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.
Saturday evening at the last and finest mini-festival of late summer, and Minnesota’s most rock’n’roll Mormons can no longer turn the other cheek. Grinding to a halt between glacially slow riffs, LOW guitarist Alan Sparhawk makes an extraordinary appeal for audience sympathy.
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.”
Much as I like a fair bit of hardcore, there’s a slightly dim earnestness surrounding some contemporary bands on the scene (like the musically quite interesting Gallows, I suppose) that can sometimes be irritating. Obviously I can sympathise with the ideology, but I guess I’ve reached a point in life where I don’t need to be lectured on the multifarious iniquities of the music business - or the iniquities of life, come to that - in such artless terms.
The movie career of Steve Coogan has so far proved to be a fascinatingly erratic subject. Sure, it’s not unusual to find a successful British TV comedian struggle to establish himself in movies, particularly in Hollywood. For every Dudley Moore, who became a huge movie star in the States with Arthur and 10, you only have to look at Peter Cook - the true genius in that partnership - whose transatlantic film career barely made it beyond Supergirl.
