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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

Interview: Karel Reisz

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UNCUT: Dog Soldiers has been called a study in betrayal. How would you define it? REISZ: Heroism in a bad cause. Debra Winger, who knew Nick Nolte from way back, said that you had to have a few beers just to be on the same planet with him. At some point in the read throughs he got the same insigh...

UNCUT: Dog Soldiers has been called a study in betrayal. How would you define it?

REISZ: Heroism in a bad cause.

Debra Winger, who knew Nick Nolte from way back, said that you had to have a few beers just to be on the same planet with him. At some point in the read throughs he got the same insight. Hey – my character drinks.

That wasn’t my experience. I saw Nolte as a Mid-Western farm boy, the sort of fellow who was never happier than when he was fixing things. You could see him getting under a tractor engine with baling wire. For the film, he took a great pride in being able to strip down an automatic weapon and then reassemble it, and he worked on it until he could do it without looking. He’s a practical actor. And I will only speak off the record about Debra Winger who was with Nick in Everybody Wins.

Would you like to film any other Stone novels? A Flag for Sunrise, for example?

I’m afraid not. You couldn’t get the money. Dog Soldiers was a commercial disaster. Minority views expressed in films simply don’t sell tickets. A Flag for Sunrise is an intensely pessimistic novel about US involvement in Central America, and film audiences do not want to know about that. I’m now beginning to feel that the pessimistic vision is not for the movies. I made two films running, The Gambler and Dog Soldiers, both of which had a pessimistic view of life. You end up making films the audience regards as downers, and they don’t go. So, finally, to whom are you doing a favour? If you’re expressing sentiments that find very little echo in the audience, maybe you should be writing novels or doing theatre where the scale of the audience is commensurate with your views.

Of the film-makers like Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson who spearheaded British Free Cinema in the Fifties, you’re the one who lasted. You’ve been criticized both for your early ideological approach, and then for your subsequent move to American subjects.

So often the critics assume that one is the lackey of a corrupt system, but in fact a big element of what they regard as one’s conformity is simply a desire to have an audience. It’s a difficult thing to balance out. I like The Gambler and Dog Soldiers very much, but, to be honest, it gets very disheartening to see them open to empty houses. Your heart sinks.

By Brian Case

Dog Soldiers

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Dog Soldiers

Retitled Dog Soldiers for the UK, 1978's Who'll Stop the Rain - based on the Robert Stone novel and directed by Karel Reisz - is a variant on Vietnam vets bringing the madness home. This madness is a consignment of Saigon heroin, and the enemy that the protagonists encounter back on American soil is as lethal as anything they might find in country. The late Karel Reisz elicited great performances from actresses - Redgrave, Streep, Lange - and not only does he get a definitively stoned performance out of Tuesday Weld, but he rescues Nick Nolte from lunkdom. Probably no-one after The Deep saw him as much beyond the ex-college football player he'd been. At 37, he seemed to be going nowhere until he was cast as Ray Hicks, a marine who read Nietzsche and, all alone on the deck of a ship returning from Vietnam, practised martial arts exercises. The part was the first of Nolte's revelations. Here, he's a man of simple loyalties to the flag and, above all, to his friends. John Converse, (Michael Moriarty) a war correspondent, is his buddy, and Hicks allows himself to be persuaded to smuggle two keys of uncut heroin back to the US. Converse's justification is that "in a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people naturally want to get high." "I didn't think we were that way," objects Hicks." "This is where everybody finds out who they are," explains Converse. "What a bummer for the gooks," replies Hicks. Great script. The first two drafts were by Stone himself. Back in San Francisco with the drugs, Hicks makes contact with Converse's wife, Marge (Weld). Far from the deal being set up, she knows nothing about it and views life through a Dilaudid haze. Hicks takes over as the bad guys working for bent Narcotics Bureau agent Anthiel (Anthony Zerbe) move in. They're lethal clowns, and Ray Sharkey, like Clu Gulager, Lee Marvin's sidekick in The Killers, is memorably uncontrollable. Hicks seeks refuge in a deserted hippy commune in the mountains. It's still wired for concerts, and there's a touching scene where Hicks and Marge barndance to Hank Snow before the shootout begins. With Creedence Clearwater Revival blasting out over gunfire, you may be reminded of Michael Herr's Dispatches in which rock and war are seen to run off the same current. The end is tragic. If Hicks is gung-ho practicality, Converse is a soured, ineffectual intellectual. A typical Stone hero, he enjoys his ironic spin on quotes like "My desire is to serve God and grow rich like all men," but the real man is expressed in the despairing statement, "I've been waiting all my life to foul up like this." He and Marge are yoyos, and Moriarty and Weld play contemptible without qualms. The acting is superb. Reisz, never a flashy director, moves the camera in on Hicks's face as Marge leaves him behind. "The love of my life, no shit. She didn't even say goodbye. How about that?" And, tenderness over, he's back in samurai mode again. "They got my buddy and they're gonna kill that pretty lady. Now how am I gonna allow that!" He takes out their truck with an M-70 grenade launcher. Not as good as the book is the usual complaint about movies. Well, Stone did worse with WUSA. Here, Reisz preserved the frightening story, made his best film, and if he mainly stripped Hicks down to Elmore Leonard's Gunnery Sergeant in The Hunted, there's enough left to hint at the intellectual depths of the novel. By Brian Case

Retitled Dog Soldiers for the UK, 1978’s Who’ll Stop the Rain – based on the Robert Stone novel and directed by Karel Reisz – is a variant on Vietnam vets bringing the madness home. This madness is a consignment of Saigon heroin, and the enemy that the protagonists encounter back on American soil is as lethal as anything they might find in country. The late Karel Reisz elicited great performances from actresses – Redgrave, Streep, Lange – and not only does he get a definitively stoned performance out of Tuesday Weld, but he rescues Nick Nolte from lunkdom. Probably no-one after The Deep saw him as much beyond the ex-college football player he’d been. At 37, he seemed to be going nowhere until he was cast as Ray Hicks, a marine who read Nietzsche and, all alone on the deck of a ship returning from Vietnam, practised martial arts exercises. The part was the first of Nolte’s revelations. Here, he’s a man of simple loyalties to the flag and, above all, to his friends. John Converse, (Michael Moriarty) a war correspondent, is his buddy, and Hicks allows himself to be persuaded to smuggle two keys of uncut heroin back to the US. Converse’s justification is that “in a world where elephants are pursued by flying men, people naturally want to get high.” “I didn’t think we were that way,” objects Hicks.” “This is where everybody finds out who they are,” explains Converse. “What a bummer for the gooks,” replies Hicks. Great script. The first two drafts were by Stone himself. Back in San Francisco with the drugs, Hicks makes contact with Converse’s wife, Marge (Weld). Far from the deal being set up, she knows nothing about it and views life through a Dilaudid haze. Hicks takes over as the bad guys working for bent Narcotics Bureau agent Anthiel (Anthony Zerbe) move in. They’re lethal clowns, and Ray Sharkey, like Clu Gulager, Lee Marvin’s sidekick in The Killers, is memorably uncontrollable. Hicks seeks refuge in a deserted hippy commune in the mountains. It’s still wired for concerts, and there’s a touching scene where Hicks and Marge barndance to Hank Snow before the shootout begins. With Creedence Clearwater Revival blasting out over gunfire, you may be reminded of Michael Herr’s Dispatches in which rock and war are seen to run off the same current. The end is tragic.

If Hicks is gung-ho practicality, Converse is a soured, ineffectual intellectual. A typical Stone hero, he enjoys his ironic spin on quotes like “My desire is to serve God and grow rich like all men,” but the real man is expressed in the despairing statement, “I’ve been waiting all my life to foul up like this.” He and Marge are yoyos, and Moriarty and Weld play contemptible without qualms. The acting is superb. Reisz, never a flashy director, moves the camera in on Hicks’s face as Marge leaves him behind. “The love of my life, no shit. She didn’t even say goodbye. How about that?” And, tenderness over, he’s back in samurai mode again. “They got my buddy and they’re gonna kill that pretty lady. Now how am I gonna allow that!” He takes out their truck with an M-70 grenade launcher.

Not as good as the book is the usual complaint about movies. Well, Stone did worse with WUSA. Here, Reisz preserved the frightening story, made his best film, and if he mainly stripped Hicks down to Elmore Leonard’s Gunnery Sergeant in The Hunted, there’s enough left to hint at the intellectual depths of the novel.

By Brian Case

Interview: Brad Anderson

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UNUCUT: Your film's been compared to Polanski, Hitchcock, Lynch, Kafka and Dostoevsky. You weren't aiming for Shrek 2 then? ANDERSON: Those guys were all on my mind! It's not like I was trying to make a Hitchcock or Polanski movie, but I know the scriptwriter was reading a lot of Eastern European l...

UNUCUT: Your film’s been compared to Polanski, Hitchcock, Lynch, Kafka and Dostoevsky. You weren’t aiming for Shrek 2 then?

ANDERSON: Those guys were all on my mind! It’s not like I was trying to make a Hitchcock or Polanski movie, but I know the scriptwriter was reading a lot of Eastern European literature when he wrote it. There’s definitely a through-line from Crime And Punishment to this film, and you can feel the Kafka influence in the idea of a man who feels he’s the victim of some kind of grand conspiracy. I mean, I came at it with my own style and approach, but maybe some of these guys were psychically on the set… For example, Bale’s landlady says “You used to be such a good tenant…”, so there are subtle Polanski references and innuendos…

Like Memento or Fight Club, this creates its own world, its own intense, off-kilter atmosphere…how do you sustain that?

Equal parts dread and a perverse, dark sense of humour. My marching orders to everyone, from set designers to actors, were to create something along the lines of a waking nightmare. Something that felt weirdly familiar, but also very alienating at the same time. Plus, shooting in Barcelona, we ended up with this strange version of a hybrid American reality. Which matches the sense of dislocation the character has. He’s not sure where he is. There’s no sense of place. That helps the overall spooky feeling. You don’t know even know when you are. There’s a timelessness, with no cellphones ringing or computer screens blinking. And zapping the movie of its colour gives it an old-school monochromatic vibe… It feels like a different reality to the one we’re used to now.

Christian Bale is at first completely unrecognisable in the role… his transformation is almost horrifying…

He went well beyond the call of duty! The character was written that way, he was actually described as “a walking skeleton”. So it was implicit he’d have to lose weight. But even I didn’t expect him to go the extremes he went to! I was grateful though, because it helped the German Expressionist feel. Plus it meant nobody on set could ever complain about anything at all, even when we went down into the unpleasant Spanish sewers, because all they had to do was look at what the lead actor was going through. Also, he didn’t have to act the insomnia too much, because one of the side effects of that drastic weight loss was he didn’t sleep much, and lost the capacity to differentiate colours.

Out on a limb here, but: is there any link between Bale’s name “Trevor Reznik” and…

Trent Reznor? Yeah, sure. Scott, the writer, loves Nine Inch Nails, and his original script had a quote from their lyrics on the first page. He always envisaged it having a Reznor soundtrack too, but I didn’t want to go in that direction. So Scott was maybe playing with the name. You don’t want to take these kind of stories about a man under excruciating torment too seriously. There’s something bizarrely funny about a guy who doesn’t realise he’s in essence a dog chasing his own tail. Sure it’s horrific and disturbing, and you mustn’t break the spell, but there’s also a twisted ridiculousness to his quest.

Interview By Chris Roberts

The Machinist

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The Machinist

Trevor Reznik is in Hell. Or, at least, somewhere very close. A wire-thin factory worker who hasnt slept for a year, he's not living but existing - and only just. Imprisoned in his crappy apartment under bruise-coloured night skies that perpetually crackle with electrical storms, Reznik knows some terrible misdeed has driven him into this hallucinatory state. If only he could remember his crime. Then he might figure out why murderous strangers are stalking him at work. And why his fragile grip on reality seems to be loosening by the hour. Shot in Barcelona but set in a deliberately non-specific netherworld, The Machinist is part psychological horror, part noir mystery and part character study of an extreme social misfit on the cusp of mental breakdown. Not since Memento has there been such an engrossingly murky enigma of a film. Loaded with literary allusions and ominous clues, this is a terrific pulp puzzler with artistic ambitions far above its station - the best kind, in other words. Christian Bale's dramatic physical transformation into Reznik is a key selling point. Shedding four stones on a crash diet, the actor's alarming skin-and-bone appearance threatens to drown out the rest of the movie at times. Razor thin, cheeks sunken into deep hollows, ribcage jutting from his skeletal frame, he's terrifyingly alien and barely recognisable on first sight. He could easily be some reptilian junkie on the brink of death. The emaciated, vampiric ogre in Chris Cunningham's video for Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy" also springs to mind. Scott Kosar's script requires Reznik to be a haunted soul, shrunk to his very bones by guilt and insomnia. But Bale's alarming act of self-harm throws up other nightmarish echoes that reach far beyond the drama at hand. It's difficult to watch him without being reminded of all the horrors of the modern age: famine, torture, AIDS, even concentration camps. The Machinist may not deserve such weighty associations, but they hover like vultures all the same. In an era when even indie-darling directors stick to the blandest of visual grammar, it's also refreshing to see a movie with such a hardcore aesthetic. The prevailing mood is lo-fi Gothic meets industrial grunge. The palette is slate greys and steely blues, desaturated and grubby, drained of life and daylight. The colours of grime and punishment. Some reviews have dismissed Anderson's grim fairy tale as post-MTV fluff, all designer despair with no substance. But the same accusation might be leveled at supreme stylists like Ridley Scott, David Fincher or Darren Aronofsky. The film's nocturnal, subterranean look is also perfectly in keeping with Reznik's purgatorial worldview. Whatever Freudian monster is gnawing at his conscience, it isn't going to be pretty. At times, The Machinist is stunningly beautiful in its ugliness. Along the way, Anderson throws in nudge-nudge references to Dostoevsky and Kafka, but Herman Melville's Bartleby probably also merits a mention. Likewise Fincher's Seven, Aronofksy's Requiem For A Dream, Polanski's Repulsion and Lynch's Lost Highway. Not to mention a raft of rock videos for Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails, Metallica and their ilk. Leigh proves her indie-queen credentials once more as the drowsy, downbeat hooker who tends to Reznik in his lonely hours. Aitana Sánchez-Gijón plays the all-night waitress who seems to offer redemption - and there is a redemption, of sorts. In fact, the fractured plot elements of The Machinist eventually align themselves into a fairly straight Twilight Zone twist that may leave some viewers underwhelmed. But reaching this destination is less important than the journey. And what a weird, dark, savage trip it is. By Stephen Dalton

Trevor Reznik is in Hell. Or, at least, somewhere very close. A wire-thin factory worker who hasnt slept for a year, he’s not living but existing – and only just. Imprisoned in his crappy apartment under bruise-coloured night skies that perpetually crackle with electrical storms, Reznik knows some terrible misdeed has driven him into this hallucinatory state. If only he could remember his crime. Then he might figure out why murderous strangers are stalking him at work. And why his fragile grip on reality seems to be loosening by the hour.

Shot in Barcelona but set in a deliberately non-specific netherworld, The Machinist is part psychological horror, part noir mystery and part character study of an extreme social misfit on the cusp of mental breakdown. Not since Memento has there been such an engrossingly murky enigma of a film. Loaded with literary allusions and ominous clues, this is a terrific pulp puzzler with artistic ambitions far above its station – the best kind, in other words.

Christian Bale’s dramatic physical transformation into Reznik is a key selling point. Shedding four stones on a crash diet, the actor’s alarming skin-and-bone appearance threatens to drown out the rest of the movie at times. Razor thin, cheeks sunken into deep hollows, ribcage jutting from his skeletal frame, he’s terrifyingly alien and barely recognisable on first sight. He could easily be some reptilian junkie on the brink of death. The emaciated, vampiric ogre in Chris Cunningham’s video for Aphex Twin’s “Come To Daddy” also springs to mind.

Scott Kosar’s script requires Reznik to be a haunted soul, shrunk to his very bones by guilt and insomnia. But Bale’s alarming act of self-harm throws up other nightmarish echoes that reach far beyond the drama at hand. It’s difficult to watch him without being reminded of all the horrors of the modern age: famine, torture, AIDS, even concentration camps. The Machinist may not deserve such weighty associations, but they hover like vultures all the same.

In an era when even indie-darling directors stick to the blandest of visual grammar, it’s also refreshing to see a movie with such a hardcore aesthetic. The prevailing mood is lo-fi Gothic meets industrial grunge. The palette is slate greys and steely blues, desaturated and grubby, drained of life and daylight. The colours of grime and punishment.

Some reviews have dismissed Anderson’s grim fairy tale as post-MTV fluff, all designer despair with no substance. But the same accusation might be leveled at supreme stylists like Ridley Scott, David Fincher or Darren Aronofsky. The film’s nocturnal, subterranean look is also perfectly in keeping with Reznik’s purgatorial worldview. Whatever Freudian monster is gnawing at his conscience, it isn’t going to be pretty. At times, The Machinist is stunningly beautiful in its ugliness.

Along the way, Anderson throws in nudge-nudge references to Dostoevsky and Kafka, but Herman Melville’s Bartleby probably also merits a mention. Likewise Fincher’s Seven, Aronofksy’s Requiem For A Dream, Polanski’s Repulsion and Lynch’s Lost Highway. Not to mention a raft of rock videos for Prodigy, Nine Inch Nails, Metallica and their ilk.

Leigh proves her indie-queen credentials once more as the drowsy, downbeat hooker who tends to Reznik in his lonely hours. Aitana Sánchez-Gijón plays the all-night waitress who seems to offer redemption – and there is a redemption, of sorts. In fact, the fractured plot elements of The Machinist eventually align themselves into a fairly straight Twilight Zone twist that may leave some viewers underwhelmed. But reaching this destination is less important than the journey. And what a weird, dark, savage trip it is.

By Stephen Dalton

Interview: Marc Riley

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UNCUT: What are your memories of The Fall’s very first Peel session in 1978? RILEY: I didn’t play on it, I came along as a roadie. That was when the bass player, Eric Ferret, left the band because we brought along a bloke on congas. This was Mark’s ruse to up the session fee by bringing along...

UNCUT: What are your memories of The Fall’s very first Peel session in 1978?

RILEY: I didn’t play on it, I came along as a roadie. That was when the bass player, Eric Ferret, left the band because we brought along a bloke on congas. This was Mark’s ruse to up the session fee by bringing along extra musicians. Anyway, Eric saw these congas in the back of the van and said he wasn’t going. But this was after he’d stopped playing halfway through a gig and Mark threw a chair at him, so I think his days were numbered. The next session after that, which is still my favourite, I joined on bass.

Do you have any contact with Mark E Smith these days?

We don’t see each other, no, though we half made up at a friend’s birthday party a few years ago. We’d both had a few drinks and it was like ‘”life’s too short”, we had a great night. He might tell you different, of course. But I was booted out of The Fall in 1983 so I’m probably not the best person to comment on Mark E Smith!

Tom Russell – Hotwalker

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Tom Russell – Hotwalker

A musical companion to Russell’s forthcoming book Tough Company – poetry, short stories and the collected correspondence between the LA-born songsmith and Charles Bukowski – Hotwalker is a colossal achievement. Part Two of Russell’s Americana trilogy that began with his own ancestral folk opera (1999’s The Man From God Knows Where), this is a headlong journey into the soul of "the old America, where the Big Guilt, political correctness and chainstores hadn’t sunk in so deep". Narrated and linked by Russell, it’s the lost post-war landscape of Beat pioneers, outsider poets and drunken angels – interspersed with snippets of Lenny Bruce, Bukowski, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, hobo composer Harry Partch, Edward Abbey and Kerouac. Most strikingly, it’s a carnival-midget speedfreak – Little Jack Horton – who plays Dean Moriarty to Russell’s Sal Paradise. The pair first met on a circus train in the ‘70s. Horton’s tall tales of lost weekends with Bukowski and stealing freight trains in the dead of night serve less as factual fodder than a musical voice on the scales of a disappearing world (indeed, Horton died shortly after his contributions here). The soundtrack is a grand sweep of American history: spooked parlour songs, Jesus ballads, loping carousel waltzes, Mexicali, raw folk-blues, country and squawking jazz. So a tough-love tribute to Dylan mentor and Greenwich Village Pope, Dave Van Ronk (with a snatch of the latter’s "Sportin’ Life Blues") nestles alongside "Bakersfield", a nod and a twang to Buck Owens, Gram Parsons and countless Okies "hopped up on moonshine and amphetamines". The reefer madness of "Border Lights" dives into "that delicious dark-eyed myth" of 1950s Mexico, high on cheap rum and forbidden dreams. Russell gets stellar musical back-up from Gretchen Peters (particularly on poignantly-rendered closer, "America The Beautiful"), Fats Kaplin on fiddle, accordion and pedal steel and Andrew Hardin on guitar, streaming into the recorded consciousness of Kerouac reading "October In The Railroad Earth" and Bukowski doing "On The Hustle". They should seal this in a vault for posterity.

A musical companion to Russell’s forthcoming book Tough Company – poetry, short stories and the collected correspondence between the LA-born songsmith and Charles Bukowski – Hotwalker is a colossal achievement. Part Two of Russell’s Americana trilogy that began with his own ancestral folk opera (1999’s The Man From God Knows Where), this is a headlong journey into the soul of “the old America, where the Big Guilt, political correctness and chainstores hadn’t sunk in so deep”. Narrated and linked by Russell, it’s the lost post-war landscape of Beat pioneers, outsider poets and drunken angels – interspersed with snippets of Lenny Bruce, Bukowski, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, hobo composer Harry Partch, Edward Abbey and Kerouac.

Most strikingly, it’s a carnival-midget speedfreak – Little Jack Horton – who plays Dean Moriarty to Russell’s Sal Paradise. The pair first met on a circus train in the ‘70s. Horton’s tall tales of lost weekends with Bukowski and stealing freight trains in the dead of night serve less as factual fodder than a musical voice on the scales of a disappearing world (indeed, Horton died shortly after his contributions here). The soundtrack is a grand sweep of American history: spooked parlour songs, Jesus ballads, loping carousel waltzes, Mexicali, raw folk-blues, country and squawking jazz. So a tough-love tribute to Dylan mentor and Greenwich Village Pope, Dave Van Ronk (with a snatch of the latter’s “Sportin’ Life Blues”) nestles alongside “Bakersfield”, a nod and a twang to Buck Owens, Gram Parsons and countless Okies “hopped up on moonshine and amphetamines”. The reefer madness of “Border Lights” dives into “that delicious dark-eyed myth” of 1950s Mexico, high on cheap rum and forbidden dreams.

Russell gets stellar musical back-up from Gretchen Peters (particularly on poignantly-rendered closer, “America The Beautiful”), Fats Kaplin on fiddle, accordion and pedal steel and Andrew Hardin on guitar, streaming into the recorded consciousness of Kerouac reading “October In The Railroad Earth” and Bukowski doing “On The Hustle”. They should seal this in a vault for posterity.

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