World Heritage status. She put together a new expedition team, including scientists and artists, which is how Hopkins came to be dangling by a thread, journeying into the deep.

At that moment, Hopkins already knew he had reached a turning point in his musical career. His fifth album, Singularity, had been released three months previously, receiving widespread acclaim and a Grammy nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Album. Hopkins considers Singularity and its predecessor, his Mercury Prize-nominated 2013 record Immunity, to be “sister albums”, with a shared intricate, euphoric and beat-driven sound. For his next record, he wanted to move in a new direction, “far away from a cosmic party or a set of festival bangers”. So he turned his gaze inward, taking inspiration from meditation, which he has practised since he was 21, and his experiences with DMT, the active ingredient in ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic brew that Amazonian tribes have been using in spiritual ceremonies for centuries. It was these influences, coupled with his time at Tayos, that led to the creation of a new album unlike any he’s made before, Music for Psychedelic Therapy, a gorgeous musical voyage that draws on ambient, drone and classical music – as well as the sounds of the natural world – and features not a single drum beat.

Continue reading at The Independent.

On Friday 19 March 1971, the journalist Hunter S Thompson and the lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta were sitting in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel – “in the patio section, of course” – drinking singapore slings and plotting the high-speed desert trip that would inspire Thompson’s most celebrated work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Fifty years and seven months later, I’m sitting on that same patio with the filmmaker Phillip Rodriguez, who made an incisive documentary about Acosta’s wild life and times, The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo. Reading Thompson as a teenager made me want to write for a living, so my plan had been to mark the 50th anniversary of Fear and Loathing first appearing in Rolling Stone by having a few drinks and toasting the memory of these two icons of cultural rebellion. Rodriguez has other ideas. “We have to rethink a lot of our gods,” he tells me, a smile breaking through his short-cropped snowy beard but his eyes deadly serious. “We become conservative if we’re still trying to preserve the mythologies of our youth.” I almost spit out my singapore sling.

These days, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas exists most powerfully in the popular imagination thanks to Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film adaptation, which starred Johnny Depp as Thompson’s alter ego Raoul Duke and Benicio Del Toro as Duke’s attorney, Dr Gonzo. On any given Halloween you will still find plenty of Raoul Dukes roaming the streets, cigarette holders clamped between their teeth, and a fair few Dr Gonzos trailing in their wake. In the film, as in the book, Acosta’s alter ego is essentially a sidekick, portrayed as a drug-crazed lunatic “Samoan”. When Acosta first read Thompson’s story, he had no problem being cast as a drug-crazed lunatic but was incensed that his identity as a proud leader of the Chicano civil rights movement had been erased. On top of that, Acosta believed he deserved credit for the work itself, in which much of the dialogue is reproduced verbatim from recordings Thompson made during their adventures in Vegas. “My God! Hunter has stolen my soul!” he wrote to Alan Rinzler, the editor who ran Straight Arrow, Rolling Stone’s books division. “He has taken my best lines and has used me. He has wrung me dry for material.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

If the success of Big Mouth has taught Nick Kroll anything, it’s just how many people in the world have had sex with their pillows. When he and his childhood best friend Andrew Goldberg were first dreaming up their hit animated show about the growing pains of puberty, they based the character of Jay Bilzerian, who has deeply involved relationships with a wide variety of soft furnishings, on a specific friend they knew as kids. Countless fans have let Kroll know since that their friend was far from unique.

“It happens a lot,” says the 43-year-old, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth as he speaks over a video call from his home office in Los Angeles. “It tends to be men who’ve had sex with pillows, but then there’s a lot of women who talk about corners of couches, or long baths with the faucet on. Very little surprises me now. That’s the beauty of the show. It makes you realise that the weird thing you did, or that you heard about, was happening all over the place. It’s all pretty common.”

Big Mouth returns for its fifth season this week, bringing us another instalment of what The New York Times has called “the greatest work of puberty-themed art ever created”. The initial premise of the show was for Kroll and Goldberg, along with co-creators Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, to explore the confusion of their own adolescence by following semi-autobiographical characters named Nick (voiced by Kroll) and Andrew (John Mulaney) as they lurch towards adulthood under the erratic influence of Andrew’s Hormone Monster Maury, a suitably deranged personification of puberty itself (also voiced by Kroll).

Continue reading at The Independent.

Naming a child can be a taxing task for any new parents, but for Adam Granduciel and his partner, the actor Krysten Ritter, one name for a boy stood out as a clear frontrunner. In 2018, the year before their son was born, the couple met Bruce Springsteen backstage at one of his theatre shows on Broadway. Springsteen is a longstanding hero of Granduciel’s, and a noted influence on the epic, road-trip-ready rock music he makes with his band The War on Drugs. No surprise then that Granduciel and Ritter decided to name their child Bruce, or that The Boss himself gave them his approval. “I didn’t tell him beforehand, but he knows now for sure,” says Granduciel of his son’s famous namesake. “He gets a kick out of it!”

In 2021, The War on Drugs are something of a rarity: a massively successful modern guitar band. Their last album, 2017’s A Deeper Understanding, won the Grammy for Best Rock Album, while their international tour next year will see them perform at some of the world’s biggest and most storied venues, including Madison Square Garden in New York and the O2 in London. Those grand arenas will provide a fitting home for the meticulously crafted rock songs that fill the band’s forthcoming new album, their fifth, I Don’t Live Here Anymore, which is set to be released on Friday. While their early records featured sprawling soundscapes emerging from a maelstrom of Seventies and Eighties classic rock influences, the songwriting on the new record is more direct, the lyrics more personal. It was to some extent inspired, Granduciel says, by the arrival of the younger Bruce in his world.

“Nothing will put your life into perspective like having a kid,” says the 42-year-old, speaking over the phone from Austin, Texas, where Ritter is currently filming the forthcoming HBO series Love and Death, from Big Little Lies creator David E Kelley. It’s a quirk of her celebrity that Granduciel has the curious distinction of being one of the very few grizzled, long-haired contemporary rockers to regularly be trailed by paparazzi around Los Angeles, often with Bruce under one arm. “I think it helped me understand what it means to grow up. It puts your place in your own life into a little bit of focus, and there were things that I wanted to write about as I entered fatherhood. It was a ripe opportunity to understand new facets of life.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

Tom Petty released a lot of great albums over the course of his four-decade career as one of the great American songwriters, but none meant more to him than 1994’s Wildflowers. “Even on the last tour, if we played a song from Wildflowers he’d say: ‘That’s the best record we ever made’,” remembers Benmont Tench, keyboardist and founding member of Petty’s backing group The Heartbreakers. “And I appreciated that he said ‘we’.”

Wildflowers is ostensibly a Petty solo record, although the majority of The Heartbreakers ended up playing on it anyway. It was recorded at a transitional time in his life; he was privately aware that his 20-year marriage was falling apart, and publicly separating from both his record label MCA and producer Jeff Lynne, who had been instrumental in the creation of his two previous albums, 1989’s Full Moon Fever and 1991’s Into the Great Wide Open. Lynne was a hero of Petty’s, and had been his bandmate in supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, but Tench says Petty was looking for a new sound. And it was easier, perhaps, recording the more personal, introspective songs on Wildflowers with Rick Rubin, a producer he barely knew when they started making the album. “People will tell their life story to a stranger, even when they won’t tell those things to a friend,” points out Tench. “I think emotionally it was great to have new blood around.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

There’s a moment during the Rolling Stones’ triumphant return to Los Angeles that stays with me long after the show is over. It comes right at the end, after the geriatric band blast through a straight two hours of the finest rock’n’roll songs ever written. They’re midway through a climactic “Satisfaction” and Mick Jagger – who is 78-years-old and by this point has done a marathon’s worth of strutting – is out at the end of his catwalk still giving his all. You can picture it: up on his tippy-toes with his arms flowing from side to side as though he’s performing an incantation. There is a reason people write songs dedicated to his moves.

He turns around to see that Keith Richards, a mere child of 77, has prowled his way down the runway to meet him. The guitarist lets his instrument go slack around his neck and with his pirate’s grin starts to mimic Jagger’s dancing in that matey, half-assed way a non-dancer does when faced with a pro. They’re only about a foot from each other, looking right in each other’s eyes, and they both just start laughing. Looking at the picture of pure joy splashed across their faces, I have to think: seriously, what are the odds?

Jagger and Richards, as any student of rock mythology can tell you, met on a platform at Dartford Station on the morning of 17 October 1961. Their next show at the SoFi Stadium, on Sunday night (17 October) will mark exactly 60 years of the prototypical rock partnership. Their diamond anniversary. Few marriages last this long, and even fewer bands. Throughout their turbulent relationship, Jagger and Richards have fought, feuded, sniped and publicly made fun of each other’s genitalia, but somehow they’ve always come back to each other. What’s even more remarkable is that by tonight’s evidence, impossibly, they’re still at the top of their game.

Continue reading at The Independent.

Last year, in those uncertain early days of the pandemic, Jake Johnson feared his movie-making days might be behind him. Apple TV had just passed on a pilot for a Seventies-set sitcom about a cult named Habata that the 43-year-old had hoped to star in, and back before a vaccine had been developed, Hollywood executives told Johnson there was no telling when – or indeed if – full-scale film productions might return. Troubled, Johnson decided to take matters into his own hands. “I called my friend Trent and said: ‘Let’s go make a movie, because we might be done in this business,’” he remembers, speaking over a video call from a trailer on set somewhere in California’s San Fernando Valley. “We said: ‘If this is our last one, let’s just go out and have a ton of fun.’”

Trent is Trent O’Donnell, an Australian director whom Johnson met when he was hired to work on New Girl, the sitcom that first hit screens a decade ago and transformed Johnson from a jobbing bit-part actor into a winning romantic lead. Over the course of the show’s seven-year run, Johnson won the heart of Zooey Deschanel’s Jess, and millions of fans, as Nick Miller, the lovably grumpy bartender who manages to become a successful author despite not being fully convinced he knows how to read.

O’Donnell joined the show as a guest director in its third season but quickly became such an integral part of the crew that Johnson remembers him being on set every day for the following four years. “He and I have spent hundreds of hours together,” he says. “For this movie, we were total partners. We wrote it together, paid for it ourselves and shot the entire movie in 12 days. To do that, we had to fully know how we work together, and all those years of New Girl really gave us that.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

For the past couple of years, three outrageously charismatic drag queens have been making one of the most revealing shows on TV. In each episode of the Emmy-nominated HBO docuseries We’re Here, Shangela, Bob the Drag Queen and Eureka O’Hara – who all rose to fame competing on RuPaul’s Drag Race – travel to a small town somewhere in the United States. When they arrive, often to an uncertain welcome, each queen adopts a local ‘drag daughter’ to mentor. After some careful coaching and fabulous makeovers, they all come together to perform a cathartic one-night-only drag show extravaganza in front of their community.

It’s a deceptively simple premise that could have become kitschy reality TV. But in fact, the sensitively handled series is deeply compassionate in the way it tells real life stories about people finding strength and self-expression, often in the face of heinous prejudice. In doing so, it also challenges a lot of preconceived ideas about the very real divisions that cut across America, including some of those held by the queens themselves.

“The big thing about We’re Here is breaking down stereotypes,” says Shangela, her infectious energy radiating across a video call from Paris, Texas. “Not only the stereotypes that people have about us in the queer community, but also the stereotypes that we have about others, whether it’s about them being from a small town, or being from a red or a blue state.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

After creating the Oscars in 1929, the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences moved on to the next item on their agenda: the construction of a purpose-built museum dedicated to movies in their home town of Los Angeles. It seemed like a natural next step. While the Academy Awards honour achievements in filmmaking each year, a permanent museum would preserve and pay tribute to those throughout history.

Still, any jaded screenwriter in Hollywood will tell you that a good idea alone isn’t enough to get a project off the ground. After decades of infighting, delays and false starts, the Academy announced in 2012 that a suitable site had been found and the museum would be open by 2017. But that date came and went, with reports of further delays and spiralling costs appearing beneath increasingly concerned headlines, such as the one from Vanity Fair in 2019, which forlornly asked: “Will the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures ever actually open?”

It took a couple more years, not helped by the outbreak of a pandemic, but now, yes, the Academy Museum will finally open its doors this week. After almost a century of prologue, the pressure is on to deliver an experience that lives up to its own billing. “There are other cities with film museums,” observed Tom Hanks, who helped spearhead fundraising for the project, in a speech to the assembled world press at a preview event last week. “But with all due respect, in a place like Los Angeles, and created by the Motion Picture Academy, this museum has really got to be the Parthenon of such places.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

Vacation Friends is an outrageous, R-rated comedy about a pair of couples who forge a tequila-fuelled friendship at a holiday resort in Mexico. If you think that sounds like the perfect escape from all the current misery, you’re not alone. When the film premiered on Hulu at the tail end of last month, it pulled in the biggest opening weekend audience in the history of the streaming service. Soon afterwards, Hulu announced that it’s already given the green light to a sequel: Honeymoon Friends. And just like that, a franchise is born.

It may be a runaway hit now, but the raucous comedy’s journey to the screen has been far from smooth sailing. Vacation Friends was first announced back in 2014, with then-real-life-couple Chris Pratt and Anna Faris set to star as a pair of hedonists wreaking havoc on another couple’s time in the sun. They’d left the project by 2016 when Clay Tarver, a former writer and showrunner on sitcom Silicon Valley, was brought in to do rewrites on the script while a new cast was assembled. “There was a minute where it was going to be made with Ice Cube and Marky Mark Wahlberg,” recalls Tarver, speaking over video call from his home in Los Angeles. “Then that fell apart, too.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

In 1960, up-and-coming screenwriters Richard Levinson and William Link were hard at work expanding a mystery script they’d written into a full-length stage play. The story, Enough Rope, featured a detective named Columbo, a dogged, unpretentious cop modelled after Porfiry Petrovich, the shrewd magistrate from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment who patiently hounds the killer until he snaps and confesses. The pair had just finished typing out a scene where Columbo interrogates a suspect and then leaves his apartment, but it ran a little short. If Levinson and Link had been using a modern word processor they might have added to the middle of the scene, but on a typewriter, that would mean retyping the whole thing from the start. Feeling lazy, they decided it would be simpler to have Columbo stick his head back through the door and say: “Just one more thing…”

Continue reading at The Independent.

I was devastated by the news that the stand-up comedian and former Saturday Night Live host Norm Macdonald has died, at the age of 61. But when I read reports that said he’d been “battling cancer”, I had to laugh. “In the old days, a man could just get sick and die,” MacDonald said in his career-best 2011 special Me Doing Standup. “Now, they have to wage a battle.”

He went on to describe his Uncle Bert’s “courageous battle” with cancer – lying in a hospital bed with a drip in his arm watching Matlock. His point obviously wasn’t to mock Bert, but rather the inadequacy of the mealy mouthed words we use when we talk about – or try to avoid talking about – the inevitable end. “The reason I don’t like it is that in the old days they’d go: ‘Hey, that old man died,’” he went on. “Now they say: ‘He lost his battle’. That’s no way to end your life! What a loser that guy was, the last thing he did was lose! He was waging a brave battle, but then at the end I guess he got kind of cowardly. The bowel cancer, it got brave. You’ve got to give it to the bowel cancer!”

Continue reading at The Independent.

Joe Pantoliano is lying across his bed at home in Connecticut with a little black shih apso puppy named Scout happily nuzzling at his chest. He’s spent the last two decades living in the countryside 45 miles north of the George Washington bridge, but in his mind he’s back in the hardscrabble New Jersey of his youth. “Growing up, I was always led to feel shame about being the son of an immigrant, like I wasn’t really American,” remembers the 69-year-old.

“The kind of Americans I knew from television were John Wayne, Robert Redford, Paul Newman and James Dean.” Dreaming of seeing his own face on screen one day, the young Pantoliano took comfort from the fact that at least the close-knit Italian-American community of Hoboken had already produced one famous son. “Frank Sinatra comes from the same town I was from,” he says. “So I thought, well, if he could get out, maybe I could too, through this avenue of entertainment.”

That road turned out pretty well for the actor affectionately known to fans as “Joey Pants”. It first took him to Hollywood in 1976, where he made his name playing ruthless toughs with a comic edge. There was Guido, the pimp who delights in torturing a baby-faced Tom Cruise through 1983’s Risky Business, and then Francis of bungling crime family the Fratellis in 1985’s The Goonies. His talent resisted typecasting, and he stole scenes as a scummy bail bondsman (1988’s Midnight Run), a US marshal (1993’s The Fugitive), a furious police chief (1995’s Bad Boys) and a duplicitous freedom-fighter (1999’s The Matrix). In 2003 he picked up an Emmy for his role as mobster Ralph Cifaretto in The Sopranos.

His latest film is something of a change of pace after all the aforementioned police and thieves. From the Vine, from director Sean Cisterna, is a lovely, gently magical-realist movie about Marco, a man driven to a breakdown by his job at a Canadian car company, who immediately moves to his ancestral home in rural Italy, where he sets about rejuvenating his grandfather’s dilapidated vineyard. Memories mingle with reality, the vines begin to whisper to him, and romances are enthusiastically rekindled in the grape vats. Pantoliano is frank about what first attracted him to the project. “I wanted to go to Italy!” he hoots. “I would have gone to Italy to open up an envelope.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

In an anonymous building somewhere in North Hollywood, a handful of roadies stride about tuning guitars in front of an elaborate drum kit bearing the legendary logo: “KISS.” The instruments fall silent in unison to announce the entrance of the band’s hulking 6ft 2in bassist Gene Simmons. The 72-year-old wears leather trousers, an embroidered denim shirt, dark sunglasses and a black baseball cap illustrated with a cartoon dollar bag. His most recognisable appendage, that famous seven-inch reptilian tongue, is hidden completely behind a square of black cotton. Forget Frank Sinatra with a cold: Gene Simmons is wearing a face mask.

Simmons is taking pandemic precautions seriously, and with good reason. Within a week of our meeting, Kiss frontman Paul Stanley, the band’s only other original member, will test positive for Covid, and shortly afterwards Simmons will too. At least four stops on their farewell End of the Road tour will have to be postponed. Today, Simmons rejects a small back room as the venue for our interview on the grounds that we’ll be in too close quarters. Instead we sit socially distanced right in the middle of the rehearsal space, which brings its own problems. We’ve barely started talking when Simmons hears a murmur from the roadies now gathered in a far corner. “So you guys are going to talk while we’re doing an interview?” huffs Simmons before adding, to no one in particular: “Can you get him out of the room, please?”

He turns back to me, muttering: “He knows I know where he lives.”

This sort of performative assholery is part of the persona Simmons has cultivated in the almost five decades he’s spent as the fire-breathing demon of Kiss, part rock star and part pantomime villain. He seems to believe it is required of him. A few minutes later, one of the various electronic devices in the room makes the mistake of letting out an audible bleep. “That’s not irritating at all, that sound!” barks Simmons immediately, before adding to me, sotto voce: “See what I’m doing there? I’m torturing everybody. It’s my job.”

Continue reading at The Independent.

David Crosby is an easy man to share your secrets with. Maybe it’s because of the life he’s lived, surviving three heart attacks, nine months in a Texan prison for drugs and weapons offences, and five decades of fractious folk-rock stardom as a member of first The Byrds and later supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Maybe he just has that kind of face, a wizened version of Yosemite Sam, as former girlfriend Joni Mitchell once described him. Either way, people have a habit of opening up to him. Take the soldier he met in an airport bar not too long ago, just back from Iraq and Afghanistan. He started telling Crosby about a firefight he’d been in, how in the middle of it he’d fired off this shot with an assault rifle that flattened a guy from 200 yards, maybe the best shot he’d ever taken. Afterwards, when the fighting was over, he went over to find the body. He’d killed a 12-year-old boy.

“He looked at me, when he said that, and his eyes were…” Crosby trails off, trying to find the words. “He was in hell,” he says finally, his clear, melodic Californian tones growing softer. “He was absolutely torturing himself to pieces right there in front of me, drunk and shattered. Listen, if you’d seen it, man, it would have broke your heart. The guy didn’t mean to do anything wrong. He was just a regular guy doing his job and he was destroyed by it.”

Crosby was so moved by the chance encounter that he wrote a song about it, “Shot at Me”, a searingly poignant ballad that appears on his new album For Free. It is Crosby’s eighth solo record, five of which have arrived since 2014, when he was 72, representing a remarkable late-career renaissance. Today, he’s speaking over the phone from the ranch house in Santa Ynez, California that he shares with his wife of 34 years, Jan Dance, and their various dogs and horses. A week ago he celebrated his 80th birthday there, with a homemade chocolate cake and a little reluctance. “I’m not sure 80 is one you celebrate,” says Crosby with amusement. “It’s one you kind of go: ‘Oh, Jesus!’”

Continue reading at The Independent.

If you’ve raised your hands in ecstasy on a dance floor in the past 44 years, sweat sticky on your skin, electricity crackling in the air and Carl Cox behind the decks, you’ll probably be able to guess what it’s like to have a conversation with the man himself.

Even over a shaky video connection, the three-deck wizard gives off enough positive vibes to heat a moderately sized flat. He’s a 59-year-old with the hyperactive energy of a toddler on a sugar bender. David Guetta, being French, calls this infectious enthusiasm of Cox’s “joie de vivre”. Another way of putting it would be the joyous exclamation that has become Cox’s signature shout-out, the same four little words plastered across the cover of his new memoir: “Oh Yes, Oh Yes!”

Continue reading at The Independent.

The first episode of The Other Two opens with a montage of entertainment TV hosts breathlessly hyping the latest new arrival on the music scene. “Buckle up girls, there’s a sexy new singer in town,” announces the first, “and guess what? He just turned 13!” Another adds: “Some in the music industry are already calling him the next big white kid.”

The pre-pubescent heartthrob in question is Chase Dreams (Case Walker), a pre-fame Bieber-type fresh from racking up millions of views on his first music video, an undeniably catchy tween-love anthem called “Marry U at Recess”. It’s the start of Chase’s journey from wide-eyed naif to fully fledged pop superstar, but that’s only a sliver of what this hilarious, sharp-witted and heartfelt comedy is all about. The “other two” are Brooke (Heléne Yorke) and Cary Dubek (Drew Tarver), Chase’s decidedly less feted older siblings, both living in New York and in their late twenties. Brooke is a former dancer seeking new purpose; Cary is struggling to make it as an actor. Neither is where they’d imagined they’d be in their professional or personal lives by now. Neither has any idea just how famous their kid brother is about to become.

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In 1978, American singer Jimmy Buffett was riding high on the success of louche beach bum anthem “Margaritaville” when he flew to London to mix his live album You Had to Be There at AIR Studios. There he was introduced to owner George Martin, the legendary producer and arranger known as the “fifth Beatle” for his influence on the band’s sound. Martin suspected he’d found a kindred spirit in Buffett, and began earnestly pitching him on his latest ambitious venture. He wanted to build a second base for AIR Studios on Montserrat, a volcanic island in the Caribbean he’d recently visited and fallen deeply in love with. Martin envisioned it as the ultimate rock star home-away-from-home: sun, sea, sand and the most impressive bespoke recording console that pioneering audio designer Rupert Neve could build him. “I just said: ‘You really don’t have to sell this to me, George!’” says Buffett with a laugh, speaking over the phone from northern California. “I can sail to work!”

AIR Studios Montserrat opened in 1979 and over the course of the next decade produced a string of hits to rival any studio on the planet. Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony and Ivory”, Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” and Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life” all came into the world beside the deep blue pool at Martin’s idyll. The Police included Montserrat locals in the video for “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic”, taken from the Ghosts in the Machine album they recorded on the island.

Then, in 1989, disaster struck. First Hurricane Hugo tore through the studio, destroying buildings and most of the equipment. Then, in 1995, Montserrat’s Soufrière Hills volcano erupted, displacing two-thirds of the island’s population and leaving the ruins of AIR in a mandatory exclusion zone in which it remains to this day.

The studio’s remarkable journey from dream to reality and then back to dream again is the subject of a new documentary, Under the Volcano, from director Gracie Otto. The rollicking film is stitched together from new interviews with key players and incredible archive footage which includes Paul McCartney’s home videos from the island and a bootlegged recording of Stevie Wonder playing an impromptu set at a local bar. Otto was also granted special permission to enter the exclusion zone to film the wreckage of the studio. “I found it quite eerie,” Otto tells me. “One side of the island is lush, beautiful and colourful, and then the other side is like the Pompeii of the Caribbean.”

The volcano was considered dormant when Buffett turned up in Montserrat with his Coral Reefer Band early in 1979. He arrived still hunting for a title for the record he planned to make there, and didn’t have to look far for inspiration. “The house we rented had this big picture window facing the volcano, so we sat there and wrote the song ‘Volcano’ looking out at it,” he remembers. The chorus goes: ‘I don’t know where I’m a gonna go when the volcano blows.’ “At the time, people were going up and bathing in the sulphur mud baths,” points out Buffett. “It was never considered harmful, and then it blew!”

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When Prince suddenly and unexpectedly departed this thing called life in 2016, at the age of 57, he left behind one of the most impressive and prodigious bodies of work ever created by a musician. On top of the 39 hit-filled studio albums and five films he put out in his lifetime, legend has it that the Purple One also kept as many as 8,000 unreleased songs stored in a subterranean vault beneath his unique and secretive recording complex at Paisley Park, in the suburbs of his hometown Minneapolis.

In the five years since Prince’s death, his estate has been faced with the thorny question of what should be done with all this unheard music. Under the stewardship of Lady Gaga’s former manager Troy Carter, the archive itself was moved to Iron Mountain, a climate-controlled storage facility in Los Angeles, and a team of archivists were put together to sift through the material. Initial vault releases played it relatively safe: expanded versions of classic albums Purple Rain, 1999, and Sign o’ the Times, along with 2019’s Originals, a compilation of Prince’s demos of songs he wrote for other artists.

Then, last year, archivist Michael Howe stumbled across the holy grail: a complete yet unreleased Prince album. Howe has said he found a trio of CD-Rs with a tracklist written out in Prince’s own handwriting, along with a scrawled title: Welcome 2 America.

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While writing and researching his two most recent books, How to Change Your Mind and This Is Your Mind on Plants, the author Michael Pollan dosed himself with all manner of psychoactive substances, ranging from LSD and mescaline to the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad. The morning we speak he’s at it again. When I ask over a video call to his window-lined home office in Berkeley, California whether he’s yet had his daily fix, he raises a cardboard coffee cup to his screen in salute before taking a long pull. “I’m in the middle of it!” he says with a nod.

The 66-year-old American quit caffeine for three months as an experiment while working on This Is Your Mind on Plants, but says he’s now happily returned to his old habit. The fact that caffeine, the world’s most popular psychoactive drug, is rarely grouped with the various illegal substances he writes about is, he argues, part of the problem. As a society we have elevated certain drugs to the status of cornerstones of our civilisation while irrationally outlawing a whole swathe of potentially beneficial chemicals.

Pollan argues the challenge facing us is how to reintegrate these substances into society. “One of the casualties of the drug war is lumping them all together,” he explains. “They’re more different than alike. You’ve got stimulants and depressants and psychedelics and one size isn’t going to fit all when it comes to figuring out how to weave them into our culture.”

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On 17 July 1988, the German singer-songwriter Nico was in Ibiza suffering from a bad headache. Despite the blistering heat, she decided to cycle into town in search of cannabis, hoping it would relieve the pain, but as she rode she suffered the brain haemorrhage that killed her. In her 49 years, she’d lived many lifetimes. She had been a model for Coco Chanel in the 1950s, acted for Fellini, sung with The Velvet Underground, and become a raw and uncompromising solo artist. Yet when the news reached the papers, their focus was elsewhere. The headline in the Berliner Zeitung read: “Nico: Death of a Star from Berlin Reveals the Secret Love Drama of Alain Delon.”

Even in death, Nico’s story was framed in the context of one of the many famous men who drifted through her life. Delon was far from alone: Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop all fell for the statuesque beauty at one time or another, but her story is not their story. A new biography, You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone, named for a line in her 1970 track “Afraid”, makes clear what a driven, creative and fearlessly original artist she was. “This woman had such an interesting life,” says her biographer, Jennifer Otter Bickerdike. “I set out to write this book because I wanted to know more about her, and because I wanted to know what was actually true and what was myth, because there is so much mythology around her.”

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In October 2018, former Death Row Records boss Suge Knight was sentenced to 28 years in prison for running over and killing music executive Terry Carter. Documentarian Nick Broomfield’s 2002 film Biggie & Tupac alleged that Knight was complicit in the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Notorious BIG” Wallace, rival rap icons who were shot in mysterious drive-bys within six months of each other in the mid-Nineties. But Knight’s lengthy incarceration presented an opportunity to uncover new evidence that even decades on could help shed light on the pair of intriguing and high-profile unsolved murders.

“People are much more prepared to talk now,” says Broomfield, speaking over a video call. “Now that Suge Knight’s behind bars, a lot of people are coming forward that were, frankly, frightened of getting killed before.”

Broomfield says further motivation to make new documentary Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac came from his desire to continue the work of the late LAPD detective Russell Poole, whose investigation into Wallace’s murder led him to believe that corrupt LAPD officers had been involved. Poole died of a heart attack in 2015 during a meeting at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, where he was still arguing his case. That same year a documentary, Murder Rap – based on a book by another former LAPD officer, Greg Kading – set out an alternative narrative that cleared the police of any involvement.

“I felt Russell Poole had been really shafted,” says Broomfield. “He had a tragic ending, and then this bulls*** programme came out. I was horrified when I saw the film. I felt it was belittling the work of Poole, and it made these ridiculous allegations that the LAPD were completely innocent and that this guy called Poochie had done the hit. The hit on Biggie was not a gang hit. Through complete annoyance, and out of loyalty to Poole, I decided to do this film.”

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When the first trailer for Fast & Furious 9 was released last year, there was one moment that set fans’ hearts racing like a souped-up muscle car. It wasn’t the epic stunts, or even when John Cena was introduced as a sibling rival to Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto. It came right at the end, after Michelle Rodriguez’s character Letty announced: “Hey guys… surprise!”. In walked Sung Kang’s Han, calmly snacking away as if we hadn’t seen him killed off three movies ago. After a quick shot of Han back behind the wheel, the screen filled with the words: “Justice is coming”.

That phrase might not mean much to the casual Fast & Furious viewer, but for the many who participated in the #JusticeForHan social media campaign, it represents that rare thing – a major studio actually listening to what its fans really want. The campaign, which was started by LA Times film reporter Jen Yamato before gaining widespread support, sought to right a karmic wrong in the Fast & Furious universe. At the end of the sixth film, we’d learnt that Han’s fiery death was the handiwork of Jason Statham’s vengeful assassin Deckard Shaw – yet by the conclusion of the eighth film, Shaw was being welcomed with open arms into the ever-expanding Toretto family.

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In episode four of Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet’s surly detective sprints over to her mother Helen (Jean Smart) as she’s being wheeled into an ambulance. “Is that it?” says Mare, with typical tact, when she sees the cut on her mother’s forehead. “‘Is that it?!’” shoots back Helen. “Well, I’m sorry I’m not more MAIMED for you.”

It is just one of countless scene-stealing moments for Smart, whose impeccable comic timing gives the grizzly whodunnit some much-needed levity. A palpable hit with both critics and the public, the 69-year-old is currently enjoying something of a “Jean Smartaissance”.

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In 1987, a 25-year-old backing singer and aspiring songwriter from Missouri gatecrashed her way into the Los Angeles auditions for Michael Jackson’s first ever solo world tour. “Hi Michael, my name is Sheryl Crow and I just moved here,” she announced. “I’m a former music teacher and I would love to go on the road with you.”

A month later Crow was onstage at the Korakuen stadium in Tokyo, her ears filled with the deafening roar of 75,000 fans. It was the first of 123 concerts over the next 16 months, during which she performed in front of a staggering 4.4 million people. Each night Crow, wearing a bustier and voluminous Eighties curls, harmonised with Jackson and shared the limelight on songs like “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Man in the Mirror”. It should have been a dream come true.

“Naiveté is such a beautiful thing,” says Crow, now 59, a nine-time Grammy winner and one of the most successful artists of her generation. She is speaking on a video call from her home in Nashville, her bedroom walls behind her filled with the art and arcane curios she collects from around the American south. An acoustic guitar lies at rest on the antique couch by her bed. “It was incredible in every way, shape and form for a young person from a really small town to see the world and to work with arguably the greatest pop star,” she says. “But I also got a crash course in the music industry.”

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Above the desk of the great British screenwriter Bruce Robinson there is an old, yellowing copy of a photograph taken during an FA Cup match in 1988. It’s not even that Robinson – who made the peerless Withnail & I, before winning a Bafta for The Killing Fields – is a particularly die-hard football fan; he just has a keen interest in the ways humans try to gain and hold power over each other. That’s what draws him to the famous picture of Wimbledon enforcer Vinnie Jones reaching back one-handed to squash Newcastle playmaker Paul Gascoigne’s testicles like ripe plums. “That’s one of the funniest photos ever taken,” Robinson once told me. “If someone’s got you by the knackers, you’re fucked.”

Jones is not your typical cinematic muse. He has a glare like someone’s just bad-mouthed his mum’s cooking and a giant granite head like he’s just pulled himself out of the dirt on Easter Island. Still, Robinson is far from the only filmmaker to find inspiration in the man who was once booked for committing a foul just three seconds after a game kicked-off.

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There are certain summers when the energy of a whole generation seems to come to a head. It happened in 1967, when 75,000 young people descended on San Francisco for the first Summer of Love in search of psychedelic rock, mind-expanding substances and a different world to the corrupt and venal one they’d inherited. It happened again in 1988, as British ravers rode the wave of ecstasy and acid house that became known as the Second Summer of Love. As live music and festivals return after the last summer of isolation – and given that many of us haven’t cut our hair in a year – is it too much to hope that 2021 could herald a return to that sense of hippie idealism and utopian hedonism?

If anyone knows what it takes to spark a Summer of Love, it’s Carolyn Garcia. As an 18-year-old in 1964, she was recruited into One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the technicolour troupe who paved the way for the Summer of Love by touring America in a psychedelic school bus handing out LSD like sacrament. Known as “Mountain Girl”, because she lived in the woods and rode a motorcycle, Garcia had a child named Sunshine with Kesey and was immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test before shacking up with (and eventually marrying) another icon of the era: Jerry Garcia, the shaggy-haired ringleader of The Grateful Dead.

Garcia, now 75, has remained true to the free-spirited ideals of her youth. Down the line from her home in Oregon, she remarks on how pleased she is that the state has recently legalised the use of psychedelics. “I just had my tiny microdose of psilocybin this morning,” she says breezily. “It makes me a little bit loquacious.”

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