Hack at work.
Killing Bono
"The best book I have ever read about trying to make it in the music business" - Elton John
"A fantastic book, which manages the difficult trick of being simultaneously very funny and very sad." - Bob Geldof
"I was Neil McCormick's fan in school. He was much cooler than me, a much better writer and I thought he'd make a much better rock star. I was wrong on one count. He's written a great book" - Bono
Laura Marling: poster girl for Nu Folk
Published: 5:13PM BST 01 Sep 2010
‘The modern world has always slightly mystified me,” says Laura Marling. Just 20 years old, already an NME cover star and nominated for next week’s Mercury Music Prize (for the second time), Marling is about as contemporary as you can get. Yet somehow it is not in the least surprising to find the wispily graceful, soft-spoken singer-songwriter proclaiming herself at odds with the times.
“I’ve got my laptop, but it troubles me in many ways. I don’t have Twitter or Facebook or anything like that. It ruins a romantic idea, which might just be an illusion, a sense of depth or continuity. I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology, but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character, of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small, and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same.”
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Robert Plant: still the mighty rearranger
Published: 3:59PM BST 20 Aug 2010
“The past,” says Robert Plant, “is a stepping stone, not a millstone.” Back in the 1970s, as the priapic frontman for Led Zeppelin, Plant pronounced himself a “Golden God”. These days, with long, curling hair and roguish goatee beard, the 61-year-old rock deity comes over more as a wise old sage.
Sitting in a hotel lobby in Dallas, he says, in a soft, Midlands burr: “This city brings back a lot of memories. This was where I rehearsed for my first post-Zeppelin gig.
“It was all huge emotional chaos in me, ’cause I was about to go out without the great force field. I was the only one carrying this thing, this myth state, to the centre of stage. There was a huge feeling of loss.”
It was his role fronting the ground-breaking, world-conquering rock quartet for 12 years that established Plant as one of Britain’s greatest voices, and rock culture’s most defining archetypes.
So what is he doing here, three decades on, playing a tour of intimate theatres with an all-singing ensemble of American roots and country virtuosos, in a group named in honour of his teenage psychedelic blues outfit, Band Of Joy?
“Well, that’s what I feel like,” he says. “Somewhere between a teenager and an old man, making my debut album. It’s freedom.”
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John Cooper Clarke: punk’s poet laureate
John Cooper Clarke appears like a man out of time. He is stick thin, dressed in shiny black boots, tight black straights, sharp shirt and buttoned-up Sixties jacket, topped off with impenetrable Raybans and an enormous, spiky, dyed black barnet. At 61, Clarke is wrinkled, his lips have shrunk, and his teeth are full of bits of gold, but otherwise he looks exactly the same as when he was the poet laureate of punk, the self-styled bard of Salford, a comic wordsmith with almost household name status.
“You know what I like to think of myself as? Adam Adamant,” Clarke declares, recalling the short-lived BBC series from 1966 about a Victorian adventurer in swinging London.
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Death shall have no dominion. My interview with the late great Sparklehorse
I’ve been listening to a ghost. The voice crackles out of my digital recorder, a little nervous and tentative. “It’s getting harder, this life, in music. Unless you have a lot of money in the bank, its very hard, especially being just one person. Record companies ….” There’s a defeated sigh. “It seems to me like nobody knows what the ****’s going on …”
Last June, I spoke to Mark Linkous, the cult genius better known as Sparklehorse. Nine months later, on March 6th this year, he committed suicide, shooting himself in the heart in an alley in Knoxville, aged 47. A brilliant, if famously troubled music maker, our brief conversation was amongst the last interviews he ever gave.
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“I don’t need everyone to love me” - Sting
Published: 08 Jul 2010
‘I don’t need everyone to love me,” says Sting. “I really don’t.” The 58-year-old superstar is preparing to go on stage with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, augmented by his own four-piece band, to perform orchestral rearrangements of songs from his back catalogue.
This, as Sting knows, is exactly the kind of thing that makes his detractors groan. “For some people, I am a pretentious prat,” he continues in his level, thoughtful way. Then he shrugs. “But they’re not people who actually know me. I don’t feel like defending myself that much, so I’d rather say, ‘That’s fine – believe what you want to believe.’ I live my life.”
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Charlotte Gainsbourg: “To be manipulated, like a piece of clay, that’s what I like”
Published: 16 Jun 2010
‘I don’t think I’m an artist,” says Charlotte Gainsbourg, tilting her head with a quizzical seriousness, the flat Anglo-French of her accent adding a kind of philosophical gravity to her words. “I don’t have my guts to put out. I really feel that I’m under someone else’s command, willing to be manipulated, like a piece of clay, that’s what I like. To have, sorry, les barrier? To have restraints. And to find my own space inside all those barriers.”
Talking to the willowy Gainsbourg in an elegant restaurant, cutlery clinking, sunlight dappling the cream tablecloth, it is easy to imagine you are a character in a French film, discussing art with a beautiful, slightly neurotic woman. It’s certainly the kind of role Gainsbourg has played before. “There’s nothing artistic about that, to me,” she says, casually dismissing her entire acting career. “Or anyone can be artistic then, because I really think anyone can act in a film. And anyone can sing.”
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Richard Thompson: “the guitar had its day by 1969″
09 Jun 2010
The great English folk-rock guitarist and singer-songwriter Richard Thompson is curator of this year’s Meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre in London, which starts on Friday. “I looked at what other curators have done, Massive Attack, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and I thought, ‘It’s wide open, I’ll see what I can get away with,’ ” says Thompson. “It’s an opportunity for me to show off some of my favourite artists, and a chance to discover some new things myself.”
One of the first events he set in motion was a tribute to Kate McGarrigle, the French-Canadian singer-songwriter who died in January. “The McGarrigle sisters had a really uniquely blended style, they didn’t sound like anyone else. And she’s been a family friend for a very long time, so this was something we had to do. We’ve got quite a line-up.”
Alongside Emmylou Harris, Nick Cave and Lisa Hannigan, McGarrigle’s children (with Loudon Wainwright III) Rufus and Martha Wainwright will be performing, as will Thompson, his ex-wife Linda and their two talented singer-songwriter offspring, Teddy and Kamila. “It’s a small, incestuous world,” jokes Thompson.
Indeed, the Thompsons often perform together, as do the Wainwrights. “In the folk world, multi-generational families of musicians are normal. In popular music, it is considered a bit questionable, perhaps because your parents’ generation tend to be considered very unhip.
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Mitch Winehouse: the crooning cabbie
The first time I saw Amy Winehouse perform live was in the basement of Pizza Express in Soho, in 2003. It was a more innocent time, before the beehives and tattoos, before the release of her witty debut album, ’Frank’ (later the same year), long before the breakaway global success of ’Back In Black’ (2006) and the well documented personal problems that followed in one of the most spectacular falls from grace the modern music business has witnessed.
Amy was just a great young singer-songwriter, with a set of smart, sassy, soulful original pop songs and some classic jazz standards. I met Amy’s extended family, who were out in support, including her cab-driving father, Mitch Winehouse, his wife, Jane, and ex-wife, Janice (Amy’s mum).
At some point of the proceedings, the burly, white-haired Mitch joined Amy for a knock-out duet of the 1930 classic ’You Go To My Head’, as recorded by Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and others. Mitch was a natural, ebullient performer with a bluff, jazzy style, and Amy clearly enjoyed singing with him. When I interviewed Amy in 2004, she spoke glowingly of Mitch. “My dad’s great,” she enthused. “He is like the karaoke Sinatra. He could be a lounge act, he’s that good.”
“That was a good night,” recalls 59-year-old Mitch, smiling. “I always wanted to sing at every opportunity, weddings, parties, bar mitzvahs, I would be up there.”
Tracey Thorn: middle age is a war zone
Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn talks about her new solo album and the truth behind her biggest hit .
Published: 26 May 2010
Tracey Thorn was missing in action for seven years. After two decades as singer and co-writer for Everything But the Girl with partner (now husband) Ben Watt, she decided it was time for a break.
The couple had twin girls in 1998 and a boy in 2001. “Motherhood is all consuming if you want it to be, so I let it be,” she says. “It was a period when I really didn’t feel I had any subject matter at all. I was immersed in the world of looking after babies and small kids. There wasn’t even a story of interesting conflict to tell: I was thoroughly enjoying it and that would have made for the worst pop music.”
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Paul Weller: “We’re the rock and roll generation”
Published: 12:15PM BST 20 May 2010
Paul Weller comes striding down Regent Street in blazing sunshine, every inch the Modfather in dark flared jeans, navy V-neck and a platinum grey, feathercut hairdo that only a rock star could carry off. Tanned and slim, Weller moves with purposeful speed, so that by the time people have realised who he is, he is already gone. It might be a metaphor for his musical career, the ever-changing moods that have carried him through the mod punk of The Jam, playful agit-pop of The Style Council and photo-Britrock of his solo career. Heads turn in his wake, smiles appearing on faces. Britain loves Weller. Stylish, angry, passionate, self-questioning and devoted to some vague yet honourable notion of authenticity in music and life, he has been a constant presence in our pop landscape for over thirty years.
“I’m going to be 52 this year, I’ve done half a century, which is pretty fundamental really,” says Weller, settling down in a café to a pot of tea. “I know I look different but I don’t feel any different. It’s a cliché but only cos its true: music does keep people young. I’m not a teenager, I see my place in the scheme of things, but as much as we don’t want to appear stupid and look like the oldest swinger in town, I don’t think you should be trapped by your age. You have to act how you feel.”
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