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We Don’t Live Here Anymore

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This fraught, intense drama is based on two Seventies novellas by Andre Dubus, a writer who, like Raymond Carver, was interested not just in the small wrong things we do to each other, but in the way our self-imposed punishments are often harsher than those any just deity would dish out. Jack, Terry, Hank and Edith - and yes, the film does echo period sex trips like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, or Carnal Knowledge - are two married couples for whom the honeymoon period is well and truly over. Larry Gross' script asks whether they can hang on beyond the itch, and then beyond the scratching. Hank (the estimable Krause, Six Feet Under star) and Jack (Ruffalo) are English teachers in a quiet New England town. They're burn-outs, though Hank still strives to write a stillborn novel, and they can muster up a silly but telling competitiveness when jogging. While Hank's wife Edith (Watts) seems calmly capable, and Jack's wife Terry (Dern) is fiery and volatile, things aren't so simple beneath the surface. Jack and Edith are in full-blown affair mode ("I wonder how we'll get caught," mutters Edith: not "if"), and soon Hank and Terry are returning the insult, partly through revenge, partly through confusion. All four loathe and fear the fact that they're sliding into the anticlimax of middle-aged parenthood. They realise the futility of fighting it and each other, but can dream up no other way to rage. The minutiae of relationship etiquette are raked over, from meaningful lack of eye contact to pillow talk to explosive rows. Obsessing over infidelity and guilt, it often suggests Six Feet Under, and similarly tries not to judge, but there's less leavening humour, dark or otherwise. All four performances are courageous, with Dern going hell for leather, though Krause and Watts seem more graceful at stepping back from the bonfire as well as hurling themselves into it. Whereas In The Bedroom - also adapted from Dubus' work - flattered to deceive, this maintains its temperature to the final knock-out blows, shattering sureties. A fearless, uncommonly truthful film. By Chris Roberts

This fraught, intense drama is based on two Seventies novellas by Andre Dubus, a writer who, like Raymond Carver, was interested not just in the small wrong things we do to each other, but in the way our self-imposed punishments are often harsher than those any just deity would dish out. Jack, Terry, Hank and Edith – and yes, the film does echo period sex trips like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, or Carnal Knowledge – are two married couples for whom the honeymoon period is well and truly over. Larry Gross’ script asks whether they can hang on beyond the itch, and then beyond the scratching.

Hank (the estimable Krause, Six Feet Under star) and Jack (Ruffalo) are English teachers in a quiet New England town. They’re burn-outs, though Hank still strives to write a stillborn novel, and they can muster up a silly but telling competitiveness when jogging. While Hank’s wife Edith (Watts) seems calmly capable, and Jack’s wife Terry (Dern) is fiery and volatile, things aren’t so simple beneath the surface. Jack and Edith are in full-blown affair mode (“I wonder how we’ll get caught,” mutters Edith: not “if”), and soon Hank and Terry are returning the insult, partly through revenge, partly through confusion. All four loathe and fear the fact that they’re sliding into the anticlimax of middle-aged parenthood. They realise the futility of fighting it and each other, but can dream up no other way to rage.

The minutiae of relationship etiquette are raked over, from meaningful lack of eye contact to pillow talk to explosive rows. Obsessing over infidelity and guilt, it often suggests Six Feet Under, and similarly tries not to judge, but there’s less leavening humour, dark or otherwise. All four performances are courageous, with Dern going hell for leather, though Krause and Watts seem more graceful at stepping back from the bonfire as well as hurling themselves into it.

Whereas In The Bedroom – also adapted from Dubus’ work – flattered to deceive, this maintains its temperature to the final knock-out blows, shattering sureties. A fearless, uncommonly truthful film.

By Chris Roberts

Hal – Hal

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Twentysomething brothers Dave and Paul Allen, offspring of folk musician parents and raiders of their record collection, aren’t shy about revealing their love of Sixties/Seventies West Coast sounds. As vocal harmonisers and, respectively, guitarist and bassist of the quartet Hal, they’ve crafted a charming and disarming debut, which conveys their mastery of sun-baked manners but never merely copies. There’s a real joie de vivre to these songs, strong and seductive enough to be both original and timeless. Having drawn an A&R scramble to Kiliney, south of Dublin, the band may find their blend of overt influences - Van Morrison, The Beach Boys, Spector - drawing initial comparisons to The Thrills of two years ago. But Hal live in their own, Teenage Fanclub-like, geography-irrelevant dreamworld. Dave, whose gorgeous voice is their gearstick, writes with keyboardist Stephen O’Brien in a manner which straddles both the mainstream melodies of a Beautiful South and the grittier edge of a chilled-out Neil Young. He’s said he wants the band to evoke indefinable nostalgia, a pining for a nebulous, half-recalled emotion. So whereas The Thrills’ second album fizzled commercially because of an increasingly arch knowingness which many found alienating, Hal - perfectionists eschewing irony - keep the envelope taut, the air fresh. Edwyn Collins makes a great choice of producer for “Play The Hits”, a frisky, California surf flurry which has too much adrenalin for pastiche, while “What A Lovely Dance” is exquisitely romantic. Hal tend to opt for lyrics which suggest rather than spell out, but its coda is a deeply affecting paean to hope. The spare, sweet “Keep Love As Your Golden Rule” points to Young’s Harvest, and “Don’t Come Running” gently coaxes out shades of Badfinger. “I Sat Down” (favourite Hal song of touring partners The Magic Numbers) is as subtly shaped by The Band as the more obvious “Worry About The Wind”, and moulds mature chord patterns into a pyramid of yearning. Embracing the torch-pop of The Everlys as much as the panoramas of the Wilsons, the brothers Allen melt any resistance with their aching take on purity and pre-modernism. By Chris Roberts

Twentysomething brothers Dave and Paul Allen, offspring of folk musician parents and raiders of their record collection, aren’t shy about revealing their love of Sixties/Seventies West Coast sounds. As vocal harmonisers and, respectively, guitarist and bassist of the quartet Hal, they’ve crafted a charming and disarming debut, which conveys their mastery of sun-baked manners but never merely copies. There’s a real joie de vivre to these songs, strong and seductive enough to be both original and timeless.

Having drawn an A&R scramble to Kiliney, south of Dublin, the band may find their blend of overt influences – Van Morrison, The Beach Boys, Spector – drawing initial comparisons to The Thrills of two years ago. But Hal live in their own, Teenage Fanclub-like, geography-irrelevant dreamworld. Dave, whose gorgeous voice is their gearstick, writes with keyboardist Stephen O’Brien in a manner which straddles both the mainstream melodies of a Beautiful South and the grittier edge of a chilled-out Neil Young. He’s said he wants the band to evoke indefinable nostalgia, a pining for a nebulous, half-recalled emotion. So whereas The Thrills’ second album fizzled commercially because of an increasingly arch knowingness which many found alienating, Hal – perfectionists eschewing irony – keep the envelope taut, the air fresh.

Edwyn Collins makes a great choice of producer for “Play The Hits”, a frisky, California surf flurry which has too much adrenalin for pastiche, while “What A Lovely Dance” is exquisitely romantic. Hal tend to opt for lyrics which suggest rather than spell out, but its coda is a deeply affecting paean to hope. The spare, sweet “Keep Love As Your Golden Rule” points to Young’s Harvest, and “Don’t Come Running” gently coaxes out shades of Badfinger. “I Sat Down” (favourite Hal song of touring partners The Magic Numbers) is as subtly shaped by The Band as the more obvious “Worry About The Wind”, and moulds mature chord patterns into a pyramid of yearning.

Embracing the torch-pop of The Everlys as much as the panoramas of the Wilsons, the brothers Allen melt any resistance with their aching take on purity and pre-modernism.

By Chris Roberts

Damien Jurado – On My Way To Absence

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Rehearsals For Departure. Ghost Of David. Postcards and Audio Letters. Where Shall You Take Me? And now On My Way To Absence. It doesn’t take a leap of Poirot proportions to spot the transient motif at the heart of Jurado’s work. But the world’s foremost singing pre-school teacher is all about transformation rather than simple escape. He’s no self-confessor either. Like Will Oldham or Dylan, he disappears rather than reveals, but his songs pivot on the Big Questions. For Jurado, too, the dark stuff - regret, retribution, madness, murder and other jollities – is an endless source of fascination and truth. It’s where he finds the essence of everyone’s soul. And though Jurado’s career has thrown up stylistic diversions (most notably on 2002’s two-fisted rock-out I Break Chairs), the American idiom that best suits his unsettling and ambiguous morality tales is old-time folk. In some ways, …Absence is his most diverse record yet, but it’s at its brilliant best when spare and uncompromising. Regular cohorts Eric Fisher (guitarist/producer), Josh Golden (bass) and Andy Myers (drums) are all here, but there’s something quietly shattering about “Fuel”, just Jurado and guitar drawing blood as a merciless small-town killer - “I murdered the law here/ I took on God here/ So in place of your sins/ I bring you a Judas” – imploring his mother to torch his body for oil. Or the destructive “Northbound”: “Tail lights broken/ Stop lights out/ I speed without caution on a road made of ice/ My body an engine/ My car is a train/ I don’t feel guilty for the hurt or pain”. It could be straight out of Badlands. Amongst the empty farmhouses, black widows, pink champagne and guns in the drawer, Jurado’s riveting narratives explore sunken relationships and thwarted dreams, perhaps most tellingly on the outstanding “A Jealous Heart Is A Heavy Heart”, mordant strings giving way to a lonely piano coda and a desperate plea - “Grow old with me” - fading into oblivion. It’s the most heartbreaking thing he’s recorded since Ghost Of David’s “Medication”.

Rehearsals For Departure. Ghost Of David. Postcards and Audio Letters. Where Shall You Take Me? And now On My Way To Absence. It doesn’t take a leap of Poirot proportions to spot the transient motif at the heart of Jurado’s work. But the world’s foremost singing pre-school teacher is all about transformation rather than simple escape. He’s no self-confessor either. Like Will Oldham or Dylan, he disappears rather than reveals, but his songs pivot on the Big Questions. For Jurado, too, the dark stuff – regret, retribution, madness, murder and other jollities – is an endless source of fascination and truth. It’s where he finds the essence of everyone’s soul. And though Jurado’s career has thrown up stylistic diversions (most notably on 2002’s two-fisted rock-out I Break Chairs), the American idiom that best suits his unsettling and ambiguous morality tales is old-time folk.

In some ways, …Absence is his most diverse record yet, but it’s at its brilliant best when spare and uncompromising. Regular cohorts Eric Fisher (guitarist/producer), Josh Golden (bass) and Andy Myers (drums) are all here, but there’s something quietly shattering about “Fuel”, just Jurado and guitar drawing blood as a merciless small-town killer – “I murdered the law here/ I took on God here/ So in place of your sins/ I bring you a Judas” – imploring his mother to torch his body for oil. Or the destructive “Northbound”: “Tail lights broken/ Stop lights out/ I speed without caution on a road made of ice/ My body an engine/ My car is a train/ I don’t feel guilty for the hurt or pain”. It could be straight out of Badlands. Amongst the empty farmhouses, black widows, pink champagne and guns in the drawer, Jurado’s riveting narratives explore sunken relationships and thwarted dreams, perhaps most tellingly on the outstanding “A Jealous Heart Is A Heavy Heart”, mordant strings giving way to a lonely piano coda and a desperate plea – “Grow old with me” – fading into oblivion. It’s the most heartbreaking thing he’s recorded since Ghost Of David’s “Medication”.

The Go-Betweens – Oceans Apart

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“Wave after wave,” sang Robert Smith from the sunken canoe of the Go-Betweens’ pop career in 1988, “your tension and your tenderness.” Those words might capture the rare balance the band struck through the 1980s. The tenderness in their facility to knock out a perfectly heartwrecking ballad at the slip of a stetson. The tension in their knowledge that they had to strive for more, to hit the charts, or at least be fit to follow in the boho sneakers of Smith or Verlaine. By 2003’s Bright Yellow, Bright Orange that tension was long gone, the double-act resigned to autumnal acoustics. Even Forster seemed to acknowledge this: “Trapped in an image, unable to move/I want to get out of folk and into rare groove”. You could imagine him and Grant McLennan living out their afternoons, trading wry rhymes on some Brisbane porch. This was how the band ends: not with a bang, but with the swish of a finished kiss. So it’s good news that “Here Comes A City”, Forster’s opening track of Oceans Apart, goes screeching away from that backporch at great speed, heading somewhere where people “who read Dostoevsky look like Dostoevsky”. The band sounds re-energised by an idea of the city, the marketplace, pop ambition. You can hear it on a couple of other Forster tracks: “Lavender” and, especially, “Darlinghurst Years”. The latter starts off as a sick Sydney sister to 1987’s “The House That Jack Kerouac Built”, except here Forster sounds giddy at the thought of that demi-monde decadence, the traffic, the cello playing through the nights, as discordant brass wails and wells through his reveries. McLennan too, so often the soft balladeer, now sounds positively wracked. “The Statue” and “This Night’s For You” could be the strongest songs he’s ever written: shimmering, synthetic, noir torch songs of longing and regret. Harvard academic Stanley Cavell coined the phrase “the comedy of remarriage” to describe those 1930 screwball movies whose couples conclude that settling down quietly is for chumps and resolve to live out their lives in disputatious adventure. With Oceans Apart, The Go-Betweens reunion, which once seemed a sweet, sighing coda, now promises to be similarly lively. Sometimes you really do need two heads. By Stephen Trousse

“Wave after wave,” sang Robert Smith from the sunken canoe of the Go-Betweens’ pop career in 1988, “your tension and your tenderness.” Those words might capture the rare balance the band struck through the 1980s. The tenderness in their facility to knock out a perfectly heartwrecking ballad at the slip of a stetson. The tension in their knowledge that they had to strive for more, to hit the charts, or at least be fit to follow in the boho sneakers of Smith or Verlaine.

By 2003’s Bright Yellow, Bright Orange that tension was long gone, the double-act resigned to autumnal acoustics. Even Forster seemed to acknowledge this: “Trapped in an image, unable to move/I want to get out of folk and into rare groove”. You could imagine him and Grant McLennan living out their afternoons, trading wry rhymes on some Brisbane porch. This was how the band ends: not with a bang, but with the swish of a finished kiss.

So it’s good news that “Here Comes A City”, Forster’s opening track of Oceans Apart, goes screeching away from that backporch at great speed, heading somewhere where people “who read Dostoevsky look like Dostoevsky”. The band sounds re-energised by an idea of the city, the marketplace, pop ambition. You can hear it on a couple of other Forster tracks: “Lavender” and, especially, “Darlinghurst Years”. The latter starts off as a sick Sydney sister to 1987’s “The House That Jack Kerouac Built”, except here Forster sounds giddy at the thought of that demi-monde decadence, the traffic, the cello playing through the nights, as discordant brass wails and wells through his reveries. McLennan too, so often the soft balladeer, now sounds positively wracked. “The Statue” and “This Night’s For You” could be the strongest songs he’s ever written: shimmering, synthetic, noir torch songs of longing and regret.

Harvard academic Stanley Cavell coined the phrase “the comedy of remarriage” to describe those 1930 screwball movies whose couples conclude that settling down quietly is for chumps and resolve to live out their lives in disputatious adventure. With Oceans Apart, The Go-Betweens reunion, which once seemed a sweet, sighing coda, now promises to be similarly lively. Sometimes you really do need two heads.

By Stephen Trousse

Interview: Norman Blake

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Interview: Norman Blake

It’s a beautiful spring morning and Uncut is on the blower to the undisputed owner of the title ‘Nicest Man In Rock’. Guitarist/singer Norman Blake is in his usual bright and breezy self as he joins us from his Glasgow home for a chinwag as his band Teenage Fanclub prepare to release their beautiful new album ‘Man-Made’. In the five years since last LP ‘Howdy!’ things have changed for TFC. The band’s deal with Sony/Columbia expired following the release of 2003’s best of compilation (2003’s ‘Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds – A Rough Guide To Teenage Fanclub’) and the new LP is their first release on their own label PeMa. And what’s more, ‘Man-Made’ was produced by post-rock veteran John McEntire (Tortoise, The Sea And Cake). So who better than stormin’ Norman to give us the lowdown from the frontline… Why were there five years between ‘Howdy!’ and the new album? “We did the compilation, which was a great way for us to bring to Sony deal to an end. We were down in the studio making ‘Howdy!’ And Alan McGee came and told us he was ending the label. He told us to finish the record and Sony would pick it up or we’d get paid off. But Sony picked up the option for the two remaining records – they did the same with Primal Scream and Super Furry Animals as well. And you know, it did OK, but we were well down their list of priorities at the label and it kind of got lost. I don’t think they’re really structured to work with a band like us. We spoke to the MD and came to an arrangement that we would do a compilation, which was great ‘cos it meant we didn’t have to give them many new songs (there were three on the compilation). It was great for them so it meant they wouldn’t have to give us lots of money to make a new record. But we spent a lot of time and effort getting the artwork right. We had a battle with them about that too. That brought us to the end of that, but because we wanted to do the compilation properly, we spent a good year on it. Then we toured that record, so before you know it there’s another two years gone! We did the record with Jad Fair (2002’s ‘Words Of Wisdom And Hope’). That album was released on Alternative Tentacles! We were in San Francisco and Jello Biafra came to see us! We met Jello! I thought it was fantastic 'cos I was really into The Dead Kennedys when I was younger and he was a brilliant guy. I just thought it was brilliant that this Glaswegian pop band ends up on Alternative Tentacles. We toured the Jad record and that took up more time. We done some bits and pieces here and there, tried to keep our hand in. And we’ve been planning the label for a bit.” So why go it alone? Can you explain how it happened? “We nearly went with Domino, but to be fair to them, they did say to us ‘You can do it yourselves’. That was decent of them. It took us a bit of time to set up, getting a distributor and all the other things you have to sort out. We can now release what we want whenever we want. We’ve got a few things coming up, for example, at the live shows we’ve got a 7” single we’re gonna be selling, tracks we did with Jad Fair. Daniel Johnston’s going to do the artwork. We’ve got the freedom to do that, and we’re going to exploit that. We’re gonna do things like that, limited stuff which we can sell at gigs and on our website.” And how does it differ from having to answer to a label? “It’s a bit more exciting, getting back to what making records is about. We’ve built up different friendships over the years, which has helped us. It’s nice to be working with old friends. We’re back to where we started, we’ve got the control that it’s so difficult for bands to have nowadays. We’re much much happier. It becomes a bit soul destroying. You become product, there’s no art. That had gone for us for a period of time. “ So what does owning your own label entail then? “Raymond (McGinley, lead guitarist/singer)’s been filling in forms for different collection agencies, generating bar codes, weird things that you have to do. We did a press trip last week, and we’re on the budget. We did the Ryanair’s all over Europe. I even had a hotel room that didn’t have any windows! Wasn’t far from being a prison cell. But we’re much more comfortable doing it like that anyway. With the first record Raymond sold a fridge and a washing machine his neighbour had left him, and we made ‘A Catholic Education’ from that. When we first went America we were skint, didn’t have any money. Drove around in a stolen car with false number plates and a hole in the floor. Totally busking it. We don’t have the stolen car anymore. But we’re getting things done.” Any plans to release records by other acts? “We’re fucking with someone else’s life if we get it wrong, so we’re aware of that. So we’ll experiment on ourselves first. Once we know the ropes, it’s something we’ll consider. Maybe not on a large scale, but a 7” or something. Hopefully we can get Franz Ferdinand to do it, sell a million, and that will set us up!” Speaking of Franz Ferdinand, how do you feel about their massive success? “I’m very happy for them. It’s about time. It’s been building up in Glasgow for about 10 years, it’s the culmination of a lot of work, from the likes of Belle & Sebastian, The Pastels, Mogwai, it’s really good that there’s a music community. People are pretty confident there. People abroad are very reverential about Glasgow. It’s kind of exotic for an American, this quaint little place.” Onto the new album then - why record with John McEntire? “We’d liked what John had done on the Stereolab records, so we got in touch with him. He was up for it, and suggested we come to Chicago. He did us a great deal on the studio, and put us up in really nice B&B round the corner. So we could afford to do it. When he was mixing things he would be pulling things out rather than putting stuff in. We just left him to it, generally we liked all the ones he did. It was a really easy process. We hardly took any equipment, just some guitars and a pair of drumsticks. We even borrowed a guitar from Jeff Tweedy. We know him from way back, when we played shows with Uncle Tupelo. I’m glad we did, otherwise we’d have been fucked. We’d have had to buy one! Chicago’s a great place. We wanted to concentrate more on the performances. We recorded it all in 5 weeks. We went back in the summer and mixed it, while Euro 2004 was on. Seven weeks, recorded and mixed.” What are your plans for the future? “Touring, as much as we can. We want to go to places we haven’t been before. Then we’ll just see what happens. Once we pay the studios and our tax bill we can make another record – either that or we’ll be going to jail for tax evasion! Either of those scenarios could happen. As long as we feel like we’ve got something to contribute then we’ll do it. But people still seem to be interested. We’ve never really looked further than six months ahead. We’d rather just keep doing that. Although we’d like to do a B-sides/rarities collection at some point.” How do feel about all the goodwill you’ve received? “It’s great that people say they like what we’ve done and that we’ve influenced them. I think people would raise their fists for us!” By Alan Woodhouse

It’s a beautiful spring morning and Uncut is on the blower to the undisputed owner of the title ‘Nicest Man In Rock’. Guitarist/singer Norman Blake is in his usual bright and breezy self as he joins us from his Glasgow home for a chinwag as his band Teenage Fanclub prepare to release their beautiful new album ‘Man-Made’.

In the five years since last LP ‘Howdy!’ things have changed for TFC. The band’s deal with Sony/Columbia expired following the release of 2003’s best of compilation (2003’s ‘Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds – A Rough Guide To Teenage Fanclub’) and the new LP is their first release on their own label PeMa. And what’s more, ‘Man-Made’ was produced by post-rock veteran John McEntire (Tortoise, The Sea And Cake).

So who better than stormin’ Norman to give us the lowdown from the frontline…

Why were there five years between ‘Howdy!’ and the new album?

“We did the compilation, which was a great way for us to bring to Sony deal to an end. We were down in the studio making ‘Howdy!’ And Alan McGee came and told us he was ending the label. He told us to finish the record and Sony would pick it up or we’d get paid off.

But Sony picked up the option for the two remaining records – they did the same with Primal Scream and Super Furry Animals as well. And you know, it did OK, but we were well down their list of priorities at the label and it kind of got lost. I don’t think they’re really structured to work with a band like us. We spoke to the MD and came to an arrangement that we would do a compilation, which was great ‘cos it meant we didn’t have to give them many new songs (there were three on the compilation). It was great for them so it meant they wouldn’t have to give us lots of money to make a new record. But we spent a lot of time and effort getting the artwork right. We had a battle with them about that too.

That brought us to the end of that, but because we wanted to do the compilation properly, we spent a good year on it. Then we toured that record, so before you know it there’s another two years gone!

We did the record with Jad Fair (2002’s ‘Words Of Wisdom And Hope’). That album was released on Alternative Tentacles! We were in San Francisco and Jello Biafra came to see us! We met Jello! I thought it was fantastic ‘cos I was really into The Dead Kennedys when I was younger and he was a brilliant guy. I just thought it was brilliant that this Glaswegian pop band ends up on Alternative Tentacles.

We toured the Jad record and that took up more time. We done some bits and pieces here and there, tried to keep our hand in. And we’ve been planning the label for a bit.”

So why go it alone? Can you explain how it happened?

“We nearly went with Domino, but to be fair to them, they did say to us ‘You can do it yourselves’. That was decent of them. It took us a bit of time to set up, getting a distributor and all the other things you have to sort out. We can now release what we want whenever we want. We’ve got a few things coming up, for example, at the live shows we’ve got a 7” single we’re gonna be selling, tracks we did with Jad Fair. Daniel Johnston’s going to do the artwork. We’ve got the freedom to do that, and we’re going to exploit that. We’re gonna do things like that, limited stuff which we can sell at gigs and on our website.”

And how does it differ from having to answer to a label?

“It’s a bit more exciting, getting back to what making records is about. We’ve built up different friendships over the years, which has helped us. It’s nice to be working with old friends. We’re back to where we started, we’ve got the control that it’s so difficult for bands to have nowadays. We’re much much happier. It becomes a bit soul destroying. You become product, there’s no art. That had gone for us for a period of time. “

So what does owning your own label entail then?

“Raymond (McGinley, lead guitarist/singer)’s been filling in forms for different collection agencies, generating bar codes, weird things that you have to do. We did a press trip last week, and we’re on the budget. We did the Ryanair’s all over Europe. I even had a hotel room that didn’t have any windows! Wasn’t far from being a prison cell. But we’re much more comfortable doing it like that anyway. With the first record Raymond sold a fridge and a washing machine his neighbour had left him, and we made ‘A Catholic Education’ from that. When we first went America we were skint, didn’t have any money. Drove around in a stolen car with false number plates and a hole in the floor. Totally busking it. We don’t have the stolen car anymore. But we’re getting things done.”

Any plans to release records by other acts?

“We’re fucking with someone else’s life if we get it wrong, so we’re aware of that. So we’ll experiment on ourselves first. Once we know the ropes, it’s something we’ll consider. Maybe not on a large scale, but a 7” or something. Hopefully we can get Franz Ferdinand to do it, sell a million, and that will set us up!”

Speaking of Franz Ferdinand, how do you feel about their massive success?

“I’m very happy for them. It’s about time. It’s been building up in Glasgow for about 10 years, it’s the culmination of a lot of work, from the likes of Belle & Sebastian, The Pastels, Mogwai, it’s really good that there’s a music community. People are pretty confident there. People abroad are very reverential about Glasgow. It’s kind of exotic for an American, this quaint little place.”

Onto the new album then – why record with John McEntire?

“We’d liked what John had done on the Stereolab records, so we got in touch with him. He was up for it, and suggested we come to Chicago. He did us a great deal on the studio, and put us up in really nice B&B round the corner. So we could afford to do it. When he was mixing things he would be pulling things out rather than putting stuff in. We just left him to it, generally we liked all the ones he did. It was a really easy process.

We hardly took any equipment, just some guitars and a pair of drumsticks. We even borrowed a guitar from Jeff Tweedy. We know him from way back, when we played shows with Uncle Tupelo. I’m glad we did, otherwise we’d have been fucked. We’d have had to buy one! Chicago’s a great place.

We wanted to concentrate more on the performances. We recorded it all in 5 weeks. We went back in the summer and mixed it, while Euro 2004 was on. Seven weeks, recorded and mixed.”

What are your plans for the future?

“Touring, as much as we can. We want to go to places we haven’t been before. Then we’ll just see what happens. Once we pay the studios and our tax bill we can make another record – either that or we’ll be going to jail for tax evasion! Either of those scenarios could happen. As long as we feel like we’ve got something to contribute then we’ll do it. But people still seem to be interested. We’ve never really looked further than six months ahead. We’d rather just keep doing that. Although we’d like to do a B-sides/rarities collection at some point.”

How do feel about all the goodwill you’ve received?

“It’s great that people say they like what we’ve done and that we’ve influenced them. I think people would raise their fists for us!”

By Alan Woodhouse

Interview: Kevin Smith

Uncut
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Interview: Kevin Smith

It’s March 2005 and Kevin Smith is a tired man. As Uncut is ushered into an understated drawing room at London’s tastefully elegant Langham Hotel, the comic book-loving writer/director/raconteur/slacker icon is garbed in his infamous green and black Silent Bob overcoat and splayed out on a chaise longue, flat out asleep. Smith tore up the international cinema scene with his breakthrough indie flick, Clerks, a fast-talking, eloquently profane low-budget masterpiece centering on the go-nowhere lives of two convenience store workers. Culled largely from Smith’s own New Jersey convenience store experiences, Clerks won the main prize at Sundance and was rapidly picked up by Harvey & Bob Weinstein’s Miramax. The Weinsteins parlayed Smith’s self-financed $26,800 black & white labour of love into a hugely profitable worldwide hit and swiftly installed Smith at the forefront of their trusted creative inner circle. “I came in right after Quentin’s Reservoir Dogs and before the release of Pulp Fiction. I’m very often – and rightly so – tied to that era, the Golden Age of Miramax, where they fucking exploded.” Over the ensuing decade, Miramax’s fortunes have risen dramatically, netting them a total of 60 Oscar wins and ten blockbuster movies (from Pulp Fiction to Spy Kids) that have grossed over $100 million at the US box office. Throughout the same period, Smith has written and directed five modestly-budgeted movies under his View Askew imprint: two raucous gung-ho comedies steeped in the comic book-inflected mythos of his “View Askewniverse” (Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), one controversial religious fantasia (Dogma), one critically-lauded exploration of contemporary sexual politics (Chasing Amy, his best movie to date) and one almost universally-derided experiment in family-friendly comedy drama (2004’s Affleck clunker, Jersey Girl). All but the latter feature Smith and childhood pal Jason Mewes as drug-dealing fanboy icons Jay and Silent Bob. In a bid to rival Robert Rodriguez as Miramax’s busiest multimedia-hyphenate, Smith has also found time to relaunch two major comic-book heroes (Daredevil for Marvel and Green Arrow for DC), maintain two award-winning websites (ViewAskew.com and MoviePoopShoot.com), film his ongoing series of Roadside Attractions shorts for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, produce an infamously short-lived Clerks cartoon show for the ABC network and launch an outrageously successful career as a raconteur on the US college lecture circuit (spawning the never-less-than-100%-entertaining DVD 'An Evening with Kevin Smith'). The View Askew canon’s record-breaking performance on DVD has ensured that Smith, along with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, is one of the company assets that the Weinstein brothers are taking with them following their acrimonious split from Disney. Harvey and Bob have had to sacrifice their beloved Miramax company name (named after their parents, Miriam and Max) but managed to keep their Dimension Films imprint. Dimension plans to release 15 to 20 films per year and the first of these is Smith’s soon-to-be-filmed Clerks sequel, The Passion of the Clerks, a production that promises to play to his creative strengths after the misfire of Jersey Girl. As Uncut thuds down in a chair opposite, Smith gingerly opens one eye. He’s clearly fucked after a marathon five-hour Q&A session (recorded at London’s Criterion Theatre for his soon-to-be-released An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder DVD), swiftly followed by a long day promoting his new book, Silent Bob Speaks (a must-read collection of Smith’s sardonic magazine columns – reviewed by Uncut this month, June 2005). Nonetheless, Smith is a man who’s incapable of delivering a half-arsed anecdote and, mere seconds after his wearily amiable greeting, he’s sat bolt upright, issuing forth with evangelical New Jersey zeal on ten years of Miramax, his real opinion of Tarantino, the brilliance of Shaun of the Dead and the raw animal power of iconoclastic Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein. You’re the man who extended Miramax’s independent portfolio beyond the pure art-house aesthetic. Who, besides Harvey and Bob Weinstein, deserves the credit for Miramax’s initial rise to power? You gotta give it up to Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies and Videotape in ’89, man. Sex, Lies was Harvey and Bob’s first multi-million dollar grosser – they did $25 million with that. It was an independent film that travelled well beyond the art house ghetto. After that, Tarantino is the one that blows Miramax off the fucking map. Miramax became The House That Quentin Built because Pulp Fiction made over 100 million bucks at the US box office alone - unheard of at that time for an independent flick. Now that they’ve stormed out of Disney, is it easy to assess the scope of the Weinstein brothers’ contribution to moviemaking over the last fifteen years? Without Harvey and Bob, independent film doesn’t get into the hands of the masses. Essentially, without them, it stays within the art house community. Harvey and Bob are responsible for taking indie flicks and bringing them to the suburbs. I grew up in the fucking backwoods of New Jersey and if I wanted to see movies like Prick Up Your Ears or My Own Private Idaho, I had to travel all the fucking way into New York to see them. Harvey and Bob completely changed the game, they took those movies to the fucking suburbs. They gave the audience the benefit of the doubt, something that the major studios hadn’t done since the late 70’s, when they decided that all American audiences wanted to see were these big budget fucking popcorn movies. They fucking forgot that there was a whole period of fantastic, successful movies that weren’t instantly commercial or marketable, made by the young turks of the 70’s. Harvey and Bob essentially reinvented that period and put independent movies back into the hands of the regular neighbourhood people who weren’t metropolitan sophisticates. You reference Quentin Tarantino’s importance to Miramax. As a fellow Weinstein employee, what’s your take on QT? Tarantino? Brilliant. Without him, I don’t have a fucking job. I saw Reservoir Dogs and I was like “Oh my god, you can reference The Thing [from Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four] in a movie? Ben Grimm? You can have a poster of The Silver Surfer hanging up? You can dissect a fucking song by Madonna?” So that opened up the door for me with Clerks. Y’know, you sit there with Pulp Fiction going “Why can’t there be more movies like this?” and at the same time you’re so glad that there’s not more flicks like Pulp Fiction because you wouldn’t appreciate Quentin as much as you do. That movie was a total eye-opener, it’s like a masterclass in mixing tones. When I first saw it, I was like “Okay, you can make a movie where one moment it’s very funny and the next minute somebody’s getting their fucking head blown off.” He really is the progenitor, man – he’s the godfather of everything. Is Tarantino a Jay and Silent Bob fan? I saw Quentin on a US TV show when Chasing Amy came out. It was around the time that Jackie Brown was released and he was sitting in with a bunch of critics discussing movies of the year. Anyway [Time Magazine film critic] Richard Corliss asked Quentin what his favourite movie of the year was and he said: “Chasing Amy, because Kevin Smith took a quantum leap between that movie and his first two movies.” I mean, that meant everything to me - my fucking head almost exploded because I respect the guy so much. A couple of years later, I saw him at the Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back premiere and he fucking loved the movie. I was like “You? You loved that movie?” But he really did. His only complaint was that he wasn’t in it. He said: “You made a fucking movie about Miramax and you didn’t put me in it?” Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back [Smith’s lunatic, self-reverential 2001 cartoon romp through the mythology of his previous four movies, full of returning characters, bad taste gags and celebrity cameos] was a real weird movie for me, ‘cause that was the one that – for some reason - seemed to gain me the credibility and respect of the dudes who’ve been doing this longer than I have. Robert Rodriguez fucking loved that movie. Richard Linklater was like “I really think that’s your best work, you’re on solid footing with this movie” and I’m like “That movie is my best work?” Six movies into your film-making career, do you get debut fimmakers quoting Kevin Smith as an influence? A while ago, Quentin called me up and said “I’m having a screening of this British movie Shaun of the Dead, have you seen it yet?” So I went over to Quentin’s and I fucking loved the movie. Last night, I was out in London with the dudes who made it, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg – excellent fucking guys. They were telling me about seeing Clerks for the first time and that watching Dante and Randall have the Star Wars conversation was a real eye opener for them. They were like “My god, you can really talk about stuff like this on film?” and when they put things together a few years later, that scene informed what they were doing with their TV show, Spaced. Two of Hollywood’s highest profile leading men, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and an Uncut favourite, Jason Lee, all received their first break working for you, right? I met Affleck and Lee through the Mallrats auditions – we set open auditions and they were the two dudes who came through. When we were shooting the flick, I just fell in love with them both. I met Matty Damon through Affleck and just kept using all three of them from then on. Affleck is like one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet - a tall, good looking, smart guy who’s really fucking witty. He’s really got everything. There isn’t much difference between Ben and Matt then and Ben and Matt now, except now they work more steadily and have a lot more fucking cash. Of course, Affleck, right now, is getting the shit knocked out of him - but that seems to have run its course. What makes you think that open season on Affleck is over? I think that Truth, Justice and the American Way (Allen Coulter’s upcoming movie about the mystery surrounding typecast 50’s Superman actor George Reeves’ sudden death, starring Affleck as Reeves] is the movie that’ll put him back on top. It’s Ben Affleck, a guy whose career has been troubled over the last year, playing George Reeves, a guy who’s career had been troubled for many years prior to his death. It’s a perfect role for him, and he’s not the lead – the movie’s really about the guy investigating Reeves’ death [played by Adrien Brody], so Affleck doesn’t have to carry the whole fucking thing. It’s a perfect comeback vehicle and we know this because we have Pulp Fiction as the model - this is the Travolta role from Pulp Fiction. Were you around when Miramax picked up the movie that kicked Affleck & Damon into the big leagues - Good Will Hunting? Back when I was writing Chasing Amy for Affleck, he gave me the Good Will Hunting script and asked me to put it in front of Harvey. I read it in the bathroom. I was there for two hours and just read the whole fucking script - y’know, fucking weeping on the toilet, which I normally do when I look between my legs. I fucking loved the script and I called Harvey and said “Boss, I know this sounds stupid, but this script my friends wrote, it’s like the best thing I’ve ever read, it’s fucking breathtaking. Like it’s good, it’s Oscar good…. I think. But it comes with a huge turnaround cost. It’s currently with Castle Rock, who picked it up for $800 grand - it’ll probably cost you a million bucks”. Harvey tells me that he never pays that kind of money for a script, that’s really fucking high, but what the fuck, send it over anyway and he’ll read it over the weekend. First thing Monday, Harvey calls me back and starts booming: “I’m buying this, I fucking love it.” So that put us all in the Miramax family – Matt, Ben and me. I was already kind of there with Chasing Amy, but that lodged us firmly in there with Harvey and Bob. You’ve often described Harvey Weinstein as a father figure and famously defended him when Peter Biskind trashed him in his 2004 book, Down and Dirty Pictures. On the eve of your fifth collaboration with The Passion of the Clerks, what’s your final word on the notorious Harvey Weinstein? He’s a fantastic man, a great beast. From time to time, he asks me “Why do you call me a beast?” It’s got nothing to do with his size, it’s just that he’s this great beast that doesn’t exist anymore, who’s all commerce and passion at the same time. With the US studio system, you get people who are all about the commerce and very little about the passion. Harvey just can’t be one without the other. He’s always a businessman, always thinking about how he can turn a buck off stuff, but how he directs movies into the cinemas and how he figures out what he wants to change about them and how he gets behind certain movies - that’s all about genuine fucking passion. He’s like an old-time Hollywood studio boss. It’s easy to take shots at contemporary Hollywood and say: “They don’t care about the art.” It’s easy ‘cause it’s fucking true – they really flat out don’t care about the art and they fucking didn’t until Harvey and Bob showed up. So, he’s just your average misunderstood movie mogul? He’s just this unique dude who’s a real creature of the ego and the id. He has this powerful fucking demeanour that’s a combination of regal and street. Like, when he bought Clerks, Harvey called us over to this restaurant at Sundance and he was sitting there, eating the greasiest fucking pile of potato skins and smoking a cigarette at the same time, going from one to the other bellowing “I fucking love this movie, I’m taking this fucking movie and we’ll put it in fucking multiplexes. We’re gonna put a fucking soundtrack on it and we’re gonna fucking blow it out”. We were like: “Fucking A, he talks like us.” He really is a splendid, splendid man. Kind of like Henry the Eighth, or Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast, but coupled with that edge that Ben Kingsley has in Sexy Beast. He can be very fucking dangerous at times. Thankfully, it’s never been turned on me but I’ve seen it turned on and, shit, he’s a fucking frightening dude when he wants to be. Interview by Andrew Sumner

It’s March 2005 and Kevin Smith is a tired man. As Uncut is ushered into an understated drawing room at London’s tastefully elegant Langham Hotel, the comic book-loving writer/director/raconteur/slacker icon is garbed in his infamous green and black Silent Bob overcoat and splayed out on a chaise longue, flat out asleep.

Smith tore up the international cinema scene with his breakthrough indie flick, Clerks, a fast-talking, eloquently profane low-budget masterpiece centering on the go-nowhere lives of two convenience store workers. Culled largely from Smith’s own New Jersey convenience store experiences, Clerks won the main prize at Sundance and was rapidly picked up by Harvey & Bob Weinstein’s Miramax. The Weinsteins parlayed Smith’s self-financed $26,800 black & white labour of love into a hugely profitable worldwide hit and swiftly installed Smith at the forefront of their trusted creative inner circle. “I came in right after Quentin’s Reservoir Dogs and before the release of Pulp Fiction. I’m very often – and rightly so – tied to that era, the Golden Age of Miramax, where they fucking exploded.”

Over the ensuing decade, Miramax’s fortunes have risen dramatically, netting them a total of 60 Oscar wins and ten blockbuster movies (from Pulp Fiction to Spy Kids) that have grossed over $100 million at the US box office. Throughout the same period, Smith has written and directed five modestly-budgeted movies under his View Askew imprint: two raucous gung-ho comedies steeped in the comic book-inflected mythos of his “View Askewniverse” (Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), one controversial religious fantasia (Dogma), one critically-lauded exploration of contemporary sexual politics (Chasing Amy, his best movie to date) and one almost universally-derided experiment in family-friendly comedy drama (2004’s Affleck clunker, Jersey Girl). All but the latter feature Smith and childhood pal Jason Mewes as drug-dealing fanboy icons Jay and Silent Bob.

In a bid to rival Robert Rodriguez as Miramax’s busiest multimedia-hyphenate, Smith has also found time to relaunch two major comic-book heroes (Daredevil for Marvel and Green Arrow for DC), maintain two award-winning websites (ViewAskew.com and MoviePoopShoot.com), film his ongoing series of Roadside Attractions shorts for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, produce an infamously short-lived Clerks cartoon show for the ABC network and launch an outrageously successful career as a raconteur on the US college lecture circuit (spawning the never-less-than-100%-entertaining DVD ‘An Evening with Kevin Smith’).

The View Askew canon’s record-breaking performance on DVD has ensured that Smith, along with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, is one of the company assets that the Weinstein brothers are taking with them following their acrimonious split from Disney. Harvey and Bob have had to sacrifice their beloved Miramax company name (named after their parents, Miriam and Max) but managed to keep their Dimension Films imprint. Dimension plans to release 15 to 20 films per year and the first of these is Smith’s soon-to-be-filmed Clerks sequel, The Passion of the Clerks, a production that promises to play to his creative strengths after the misfire of Jersey Girl.

As Uncut thuds down in a chair opposite, Smith gingerly opens one eye. He’s clearly fucked after a marathon five-hour Q&A session (recorded at London’s Criterion Theatre for his soon-to-be-released An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder DVD), swiftly followed by a long day promoting his new book, Silent Bob Speaks (a must-read collection of Smith’s sardonic magazine columns – reviewed by Uncut this month, June 2005).

Nonetheless, Smith is a man who’s incapable of delivering a half-arsed anecdote and, mere seconds after his wearily amiable greeting, he’s sat bolt upright, issuing forth with evangelical New Jersey zeal on ten years of Miramax, his real opinion of Tarantino, the brilliance of Shaun of the Dead and the raw animal power of iconoclastic Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein.

You’re the man who extended Miramax’s independent portfolio beyond the pure art-house aesthetic. Who, besides Harvey and Bob Weinstein, deserves the credit for Miramax’s initial rise to power?

You gotta give it up to Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies and Videotape in ’89, man.

Sex, Lies was Harvey and Bob’s first multi-million dollar grosser – they did $25 million with that. It was an independent film that travelled well beyond the art house ghetto. After that, Tarantino is the one that blows Miramax off the fucking map. Miramax became The House That Quentin Built because Pulp Fiction made over 100 million bucks at the US box office alone – unheard of at that time for an independent flick.

Now that they’ve stormed out of Disney, is it easy to assess the scope of the Weinstein brothers’ contribution to moviemaking over the last fifteen years?

Without Harvey and Bob, independent film doesn’t get into the hands of the masses. Essentially, without them, it stays within the art house community. Harvey and Bob are responsible for taking indie flicks and bringing them to the suburbs. I grew up in the fucking backwoods of New Jersey and if I wanted to see movies like Prick Up Your Ears or My Own Private Idaho, I had to travel all the fucking way into New York to see them. Harvey and Bob completely changed the game, they took those movies to the fucking suburbs.

They gave the audience the benefit of the doubt, something that the major studios hadn’t done since the late 70’s, when they decided that all American audiences wanted to see were these big budget fucking popcorn movies. They fucking forgot that there was a whole period of fantastic, successful movies that weren’t instantly commercial or marketable, made by the young turks of the 70’s.

Harvey and Bob essentially reinvented that period and put independent movies back into the hands of the regular neighbourhood people who weren’t metropolitan sophisticates.

You reference Quentin Tarantino’s importance to Miramax. As a fellow Weinstein employee, what’s your take on QT?

Tarantino? Brilliant. Without him, I don’t have a fucking job. I saw Reservoir Dogs and I was like “Oh my god, you can reference The Thing [from Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four] in a movie? Ben Grimm? You can have a poster of The Silver Surfer hanging up? You can dissect a fucking song by Madonna?” So that opened up the door for me with Clerks.

Y’know, you sit there with Pulp Fiction going “Why can’t there be more movies like this?” and at the same time you’re so glad that there’s not more flicks like Pulp Fiction because you wouldn’t appreciate Quentin as much as you do. That movie was a total eye-opener, it’s like a masterclass in mixing tones. When I first saw it, I was like “Okay, you can make a movie where one moment it’s very funny and the next minute somebody’s getting their fucking head blown off.” He really is the progenitor, man – he’s the godfather of everything.

Is Tarantino a Jay and Silent Bob fan?

I saw Quentin on a US TV show when Chasing Amy came out. It was around the time that Jackie Brown was released and he was sitting in with a bunch of critics discussing movies of the year. Anyway [Time Magazine film critic] Richard Corliss asked Quentin what his favourite movie of the year was and he said: “Chasing Amy, because Kevin Smith took a quantum leap between that movie and his first two movies.” I mean, that meant everything to me – my fucking head almost exploded because I respect the guy so much.

A couple of years later, I saw him at the Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back premiere and he fucking loved the movie. I was like “You? You loved that movie?” But he really did. His only complaint was that he wasn’t in it. He said: “You made a fucking movie about Miramax and you didn’t put me in it?”

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back [Smith’s lunatic, self-reverential 2001 cartoon romp through the mythology of his previous four movies, full of returning characters, bad taste gags and celebrity cameos] was a real weird movie for me, ‘cause that was the one that – for some reason – seemed to gain me the credibility and respect of the dudes who’ve been doing this longer than I have. Robert Rodriguez fucking loved that movie. Richard Linklater was like “I really think that’s your best work, you’re on solid footing with this movie” and I’m like “That movie is my best work?”

Six movies into your film-making career, do you get debut fimmakers quoting Kevin Smith as an influence?

A while ago, Quentin called me up and said “I’m having a screening of this British movie Shaun of the Dead, have you seen it yet?” So I went over to Quentin’s and I fucking loved the movie. Last night, I was out in London with the dudes who made it, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg – excellent fucking guys. They were telling me about seeing Clerks for the first time and that watching Dante and Randall have the Star Wars conversation was a real eye opener for them. They were like “My god, you can really talk about stuff like this on film?” and when they put things together a few years later, that scene informed what they were doing with their TV show, Spaced.

Two of Hollywood’s highest profile leading men, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and an Uncut favourite, Jason Lee, all received their first break working for you, right?

I met Affleck and Lee through the Mallrats auditions – we set open auditions and they were the two dudes who came through. When we were shooting the flick, I just fell in love with them both. I met Matty Damon through Affleck and just kept using all three of them from then on. Affleck is like one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet – a tall, good looking, smart guy who’s really fucking witty. He’s really got everything. There isn’t much difference between Ben and Matt then and Ben and Matt now, except now they work more steadily and have a lot more fucking cash.

Of course, Affleck, right now, is getting the shit knocked out of him – but that seems to have run its course.

What makes you think that open season on Affleck is over?

I think that Truth, Justice and the American Way (Allen Coulter’s upcoming movie about the mystery surrounding typecast 50’s Superman actor George Reeves’ sudden death, starring Affleck as Reeves] is the movie that’ll put him back on top. It’s Ben Affleck, a guy whose career has been troubled over the last year, playing George Reeves, a guy who’s career had been troubled for many years prior to his death. It’s a perfect role for him, and he’s not the lead – the movie’s really about the guy investigating Reeves’ death [played by Adrien Brody], so Affleck doesn’t have to carry the whole fucking thing. It’s a perfect comeback vehicle and we know this because we have Pulp Fiction as the model – this is the Travolta role from Pulp Fiction.

Were you around when Miramax picked up the movie that kicked Affleck & Damon into the big leagues – Good Will Hunting?

Back when I was writing Chasing Amy for Affleck, he gave me the Good Will Hunting script and asked me to put it in front of Harvey. I read it in the bathroom. I was there for two hours and just read the whole fucking script – y’know, fucking weeping on the toilet, which I normally do when I look between my legs. I fucking loved the script and I called Harvey and said “Boss, I know this sounds stupid, but this script my friends wrote, it’s like the best thing I’ve ever read, it’s fucking breathtaking. Like it’s good, it’s Oscar good…. I think. But it comes with a huge turnaround cost. It’s currently with Castle Rock, who picked it up for $800 grand – it’ll probably cost you a million bucks”. Harvey tells me that he never pays that kind of money for a script, that’s really fucking high, but what the fuck, send it over anyway and he’ll read it over the weekend. First thing Monday, Harvey calls me back and starts booming: “I’m buying this, I fucking love it.” So that put us all in the Miramax family – Matt, Ben and me. I was already kind of there with Chasing Amy, but that lodged us firmly in there with Harvey and Bob.

You’ve often described Harvey Weinstein as a father figure and famously defended him when Peter Biskind trashed him in his 2004 book, Down and Dirty Pictures. On the eve of your fifth collaboration with The Passion of the Clerks, what’s your final word on the notorious Harvey Weinstein?

He’s a fantastic man, a great beast. From time to time, he asks me “Why do you call me a beast?” It’s got nothing to do with his size, it’s just that he’s this great beast that doesn’t exist anymore, who’s all commerce and passion at the same time. With the US studio system, you get people who are all about the commerce and very little about the passion. Harvey just can’t be one without the other. He’s always a businessman, always thinking about how he can turn a buck off stuff, but how he directs movies into the cinemas and how he figures out what he wants to change about them and how he gets behind certain movies – that’s all about genuine fucking passion. He’s like an old-time Hollywood studio boss.

It’s easy to take shots at contemporary Hollywood and say: “They don’t care about the art.” It’s easy ‘cause it’s fucking true – they really flat out don’t care about the art and they fucking didn’t until Harvey and Bob showed up.

So, he’s just your average misunderstood movie mogul?

He’s just this unique dude who’s a real creature of the ego and the id. He has this powerful fucking demeanour that’s a combination of regal and street. Like, when he bought Clerks, Harvey called us over to this restaurant at Sundance and he was sitting there, eating the greasiest fucking pile of potato skins and smoking a cigarette at the same time, going from one to the other bellowing “I fucking love this movie, I’m taking this fucking movie and we’ll put it in fucking multiplexes. We’re gonna put a fucking soundtrack on it and we’re gonna fucking blow it out”. We were like: “Fucking A, he talks like us.”

He really is a splendid, splendid man. Kind of like Henry the Eighth, or Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast, but coupled with that edge that Ben Kingsley has in Sexy Beast. He can be very fucking dangerous at times. Thankfully, it’s never been turned on me but I’ve seen it turned on and, shit, he’s a fucking frightening dude when he wants to be.

Interview by Andrew Sumner

Anatomy Of A Murder

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Anatomy Of A Murder

Otto Preminger was a wealth of contradictions and ambiguities. A dictatorial movie director, nicknamed "Otto The Terrible", his films are still steeped in social equality. He was a Viennese Jew who moonlighted as a screen Nazi (see Stalag 17), made his classic 'Hollywood' films while working outside of the Hollywood system, and balanced his oft-declared antipathy towards actors and stars with his own celebrity status (he appeared as Mr Freeze in TV's Batman, and was a regular on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show). It's no surprise then, that courtroom drama Anatomy Of A Murder from 1959, arguably Preminger's finest film, is also his most brazenly ambiguous. From the opening Saul Bass title sequence and Duke Ellington score, Preminger introduces a movie that's simultaneously seedy and righteous. There's defence attorney Paul Biegler (Stewart), who frequents late night jazz bars, has been passed over for promotion and isn't averse to leering at slatternly soldier's wife and rape victim, Laura Manion (Remick). Manion's hothead husband Fred (Gazzara) has murdered Laura's alleged rapist, and now Biegler has to prove that Fred was temporarily insane at the time. But Preminger, himself a law graduate, doesn't stop there. Fred (the brilliantly mercurial Gazzara) is deeply sinister and possibly homicidal, while Remick's Laura is sociopathically horny - she attempts to seduce Biegler at the crime scene, is forever "jiggling about" in tight outfits, and her torn 'panties' become the cornerstone of the case. Denying us a team to cheer, Preminger asks us to observe open-mouthed as the process of law is batted furiously back'n'forth between the resourceful Biegler and prosector George C Scott. Preminger's methods are ultimately so assured that by the movie's end it barely matters who wins or loses, just that Biegler has another case. And he does. By Kevin Maher

Otto Preminger was a wealth of contradictions and ambiguities. A dictatorial movie director, nicknamed “Otto The Terrible”, his films are still steeped in social equality. He was a Viennese Jew who moonlighted as a screen Nazi (see Stalag 17), made his classic ‘Hollywood’ films while working outside of the Hollywood system, and balanced his oft-declared antipathy towards actors and stars with his own celebrity status (he appeared as Mr Freeze in TV’s Batman, and was a regular on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show). It’s no surprise then, that courtroom drama Anatomy Of A Murder from 1959, arguably Preminger’s finest film, is also his most brazenly ambiguous.

From the opening Saul Bass title sequence and Duke Ellington score, Preminger introduces a movie that’s simultaneously seedy and righteous. There’s defence attorney Paul Biegler (Stewart), who frequents late night jazz bars, has been passed over for promotion and isn’t averse to leering at slatternly soldier’s wife and rape victim, Laura Manion (Remick). Manion’s hothead husband Fred (Gazzara) has murdered Laura’s alleged rapist, and now Biegler has to prove that Fred was temporarily insane at the time. But Preminger, himself a law graduate, doesn’t stop there. Fred (the brilliantly mercurial Gazzara) is deeply sinister and possibly homicidal, while Remick’s Laura is sociopathically horny – she attempts to seduce Biegler at the crime scene, is forever “jiggling about” in tight outfits, and her torn ‘panties’ become the cornerstone of the case. Denying us a team to cheer, Preminger asks us to observe open-mouthed as the process of law is batted furiously back’n’forth between the resourceful Biegler and prosector George C Scott.

Preminger’s methods are ultimately so assured that by the movie’s end it barely matters who wins or loses, just that Biegler has another case. And he does.

By Kevin Maher

Van Der Graaf Generator – Present

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Van Der Graaf Generator – Present

Although customarily associated with prog, Van der Graaf Generator were always a world away from the ridiculous likes of Yes and Jethro Tull. They hit darker, more urgent notes that resonated with a rogues’ gallery of fellow pop mavericks, from Bowie and Johnny Rotten to Mark E. Smith, Graham Coxon and Luke Haines. In recent years, singer-guitarist Peter Hammill has re-emerged with increasingly confident and acute solo records about our current condition. And it was a rapturously received Van der Graaf encore at a 2003 Hammill gig that sparked their reunion. Hammill’s near-fatal heart attack that December only added intensity to this risky return. It’s the core of the band’s shifting line-up: Hammill plus Hugh Banton (keyboards), Guy Evans (drums) and David Jackson (saxes and flutes), offering 37 minutes of new songs, plus an hour labelled Improvisations. They sound eerily similar to the last time this quartet recorded, in 1976: this isn’t their crunk record. Instead it’s a restatement of old strengths, and far from quaint. When “Every Bloody Emperor”, a typical recent Hammill lyric about our tawdry rulers, breaks into a seasick madrigal sway, it suggests the historical reach of older men without blunting its anti-Blair bite. Such hints of English pastoralism, always key to Van der Graaf’s appeal, bolster “Boleas Panic”’s bucolic spaciness, all flutes and church organs, pacific yet musically tense. Johnny Rotten’s soft spot for these so-called proggers is then justified by “Nutter Alert”, a prime Hammill paranoid rant as “darkness falls in a telephone call”, punctured only when a lengthy band breakdown lets its raging glee slip. “On the Beach” is a suitably elegiac coda, Hammill warmly pondering passing time before the sound of waves washes over it all. The Improvisations CD, though heavier going, fulfils its intended function as a once-only insight into the band’s inner workings. Not yet quite reaching peak wattage, it’s still a worthy return from these peerless English dreamers. By Nick Hasted

Although customarily associated with prog, Van der Graaf Generator were always a world away from the ridiculous likes of Yes and Jethro Tull. They hit darker, more urgent notes that resonated with a rogues’ gallery of fellow pop mavericks, from Bowie and Johnny Rotten to Mark E. Smith, Graham Coxon and Luke Haines. In recent years, singer-guitarist Peter Hammill has re-emerged with increasingly confident and acute solo records about our current condition. And it was a rapturously received Van der Graaf encore at a 2003 Hammill gig that sparked their reunion. Hammill’s near-fatal heart attack that December only added intensity to this risky return.

It’s the core of the band’s shifting line-up: Hammill plus Hugh Banton (keyboards), Guy Evans (drums) and David Jackson (saxes and flutes), offering 37 minutes of new songs, plus an hour labelled Improvisations. They sound eerily similar to the last time this quartet recorded, in 1976: this isn’t their crunk record. Instead it’s a restatement of old strengths, and far from quaint. When “Every Bloody Emperor”, a typical recent Hammill lyric about our tawdry rulers, breaks into a seasick madrigal sway, it suggests the historical reach of older men without blunting its anti-Blair bite.

Such hints of English pastoralism, always key to Van der Graaf’s appeal, bolster “Boleas Panic”’s bucolic spaciness, all flutes and church organs, pacific yet musically tense. Johnny Rotten’s soft spot for these so-called proggers is then justified by “Nutter Alert”, a prime Hammill paranoid rant as “darkness falls in a telephone call”, punctured only when a lengthy band breakdown lets its raging glee slip. “On the Beach” is a suitably elegiac coda, Hammill warmly pondering passing time before the sound of waves washes over it all. The Improvisations CD, though heavier going, fulfils its intended function as a once-only insight into the band’s inner workings. Not yet quite reaching peak wattage, it’s still a worthy return from these peerless English dreamers.

By Nick Hasted

The National – Alligator

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The National – Alligator

Relocate the Tindersticks or the Czars to the restless buzz of New York and you’re close to the sound of The National, who began to build a reputation as intense, hopelessly doomed romantics with 2001’s self-titled debut. By 2003’s Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers (partly helmed by Interpol producer Peter Katis and arranged by Padma Newsome, member of criminally-overlooked avant-classicists Clogs), people began to take notice - not least in these pages, where it nestled in our year-best shortlist. With hangdog frontman Matt Berninger’s baritone somewhere between Jarvis Cocker and Leonard Cohen, and rich velvet tunes loaded with spite and self-loathing, The National were undeniably seductive. Music that many took to be studied self-pity, however, was suffused with narcissistic humour and deadpan shock tactics. Alligator, their new label debut, expands on both. On “Karen”, for instance, Berninger pursues a relationship to escape his own lack of direction, and is faced with a truly disturbing potential father-in-law: “It’s a common fetish for a doting man/ To ballerina on the coffee table/ Cock in hand.” On the Bunnymen/Joy Division spiral of “Lit Up”, the self-deprecation extends to the music itself, “This sound I make/ That only lasts a season/ And only heard by bedroom kids who buy it for that reason”. The band themselves – two pairs of brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dressner and Scott and Bryan Devendorf – judge it near-perfectly, delicately poised between liberty and restraint. Lyrically, “Val Jester” is the simplest thing here, but the swollen strings and circular arpeggios elicit a world of heartbreak on their own. With humming guitars to the forefront, there’s an anxiety forever threatening to simmer over into full-on paranoia. In this respect – even without the vocals – it could only be the product of a teeming metropolis. It is Berninger’s fragile ego and his luxuriant words which dominate, though. “I’m a perfect piece of ass,” he proclaims in the shadowy strut of “All The Wine” (previously on last year’s excellent mini-album, Cherry Tree). And by the closing “Mr November” he is almost desperately upbeat: “The English are waiting,” he notes, as the deadline set by new label Beggar’s Banquet looms, “And I don’t know what to do/ In my best clothes/ I’m the new blue blood/ I’m the new white hope”. Remarkably, it’s no idle boast. By Rob Hughes

Relocate the Tindersticks or the Czars to the restless buzz of New York and you’re close to the sound of The National, who began to build a reputation as intense, hopelessly doomed romantics with 2001’s self-titled debut. By 2003’s Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers (partly helmed by Interpol producer Peter Katis and arranged by Padma Newsome, member of criminally-overlooked avant-classicists Clogs), people began to take notice – not least in these pages, where it nestled in our year-best shortlist.

With hangdog frontman Matt Berninger’s baritone somewhere between Jarvis Cocker and Leonard Cohen, and rich velvet tunes loaded with spite and self-loathing, The National were undeniably seductive. Music that many took to be studied self-pity, however, was suffused with narcissistic humour and deadpan shock tactics. Alligator, their new label debut, expands on both.

On “Karen”, for instance, Berninger pursues a relationship to escape his own lack of direction, and is faced with a truly disturbing potential father-in-law: “It’s a common fetish for a doting man/ To ballerina on the coffee table/ Cock in hand.” On the Bunnymen/Joy Division spiral of “Lit Up”, the self-deprecation extends to the music itself, “This sound I make/ That only lasts a season/ And only heard by bedroom kids who buy it for that reason”.

The band themselves – two pairs of brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dressner and Scott and Bryan Devendorf – judge it near-perfectly, delicately poised between liberty and restraint. Lyrically, “Val Jester” is the simplest thing here, but the swollen strings and circular arpeggios elicit a world of heartbreak on their own. With humming guitars to the forefront, there’s an anxiety forever threatening to simmer over into full-on paranoia. In this respect – even without the vocals – it could only be the product of a teeming metropolis.

It is Berninger’s fragile ego and his luxuriant words which dominate, though. “I’m a perfect piece of ass,” he proclaims in the shadowy strut of “All The Wine” (previously on last year’s excellent mini-album, Cherry Tree). And by the closing “Mr November” he is almost desperately upbeat: “The English are waiting,” he notes, as the deadline set by new label Beggar’s Banquet looms, “And I don’t know what to do/ In my best clothes/ I’m the new blue blood/ I’m the new white hope”. Remarkably, it’s no idle boast.

By Rob Hughes

Interview: Gorillaz

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Interview: Gorillaz
"Every great band is destroyed by their success: cartoon bands are no exception." Discuss... Noodle: When many great bands start off they are uniquely oblivious to what makes them special, what makes that exceptional. When they become successful these reasons are pointed out to them. Their magic i...

“Every great band is destroyed by their success: cartoon bands are no exception.” Discuss…

Noodle: When many great bands start off they are uniquely oblivious to what makes them special, what makes that exceptional. When they become successful these reasons are pointed out to them. Their magic is analysed and explained to them by their fans, the press or the people surround them. Therefore it forces a change in them. Either the band

react against it, or try to imitate the elements that make them successful, or other people expect a change. Even the choice to ignore these explanations is a decision. It usually affects that chemistry of a band. It can never remain the same as that first initial unconscious period. Every great band will face destruction or must destroy themselves in order to..start again. Cartoon bands are no exception.

Murdoc: The trouble with great bands is they lose their edge, y’know? The get distracted, or they start writing. ballads, or they mellow out. You know what I’m talking about anyway. As soon as bands become big they invariably need to be brought down. They get complacent. However, cartoon bands are the exception.

Russel: Yeah that’s the difference. You don’t want a cartoon band to become a caricature of themselves.

2D: That would just be weird.

Murdoc: Bands just seem to screw it up at some stage for some reason. If

they don’t, well that’s just equally dull.

Any truth in the rumours that Murdoc wants to kick 2D’s head in for being such an irritatingly good-natured pretty boy?

Murdoc; Hey, I’d want to kick his head in even if he was ugly. You can’t blame it all on good looks.

Was Danger Mouse chosen to produce because of his skills or his name?

Russel: We would never be so flippant with our music as to choose a producer for any other reason than a mutual love and respect for music, and an incredible ability to execute the vision they had for the album.

Murdoc: Yeah. The name Dangermouse was just a bonus.

2D: So was the fact that he turned up with an eyepatch and a mate called Penfold.

Noodle: I was impressed with the work he had done on his own ‘Grey Album’ which I had downloaded from the Internet. It took a while to convince him to work with Gorillaz, but the album took a leap into the incredible when Mr. Mouse arrived. This would be around June 2004. Dangermouse and myself immediately began an intricate pre-production session.

Murdoc: This mainly involved playing table tennis and listening to a load of old electro records.

Noodle: His instinct and insight into music is very intuitive. He will pull out the necessary elements of a track and disguard the rest. In that way the music has an athletic, direct economy whilst still remaining full and rich. I fully expect Dangermouse to produce an impressive run of excellent albums over the next 10 years.

Murdoc: Pass us a biscuit Noodle. I’m getting a bit peckish.

How on earth did Dennis Hopper get involved in this madness?

Murdoc: Oh yeah. Right. Blame it on us. Like Dennis Hopper had spent his entire life in perfectly normal and sane surroundings until he got dragged into the big old nasty madness of the Gorillaz world. Christ! Why don’t you find some other scapegoat, Huh?

Russel: Noodle ran into him at some award show and it turns out he knew some Gorillaz tracks already. We told him what we were working on and then took it from there. He’s always been a symbol for a certain type of expression and free speech that suited the track we were working on. So he seemed a relevant choice for Gorillaz.

Murdoc: He’s always crashed his bike right into the palace of wisdom so we thought, ‘wait a sec I’ll just get my helmet.’

Noodle: The track he narrated was a serious tale or a nation of innocents whose happiness was destroyed by people infiltrating them, and trying to overtake them. As they had never seen aggression or this type of behavior before, they were unprepared. It awoke something in their society which destroyed them and their attackers. This story is read by Dennis Hopper on the album, and because of his history he seemed the right person to deliver it.

2D: Hmmm. And he was great in Speed as well.

Interview: Donovan

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Interview: Donovan

The celebration starts here with EMI’s release of his four, truly classic and remarkably consistent albums from the second half of the decade: Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow, Hurdy Gurdy Man and Barabajagal. A mid-price reissue of Sanctuary’s Summer Day Reflection Songs anthology gathers up all his recordings from 1965 alone, two albums, What’s Been Did And What’s Been Hid and Fairytale, three hits singles and a chart-topping EP. Whatever else, the '60s was no place for slackers. Donovan is also about to embark on his biggest UK tour in three decades, a full month of dates commencing May 11 and, come September, Random House will publish his autobiography, only covering the '60s, The Hurdy Gurdy Man. A figure whose patchy career since the '60s has often seen him overlooked and undervalued, Donovan today manages, with no small amount of charm, to combine a raggle-taggle hippie persona with a strong line in self-publicity. Is the legacy of the '60s so strong as to be overbearing and to a point where it overshadows anything you‘ve done since? The '60s cast a long shadow but that’s no bad thing. It was such an amazing creative decade that it’s a hard act to follow for any generation coming after it. So much happened but I don’t feel stuck in the '60s. I’m proud to have been part of that. I achieved all I set out to do by 1969 but, of all the things, the most important was helping to bring meaning and lyrics into the charts, taking songs of civil rights and protest and taking poetry into the charts. That generation changed the cultural landscape through ideas and songs about inner discovery, spiritualism, mediation, yoga, ecology, feminism. I shared this mission with Dylan and The Beatles, among others. How easy was it to break from the shackles of being a pop star and, in your case, the folk tag. I didn’t have to try. The reason I was so diverse was that I got bored if I did the same thing again and again. I think that’s why I’m so hard to place in history - because I didn’t stand still. I wasn’t simply a folk musician or a pop musician. Music is like modern art, it’s about constant expression, part of a bohemian theme and its death to repeat yourself, so I never repeated myself. Each single, each album track, would be as different as I could make it. Even on the early albums you were embracing jazz and elaborate arrangements? The songs were written that way. I heard the sounds that went with them as I wrote them. Classical musicians say the same thing; that in composing with one instrument they hear all the other instruments. That’s what happened with me, whether it was jazz or blues or more elaborate orchestrated arrangements. I heard all those things at once so it was never hard to be diverse - it was essential. One thing about the '60: there was a freedom that not only allowed you to be diverse, it required you to try something new, to experiment. You had to keep coming up with new ideas to keep up with everyone else. It changed every month and the songs reflected those changes. What was Mickie Most’s role? He must have allowed you that freedom to try such expansive ideas on your albums. Mickie Most was integral. He could hear what I was trying to do which is why he said we’d better get an arranger and he introduced me to John Cameron. Mickie would pick the singles and he would work on them and he’d leave the album tracks to John Cameron, the master arranger, and I. John and I would cook up what we would call mini-soundtracks - soundtracks to my poems... you could close your eyes and you're in a movie on songs like "Celeste" or "Guinevere ". I would hear harpsichord so John would work out a score to include harpsichords. That is not to say that Mickie did not produce the album tracks. Mickie would say, 'You need to thin it down' so that my vocal, my poetry and the guitars were up front. At times our arrangements would get carried away, would be too busy, and Mickie would thin them out. Mickie had that perspective; he knew not just how to make hit records but how albums should sound. I thank Mickie so much for this. Also this is not to say that I did not work on the singles. I learnt the art of singles composition from listening to Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers and The Beatles and countless other pop records. Mickie taught me the sequence of verses for singles and I had already learnt a close mic technique which Mickie and I then developed. Was Sunshine Superman your Sgt Pepper? My arse was being sued by Pye after Sunshine Superman so Sunshine Superman, my masterwork, sat on the shelves for seven months. If you date it, it was at least a year and a half before Sgt Pepper and I remember Mickie saying to me, 'Don’t play it to McCartney' but of course everybody was sharing with everyone else and nicking from each other. I played it to McCartney anyway. But they were already there, anyway, and George Martin was doing something similar with The Beatles, working out arrangements from ideas they had in their heads. George Martin was The Beatles' guy and John Cameron was my guy and they both had an appreciation of jazz which was key. There’s a current vogue for recreating classic albums in their entirety. Would you consider doing that with Sunshine Superman? I’d love to present Sunshine Superman onstage to highlight the possibilities of fusion for a new generation. It would be great to have younger players explore the work. It would be cool if some of the original cats were on stage from the session, too, though. Did you teach John Lennon to play acoustic guitar in Rishikesh? I played acoustic guitar continuously there and John, Paul and George only had acoustics with them. So we were all playing together throughout each day. John could already play acoustic guitar but I taught him finger style in India. He looked at me playing and said, 'How do you do that?' He really wanted to know and he learnt it really fast… It was a joy to teach him and we were very good friends as I was with all of them. I taught him the secret moves over two days. The first thing he wrote was the moving ballad to his mother, "Julia ". I helped him with the lyrics a bit as he said I was good at child songs. And he wrote "Dear Prudence" soon after learning the new style. George had brought in Indian instruments to the ashram in Rishikesh and he gave me a tamboura, the Indian bass instrument. George wrote one of the verses for my song The Hurdy Gurdy Man and I played tamboura on the recording. It was two-way; I learnt from them and they learnt from me We shared a common dilemma which was Super Fame but underneath we were still art students and in India we got a chance to be art students again. We all hung out with acoustic guitars. John used to draw, we’d mediate and there was no press, no media, no tours, no pressure, no fame. I learnt new styles as they did and their songwriting changed just as mine did. We’d play for hours on end and so much of this became part of The White Album. I’m proud to have influenced the White Album in any way. The '70s were less kind to you, though, weren't they? We were none of us ready for the impact on our personal lives. In the '70s I dropped out although I actually made nine albums which may sound contradictory but I didn’t promote them. Times had changed but we all had to grow up. We all realised that by the '70s we were broke because everybody had thieved all the money. It’s ridiculous to say that because there was millions coming in but we were all so naïve and the deals were not structured toward the artists. Come the '70s, we owed tax and had no money to pay it so we had to become businessmen. Luckily I did have a publishing deal; the record deals meant for nothing. The reason McCartney or the Stones and The Who toured so much in the '70s was because that’s where the money was for them playing huge stadiums. That wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to continue, I’d done it all. My mission in the '60s was to bring my bohemian manifesto into popular culture but by the '70s all the bohemian ideas were out in the open and people could, if they wanted to, explore them. In '69 I walked away and luckily I ran into Linda. I’d met my muse, my Sunshine Supergirl, in 1965 but we then parted for three and a half years when she was with Brian [Jones]. But we came together at the end of the '60s and thank God we did because none of the relationships of anyone I knew from the '60s survived beyond the end of it. It was so hard because of the fame, the loss of private life. Fantastic professional success but personal disaster. That was the price we paid. It was hard in the '70s because I thought, What am I gonna do? So I kept making records but I didn’t want the pressure of touring, the danger of pushing and shoving to compete. I’d re-met Linda, the gal I’d fallen in love with in 1965, and we wanted to share our life together and start a family. We didn’t want to do that other thing any more. I made the records, I had a record contract that required me to, if nothing else, but in the '80s I did less and in the '90s I did even less recording until I made the Sutras album. I’ve made 27 albums to date but I feel I have a new lease of life now. I‘m enjoying the Beat Café tour I‘m doing now [in the States touring with John Mellencamp]. And we’re playing a lot of that classic '60s material. I don’t feel I have to deny the '60s any more. It was so fast in the '60s: five or six singles in a year and two, even three, albums in a year. No one thought it would last, just like a big flash in the pan. There was no precedent for it. Rock'n'roll in the '50s hadn’t really lasted; its influence did. The reason it hasn’t gone away in one sense is that we '60s artists rediscovered the roots of popular music and brought rhythm and blues and jazz to the front and those roots will never die. You talked about your mission at 16. What’s your mission at 60? My mission at 60, it’s the same mission. Leonard Cohen said that a poet finds his theme when he is in his teens and he never leaves that theme. Every song is a variation of that theme and mine was to present the possibilities of personal freedom. We are brought up conditioned, packaged and sold but if you can escape from the conditioning you can have true freedom of thought and expression. I think it’s the poets' job to present these inner ways of change and that was my mission 40 years ago and the same today. That’s what I mean by Bohemia and what I’m presenting now, Beat Café, is a way of saying this is where it all came from. The Bohemian scene of the '50s prepared the fusion and it was out of those Bohemian Cafes, R&B and Jazz Clubs and literary and art school scene that Dylan, The Beatles and I came. We brought with us the boldness to change popular music for the better, linking the world through music. That’s the story of Donovan; that’s what the '60s was about - change.

The celebration starts here with EMI’s release of his four, truly classic and remarkably consistent albums from the second half of the decade: Sunshine Superman, Mellow Yellow, Hurdy Gurdy Man and Barabajagal. A mid-price reissue of Sanctuary’s Summer Day Reflection Songs anthology gathers up all his recordings from 1965 alone, two albums, What’s Been Did And What’s Been Hid and Fairytale, three hits singles and a chart-topping EP. Whatever else, the ’60s was no place for slackers.

Donovan is also about to embark on his biggest UK tour in three decades, a full month of dates commencing May 11 and, come September, Random House will publish his autobiography, only covering the ’60s, The Hurdy Gurdy Man. A figure whose patchy career since the ’60s has often seen him overlooked and undervalued, Donovan today manages, with no small amount of charm, to combine a raggle-taggle hippie persona with a strong line in self-publicity.

Is the legacy of the ’60s so strong as to be overbearing and to a point where it overshadows anything you‘ve done since?

The ’60s cast a long shadow but that’s no bad thing. It was such an amazing creative decade that it’s a hard act to follow for any generation coming after it. So much happened but I don’t feel stuck in the ’60s. I’m proud to have been part of that. I achieved all I set out to do by 1969 but, of all the things, the most important was helping to bring meaning and lyrics into the charts, taking songs of civil rights and protest and taking poetry into the charts. That generation changed the cultural landscape through ideas and songs about inner discovery, spiritualism, mediation, yoga, ecology, feminism. I shared this mission with Dylan and The Beatles, among others.

How easy was it to break from the shackles of being a pop star and, in your case, the folk tag.

I didn’t have to try. The reason I was so diverse was that I got bored if I did the same thing again and again. I think that’s why I’m so hard to place in history – because I didn’t stand still. I wasn’t simply a folk musician or a pop musician. Music is like modern art, it’s about constant expression, part of a bohemian theme and its death to repeat yourself, so I never repeated myself. Each single, each album track, would be as different as I could make it.

Even on the early albums you were embracing jazz and elaborate arrangements?

The songs were written that way. I heard the sounds that went with them as I wrote them. Classical musicians say the same thing; that in composing with one instrument they hear all the other instruments. That’s what happened with me, whether it was jazz or blues or more elaborate orchestrated arrangements. I heard all those things at once so it was never hard to be diverse – it was essential. One thing about the ’60: there was a freedom that not only allowed you to be diverse, it required you to try something new, to experiment. You had to keep coming up with new ideas to keep up with everyone else. It changed every month and the songs reflected those changes.

What was Mickie Most’s role? He must have allowed you that freedom to try such expansive ideas on your albums.

Mickie Most was integral. He could hear what I was trying to do which is why he said we’d better get an arranger and he introduced me to John Cameron. Mickie would pick the singles and he would work on them and he’d leave the album tracks to John Cameron, the master arranger, and I. John and I would cook up what we would call mini-soundtracks – soundtracks to my poems… you could close your eyes and you’re in a movie on songs like “Celeste” or “Guinevere “. I would hear harpsichord so John would work out a score to include harpsichords.

That is not to say that Mickie did not produce the album tracks. Mickie would say, ‘You need to thin it down’ so that my vocal, my poetry and the guitars were up front. At times our arrangements would get carried away, would be too busy, and Mickie would thin them out. Mickie had that perspective; he knew not just how to make hit records but how albums should sound. I thank Mickie so much for this.

Also this is not to say that I did not work on the singles. I learnt the art of singles composition from listening to Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers and The Beatles and countless other pop records. Mickie taught me the sequence of verses for singles and I had already learnt a close mic technique which Mickie and I then developed.

Was Sunshine Superman your Sgt Pepper?

My arse was being sued by Pye after Sunshine Superman so Sunshine Superman, my masterwork, sat on the shelves for seven months. If you date it, it was at least a year and a half before Sgt Pepper and I remember Mickie saying to me, ‘Don’t play it to McCartney’ but of course everybody was sharing with everyone else and nicking from each other. I played it to McCartney anyway. But they were already there, anyway, and George Martin was doing something similar with The Beatles, working out arrangements from ideas they had in their heads. George Martin was The Beatles’ guy and John Cameron was my guy and they both had an appreciation of jazz which was key.

There’s a current vogue for recreating classic albums in their entirety. Would you consider doing that with Sunshine Superman?

I’d love to present Sunshine Superman onstage to highlight the possibilities of fusion for a new generation. It would be great to have younger players explore the work. It would be cool if some of the original cats were on stage from the session, too, though.

Did you teach John Lennon to play acoustic guitar in Rishikesh?

I played acoustic guitar continuously there and John, Paul and George only had acoustics with them. So we were all playing together throughout each day. John could already play acoustic guitar but I taught him finger style in India. He looked at me playing and said, ‘How do you do that?’ He really wanted to know and he learnt it really fast… It was a joy to teach him and we were very good friends as I was with all of them. I taught him the secret moves over two days. The first thing he wrote was the moving ballad to his mother, “Julia “. I helped him with the lyrics a bit as he said I was good at child songs. And he wrote “Dear Prudence” soon after learning the new style.

George had brought in Indian instruments to the ashram in Rishikesh and he gave me a tamboura, the Indian bass instrument. George wrote one of the verses for my song The Hurdy Gurdy Man and I played tamboura on the recording. It was two-way; I learnt from them and they learnt from me

We shared a common dilemma which was Super Fame but underneath we were still art students and in India we got a chance to be art students again. We all hung out with acoustic guitars. John used to draw, we’d mediate and there was no press, no media, no tours, no pressure, no fame. I learnt new styles as they did and their songwriting changed just as mine did. We’d play for hours on end and so much of this became part of The White Album. I’m proud to have influenced the White Album in any way.

The ’70s were less kind to you, though, weren’t they?

We were none of us ready for the impact on our personal lives.

In the ’70s I dropped out although I actually made nine albums which may sound contradictory but I didn’t promote them. Times had changed but we all had to grow up. We all realised that by the ’70s we were broke because everybody had thieved all the money. It’s ridiculous to say that because there was millions coming in but we were all so naïve and the deals were not structured toward the artists. Come the ’70s, we owed tax and had no money to pay it so we had to become businessmen.

Luckily I did have a publishing deal; the record deals meant for nothing. The reason McCartney or the Stones and The Who toured so much in the ’70s was because that’s where the money was for them playing huge stadiums.

That wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to continue, I’d done it all. My mission in the ’60s was to bring my bohemian manifesto into popular culture but by the ’70s all the bohemian ideas were out in the open and people could, if they wanted to, explore them.

In ’69 I walked away and luckily I ran into Linda. I’d met my muse, my Sunshine Supergirl, in 1965 but we then parted for three and a half years when she was with Brian [Jones]. But we came together at the end of the ’60s and thank God we did because none of the relationships of anyone I knew from the ’60s survived beyond the end of it. It was so hard because of the fame, the loss of private life. Fantastic professional success but personal disaster. That was the price we paid.

It was hard in the ’70s because I thought, What am I gonna do? So I kept making records but I didn’t want the pressure of touring, the danger of pushing and shoving to compete. I’d re-met Linda, the gal I’d fallen in love with in 1965, and we wanted to share our life together and start a family. We didn’t want to do that other thing any more. I made the records, I had a record contract that required me to, if nothing else, but in the ’80s I did less and in the ’90s I did even less recording until I made the Sutras album. I’ve made 27 albums to date but I feel I have a new lease of life now. I‘m enjoying the Beat Café tour I‘m doing now [in the States touring with John Mellencamp]. And we’re playing a lot of that classic ’60s material. I don’t feel I have to deny the ’60s any more.

It was so fast in the ’60s: five or six singles in a year and two, even three, albums in a year. No one thought it would last, just like a big flash in the pan. There was no precedent for it. Rock’n’roll in the ’50s hadn’t really lasted; its influence did. The reason it hasn’t gone away in one sense is that we ’60s artists rediscovered the roots of popular music and brought rhythm and blues and jazz to the front and those roots will never die.

You talked about your mission at 16. What’s your mission at 60?

My mission at 60, it’s the same mission. Leonard Cohen said that a poet finds his theme when he is in his teens and he never leaves that theme. Every song is a variation of that theme and mine was to present the possibilities of personal freedom. We are brought up conditioned, packaged and sold but if you can escape from the conditioning you can have true freedom of thought and expression. I think it’s the poets’ job to present these inner ways of change and that was my mission 40 years ago and the same today. That’s what I mean by Bohemia and what I’m presenting now, Beat Café, is a way of saying this is where it all came from.

The Bohemian scene of the ’50s prepared the fusion and it was out of those Bohemian Cafes, R&B and Jazz Clubs and literary and art school scene that Dylan, The Beatles and I came. We brought with us the boldness to change popular music for the better, linking the world through music. That’s the story of Donovan; that’s what the ’60s was about – change.

Bob Dylan – Like A Rolling Stone

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The comment comes in Marcus's new book, Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crosroads,published to commemorate the song's 40th anniversary. On its release, everything about the song seemed insurrectionary, from the dense intrigue of the lyric to the magisterial sneer in Dylan's voice to the crackling electricity of the accompaniment. Even its length was revolutionary. At six minutes and six seconds, Like A Rolling Stone busted wide open every rule of radio formatting. And yet when CBS chopped the song in half with three minutes on each side of the 45rpm single and radio DJs faded the song after side one, so many fans jammed station switchboards demanding to hear it in full that programmers across America caved in and played it in full. By September it had sold a million copies and risen to number two in America and number four in Britain. The Beatles joined Marcus's ''running battle'' and before the year was out had come up with Rubber Soul. But nobody else was really in the race. Not that everybody got it at the time. When Dylan took Like A Rolling Stone on the road , the folk purists turned out in their droves to boo and jeer the prince- of-protest-turned-electric-messiah. The song received its first live performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. It was also the first time Dylan had plugged in his electric guitar in front f an audience and there were howls of outrage. The boos reached a crescendo the following year on his world tour with the Hawks, culminating in the infamous incident at Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. Immediately before playing Like A Rolling Stone , someone in the audience -which had been unremittingly hostile throughout Dylan's electric set - shouted 'Judas!' ''I Don't believe you. You're a liar!,'' Dylan sneered back. Then he turned to his backing band and instructed them to ''play fuckin' loud!'' The electrifying take that followed can be heard The Bootleg Series Vol 4: Live 1966. So what is it about Like A Rolling Stone that means that after 40 years it still consistently tops lists as the greatest song of all time? Uncut attempted to find out when it asked an all-star panel for its Dylan special on the occasion of the magazine's fifth birthday. ''A song structure and rhyme pattern that boldly went where no other rock tune had gone before and imagery that touched the imagination of every teenage malcontent in the western hemisphere,'' Mick Farren reckoned. ''It's the song I'd play for an alien who had just landed, asking to be taken to our songwriting leader,'' Grant-Lee Phillips said. Fairport Convention's Simon Nicol reckoned it was simply ''the best song anyone has ever written, Gershwin, Porter and Schubert included.'' But we'll leave the final word to Pete Wylie: '' When you hear it , you just think 'how the fuck did he do that?' '' Nigel Williamson tells the full story of the writing and recording of Like A Rolling Stone in the June issue of Uncut. Greil Marcus's book Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads will be published by Faber & Faber on June 2 and will be reviewed as 'book of the month' in the July issue of Uncut.

The comment comes in Marcus’s new book, Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crosroads,published to commemorate the song’s 40th anniversary. On its release, everything about the song seemed insurrectionary, from the dense intrigue of the lyric to the magisterial sneer in Dylan’s voice to the crackling electricity of the accompaniment. Even its length was revolutionary. At six minutes and six seconds, Like A Rolling Stone busted wide open every rule of radio formatting. And yet when CBS chopped the song in half with three minutes on each side of the 45rpm single and radio DJs

faded the song after side one, so many fans jammed station switchboards demanding to hear it in full that programmers across America caved in and played it in full. By September it had sold a million copies and risen to number two in America and number four in Britain. The Beatles joined Marcus’s ”running battle” and before the year was out had come up with Rubber Soul. But nobody else was really in the race.

Not that everybody got it at the time. When Dylan took Like A Rolling Stone on the road , the folk purists turned out in their droves to boo and jeer the prince- of-protest-turned-electric-messiah. The song received its first live performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. It was also the first time Dylan had plugged in his electric guitar in front f an audience and there were howls of outrage. The boos reached a crescendo the following year on his world tour with the Hawks, culminating in the infamous incident at Manchester Free Trade Hall on May 17, 1966. Immediately before playing Like A Rolling Stone , someone in the audience -which had been unremittingly hostile throughout Dylan’s electric set – shouted ‘Judas!’

”I Don’t believe you. You’re a liar!,” Dylan sneered back. Then he turned to his backing band and instructed them to ”play fuckin’ loud!”

The electrifying take that followed can be heard The Bootleg Series Vol 4: Live 1966.

So what is it about Like A Rolling Stone that means that after 40 years it still consistently tops lists as the greatest song of all time? Uncut attempted to find out when it asked an all-star panel for its Dylan special on the occasion of the magazine’s fifth birthday. ”A song structure and rhyme pattern that boldly went where no other rock tune had gone before and imagery that touched the imagination of every teenage malcontent in the western hemisphere,” Mick Farren reckoned.

”It’s the song I’d play for an alien who had just landed, asking to be taken to our songwriting leader,” Grant-Lee Phillips said.

Fairport Convention’s Simon Nicol reckoned it was simply ”the best song anyone has ever written, Gershwin, Porter and Schubert included.”

But we’ll leave the final word to Pete Wylie: ” When you hear it , you just think ‘how the fuck did he do that?’ ”

Nigel Williamson tells the full story of the writing and recording of Like A Rolling Stone in the June issue of Uncut. Greil Marcus’s book Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads will be published by Faber & Faber on June 2 and will be reviewed as ‘book of the month’ in the July issue of Uncut.

Interview: Trent Reznor

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Interview: Trent Reznor

What I was concerned about when I wrote the Downward Spiral record was being a self-centred destructive force. The point was tearing down everything in a search for something else. I had a little experiment in my life in my early 20s where I knew what I wanted to do but I was afraid to do it. I was afraid it wouldn't be any good. I'd always been smart and knew I could get by. But I'd never pushed myself to see what I was capable of because I didn't have to. Then I thought 'what would happen if I get rid of all the shit I don't need?' I don't need friends or girls or a band. It was like 'fuck you' and I became autonomous and turned inward and found all this hatred and 'me against the world' attitude. And that hatred and isolation found expression in your music? I found I could turn that into something. Instead of punching the wall and having my hand hurt, I could write it down. Strangely things came out of that seemed to have this catharsis. There was a beautiful element to it and it made me feel good. So I decided to keep doing that. When I wrote The Downward Spiral in 1993 I was five or six years into that experiment and it still worked. The record was exploring a narrative about someone who systematically examines every aspect of their life and then destroys it on a path to trying to find some other solution. I'd started with that theme and fitted songs into the storyline, dealing with religion and sex and drugs and the record ended with some sort of conclusion that could have been suicide, but certainly wasn't a positive place. The one song on that record that doesn't fit that description was Hurt, How did you write Hurt, which Johnny Cash famously covered... The video he made of that song was overwhelming. When I saw it the power and beauty of music struck me in a really profound way. I was at a point in my life when I was really unsure if I was any good or if I had anything to say. The song came out of a really ugly corner of my mind and turned into something with a frail beauty. And then several years later an icon from a completely different world takes the song and juxtaposes himself into it in a way that seems more powerful to me than my own version. I was flattered as an artist and as a human being they could do that with my song. And it came at a very insecure time in my life and it felt like a nudge and boost and a hug from God. It said 'everything's OK and the world is bigger than what's just in my head.' So how did you write Hurt? I wrote that after I thought the record was finished. It happened in a day or so and I hadn't planned on it being on the record or on making a song as gentle or delicate or that. I was uneasy about putting it on the album because that song felt like I was saying I needed help. I wouldn't admit that to myself but when I wrote it I felt like I was sitting in a pile of rubble and there was a hint of regret and remorse. Hurt was the first inclination for me that I could use a hand here. The Downward Spiral album was a record all about beating everybody up - and then Hurt was like a coda saying may be I shouldn't have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise. That seems to be a bit of a theme with your work with Nine Inch Nails... Well a lot of what I've done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear. I was trying to keep the songs in a framework that was tough and I learnt a lot from Jesus and Mary Chain about how to bury nice pop songs in unlistenable noise - the idea being if you can get behind that wall you find there's a pearl inside. That's where my head was at. What was behind the lyric when you wrote it? The 'empire of dirt' was presumably the whole junkie lifestyle... Interestingly enough, when I wrote the song I had no idea what was in store for me. I wrote the album about somebody who follows this path who was an extension of me. But it was in my head. I hadn't actually lived it. Then later I lived it. I didn't realise the record was a premonition. I was using the metaphor of drugs at the forefront of what was going on. But I wasn't a junkie. Later I became one, but I didn't know there was an addict in me that just hadn't bloomed out of the dirt yet. So that whole album became a self-fulfilling prophecy? Yes. Oddly enough, that album began my own personal plummet into the depths of addiction and finding out my way doesn't work and that I needed people and help every once in a while and I am human after all. That's why the records since then have taken such a long time. On 1999's The Fragile I was still lying to myself about what was really happening. You developed a reputation for excess that was excessive even by rock'n'roll standards... Even when you come to the end of a destructive phase of writing all those songs like that , it sticks with you. It's not like I could say 'I'm done writing, I'm now going to go out there and be normal.' In my life I was always floating around the edge of the dark side and saying what if take it a little bit too far and who says you have to stop there and what's behind the next door. Maybe you gain a wisdom from examining those things. But after a while you get too far down in the quicksand. So how did you clean-up? Very simple. In 2001 when we finished touring, I realised 'you're going to die unless you stop'. Your friend just died and there's no more way forward You get your shit together or your die. It's tough when you think you're smart. I'd seen people and said 'I'll never be that fucking bad. I'm too smart to be an addict.' Yet I became something I never thought I could be. It was a gradual realisation but there was a definite point where if I had any molecule of sanity left, I couldn't deny what was right in front of my face. Do you have to reach a point of self-loathing to take that decision to change? You do loathe yourself because you've lost all self-respect. I remember thinking 'What's the point? I've had everything I ever wanted in my life and I'm vomiting in the sink again. How did that happen?' So yes, I hated myself. Is the new record, 'Halo 19: With Teeth', a chronicle of your recovery? I hope it's not that boring. I didn't want to be preachy. But I can't deny it was a huge thing behind the record. Every aspect of my life changed. I decided I would do anything not to be in this shape. I thought 'let me not try to bend the rules and just take it easy and not think about making a record.' I spent time sitting on a couch, feeling OK, reading a book, pursuing friendships and not wanting to jump out the window. I spent a couple of years just trying to feel OK with myself and not always to be in a white-knuckle state of despair. And I succeeded. I felt my whole life up until that point had been swimming against the current. I came to realise what I was fighting for didn't make sense any more. But how does that impact on your creativity? If you're felling OK and pretty contended with your life, does that make for good music? I don't remember particularly needing to be fucked up to write music. But I don't remember not being fucked up when I was writing music. But by the end I couldn't write a song because I was high and I felt like my head was stuffed full of cardboard. I had nothing interesting to say. And when I started this record, which was Jan 2004, it felt like there were a million ideas stuck in my head that were finally able to come out. I found I could pursue an idea down its course, whereas before I'd get two bends down the road and I'd forget what I was doing. It was so empowering to feel I could think again. It feels pretty good to be able to look at fresh experiences with a new clarity. Because I'd lost that. I'm not just trying to be the positive ex-junkie guy and I hate to be preachy. But what I've gained is so much more than what I've had to give up. The album 'Halo 19: With Teeth' is out on Island on May 2.

What I was concerned about when I wrote the Downward Spiral record was being a self-centred destructive force. The point was tearing down everything in a search for something else. I had a little experiment in my life in my early 20s where I knew what I wanted to do but I was afraid to do it. I was afraid it wouldn’t be any good. I’d always been smart and knew I could get by. But I’d never pushed myself to see what I was capable of because I didn’t have to. Then I thought ‘what would happen if I get rid of all the shit I don’t need?’ I don’t need friends or girls or a band. It was like ‘fuck you’ and I became autonomous and turned inward and found all this hatred and ‘me against the world’ attitude.

And that hatred and isolation found expression in your music?

I found I could turn that into something. Instead of punching the wall and having my hand hurt, I could write it down. Strangely things came out of that seemed to have this catharsis. There was a beautiful element to it and it made me feel good. So I decided to keep doing that. When I wrote The Downward Spiral in 1993 I was five or six years into that experiment and it still worked.

The record was exploring a narrative about someone who systematically examines every aspect of their life and then destroys it on a path to trying to find some other solution. I’d started with that theme and fitted songs into the storyline, dealing with religion and sex and drugs and the record ended with some sort of conclusion that could have been suicide, but certainly wasn’t a positive place.

The one song on that record that doesn’t fit that description was Hurt, How did you write Hurt, which Johnny Cash famously covered…

The video he made of that song was overwhelming. When I saw it the power and beauty of music struck me in a really profound way. I was at a point in my life when I was really unsure if I was any good or if I had anything to say. The song came out of a really ugly corner of my mind and turned into something with a frail beauty. And then several years later an icon from a completely different world takes the song and juxtaposes himself into it in a way that seems more powerful to me than my own version. I was flattered as an artist and as a human being they could do that with my song. And it came at a very insecure time in my life and it felt like a nudge and boost and a hug from God. It said ‘everything’s OK and the world is bigger than what’s just in my head.’

So how did you write Hurt?

I wrote that after I thought the record was finished. It happened in a day or so and I hadn’t planned on it being on the record or on making a song as gentle or delicate or that. I was uneasy about putting it on the album because that song felt like I was saying I needed help. I wouldn’t admit that to myself but when I wrote it I felt like I was sitting in a pile of rubble and there was a hint of regret and remorse. Hurt was the first inclination for me that I could use a hand here. The Downward Spiral

album was a record all about beating everybody up – and then Hurt was like a coda saying may be I shouldn’t have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise.

That seems to be a bit of a theme with your work with Nine Inch Nails…

Well a lot of what I’ve done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear. I was trying to keep the songs in a framework that was tough and I learnt a lot from Jesus and Mary Chain about how to bury nice pop songs in unlistenable noise – the idea being if you can get behind that wall you find there’s a pearl inside. That’s where my head was at.

What was behind the lyric when you wrote it? The ’empire of dirt’ was presumably the whole junkie lifestyle…

Interestingly enough, when I wrote the song I had no idea what was in store for me. I wrote the album about somebody who follows this path who was an extension of me. But it was in my head. I hadn’t actually lived it. Then later I lived it. I didn’t realise the record was a premonition. I was using the metaphor of drugs at the forefront of what was going on. But I wasn’t a junkie. Later I became one, but I didn’t know there was an addict in me that just hadn’t bloomed out of the dirt yet.

So that whole album became a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Yes. Oddly enough, that album began my own personal plummet into the depths of addiction and finding out my way doesn’t work and that I needed people and help every once in a while and I am human after all. That’s why the records since then have taken such a long time. On 1999’s The Fragile I was still lying to myself about what was really happening.

You developed a reputation for excess that was excessive even by rock’n’roll standards…

Even when you come to the end of a destructive phase of writing all those songs like that , it sticks with you. It’s not like I could say ‘I’m done writing, I’m now going to go out there and be normal.’ In my life I was always floating around the edge of the dark side and saying what if take it a little bit too far and who says you have to stop there and what’s behind the next door. Maybe you gain a wisdom from examining those things. But after a while you get too far down in the quicksand.

So how did you clean-up?

Very simple. In 2001 when we finished touring, I realised ‘you’re going to die unless you stop’. Your friend just died and there’s no more way forward You get your shit together or your die. It’s tough when you think you’re smart. I’d seen people and said ‘I’ll never be that fucking bad. I’m too smart to be an addict.’ Yet I became something I never thought I could be. It was a gradual realisation but there was a definite point where if I had any molecule of sanity left, I couldn’t deny what was right in front of my face.

Do you have to reach a point of self-loathing to take that decision to change?

You do loathe yourself because you’ve lost all self-respect. I remember thinking ‘What’s the point? I’ve had everything I ever wanted in my life and I’m vomiting in the sink again. How did that happen?’ So yes, I hated myself.

Is the new record, ‘Halo 19: With Teeth’, a chronicle of your recovery?

I hope it’s not that boring. I didn’t want to be preachy. But I can’t deny it was a huge thing behind the record. Every aspect of my life changed. I decided I would do anything not to be in this shape. I thought ‘let me not try to bend the rules and just take it easy and not think about making a record.’ I spent time sitting on a couch, feeling OK, reading a book, pursuing friendships and not wanting to jump out the window. I spent a couple of years just trying to feel OK with myself and not always to be in a white-knuckle state of despair. And I succeeded. I felt my whole life up until that point had been swimming against the current. I came to realise what I was fighting for didn’t make sense any more.

But how does that impact on your creativity? If you’re felling OK and pretty contended with your life, does that make for good music?

I don’t remember particularly needing to be fucked up to write music. But I don’t remember not being fucked up when I was writing music. But by the end I couldn’t write a song because I was high and I felt like my head was stuffed full of cardboard. I had nothing interesting to say. And when I started this record, which was Jan 2004, it felt like there were a million ideas stuck in my head that were finally able to come out. I found I could pursue an idea down its course, whereas before I’d get two bends down the road and I’d forget what I was doing. It was so empowering to feel I could think again. It feels pretty good to be able to look at fresh experiences with a new clarity. Because I’d lost that. I’m not just trying to be the positive ex-junkie guy and I hate to be preachy. But what I’ve gained is so much more than what I’ve had to give up.

The album ‘Halo 19: With Teeth’ is out on Island on May 2.

See the trailer for Gus Van Sant’s ‘Last Days’

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See the trailer for Gus Van Sant’s ‘Last Days’

Uncut.co.uk is delighted to offer you a chance to see the trailer for Gus Van Sant's controversial new movie, Last Days, loosely based on the final, tormented hours in the life of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain. Shot in the same, semi-documentary stye as Van Sant's last film, the award winning Elephant, Last Days stars Michael Pitt as Blake, a tormented rock star buckling under the weight of his success. "He's like Hamlet, reflecting on his personal ghosts and demons, and while I don't know what [Cobain's] were, I'm imagining what they might have been," Van Sant told MTV. "It's pretty much his thing. He's alone." The film also stars Asia Argento, Lukas Haas, Harmony Korine and Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon. Thurston Moore, Gordon's husband and fellow Youth member, is music consultant on the film. Last Days receives its world premier at this year's Cannes Film Festival on May 13. It opens here in the UK on September 2. Quicktime: Low/Med/High Windows Media: Low/Med/High Real Player: Low/Med/High

Uncut.co.uk is delighted to offer you a chance to see the trailer for Gus Van Sant’s controversial new movie, Last Days, loosely based on the final, tormented hours in the life of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain. Shot in the same, semi-documentary stye as Van Sant’s last film, the award winning Elephant, Last Days stars Michael Pitt as Blake, a tormented rock star buckling under the weight of his success.

“He’s like Hamlet, reflecting on his personal ghosts and demons, and while I don’t know what [Cobain’s] were, I’m imagining what they might have been,” Van Sant told MTV. “It’s pretty much his thing. He’s alone.”

The film also stars Asia Argento, Lukas Haas, Harmony Korine and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. Thurston Moore, Gordon’s husband and fellow Youth member, is music consultant on the film.

Last Days receives its world premier at this year’s Cannes Film Festival on May 13. It opens here in the UK on September 2.

Quicktime: Low/Med/High

Windows Media: Low/Med/High

Real Player: Low/Med/High

Bruce Springsteen : Devils & Dust

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Bruce Springsteen : Devils & Dust

Every decade or so, Bruce Springsteen feels the urge to make a stripped-down roots album. It started in the '80s with Nebraska. Then in the '90s it was The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Now comes the third in the sequence with Devils & Dust, due for release on April 25. Laden with folk and country influences, many of the songs on the new album were written during the solo tour that followed the release of Tom Joad in 1995/96. "I wrote a lot of this music after those shows, when I'd go back to my hotel room," Springsteen has said. "I still had my voice, because I hadn't sung over a rock band all night. So I'd go home and make up my stories." The acoustic songs he'd accumulated were then set aside for an E Street Band reunion tour in 1999 and further delayed when the intervention of Osama Bin Laden compelled him to respond with 2002's The Rising. It's a history that gives Devils & Dust something of a time-warp feel, with many of the dozen compositions harking back to a pre-9/11 America and Springsteen singing about mothers and fathers, sons and lovers in a world in which global apocalypse takes a back seat to the everyman themes of faith, trust, dreams, hopes and fears - both lost and found. "All the songs are about people whose souls are in danger or at risk. They all have something eating at them. Some come through successfully and some come to a tragic end," Springsteen says of the album's dozen compositions in a 30 minute DVD film that will accompany all copies of the CD. The film, directed by Danny Clinch and shot in New Jersey in February 2005, also features full-length solo acoustic performances of six of the songs on the album – “Devils & Dust”, “Reno”, “Long Time Comin'”, “All I'm Thinkin' About” and “Matamaros Banks”. The album was recorded at Thrill Hill studios in Los Angeles and at home in New Jersey and produced by Brendan O'Brien, who also helmed The Rising. Musicians on the album include O'Brien on bass, Steve Jordan on drums and recent E Street Band addition Soozie Tyrell on fiddle, with further orchestration by the Nashville String Machine. Springsteen will play London's Albert Hall on May 27/28, promising a solo set that will will focus on the new album, along with material from Nebraska and The Ghost Of Tom Joad, plus stripped-down takes on songs from The Rising. Here, Uncut.co.uk exclusively offers a track-by-track preview of the album. Devils & Dust Starts of with just an acoustic guitar and gradually builds with the introduction of piano and strings into something more epic, while the line 'we've got God on our side' and a wheezing harmonica create a Dylanesque atmosphere. One of the few post 9/11 songs on the album, according to Springsteen it was written from the perspective of an American solider in Iraq : "What if what you do to survive/kills the things you love?" All The Way Home The oldest song on the album, written by Springsteen 15 years ago for a 1991 Southside Johnny album. The closest thing to a rocker on the album, albeit one that shuffles rather than explodes, with a hedonistic lyric about picking up a girl in a bar to a soundtrack of "some old Stones' song the band is trashin'." Reno The controversial one that has resulted in the album carrying an 'adult content' sticker. A simple acoustic guitar augmented by gorgeous strings underpins a lyric about a visit to a prostitute with explicit references to anal and oral sex. Long Time Comin' A delicious country romp and an infectious love song about a pair of lovers expecting their first child : "Lay my hands across your belly and feel another one kickin' inside/I ain't gonna fuck it up this time." Black Cowboys Led by a plaintive piano part, one of the densest narrative songs Springsteen has every written - five wordy verses with no chorus about the rite-of-passage of one Rainey Williams, growing up in the ghetto but obsessed with watching old westerns on daytime TV. Maria's Bed A carnal lyric about a typical blue-collar Sprinsgteen hero ("Been in a barbed wire highway 40 days and nights/I ain't complain'n, that's my job and it suits me right") set to an infectious, freewhelin' country stomp, complete with mandolin, dobro and fiddle. Silver Palomino Springsteen exchanges four wheels for four legs on a romantic Tex-Mex-tinged border ballad about a boy's love for his horse - and so much more. Jesus Was An Only Son Swelling organ, piano and backing chorus with a subtle gospel feel and a biblical lyric with references to Calvary Hill, Nazareth and Gethsemane. Leah Written before or after 9/11? It could be either. Mexican-sounding trumpet, lovely backing vocals and an insistent rhythm support a lyric of idealistic aspiration: "I wanna build me a house on higher ground/I wanna find me a world where love's the only sound." The Hitter Perhaps the album's most powerful narrative. With extraordinary empathy Springsteen tells the tale of a crooked boxer who's tasted success and then fallen on bad times against a potent but simple acoustic guitar accompaniment. All I'm Thinkin' About Even a roots-based Springsteen album wouldn't be complete without at least one song about automobiles. A celebratory love song with a lyric populated by flat bed Fords and black cars shinin' and which rides buoyantly over an exuberant tune rendered as a jug band stomp with joyous falsetto vocal. Matamaros Banks A moody lament for a dead lover with a tune that sounds like it was borrowed from an ancient old folk ballad closes the album on a sombre note.

Every decade or so, Bruce Springsteen feels the urge to make a stripped-down roots album. It started in the ’80s with Nebraska. Then in the ’90s it was The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Now comes the third in the sequence with Devils & Dust, due for release on April 25. Laden with folk and country influences, many of the songs on the new album were written during the solo tour that followed the release of Tom Joad in 1995/96.

“I wrote a lot of this music after those shows, when I’d go back to my hotel room,” Springsteen has said. “I still had my voice, because I hadn’t sung over a rock band all night. So I’d go home and make up my stories.”

The acoustic songs he’d accumulated were then set aside for an E Street Band reunion tour in 1999 and further delayed when the intervention of Osama Bin Laden compelled him to respond with 2002’s The Rising. It’s a history that gives Devils & Dust something of a time-warp feel, with many of the dozen compositions harking back to a pre-9/11 America and Springsteen singing about mothers and fathers, sons and lovers in a world in which global apocalypse takes a back seat to the everyman themes of faith, trust, dreams, hopes and fears – both lost and found.

“All the songs are about people whose souls are in danger or at risk. They all have something eating at them. Some come through successfully and some come to a tragic end,” Springsteen says of the album’s dozen compositions in a 30 minute DVD film that will accompany all copies of the CD. The film, directed by Danny Clinch and shot in New Jersey in February 2005, also features full-length solo acoustic performances of six of the songs on the album – “Devils & Dust”, “Reno”, “Long Time Comin’”, “All I’m Thinkin’ About” and “Matamaros Banks”.

The album was recorded at Thrill Hill studios in Los Angeles and at home in New Jersey and produced by Brendan O’Brien, who also helmed The Rising. Musicians on the album include O’Brien on bass, Steve Jordan on drums and recent E Street Band addition Soozie Tyrell on fiddle, with further orchestration by the Nashville String Machine.

Springsteen will play London’s Albert Hall on May 27/28, promising a solo set that will will focus on the new album, along with material from Nebraska and The Ghost Of Tom Joad, plus stripped-down takes on songs from The Rising.

Here, Uncut.co.uk exclusively offers a track-by-track preview of the album.

Devils & Dust

Starts of with just an acoustic guitar and gradually builds with the introduction of piano and strings into something more epic, while the line ‘we’ve got God on our side’ and a wheezing harmonica create a Dylanesque atmosphere. One of the few post 9/11 songs on the album, according to Springsteen it was written from the perspective of an American solider in Iraq : “What if what you do to survive/kills the things you love?”

All The Way Home

The oldest song on the album, written by Springsteen 15 years ago for a 1991 Southside Johnny album. The closest thing to a rocker on the album, albeit one that shuffles rather than explodes, with a hedonistic lyric about picking up a girl in a bar to a soundtrack of “some old Stones’ song the band is trashin’.”

Reno

The controversial one that has resulted in the album carrying an ‘adult content’ sticker. A simple acoustic guitar augmented by gorgeous strings underpins a lyric about a visit to a prostitute with explicit references to anal and oral sex.

Long Time Comin’

A delicious country romp and an infectious love song about a pair of lovers expecting their first child : “Lay my hands across your belly and feel another one kickin’ inside/I ain’t gonna fuck it up this time.”

Black Cowboys

Led by a plaintive piano part, one of the densest narrative songs Springsteen has every written – five wordy verses with no chorus about the rite-of-passage of one Rainey Williams, growing up in the ghetto but obsessed with watching old westerns on daytime TV.

Maria’s Bed

A carnal lyric about a typical blue-collar Sprinsgteen hero (“Been in a barbed wire highway 40 days and nights/I ain’t complain’n, that’s my job and it suits me right”) set to an infectious, freewhelin’ country stomp, complete with mandolin, dobro and fiddle.

Silver Palomino

Springsteen exchanges four wheels for four legs on a romantic Tex-Mex-tinged border ballad about a boy’s love for his horse – and so much more.

Jesus Was An Only Son

Swelling organ, piano and backing chorus with a subtle gospel feel and a biblical lyric with references to Calvary Hill, Nazareth and Gethsemane.

Leah

Written before or after 9/11? It could be either. Mexican-sounding trumpet, lovely backing vocals and an insistent rhythm support a lyric of idealistic aspiration: “I wanna build me a house on higher ground/I wanna find me a world where love’s the only sound.”

The Hitter

Perhaps the album’s most powerful narrative. With extraordinary empathy Springsteen tells the tale of a crooked boxer who’s tasted success and then fallen on bad times against a potent but simple acoustic guitar

accompaniment.

All I’m Thinkin’ About

Even a roots-based Springsteen album wouldn’t be complete without at least one song about automobiles. A celebratory love song with a lyric populated by flat bed Fords and black cars shinin’ and which rides buoyantly over an exuberant tune rendered as a jug band stomp with joyous falsetto vocal.

Matamaros Banks

A moody lament for a dead lover with a tune that sounds like it was borrowed from an ancient old folk ballad closes the album on a sombre note.

Interview: Paul Schrader

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Interview: Paul Schrader

"I always thought there would be blood on the floor, I just didn’t think it would all be mine…" In March this year at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film, a movie no one expected would ever see the dark of theatre was finally screened for the public - Exorcist: The Prequel, Paul Schrader’s version of horror-franchise prequel, which was quashed by its studio after it was nearly finished three years ago. By now it’s the stuff of Hollywood legend – how producers Morgan Creek hired Taxi Driver and Raging Bull screenwriter Schrader to direct the story of Father Merrin’s early battle with the devil, then panicked when he handed in a film soaked in angst and light on scares. Subsequently, Schrader’s cut was abandoned in favour of a much more conventional version directed by Renny Harlin, which went on to garner vicious pans from critics if moderate box-office success. The film is scheduled now to get a theatrical release in select European territories and in the US in May. Here, Schrader talks to Uncut about his long struggle to get the movie to the big screen… Uncut: Did you revisit the first Exorcist film for inspiration? Schrader: Yes, but we didn’t look at it that closely. All we had to do with this prequel is make sure Merrin lives and meets the Devil. Did you experience a feeling of Schaudenfreud when the Harlin version bombed? It was mostly Freud rather Schaudenfreud because what I was most worried about was that it would be sort of good, so [as I watched it] the worse it got, the better I felt. By the end of it I was thinking maybe there’s a chance mine will come back. And to be honest, I don’t think Renny’s film really bombed: it did $40 domestic and about $30 internationally. When they asked you to make the film did you have any inkling of the problems ahead? I should have! Every director has an ego the size of this building and still thinks, ‘I can do it.’ I always thought there would be blood on the floor, I just didn’t think it would all be mine. It’s like you have a sick child in the other room, you’re always hoping. DVD and the internet has changed the face of exhibition and marketing, so I could begin my campaign to get this version released by saying over and over, ‘There’s money in the DVD. Don’t forget there’s money in the DVD.’ Morgan Creek provided a bare bones budget to complete the film. The biggest problem was that there was no score. We used remixed version of Trevor Raban score, but I still didn’t have a theme so Angelo Badlamenti who I’d done four films with, wrote me a theme and orchestrated it, and I bought him a Rolex on eBay in deep gratitude. I also ended up getting music from the band Dog Fashion Disco, whom my son introduced me to. I paid them in meals. You’re being awfully candid now publicly about what happened. Didn’t you sign some kind of non-disparagement agreement with Morgan Creek? Yes, but I think the dispassionate recalling of the facts speaks for itself. Nobody wants to hear a whiny, vindictive overpaid director. Because the future of the film wasn’t in the hands of the same people who mistreated me, or treated me in a certain way, if I had ever succumbed to the temptation to vent my spleen I would have lost any opportunity of getting the film screened. That might have offered some temporary satisfaction but nothing like the kind of satisfaction I feel today. We learned to fight another day and to have some kind of ironic distance otherwise it’s just a life of grinding pain in this business, so if you can’t step back and see it all with a shrug you won’t last long. Interview by Leslie Felperin

“I always thought there would be blood on the floor, I just didn’t think it would all be mine…”

In March this year at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film, a movie no one expected would ever see the dark of theatre was finally screened for the public – Exorcist: The Prequel, Paul Schrader’s version of horror-franchise prequel, which was quashed by its studio after it was nearly finished three years ago.

By now it’s the stuff of Hollywood legend – how producers Morgan Creek hired Taxi Driver and Raging Bull screenwriter Schrader to direct the story of Father Merrin’s early battle with the devil, then panicked when he handed in a film soaked in angst and light on scares. Subsequently, Schrader’s cut was abandoned in favour of a much more conventional version directed by Renny Harlin, which went on to garner vicious pans from critics if moderate box-office success.

The film is scheduled now to get a theatrical release in select European territories and in the US in May.

Here, Schrader talks to Uncut about his long struggle to get the movie to the big screen…

Uncut: Did you revisit the first Exorcist film for inspiration?

Schrader: Yes, but we didn’t look at it that closely. All we had to do with this prequel is make sure Merrin lives and meets the Devil.

Did you experience a feeling of Schaudenfreud when the Harlin version bombed?

It was mostly Freud rather Schaudenfreud because what I was most worried about was that it would be sort of good, so [as I watched it] the worse it got, the better I felt. By the end of it I was thinking maybe there’s a chance mine will come back. And to be honest, I don’t think Renny’s film really bombed: it did $40 domestic and about $30 internationally.

When they asked you to make the film did you have any inkling of the problems ahead?

I should have! Every director has an ego the size of this building and still thinks, ‘I can do it.’ I always thought there would be blood on the floor, I just didn’t think it would all be mine. It’s like you have a sick child in the other room, you’re always hoping. DVD and the internet has changed the face of exhibition and marketing, so I could begin my campaign to get this version released by saying over and over, ‘There’s money in the DVD. Don’t forget there’s money in the DVD.’ Morgan Creek provided a bare bones budget to complete the film. The biggest problem was that there was no score. We used remixed version of Trevor Raban score, but I still didn’t have a theme so Angelo Badlamenti who I’d done four films with, wrote me a theme and orchestrated it, and I bought him a Rolex on eBay in deep gratitude. I also ended up getting music from the band Dog Fashion Disco, whom my son introduced me to. I paid them in meals.

You’re being awfully candid now publicly about what happened. Didn’t you sign some kind of non-disparagement agreement with Morgan Creek?

Yes, but I think the dispassionate recalling of the facts speaks for itself. Nobody wants to hear a whiny, vindictive overpaid director. Because the future of the film wasn’t in the hands of the same people who mistreated me, or treated me in a certain way, if I had ever succumbed to the temptation to vent my spleen I would have lost any opportunity of getting the film screened. That might have offered some temporary satisfaction but nothing like the kind of satisfaction I feel today. We learned to fight another day and to have some kind of ironic distance otherwise it’s just a life of grinding pain in this business, so if you can’t step back and see it all with a shrug you won’t last long.

Interview by Leslie Felperin

Cannes you dig it?

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Cannes you dig it?

The line-up for the 58th Cannes Film Festival was announced this morning, August 20, and leading the pack was a strong selection of former festival winners, plus the usual smattering of A list Hollywood glamour. At the top of Uncut’s list of movies to catch, there’s David Cronenberg's History Of Violence, based on John Wagner's hit graphic novel; Gus Van Sant’s sort-of 'biopic' of Kurt Cobain, Last Days; Lars Von Trier's follow-up to Dogville, Manderlay; Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray and Julie Delpy; Wim Wenders' Don’t Come Knockin’ starring Sam Shepherd as an ageing cowboy star; Atom Egoyan's Where The Truth Lies; Tommy Lee Jones' feature debut as director, a Western called The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Matchpoint, Woody Allen's first movie shot in the UK. Supplying the now familiar quota of Hollywood glitz is George Lucas' Star wars Episode III – Revenge Of The Sith, which screens Out Of Competition, and Robert Rodriguez Sin City, which in showing In Competiton. There’s also a major retrospective planned for James Dean, and also Michael Powell. The Festival runs May 11 – 22, and of course Uncut will be bringing you regular reports from the Croisette, so check back here regularly for the latest movie reviews of gossip. We can’t wait!

The line-up for the 58th Cannes Film Festival was announced this morning, August 20, and leading the pack was a strong selection of former festival winners, plus the usual smattering of A list Hollywood glamour.

At the top of Uncut’s list of movies to catch, there’s David Cronenberg’s History Of Violence, based on John Wagner’s hit graphic novel; Gus Van Sant’s sort-of ‘biopic’ of Kurt Cobain, Last Days; Lars Von Trier’s follow-up to Dogville, Manderlay; Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray and Julie Delpy; Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knockin’ starring Sam Shepherd as an ageing cowboy star; Atom Egoyan’s Where The Truth Lies; Tommy Lee Jones’ feature debut as director, a Western called The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Matchpoint, Woody Allen’s first movie shot in the UK.

Supplying the now familiar quota of Hollywood glitz is George Lucas’ Star wars Episode III – Revenge Of The Sith, which screens Out Of Competition, and Robert Rodriguez Sin City, which in showing In Competiton.

There’s also a major retrospective planned for James Dean, and also Michael Powell.

The Festival runs May 11 – 22, and of course Uncut will be bringing you regular reports from the Croisette, so check back here regularly for the latest movie reviews of gossip.

We can’t wait!

Interview: Wilco

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Interview: Wilco

2004 was a crucial, transitional year for Wilco. Jeff Tweedy was rushed to rehab in April after suffering from painkiller addiction and the band's fifth album, A Ghost Is Born, was hastily put on hold. Produced by Sonic Youth's Jim O'Rourke and finally given a release in June, the album provided the excuse for Tweedy to get back on the road. More recently, an expanded version of A Ghost Is Born, featuring live and unreleased tracks, was released in March 2005. Uncut spoke to Wilco's John Stirratt and Glenn Kotche during that same month, while they were on tour in London. On the agenda: Tweedy's troubles, the notorious Wilco documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (see below), music downloads, festival plans and what the future holds for Wilco, both as a band and in their individual careers. In order to hear this you will need Real Player. Simply click on the questions/links below to hear the answers to the interview:

2004 was a crucial, transitional year for Wilco.

Jeff Tweedy was rushed to rehab in April after suffering from painkiller addiction and the band’s fifth album, A Ghost Is Born, was hastily put on hold. Produced by Sonic Youth’s Jim O’Rourke and finally given a release in June, the album provided the excuse for Tweedy to get back on the road. More recently, an expanded version of A Ghost Is Born, featuring live and unreleased tracks, was released in March 2005.

Uncut spoke to Wilco’s John Stirratt and Glenn Kotche during that same month, while they were on tour in London. On the agenda: Tweedy’s troubles, the notorious Wilco documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart (see below), music downloads, festival plans and what the future holds for Wilco, both as a band and in their individual careers.

In order to hear this you will need Real Player. Simply click on the questions/links below to hear the answers to the interview:

South By Southwest 2005

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South By Southwest 2005

On an unseasonably cool night in Texas, Micah P. Hinson was just about to kick off Uncut's showcase at the South by Southwest music festival when his cell phone rang. A sympathetic girl in the audience yelled, "She's not worth it!" before Hinson sheepishly turned his phone off and started playing. Hailing from the West Texas town of Abilene, Hinson is a strange bird onstage, appearing somewhat uncomfortable in his own skin while mumbling desolate, westward-leaning Leonard Cohen lamentations like "Beneath the Rose." Nevertheless, his wizened, youth-belying voice made for a mesmerising performance. Belfast's the Amazing Pilots suffered from a poor mix that prompted guitarist Paul Wilkinson to walk off the stage at one point. The sharp-looking trio never could quite turn it on, though the melancholy pop of "All My Wasted Days" hinted at their capabilities under better circumstances. Willard Grant Conspiracy delivered the evening's best set. Their glorious sprawl of psychedelic twang enabled them to touch on a wide array of emotions. The high point was "Soft Hand," a lap steel and viola accented wall of pop bliss that vocalist/guitarist Robert Fisher humorously introduced as "unnecessarily bright." Richmond Fontaine contributed a short, affable helping of Sunbelt rock highlighted by a cameo on "Through" from Damnations vocalist Deborah Kelly. Will Johnson's South San Gabriel drew a warm reception with their highly unorthodox combination of cinematic alt-country washes and synthetic rhythm tracks Raymond Scott would've approved of. The recurring sound problems finally culminated in American Music Club not starting until almost 2 a.m. Mark Eitzel was in rare form, knocking over his mike stand and kicking at audience members while alternately apologising for his behaviour. After just five songs, including strained readings of "Only Love Will Set You Free" and "Patriot's Heart," Eitzel called it a night with two middle finger salutes. By Greg Beet Roll over the images to see a full gallery from the night, below. A full review of Uncut Presents @ SXSW will appear in the June issue of Uncut magazine

On an unseasonably cool night in Texas, Micah P. Hinson was just about to kick off Uncut’s showcase at the South by Southwest music festival when his cell phone rang. A sympathetic girl in the audience yelled, “She’s not worth it!” before Hinson sheepishly turned his phone off and started playing. Hailing from the West Texas town of Abilene, Hinson is a strange bird onstage, appearing somewhat uncomfortable in his own skin while mumbling desolate, westward-leaning Leonard Cohen lamentations like “Beneath the Rose.” Nevertheless, his wizened, youth-belying voice made for a mesmerising performance.

Belfast’s the Amazing Pilots suffered from a poor mix that prompted guitarist Paul Wilkinson to walk off the stage at one point. The sharp-looking trio never could quite turn it on, though the melancholy pop of “All My Wasted Days” hinted at their capabilities under better circumstances.

Willard Grant Conspiracy delivered the evening’s best set. Their glorious sprawl of psychedelic twang enabled them to touch on a wide array of emotions. The high point was “Soft Hand,” a lap steel and viola accented wall of pop bliss that vocalist/guitarist Robert Fisher humorously introduced as “unnecessarily bright.”

Richmond Fontaine contributed a short, affable helping of Sunbelt rock highlighted by a cameo on “Through” from Damnations vocalist Deborah Kelly. Will Johnson’s South San Gabriel drew a warm reception with their highly unorthodox combination of cinematic alt-country washes and synthetic rhythm tracks Raymond Scott would’ve approved of.

The recurring sound problems finally culminated in American Music Club not starting until almost 2 a.m. Mark Eitzel was in rare form, knocking over his mike stand and kicking at audience members while alternately apologising for his behaviour. After just five songs, including strained readings of “Only Love Will Set You Free” and “Patriot’s Heart,” Eitzel called it a night with two middle finger salutes.

By Greg Beet

Roll over the images to see a full gallery from the night, below.

A full review of Uncut Presents @ SXSW will appear in the June issue of Uncut magazine

In Detroit with Brendan Benson

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In Detroit with Brendan Benson

“I’ve always been this way / Never known any other way to feel” (Brendan Benson, ‘Tiny Spark’, 2002) “All I want is a sure footing, to know I’m appreciated enough so that I can continue making records and people will listen to them. I need to do it. If I can make a living out of it then great. There’s no turning back, I can’t do anything else.” Detroit singer/songwriter Brendan Benson is telling this writer forcibly, fuelled by an extensive supply of wine, what motivates him to make music. And while he might seem blasé about what the future holds, even this most self-effacing of men must be excited at the very real prospect that new album ‘The Alternative To Love’ is going to move him from the realms of cult artist and into the big league. If there’s any justice it will anyway. Things are certainly a lot brighter for Brendan than they were back in 1996, when Virgin put out his debut album ‘One Mississippi’. Despite a raft of good reviews and a set of cracking tunes (Check out the awesome ‘Emma J’, ‘Sittin’ Pretty’ and ‘Insects Rule’) the record inexplicably flopped and he found himself dropped and thoroughly disillusioned. But there was a silver lining - with the money left over from the deal he bought the beautifully elegant house-cum-studio we are sitting in, which he shares with his friendly fat moggy Sam. With the help of pal Jason Falkner (Jellyfish), Brendan gradually put together the songs which became 2002’s tremendous ‘Lapalco’, which was picked up and released by his new label V2 (Startime in America). Since then the likes of neighbour, pal and collaborator Jack White, The Datsuns and Keane (with whom Brendan toured last year at their personal request) have been falling over themselves to eulogise his hook-laden heartbreakers. Recalling his lean years, Brendan says: “’One Mississippi’ was critically acclaimed, it’s just no one heard it. I then bought a studio. It was kind of perfect, I got dropped, had this studio, didn’t know if I wanted to write anymore. I felt pretty discouraged, was doubting if I had something to offer. But I had the studio so I started to record other bands. It took me years to realise I had my own good record in ‘Lapalco’.” ‘Lapalco’ is a shade darker than ‘One Mississippi’, but pretty much sticks to the same blueprint, the great lovelorn powerpop of Big Star crossed with sensitive strums that Nick Drake would have been proud of. It’s an addictive, giddy and completely natural formula. ‘The Alternative To Love’ is more or less a cross between the first two albums, with bursts of ‘One Mississippi’s sugar rush and nods to the greater depth of ‘Lapalco’’s songs. The rollicking first single ‘Spit It Out’, the deceptively jaunty ‘Cold Hands (Warm Heart)’ and the sparse ‘Them And Me’ feel like old friends already – classic radio songs, which, when you scratch the surface, are saying a whole lot more than you initially realised. Hey, if it ain’t broke why try and fix it? Brendan, who plays everything on the album, insists having a captive audience isn’t going to change the way he works one little bit. ““I had gained some momentum with ‘Lapalco’ - but I didn’t have a vision,” he says. “I don’t think I ever do. I admire people who do, who do something different. I do whatever feels right, I don’t think about it much.” “I recognise my self-centredness,” he adds. “If I was in a band, there’d be some kind of collective goal.” And how does he feel about the growing amount of recognition he is receiving? “I do like the attention,” he admits, “I like the affirmation and compliments but I think ultimately I do it out of compulsion.” And what about Detroit? As has been well documented, Brendan is very good friends and close neighbours with The White Stripes – indeed he and Jack White have recorded an album together (“It sounds like Deep Purple crossed with Cat Stevens”) which is expected to come out in 2006 sometime. But how does he fit in to the much-heralded Detroit ‘scene’? “I’m the wrong guy to ask about Detroit,” he insists. “I live here and am friends with all the bands but I’m not involved in the scene. I hardly ever go out. I feel just too old for it (he’s 34). “Anyway, It was the NME that popularised Detroit, made it a scene, a movement. That’s OK, it didn’t hurt anybody. It made Detroit bands more popular, gave them more motivation.” And of course, the monstrous success of his old friend has changed things. Brendan concurs, stating: “Jack has become so popular and so famous,. It’s affected the music scene here, but only in a positive way. It’s shed some light on Detroit and in turn bands were filled with more hope, that something might happen. Most bands are doing it for their own amusement, not to be famous or make money, No one’s generally very ambitious. People are very complacent. Now a lot of people felt like they might have a chance. It helps that Detroit has at the moment a ton of great bands.” And one heck of a singer/songwriter. Just one more thing Brendan, what on earth is the alternative to love? “I gotta come up with a good answer to that,” he chuckles. “Basically, beyond love, what else is there? We’re all searching for it, that utopia. Maybe one day I’ll find it.” Alan Woodhouse

“I’ve always been this way / Never known any other way to feel” (Brendan Benson, ‘Tiny Spark’, 2002)

“All I want is a sure footing, to know I’m appreciated enough so that I can continue making records and people will listen to them. I need to do it. If I can make a living out of it then great. There’s no turning back, I can’t do anything else.”

Detroit singer/songwriter Brendan Benson is telling this writer forcibly, fuelled by an extensive supply of wine, what motivates him to make music. And while he might seem blasé about what the future holds, even this most self-effacing of men must be excited at the very real prospect that new album ‘The Alternative To Love’ is going to move him from the realms of cult artist and into the big league. If there’s any justice it will anyway.

Things are certainly a lot brighter for Brendan than they were back in 1996, when Virgin put out his debut album ‘One Mississippi’. Despite a raft of good reviews and a set of cracking tunes (Check out the awesome ‘Emma J’, ‘Sittin’ Pretty’ and ‘Insects Rule’) the record inexplicably flopped and he found himself dropped and thoroughly disillusioned. But there was a silver lining – with the money left over from the deal he bought the beautifully elegant house-cum-studio we are sitting in, which he shares with his friendly fat moggy Sam. With the help of pal Jason Falkner (Jellyfish), Brendan gradually put together the songs which became 2002’s tremendous ‘Lapalco’, which was picked up and released by his new label V2 (Startime in America). Since then the likes of neighbour, pal and collaborator Jack White, The Datsuns and Keane (with whom Brendan toured last year at their personal request) have been falling over themselves to eulogise his hook-laden heartbreakers.

Recalling his lean years, Brendan says: “’One Mississippi’ was critically acclaimed, it’s just no one heard it. I then bought a studio. It was kind of perfect, I got dropped, had this studio, didn’t know if I wanted to write anymore. I felt pretty discouraged, was doubting if I had something to offer. But I had the studio so I started to record other bands. It took me years to realise I had my own good record in ‘Lapalco’.”

‘Lapalco’ is a shade darker than ‘One Mississippi’, but pretty much sticks to the same blueprint, the great lovelorn powerpop of Big Star crossed with sensitive strums that Nick Drake would have been proud of. It’s an addictive, giddy and completely natural formula.

‘The Alternative To Love’ is more or less a cross between the first two albums, with bursts of ‘One Mississippi’s sugar rush and nods to the greater depth of ‘Lapalco’’s songs. The rollicking first single ‘Spit It Out’, the deceptively jaunty ‘Cold Hands (Warm Heart)’ and the sparse ‘Them And Me’ feel like old friends already – classic radio songs, which, when you scratch the surface, are saying a whole lot more than you initially realised. Hey, if it ain’t broke why try and fix it?

Brendan, who plays everything on the album, insists having a captive audience isn’t going to change the way he works one little bit.

““I had gained some momentum with ‘Lapalco’ – but I didn’t have a vision,” he says. “I don’t think I ever do. I admire people who do, who do something different. I do whatever feels right, I don’t think about it much.”

“I recognise my self-centredness,” he adds. “If I was in a band, there’d be some kind of collective goal.”

And how does he feel about the growing amount of recognition he is receiving?

“I do like the attention,” he admits, “I like the affirmation and compliments but I think ultimately I do it out of compulsion.”

And what about Detroit? As has been well documented, Brendan is very good friends and close neighbours with The White Stripes – indeed he and Jack White have recorded an album together (“It sounds like Deep Purple crossed with Cat Stevens”) which is expected to come out in 2006 sometime. But how does he fit in to the much-heralded Detroit ‘scene’?

“I’m the wrong guy to ask about Detroit,” he insists. “I live here and am friends with all the bands but I’m not involved in the scene. I hardly ever go out. I feel just too old for it (he’s 34).

“Anyway, It was the NME that popularised Detroit, made it a scene, a movement. That’s OK, it didn’t hurt anybody. It made Detroit bands more popular, gave them more motivation.”

And of course, the monstrous success of his old friend has changed things.

Brendan concurs, stating: “Jack has become so popular and so famous,. It’s affected the music scene here, but only in a positive way. It’s shed some light on Detroit and in turn bands were filled with more hope, that something might happen. Most bands are doing it for their own amusement, not to be famous or make money, No one’s generally very ambitious. People are very complacent. Now a lot of people felt like they might have a chance. It helps that Detroit has at the moment a ton of great bands.”

And one heck of a singer/songwriter. Just one more thing Brendan, what on earth is the alternative to love?

“I gotta come up with a good answer to that,” he chuckles. “Basically, beyond love, what else is there? We’re all searching for it, that utopia. Maybe one day I’ll find it.”

Alan Woodhouse

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