White Denim, as their frenetic live shows would suggest, are not a band much given to idling. Last summer, while the master tapes of their scintillating third album D were withering on the reel, awaiting record company approval of a reworked song that the band never wanted on the album in the first place, the Texan crack shots decided to use their downtime productively.
Ahead of a UK dates to support the new Waterboys album, An Appointment With Mr Yates, Mike Scott will answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With... feature.
Elvis Costello wasn’t himself 25 years ago, the musician credits on the two albums he released in 1986 listing him as Little Hands Of Concrete (King Of America) and Napoleon Dynamite (Blood & Chocolate). While the former was a self-mocking reference to his habit of breaking guitar strings, the latter was a more boastful persona who made his stage bow as the mad-eyed master of ceremonies at fairground-like live shows.
An unsentimental tribute to the silent era...It is very easy to become consumed by a cosy nostalgia for the silent era. We all know Gloria Swanson’s anguished protest as the ageing silent queen from Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” We’ve seen Chaplin’s bow-legged walk, Keaton’s stony-faced escape-artistry and Harold Lloyd dangling from the clock face.
I’m not sure what happens on Saturday towards the end of the first night of Bob Dylan’s three shows at London’s Hammersmith Apollo. Suddenly, though, he’s blazing through one of the songs he traditionally reserves for encores, “All Along The Watchtower”, with no break between it and the roaring version of “Ballad Of A Thin Man” that normally you’d have expected to be the show’s climax, the band then taking a well-deserved bow and a quick break before coming back for one, two or three more songs, further lapping up of the crowd’s applause prior to a final wave goodnight, perhaps even a nod from Bob in the general direction of a crowd he otherwise doesn’t go too far out of his way to acknowledge.
One (or rather, three) from the heart of Coppola’s American Zoetrope dream...Hammett was intended by Francis Ford Coppola to be one of his American Zoetrope studio’s first movies, a calling card for the Zoetrope vision and the American debut of German director Wim Wenders. In the event, the film, an homage to novelist Dashiell Hammett boasting a rare lead from Coppola regular Frederic Forrest, did become synonymous with the studio. Just not the way Coppola had hoped.
