“The truth is, I don’t like dangerous things and am quite normal,” Christopher Walken told Uncut in September 2006. “I was born into show business and that brings with it being a little eccentric, the way you speak, the way you approach things. This innately gives me a sense of foreignness, which can easily translate into…s-t-r-a-n-g-e.”
I was reading over the weekend about Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese's latest collaboration - a project for HBO about the music industry in New York during the Seventies.
In an interview in the current issue of Uncut with Willy Vlautin, the singer-songwriter with Richmond Fontaine, discusses his flourishing second career as an author.
A lot of people peak in high school. Eric Love is not one of them. While many other teenagers are in the thick of their glory days, Eric is being starred up – that is, making the transition from a juvenile facility to a maximum security penitentiary, where he is billeted alongside some of the country’s very worst criminals. What follows over the next 100 minutes is as harrowing as you’d perhaps expect for a film that, in the first 10 minutes, sees Eric fashioning a shiv from a toothbrush and Bic razor. No good will come of this.
I had the good fortune to interview Jim Jarmusch recently for our An Audience With… feature. As you’d imagine, it was interesting, wide-ranging chat, and inevitably not everything we talked about made it into the magazine. There’s a couple of things in particular that seemed pretty interesting – not least the ‘full’ answer he gave to a question regarding the current status of The Sons Of Lee Marvin, a shadowy cabal whose members – allegedly – include Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Nick Cave and Iggy Pop.
There’s a Youtube clip of Ryuichi Sakamoto, dressed in black hunched over a piano playing the piece of music he is most famous for – “Forbidden Colours”, from the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. It is, I guess, the idea of Sakamoto we’re most familiar with – the artist, his instrument of choice, the music he is playing both delicate and fluid.