A lovely morning here in London, as the newly expanded version of “Kind Of Blue” makes for a perfect start to the day. I imagine you may have seen this by now, but if not, please check out Ben Kingsley doing Minor Threat. That’s Ben Kingsley doing Minor Threat, and watching it doesn’t make the concept any more assimilable.
Around the time, I think, his “Eureka” album came out, I interviewed Jim O’Rourke. It was O’Rourke’s most conventional, song-based album to date, but he still had the musical outlook of an improvising musician. He wouldn’t be touring the album, he told me, because he never wanted to play the same thing more than once. Even a radically rearranged version of a song would be in a way dishonest, he thought. The best way for an insatiable creative force like O’Rourke to make music, it transpired, was to start with a totally clean sheet every single time he picked up an instrument.
Washed up fighters make great movie characters. Think of Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech in On the Waterfront, Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby and Stacy Keach, pissing blood in John Huston’s underrated Fat City. Add to their ranks Randy “The Ram” Robinson, played here by Mickey Rourke in the role that's justifiably attracting much talk of an Oscar.
Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.”
A bit of a sketchy bunch this week, as you’ll see. But the TV On The Radio album is getting played daily at least once, and there’s an auspicious new Mystery Record for me to be all cagey about.
A bit of shameless self-promotion today, since I’ve spent the past month or so selecting a bunch of tracks for a new CD which comes free with the new issue of Uncut, out this Thursday or thereabouts. Ostensibly, “Interstellar Overdrive” is a compilation of newish psych to coincide with our Pink Floyd cover story. Alternatively, though, it’s a bit like a Wild Mercury Sound playlist.
