There’s a story about Steve McQueen being offered the role of architect Doug Roberts in The Towering Inferno. McQueen turned it down, asking instead to play fire chief Michael O’Hallorhan, claiming that there’s no way an audience would find him believable in any role other than a straight-ahead man of action. The part of Roberts, instead, went to Paul Newman. At that point, in 1974, Newman’s most successful roles had been as outlaws, con-men and rebels – characters arguably not that far removed from the kind of people who peppered McQueen’s own CV. But it says a lot, perhaps, about how cinema audiences were prepared to accept him, that despite the succession of outsiders and wild ones he’d played, there was something inherently likeable and appealing about Newman. It’s certainly true in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969). For a film made in the late Sixties – a time where it was all about sticking it to The Man – it’s maybe not surprising that audiences would be rooting for characters who, in an earlier, less complicated era would have been the bad guys. The easy charm of Newman and Robert Redford put Butch & Sundance in the Top 10 grossing movies for the decade. Newman had been a more dangerous kind of outlaw for Arthur Penn in The Left-Handed Gun (1958), based on a TV play written by Gore Vidal where he played a feral Billy the Kid with an unnerving hair-trigger temper. You wonder what he’d have been like for Peckinpah. Newman was a huge star in the Sixties – an era not exactly light on major Hollywood muscle. He shared the decade with Brando (with whom he'd studied at the Actors' Studio under Lee Strasberg), McQueen, Redford and later, Beatty and Hoffman. If you see the Sixties as the transitional period between the Golden Age of Hollywood and the modern era, then you can argue that Newman is the link between Clark Cable and George Clooney. His classic movie star looks would certainly have not been out of place in a previous time, while his willingness to build a CV around rebels and outsiders chimed with the decade's counter-culture leanings and was picked up by a later wave of actors. You can see the arc of his career, and how he successfully manoeuvred between the demands of different eras of filmmaking by the directors he worked with. There’s Preminger, Robert Wise, Michael Curtiz, Hitchcock and Huston; Altman and George Roy Hill; Scorsese, the Coens and Sam Mendes. Newman did his last on screen work for Mendes, playing a gangster in The Road To Perdition (2002). The film itself is often too sentimental, but Newman is towering as Irish Catholic Mob patriarch, John Mooney. It reminds me, to some degree, of the way Leone used Henry Fonda, similarly in the autumn of his career, as the sadistic killer in Once Upon A Time In The West. That was a brilliant piece of counter casting that subverted Fonda’s legacy of noble, finely chiselled heroes. So, too, here was Newman, wintry and sinister, telling Tom Hanks’ enforcer Michael Sullivan, “None of us will see Heaven.” Whatever we might have thought of Newman’s catalogue of jailbirds, cardsharps or pool hustlers, none of them were ever as vicious as this. Here are some YouTube links to five of Newman’s greatest screen moments. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID: "For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble..." THE STING: "Your one thousand..? I'll raise you two thousand..." THE HUSTLER: "I came to play pool, Fats..." COOL HAND LUKE: "Nobody can eat 50 eggs..." ROAD TO PERDITION: "This is the life we chose, this is the life we lead..." Now we’d like you to tell us what your thoughts and feelings are about Paul Newman. What were his defining roles for you? How do you think he'll be best remembered..?

A long time ago, one of my old NME colleagues described a pretty rackety record – approvingly, I should say – as sounding like “a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs.” That phrase came back to me this morning when I put on the debut Abe Vigoda album for the first time in a while. I think “Skeleton” may have been out in the States for a few months, though it’s only getting a UK release in about a fortnight. Abe Vigoda are from LA, and are reputedly connected with that scene of bands clustered around The Smell club which has already birthed, among others, No Age. Abe Vigoda don’t sound much like No Age (the reverberant scrape of instrumental “Visi Rings” apart): their chaotic, exuberant noise is much cleaner and more sprung than that duo’s fuzzed-out sound. After some hard graft from the sort of critics who spent their time compartmentalising bands into neat new genres, it seems we’re meant to call Abe Vigoda’s sound “Tropical punk”. Which means, basically, that they play with a certain pseudo-unhinged velocity while having a rhythmic vigour and a delirious, ambulatory guitar sound that ties them in with the current vogue for Afro-influenced indie. If I can join in the genre hair-splitting, they actually sound more like a particularly frantic post-punk band to my ears, though one who have obviously taken on board (like No Age) the hurtling potency of ‘80s US hardcore, too. I think it was “Bear Face”, playing in the office a couple of months ago, which prompted a passing sub to compare them to “XTC playing soukous”, which isn’t bad. But that suggests a sort of whimsical self-consciousness which isn’t quite so apparent. Obviously, Abe Vigoda’s sound has come about via some presumably intensive plotting – for all the manic clatter of these 14 songs, there’s a real clarity and purpose to a lot of them that suggests algorhytmic complexity as much as hipster spontaneity. The ringing lead guitar that cuts through everything has a kind of detuned hi-life tone to it which is really engaging, especially on “Endless Sleeper”. Which drives us to the glib, but more or less accurate, 2008 contextualisation, placing Abe Vigoda as a deluxe gnarly hybrid of Vampire Weekend and Sonic Youth. Works for me. . .

I’ve just finished the excellent latest edition of Granta, subtitled “The New Nature Writing”, and become fascinated by the idea of Ghost Species. The concept comes up in a piece by the estimable Robert MacFarlane (I can’t recommend his books enough, incidentally). Apparently, a ghost species is one that has been out-evolved by its environment, leaving it doomed to extinction. MacFarlane applies the term, rather movingly, to small-scale family farmers in Norfolk, facing economic obliteration by the multinational concerns eating up the land around them. It also got me thinking, though, relatively frivolously, about what kinds of bands might be musical ghost species; those who have been left behind by cultural evolution, for better or worse. One of those genres which struck me as seriously threatened was post-rock, not least because the adventurous spirit of the original post-hardcore experimentalists seems to have degenerated into so much prosaic quiet/loud dynamics and sub-metal chundering. An evolutionary dead-end. But then I realised that one of the records I’d been playing a lot of late, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore’s fantastic “Dolores”, was ostensibly a post-rock record, in the best sense of the term. Bohren are a German band I’ve read about over the years (they formed in 1992, apparently), but somehow never heard until “Dolores” turned up. They operate somewhere around a point where jazz, ambience and post-rock intercept – which makes them sound rather like The Necks. I imagine Bohren would probably appeal to Necks fans, but they’re still quite different propositions, judging by “Dolores”. For a start, “Dolores” seems meticulously composed rather than improvised: a series of slow, contemplative pieces driven by saxophone, vibes or piano, anchored by discreetly brushed cymbals, shrouded in a distant atmospheric hum. The post-rock antecedents to this strike me as being Labradford, especially, with the baroque classical influence replaced with the jazz of Bill Evans, perhaps, and maybe some early Tortoise. But there’s also a strong kinship with Josh Haden’s exceptional Spain circa “The Blue Moods Of Spain” (though Bohren’s work is entirely instrumental), and, as someone here mentioned the other day, Angelo Badalamenti’s “Twin Peaks” work. And then there’s the doom element, which has seen Bohren recently aligned with the likes of Earth and Sunn 0))). You can hear that in the sloth and resonant chordal thump of things like “Welk” and “Schwarze Biene (Black Maja)”. The latter track is the stand-out, probably, beginning like something from the Aphex Twin’s “Ambient Works Volume Two” before the piano arrives. But “Dolores” isn’t really a record where individual tracks stand out that much; it’s a completely engrossing whole. Anyone out there know if Bohren’s previous albums are as good as this one?