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.

The penthouse suite at the Hotel Martinez in Cannes was once the most expensive in the world. At nearly £24,000 per night, nowadays it’s considered merely the fourth costliest on earth. So what’s the view like from the opulence of the seventh floor? Probably of your yacht, so long as Roman’s isn’t in the way. Then, if you look west on a clear day, down the curving stretch of the beachfront known as la Croisette, the landmark at the far end is the squat glass pile of the Palais des Festivals. That’s the business end of Cannes, where for the two weeks of the festival hustlers converge at the Marché du Film to hawk all manner of art house and erotica, densely plotted thrillers and cheesy B-movies, most of which will probably never see the dark of your local cinema.

It’s also where the films, including the press screenings and the red carpet premieres, are shown. If you’re travelling from the Martinez to a gala opening then that means a short trip as part of a convoy of official cars. Alternatively, if you’re still partying as the sun comes up, you might glimpse bleary eyed journalists making the kilometre shuffle, dragging theirs hangovers behind them, to ensure that they’re at the dawn press screening in good enough time that they don’t have to wrestle for a seat with the guy from the Kazakh Film Federation.

Look closer and you’ll see the run of luxury hotels down the seafront: the Majestic, the Marriott and the Carlton, which this year has been taken over by Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator  and made to look like a gaudy totalitarian palace. The entire seafront stretch is adorned with movie posters of all shapes and sizes, mostly for projects with distant release dates and dubious premises. One of the most prominent billboards this year is not for a film but rather a character: “Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher”. The next is for the newly postponed, backlash-ready GI Joe: Retaliation. Doubtless future Palme d’Or contenders both.

Opposite the hotels is the beach itself, which inevitably has its own cinema. It appears to mainly screen old Bond movies, which seems fitting in a town where men are rarely out of tuxedos. There’s then a string of temporary beachfront bars like Chivas House which host the various exclusive after-parties. These will be heaving until the early hours, so for a quiet drink its better to head a couple of streets back into the old town to places like Silencio, David Lynch’s Parisian nightclub which has taken up residence at the summit of Cannes’ Five Hotel.

Look straight down from the terrace, like P Diddy did from his room a couple of days ago, and you’ll be able to wave to the crowds of autograph-hunters and amateur paparazzi who cluster around the Martinez for the duration of the festival. They hang around the hotel from around 9am to ensure a spot close to the barriers for showtime: the pre-premiere moment when celebrities make the short walk from the hotel doors to their waiting cars, and the iPhones and SLRs click away in harmony. In such a frenzied atmosphere, the potential for mayhem is high. One afternoon I saw a beautiful young Asian woman in a short yellow dress walk shyly through the front door of the Martinez, then launch a big wave at the crowds. This triggered a wall of camera flashes and cries of “Freida!” before someone forlornly pointed out that she was not, in fact, Freida Pinto. Whoever she was, she got her Cannes moment.

Whatever the views from the roof are like, the ground-floor bar is unparalleled for people-watching. While skimming the trade dailies for newly inked deals, you can watch the stars leaving for the red carpet, the equally glamorous Harvey Weinstein-presided parties by the pool and the informal meetings happening over drinks. Hustlers in every direction. Everyone in Cannes is hustling for something. Producers take a year’s worth of meeting in two weeks and young actors with light in their eyes brush shoulders with older rivals who were major players once upon a time.

The former stars watch the current crop glide past on the crest of their waves, temporarily invincible. Eva Longoria has at least two separate entourages, one security, the other simply to deal with the train of her dress. Lana Del Rey takes the time to work the barriers outside the hotel then can’t find her car in the queue. The crowds just keep cheering her as she goes from door to door. Freida Pinto arrives. It’s really her this time, and the crowds whoop it up again. Back inside, Bill Murray is delighting in subverting the entrenched celebrity code by approaching and deadpan-charming everyone he sees. He joins us for a drink a couple of nights running, telling us he’s in town to “cause mischief”. He’s succeeding.

Cannes is celebrity in the raw. For the crowds at the barriers there is the coquettish promise of proximity to the rich and famous even as the distance between fans and stars is reinforced with metal barriers, blacked-out cars and burly security. Inside the barriers, the deals that make celebrity happen are signed. It’s a hustler’s paradise and the views are spectacular.

Originally published by British GQ.

“My favourite line on the album is from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Tower Of Song'” says Tom Jones with a knowing chuckle. “‘My friends are gone / and my hair is grey’ That rang a bell as soon as I heard it.” Well, Mr Jones, at 71 it’s not unusual. Having removed his ill-advised dye, his hair is now closer to salt-white and the friends that are departed – Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin – still pepper his conversation. Jones’s life-story is the outlandish tale of a young lad from Pontypridd in the Welsh valleys whose booming voice took him all the way to the Rat Pack’s Las Vegas turf. Now he’s not only a judge on the BBC’s The Voice but also releasing his 38th album, Spirit In The Room. For this latest venture he’s recruited the drummer from hip LA artrockers Warpaint and is covering Tom Waits. “You’ve got to do it in a cheeky way,” he explains of Waits’ song “Bad As Me”. “You don’t want to make it sound blasphemous when you’re singing about the ‘mother superior in only a bra’.” We caught up with the full-throated crooner at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London’s Bloomsbury to discuss the advice Sinatra gave him, the importance of being able to tie a bow tie and why he’s never had to cook a single meal in his life.

GQ.com: Which singers do you consider particularly stylish?
Tom Jones: Dean Martin always dressed very well but then he was a good looking fella with a good physique so he could wear anything. I remember talking to him after he came over on the Queen Mary because I’d never been on a big ship. He said: “The only trouble is the captain invites you to sit at the top table and you’ve got to wear the bloody tuxedo! I wear a tuxedo onstage I don’t want to be wearing it out for dinner. You’ve got to look like Cary Grant all the time!” Dean was always very stylish, as was Sammy Davis. Frank Sinatra was always wearing a tuxedo but I thought he was quite conventional.

What about Elvis?
Elvis was always over the top. It’s funny that in those days people who wanted to look like Elvis would wear leather jackets and jeans, because that’s what he wore in his movies. In real life, Elvis never wore denim. He thought they were work clothes. When he had to wear them, when he was driving a truck, he would do but he always loved the way black entertainers dressed. He styled himself on them, because he wanted to be flamboyant. That’s why he had that gold lamé suit! He designed his jumpsuits himself. He always said, “If you’re going to be a star, you should look like one.”

Did that influence your own look?
I was a teddy boy in the Fifties, so when I first started wearing long trousers they were tight. In the Sixties it stayed like that. The jackets got shorter, the shoes changed from beetle-crushers to winklepickers… but the trousers stayed tight. I think the first time I ever wore a tuxedo was when I played at the Talk Of The Town in 1967, because it was a nightclub and that was the thing to do.

Can you tie your own bow tie?
I had to learn to do that, especially when I had my own TV show in the late Sixties. I used to [perform] a concert slot so I wanted to get that tie off. You don’t want to be unclipping a fake bow tie. You still see people do it now – they unclip it and they’ve got the bloody whole bow hanging on one side! I had to practise. I remember doing it over and over again in the makeup room. Once you see a real bow tie tied, it’s definitely got a flair to it.

Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever heard your music played?
It’s always good to hear it at festivals. When you hear “Delilah” coming over the airwaves it’s such an “up” tune and it’s great to see people’s reactions to it. They sing “Delilah” at rugby matches as well, of course! That’s always a kick.

What’s the biggest misconception about you?
I’m not a bloody coat-rack for underwear! You don’t have to throw them when you come and see me. Have a listen first. I think the image sometimes overshadowed the talent. I was partly to blame for that, of course. [Roguish smile] You can’t record a song like “Sex Bomb” and then complain that people see you in that way. The biggest misconception about me is that my audience is 90 per cent female. I think the truth is closer to 50-50.

Has The Voice meant that you’re being recognised by a new generation?
Yes, there were some kids who wanted a photo when I flew in from LA last week. I know that when we were talking about putting the judges together they wanted a cross-section of people. They’ve got me there because I’ve been around so long, but it’s nice to know that the kids are taking notice not just to Jessie J, Will.I.Am and Danny O’Donoghue. That’s nice. That’s flattering.

Did you have any doubts about getting involved?
This is the first time I’ve ever been involved in something that’s not just about me. Over my career, all the decisions I’ve had to make about song choices and producers were all about my next record. Now I’m trying to pass that onto other people. That’s new – you’re throwing yourself out there. When I was watching the blind audition shows back, I noticed that there’s a girl on show three who’s singing great and none of us turned around! The viewing audience must have thought there was something wrong with us. The thing is, at first they were calling me “trigger happy” because as soon as someone started singing I’d be hitting the button. The producers told us we had to slow down because we had a lot of people to listen to and we could only choose 10 people. You can’t explain all that to the contestants or to the viewers!

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
Frank Sinatra said to me: “You don’t have to push the shit out of every song you sing, you know. There’s light and shade. Preserve your voice.” At the time I said, “I know what I’m doing” but the longer I kept going I realised that Frank was right. You don’t have to bite the head off the microphone on every song. That’s youth, I suppose. [Actually], the first piece of good advice I was given was when I was working in a paper mill. I got married when I was 16 so I had to do shift-work to make ends meet.I was working on this machine and this old fella – I say old fella, he was probably younger than I am now – was working on the next one. He said “The word round here is that you can sing. Why don’t you go for it?” I replied that it would happen eventually and somebody was bound to notice me. He said, “Don’t hang about! Time will run, believe me. You can always do this if you fail, but give it a go for Christ’s sake!” That made me think.

What’s the best way to impress a woman?
To talk to her and not be moody. It’s important not to be too moody.

What’s your drink of choice?
Champagne. Dom Pérignon, to be precise. I used to be a beer drinker, so real ale still stands high on my list. I love going into a pub and seeing the pump in action. That’s a close second…

What’s the best thing you can cook?
Oh God, I can’t cook. It’s coming from that bloody working class background. My father said, “Don’t go in the kitchen.” I used to help my mother when I was a kid and I love food. I love going into restaurants but if I had to cook for myself… Christ. I suppose I could grill a steak or something. I could boil an egg. I’ve never had to. [Pause] I can make a sandwich.

Can you recommend a good book?
I love British history. I liked The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James and Victoria’s Wars by Saul David. Then again, a book of jokes is pretty good too.

How many watches do you own?
Oh, Christ. I tried to count them but I haven’t got around to them all yet. I have a weakness for watches. I have to stop myself buying more. Today I’m wearing a Santos by Cartier.

Which singers have the greatest voices of all time?
Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent would be my five. They each had something unique at the time. Chuck Berry’s such a great lyricist. I know Chuck and the thing about him is that he doesn’t know what’s so great about them. He’s that kind of guy. In old songs they used to repeat lines a lot, but with Chuck Berry every note was a new word. There’s a song called “Let It Rock” about a guy working on a railroad, and in three verses he paints such a picture. [sings low] “Later in the evening when the sun is sinking low / All day I been waiting for the whistle to blow / Sitting in a teepee built right on the tracks / Rolling them bones until the foreman comes back / Pick up you belongings boys and scatter about / We’ve got an off-schedule train comin’ two miles out.”. I mean, Jesus Christ! You can see it! Tremendous!

Originally published by British GQ.

“When you’re promoting a film it’s really interesting trying to gauge what people think about it,” says Guy Pearce with a grin. “It’s terrible if the film’s crap because you’re just sitting there going: “Christ!”” Fortunately for Pearce and for us, his new film Lockout is a lot of fun – a knockabout romp through a space prison with Pearce as the swaggering action hero who barely notices a punch to the face. As Pearce admits (and anyone who’s sat through Adam Sandler’s Bedtime Stories would agree), he’s made the odd cinematic mistake but when he’s good, he’s extraordinary. From LA Confidential to Memento and The Proposition, not to mention cameos in The Hurt Locker and The Road, Pearce has racked up appearances in unmissable films without ever quite assuming the arrogance of superstardom. Indeed, when we meet him at the Corinthia Hotel in central London, a short walk from the Thames, he couldn’t be further from the macho archetype he’s just played onscreen. Wearing thick-rimmed Dita’s New Yorker glasses and sinking back in his chair with legs crossed, the 44-year-old Australian shares his excitement about being able to inhabit the imagined worlds of Luc Besson and Ridley Scott, the fascinating dynamic created by John Hillcoat and Nick Cave and why he’d rather go cross-eyed than watch a film in 3D.

GQ: How was it playing an unreconstructed, chain-smoking, wise-cracking antihero?
Guy Pearce: It was great fun, but I wanted to make sure that there was a three-dimensional nature to the character. There are a couple of serious moments in the film where it’s important to see that he actually is a person with feelings, even if he spends most of his time trying to repress them. I say in the film something like, “Oh well, people die all the time.” He tries to bury his emotions. I think a lot of actors take on fun roles and then they’re lazy or flippant with them. I just can’t do that.

Was it a challenge to play such a physical role straight after the louche bounder you played inMildred Pierce?
Yeah – they were totally separate! I met the directors ofLockout when I was doing Mildred Pierce and they were nervous because I was so skinny. I didn’t really have the look that they wanted, but I assured them I could sort that out at the gym.

After seeing your sex scenes in Mildred Pierce,  will you see Titanic 3D or have you seen quite enough of Kate Winslet naked?
Never enough of Kate Winslet naked, but certainly enough ofTitanic! [Laughs] I don’t enjoy movies in 3D. I find I can’t engage with the story as well. I saw Hugo in 3D and I ended up taking the glasses off and watching it slightly cross-eyed, because at least I felt the effects weren’t hindering me. I probably shouldn’t be saying that because Prometheus is in 3D! I had no control over that.

When you were approached about Prometheus  did you realise that the majority of your role would become a YouTube TED Talk?
It was great! To know that we were doing it purely for the back-story of the film was really interesting. It was kind of hard work because it was a fairly long speech that I had to give. It was a lot to learn, longer than the finished product which has been released. It’s almost disappointing, because you have a little moment of: “What? I learned so much and you cut it out!”

Your next film Lawless reunites you with The Proposition and The Road director John Hillcoat…
John’s such a lovely director to work with. He’s a wonderful human being and a really artistic guy. He’s very generous and extremely honest about what he’s capable of and what he isn’t. I’ve seen a rough cut of Lawless already and it’s fabulous. Nick Cave adapted the book, so again it has the real flavour that those two create. Their dynamic is fascinating.

Were you already a Nick Cave fan before you made The Proposition?
I’m a big fan of his music and The Proposition is my favourite of all the films I’ve done. It was intense but it was enjoyable as well. You can’t help but feel moved by spending so long working in that Aboriginal landscape in such a spiritual part of the world. The heat in that remote desert just made the whole thing really weird and unusual.

Originally published in British GQ.

In a suite at London’s Claridge’s Hotel, Ewan McGregor is pulling a face of utter bewilderment as he ponders the relentless march of CGI. The man who once had to battle to keep a straight face while conversing with Jar Jar Binks gestures towards the poster for his rather more sedate new film Salmon Fishing In The Yemen. “I mean, what I don’t understand,” he sighs, “is why on earth they’ve decided to turn my trousers blue.” Back from filming the Lasse Hallström-directed rom-com on location in Morocco and Scotland, here he shares the acting advice he was given by the screenwriter Dennis Potter, his sartorial lessons from Neil Barrett and what cheating death on a motorbike taught him.

Watch at GQ.

“I guess I’m an amateur anthropologist,” says Susan Orlean, musing on her two decades as a staff writer for the New Yorker. “It’s part of my nature to poke around in things.” Since joining in 1992 after writing for Rolling Stone, Vogue and the Boston Globe, Orlean has earned her reputation as one of the world’s great exponents of literary nonfiction by taking curious personal stories and mining them for universal truths. She recently published ‘Rin Tin Tin’, the tale of the eponymous canine movie star through which she explores, among other things, 20th-century celebrity culture. Her 1998 bestseller ‘The Orchid Thief’ focused on obsessive flower collectors and inspired Charlie Kaufman’s film ‘Adaptation’ in which a character called “Charlie Kaufman” is driven mad trying to adapt a brilliant book written by a character named “Susan Orlean”. Here, the real-life Orlean talks to me about what she made of Meryl Streep’s take on her, the book that changed her life and how holding court in a bar can teach you the secrets of a compelling story.

I notice you try not to embellish scenes which you’re describing but at which you weren’t present? ‘Rin Tin Tin’ was researched, rather than your usual experiential writing. Was that a challenge?

That was a huge challenge. I have always found the idea of recreating scenes that you weren’t present at to be borderline unethical. It just doesn’t really appeal to me. I don’t feel that I need to write that way. I also feel that readers are very generous, and I don’t think that they’re disturbed by the idea that you confess to your limitations as a reporter. A certain amount of this simply can’t be known, or would require so much reporting that it would be a huge waste of time to establish one small fact. In this case I was using “inductive reasoning” to assume that at this time when dogs were popular in film there would have been an upswelling of interest in the idea that you could make a good living by having your dog in a movie and there would have almost certainly been other people treading the same sidewalk. I guess it just comes down to trusting the reader, and believing that the reader can trust me when I say that it’s a pretty good bet that that was happening, and move on from there as opposed to either embellishing when I don’t really have the information or skipping it altogether when I feel that I can still talk about it. It’s the way that you would talk about it to a friend, if you were saying: “Oh, I’ve been reading all about this dog Rin Tin Tin and there were probably other dogs trying to get into movies at the time, but he’s the one that made it.” It’s a very natural way that we communicate with each other.

Are you strict with yourself about not “smoothing the edges” of a story?

I am strict, and of course I feel like that’s the correct posture to take! I also think it’s the most unambiguous one. I’m going to tell you what I know to be true, and I’m going to admit when there’s information that I can’t get. I wouldn’t tell my friends a story filled with things that aren’t true. Why would you? You would tell them about an experience you’ve had or something you’ve learned that was interesting, and when you came to parts you couldn’t answer you would simply acknowledge that. That to me feels natural and I don’t believe in smoothing edges and writing as if you knew something, and I don’t like reading stories that involve recreated scenes that I know the person couldn’t have observed. I think they ring false.

I agree, I find it jarring.

If it’s fictional then you accept that it’s an imagined version, and I’m perfectly comfortable with that and read fiction and see movies that are built on imagined encounters, but nonfiction is not fiction. As a writer you have to have the confidence to be transparent, and I think that includes acknowledging when it’s not possible to know something. I think that then readers trust you because they know that what you’re telling them is real.

Recently a British writer named Johann Hari lost his job after he embellished his profile pieces.

Oh really? Ugh. I think readers have a gut reaction to things that feel fake. I just recoil from them, and question how people could know these things. It just doesn’t make any sense. We’ve had instances here of people spectacularly and flamboyantly faking what they were writing and mostly in memoir, which is a little bit different to reporting. I think as a reporter you’re one step even further removed from fiction. You’ve basically said to people that you’re taking an objective and honest snapshot of the world and showing them what’s really there. With a memoir already you know that you’re seeing it through the lens of memory which is a somewhat unreliable narrator to begin with.

Are you a good storyteller in person? Do you think that those are shared skills: writing and being able to tell a good story in a bar?

Oh, what a great question! The answer is, and I’m embarrassed to blow my own horn, I actually do think I’m a very good storyteller and I feel like the skills are absolutely intertwined. Not every writer enjoys the process of oral storytelling, they don’t necessarily like being the centre of attention. They may be shy or introverted, but I think that the art of storytelling is knowing both what a story is and what story might appeal to the greatest number of people, and then knowing the art of deduction of playing out a story, the timing of it. The way you do a striptease with information to keep people engaged. It’s about an audience and I think whether you’re in a bar telling a story or telling a story on the page, it’s about engaging an audience and luring them along and keeping them interested and tantalized, so I think they’re very much connected and I secretly think I’m a very good storyteller in a bar, especially after several drinks.

What’s your role as a character in your stories?

It’s related to what we were just talking about. One thing I’m very comfortable with is the inherent subjectivity of literary journalism. All journalism has some amount of subjectivity, but the kind of writing that I do is honest and factual, but I’m very clear about the fact that it is a story I’m telling you, limited by my vision of the story, my abilities as a reporter and frankly coloured by what I have come to feel is important, what I want to talk to you about. Sometimes my presence in the story is just to be the narrator taking you from one place to another, but sometimes, particularly in books, I feel like I want to reveal to you why I was drawn to the story. It’s not like writing a political biography, that there’s an acknowledged need for it, or stories that are understood to be significant. Many times I’m writing about something that I feel is oblique enough that I want to tell you why I thought it was important. I want to share my surprise about how I came to the story. I don’t really want to be a character, but I want you to understand going into it what drew me in. Sometimes it becomes part of explaining how I moved from one place to another in the reporting. It becomes a natural way of saying that how I got from point A to point B involved me learning this, that or the other. Just the way that someone telling you a story in a bar is very present and you’re very aware of them. Even if the story is not about them, it’s about them telling you the story.

Is there a pattern to what catches your eye and draws you in, in terms of finding stories?

I’m scouring newspapers and I think it’s part of my nature to simply be poking around and listening and reading and actually sometimes enjoying reading things that I’m not normally interested in or that aren’t part of my specific set of tastes and curiosities. I’m always thinking: “Huh, I wonder what that is like?” When an idea gets stuck and I find myself returning to it, or having the curiosity that’s very natural: “Gee, that’s interesting. I wonder what that’s about?” It’s such a pure response of my own curiosity that I don’t then think: “Gee, I wonder if this will be a popular story?” I tend to just get excited and the next thing I know I really want to write this story and I’ll simply make people interested in it. I won’t say it’s narcissistic, but I don’t focus group my ideas in any way. If I’m excited about it then I just feel sure that it’s exciting.

Do you ever then lose interest once you’ve started?

It does happen, but less often than you’d think. It may be because I’m so picky. I hear stories and think they’re kind of interesting but often they feel too narrow. The ones that really stick I tend to be devoted to. To be honest, I don’t write a million stories. I’m not looking for twenty good ideas, which would mean a lot of false starts. I can wait for that idea that feels genuinely interesting. It’s a very fortunate position to be in because I’m not trying to find a million ideas.

How do you write a good opening? How do you convince someone to read something if the subject itself isn’t going to convince them?

You just hit the nail on the head. Very often I’m swimming upstream. I’m starting with an idea that initially many people would react to by saying: “I’m not interested. Why would I ever read this?” That’s why I feel like the lede is so important. You’re a salesman, and at that moment when someone walks into the showroom you’ve got to immediately capture and keep them there. You have to show them why this thing they didn’t want to buy is in fact something they can’t live without. Where that lede comes from can be a whole lot of places. I always start writing with my lede, and I don’t feel that I can write a story and then come back and do the lede later. I feel it just sets the tone in such a powerful way that I can’t imagine going back later and sort of pasting a lede on. One really liberating thing for me was coming to the conclusion that a lede did not have to be a miniature encapsulation of the story. It could be a tiny sliver that was just sexy enough to draw you in, and then I’m going to tell you what the story’s really about. Sometimes I think it just has to be mysterious and intriguing enough that if you half-read the sentence idly you’ll think: “I have to read the rest of this.” A lot of times I’m embedding a joke or a twist or something odd in that first sentence, just so you think: “I’ve got to read the rest of this! What is this about?” It’s okay to be a little bit baffling. To go back to the bar that has become our metaphor, it’s like your opening line when you meet someone, and having it be sort of intriguing and curious and arresting. It doesn’t have to be: “Hi, my name is Susan.” That’s boring. That’s true, and it may be useful to know, but it’s not a very interesting way to begin a conversation. It’s a lot more about attention in that first sentence, and I feel like a lot of times it’s better not to tell people what the story’s about for a little while. Just get them interested and tease them with ideas that become fascinating. I feel like writing is very transactional. I say to my students: “You have to write every sentence.” There’s no moment in a story when you can get lazy. Every single sentence is selling the story. I don’t mean that to sound commercial, I mean it just in the same way that in the bar the minute your story gets boring people are going to drift off, and go and listen to someone else tell a story, or get another drink, or leave. I feel like every sentence is part of this process of saying: “Listen! Listen! Listen!” Ledes are very difficult, and a lot of times I’ll go for a long time without thinking of the lede. Believe me, the lede for Rin Tin Tin took me so long I don’t even want to think about it. The lede for a book has an enormous weight on it. I spend a lot of time waiting and thinking and then trying not to think, waiting for inspiration. Just to get the gears turning I’ll read ledes of a ton of different pieces, both old pieces of mine and those by people I really admire.

Do you have a stock of favourite writers’ books that you always go back to?

Oh yeah, and they’re all dog-eared from me flipping through them. Very often people come to stories from very unlikely directions, and it’s good to remind yourself that there are many ways to skin a cat. If it’s not working the way you think you should start the story then maybe throw that all out and come at it from a different way that feels fresh and different.

Who are those writers?

I have a stack of books on my desk that I go back to all the time. A couple of Joan Didion books, a couple of John McPhee books, a couple of collections of narrative journalism that I think are really good. They have an array of writers who I admire. One’s called Literary Journalism, which has a bunch of very good pieces. I keep AJ Liebling and Joseph Mitchell sitting there. Calvin Trillin. This is my stack, and they’re all pretty different writers, and they can all help me when I’m dry and I can’t think of anything.

Is it just as hard to close an article as to open it?

I think ends are easier because while you want it to be very satisfying, and a good way to bring it all to a close, I don’t think it has that same burden of getting people engaged. It’s a little less difficult, but I still think they’re pretty tricky. The best lesson for me was that I used to spend all this time writing these endings, and go to great lengths to work them out, and be very proud that I’d made them work, and I’d turn in my stories and my editor would say: “I really liked the piece, and I just cut off the last paragraph.” I was horrified! “What are you talking about?” He made the point that a lot of times you’ve already ended and then you do yet another ending. It’s okay to end in a less valedictory fashion. You don’t have to have the full orchestra blaring at the end. You can end with a slightly off-kilter tone. It was a great lesson for me, even though I was shocked by it at first, but it taught me that sometimes you’ve already ended and you’re just adding a little bit too much at the end. People are quite good at filling in that final note in their own mind.

What is it that attracts you to write about topics that are popular but not critically acclaimed, like the painter Thomas Kinkade?

I’ve always had a kind of perverse curiosity about anything in culture that has become enormously popular and successful and I don’t know why. Frequently it’s something that I don’t like, or that I don’t consider especially admirable, and yet it had managed to become enormously popular. I’m very curious about populism in every way. What is it that connects with so many people? Thomas Kinkade was a perfect example of that, because when I first saw the paintings I thought: “These are absolutely horrible! I can’t believe they’re so popular. What’s the DNA of something that has communicated with so many people?” It absolutely fascinates me. In fact, I think I’m better at looking at these things when I don’t have an emotional connection to the content, because then I’m really looking at it from the distance of: “Explain to me how this connects.” Why and how did this become embraced? How did this become something that so many people care about? Especially if I don’t personally like it. I also think that we need to spend more time thinking about that. It’s very easy to be elitist and then miss the big picture. Thomas Kinkade is not a dumb guy, and he made some very salient points about modern art and how a lot of modern art simply has no meaning to many people, except for art critics, and that’s a real question to ask. What does that mean then? What’s the meaning of art if nobody takes any pleasure out of it apart from a group of people who’ve designated themselves as tastemakers? At the same time, not everything is valuable because it’s popular, but I think there’s a great story that you can tell about culture through those things that become embraced by great numbers of people. There’s a mechanism to it as well. It’s not purely organic, it’s marketed and it’s meant to be popular. It’s quite different from a viral video where something a guy made on his flip-camera is suddenly and unexpectedly embraced by millions of people. This is something that involved strategic decisions to make something popular, and I find writing about that very interesting. I also think it’s a real challenge for me intellectually to try to write objectively about something that personally is not to my taste. Thomas Kinkade was really a rewarding story, because he was not a fool. He asked questions which are legitimate about what popularity means, and what is art? If something makes people happy, how can you say that it’s not good? They’re all very good questions to ask, especially in an era where art in many cases has become so distanced from most people. They just cannot understand how it can be valued the way it is valued. I love those stories. I loved writing about music when I was at Rolling Stone. I stopped writing about the music I liked because I preferred just listening to it, so I then became very interested in groups who became hugely popular and how that came about and why, and for that matter what it was like for those musicians in those bands. I guess I’m an amateur anthropologist. What I look for are things that define culture, and those are in some cases very limited and elite, and in many cases they’re the things that are consumed in a much broader way.

I agree…

It’s so interesting. I love music and I can sometimes appreciate a very big, fat pop song that everyone in the world is singing all at once. At the same time, a lot of my taste is a lot less popular. That’s fine, it just happens to be the stuff I love. Sometimes there might be good stories to write about those musicians, but I am very interested in that bigger question of ‘What draws people together?’ What are the things that can connect in some unconscious way with a lot of people, and with a real variety of people? That intrigues me.

Do you listen to music while you write?

For a while I did, but then I just found that it was a little too distracting. Which is too bad, because that’s a lot of time when I could have been listening to music! I can’t listen to the radio because as soon as there’s talking it really distracted me. Then for a while once I discovered Pandora I would listen to that. It saved me having to think of what CD I wanted to hear. I didn’t even really want to hear music that I’d picked. So I listened to Pandora until I really felt that I was too distracted by it.

What do you listen to?

I listen to a lot of what I guess you’d call indie music. Alternative rock. I just went to a Wilco concert, I like Belle & Sebastian. I really love Eels. He seems fascinating and I’ve often thought he’d make for a really interesting profile piece. I like Laura Marling and love Mumford & Sons, and I really love African music. I love Congolese music. Franco sort of changed my life. He made a million albums, and some of those songs are just the most magnificent things I’ve ever heard. He was just the most incredible force. Amazing guitar player, amazing voice, amazing songwriter. I love how complex it is. People think of “world music” as kind of twee. I mean, “world music”? For crying out loud! You’re basically lumping a million different kinds of music together. Even just within Africa the music is very different. I did a story some years ago about an African music store in Paris, and at the time I kind of wanted to go to the Congo to write a little bit in addition about the diaspora, but things were very bad in the Congo at the time and the magazine didn’t want me to go so I kind of chickened out!

Did Charlie Kaufman really come to New York to try and meet you, as his character does in ‘Adaptation’?

I think that he did exactly what he shows in the movie! I think he came to New York and that he sort of stalked me but never brought himself to talk to me. We met finally on the set of the film, and I think for both of us it was kind of embarrassing, although he told me that he felt it was much more embarrassing for him than it was for me! We then became friends, and he’s wonderful, but I’ve never asked him outright about that because it really did feel personal. Which is funny to say, given that it was on the screen and seen by millions of people, but I actually felt that it would be too embarrassing if I said: “Come on, be honest with me!” He was genuinely embarrassed when we finally and that made me feel that it was either true or that portraying it as true made him feel kind of exposed! I love the movie and give all the credit for the brilliance of it to Charlie and to Spike. I was very nervous about agreeing to it, and it was a complete shock to read the screenplay! My first reaction was: “Absolutely not!” They had to get my permission, and I just said: “No! Are you kidding? This is going to ruin my career! You can’t!” Very wisely, they didn’t really pressure me. They just let me think about it. They did tell me that everybody else had agreed, and that all the real people involved were okay with them using their real names. I somehow got emboldened and just thought that it would be interesting. I knew that the people involved were devoted to making a good movie, and that combination got me curious enough that I said: “Ok, go ahead. We’ll see.” It was certainly scary to see the movie for the first time. I was thinking: “Is it too late to change my mind?” and the answer, of course, was yes, it was too late to change my mind. I took a while for me to get over the idea that I had been insane to agree to it, but I love the movie now. I really think it’s one of the great postmodern American movies. It’s really quite special.

It’s actually very faithful to the spirit of the book.

Yes. I felt that a conventional Hollywood adaptation would have been much less faithful. While this was not meant to a cinematic recreation of the book, it was a meditation on the book and it felt to me much more real than if it had been turned into a Hollywood movie. What I admire the most about the film is that it’s very true to the book’s themes of life and obsession, and there are also insights into things which are much more subtle in the book about longing, and about disappointment.

And how did it feel to see yourself played by Meryl Streep?

She’s amazing. It was great because she wasn’t trying to impersonate me. She created the character just through knowing me from the book and inhabited the role in a way that really suited the film. It’s actually one of my favourite performances by her! Maybe I’m a little prejudiced, but how could I not be? But I think she’s really loose in the film and it’s really appealing to see her being so funny. I really like her portrayal… of this strange creature!

Can you recommend a good book?

Can I have two? One I’m reading now and I really like is called We The Animals by Justin Torres. It’s a collection of related short stories, and he’s a young American writer. Really terrific. The book that I proselytise about the most is actually a trilogy by Pat Barker: Regeneration, The Eye In The Door and The Ghost Road. It’s a trilogy about World War I, and they just affected me. They’re brilliantly written, and they just changed the way I looked at life. There aren’t that many books like that. Why is that? It’s hard to say. There’s almost nothing in it which would seem to relate to me directly. It follows two people’s stories through World War I, one is a soldier and one is a doctor, but it was just kind of mind-boggling. There are many books that changed my world, many of which I read when I was younger and which are classics, but this is something I’m always nagging people to read because it’s so fantastic! It’s great stuff.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Save your receipts, and have fun! I guess one suggests that one of those suggests you should be more professional, and the other that you should be less professional. I’m hitting from both sides of the plate.

An abridged version of this interview was published by GQ.

“Hey! I need a fork!” In a secluded backroom at Sony Music’s London office, Harlem-born A$AP Rocky has just taken delivery of a consignment of Nando’s but has realised too late that he doesn’t have anything with which to eat his “Macho peas”. Improvising, he tears the corner off the carton and starts spooning them into his mouth with a shrug: “I’m so ghetto, look at what I do!” This might be his first time in London, and his first taste of that patented Peri Peri, but the 23-year-old’s reputation precedes him. Since he announced himself to the world with “Peso” late last year (with its catwalk-friendly line “Raf Simons, Rick Owens, usually what I’m dressed in”) he’s signed a $3m deal with Sony and become known as the East Coast MC with an eye for fashion that’s as high as he is. Slouching back on a sofa, he talks to GQ.com about why he isn’t a gangster, the $2,500 trainers he won’t wear and why you should think twice before copying Tupac’s tattoo…

Continue reading at GQ.

LCD Soundsystem were one of the smartest, funniest and most literate bands of the last decade, and they did it by playing by their own rules. This isn’t empty hyperbole, there were actual rules. “No sunglasses on stage” was one, as was “No rocking out” and “No psyching up the crowd”. Why was this Spartan attitude to audience interaction so important? James Murphy, LCD’s erstwhile iron-fisted leader, remembers his reign with a broad grin. “We relaxed them for a while, but people would get like James Brown ‘fined’. “You’re rocking out! Stop that!” No cool stuff. It’s a shortcut for meaning. It’s a simulacrum for meaning. I wanted to do away with that as much as humanly possible. The end doesn’t justify the means.”

Murphy grew up in New Jersey listening to David Bowie, the Clash and the warm hum of electrical appliances.  In his stoic Irish Catholic family, the sound of a refrigerator was a “replacement for hugs”. After moving to New York City in his late teens his attempts to understand the emotional power of noise led him into production and a series of failed bands. He was 35 by the time LCD Soundsystem released their debut album, and while he says now that he never made another song quite as direct as their debut single “Losing My Edge”, it’s the band’s second album, 2007’s Sound Of Silverwhich contains some of their most visceral and powerful moments, like the double punch to the heart and gut of “Someone Great” and “All My Friends”. Along the way he’s been charged with musical theft from time to time, and you can certainly hear him paying tribute to his heroes – well, specifically Bowie’s “Heroes” – on tracks like “All I Want”, but that was always sort of the point. There are no new things under the sun, just better remixes.

Following the release of their third album, This Is Happeningin 2010, Murphy called time on the band, as he’d always threatened to, with an epic 4-hour final show at New York’s Madison Square Garden on 2 April 2011. Now, almost exactly a year later, GQ.com meets him at London’s Red Bull Music Academy as he’s preparing to give a talk to a room full of the sort of wide-eyed kids that he’s been talking about “coming up from behind” since the days of “Losing My Edge”. The four-day beard growth that seems to have been a permanent fixture for the last five years is now almost entirely white, but at the fitting age of 42 Murphy seems to have found something like the meaning of life. He’s finishing work on the full-length concert film which will accompany LCD’s documentary Shut Up And Play The Hits, and he continues to make music without the pressure of the band. As he tells us, his restless curiosity about how stuff works is now also free to extend into the realms of wristwatches, making the perfect cup of coffee and fiction-writing, meaning his next big release could be printed and bound rather than pressed on vinyl.

GQ.com: Did you ever imagine you’d find yourself lecturing about music?
James Murphy: I never thought I’d do this. I have no game plan, I just improvise. I did a talk with David Byrne at Yale last month. David seems to have a career path that fits him very well and I would want one that fits me. I like that he’s cut a wide swath for himself. It’s very different though, because he was in a very successful band when he was quite young.

Are you growing more comfortable at being the centre of attention?
Sometimes my anxiety makes me very quiet and sometimes it makes me falsely gregarious as a way of trying to make everybody happy. It’s not something I desire. Stage fright is a very real thing for me. I don’t address performing. I try to play the songs. The performative aspect for me is always musical and physical and not about theatre, which I think is a failure of mine. I think if I had a little more confidence or I was a different kind of guy, it’d be cool. I love David Bowie, who’s obviously a theatrical performer but I don’t have that gene. I need to get over my self-consciousness and the only way to do that is to try and forget that there are people there. Luckily I designed a lot of music where there’s not a lot of down-time. I sing almost the entire time or play percussion. It’s very physical so that it’s easier for me to let go a bit.

Do you feel very connected to your lyrics?
Some more than others. I get rid of them if they feel too much like “Where did that come from?” unless I really like the way they feel or sound. David Byrne said that the words don’t matter to him, just the emotional tone. He’ll think in sounds and then fit words into them. That makes a lot of sense for him, but I feel like there needs to be a point of view. I feel like a newscaster, not a charming personality. If I didn’t have news to say, then why would you listen to me?

There’s an emotional weight to LCD Soundsystem’s music that means fans often say they’d like it played at their funeral. Is that something you can relate to?
As long as they don’t mean, “I hate this, when I’m dead you can play it!” I think that’s positive but I don’t know how it makes me feel. If I had to pick something to play at my funeral I’d force everyone to listen to “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” performed by Roberta Flack really loudly on a really good sound-system, just because I want everyone to hear what I hear when I hear that.

What are you most afraid of?
Making people feel terrible. Or the selfish version: being blamed for making people feel terrible. [Laughs]

Mark E Smith says the Fall would have been the same band even if he wasn’t from Salford. Would LCD Soundsystem have been the same without New York?
I think it had a big impact. I don’t think if I’d grown up in New York I’d have made the same music but I’m from a small place in New Jersey very close to the city. I moved there after fetishising it and as opposed to just being disappointed by it not being right, I tried to manipulate it into being right, so that was pretty formative. It’s a big part of me. I’m a reactive person. Mark E Smith seems to be a generative person. “I’m going to make this thing. Nothing like it happened before. Nothing like it has happened since.” I’m not that guy. I’m a middle-aged guy who responds to stuff. I’m a volley-er, not a server.

What was the best record in your parents’ collection?
For Sentimental Reasons by the Nat King Cole Trio – it has “That Ain’t Right” and “This Will Make You Laugh” on it. That was my dad’s favourite record. He was a bouncer at a jazz club.

What’s the secret to making the perfect cup of coffee?
Good beans, good roast and following the recipe. You’ve got to have a good brew ratio. You’ve got to have the right amount of grounds, ground the right way, in a French press, held for the right amount of time. It’s not a very sexy answer, but it’s the truth!

When did you first become interested in watches?
The first watch I had was given to me when my grandfather passed away. My mother gave me his watch, which was a Forties Bulova. My father’s father had passed away before my parents were married but when they saw that I liked that watch my father gave me my other grandfather’s watch as well. That was a Twenties’ Gruen. I went through a big phase of wearing old Timetron digital LED watches and actually I didn’t wear a watch for years and years. Recently I started liking them again. I just think these things float through space and they go into your ear and you find that you’re not alone. I started liking automatic and mechanical watches. I really like the mechanisms.

Can you recommend a good book?
David Foster Wallace is great so read Infinite Jest because it’s amazing, then Pale King because it’s beautiful. Broom Of The System is fine and you should read it if you want to know more about where he came from. Also, read Sam Lipsyte especially Home Land and The Ask. He’s a great contemporary writer, and young-ish. Young for writing, but older than me.

Do you have any plans to write fiction yourself?
That’s what I went to school for, so it’s where I come from academically. I’m writing now, actually. A novel. I’m always making things, but whether they turn into something that I’ll consider making a part of the public world is different. I mean, I write songs every day, but only once in a while do they go out into the public sphere. I’m also dubious because as a person who’s known for something else, something that I wrote might get published before it was ready. Maybe I’ll have to send things in under a pseudonym, just so that they’re considered fairly. Editing is no joke.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
My dad gave me some good advice: when you’re walking with a lady you should always walk on the street side. His other advice was “Don’t do anything jailable” and “Don’t die”. [Laughs] He was using the minimum number of words but you got his point. If you’re doing stupid shit, be the guy who doesn’t do the stuff that could kill you. If you’re going to break the law: speed, run a red light, drink underage but don’t get yourself sent to jail. That’s when you know your dad was not raised fancy. It’s not like he told me: [adopts aristocratic accent] “Always take care of the little people.” It’s not noblesse oblige.

Originally published by British GQ.

Peter Berg is sunk deep into an armchair in his hotel suite at London’s Claridge’s, rubbing his brow. He’s wearing a suit jacket approximately two sizes too small for him and the expression of a man simultaneously nursing an expensive hangover, transatlantic jetlag and the pressure of bringing the $200m blockbuster Battleship  safely into harbour. After proving his big-budget action credentials with Will Smith’s drunk superhero movie Hancock, Universal handed him the keys to their brand new Hasbro franchise (complete with stars Liam Neeson, Taylor Kitsch and Rihanna) and all the political headaches that go with it – they’re spending another $50m on promotional tie-ins with the likes of Coca-Cola Zero and Subway alone. GQ.com lends an ear as he explains how he’s dealt with the inevitable jokes about making a film based on a children’s game, how Spider-Man changed everything for moviemakers and why the best way to wake up is with a “Breakfast of Booze”.

GQ.com: How involved were Hasbro in the making of Battleship?
Peter Berg: First of all, Hasbro doesn’t have any real creative input. They might have an idea, and I’ll listen to anybody’s ideas because I’m a very inclusive filmmaker – Hasbro have had some really good ideas. That being said, there’s a lot of scepticism and cynicism about the title and the fact that there’s a toy company involved. People have been very public about it: “What’s next, ‘Tic-tac-toe: The movie’?” At the same time, I’ve also met a lot of people who generally don’t write for websites or blog who say; “Wow! That’s awesome, I love that game!” So how it really pans out remains to be seen. I think at the end of the day the movie will succeed or fail based upon itself and once people have taken their shots at the title, they’re still going to take a look at the movie. If the movie is good and the marketing is good then it’ll work, if not, it won’t. I don’t think that the title of Transformers  and Hasbro’s involvement in it had very much to do with the film’s success – but Michael Bay had a lot to do with it. Pirates Of The Caribbean didn’t owe much of its success to the theme park ride, it was a success because it was a Johnny Depp movie directed by Gore Verbinski.

What motivates you to make a summer blockbuster?
I’m interested in the business of movies. When I first started making films as a profession, Universal was the top studio. Stacey Snider was running it and back around 2000 they had movies like Meet The Parents and The Bourne Identity. They were number one. Their movies were making a certain amount of money, maybe $350-400m worldwide and were good movies with character and some effects. Suddenly Spider-Man comes along in 2002 and blows the roof off it! People realized that there was actually a bigger audience out there and a bigger appetite. It was Sam Raimi (a respected filmmaker) and Tobey Maguire (a pretty good actor) and the movie was actually really good! It made a lot of money all around the world. Suddenly people realised “Holy s***! There’s a new game!” When a movie like Avatar  does the kind of business it does you have to realize that there’s an appetite for big spectacle that delivers. There’s gotta be emotion, humour and character but if you can take those things and add big, epic never-before-seen visual spectacle then you can make a mega-movie. If you look at the directors, guys like JJ Abrams, Jon Favreau, James Cameron, Gore Verbinski – these are talented filmmakers who understand the thrill and the rush you get making movies like that.

Are we supposed to sympathise with the aliens in Battleship?
I wanted the aliens to at least have a pathos because we see so many [science fiction] films where we don’t know what’s going on and they’re killing everything. I liked the challenge of making their thought processes and emotions part of the film. Making their desire to look out for themselves as relevant as our desire to look out for ourselves. There’s a scene later on in the film where there’s an encounter between an American scientist and an alien scientist. It’s a peaceful encounter where they just take the measure of each other and I think it’s my favourite scene in the movie. I also like the idea that the aliens didn’t start it – we started it! We didn’t mean to start it but there’s a series of misunderstandings. I’ve seen that happen in real life: giant miscommunications which end in violence.

Is there any truth to the rumour that you’re going to direct an N.W.A biopic?
No. I’m a huge fan of N.W.A. I was really into Eazy-E, like every other red-blooded, white American who thinks he’s a rapper from Compton. It’s not a movie I’m going to do but I hope somebody does it because it would be a great story.

Can you recommend a good book?
Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell. It’s going to be my next movie and it’s a hell of a book.

What’s the best thing you can cook?
The Breakfast of Booze. We make it every Super Bowl at my house. I got the recipe from Epic Meal Time. They’re my heroes. They’re some cooks from Canada who have a YouTube channel and they’re getting big.

What’s your whiskey of choice?
I’m a Jack Daniels man. As classless and American as that is, I grew up drinking Jack Daniels.  Last night, though, I was drinking a 1966 Macallan. That was a treat. It was £500 for a shot of that.

Originally published by British GQ.

The man the Old Trafford terraces still call “King Eric” wants a cigarette. GQ.com is stood with Cantona by the pool in the basement of Piccadilly’s Haymarket Hotel where a family of swimmers can’t quite believe what’s happening around them. The footballer whose talent, arrogance and occasional acts of uncontrolled aggression defined the early years of the Premiership has just appeared from one of the pool’s side-rooms, possibly a sauna, out of which in the last three-quarters of an hour both Radio One’s Edith Bowman and David Frost have emerged looking equally awed. The Frenchman is patting his pockets distractedly until one of his team of press handlers scurries over to stop him. “You can’t smoke down here!” she whispers urgently.Cantona looks at her, baffled. “But why not?” he asks with a shrug. He makes his apologies and disappears off in search of Frédéric Schoendoerffer, the director of his new film Switch  and the keeper of his tabs. A couple of minutes later we are safely ensconced in a quiet side room where Cantona, sipping an espresso, apologises for the delay. He eases back in his chair, tilting his chin skywards contemplatively and sets about expounding his philosophy that everything – football, acting, even cooking – is simply another way of expressing your true self.

GQ.com: Detective Forgeat, the character you play in Switch, always has a cigarette in his hand. Do you smoke as much as he does?
Eric Cantona: It’s to show that he is a free person. It’s not because you like adventure that you smoke but I think it shows the freedom that Forgeat has and where he puts his priorities. His priority is his job and he’ll do anything that helps to inspire him to do it well. He doesn’t obey the smoking ban. For me, I don’t like it when there is too much interference in our lives. We’re not children. It is our own life in our hands.

What advice would you give to someone like yourself who wants to act but is not a trained actor?
It’s a discipline. For me football, cinema, theatre or photography are all ways of expressing ourselves. Of course, if you want to be a photographer you need to learn the techniques. You must learn how to play the sport but I don’t think the technique is the most important thing. Sometimes it’s nice when it’s not so perfect. It’s like beauty. If someone is too perfect they won’t look good. Imperfection is important. That’s why I think it’s important to learn the techniques but to know when to stop using them. We can be eaten by techniques and forget what we have inside of us.

If you could have acted in any film, which would it be?
I would like to have worked with [Pier Paolo] Pasolini. In Oedipus Rex, maybe.

What was the best thing about playing football?
Expressing myself. Of course, my dream was always to play for the best teams and with the best players but I loved to express myself through the sport.

Can you recommend a good book?
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. It’s about our desires and the small voice inside us that tells us not to follow them. It’s about that rivalry between the two people inside each of us.

What music do you listen to at home?
I love the singer-songwriter Sophie Hunger, particularly her last two albums 1983 and Sophie Hunger.

What achievement are you most proud of?
I try to be honest. I’m honest with people and I try to respect myself. If I respect myself and I am honest with myself, then I will respect other people. Of course, I don’t do everything perfectly. I’m proud that I’ve tried many things. I’ve shown that as people we can try anything.

What is the best advice you’ve ever been given?
I don’t remember any advice. I listen to my own experience. My mind says to me that life is just “le passage” – a journey. You are here today, but tomorrow… you don’t know. You must live with a feeling of freedom. You are not “appartenir“. You don’t belong to other people, your environment or the world around you. You are free. That helped me to achieve a lot of things.

What is the best thing you can cook?
Dorado. It’s a fish. The secret is in the filling.

The filling?
Non, the feeling! I know how to cook it, but if I told you how to do it, then yours would be different to mine. It’s all about the feeling.

Originally published by British GQ.

“She’s not naked?” Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is a little taken aback by his Game Of Thrones co-star Emilia Clarke’s GQ photo shoot. “That makes a change!” Best known for playing Jaime Lannister in the notoriously clothes-repellent fantasy series, the 41-year-old Dane is here today to talk about his role in the film adaptation of Norwegian crime-writer Jo Nesbø’s blackly comic Headhunters. A heist movie that escalates into a Coen Brothers-esque cat-and-mouse pursuit across Scandinavia, Coster-Waldau plays a character he describes as “an alpha-alpha male, dashing and extremely well-dressed”. To mark the release of Headhunters in cinemas, here he discusses the most beautiful Game Of Thrones fan he ever laid eyes on, the stubbornness of English football fans and one particularly eye-watering encounter with a doctor…

What did you think when you first read the script for Headhunters?
I loved the fact that the main guy is such an idiot and that he’s not very nice. Within seconds of the movie starting you see him being unfaithful and on top of that treating that girl like she’s worthless. The script has so many twists and turns and surprises. It’s a great story.

Will you audition to play your character again when the film is remade for America?
I don’t know! I haven’t thought about it. It’s great that it’s being talked about, though. The fact is when a film with subtitles comes out in America it will only find a limited audience. If they can sell it and make some money then that’s great.

You’re very well dressed at the start of the film. What were you wearing?
I’ve never tried on so many suits for a role! We ended up with Paul Smith for the film. I loved them, but personally I wouldn’t spend that much money on a suit. Today I’m wearing a… [Looks for tag] Boss Selection suit jacket – clearly not bought by myself! The trainers are Reebok. I like to wear beautiful clothes but I don’t have that many.

Can you recommend a good book?
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. I guess with any story it’s the characters that pull you in and I love the way he tells the story of those friends.

Are you looking forward to Euro 2012 this summer?
I’m feeling very confident although we Danes aren’t quite as mad as you guys are. My best friend is English so I know that at every World Cup and Euros you manage to convince yourselves that you’re going to win it. You set yourselves for that horrible, horrible despair when you crash out on penalties against Germany. Actually one of the greatest matches I ever saw was at Wembley during Euro ’96 between Scotland and England. That was an incredible game. Remember Gascoigne’s goal and then his celebration? Just amazing.

Are there any members of the Game Of Thrones cast you haven’t seen naked?
Let me think. I’ve seen Sean Bean naked. I’ve seen Mark Addy. And Lena. I haven’t seen the kids of course, but all the adults. We do that at the read-through. We just strip naked and read the script.

Given that there’s even an official Game Of Thrones cook book, what’s the best thing you can cook?
I do a really wicked chicken where I stuff Parma ham under its skin.

What’s been your strangest fan experience?
I was very lucky to be invited to ComicCon last year. That was a tremendous experience. We were sat on this panel and to see all the fans and their passion and energy was incredible. A lot of people in costume, of course. In the show Emilia Clarke plays this character called Daenerys Targaryen and I remember seeing an Asian Daenerys Targaryen at ComicCon. She was quite stunning. A beautiful vision.

Have you met Game Of Thrones creator George RR Martin?
Yes, he’s a very sweet man and very proud of his work, as he should be. I guess in that situation every actor wants to ask whether their character is going to survive, but I didn’t. I kept my pride. He was very gracious.

What can you tell us about your upcoming role in Oblivion alongside Tom Cruise?
Well, I can tell you that it’s directed by Joe Kosinski and based on a story he came up with along with Barry Levine. The script is by William Monahan. I play a guy called Sykes. Apart from Tom Cruise there’s also Morgan Freeman, Andrea Riseborough and Olga Kurylenko. It’s set in the not too distant future and that’s about all I can tell you! I play a pretty traumatised man, that’s all I’ll say.

What’s the worst pain you’ve ever experienced?
I’ll tell you that, but it will make you feel the pain too. I once had a urinary infection. That was fine, but in Denmark when you have that, as a man, if you’re under the age of 50 they call you in for a test. I thought it was a test to check how much power your piss has. I went in and they sent me down to examination room number three. There was a nurse waiting for me. She asked me to undress, so I did. I asked her what we were doing, and she just said that they wanted to have “a look”. So I’m lying there and she puts a little bit of gel on my willy. I asked her what it was for and she said it was so that it wouldn’t hurt so much. Then the doctor came in with this big thing and said: “Let’s have a look at it, then!” He had this big, bendy camera. Then he inserted it into my penis. That pain was beyond painful. So the lesson is never let anyone put a camera up your penis. Afterwards he asked me if I wanted him to have a look at the other one. He had another big thing to go in the arse. I told him I was alright.

I don’t blame you.
There was a TV screen showing what they could see but I was in too much pain to look at it. I remember he’d put it in and I was screaming in agony and then he said: “Right, now the worst pain is still to come.” He had to force his way inside because the bladder closes up. Every time he moved it was horrible.

I’m glad I’ve managed to avoid requiring too much medical attention to my penis.
You’re very lucky. When I was 21 I went to a music festival and met a girl who gave me two presents that I didn’t discover until I got back. Two great venereal diseases.

Which festival was that at?
That was at Roskilde, which is a huge festival in Denmark with just as much mud as Glastonbury. I’ve seen some amazing bands there. A couple of years back I saw Nick Cave, not with the Bad Seeds but with Grinderman and they really delivered. He was great.

Originally published at GQ.

Rita Ora arrives for our interview bearing gifts. Appearing beneath blonde locks and wearing bright red lipstick and a tight dress, the 21-year-old might already have a number one single “Hot Right Now” (with DJ Fresh) and a direct line to her label boss Jay-Z, but she’s also generous with her cupcakes. She excitedly offers us a delicate chocolate creation covered with an obscene amount of icing while taking a red velvet one for herself. “You wouldn’t mind if I just dug in, would you?” Although she was signed by Jay-Z to Roc Nation three years ago, this year Ora is finally enjoying her moment in the spotlight: releasing “R.I.P” written by Drake and featuring Tinie Tempah, touring with Coldplay and finally unveiling her debut album. Between mouthfuls of icing and enthusing about her single (“I love the message behind it. “R.I.P to the girl you used to see, her days are over”. It’s like something you’d say in a conversation.”), she tells GQ.com about working for Hova, her advice on getting tattoos and her love of Bruce Springsteen.

GQ: What’s Jay-Z like as a boss?
Rita Ora: He’s a great mentor, a great boss and so is his wife. There’s not a lot of people on Roc Nation so the few that are genuinely get time spent on their project. It’s like a family, well especially now with Blue Ivy – although she just chills: eats, sleeps, wakes up, eats, sleeps. Jay-Z taught me a lot about patience as an artist. I was itching. When I was 18 I thought it was all going to happen so quickly – I just thought next week I’d be on Oprah!

What’s the most important item on your rider?
Throat Coat Tea and a steamer. A steamer is like an inhaler so you can inhale this oil, or frankincense of eucalyptus. Before I go onstage I spend half an hour taking in that steam and it saves my life! A little bit of whiskey, too.

What advice would you give someone getting a tattoo?
Know what you want to get, because even if you try and take it off with a laser it’s not 100% going to come off.

You signed to Roc Nation at 18 and you’re now releasing your debut album at 21. Have the last three years been your equivalent of going to university?
Roc Nation is like my uni. I had a flat in Brooklyn and it was definitely like being at uni but because I did it in the States I was underage. I couldn’t even go anywhere to party! When I came back to London I could drink, so we had our fair share of parties here.

What music do you love that would surprise people?
I’m a huge Bruce Springsteen and Duran Duran fan. But No Doubt are one of my favourite bands of all time. When I first saw Gwen Stefani wearing red lipstick I thought it was the prettiest thing I ever saw.

Have you ever cheated death?
I was doing yo-yos on stage and I almost fell off. I was scared of embarrassing myself more than death, so I guess I really cheated embarrassment.

What’s your key style advice for men?
The worst thing is when a guy just looks awkward. It’s not attractive. A guy has a certain power anyway just by being a different sex, so all you have to do is just be comfortable.

You’re supporting Coldplay at their stadium shows this summer. How did that happen?
I’m so glad that’s out now because I’ve known for a minute and I’ve wanted to tell everyone! They heard my tracks and then “Hot Right Now” went to number one. I’ve met them a few times over the last few years so they asked me to be on the tour. I’m over the moon – they play huge  arenas and I can’t wait to finally do it!

Originally published by British GQ.

In 2008 I found myself stood in a sewer trench in the centre of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, trying to help a man named Karem clear it with a spade. If he didn’t do this then when the rains came the sewers would flood the adjacent homes, which were little more than permanent slums. Karem, who was in his mid-twenties, turned to me and said: “My country, the DRC, it’s fucked”. Ankle-deep in sewage, I found it hard to disagree.

I’m telling you this not to perpetuate the idea that central Africa is a hopeless place, which it isn’t, but by way of explaining that I have some insight into what it’s like to be a white man in a country that I don’t understand wanting to help in any way I can. Maybe this is why, despite extensive flaws, I have some sympathy with the filmmaker Jason Russell and Invisible Children’s campaign to arrest Joseph Kony, the fugitive leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Kony 2012 is about a promise. It’s a promise that Jason Russell made to Jacob, a former child soldier, when he met him in Uganda in 2003. Jason promised Jacob that he would stop at nothing to have Joseph Kony arrested and last week he managed to get the whole world talking about Kony and his army of children. This is no mean feat and I think it’s wholly admirable that Jason Russell is keeping his promise to his friend. However, in doing so he is using and perpetuating stereotypes that obscure the reality of life in central Africa.

The Kony 2012 campaign is a brilliant demonstration of the power of a simple narrative over a complicated one. The message, as is made explicitly clear in the film, has been simplified to the level that a five-year-old child, in this case Jason Russell’s son, can understand it. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, the world is more complicated than that.

First of all, Joseph Kony is no longer in Uganda, where Invisible Children have successfully lobbied to send American advisory troops to hunt for him. In the last half decade he has moved through the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and is now most likely in the Central African Republic. In the film, Russell repeatedly refers to Uganda as a warzone, doing a disservice to the country’s partial recovery in the years since Kony was forced to flee. In reality, children in Uganda are now at a far greater risk from nodding disease, an incurable and debilitating neurological condition, than they are from Joseph Kony.

Arresting Kony won’t stop militias from recruiting child soldiers and it won’t bring an end to nodding disease, chronic lack of sanitation or any of the many other awful things that can happen to you if you if you have the misfortune to be a child born into poverty in central Africa. Invisible Children, by their very design, are not built to tackle these problems. They’ve been repeatedly criticised for the lack of transparency over their accounts and the small percentage of their funds which go to development work on the ground, and by their own admission they are a campaigning organisation first with everything else an afterthought. All they really care about is that promise. That’s why while their campaign has been startlingly well executed, the very last thing anyone should do is give them more money. They don’t need it. Their stated aim, to raise awareness about the actions of Joseph Kony, has already been achieved.

The fact that reality is more complex than the Kony 2012 campaign would like it to be shouldn’t mean that people have to be confused or bored into apathy. There are things that can be done to help children in Central Africa, but these things will be slower and less glamorous than hunting down a single “bad guy”.

I met another young man in the Democratic Republic of Congo named Freddie Mbulayi Kabamba. He was part of a small organisation named RECIC who were seeking to establish local political accountability, and who had been supported for many years by the international development organisation Christian Aid. When I asked him whether he had any hope for the future of his region, he said: “We have hope, but not for now. In a long time. Hope is permitted, but we must have good leaders.”

That’s what people want and need. Not quick fixes and American troops, but their own accountable political structure. Neither Uganda or the misleadingly-named Democratic Republic of Congo are functioning democracies. I hope Joseph Kony is arrested this year, with or without the help of the American advisory troops, but that will not be the end of the story.

Originally published by British GQ.