Jocks&Nerds Issue 18, Spring 2016 by Jocks&Nerds Magazine

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Masthead Issue 18 On the cover

Willem Dafoe wears jacket and shirt by Prada; pocket square by Caruso Photographed by James Dimmock, styled by Mark Anthony Bradley

Editor-in-Chief & Creative Director Marcus Agerman Ross marcus@jocksandnerds.com Contributing Creative Direction Daren Ellis daren@seestudio.com Designer Anna Holden anna@tack-press.com Assistant Editor Chris Tang tang@jocksandnerds.com Editorial Assistant Edward Moore edward@jocksandnerds.com Contributing Fashion Editors

Mark Anthony Bradley, Harris Elliott, Richard Simpson Senior Staff Writer Chris May

Photographs Julian Baumann, Grègoire Bernardi, Dean Chalkley, Kevin Davies, James Dimmock, Sean Alexander Geraghty, Lee Vincent Grubb, Tim Hans, Owen Harvey, Martin Holtkamp, Elliot Kennedy, Phil Knott, Mark Mattock, Linus Ricard, Derek Ridgers, Derrick Santini Fashion Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala, Rose Forde Special Thanks Benny Bueno at the Dania Jai-Alai Team casinodaniabeach. com, Jeffery Conway at the US National Jai-Alai Association national-jai-alai.com, Peter Dennett, Amy Foster at Skinny Dip skinnydiplondon.com, Anna Gibson at Lo and Behold Productions loandbeholdproductions.com, Sean McLusky, Martin Tickner, Simple Genius, Leigh Walton at Top Shelf Productions topshelfcomix.com Retouching and Colour Management Complete completeltd.com Printing Park Communications Ltd parkcom.co.uk

Staff Writers

Distribution White Circ Ltd whitecirc.com

Subeditor Rosie Spencer

Stockist Enquiries Boutique Mags boutiquemags.com

Paolo Hewitt, Joe Lloyd, Andy Thomas, Mark Webster

New York Editor Janette Beckman janette@jocksandnerds.com Music Events Programmer Stuart Patterson stuart@jocksandnerds.com Advertising Manager Fiona Wallace fiona@jocksandnerds.com Junior Sales Executive Farnaz Ari farnaz@jocksandnerds.com Commercial Manager, Tack Studio

Nina Akbari nina@tack-press.com

Project Coordinator, Tack Studio

Elizabeth Jones elizabeth@tack-press.com

Finance Bryan Kemsley, Ardor Business Solutions Limited accounts@tack-press.com Head of Editorial, Tack Press Oliver Stratford oliver@disegnomagazine.com Publisher Johanna Agerman Ross johanna@disegnomagazine.com

Annual Subscriptions jocksandnerds.com/subscribe Contact Jocks&Nerds Magazine Tack Press Limited Unit 7, Ability Plaza Arbutus Street London E8 4DT +44 20 7249 1155 info@jocksandnerds.com jocksandnerds.com facebook.com/jocksandnerds @jocksandnerdsmagazine @jocksandnerds Copyright All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions expressed in the magazine are that of the respective contributors and are not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff. Tack Press Limited Tack Press is the parent company of Jocks&Nerds and Disegno magazine, as well as the creative services agency Tack Studio. Tack Press Limited © 2016

R EGE N T ST R E ET SL OA N E S QUA R E

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Contents 14. An exclusive picture essay on modern-day Cuba 23. Season round up including politically active fashion from Katharine Hamnett, the films of Richard Linklater and powerful photography by Don McCullin 41. Scream If You Want to Go Faster: photographer Phil Knott looks at transport as subculture 52. Greenfield Gardens: essential kit for the season. Photographed by Mark Mattock 61. Ross Allen, Jake Auerbach, Bloom Twins, Hartmut Geerken, Rogerio Igarashi Vaz 66. DJ and producer Lono Brazil shows off the most stylish ways to wear white socks Photographed by Dean Chalkley; styled by Harris Elliott 74. Willem Dafoe: master of performance 86. Blaze and Boogie. Photographed by Mark Mattock; styled by Harris Elliott 96. Meilyr Jones’s debut album is inspired by the poetry of Keats 106. Jason Leung. Photographed by Elliot Kennedy; styled by Rose Forde 116. Dexys’ Kevin Rowland divulges the secrets of song making 122. Jonathan Meades reveals his refreshingly simple cookbook 132. Jake Canuso. Photographed by Derek Ridgers; styled by Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala 140. Parallelogram. Photographed by Derrick Santini; styled by Mark Anthony Bradley 150. Musician and free thinker Frank Zappa is remembered in two new documentaries 154. Matthew Herbert’s latest experiment, an album in book form 160. Jai Alai: the fastest ball sport in the world is making a comeback 166. Punk at 40: what does it mean today? 172. Gutterdämmerung: Bjorn Tagemöse’s explosive rock opera 178. Once the preserve of goths and geeks, today Graphic Novels are a serious art form 184. Lighting Design takes centre stage 190. College Jacket: taking military style to civvy street via the American campus

A Photographic Portrait of Cuba Jocks&Nerds travelled to the Caribbean’s largest island for this exclusive shoot. Photographer Lee Vincent Grubb took the pictures in two locations in Cuba – the town of Trinidad and the capital, Havana, a city he found alight with optimism following the relaxation of US sanctions. “It was brilliant,” says Grubb. “Drink, fashion and music exploding everywhere. Neighbourhood dancehall-style parties were happening all over the place, with DJs, speaker stacks and all. The feeling I got from everyone was that of fun and freedom. It was incredibly dark and rainy on our last day there, but even so, when I got back to London it looked like someone had put the dimmer switch on.” To see more of Lee Vincent Grubb’s photo essay on Cuba visit jocksandnerds.com/cuba Havana

Malecón roadway, Havana

/Lee Vincent Grubb /Chris May

Photographs Words

Town of Trinidad, central Cuba

Trinidad

Old Havana city centre

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Old Havana

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Shoeshiner, Trinidad

Street life, Old Havana

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Katharine Hamnett x YMC

/Chris May

All words

Katharine Hamnett, fashion designer

Katharine Hamnett has been engaging fashion with social activism for over 30 years. In 1984, she famously hijacked a Downing Street reception by smuggling in one of her “58% Don’t Want Pershing” anti-nuclear T-shirts and slipping it on before being photographed standing next to Margaret Thatcher. “She let out a shriek of horror,” says Hamnett with relish. Among Hamnett’s targets today is the clothing industry’s involvement in climate change and environmental damage. “I don’t think making clothes sustainably can be their raison d’être,” says Hamnett. “It’s got to be fashion first. But the way the industry is set up is an environmental issue. It’s the fourth-largest industry in any developed economy and the amount of CO2 emissions we generate from flying stuff around the world is phenomenal. Then there are the greenhouse gases from chemical fertilisers used in cotton agriculture, which

is 10 per cent of world agriculture. So we are massive contributors to climate change. “The whistle was blown on the clothing industry 25 years ago and I’m surprised that progress has been so slow in coming. But it is coming and the dinosaurs are starting to hit the wall. There’s a generation emerging who care. Marketing is defined as giving people what they want and these young people want clothes that they can wear with a free conscience. Thank god for the young. Their elders have really fucked things up.” Hamnett’s political awareness dawned in the late 1960s, while she was studying at Central Saint Martins school of art. “1968 was extreme for me,” says Hamnett.

“I’d lived a very sheltered life. I’d been to [prestigious English boarding school] Cheltenham Ladies’ College, my father was a government defence attaché. I had to tone my accent down when I went to Saint Martins because I sounded so posh. It was strictly a meritocracy and most of the students were working class. But by the time my PA was there she had to tone her accent up, because it was all posh girls. It breaks my heart the way the government is cutting support for arts education and for the arts in general. What is going to happen to this country? Support Labour, I say. Jeremy Corbyn was my constituency MP for 30 years and he was a good one and a very decent man. You’ve got my number. Think of a good T-shirt for Jeremy and I’ll do it.” The Katharine Hamnett x YMC collection is out now katharinehamnett.com youmustcreate.com

/ Kevin Davies

Photographs

Jimmy Collins, co-founder of YMC; Selene Collins, consultant; Katharine Hamnett; Jody Moss, consultant; Fraser Moss, co-founder of YMC; all wear T-shirts by Katharine Hamnett x YMC

Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers Sometimes it takes an outsider to open your eyes to the commonplace. That is the winning approach adopted by Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, an exhibition that presents images of Britain since the 1930s as seen through non-native eyes. Curated by celebrated British photographer Martin Parr, the images range from reportage and street photography to portraiture and architectural images. Featured names include Tina Barney, Bruce Davidson and Garry Winogrand from the US; French master Henri Cartier-Bresson; Dutch photographers Rineke Dijkstra and Hans Eijkelboom; Germany’s Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte; Japan’s Akihiko Okamura; and Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain. The exhibition Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers is open at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2 from 16 March barbican.org.uk A book of the same name is out on 15 March prestel.com

The Red Sheath, 2001 Photograph © Tina Barney, courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery

The coronation of King George VI, Trafalgar Square, London, England, 1937 Photograph © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Rolling Stones In 1962, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards formed the Rolling Stones in a scuzzy flat at the edgy SW10 end of London’s King’s Road. Style and musical integrity have kept the band credible for 54 years, while they have carried on joyously growing older disgracefully. Exhibitionism: The Rolling Stones, an exhibition of Rolling Stones paraphernalia, opens at the Saatchi Gallery, King’s Road, London SW3 on 5 April saatchigallery.com Breaking Stones, a book on the Rolling Stones’ formative years, featuring photographs by Terry O’Neill and Gered Mankowitz, is out on 4 April antiquecollectorsclub.com

The Rolling Stones recording at Olympic Studios, London, 1978 Photograph Helmut Newton

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OBSESS O V E R D E TA I L S

Create a beautiful website for your designs.

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

/Linus Ricard

Photograph

Brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec are widely regarded as the most innovative industrial designers to have emerged from France since Philippe Starck. They became major players at the Milan furniture fair in 2000, where their “tree-house bedroom” for Cappellini created a massive stir. Resembling a giant budgie cage, the piece was a bed hoisted up on collapsable steel supports and reached by ladder – ideal for people who live and work in one space, or peripatetic twenty-somethings. The Bouroullecs’ aesthetic involves what they call “poetic practicality”. In an interview with The New York Times, Erwan explained: “We don’t want to make only functional pieces. [This] is not just a table, and we don’t want to tell anyone whether it functions as sculpture in the middle of a room or as a place to toss your keys by the front door. Put it anywhere and use it your own way.” An exhibition of work by designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec opens at three venues in Rennes, France – Frac Bretagne, Les Champs Libres and Le Parlement de Bretagne – on 25 March fracbretagne.fr leschampslibres.fr bouroullec.com

Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec in their Paris studio

Issey Miyake Issey Miyake’s influence on fashion has been profound, and it has not been restricted to garments. His Issey Miyake and Twelve Black Girls show, which included Grace Jones, confronted fashion’s sidelining of black women 40 years ago, and he has also championed older people, using models in their seventies. Miyake has challenged convention in the wider design world too. When still a student in 1960, he wrote a protest letter to the World Design Conference in Tokyo, asking why clothing design was not included in the event. In 2007, he won any vestiges of the argument when he co-founded and co-designed 21_21 Design Sight, Japan’s first design museum. He has also set himself personal design challenges. One of the hardest tasks for a designer is creating costumes for dancers, where absolute freedom of movement is non-negotiable. His collaborations with choreographer William Forsythe and his iconoclastic Frankfurt Ballet in the 1990s remain landmark successes. Miyake Issey Exhibition: The Work of Miyake Issey opens at the National Art Center, Tokyo, on 16 March nact.jp Grace Jones wearing outfit by Issey Miyake at the Grammy Awards, 1983 Photograph Chris Walte

Don McCullin Photographer Don McCullin’s diary of journalistic assignments during the final four decades of the last century reads like a catalogue of hell and human stupidity: the civil wars in Cyprus and the Congo in 1964; the Vietnam War, 1965-68; the Six-Day War between Israel and its neighbours in 1967; the war in Biafra, 1968-69; the Khmer Rouge’s seizure of Cambodia, 1970-75; the war in Ireland and the cholera epidemic in Bangladesh in 1971; the Lebanese civil war in 1982; the Gulf war in 1991; India’s disease-ridden underclass, 1995-97; and the Aids epidemic in South Africa in 2000. And that is not a complete list. Any sensitive person who has lived through such horrors is likely to feel guilty about his own survival, and McCullin has admitted to that. The experiences were doubly traumatic for him because, unlike more hard-nosed photographers, he felt himself to be a participant in what was going on around him, not a mercenary observer. He felt compelled to stop and help the people he photographed rather than walk away from them in search of the next picture. There’s a shot taken by another photographer showing McCullin in Cyprus, carrying an elderly woman away from the fighting. Why did McCullin immerse himself in all this darkness? In an article in the book Don McCullin: The Impossible Peace,

Sheep going to the slaughter, early morning, near the Caledonian Road, London, 1965

published by Skira in 2012, the interviewer enquired whether McCullin had asked himself that question. “Only 10,000 times,” said the photographer. But he was, he explained, a campaigner before he was a professional craftsman. “I am trying to make the image impossible for you not to see. I do not want you to walk past any of my images. I believe I am trying to empower the image. I want you to say, what does this mean?” McCullin was born in central London’s St Pancras in 1935 and grew up in a two-room tenement nearby in Finsbury Park. His father died when he was 14 and after doing military service from 1954 to 1956, he travelled in Egypt, Sudan, Kenya and Yemen. His first published work was in The Observer in 1959, when he photographed Finsbury Park street gang the Guvnors. He was fortunate to live most of his career during Fleet Street’s heyday. He was with The Observer until 1964 and then spent a year with The Daily Telegraph. He joined The Sunday Times Magazine in 1966, staying with the Times Newspapers group until Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1981, when he quit. In a 1984 interview with Granta magazine, McCullin explained that he refused to work for an editor-in-chief who “wouldn’t bat an eyelid on hearing you’d died”. “The tragedy is that all these images I’ve put up didn’t really work,” McCullin told The Spectator in 2015. “I thought it might persuade people to understand a different version of what our lives on earth were

“I thought it might persuade people to understand a different version of what our lives on earth were meant to be” meant to be.” In the interview, McCullin describes an encounter with a dying albino boy in Biafra who silently took hold of his hand, one of 800 starving children he had found in a makeshift orphanage. All McCullin could give the boy was a barley sugar. “Don’t think that was easy for me, to look at that little boy who had licked out the inside of this French corn-beef tin and made it look like a brand new Rolls-Royce. I know where I’m coming from. I take more than I bring. I bring hope but I give nothing. That’s not a role I’m proud of… These are the bad, bad days of my life, that never leave me. I am pulling behind me the chains you will find on a prisoner. I am not free.” McCullin has said that his present, peaceful semiretirement in Somerset is a solace he has earned. Who would deny it? The Photo London art fair – which has awarded Don McCullin the accolade of Master of Photography 2016, with a special exhibition of his works – is at Somerset House, Strand, London WC2, 19-22 May photolondon.org somersethouse.org.uk

Unemployed men gathering coal, Sunderland, circa 1970s

African family with gun, Karo Tribe, Ethiopia, 2003 Photographs ÂŠ Don McCullin, courtesy of Hamiltons Gallery, London

Wake Up You! The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock For many people outside West Africa, Nigerian music of the 1970s begins and ends with Fela Kuti and King Sunny Adé. But afrobeat and jùjú are only the more visible aspects of a huge swathe of great sounds that mixed up highlife and traditional folk music with rock, funk, jazz and psychedelia, creating a magical new audio world. Today, artists such as Joni Haastrup, the Funkees, Noir, the Magnificent Zenians, War-Head Constriction, Tony Grey and the Black 7, Ify Jerry Krusade, the Hygrades and the Hykkers are mostly forgotten. They deserve another spell in the sun, and Los Angeles -based Now-Again Records is giving them one. Two, actually, with a pair of double LPs, each with a 100-page book. Now-Again was formed by Eothen Alapatt (aka Egon) in 2002, and made its name reissuing obscure US funk and soul treasures from the 1970s on CD and high-grade vinyl. Until 2011, Alapatt’s main gig was running Stones Throw Records, but these days he is fully focused on Now-Again and Madlib Invazion, a label he set up with LA producer and rapper Madlib. Now-Again looks set to become an important cog in the African rerelease world, alongside Sterns, Knitting Factory and Soundway. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Joni Haastrup, who was briefly a member of Ginger Baker’s Airforce and the leader of the influential MonoMono band, is the only notable omission from the Wake Up You! albums, which derive their name from Haastrup’s 1978 solo album, Wake Up Your Mind. But members of MonoMono are featured on one of the tracks on volume two of Wake Up You! and Soundway has reissued Haastrup’s key albums of the era – Give the Beggar a Chance and Dawn of Awareness, both made with MonoMono, and Wake Up Your Mind.

Tony Grey and the Black 7, Warri, Nigeria, 1978

The two-volume album and book Wake Up You! The Rise and Fall of Nigerian Rock, 1972-1977 is out on 15 April nowagainrecords.com

Drummer for the group Tony Grey and the Black 7, Warri, Nigeria, 1978

Heartworn Highways Time was when American country music was perceived to be the exclusive preserve of reactionary white bigots – as portrayed in Dennis Hopper’s 1969 movie Easy Rider or Neil Young’s ‘Southern Man’ on his 1970 album, After the Gold Rush. The real picture was always more complex, though for decades the longrunning national radio show Grand Ole Opry energetically championed clean-cut artists and traditional values. But a significant number of country artists have long lived by their own, dissident rules. In the 1930s, many of them played a heroic role in keeping American amphetamine manufacturers in business. The “outlaw country” movement of the mid-1970s was, essentially, the overdue recognition by the major record labels of an existing, left-leaning, deviant strand of the music. Willie Nelson became a flag-bearer for the style when in 1973 he grew his hair long and came out as a dope smoker. Other prominent

artists included Steve Earle, Guy Clark and Townes van Zandt, who are among those showcased in James Szalapski’s 1976 documentary, Heartworn Highways. At 82, Nelson is still out there. On a recent tour, his band bus was stopped by police outside New Orleans because officers in an overtaking patrol car smelled weed fumes exiting the windows. Everyone on board, including Nelson, had to step off the bus for questioning – except drummer Paul English, Nelson’s elder by a year, who was asleep on his bunk. “Didn’t they notice me?” English asked Nelson later. “They did,” replied Nelson. “But I told them you were dead.” A 40th-anniversary boxset of the country music documentary Heartworn Highways is out on 16 April lightintheattic.net

Uncle Seymour Washington and Townes van Zandt, 1976 Still courtesy of SeaLion Films/Light in the Attic

Real Food by Martin Parr Photographer Martin Parr is known for his revealing approach to social documentary. His latest book, Real Food, might be more accurately titled “Surreal Food”. It is a collection of garish and outlandish, refined and processed grub shot over the past 25 years in greasy spoons and fast-food joints around the world. True to form, the ironies come not from Parr but are inherent in his subjects – a Slovenian sausage unceremoniously plonked on a white platter that resembles something altogether less tasty, or stacked tins of Spam in Japan, where the product is regarded as a delicacy, reverently garlanded with cherry blossom. In the introduction Fergus Henderson, founder of London restaurant St John, affectionately likens Parr’s shots to “naughty seaside postcards”. The book Real Food by Martin Parr is out on 4 April phaidon.com Wells, Somerset, England, 2000 Photograph © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Norman Walsh developed the Tornado in 1983 due to the demanding market of athletes competing in major marathons and races across the globe, most notably the 1983 London Marathon. The shoe featured an ultra-lightweight upper, grounded to the iconic Vibram outsole with extra EVA cushioning in the midsole to combat the strenuous use and offer extra comfort.

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Richard Linklater Film director Richard Linklater’s latest release, Everybody Wants Some!!, is a comedy drama set in the mid-1980s. It’s about a group of college freshmen experiencing their first rush of unsupervised adulthood over a rowdy weekend before college proper begins. In the press pack, Linklater describes it as the “spiritual successor” to his much-loved 1993 hit, Dazed and Confused. “It’s the last weekend of freedom before classes start,” says Linklater, “and everybody wants some.” The trailer for Everybody Wants Some!! suggests another affectionate portrait of what it is like to be young and dumb, and is peopled with a similar mix of characters as Dazed and Confused – the tough jock, his dim-witted friend, the super-cool guy and, of course, the stoner and his words of wisdom. The soundtrack features classic cuts from the 1980s by Talking Heads, Blondie, Pat Benatar and Devo – and the film is named after a Van Halen song. In an interview with The Film Stage last year, Linklater explained: “You show up at college and you’re listening to Van Halen, but you go to discos to chase women, and then you end up at a punk club or a country bar. All that stuff was on the table, so it’s an interesting cultural moment because they go to an art party and they’re listening to the Talking Heads. It’s a cultural moment where you’re like, ‘Who am I? Am I punk? Am I new wave? Am I heavy metal?’” Linklater was born in Houston in 1960 and lives and works in Austin, which since the 1980s has been an indie-friendly alternative to Hollywood. After dropping out of university, he worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and acquired his love of film during shore-leave visits to the cinema. The epiphany came while watching Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. “At that point I was an unformed artist,” Linklater said in a 2011 interview in The New York Times. “But something was simmering in me, and Raging Bull brought it to a boil.” Linklater bought an entrylevel camera and some basic editing equipment and moved to Austin. He made a string of shorts before his first feature, It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, in 1988, shot

on Super 8 film and edited at a public-access cable TV station. His breakthrough came in 1991 with Slacker – reputed to have been made for $23,000 and which went on to gross $1.2m – and Dazed and Confused two years later. Linklater visits Hollywood as little as possible, following the bruising experience of making The Newton Boys in 1998. A plodding genre movie that 20th Century Fox dumped into the late-summer graveyard, it got mixed reviews and did little at the box office. Linklater is in any case the antithesis of your typical Hollywood director, the sort of guys Willem Dafoe half-jokingly refers to elsewhere in this issue as “people who wear baseball hats”. In an interview with The New Yorker in 2014, regular Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke said: “Almost every other director I’ve worked with hides behind the monitor – they love to huddle up with the director of photography and talk about ‘the light’ or ‘the frame’. Directors are interested in ‘If you turn a little to the left, your nose catches a light in a great way.’ Rick would puke if anybody said that on his set. Like, ‘What are we doing, an ad?’ We’re playing human beings here.” One of Linklater’s signatures is the use of loosely scripted and loosely structured plotlines. Another is filming the same actors over an extended period of time, as in the romantic-drama trilogy Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013). Alongside Hawke, other Linklater regulars include Matthew McConaughey, Jack Black and Patricia Arquette. In the coming-of-age drama Boyhood (2014), he brought the same cast together for a few days every year for 12 years. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph last year, Linklater talked about the challenges of making movies over extended timelines, particularly ones using

“We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it’s about bending the elements of a story into existence” the same actors. “Boyhood depended on the continued participation of young Ellar Coltrane [who played the protagonist],” said Linklater. “A boy of six may agree to star in a film that will be shot over the next 12 years of his life – but he cannot be held to it against his will. What if Ellar had hit adolescence and declared he wanted nothing to do with Boyhood? But in this case you had to give up full control, and admit you have a major collaborator sitting with you at all times – and that’s the unknown, the future. You’re counting on it being there, but you don’t know what it is yet.” The film Everybody Wants Some!! by Richard Linklater is out in UK cinemas on 13 May paramount.co.uk

SWEDISH MELANCHOLY AT ITS DRIEST www.stutterheim.com

Speculating about whether a public figure would approve or disapprove of something or other, years after they have left town, is a far from exact science. But it is a pretty safe bet that the couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga would recoil from modern social media. He was an intensely private man who only gave two press interviews during his entire life. His aversion to personal publicity led to the nickname “the monk of couture” – although this monk was said by his friends to mix the best dry martinis in Paris. In 1968, when he closed his couture house, he avoided publicity by simply locking the doors without prior announcement and walking away from it all. Balenciaga transformed the way 20thcentury designers dressed women by introducing revolutionary new silhouettes. Cubist art was a clear influence; another was the Japanism that had swept fin-desiècle French fashion, in which flowing, kimono-inspired shapes liberated women from the tyranny of corsets. Balenciaga’s achievements are being celebrated with a career-long retrospective that is part of the exhibition Game Changers: Reinventing the 20th Century Silhouette, curated by Karen van Godtsenhoven at Antwerp’s Mode Museum. “The foundation of Balenciaga’s legacy is the way he moved away from the hour-glass shape that had been the norm for dressing women’s bodies,” says Godtsenhoven. “He introduced pure, architectural lines to make an independent structure which separated garment and body, and his extreme, abstract silhouettes paved the way for Issey Miyake’s generation.”

Cristóbal Balenciaga

Game Changers: Reinventing the 20th Century Silhouette, an exhibition exploring the work of fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, opens at Mode Museum, Antwerp, on 18 March momu.be Cristobal Balenciaga, A/W 1958 Photograph Tom Kublin, courtesy of Balenciaga Archives

Atelier and Repairs

After cutting his teeth with Benetton, Maurizio Donadi spent the 1990s and 2000s working internationally for Levi’s XX, Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Diesel. In 2012, he went independent, co-founding brand consultancy Conduit Creative Office in Los Angeles. Donadi’s latest venture, Atelier and Repairs, is based in central London. The mission statement is “to produce less and repair more”, offering clothing repairs, customisation, repurposing and upcycling, with master tailor Scott Boyd-Errol demonstrating that a stitch in time can do more than save nine. Atelier and Repairs, 60-62 Titchfield Street, London W1 atelierandrepairs.com

Photograph courtesy of Atelier and Repairs

Robert Mapplethorpe Just as William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch had done for the written word a decade earlier, in the early 1970s Robert Mapplethorpe freed American photography from the repressive weight of federal anti-obscenity laws and the censorship that accompanied them. Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic portraits of submissives and dominants in New York’s BDSM scene took on the law – and the law lost. From 1967 to 1974, Mapplethorpe lived with Patti Smith, and shot the front cover of her debut album, Horses. In her memoir of their relationship, Just Kids, Smith wrote, “Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art… As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, ‘His obscenity is never obscene’.” In the early 1980s, Mapplethorpe’s erotically charged portraits of flowers caused almost as much controversy as his BDSM portraits. The documentary film Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures is out in UK cinemas on 22 April mapplethorpefilm.com The book Mapplethorpe Flora: The Complete Flowers is out on 14 March phaidon.com The exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium opens at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, on 15 March and at LACMA, Los Angeles, on 20 March getty.edu lacma.org

Self-portrait, 1980 Photograph Robert Mapplethorpe © The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

Vans 50th Anniversary If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Within months of their introduction in 1977, Californian sports brand Vans’ Sk8-Hi high-top sneakers became the sine qua non of skater footwear. Originally known as Style 38, the Sk8-Hi has survived the past four decades with only minor tweaks. Vans – which began life as the Van Doren Rubber Company, producing deck shoes – has its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, the brand is releasing 50 new colourways of the Sk8-Hi, from flat-wash combinations to floral and geometric designs. Meanwhile House of Vans, a transformation of the Old Vic Tunnels under Waterloo station that opened in 2014 as an indoor skate park and arts hub, continues to present live bands, film screenings and art exhibitions. A 50th-anniversary edition of the book Vans: Off the Wall is out on 22 March abramsbooks.com vans.co.uk A Santa Monica local with his ’57 Chevrolet Stepside, 1977 Photograph © Wynn Miller

Earlham Street, Covent Garden

w w w. fa r a h .c o.u k

EASTER THURSDAY

THREE FLOORS OF MUSIC

Thursday 24th March 6pm–3am Ace Hotel London, 100 Shoreditch High St, London E1 6JQ Tickets £10 available from residentadvisor.net

Jocks&Nerds

Scream If You Want to Go Faster Brooklyn-based British photographer Phil Knott’s photo essays on subcultures are ambience-rich mixes of reportage and portraiture. His latest project is Scream If You Want to Go Faster. “The title comes from the cry of a fairground operator on the waltzer,” says Knott. “He would shoot over records, ‘Hold tight ladies. Scream if you want to go faster!’ I began the project in London in 1999. I had become fascinated with skate culture, kids on pieces of wood with four wheels doing incredible things. It’s like we need to keep pushing further and faster. And I was interested in the personalisation of modes of transport – customised cars and bikes and so on. There was something magical about these objects.” Lower East Side, New York, 2005

/ Phil Knott

Photographs

Puerto Rican Day, Brooklyn, New York, 2006

U K / L O N D O N / M A N C H E S T E R / L I V E R P O O L / S H E F F I E L D / N OT T I N G H A M / N E W C A S T L E / B R I G H TO N / C A R D I F F / E D I N B U R G H / G L A S G OW / L E E D S / B I R M I N G H A M J A P A N / A O YA M A / N A G O YA P A R C O / O S A K A / S A P P O R O / F U K U O K A / V E N U S F O R T / R E R A / KO K U R A

P R E T T YG R E E N . CO M

Mini Nascar race, Upstate New York, 2003

Mini Nascar racer, Upstate New York, 2003

Parking lot, Memphis, Tennessee, 1998

Mini Nascar racer, Upstate New York, 2003

Mini Nascar race, Upstate New York, 2003

TOMMY FYNN \ THE HEATHROW PRESTIGE \ TREBOUX PHOTO

H EAT H R OW P R E ST I G E THE DCSHOES.COM

WITH

Puerto Rican Day, Brooklyn, New York, 2006

Manhattan, New York, 1999

Rapper Lil Wayne, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2000

Manhattan, New York, 2004

Manhattan Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, 1999

INTRODUCING THE ELEMENT MINERAL DPM COLLECTION SPRING 2016 ANTON JACKET - DRAPER FLEECE PHOTO BY ELEMENT ADVOCATE : BRIAN GABERMAN @ELEMENTBRAND

LEMENTSPRING16

ELEMENTBRAND.COM

Stunt rider, Long Island, New York, 2004

Musician David Holmes, London, 2000

Wadeson Street, Bethnal Green, London, 1999

Skateboarder Harold Hunter and friend, Manhattan, New York, 2002

Model Daniel Jackson

Jocks&Nerds x Timberland

Timberland Photograph Derrick Santini Styling Mark Anthony Bradley

Timberland began in rural New England, but is now recognised around the world. And as the label has travelled, so has its apparel, with its two-eye boat shoes stepping off the deck and into the metropolis. Timberland first produced its boat shoes in 1979, and since then they have become as much part of the brandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heritage as the classic yellow boot. Still manufactured on the original machines, with premium leather uppers and siped rubber soles, these days the shoes are as good a match for the narrow streets and cobbled canals of London as for treading the decks on the east coast of the US. timberland.co.uk

Greenfield Gardens

Jacket by Arcâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;teryx.

Top by Hackett; jacket and shorts by Sunspel.

/Mark Mattock

Photographs

Eau de toilette by Carven.

Espresso maker by Alessi x Illy, designed by Michele De Lucchi.

Glasses by Ray-Ban.

Chair by Emeco, designed by Jasper Morrison.

Headphones by Bang and Olufsen.

Watch by Nixon.

GPS sport watch by Garmin.

Jacket, top, bag, watch and Swiss army knife by Victorinox.

Shorts by Orlebar Brown.

Watch by Raymond Weil.

Trainers by Vans.

Shoes by Red Wing Shoes.

Street Twin by Triumph Motorcycles.

UK stockists on MasterCraftUnion include: Selfridges, Harvey Nichols,The Library (London), whilst international stockists include; L’Eclaireur (Paris) – Antonia / Excelsior (Milan) – Joyce (Hong Kong) – Apropos (Koln), Pool (Munich) – Maxfield (LA). Prices range from: £390 – £600. www.MasterCraftUnion.com

Bloom Twins

In 1964, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev watched with alarm as the Beatles’ cultural revolution spread east and threatened to infect Soviet youth. Brezhnev’s solution was to set up the Melodiya label, a state monopoly that aimed to defuse the situation by releasing pop and rock records made by officially approved, heavily censored artists. In response, a generation of samizdat (underground) bands emerged, obliged to release their recordings on used X-ray film salvaged from hospital wastebins. This story is told in Stephen Coates’ recently published X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone.

/ Chris May

All words

In Russia today, as Putin reverses the freedoms that followed the downfall of the USSR, samizdat descendants such as Pussy Riot are at the forefront of resistance. In Ukraine, under Soviet control until 1991, they have also raised their voices. In 2013, when the now self-exiled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych attempted to return the country to Moscow’s orbit, a million people gathered in Kiev’s Independence Square to

protest – and be entertained by bands such as Bloom Twins, led by twin sisters Anna and Sonia Kupriienko, whose set included Bob Marley and Peter Tosh’s anthem ‘Get Up, Stand Up’. The sisters, now based in London, call their music “dark pop”, and you will not have heard a version of ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ like it. They write their own songs, too, and among their admirers is Iggy Pop, who made Bloom Twins Artist of the Week on MTV in 2013.

Bloom Twins’ debut album is out later this year bloomtwins.com Photograph / Owen Harvey

The best things in life are three GB1531

Applewood Road Applewood Road “A flawless set that has to be the most haunting release of the past year” - Sunday Times

GB1530

Binker and Moses Dem Ones

Best Jazz Act 2015 MOBO Awards “A fascinating set of contemporary, freely improvised jazz, beautifully recorded in vintage style onto 180g vinyl” - Jazz Journal

RSGB1002

The James Taylor Quartet Bumpin’ On Frith Street Early April release for the first JTQ quartet-only recording for a decade

Rogerio Igarashi Vaz “Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy,” said Frank Sinatra, “but the Bible says love your enemy.” It’s Rogerio Igarashi Vaz’s favourite motto. Born in Brazil but resident in Japan since 1994, Vaz is among the hottest mixologists in Tokyo. He runs Bar Trench in Shibuya, a happening neighbourhood packed with boutiques and niche music venues. Vaz does things with absinthe, aquavit, mezcal, pisco and cachaça that initiates say are works of art, and his Try If You Are a Man cocktail poses an irresistible challenge. Cheers! small-axe.net/bar-trench Photograph

/ Martin Holtkamp

Ross Allen

Photograph

/Sean Alexander Geraghty

DJs are skilled at managing portmanteau careers, and none more so than Ross Allen. He is launching a new label, Meltdown Music Productions, he hosts the Sunday evening Meltdown Show on digital station Mi-Soul, he is a freelance A&R for labels such as Virgin, Ninja, Domino and Island, he produces and manages artists, and he has a monthly residency at the House of St Barnabas in Soho, London. He also used to write for the late, lamented magazine Straight No Chaser. “I started DJing 30 years ago,” says Allen. “I was the kid at school who was buying import records and had all the new soul, funk, electro, hip-hop and go-go releases. Everything sort of blossomed from there. But actually, I’ve had to cut down on the DJing recently. I was managing [the band] London Grammar up until last year and I was on the road with them for 18 months, flying in and out. So DJ gigs were having to get cancelled left, right and centre. In the end I thought, I’m done with this, I’ve done 30 years of DJing, it’s time to move on. “Right now, the new label is my main project. Plus there’s a band called UMS, who I’m in negotiation with a major label about. And I’ve been producing some new stuff from Jeb Loy Nichols and may do some more. He’s a singer/songwriter from Wyoming who now lives in Wales and whose style straddles country, soul, folk, reggae and blues.” facebook.com/rossallensmeltdown

Jake Auerbach The remarkable son of a remarkable father, documentary filmmaker Jake Auerbach is the only child of the painter Frank Auerbach. His latest release is Frank, and it is a film he never thought he would make. “It felt a bit too close,” he says. “It came about because my father is in his eighties and doesn’t travel anymore, and when an exhibition of his work was put on in Germany, I decided to film it for him – he hadn’t seen some of the pictures for 60 years. Then it seemed silly not to film his responses. So it began as a home movie really.” Auerbach left the BBC at the end of the 1990s to set up Jake Auerbach Films, and distributes his documentaries through the company’s website via streaming or sale of DVDs. “I was sitting next to a very wealthy man at dinner and he asked how many films I owned,” says Auerbach, recalling the point at which he made the decision to set up on his own. “I said, ‘None, the copyrights are all with the corporations who commissioned them.’ He said I was crazy, that ownership was everything. This was just at the start of the digital revolution, and I thought I would give it a go. The company pays for itself, just about, though my bank manager would probably say it was a bad business decision.” The DVD of Jake Auerbach’s documentary film, Frank, about his father Frank Auerbach, is out now jakeauerbachfilms.com

/ Kevin Davies

Photograph

Hartmut Geerken

/Julian Baumann

Photograph

Writer and musician Hartmut Geerken discovered Sun Ra in the mid-1950s, aged about 16, while listening to JoachimErnst Berendt’s pioneering jazz programme on German radio. Entrancement led to obsession and, over the past 60 years, Geerken has put together probably the most comprehensive Sun Ra archive on the planet – including original pressings of all his LPs and all but three of his singles, almost 500 unreleased concert and rehearsal recordings, and a vast library of literature, photographs, film footage, correspondence, concert programmes, posters, flyers and business cards. Geerken began a lifelong friendship with Sun Ra in 1971, while working in Cairo for German cultural organisation the Goethe-Institut. “I read a negative review of Sun Ra’s first European tour in Der Spiegel,” says Geerken. “So I wrote, inviting him to come and visit his spiritual home. I didn’t get a reply. About six months later, I was driving from Cairo to Giza when I picked up a hitchhiker who I realised, because of his clothes, was not Egyptian. He introduced himself as John Gilmore [Ra’s longtime tenor-saxophonist]. I slammed on the brake. I said, ‘You are John Gilmore? I have all your records with Sonny.’ We were both astonished. He took me to meet Sun Ra. He said he had never received my letter. He had arrived with 21 of his musicians without any concert bookings.” Geerken arranged performances and accompanied Sun Ra inside the Great Pyramid in Giza. Geerken’s Omniverse Sun Ra, a sumptuous and scholarly compendium of essays, photographs and definitive discography, co-authored with Chris Trent, was published in 1994. Secondhand copies have sold for around £1,000. A revised and expanded edition has now been published by London-based Sun Ra specialists Art Yard Records. At £49.95, you may no longer need a bank loan to buy it. Omniverse Sun Ra by Hartmut Geerken is out now artyardrecords.co.uk hartmutgeerken.com

Socks by Art Comes First; jacket by Alexander McQueen from Matches; trousers by Y-3 from Matches; shirt by Spencer Hart; shoes by Uptown Yardie; hat, stylist’s own; sunglasses by Dita.

Lono Wears White Sox Photographs

/Dean Chalkley Styling/Harris Elliott

Lono Brazil is a New York-based DJ, remixer and music producer. In a career spanning four decades he has worked with some of hip-hop and house music’s great pioneers, among them Pete Rock, Red Alert, Russell Simmons, Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy. This summer sees the release of Brazil’s latest EP, recorded under the moniker Loft Punks, a reference to his hero David Mancuso. His vocals can also be found on Ron Trent’s latest album, which is out later this year. mixcloud.com/mrbrazil

Socks and jacket by Lewis Leathers; kilt from Cenci; shirt by Spencer Hart; shoes by GH Bass; hat by Harris Elliott x CA4LA; sunglasses, stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

Socks by American Apparel; jacket from The Vintage Showroom; trousers and garter, stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own; shirt by Wooyoungmi; shoes by Peter Non; hat by By Walid.

Socks by Uniqlo; jacket by Stüssy; trousers by Casely-Hayford; shirt by Spencer Hart; shoes by Peter Non; hat, model’s own; military braid from Cenci; badge by Christopher Nemeth.

Socks by Topman; jacket by Lewis Leathers; tracksuit bottoms by CP Company; shirt by Spencer Hart; shoes by Casely-Hayford; hat by Art Comes First; gloves by Dents, sunglasses, stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own. Bicycle by Tokyobike.

Socks by Uniqlo; jacket by CP Company; trousers by Comme des Garçons; shoes by Uptown Yardie; sunglasses, stylist’s own.

Socks by Uniqlo; sweater by Art Comes First; shorts by Mohsin; shirt by Spencer Hart; shoes by Casely-Hayford; beret, tie and leggings, modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own; sunglasses, stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

/Britta D at Carol Hayes Management using Verso Skincare /Declan Slattery and Ken Street Styling Assistant/ Miko Shimizu Digital Equipment /courtesy of ThreeFourSnap threefoursnap.com

Grooming

Photographic Assistants

Photographs

/James Dimmock Styling/Mark Anthony Bradley Words/Chris May

From the outlaw biker Vance in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Loveless to troubled director Pasolini in Abel Ferrara’s eponymous film, stage and screen actor

Willem

Dafoe is best known for his portrayals of people on the transgressive margins of society.

master of characterisation with little over a year of formal training, Dafoe learned his craft first in the touring company Theatre X in his hometown of Milwaukee in the early 1970s, then in the experimental Wooster Group in New York. Born in 1955 and brought up in Wisconsin in America’s Midwest, Dafoe was one of seven siblings, five of them sisters. He studied drama at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but left after his first year to join Theatre X. He moved to New York in 1976, attracted by its downtown arts scene, and joined the highly regarded Performance Group. This avantgarde theatre collective was in the process of morphing into the Wooster Group, which he worked with until the early 2000s. Dafoe began a parallel career as a screen actor in 1980, in Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, but he was removed from the final cut after Cimino fired him for laughing during a lighting test. He reentered the movies more successfully in 1982, in Bigelow’s The Loveless. 74

Women have been key in shaping Dafoe and helping him develop as an actor. His parents, a surgeon and a nurse, worked incredibly hard, meaning his older sisters had to pick up the slack and run the household. When he moved to New York, he became the partner of Wooster Group director Elizabeth LeCompte, a formidable figure 11 years his senior. The relationship lasted until 2004. The following year he married Italian director and actress Giada Colagrande, another strong woman with whom he frequently collaborates. Dafoe received his first Oscar nomination in 1986, for his role as dope-smoking Sergeant Grodin in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. He has since worked with many of cinema’s most remarkable directors, including Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Lars von Trier, Spike Lee and Wes Anderson. Offbeat collaborations outside the world of film include being guest vocalist on Lou Reed’s album The Raven in 2002, and working with performance artist Marina Abramović and singer Antony Hegarty in 2011.

Jacket by Bally; trousers by Gieves and Hawkes; sweater by Uniqlo.

much having to eat fast, it was more you had to forage for food, you were kind of on your own. I learned how to cook when I was very young. Basically, I was raised by my sisters. Did your parents encourage your interest in the performing arts? Not particularly, but they didn’t discourage it either. I think they were overwhelmed with work and by having all these kids and they thought that I was the one they could let go. I only learned later that they weren’t sure about me pursuing performance. But because I didn’t have any formal acting training, or very little anyway, I was considered to be outside of their usual path of paying for their kids to train for a professional career. I was never a kid who had a vision of being an actor. I didn’t watch much TV and I wasn’t really into movies. Acting was something that I liked to do but never thought of as a profession. I kind of bumped along and then after a certain amount of time I thought, well, I guess I’m an actor because that’s how I make my living. I just approached it as something fun to do. I would go towards situations and people. They weren’t necessarily career choices. They were what I liked doing at the time. I read somewhere that your parents excluded themselves from one room in the family house, so that there was somewhere for the children to have sex with their partners. It’s true. They had this theory that it was more comfortable than doing it in the back seat of a car.

Jacket by Marc Jacobs; shirt and sweater by John Smedley.

There’s no theatrical tradition in your family. What motivated you to become an actor? It probably had to do with coming from a big family. There are lots of personalities, you have a tribe and you all take up your positions in it. I was the one who found his identity through performing. It was partly about getting attention. They say people in large families also have to eat fast… It’s true. And I do to this day. I came from a very chaotic household, because both of my parents worked very long hours. So it wasn’t so

Did you extend the same facility to your son, Jack? Not really, because he grew up in a loft in New York. We had almost the opposite situation there, because in a traditional loft there’s barely any separation between rooms. Of course, he grew up differently, being in New York. He could do whatever. What led you to leave Milwaukee and move to New York? I was touring with Theatre X,

and the director of the Performance Group saw me somewhere and said, “Hey kid, if you’re ever in New York come by and see me.” It was an invitation but it wasn’t very concrete, it wasn’t a job offer. But when my time with Theatre X ran its course, I went to New York trying to figure out what to do. The usual career paths of Broadway or off-Broadway or television weren’t immediately available to me and weren’t what attracted me anyway. What attracted me was what was going on downtown. There was a particular energy in New York at the time, in music, in theatre, in dance, all the arts. It was like going to Mecca. So I knocked on the Performance Group’s door.

because Cimino had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture for The Deer Hunter, and it had a great cast. They were filming in Montana and I was supposed to be there for two weeks, but it turned into three months. One day, we were standing around while they were doing lighting set ups and this woman whispered a joke in my ear and I laughed. And Cimino said, “Willem, step out.” And that was it. I was out and my role was cut.

And from there, what led to the movies? Some people associated with Kathryn Bigelow saw me in a performance by the Wooster Group. They said, “Would you like to be in this movie?” I read the script and said yes. I’d already worked as a glorified extra in Heaven’s Gate and I kind of parlayed that into making them believe I was up to it, and so I got cast for The Loveless, Kathryn’s first feature-length movie. It was my first big screen role. It didn’t get a regular release for many years. It played the festival circuit and got some international release, including being a kind of midnight movie in London. And then this woman, Phyllis Carlyle, saw the movie and found me in the phone book. She called me up and said, “Listen, do you want to do more of this, because if you do, I think I can help you.” And I said, “Yes, I think I do.” She was my manager until the mid-1990s.

Films can entertain or inform, and an unusually high proportion of your work does both. But above all it encourages the viewer to “face the strange”, as David Bowie sang in ‘Changes’. I like the Bowie quote. But for me the words “entertain” and “inform” are a little tricky. I would rather say “inspire”. I think if you have a shift in what you see, rather than just seeing what you already know, you might, for want of better words, learn something. If you’re inspired, that is entertaining. It’s better than being entertained because it gives you a kind of energy. Films can help you find the key to a certain kind of mystery, to a certain kind of poetry. As an actor, that’s always been my ambition. I say “inform” is a funny word because I never consciously know what I’m informing the audience of. My intention is to play with certain characters and situations that help us understand the mysteries, things we can’t explain… to confront the other, to paraphrase Bowie. I think anybody,

Before starring in The Loveless, how had the Heaven’s Gate gig come about? A friend called me up and said, “They’re looking for people with ethnic faces. What you have to do is submit a picture, and if they like your face they’ll call you in and then you have to do this monologue in English and in another language.” I did that and got called in. A Belgian friend had taught me to do the monologue in Flemish, which I learnt phonetically. It seemed like a big opportunity, there was a lot of anticipation around the film,

Top by Lanvin; trousers by Neil Barrett.

Coat by Pal Zileri; trousers by Z Zegna; jacket by Massimo Piombo; shirt and pocket square by Caruso; boots by Block and Last; scarf, stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

Jacket by Gieves and Hawkes; shirt by Caruso.

regardless of who they are and where they come from, gets turned on when they’re put in touch with those things. And although a lot of acting is verbal, the experience for the audience is often beyond words, whether they’re watching a narrative performing art, or a non-verbal one such as dance. How did it feel being at the receiving end of protests from the religious right following the release of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988? What I felt was most difficult was that the movie would always be seen through that filter. In the States, and probably elsewhere

Jacket by Polo Ralph Lauren; shirt by Berluti.

too, the protests did impact on distribution. So I think what is really a good film didn’t get its day. While some people would argue that the protests helped raise interest in it, I would say no, they created a cloud around the film that kept people from seeing it. In some cases, distributors were bullied into not distributing it. And there has been some fallout for me on a personal level on a couple of occasions. As late as last year I was rejected for a movie because the financiers were getting their funds from faith-based groups and they didn’t want the association. It may have been because of my more recent work in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist [2009] or Nymphomaniac [2013]. Last year, we profiled a British wardrobe master. He’s worked with Bertolucci,

Spielberg, Tim Burton, Ridley Scott and so on. He said that “directors are like Roman emperors, they’re all slightly mad”. What’s been your experience of directors? The slightly mad ones are the ones that I like. The best stories most often come from people on the margins. It’s kind of a joke, but I don’t generally work with people who wear baseball hats. The director is very important to me. I don’t believe in creation by committee. You have to get behind one vision. I like having someone trying to express something and having me being the channel for them to express it. I like serving someone else’s vision. That’s my way of learning. And if you want to do that, you want to do it for people who have very personal and unique visions. As well as directorial guidance, you’ve also said that simply having the right costume can get you into a role. I think performing is an exercise in doing tasks in a full,

concentrated, focused way. You’re always looking for things that trigger you into that state where you don’t think about anything other than what you’re doing. You don’t think about what it means, you’re just intoxicated in the doing of it. A costume can be a device to encourage that. It’s something that gets you somewhere that you normally can’t get to through traditional psychological routes. It works on an animal level. I’m always looking for those triggers. When we spoke about your role in Pasolini last summer, you mentioned that Pasolini’s family had lent you his spectacles and some of his clothing for the shoot. I guess costumes don’t get more helpful than that. They were like relics. It brings you closer when you have such tangible things. It allows you to flirt with ghosts. In any system of beliefs, sometimes you need touchstones to hold onto, to help you in your belief. And without getting too esoteric about it, Pasolini’s items helped us make something that would be in the spirit of him – as much as we could as Americans, as much as we could for people in Italy, as much as we could with him as a

Jacket by Costume National; sweater by John Smedley.

Overcoat by Paul Smith; trousers by DSquared2; coat by Christopher Kane; shirt by Caruso; sunglasses by Bridges and Brows.

Jacket by Acne; shirt by Richard James.

prophet, and as much as his thoughts and ideas guide us today. You divide your year mainly between New York and Rome, with a lot of travelling to other places. Do you ever feel the lack of a fixed geographical centre? Or has 40 years of being a peripatetic actor prepared you for it? I am a nester, but I’m used to it, I’m always happy to travel. Even when I had a home with the Wooster Group for almost 30 years, we toured a lot. I still love taking planes. Airports are one of my favourite places. Really. There are certain practicalities, but an airport is a special place, where everybody’s in transition. Airports hold people who are becoming. And my wife travels with me most often, which helps.

If you’re inspired, that is entertaining. It’s better than being entertained because it gives you a kind of energy. Films can help you find the key to a certain kind of mystery, to a certain kind of poetry. As an actor, that’s always been my ambition Travel can be debilitating though, however much you enjoy it. How do you stay tuned? One thing is that I do yoga. Every morning except Saturdays, new moons and full moons. I do an hour and a half. What about diet? You’re vegetarian, is that right? Actually, I’m vegan now. So is Giada. I was vegetarian, but then I came to Italy and I had a whole new experience with food. Then Giada, who is very educated about nutrition and also about the food industry, started turning me on to information about the wisdom of being vegetarian. In 2014, I had to lose a lot of weight for the movie My Hindu Friend, where I played a cancer survivor, so I tried a vegan diet. It gave me terrific energy. So I’ve remained a vegan basically, though sometimes I will have some fish. Do you have a therapist? Never had one. I could say I’ve never needed a therapist – but you might get an argument about that from some people. When I was working on Antichrist I studied 84

cognitive behavioural therapy so I could understand the methods used in the story. But I’ve never been attracted to therapy. I’m not saying I’m proud of that, I just never got there. Are you attracted to forceful women? Elizabeth LeCompte certainly comes across as forceful. Yes, and Giada is as well. Giada could beat Liz up in a match. But I always get uncomfortable when I read a man being interviewed who says he really likes women. Like, in what way does he really like them? I’m a guy that grew up in middle America, but I’ve always sought out people with different points of view or lifestyles. I’ve always identified with the other, in a community that, in my experience, is heavily populated by women and gay men. While I enjoy the friendships I have with guys, I feel like I don’t speak their language and I don’t aspire to the same things that they do. When I’m in their company, I don’t necessarily share their ambitions and agreed-on modes of talking to each other. So I have to kind of pass. There’s also a natural competitiveness with men that’s a drag. Not that it doesn’t exist with women, but it’s different somehow. I’ve never had any close male friends. But you don’t know what you’re missing if you’ve never had it, and if you’ve got your hands full, you’ve got your hands full. And I think that the old boy network not only disadvantages women, it also stunts men’s personal growth. You once said you approach every role with a beginner’s mind and an amateur’s love. Do you still stand by that? Absolutely. Here’s the deal. What I love most about every art form is the humanity of it and how it gets expressed. I think that’s the purpose of culture, to elevate how we see our lives. And when you speak of someone being a professional, what’s often implied is that here is someone who is very successful at their craft, at the technicalities of it. Such a level of perfection sometimes closes out the mysteries, the humanity, the vulnerability, the specialness. [Dancer and choreographer] Martha Graham, watching a technically gifted dancer rehearse, once said, “That’s perfect but it’s too efficient.” I was recently in Cleveland, Ohio, shooting a film. One of the places that Cleveland has is a very commercial tourist attraction called the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And one day I had a lot of time off, and there’s not so much to do in Cleveland, so I went. The thing that it does have is a lot of fantastic archival film footage. Early blues people, early rock’n’roll, early country. I watched this stuff, and it was so inspiring precisely because it wasn’t slick. The performances and recordings weren’t technically perfect, they were often very rough. You really had that sense of a person from the tribe getting in front of the other people in the tribe and showing what they had. And doing it from the heart.

I love the way you take yourself out of your comfort zone as an actor. How did you come to be working on The Life and Death of Marina Abramović in 2011? I had known Marina for years. She was a neighbour of mine in New York. She lived in the same co-op that the Performance Group was in. I could see her bedroom window from my bedroom window. But the collaboration was really through [director] Bob Wilson. I’d also known him for years. He’d come to shows, and there was kind of an understanding that I wanted to work with him. Finally, he called me up and said, “I think I have something for us to do together.” It was a very good experience. That show was special, because a lot was demanded of me in it. Marina is a great artist, and also Antony Hegarty wrote some beautiful music. Did your participation in Lou Reed’s album The Raven in 2002 also come about by being part of the downtown New York scene? Pretty much. Over the last 20 or so years of Lou’s life, we had lots of mutual friends and I got to know him and his wife. And when he did a kind of homemade project, like The Raven, he’d call up people he knew to help with it. It happened because our worlds overlapped. I hear you’re planning a new movie with Abel Ferrara. How’s that coming along? We’re working on it, but we haven’t made it yet. It’s called Siberia. It’s based on Carl Jung’s The Red Book [a diary of Jung’s dreamworld experiences, written between 1914 and 1917]. There are funding difficulties. But when are there not funding difficulties? We’re determined to make it. Willem Dafoe stars in several upcoming films, including My Hindu Friend, What Happened to Monday? and Dog Eat Dog The Great Wall, directed by Zhang Yimou, is out in November universalpictures.com

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Blaze and Boogie

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Blaze wears jacket by Richard Anderson; jeans by Martine Rose; shirt by Hackett; sunglasses by Dita; tie from Cenci; hat and socks, modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own. Ras wears jacket by CaselyHayford; jeans by Martine Rose; shirt by Hackett; sunglasses by Thom Browne; tie from Cenci.

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Meilyr Photographs

/Derrick Santini Styling/Mark Anthony Bradley Words/Chris May

Race Horses / Rome / David Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’ / Stealing Sheep / Eric B and Rakim / Lady Chatterley’s Lover / Ken Loach’s The Spirit of ’45

orn and brought up in the small town of Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast, by the time he was 16, singer, songwriter and musician Meilyr Jones was “absolutely desperate” to come to London. A tuba player in the school orchestra, Jones opted to continue his studies at London’s Royal Academy of Music from 2005 to 2008. Though he still speaks with a lilting west Wales accent, he has lived in the capital ever since, aside from a highly productive spell in Rome in 2013. Jones spent less than two months in the Italian city, but it was an auspicious break, cleaning out the sense of loss left by the recent break-up of his band – Race Horses, formed eight years earlier – and a longstanding relationship. The album he has made inspired by these events, 2013, is a delicious mix of muscular but nuanced psychedelic pop and baroque chamber music, recorded with a 30-strong orchestra made up of rock, classical, jazz and brass band players – including Lucy Mercer from Stealing Sheep on drums, Robert Wyatt band member Ros Stephen on violin and Jones’s brother on timpani. Jones also made use of a community choir in Glasgow, three trombonists recorded in a cemetery, field recordings of birds, a Japanese accordionist Jones met in Rome, a flash of David Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’ and a church organ recorded in Bristol. The outstanding arrangements are by Jones, orchestrated by his friend Joseph Davies. “I really felt the break-up of Race Horses, because for so long I had filtered everything through it,” says Jones. “When you’re in a band it’s like a second family. Plus I ended a long-term, beautiful relationship around the same time. So suddenly I had all this freedom, but it was tied up with feelings of regret. I had a little money to play with and I decided I needed to go somewhere unfamiliar, where I could be out of my depth, for a proper change. I was reading a lot about sculpture and art and early music, and Rome ticked all the right boxes. And I

JONES thought, even if I have a terrible time it will be better than being in the same stagnant situation with reminders of things that have ended. Even if I don’t get on with anyone and it’s strange, that will be fine. I found a place to stay on Craigslist. It was in a pretty rough district, but there was a nice feel about the way the ad was written. I had an intuition that something good was going to happen, but other than that, no expectations.” Jones’s intuition proved right. “Rome was the first thing I’d done for a long time that was just me,” he says. “It was a revelation. To be in a new city with people speaking a language I didn’t understand. I didn’t know anyone when I got there – though one of the people I met I now consider to be one of my best friends. In the evening I’d go to parties and meals with the people I was staying with, or go on a moped to someone else’s house and drink some wine. It made me feel alive again. And I loved the way Rome combines high culture with a really tacky, lowbrow aspect, a mischievous roughness. There is so much beauty but the place is real, it hasn’t been sanitised yet. “During the first few nights, I had lots of dreams. It felt as though I was getting rid of all the bad stuff. And then newness came through. The first morning I woke up at five and there was this incredible red sunrise outside my window. I spent around six hours each day just walking around the city, visiting churches and looking at paintings and

sculptures. In frescoes I was struck by the shading of light and colour, and it resonated with the idea I had of making my music more pastel, less primary than is usual with pop – towards a pliant warming rather than a hard beat, towards the things in between, the quieter things, not just the strong colours.” The first song Jones wrote for 2013 was ‘Refugees’, which was released as a single last summer. “It grew out of three things,” he says. “My shifting relationship with Wales, Ken Loach’s film The Spirit of ’45, and the scene in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover where she first sees Mellors naked.” It is a rousing song but also a gentle one, a combination that recurs frequently on 2013. There are brighter, more pop-driven moments too, such as ‘How to Recognise a Work of Art’, in which Jones wanted to “write about art, but not in a wanky way”. An unexpected influence on 2013 was Eric B & Rakim’s Paid in Full album, which Jones loves “because all the weaknesses and the strengths are worn with such confidence” and because it introduced him to the idea of recycling music. “It made me think of the time when I was working at [central London church] St Martin-inthe-Fields as an usher,” he says. “I stood outside the door and there was baroque music inside and outside there were people singing in the square, and I thought, I have to make a record that sounds like this moment. Or rather, that sounds like my life, that I’m alive and these are things I’m hearing.” The album 2013 by Meilyr Jones is out now moshimoshimusic.com meilyrjones.com Jones’s UK tour starts at Ramsgate Music Hall on 25 April. He performs at Field Day 2016, Victoria Park, London E9 on 11 June fielddayfestivals.com

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Suit and shirt by Etro.

Coat by Ermenegildo Zegna; trousers by Pringle of Scotland; shirt by Acne; shoes, modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own; socks by Pantherella.

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Jacket by Caruso; jeans by APC; sweater by John Smedley.

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Sweater by Paul Smith.

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Jason Leung

Blazer and shirt by Corneliani; trousers and belt by Canali; jacket by Pringle of Scotland; T-shirt by Merz B Schwanen; sunglasses by Cubitts.

/Elliot Kennedy Styling/Rose Forde

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Jacket, trousers and belt by Lanvin; shirt by E Tautz; T-shirt by Merz B Schwanen; scarf by Margaret Howell.

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Suit by Yohji Yamamoto; top by Merz B Schwanen; rings, modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

Jacket, shirt and trousers by Emporio Armani; sandals by Margaret Howell; sunglasses by Persol; socks by Merz B Schwanen; hat, stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

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Blazer and shirt by Corneliani; trousers by Canali.

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Words

Kevin

Rowland Dexys frontman discusses his creative process ahead of the band’s forthcoming album of traditional Irish songs.

hen we meet for the interview, Kevin Rowland is dressed stylishly – Lee denim top, braces and checked shirt, brown trousers and boots – and this comes as no surprise. Clothes have always been important to him. In his two bands, Dexys Midnight Runners and later Dexys, he has fashioned five distinctive looks that remain powerful images. Rowland has always sought to differentiate himself from others, but it is the individuality of his songwriting that we are here to discuss rather than his sartorial instincts. He has honed his craft since the mid-1970s through a series of landmark albums, two of which – Searching for the Young Soul Rebels of 1980 and Don’t Stand Me Down of 1985 – appear in numerous top 100 album lists. His debut solo album of 1999, My Beauty, should also be afforded such status. With the approaching release in May of a new Dexys album, a series of musical interpretations of other people’s songs, we sat down with the man to talk about his unique creativity. Let’s start with your new work. The album is called Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul. I had the idea to do an Irish music album in the 1980s. It was going to be called Irish. This was about 1984, when we were doing Don’t Stand Me Down, and me and Helen [O’Hara, former Dexys musician] said we would do an Irish album next. We were planning to do songs like ‘Women of Ireland’, ‘I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen’ and ‘Carrickfergus’, which we have now done on this album. It has been at the back of my mind for many years. Even before we did the last one I was thinking, we could do ‘Carrickfergus’ this way, we could do ‘Carrickfergus’ that way, change

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that lyric to this, that kind of thing. Then I went to India on this Ayurveda retreat, which was massively helpful. I had been booking studios and cancelling them again and again. My manager at the time, Tim Vigon, told me he thought I would never record an album. One day, while I was on this Ayurveda retreat, I sat in a garden and I thought, right, I am going to make the [One Day I’m Going to] Soar album. And then another thought, a very strong intuitive thought came to me, and it said, “After the Soar album, don’t go and do an album even remotely like it. Do this one. Do Let the Record Show.” So, this album has been at the back of my mind for a long time. The songs themselves, all of them were songs I had wanted to do forever. I am a singer and I love good songs. However, these could not just be songs I liked, they had to be songs I felt we could do something with, songs I could really sing. And I am really glad we did something different to One Day I’m Going to Soar. I put my heart and soul into this. We all have. How do ideas come to you? I will get ideas as I go off to sleep. I might get a little tune, an idea for a lyric. But that is just an idea, the real work is sculpting. My friend, Christos Tolera, calls it editing. I describe it as sculpting. You get a load of ideas, but what is really important is what you do with them. That’s where the work is. I tend to get a lot more intuitive ideas when I am sitting down at 10 o’clock or five o’clock, whatever time it is, and I say, “OK, I am writing at this time.” I am more likely to get an idea that way than sitting round all day waiting on something to happen. When I get an idea, for me it is sacred. It doesn’t mean to say every drum pattern, every bass note or piano note that goes with that is correct. It is about finding the best thing for it. Sometimes you get a lyric or a melody

and you know that it is right. It is what you do with it and that is down to editing. With regards to the band we make loads of different versions of the songs and then I go home and it’s, “I like that, don’t like that, like that.” As I said, editing. Have you always worked in that way? Absolutely. With ‘Come on Eileen’ I got the band I had then to play the chorus in every single key. Now you don’t have to do that because you have machines that can do it, but back then those machines did not exist. So I would say to the band, “Keep the verse in that key, that’s working, but give me the chorus in D.” Then I’d record it on my little tape recorder. Then say, “OK, got it, can we now do it in E flat? Right. Got it. Can we do it in F?” Then I’d take it home, listen to it and say, “OK this is working, that isn’t working.” Do whole songs play out in your mind? It has happened. The whole of the melody of ‘Knowledge of Beauty’ came to me when I was falling asleep one night. I didn’t think it was any good but I thought I’d tape it anyway. The next day Helen picked the chords out to the melody and we both went, “Bloody hell.” I went through the Dexys catalogue and, out of all the songs, eight are down

solely to you – which suggests you prefer collaboration. Why is that? Lots of reasons. Firstly, I am not a very accomplished musician as regards chords and there are quite a few chords I can’t play. I should be able to play them by now but I have never really learnt enough. I can play guitar and get by, but I have had a bit of a learning block since I was about 11, so I don’t know as many chords as I’d like to. Secondly, and very importantly, I feed off people’s energy. I am a bit of a vampire like that. If nobody is coming round to write, I won’t do anything. I don’t know why, I just won’t. But if I know Jim [Paterson, ex Dexys] is coming round to write or whoever, I think, what are we going to work on? I better get that idea ready. Better have something for him then we will work together. Plus, I don’t think there is any such thing as a solo artist, not really. Unless you are an absolute genius and play everything yourself and it sounds amazing, music is collaboration. The way Dexys works, songwriting, recording, style, everything, is my vision – and I don’t always know what that vision is – and those who help me achieve it, I get on with. Those who want to take it somewhere else, I let go.

What sparks your lyrical imagination? No idea.

Location Euro Cafe, 327 Kingsland Road, London

It is a general statement, but your lyrics can be very straightforward. Or, they seem to be very personal and quite oblique, such as ‘All in All’ from the TooRye-Ay album. Some songs I don’t even know what I am writing about until I finish, and sometimes even not then. Way after we recorded ‘All in All’ someone said, “That’s about so and so,” and then I realised it was. In those days I was writing a lot of songs that I didn’t know what they were about. ‘All in All’ was originally called ‘All it Takes’, and on the day of the recording of the vocal, I wasn’t happy with it. So, I went out into the garden of the studio and I wrote the lyric. Blimey, I wouldn’t dream of doing that now. It was more spontaneous in those days. Do you ever write on tour? Never, but what I used to do on tour was rearrange the old ones. In a way, it was writing. Again, it was editing. We would have long sound checks and I would think, right, let’s change this to this. ‘Tell Me When My Light Turns Green’ changed like that. But I didn’t write on tour because after the first few times I didn’t like touring. I liked some aspects of it but I didn’t like long journeys every day. I couldn’t write on a bus or at those airports waiting for a plane. I know it sound glamorous but I didn’t find it so. 119

Do you feel underrated as a lyricist? No. I try not to think about that. I don’t even see myself as a lyricist. I don’t even know what I see myself as. I just do it. I seem to be more of the view lately that the thing I am dealing with is a kind of magic. Keith Richards said the same thing. He said musicians were just vessels for the music to come through. Others have said that as well, the jazz drummer Art Blakey for example. It’s true. Ideas are like that. Style is like that. I remember when I got the idea of the dungarees in 1982, I remember thinking, fuck, better do this quickly before someone else. Because ideas are in the air and if you don’t grab them, someone else does. Each time I write something I think, how the fuck did that happen? Where did that come from? If it’s any good that is. Our standards are very high. We don’t write 10 songs and hope one is good. We don’t even get to the end of the first verse unless we are really happy with the song. Ever written a song when you are high? Not any good ones. At the time, I thought they were amazing but I looked at them a couple of days later and they were shit. Cocaine is terrible for lyrics. The ones I wrote on coke were quite political but they were not me and it was an act. The lyrical stance I was taking didn’t really have integrity. I thought it did but it was a bit of a stance, a bit of a pose. I just much prefer where I am now.

Something will come that is so clear, so strong, that I know it is the truth – and I never mess around with it You have always sought to be different. How did that translate itself in your music? Were there chords you used that others might not, for example? Put it this way, there were chords we wouldn’t use. You would hear a record and think, ugh, why have you put that chord there? I think we were always looking for something different. It wasn’t just the brass… putting the talking in, putting the strings in. The fact that we were doing soul in 1978… No one was doing soul then, no one cool anyway. When I thought about the idea of doing soul, I thought, great, no one else is doing that. Thing is, I love all kinds of music and I kind of regret putting us into that soul corner. We were soul but we were other things as well. Whenever you label yourself or allow someone else to label you or bracket you, you kill it. But the thing is, I don’t listen to our old records. I have no interest in them, a lot of it I don’t… I think 120

it was probably alright at the time but it doesn’t work for me now. I much prefer where I am now. That said, back in 2004, when I was thinking about the Soar album, I was considering doing an electronic album. It is not necessarily by design that a lot of Dexys music is on organic instruments; it just worked out that way. We did try out other things but they never worked. Round about 1984 we tried synths, but a lot of those records using those machines from then now sound clippity cloppity. But I don’t think it is a shame I haven’t done anything electronic. They are only instruments and it is not about the instruments. Other musicians have spoken about the fact that sometimes when writing, a musical accident will happen and lead the song into something they never expected. Has that happened to you? Yes it has, definitely. ‘She’s Got a Wiggle’ comes to mind. We were playing a verse, me and Jim, again a chord sequence over a drum beat, and something happened on the machine, it got stuck or jammed, and we went, what? That sounds great. So we left it in. It is really important when you collaborate that you do so with people who have the same taste as you. Some people say it is not important but it is. You’ve got to be on the same page. Do songs come together in pieces? Yes, definitely. ‘This is What She’s Like’, I got the chorus going to sleep. That seems to happen to you a lot. It did in those days. I might have been more obsessive then, but I used to keep a tape recorder by my bed then and, it’s funny, I don’t think too many came to me before I started putting that tape recorder by my bed. The chorus to the song came [sings:] “What’s she like, tell me what she’s like.” I was actually singing those words and that melody and I had no idea why. I was half asleep. I thought it sounds rubbish but I kept singing, “What’s she like, what’s she like.” In the morning, I listened to it and thought, that’s not bad, and then I began writing around that. What is the average time for a song to be completed now? It’s hard to say. Our songs tend to take a while. We might work on a bit here and then leave it for a while. It wouldn’t be unusual to take six weeks for one. Are you impressed when you have finished a song? Every time. Completely. How did that happen? It’s magic. You just sat down and you did what you did and it happened. On ‘It’s OK John Joe’ from the Soar album, I believe you were writing an email and turned it into a song. Do you often have the words before the music? Quite a lot. ‘Geno’, which I didn’t write the

music for – Kevin Archer did – I wrote the lyrics to that two years before, exactly as it was. I wrote it as a poemy kind of a thing. When I get something that I feel is strong, that really is me, that feels like the truth, I write it. I don’t worry that I don’t have any music for it. Is that what you are looking for in your art, truth? Absolutely: the indisputable truth. I am not going round saying, “Is that the truth? Is this the truth?” But something happens in the creative process. I’ll be walking down the street and something will come like a bolt out of the blue and I will stop and sing something or write something down, and I know it is right. Something will come that is so clear, so strong, that I know it is the truth – and I never mess around with it. Are you going to put that drumbeat on it? Are you going to sing it that way? Are you going to have two people singing that line? Quite a puzzle isn’t it? It reminds me of a film director’s job. That is so funny you should say that, that is exactly how I feel. I don’t feel like it’s a record inside of me, it feels like I am making a film. The last album felt like that and this new one has especially felt like that. I don’t know if it is like that for other people… I think it is good to acknowledge that it is magic but the important thing to know is – it’s not me. I just do it, and it comes through me. That’s all. The album Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul, by Kevin Rowland’s band Dexys, is out in May dexys.org Kevin Rowland and Sean Read of Dexys perform at Imagining Ireland, a concert exploring the relationship between English and Irish music of the past 100 years, at the Royal Festival Hall, Belvedere Road, London SE1, 29 April southbankcentre.co.uk

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Meades /Andy Thomas Photographs/Grégoire Bernardi

Words

Jonathan

Renowned as an acerbic restaurant critic, the writer and presenter talks about his upcoming ‘anti cookbook’, along with his latest TV series exploring architecture under the Mussolini regime.

he book is about everything I cook and is blindingly unoriginal.” This is how Jonathan Meades describes his forthcoming book project, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen. “A recipe book which is also an explicit paean to the avoidance of culinary originality, to the daylight robbery of recipes, to hijacking techniques and methods, to the notion that in the kitchen there is nothing new,” writes Meades in the introduction to his “anti cookbook”. It’s the second book on food from the ex restaurant critic for The Times. In 2002 Incest and Morris Dancing collated Meades’ writings for The Times between 1986 and 2001. “Purveyors of the bland, the unauthentic and the mediocre will have been sleeping easier since last December, when Britain’s most vitriolic, knowledgeable and literate restaurant critic handed in his napkin,” wrote Christopher Hirst in his review of Incest and Morris Dancing in The Independent. The thematic shift in Meades’ relentless, caustically witty prose for The Times was both disorientating and thought provoking. “I find everything fascinating… everything looks 122

fantastic if you look at it long enough,” he once said. It’s been that way since he first appeared in his trademark black suit and Ray-Bans on the BBC in the early 1990s, with the series Abroad in Britain. In the introduction, he strode across the screen in a polka dot tie and pink platform shoes to announce that the series was to be “devoted to the proposition that the exotic begins at home”. Meades’ subsequent series Magnetic North and Off Kilter brought a similarly surreal critical eye to northern Europe and Scotland respectively. In 2013 he celebrated The Joy of Essex: “All places, all counties are various, all counties, all places are equally defined by a shorthand that denies that variety and reduces them to cliché,” he announced. And in 2012 he broke down other myths with the series Jonathan Meades on France, where he has lived for the past eight years. In the series he looked beyond the stereotypes, promising: “No check tablecloths, no ‘Gallic’ shrugs, no strings of onions, no art of living in Provence, no dream homes, no boules, no ooh la la.” In his 2014 memoir An Encyclopaedia of Myself, about growing up in 1950s Salisbury, in Wiltshire, Meades used evocative black-and-white photographs that brought to mind those in W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn. And there are echoes of Sebald in the narrative and temporal jumps of Meades’ prose. Another writer whose footsteps Meades treads in is Ian Nairn. In 1957, the writer and architecture critic wrote Counter-Attack Against Subtopia, a term he used to describe bland post-war suburbia. Meades’ own attacks against the bland, and celebrations of the bold, could be seen in his 2014 TV programme Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness: Concrete Poetry. His alternative reading of architecture also resulted in his darkly comic study of Jerry-Building: Unholy Relics of Nazi Germany and Joe-Building: the Stalin Heritage Trail. This spring sees the broadcast of the third in this trilogy with Ben Building, on the architecture of Mussolini’s Italy.

Hurtling between seemingly disparate subjects and finding the magical in the mundane, Meades saves some of his most caustic wit for the restaurant industry. “The sheer bollocks that chefs spout is startling,” he once wrote. Terms like “fine dining”, “sourced” and “drizzle” are easy game for Meades – as are celebrity chefs, Michelin stars, and the idea of London as the gastronomic capital of the world. Nearly 15 years since his last restaurant review for The Times and eight stone lighter, he has returned to the subject of food in The Plagiarist in the Kitchen. We travelled to Marseille to meet Meades at his home in Cité radieuse, the protobrutalist housing development designed by Le Corbusier in the late 1940s. Before the interview we explore the building together, including the sculptural béton-brut roof terrace that Meades described as “a transcendent work [that] is exhilarating and humbling” in his 2012 book Museum Without Walls. So it is on the subject of architecture that we begin our long discussion. It must be a great building to live in, how long have your been here? We moved here just under five years ago. We had lived for ten

years in Bermondsey Street in south London. That area changed dramatically. If you got up early enough you would see this grey swarm heading towards the City, in time for the Japanese stock markets to open. So from being this forgotten backwater it suddenly became a building site, and is now wall-to-wall tapas bars. So then we moved to outside of Bordeaux. I hadn’t lived out in the country before and didn’t realise what it would be like. I quite like the country if I’m in a car. Was the building the main reason for moving here? Yes, I’d known the building since the early 1980s and had always been rather obsessed by it. I would often come here and look at it. What is it that you like? There are a whole load of things. There is something so primitive about it. And I love the muscularity. Le Corbusier came up with this idea of using crude concrete just after the war. And I much prefer post-war Le Corbusier than the white, orthogonal, very smooth stuff. And the roof is wonderful. It’s the greatest sculpture park in the world I think. Unfortunately, it gets ruined because the gym up there has been taken over by this guy called Ito Morabito, who is kind of like the French Thomas Heatherwick. He puts on shows of this very bad conceptual art up there. It’s just absolute rubbish, complete drivel. And he puts his sculptures outside, which are fighting with the wonderful sculpture that is there already. It doesn’t work and I think it’s going to go under. I mean one hopes it will. But the guy is a complete self-publicist in the way that Heatherwick is. He doesn’t have much to back it up though. You’ve also spoken before about how the English restaurant industry has deluded people through PR. How did this come about? English restaurants have a much greater talent for PR than they do for cooking. It’s the peddling of dreams and illusions rather than particularly great food. While London has improved, it’s 124

nowhere near as good as it thinks it is. And London as I first knew it in the 60s and 70s was nowhere near as bad as it’s made out to be now. For example, I used to go to a restaurant called Koritsas in Camden Town. It also happened to be the unofficial headquarters for artists like David Hockney and Peter Blake. It was great, wonderful, Cypriot food, simple and really well done. I much prefer that to ridiculously misspelt menus of foams and all these things that people like Heston Blumenthal do.

a guy called Alan CromptonBatt. I liked him very much but one knew that he was a salesman, and a very good salesman. He was absolutely obsessed by Andrew Loog Oldham and what he had done with the Rolling Stones. And he was very much in that tradition. He more or less invented Marco Pierre White, also Nico Ladenis.

When did PR become so important in the restaurant industry? It really started in a big way in the 80s. The first hugely successful restaurant PR was

How did you end up being the restaurant critic for The Times for so long? I only expected to do it for

Cité radieuse, Le Corbusier’s seminal Marseille housing project and home to Meades

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a short while and after a few months I thought, I’m going to jack this in. But they gave me a pay rise so I kept doing it. And it kept on going like that. And I did it for 15 years – but I don’t think it did me any good. You mentioned the food in England in the 1960s, but what food were you brought up on in the 1950s? Well the impetus in the years following the war from 1945 to 1950 was cheap food. But Clement Attlee’s policy didn’t work because we were still using ration books until 1954. And even after that there were shortages. But having said that I thought the food I grew up with was very good. People were very resourceful. They’d use everything. In this new book I’ve put in a

all came down to being resourceful. I had a great childhood friend and for his mother no bread went to waste. She would dip it in milk and put it in the oven overnight so you’d have rusks. And I still do that myself. I can’t stand waste and that’s to do with those years. All leftovers get used up in one way or another. In fact I like leftovers because you can always work out something interesting to do with them. You have written about how, in the post-war period, the English lost their links to their indigenous food. How did this happen? There was some great indigenous cooking that did endure, like steak and kidney pudding, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pudding etc. But then in the very late 50s you got people like Elizabeth David. Although they were mostly very good writers, they convinced the British that our food wasn’t worth bothering with. So an avocado is superior to a cauliflower. And as a result there began to be an inferiority complex about British food, and people became ashamed of what they cooked. And then you’d get these crazes: the smorgasbord craze, the paella craze. It was like food started becoming pervious to fashion. So it all became much more self-conscious. Food also became much more of a class and culture signifier.

The idea that cooking has become a form of entertainment is abhorrent. It’s a craft that should be taken seriously rather than something mediated by television chefs recipe for tripe and onions, which both my mother and grandmother would cook. I thought it was delicious. They do it at St John, one of my favourite restaurants in London. I also remember as a child frequently having boiled ham. My mother would make a soup from the stock with some dried peas. You didn’t have a lot of food that came from outside of Britain either apart from some commonwealth stuff. You didn’t get the array you get today, but it was very nice and people were very healthy generally. In An Encyclopaedia of Myself you spoke about some of the dishes your mother cooked when you were a child. Was she the norm or an anomaly at the time? She was probably a bit of an anomaly and cooked more interesting food, but in the book I also mention the food some of my friends’ mothers would cook. Again it nearly

What were the main cookbooks you had in your house? My mother had Elizabeth David and Patience Gray’s books, and also Mastering the Art of French Cooking [by Julia Child]. I’ve actually got my mother’s copy here, which is falling apart. It’s a brilliant book because if you follow the recipes you will learn how to cook. Step one, step two, step three, and do not digress from this. And it does teach you, so the title of the book is apt.

When did you start cooking yourself? I’d cook from home at about the age of 13 or 14 I suppose. I worked my way through certain recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking to the point where I could do them without referring to the book for the whole time. And then I would use other recipe books, but I would seldom read the whole recipes, they would bore me stiff. As I say in The Plagiarist, quite often I would just look at a picture of something and know how to do that. But that comes with confidence and I’ve been doing this for half a century now. In the series Slow Cooking you said, “Cooking is a craft not an art.” Can you explain? There’s a quote of Gore Vidal’s: “Art should always be different, craft should always be the same.” I think writing should be experimental and should always be trying something new. I think with cooking you shouldn’t be trying something new. I think trying selfconsciously to create new dishes is futile and terribly arrogant. I also don’t like a lot of things on a plate, and hate trimmings and garnishes and all that. It’s usually a way of adding value to something that’s not particularly good in the first place. There is a big industry now behind cookbooks. How many of them do you think are any good? There used to be these things called the Glenfiddich Food and Drink Awards. I was one of the judges in around 1990 and I was sent all these cookbooks.

I think I was sent about 60. The one that won was by Pierre Koffmann, who is a really fine chef. But I sold all the others. They were endlessly repeating each other, while pretending to be original. The other thing is that people like Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden and Jane Grigson, they were very good writers, but most of these new cookbooks are by people who really can’t write. Why did you decide to do your own cookery book? I had published Museum Without Walls with Unbound and that was very successful. And [co-founder] John Mitchinson, who is a good friend, said that I had once talked about doing a recipe book back in 1998. And so that is what I have done. The only criteria I use in the book is that if I haven’t cooked a dish ever it doesn’t go in. What I think might be of interest is the certain number of recipes that people might not have come across as they are mostly quite old. Many of the recipes look quite straightforward compared with what people might expect from reading other cookbooks of today. One of the first recipes I wrote down was for a dish called Poulet à l’Oignon from a friend of mine, Jean-Pierre Xiradakis, and his restaurant in Bordeaux. It’s almost fail-safe to make because it’s basically chicken with sliced onions. You don’t even brown the onions. My favourite recipe in the book is for grilled mackerel, and the ingredients are “a mackerel”. And that’s it. I remember Matthew Fort at one point when he was writing for The Guardian had a campaign for dishes of no more than five ingredients. And that’s a very good idea I think. I don’t mind sauces like salsa verde, but on their own and not on a nice piece of fish. If it’s really good fresh fish, it shouldn’t need anything on it. I think it was in Slow Food that you said we’d lost the basics of cooking. When did you see this happen? There was this obsession with new techniques, with pressure cookers and so on. Also lots of pre-prepared stuff. 127

And once you start relying on pre-preparation you do probably forget the basics. I think it’s quite interesting that a lot of French people are really terrible cooks. And this is because they can go to the supermarkets where you can buy very, very good cassoulet or stew or whatever. And the butchers will always have three of four prepared dishes. So you don’t actually need to cook. How closely connected were the indigenous dishes of France and Britain? There were archetypal peasant foods you would get in both cultures. For example something like slow cooked boiled beef. That was because in many instances, people didn’t have any choice but to slow cook because they didn’t have their own stove. But yes the same things do turn up in many cultures. The difference is that the British didn’t appreciate them and lost the hang of doing them. For example boiled beef and carrots was a regular dish, but the British threw it out. This is quite odd when you consider this idea that Britain is respectful of its past and so on. Which I think is completely wrong. I think Britain is far more susceptible to fashion than other countries in Europe. For example, the British tear down buildings with huge enthusiasm. What do you think about British supermarkets? When I do go into one it’s usually when I need something very specific. And I’m horrified by the comparison to French supermarkets. They are on a completely different level here. The quality and the freshness are incomparable. French supermarkets are run on different principles and there is a lot more local produce. You’ve got stuff that’s come from 10 or 12 miles away. One of the other things that has really become a big industry is organic of course. Yes “organicising” as we called it in the programme, Meades Eats. I think it’s a compete racket. The sheer number of fraudulent instances of deception is startling. I remember being on a panel at the Bath Literary Festival and 128

this issue came up. Jonathan Dimbleby was chairing the thing and I said it was a racket. He was also a president of the Soil Association and he got really angry with me and said, “No, no, all these people are really honest, hard working people,” and I said, “Yes hard working, but criminally inclined Jonathan.” Anyway he stormed off afterwards. It was as if I had insulted his faith. And it is a kind of faith I think, and absolute nonsense. Does France have this same obsession with organic? It’s much more ambiguous here. The certificates and stamps of being organic don’t exist to the same extent because

there is so much more agriculture. It’s much more ad hoc. People are also so used to getting good stuff that they won’t accept the rubbish. They don’t need regulations, which I think is very important. There is also a kind of implicit trust between the consumer and the purveyor, the retailer. And that’s evident in other ways in France. If you go into a café here you get a coffee and you don’t pay for it on the spot. In Britain that would mostly not happen because the expectation is that you are

Details of Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse, Marseille

going to do a runner. Everyone is thought of as a potential criminal. “Crass tossers with the spray-on grins, gestures and catchphrases” was how you once described celebrity chefs. Are there any that you like? Firstly I think the idea that cooking has become a form of light entertainment is abhorrent. It’s a craft that should be taken seriously rather than something mediated by people like John Torode and Gregg Wallace. The only good one there has ever been really was Keith Floyd. He was a performer, whereas most of these other people are terrible and embarrassing to watch. They really don’t know what to do and have been put through some kind of media training, which has not been particularly efficacious. But Floyd was great. I don’t believe this stuff of people being naturals; he really worked at it and knew exactly what he was doing. And he could really turn it on. He could turn it off as well, and could be an absolute pain in the arse. But he was rather brilliant even though every programme was the same as the last one. Another commentator you had a lot of time for was the late architecture critic Ian Nairn. The thing that made his name was Outrage. Written in 1955 it was an account of going from Southampton to Carlisle, and the homogeneity that he saw. At that point there was very little being built apart from social housing. He was thinking that there is a generation of architects just champing at the bit and they are going to transform Britain. Ten years later, those architects had indeed built stuff. And he wrote this famous article in The Observer saying that British architecture is just not good enough. That stirred something in the architecture establishment and they really went for him. But he had been presuming that something really bold was going to happen. And after that he became really disillusioned. He was one of the only supporters of brutalism at the time wasn’t he? He was a great fan of the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, and Rodney Gordon and Owen Luder’s other brutalist works like Eros House in Catford. In the most part he was pretty sniffy about the moderate stuff, the every day norm is what he really disliked. But I don’t actually think he was that important as an architecture critic. He was important as a wonderful writer about London. Nairn’s London is just a fabulous book. The writing is a lot more interesting than most of the places he describes. There’s one place near Mitcham Common in south London of which he says: “It is always 4 o’clock in the afternoon in November here.” And it’s just such a wonderful description of a place. People tried to portray him as some sort of an activist, which he wasn’t at all. He couldn’t stand committees or things like that, he would much rather be down the pub. Which he did all too successfully. When did you become consciously aware of buildings and topography? When I was very young. I made a film about this called Father to the Man. My father was a rep for a biscuit company and I used to go with him to small towns in Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset. And at a very tender age I would just be left and so I would wander around these towns looking at the buildings. But my interest kind of crept up on me because I didn’t write anything about architecture for the first few years I was writing. Then I was asked to review a show called Marble Halls at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, which was one 129

of the first shows to make a really big effort to popularise Victorian architecture. And then I realised how much I actually knew about architecture – without having studied it but having absorbed it. I’d always make a detour to look at interesting places. I could never go from A to B without going to Z as well. Why was Victorian architecture looked down on? I don’t know exactly but I think it’s to do with fashion. Several generations grew up despising Victorian buildings and pulling them down. And it got to the point that people like Evelyn Waugh, Kenneth Clarke and Osbert Lancaster had to stand up and say, “This is actually really valuable and remarkable stuff.” And so the Victorian Society started intervening and things got better. And it’s very similar to the kind of thing that is happening with brutalism at

Your new television show Ben Building on the architecture of Mussolini’s Italy follows ones on Hitler and Stalin. How are these films different? They are all very different architecturally, but they also very different filmically. I think Joe-Building, the one on Stalin, is a much better film than the Nazi one actually. It was much more textured and had more layers. The new Ben Building film is much more to do with defining what fascism is or isn’t. We filmed more in the studio and it’s more polemical than the other two films, which were more descriptive. We filmed this one in Rome, Genoa, Milan and Redipuglia on the Slovenian border, where there are these huge weird structures that you can see from the sky. Also in Sabaudia, which is this extraordinary new town and very eerie. In the film we talk about [Italian artist] Giorgio de Chirico. His influence on the architecture of the 20s and 30s really is considerable, and especially in Sabaudia. Were these buildings the vision of the architects or Mussolini? Mostly the architects. Mussolini liked the fact that there were these warring factions between the modernists and traditionalists. He liked the divide and rule thing. But one of the interesting things when you start looking into it is the idea that progressive architecture as the realm of the left is completely wrong headed. There is probably more modern architecture of high quality in Italy from the 20s and 30s than there is anywhere else in Europe. And it was made under a tyrannical and authoritarian government. So you can’t just link modernism to progressive politics and so on.

I think Britain is far more susceptible to fashion than other countries in Europe. The British tear down buildings with huge enthusiasm the moment. Every week there is a new book about brutalism, but in many instances, it’s too late because so much of it has been torn down. Like in Birmingham where the last of John Madin’s buildings, the Central Library, is currently being knocked down? Yes Birmingham had some very, very good stuff. The thing is English Heritage always take the easy route. They will list things that are not going to be troublesome. So they will list churches and individual houses but when it comes to listing something like Birmingham Central Library, the Tricorn in Portsmouth, or the Trinity in Gateshead, they don’t want to know. Those last two were the greatest works of British brutalism I think. And now everything that Rodney Gordon and Owen Luder did is more or less gone.

You’ve spoken about the influence on brutalism of the Nazi bunkers in places like Guernsey. I’ve seen them in Jersey and they are incredible structures. Why were they built like that? Friedrich Tamms was the main designer and the thinking was to scare the local populous. Some of them look like animals and some like visors, and they really are quite frightening. And they only occurred like that in occupied countries. The stuff that was built in Germany is not graphically potent in the same way. It didn’t need to be. You had a largely obedient population that didn’t need to be cowed by these things. So in the occupied countries they had a dual purpose, they were both defensive and offensive towards the indigenous population. I think Paul Virilio was really the first person to study these bunkers. They fitted into his idea that most technological breakthroughs are caused by war. So computing, binoculars that work at night, camouflage, and such like. Alongside The Plagiarist and Ben Building, you’ve also got your first art exhibition in London soon. I just started mucking around with manipulating images to see what could be done with them. Also taking a lot of paintings that I photographed and then re-photographed. Doing a lot of tearing up of paintings and putting them back together, dousing them with things. I also use a lot of froissage [a collage technique involving crumpled paper]. There is an artist I very much like called Ladislas Kijno. He’s a wonderful painter and he did this froissage a lot. I watched this film on him and he’d be painting away and then put a sheet of paper on top. He’d then pull that off, so you would have a new image of that, and so on.

Then he’d screw that up, and then do even more things to it. He was a big influence. I’m thinking also of artist Gerhard Richter? Yes, but it depends which Richter. I like the late abstract stuff very much, but I don’t like those earlier blurry paintings. Was there anyone else who influenced you? There is also very late Warhol done with oxidation and metal. They are really beautiful although they are not very well known. I’m not a fan of Warhol’s in general, but I really like that stuff. That was definitely another influence. I also use chance in quite a deliberate way. I am more interested in process than results, but if I can get a result I like then it’s great. What I really like about Ladislas Kijno though was that he was very eclectic and always doing different things. Although I don’t set out to copy anyone, I do think other people’s work can be very inspiring, whether that applies to writing, TV, painting or whatever. But the art is totally different to food because it’s like a perpetual experimental. I really don’t know what is going to happen next. The Plagiarist in the Kitchen, a recipe book by Jonathan Meades, is out in October unbound.co.uk Ben Building. Mussolini: Monuments, Modernism and Marble, presented by Meades, is on the BBC later this year bbc.co.uk Ape Forgets Medication: an Exhibition of Treyfs and Artknacks by Jonathan Meades goes on display at Londonewcastle Project Space, 28 Redchurch Street, London E2, 7-27 April londonewcastle.com

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Jake Canuso Photographs

/Derek Ridgers Styling/Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala

Originally trained as a dancer, Swiss-born Italian actor Jake Canuso is most familiar to British audiences for his role in the TV comedy series Benidorm. His film credits include The Dark Knight Rises and Nine, and he returns to Los Angeles this summer to work on his latest feature. twitter.com/jakecanuso

Suit by Pokit; shirt and shoes by Issey Miyake; hat by Lock and Co; ring, modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

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Suit and pocket square by Emporio Armani; top by Orlebar Brown; sunglasses by Issey Miyake; scarf by Drakeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s.

Suit by Vivienne Westwood Man; shirt by DSquared2; shoes by Louis Leeman; black ring by Shamballa Jewels; watch and silver ring, modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

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Jacket, shirt and trousers by Caruso; hat by Emporio Armani; ring by Shamballa Jewels; belt by Pokit.

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Suit by Richard Anderson; top by Vivienne Westwood Man; hat by Lock and Co; black ring by Shamballa Jewels; bracelet by Miansai; watch and silver ring, modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own.

Jacket by Emporio Armani; trousers by DSquared2; hat by Lock and Co; scarf by Drakeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s; watch by Tudor.

/Susana Mota using Mario Badescu, Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics and Paul Mitchell susanamota.co.uk /Sarah Appelhans at Unravel Productions unravel-productions.com Location /Scarfes Bar, Rosewood Hotel, 252 High Holborn, London WC1 scarfesbar.com Grooming

Production

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Suit by Canali; T-shirt by Orlebar Brown; scarf by Drake’s; watch by Tudor; necklace by Shamballa Jewels; ring, model’s own.

Parallelogram Photographs

/Derrick Santini Styling/Mark Anthony Bradley

For his Parallelogram show during London Collections Men in January, YMC’s Fraser Moss staged a live band playing a psychedelic, guitar-heavy sound while the models walked the runway. Perhaps not quite a supergroup, but certainly a coming together of some great musicians – Maxim Barron and Charlie Salvidge from Toy, Samuel Kilcoyne, previously of S.C.U.M and son of Barry 7 of Add N to (X), Chris Rotter and the Bad Meat Club, and Earl Ho, previously of Sherpa – the band performed an unrehearsed set influenced by late 1960s psychedelia and Middle Eastern sounds. thebadmeatclub.com toy-band.com

Chris wears jacket by Oliver Spencer; shirt by Wood Wood; scarf by Paul Smith.

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Earl wears jacket by Dries Van Noten, from Mr Porter; trousers, model’s own; shirt by Barbour. Chris wears jacket by John Varvatos; jeans by Hawksmill Denim Co; shirt by Wood Wood; sunglasses by Mont Blanc; scarf by Paul Smith. Charlie wears jacket by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; trousers, stylist’s own; shirt by Levi’s.

Earl wears jacket and cravat by Paul Smith; shirt by Caruso.

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Charlie wears jacket by Oliver Spencer; jeans, model’s own; shirt by Levi’s Vintage Clothing. Earl wears jacket and shirt by Richard James; trousers by Paul Smith. Chris wears jacket by Richard James; jeans by Hawksmill Denim Co; shirt by Acne.

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Chris wears jacket by Neil Barrett; shirt by Leviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s; sunglasses by Dita.

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Earl wears jacket by Dolce and Gabbana, from Mr Porter; trousers, model’s own; shirt, stylist’s own; shoes by Richard James. Chris wears jacket and scarf by Paul Smith; jeans, model’s own; shirt by Pal Zileri; shoes by Richard James; sunglasses by Dita. Charlie wears jacket by Bally; jeans and shoes, model’s own.

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Earl wears coat by Lanvin; shirt by Maison KitsunĂŠ; cravat by Pal Zileri.

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Chris wears jacket by Valentino; jeans, model’s own; shirt by Waven; sunglasses by Dita; scarf by Paul Smith; ring, model’s own.

Charlie wears jacket by DSquared2; jeans and scarf, modelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own; shirt by Richard James.

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/Lorenzo Bell

Photographic Assistant

Chris wears jacket by Neil Barrett; jeans by Hawksmill Denim Co; shirt by Levi’s; sunglasses by Dita. Earl wears jacket by YMC; trousers, model’s own; sweater by John Smedley; hat, stylist’s own; scarf by Caruso. Charlie wears jacket by Levi’s Vintage Clothing; jeans and belt, model’s own; shirt by John Varvatos.

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/Chris May

Words

One of the great visionaries of American music, with an inimitable style combining multiple genres,

Frank

Zappa was also a life-long campaigner for freedom of speech whose thinking remains relevant today.

hile the most likely outcome of putting people in prison is criminal relapse, jail can also have unexpectedly transformative consequences for its subjects. In 1946, the pimp and racketeer Malcolm Little went into Boston’s Charlestown State Prison to serve a sentence for grand larceny. By the time of his parole six years later, Little had renamed himself Malcolm X and was on the way to becoming a prominent black nationalist leader. The guitarist, bandleader and composer Frank Zappa spent a much shorter time in jail than Malcolm X, but the experience was life changing for him too. In 1965, Zappa, then a small-time record producer, was sentenced to six months in California’s San Bernardino County Jail, convicted of producing a pornographic audio tape. In a classic case of police entrapment, an undercover officer had offered Zappa and his girlfriend $100 to record themselves having sex. The pair bounced around on their bed for half an hour, fully clothed, making appropriate groans and moans and engaging in what the police described as

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“blue dialogue”. Zappa had been singled out by the cops because of his bohemian appearance, a perceived threat to the rightthinking citizens of Cucamonga, the village 75 miles east of Los Angeles where Zappa’s tiny studio was located. All but 10 days of Zappa’s jail term were suspended, but those 10 days led him to re-evaluate the American way of life and the purpose of his music. When he got out, on three years’ probation, Zappa’s faith in the police, the judicial system and everything he had been taught in school about the United States had been turned inside out. He became a life-long campaigner for freedom of speech as promised under the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and a combative opponent of the educational, religious and political establishments that he accused of conspiring against it. His newly subversive aesthetic, which combined American libertarianism with European situationist thinking, informed the content of his first two albums, Freak Out! in 1966 and Absolutely Free in 1967, along with that of the many other records that followed them. Zappa was particularly suspicious of the

education system. He took his children out of school as soon as he could under US law and, although he did not forbid them to go to college, he refused to pay for them to do so. “If you want to get laid, go to college, if you want an education, go to the library,” he told them. Zappa’s legacy of memorable aphorisms also includes: “Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny”; “A mind is like a parachute, it doesn’t work if it is not open”; and, perhaps most famously, “Rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.” Zappa was one of the great visionaries of mid-20th-century American music, with a crossgenre style that mashed up doowop and R&B with rock, free jazz, jazz fusion, world music, musique concrète and modernclassical orchestral music. In his mid-teens, not long after he discovered doo-wop, Zappa became an admirer of the modernist composer Edgard Varèse, whose trademark blocks of sound, concern with texture rather than pitch, and use of mutating time signatures

Frank Zappa, 1976 Photograph Neil Zlozower

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all found their way into his music, be it his work with his freak rock band the Mothers of Invention in the 1960s, or the symphonic music he composed for Pierre Boulez’s Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain in the 1980s. Zappa made no qualitative distinctions between the Penguins’ doo-wop song ‘Earth Angel’ and Varèse’s dissonant experiments. In his idiosyncrasy and eclecticism, Zappa’s closest cousin is probably Sun Ra. Like Sun Ra, he spent the bulk of his career at arm’s length from the established music business; Sun Ra’s records came out mostly on his own Saturn label, Zappa’s on his own Bizarre, Straight, Discreet, Zappa and Barking Pumpkin imprints. He set up his first song-publishing company, Aleatory Music, in 1963, his first studio, Studio Z, in 1964, and his first label,

record business. Both were original, non-doctrinaire thinkers who not only attacked the US establishment but also lampooned aspects of the counterculture that supported them. Both were articulate, ahead-ofthe-curve critics of consumerism. Both were anticommunist at a time when it was not fashionable to declare yourself so – Zappa turned down invitations to perform in Russia until after the downfall of the USSR – and were active supporters of playwright/politician Václav Havel and the Velvet Revolution, which freed Czechoslovakia from Soviet control in 1989. Frank Vincent Zappa was born to Italian-American parents on 21 December 1940 in Baltimore, on America’s east coast. His father worked as a meteorologist for the US Chemical Warfare Service. The family moved to California in 1951 and Zappa spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon. He discovered doo-wop, aged 13, listening to the radio in his parents’ car. A few months later, he bought his first record, ‘Riot in Cell Block Number 9’ by the Robins. He showed his independent thinking early on, rejecting his parents’ Catholicism, and religion in general, at the age of 18. “One of my main influences, and probably one of the things that turned my ear around since the very beginning, is R&B,” said Zappa in a 1986 radio interview. “The earliest, most primitive R&B… Not

Like his fellow libertarians William S. Burroughs and Lenny Bruce, Zappa at times doubted humankind’s capacity for intelligent evolution Bizarre, in 1968. He demanded exhaustively rehearsed musical perfection from the Mothers of Invention and its successors, just as Sun Ra did from his Arkestra. Again like Sun Ra, Zappa was extraordinarily prolific: by the time of his death from prostate cancer in 1993, he had released 59 albums not including reissues. Sun Ra, who died the same year, had a recording career roughly twice as long as Zappa’s, during which he released around twice as many albums. Zappa also championed other innovative artists. He produced Captain Beefheart’s masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica, for Straight in 1969, and released Tim Buckley’s Sefronia, Buckley’s magnificent follow up to Greetings from L.A., on Discreet in 1973. Another artist with parallels to Zappa was his close contemporary Lou Reed. Both began their recording careers producing soundalike doo-wop and surf music singles for copycat labels and, partly because of these early experiences, both were acutely aware of the venal and parasitical nature of the 152

because of the nostalgic aroma that goes with it, but musically, because of the sound of it… It’s something that I’ve always admired, a musical tradition that should be carried into the future.” When he was 16, Zappa, to his parents’ horror, adopted the sartorial style of the Mexican American pachucos who shaped doo-wop street style in east Los Angeles: Cuban heels, long drape jackets, baggy trousers tapered tightly at the ankles, a greased back pompadour, long side burns, a moustache and a goatee beard. Zappa’s fifth album was the tongue-firmly-notin-cheek doo-wop tribute, Cruising with Ruben and the Jets, in 1968. By the mid-1980s, he had built up a collection of around 7,000 doo-wop and R&B singles. The chief formative influence on Zappa as a guitarist was R&B’s Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, whose single ‘Three Hours Past Midnight’ Zappa bought in 1956. “One of the things I admired about him was his tone,” said Zappa. “This wiry kind of nasty, aggressive and penetrating tone. And another was that the things he would play would come out as rhythmic outbursts over the constant beat of the accompaniment… There was a speech influence to the rhythm.” Zappa encountered his other key formative influence, Varèse, when he was 16, through his high school music teacher. One of the first albums he bought was The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse Volume 1. The store owner let Zappa have it cheap because none of his other customers would buy it. Zappa regarded doo-wop and Varèse’s music with equal respect. “It was like, here is a guy who’s writing dissonant music and he’s not fucking around,” said Zappa in 1990. “And here’s a group called the Robins, and they don’t seem like they were fucking around either. They were having a good time… The basic soul of the music seemed to me to be coming from the same universal source.”

Zappa came to jazz a little later, when he was 19. Among the first jazz albums he bought were the iconoclastic pianist Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Advance (1956) and Looking Ahead (1958), and Ornette Coleman’s Something Else (1958) and Tomorrow is the Question (1959). Zappa’s eighth album, 1969’s mostly instrumental masterpiece Hot Rats – which featured Captain Beefheart on its only vocal track, Willie the Pimp – was heavily jazz-influenced, though less by free jazz than by the jazz fusion of Miles Davis and Weather Report. Zappa laid out his post-prison social manifesto in 1966, in the sleeve notes for Freak Out! “On a personal level,” he wrote, “freaking out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress and social etiquette to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole… We would like to encourage everyone who hears this music to join us… become a member of the United Mutations.” In order for society to progress, Zappa said it was necessary to “deviate from the norm”. A year later, Absolutely Free warmed to the theme. Of the track ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’, Zappa said: “It’s a song about the people who run the government, the people who make the laws that keep you from living the kind of life you know you should lead. These unfortunate people manufacture inequitable laws and ordinances, perhaps unaware of the fact that the restrictions they place on the young people in a society are a result of their own hidden sexual frustrations. Dirty old men have no place running your country.” On the track ‘Plastic People’, Zappa labelled the Los Angeles police department “Nazis”, based on his own experiences and also those of his audiences, who were being harassed for smoking weed and taking acid. Although Zappa only smoked around a dozen joints during his entire life, and disapproved of drug use, he defended other peoples’ freedom to do so. He was equally down on alcohol: the track ‘America Drinks and Goes Home’, inspired by his

early 1960s experiences playing Top 40 covers in a suburban LA lounge band, is garnished with boorish, drunken shouting and the sound of smashing glass. By the early 1970s, Zappa had broadened his social critique to include opposition to TV-fuelled consumerism. On 1973’s album Over-Nite Sensation, he accused TV and religion of conspiring to create a “fascist theocracy” in the US, employing precisely the same argument as the Italian film director Pasolini would put forward two years later when discussing his film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Zappa’s lyric for the track ‘I’m the Slime’ went: “I’m gross and perverted, I’m obsessed and deranged, I have existed for years but very little has changed. I’m the tool of the government and industry too, for I am destined to rule and regulate you. I might be vile and pernicious but you can’t look away. I make you think I’m delicious with the stuff that I say. I’m the best you can get. Have you guessed me yet? I’m the slime oozing out from your TV set.” Zappa returned to the threat of a fascist theocracy many times. In 1984, he campaigned in support of soft-core pornographer Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler. That Flynt was being harassed by religious pressure groups and the FBI was good enough for Zappa. Writing in the January 1984 issue of Hustler, he said: “Please be advised: Your right to think for yourself has not yet been cancelled. You can still do it: And it is good for you. It is also good for America. The formula for the control of a totally submissive workforce, as it is being administered today, is a shortsighted solution to complex anthropomorphic problems. Uniformity if neither desirable nor enforceable, and especially in the case of a ‘free society’, it is nothing to aspire to.” A year later, Zappa appeared before a senate committee set up to consider the statutory labelling of “objectionable” lyric content on record sleeves, a key demand of the pressure group the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), formed by the wives of leading politicians. In a lengthy and well-argued speech, Zappa said: “The PMRC’s proposal is most offensive in its ‘moral tone’. It seeks to enforce a set of implied religious values on its victims. Iran has a religious government. Good for them. I like to have the capital of the United States in Washington, DC, in spite of recent efforts to move it to Lynchburg, Virginia. Fundamentalism is not a state religion. The PMRC’s request for labels regarding sexually explicit lyrics, violence, drugs, alcohol and especially occult content reads like a catalogue of phenomena abhorrent to practitioners of that faith. How a person worships is a private matter, and should not be inflicted upon or exploited by others. Understanding the fundamentalist leanings of this organisation, I think it is fair to wonder if their rating system will eventually be extended to inform parents as to

Frank Zappa, 1967 Photograph Jerry Schatzberg

whether a music group has homosexuals in it… or Jews.” Zappa also criticised the PMRC’s suggestion that record companies “reevaluate” the contracts of those bands who did “offensive” things on stage. In an open letter to Tipper Gore, wife of senator Al Gore and a prominent member of PMRC, he wrote: “May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face.” In a press interview published during the hearing, Zappa said: “My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.” And he concluded: “Tax the fuck out of the churches.” A musician and thinker of enduring relevance, Zappa – like his fellow libertarians William S. Burroughs and Lenny Bruce, both of whom he knew and admired – at times doubted humankind’s capacity for intelligent evolution. “Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe,” he said. “I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.” But Zappa was at heart an optimist. On the US leg of his 1988 world tour, during the run-up to the presidential election, he had voter registration booths set up in all the venues he played, resulting in around 11,000 new registrations. “The United States is the least registered

industrial country on Earth,” Zappa told Overseas magazine. “It’s pathetic. I don’t believe an American has a right to complain about the system if he can vote and doesn’t.” In a tribute he gave following Zappa’s death, Lou Reed said: “Whether writing symphonies, satirical broadsides or casting a caustic glow across the frontier of madness that makes up the American political landscape, whether testifying before Congress to put the PMRC in its rightful lowly place, or acting as a cultural conduit for President Václav Havel and the Czech government, Frank was a force for reason and honesty in a business deficient in those areas.” Havel’s tribute said: “Frank Zappa was high up there in rock heaven… whenever I think I want to escape I think of him.” Roxy – The Movie, featuring Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention live at the Roxy Theatre, 1973, is out now on DVD eagle-rock.com A documentary on Frank Zappa by Alex Winter is currently in production, due for release in 2017 Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words, a documentary by Thorsten Schütte, is due for release later this year filmsdupoisson.com 153

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/Andy Thomas Photographs/Dean Chalkley

Matthew

Herbert The latest project from the maverick music maker is an album that you can’t listen to. But you could, with enough time and money, go out and make it yourself using his detailed book of instructions.

or my next record, I will write a description of the record rather than make the music itself,” explains Herbert in the crowd-funding campaign for his book The Music. “Each chapter will describe in precise detail what sounds to use, how they should be organised and occasionally an approximation of what the net result should sound like.” But no instruments are to be involved: “Why use a violin when you can use a lawnmower? Why use a lawnmower when you can use the explosion of a bomb in Libya?” With his mutations of house and jazz as Doctor Rockit and Herbert through to his avant-garde reconstructions of techno as Wishmountain and Radioboy, Matthew Herbert was one of the most exploratory producers to emerge out of the UK in the 1990s. In 2001, his Bodily Functions LP, under the name Herbert, featured sounds generated from human hair and skin. And today he is best known for various projects where he has used everyday

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noises (so-called found sound) to create electronic music with a message. Drawing on his formative years as a 14 year old playing in a Glenn Miller-style group, his Matthew Herbert Big Band played their first concerts in 2003. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Herbert ripped up newspaper headlines of the second Gulf War, feeding them through his sampler. Two years after the subsequent Big Band LP Goodbye Swingtime, he released Plat du Jour, exploring the industrialised food industry through such sonic devices as recordings of chicken farms. The theme was explored further on his 2012 LP One Pig, which documented the 20-week life of the animal to “acknowledge the realities of what it is to eat meat”. Since 2001, all of Herbert’s work – recorded for his own Accidental Records label – has been made under the principles of his Personal Contract for the Composition of Music (Incorporating the Manifesto of Mistakes). Essentially it challenges him to strive for originality. The Music raises interesting questions about the music-making process in the 21st century. “Much of music is so busy soundtracking the status quo that it’s lost its evolutionary urge,” he writes in the introduction to the new book. “Faced with the chance to make music out of an A&E department or a guitar, music continues to choose the path of least resistance.” For Herbert, despite technological advancements and turbulent world events, music remains largely conservative. With The Music he tackles this complacency with a typically innovative and thought-provoking work. It arrives after his first dance record under the name Herbert for nearly a decade, The Shakes, released in 2015. “Music can’t only and always be a call to arms,

it can also tenderise and engulf when comfort is needed,” said Herbert of The Shakes. As we have come to expect, it was a dance record that carried a message, using the sounds of bullets and shells purchased on eBay as part of its sonic landscape. We spoke to Herbert at his studio in Whitstable to delve a little deeper into the mind of a true musical radical.

I understand you’ve had this idea for over 20 years, so why did you feel like now was the time to release a book instead of a record? I am 44 this year. When you are getting older you start thinking, shit I’m running out of time to do everything. The last Big Band record I did had 400 people on it and thousands of sounds and was recorded at the British Museum, the Houses of Parliament and a branch of McDonald’s. It was really full on and then the One Pig record took another three years. These projects take a lot of time, so now it felt right to finally commit this idea to paper. Another thing was I have a very clear vision of where I think I should be going with sound and I really can’t do it on my own. To make this into a record would take years and millions of pounds to make. So the idea is that the book could be turned into a record with the time and resources? Yes absolutely. It’s designed

so that it could possibly be made providing you could, for example, persuade President Assad of Syria to record himself falling asleep, or every Tory MP allowed you to sample them mowing their lawns at the same time. So yes it’s theoretically possible, and more importantly it will all have happened or could be happening right now. What about the way other people will imagine these sounds? Everyone will bring their own ideas to it. Yes, that is really exciting. The only correct or definitive performance is the one that happens in every person’s head. It’s not like a recording when you never know how it will end up. The Big Band was a good example because you have an idea of how it’s going to sound, so you write it on your computer and do all that work and then you get it into the studio and parts just don’t work. And then other parts you think would sound a bit lame sound incredible. You just

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aren’t in control of it, and in some ways you just have to surrender to the limitations of the tools you have. Whereas with this project I can just write a description of a sound or where it’s come from and the listener does the rest. And what about you, from a creative point of view, writing down rather than making music? The writing is quite overwhelming, because the only limit now is my imagination. For example, there is a chapter on silences, and I’ll be in bed at say two in the morning and suddenly think, oh shit I forgot about the silences in sport, or I haven’t even thought about Belgium. But writing is also a meditative and mind expanding experience as you transport yourself around the world constantly. I also thought there was something quite poetic about it and wondered if this was something you felt while writing it? There is definitely a lyricism to it that I was not expecting. I guess that comes from the juxtapositions. In many ways it’s just an instruction manual. So it doesn’t tell you what to feel about the stuff, it just points to things and moments. And then it’s up to the reader to start to assemble them in their head and imagine how it would sound. But there is a certain poetry to it because poetry is about all the stuff that is left out as much as the stuff that is on the page. It’s about the spaces around the words. So it’s been quite tricky thinking about where paragraphs should go. Maybe it shouldn’t have any at all, or do they become really important?

Is that because the paragraphs then become a whole new part of the rhythm? Yeah, absolutely. For example there is a bit in the first chapter that I like that has different steps. So a step here and then a step there and you really feel the pace and rhythm change. And that’s been an odd experience to discover that the act of writing is musical in itself. One knows instinctively that it is but to actually experience it in this form is quite revealing. And this really affects the language you use. If you use a word that is ugly or too specific or not specific enough it changes that rhythm. Why did you decide not to include any ‘traditional’ instruments in the text? Because for me the biggest revolution in my time is that music can be made out of anything, you don’t have to play a piano or pick up a guitar. We are in a new epoque where you can use the sound of a fishing trawler or a football crowd or a brick to make music

The act of writing is musical in itself. One knows instinctively that it is, but to actually experience it in this form is quite revealing. And this really affects the language you use. If you use a word that is ugly or too specific or not specific enough it changes that rhythm with. So that creates such a philosophical shattering of what music has been all these years, that I feel I have a responsibility to take that really seriously. So it’s a natural extension of your experiments with found sound? Yes, it’s not that there’s no point in doing it if there are instruments in it, but it’s not radical doing things that way. Music needs radicalism right now. It needs shocks, different ways of talking about it, different ways of listening, new distribution models. One of the composers most associated with found sound was the late John Cage. Why was he so important? One of the most important aspects of John Cage is his philosophical framework for everything. He wasn’t just doing things for fun or because he could. He was doing it as part of a wide exploration of what music is, how we receive it, what it means to play music and how that is different to writing down music. And what kind of change are you trying to effect not just in people but also in the world, in nature and all this kind of stuff. And I feel like his contribution was always about going up to a wall and trying to get through it. And looking at where we are now there are no walls really. You can do anything with anything. You can make a piece of cheese sound like Jimi Hendrix and vice versa. Every day the possibilities are multiplied infinitely again because a new plug in or another piece of technology comes out. Cage is needed more than ever. How liberating was it when you first got your hands on a sampler in the 1990s? It was liberating, but it took quite a long time for me to process what this technology meant. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first records were all based in the house. My first LP as Herbert was called Around the House and the first Wishmountain record had tracks called ‘Pepperpot’ and ‘Cheesegrater’. So it was just things that were all around me. I did realise that any noise in the world could be music, although I didn’t make the connection for a while that that could mean anything from a traffic jam to the American presidential elections to 480 avocados rolling down some stairs. It took a while for my brain to catch up. When you look at technology in music today do you think in some ways it has restricted progression and innovation? It’s absolutely done that. Just look at a music-making programme like Logic. 157

German software engineers developed it in the 1990s and it got better and better and then Apple bought it. And even though it’s now way more able and sophisticated in what it can do, they’ve simplified it. Just the whole framework and the expectations of how you might want to make music are so clearly defined. So if you open it up, it asks, ‘Do you want to write hip-hop, do you want to write techno?’ And then it loads up loads of sounds to you. It also has loads of loops you can drag and drop in. For me, the whole madness is epitomised by this section of spoken words and phrases you can drop in, and one of them is this dude going, “Amazing.” And I’m like, what the fuck did they think I might want with some middle-aged dude saying that? So it’s actually a regression from the blank slate when you started using samplers? It’s such a bastardisation of what it was meant to be. It just becomes like musical shopping, so you take a bit of this and a bit of that. It’s not that I’m overly nostalgic about the old ways, but if human beings don’t think about what they are doing and just do stuff then we are fucked. We have to think about our actions and think about what we are doing.

The majority of iTunes has not been downloaded once, so we have to accept that music is now another form of waste. And it’s being made as disposable as a bag of crisps And this is also related to the way we consume music? The majority of iTunes has not been downloaded once, so we have to accept that music is now another form of waste. And it’s being made as disposable as a bag of crisps. So it’s also all tied up in the distribution models. We now watch music rather than listen to it. For example, 40 per cent of YouTube activity is music related. Once we finish making a record now we have to think, what does this thing look like. And that is a giant step backwards in terms of marshalling the imagination. Because it’s too explicit? Yes, for example it’s impossible to think about Fat Boy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ without thinking about people in the shopping mall [in the video] instead of thinking about people from the civil rights movement, which is where the original 158

song came from. Everyone used to have their own videos in their heads and now it’s laid out explicitly for us. So there is a collapsing of the imagination in that sense. And at the same time a loss of mystery? Yes, there is that and also the biggest revenue now in music is through advertising. So many people have stopped releasing records and are now just trying to get their music into ads. And that creates timidity in music and a world where the music we hear in the every day sense is stripped of drama. It’s all got to be happy and telling you everything is OK. And also the way a record becomes associated with a certain advert. Look at a beautiful record like ‘God Only Knows’, which friends of mine got married to. So they contextualise that song to themselves and then a couple of years ago it’s used on a Volkswagen commercialvehicles advert. It’s so utilitarian and just takes all the joy, mystery, passion, pain and spirituality out of music. It just sucks it all out and attaches it to a white van driving up the M1. So in many ways music has now become part of the problem when it used to part of the solution. You state in the introduction to your book, ‘Much of music is so busy soundtracking the status quo that it’s lost its evolutionary urge.’ Is there any area of music where you feel that isn’t true? It’s not so much in strictly musical terms, but the most radical and innovative work that I’ve experienced in the last few years is in opera. Seeing Heiner Goebbels’ production of a Louis Andriessen opera in Germany with 150 sheep on stage and three enormous remote control zeppelins flying around the stage – just the breadth, scope and commitment of vision, and seeing how far you can go with a particular distillation of an idea, was so intoxicating and breathtaking in its ambition. I found that really depressing as well because it just reminded me of how comfortable everything else has become, particularly in dance music.

Why do you think that happened in dance music when it was once so revolutionary? Well to start with, capitalism has a wonderful ability to corrupt anything of any value or meaning. But certainly in the UK I think you can trace a before and after around the Criminal Justice Bill [in 1994]. Before that the outdoor parties were free and we just used to throw them wherever we wanted and invite whoever we wanted. There was no charge and it was a real classless expression through dancing and music. Then you had the emergence of the super clubs, when everything seemed to be about selling things. Yes and with the clampdown after the bill was passed, everything moved inside; there were bouncers on the door deciding who could come in, there was a charge to get in, the events were advertised, everyone was back on alcohol again. I remember that march against the Criminal Justice Bill and the charges in Hyde Park by the police. It definitely felt like a sinister attack on the culture. Yes I was there too. I remember being trapped next to a fence on Park Lane and they kept us there for a couple of hours and then returned with their riot gear and just charged us. It was all very scary and it was obvious they were really threatened by the music and the culture. Are there places where dance music still feels political? Well it’s different in somewhere like Berlin, when you look at a club such as Berghain. They don’t allow sponsorship and don’t do any press so nobody speaks on behalf of the club. So they have a very free attitude and dance music does still feel political there and in other places across Europe. You made your first dance LP for more than 10 years last year. When you released The Shakes, you said you wanted to find the middle ground between diversion and action. Can you explain? I thought more about it when I came to do the live show for The Shakes with the writer Duncan Macmillan. Before that I had done a lot of difficult live shows with bombs and pigs and so on. So when it came to The Shakes, I wanted to do something that was more celebratory. But one of the conclusions we reached was that it was possible to have fun, but for there to be meaning at the same time. It’s OK to take pleasure and there be something constructive and well thought out as well. So I guess with the record, although it was celebratory, we wanted it to also talk about important things. How do you go from recording such a serious record as One Pig to The Shakes and then onto The Music? The creative process just goes in cycles. At the moment, I have a really profound need

/Gideon Marshall Digital Equipment/courtesy of Three Four Snap threefoursnap.com

Photographic Assistant

to look really closely at sound and follow that stuff to its logical conclusion. But when I made The Shakes in 2014, I had a profound need to have fun again. I had got so embroiled into seriousness and death, I felt like I owed it to myself to lighten up. You’ve previously spoken about the importance of music documenting exactly what is happening at that time. Do you think The Music will make this even more evident in the fact that it is written down? I would hope so, and for it be a kind of version of Samuel Pepys’ diaries somehow: this is what the world sounded like in 2016. One of the briefs I set myself was that all of the sounds used could have been happening right now. So you don’t hear descriptions of the first moon landing or Donald Trump swearing the oath of allegiance as he becomes president. For me, it feels that it’s one of the artist’s responsibilities to describe the world as it is now, as they see it and hear it. One of the other things your work does is make connections with events happening at the same time in different parts of the world. Why is that so important to you? It’s just the way my imagination works.

Right now in Canada they might be loading a plane with wheat for tomorrow’s bread in the UK. So what kind of bread I buy is directly related to that story of what is happening in Canada. There’s also an extract from The Music when you juxtapose the sound of Philip Green, chairman of the company that owns Topshop, Burton and other retail giants, getting into his most expensive car with noise of the clothing factory workers in the Far East. Yes, it’s very hard for me to forget or unlearn these things, like the slaves in the Thai fishing industry. The cheap fish you see in the supermarket or the prawns in the sandwich you might pick up at the station, they all connect to some story. So the connections I make are already there and being made. The fact is we just choose to see the world from one perspective.

And finally, is their one objective you would like The Music to achieve? For me personally, to show where my music would end up given enough time, money, resources, ability and imagination. So it’s a shortcut to that end point I guess. And also for others to think about what a record could sound like if these tools were used to their full capacity. I also get frustrated when my records are put in the charts alongside other things that they have absolutely nothing in common with. For example, if I made a record out of a bomb exploding, I feel like it needs to be thought of in a different context to something like U2. It doesn’t make it better, just different. And so in a way, by putting it in book form, people will have to shift the context of it. The Music is the latest project by Matthew Herbert. It is an album created as a book of instructions matthewherbert.com A Matthew Herbert remix of ‘I’m the Message’ by Karl Bartos, ex-Kraftwerk, is out on 25 March

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/Mark Webster Photographs/Tim Hans

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Jai

ALAI This ancient Basque game, the fastest ball sport in the world, has thrown off its criminal past and is making a comeback on the courts of Florida.

s ball games go, it is as old as many of the more venerable, but the sport that began life in the Basque region as pelota – and became renowned in its more refined form as jai alai – has never really hit the heights of many of its counterparts. In spite of a seemingly patchy appeal, though, it retains the accolade of the fastest ball sport in the world. It also has hardcore players and enthusiasts that keep it alive around the globe (in Latin America, Spain, France, Italy and, most famously, Florida) as well as a healthy following of punters for whom it is one of the most exciting betting sports there is.

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Although versions of this type of ball game go back many centuries, jai alai’s specific roots go back around 400 years, with a similar development to real tennis. In the Spanish Basque version of pelota, the game evolved using the outside walls of churches after Sunday mass. Frontón is the Spanish word for this type of facade, and it has been retained as the name for a jai alai playing area – a three-sided court that has kept the traditional layout, meaning the sport can’t be played left-handed. While some variations of pelota retained a leather glove as a bat, the version known as zestapunta (the Basque term for basket tip) used a curved wicker basket as a racket, known now as a cesta. In 1875, the Spanish writer Serafín Baroja first referred to this particular adaptation of the sport as jai alai (a “merry festival”), which is the name it arrived with at the St Louis World’s Fair in the United States in 1904. Twenty years later, the first fronton in Florida was opened at the Hialeah Park racecourse just outside Miami. It was a location that immediately suited the proclivities of the venue’s captive audience, who could just as easily bet on a horse race or this new

In its heyday it not only attracted the interest of several thousand spectators at the matches, but also the more unwelcome attention of criminals, who saw the sport as a golden opportunity to both make and launder big money

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sport, in which men launched a Brazilian rubber and goatskin projectile (pelota) at speeds that can now reach up to 200 mph (although betting on jai alai wasn’t officially legalised until 1934). In the US, jai alai has been started up and dispensed with in various locations, from New Orleans to Connecticut and Newport, Rhode Island – while Las Vegas also had a couple of attempts to replicate the appeal of the frontons in Florida. However, it was the sunshine state that remained the sport’s natural home. In its heyday it not only attracted the interest of several thousand spectators at the matches, but also the more unwelcome attention of criminals, who saw the sport as a golden opportunity to both make and launder big money. This period has been graphically recounted in the recent Johnny Depp film Black Mass, about the notorious Boston gangster James Joseph ‘Whitey’ Bulger. In a recent article for Time magazine, Robert Sullivan recalls the time in 1981 when, as a junior reporter at Sports Illustrated,

he found a newspaper story that he thought was about a shooting at a golf course, but it “turned out it wasn’t about golf, but jai alai. Well, heck, that’s a sport too, sort of”. The story told of the death of Roger Wheeler, head of World Jai Alai, Inc, “an innocent [who] didn’t like all the crookedness”, and who was murdered when he chose not to cooperate. For the past decade or so, the sport has been in something of a decline, even in Florida. But one of its original homes has just reopened after a $60 million renovation, and is once again endeavouring to place the sport centre stage. The Casino at Dania Beach has just relaunched its hotel resort with a lavish new fronton, and recruited leading jai alai players from around the world to compete there. Competitors – traditionally known by their nicknames, such as Gonzalo, Manex, Minte and Zabala – will be tasked with once again making jai alai a major feature in Florida, and in the process help put one of the oldest, and certainly fastest, ball games back on the sporting map.

Live matches of jai alai take place Monday to Saturday at the Casino, Dania Beach, Florida. After a break from 1 July to 15 September, the Casino will introduce a new format, dividing its usual roster into three or four groups of teams representing nearby cities, with a championship prize on 15 December casinodaniabeach.com

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Punk Words

Mystified / Speed / Bazooka Joe / FKA Twigs / Two Sevens Clash

he year 2016 is being celebrated as the 40th anniversary of the birth of punk. There are more gigs, film seasons, fanzines, exhibitions, fashion shows, book reprints and record reissues in the pipeline than you could shake a stick at. A year-long festival, Punk.London: 40 Years of Subversive Culture, is being backed by some of London’s leading cultural organisations, including the British Fashion Council, the British Film Institute, the British Library, the Design Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Museum of London together with international audio behemoth Universal Music. Amusingly, all of these institutions that existed in 1976 were then the perceived enemies of punk. Even the London mayor’s office, headed by a born-to-privilege establishment figure who is the embodiment of almost everything punk derided, is enthusiastically promoting the festival as a tourist attraction. And yet, much of punk music was inchoate, or worse. Many of the fanzines that grew up around it were barely literate. Punk clothes and hairstyles were so rapidly codified and so slavishly iterated that their vaunted individuality was replaced by tribal uniformity. Some of this, perversely, was the point of punk as well as its weakness. Then there was the spitting and the frequent violence. And for all its newborn vigour, punk lasted

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barely 18 months. “Punk died in 1978. Get over it,” said Viv Albertine of the Slits, as quoted in Punk. London’s promotional material. So what’s to celebrate? The answer is: a lot. Punk’s defining and most enduring cultural impact was its DIY cultural ethos. It provided a platform on which marginalised sections of society, notably women and working class youth of both genders, could express themselves. Its empowering appeal to young female singers, musicians and designers, coinciding as it did with a broader surge in feminist activism, was profound. There was plenty of laddism about, but you didn’t need access to an old boy network to become part of punk. For a time, it seemed like there were more female or female-led punk bands around than male ones. Punk was liberating, too, because it was about process not product. It was a precursor of citizen journalism, DIY recording studios and low-budget filmmaking enabled by the digital era, sharing its democratising tendencies. “Punk’s DIY ethos taught me that a good idea attempted is better than a bad idea perfected,” says Don Letts, who was the resident DJ at punk’s Covent Garden nexus, the Roxy, during its 100day existence that started in December 1976. Punk also gave the first serious kick in the pants to traditional British deference – to the monarchy, the police and authority figures in general. Punk was, however, an evolutionary rather than revolutionary moment. It built on the subcultures it succeeded – notably the freak counterculture and original skinhead movement of the late 1960s – rather than eradicating and replacing everything that went before it, as it often professed to do. And the best of punk has, in turn, been borrowed and built on by the subcultures that have followed it. “We feel punk is about freedom,” says Jess Allanic of latter-day punk trio Mystified, who will be playing at the Roundhouse’s punk weekender in July. “It represents the choice to break and reject routine, to do and say exactly what we want. Punk is about not waiting for anyone or anything. If we want something, we do it ourselves. Being punk means being that small part of the population that isn’t asleep and has the balls to actually stand up and say, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’ Being punk is being awake, alive and free.” Joe Corré, who founded lingerie retailer Agent Provocateur in 1994, is the son of two of punk’s most prominent protagonists, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. Corré was about nine years old when punk exploded. He can see the benefits the movement brought to its participants, and also the contradictions inherent in an establishment-funded festival of celebration. “The really important aspect of punk, which changed a lot of people’s lives, was that it opposed the idea that kids

had their lives carved out in front of them,” says Corré. “If you were living in Barnsley or Nottingham you were expected to go down the coalmine and so on. You followed local tradition. Punk woke a lot of people up from that. To ignore everything that had been put on the table for you was a liberating experience. The problem is that without purpose and focus, it all dissipates into something that just became a bit of a tourist attraction. That’s what I think punk is now. “What banged it home to me was that there was an edition of American Vogue about a year ago which covered an annual gala they give, when all the TV crews are there asking the celebrities on the red carpet about the dresses they’re wearing. This one was all about punk sponsored by Vogue. I watched it because my mother went to it. Anna Wintour was there wearing this floral dress and she said, ‘I’m wearing this dress with these pink flowers because Paul Simonon from the Clash told me that the colour of punk is pink.’ And I thought, what a fucking twat. Mind you, I never liked the Clash either, all that victim stuff, all the ‘we never live less than nine floors up’ stuff. Yet somehow these people have managed to hang on to their credibility. One of the things I’ve always admired about my mother is that she’s never stuck herself into that, never limited herself into punk being her main thing. It was just part of her journey to where she is today, and she’s become interested in all kinds of other things. She sees punk very much as a failed experiment, that she learnt from. “It’s a joke that all these people want to sponsor punk

Soho, London, 1978 Photograph ÂŠ Derek Ridgers

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middle America’s militaristic, commie-bashing, McCarthyite prejudices. Unfortunately for punk, two decades later, pharmaceutical speed had become hard to buy on the street, as governments banned its use as a routinely prescribed slimming aid. Bootleg, aka bathtub, speed, however, is cheap and easy to produce – though in the 1970s it was often made so badly that you could get a bleeding nose just by looking at it. At least part of the disposability of punk’s cultural artefacts can be ascribed to the quality of speed available to all but its most well-connected adepts – and to the gluesniffing of those who could not afford even low-grade sulphate. Cocaine was way beyond most punks’ budgets. Writing before his death in 2009, Nat Finkelstein, court photographer of Andy Warhol’s Factory, said, “The legacy of punk for me is that quote from Lou Reed where he said the three worst people in the world are Nat Finkelstein and two speed dealers.” “I don’t remember having any coke at that time because it was £5 for a gram of sulphate and £60 for a gram of coke,” wrote Chris Duffy of Bazooka Joe, who headlined when the Sex Pistols played their first gig, at Central Saint Martins art school in November 1975. “None of us wanted to do marijuana,” says Duffy. “It was all adrenalin driven until the Americans, Johnny Thunders and all those bands, came on board, and then came heroin.” Heroin killed the Pistols’ Sid Vicious, who died from an Olli Wisdom of the band the Unwanted, Man in the Moon pub, London, 1977 Photograph © Derek Ridgers

Punk.London sounds like the celebration of something being neutered Billy Childish

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today. I’ve got this collection of old clothes from that time, that I’ve held on to over the years, and I was thinking of maybe doing some sort of exhibition. And then I heard about this festival coming up and I thought, well, I ain’t going to fucking do anything with it this year, that’s for sure. What are we going to have next? It’s only a matter of time before it’s all over Sainsbury’s and Boots.” In my bathroom cabinet there is a blue and silver Boots tin, circa 1955. It bears the motto “Pure Drugs”, underscored in smaller type with the tagline “Prescriptions Accurately Dispensed”. It has a certain period charm. All subcultures are shaped by their recreational drugs of choice, and punk’s “fuck you” attitude, along with many of its cultural artefacts, emerged from a blizzard of bootleg amphetamine sulphate (speed). This substance is not best known for eliciting nuance or thoughtful reflection. In the 1950s, high-grade pharmaceutical speed had fuelled

Jayne County, the Roxy, London, 1977 Photograph © Derek Ridgers

Ian Dury and the Blockheads, London, 1982 Photograph © Clare Muller / PYMCA

Patti Palladin of the band Snatch with guitarist Keef, Maida Vale, London, 1976 Photograph © Peter Gravelle

overdose in 1979, and it sucked the spirit out of many of his contemporaries. That legacy is not one being celebrated by Punk.London. Jon Savage is the author of the authoritative history England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, which has just been reissued as a Faber Modern Classic. “On one level, punk was a generational coming of age,” says Savage. “So it’s still a totem for a lot of people. But the number one place where I see the continuing influence of punk is its attitude to authority. Also, and I think

more importantly, the idea of do it yourself. That was the most creative, the most positive side of punk, which has had so many ramifications – you can see it all the way through music ever since really. It doesn’t directly affect something like grime or 1980s hip-hop, but it did have an influence. Musically, what I think people miss about punk, and I certainly did at the time, is the humour. But listening to it now, I enjoy listening to the fast, humorous, witty stuff. So I do still really like Buzzcocks. The kind of heavy statement stuff has worn less well. But maybe that’s embarrassment at one’s own youth and taking it so very seriously. And in a way, it invited you to take it seriously; it was promoted in some quarters as social realism. But early punk was actually quite science fiction. “The depressing side of punk is the heritage aspect. It’s an example of how, inevitably, punk has been co-opted. Also I go crazy when I see parents dressing their kids in Ramones T-shirts. Do you really want your

The really important aspect of punk, which changed a lot of people’s lives, was that it opposed the idea that kids had their lives carved out in front of them Joe Corré

Punk’s DIY ethos taught me that a good idea attempted is better than a bad idea perfected Don Letts

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I go crazy when I see parents dressing their kids in Ramones T-shirts. Do you really want your kids becoming male hustlers? Jon Savage

kids becoming male hustlers? Perhaps not.” The musician and painter Billy Childish, who turned 17 in 1976, agrees. Living in Kent, he has been unaware of London’s anniversary festival. “It sounds like the celebration of something being neutered,” he says. Don Letts is also out of sympathy with the idea of punk as heritage. He views his involvement with Punk. London with ambivalence. “I don’t want to bite the hands that feed me, these sponsored events I’m doing,” he says. “But we’ve got to be wary of punk becoming just another marketing ploy. Music and art used to be against the establishment. Now it’s about being part of the establishment. And that’s when you’re fucked. The general cultural climate in the west, it feels like punk never happened. I don’t want to tar everyone with the same brush – there are little things that are going on, I’d argue that Björk’s got a punk attitude, and FKA Twigs – but the aspirations of the young have changed. They’ve become careerist. I’m not asking people to throw Molotov cocktails. But at least give me some edge, man. Have an opinion. That would be a start. I mean, Adele, what the fuck is that? Why has popular culture grown so conservative? That’s the debate I’d like to be having. “If anything, punk should be a timely reminder of an energy, an attitude – the idea of using what you’ve got to get what you need, turning problems into assets, the DIY ethic. That’s what people need to take from punk and it will help them look forward, not back.” One of Letts’ major contributions to punk was 170

Siouxsie and the Banshees, 100 Club, London, 1978 Photograph © Derek Ridgers, courtesy of the Photographers’ Gallery, London

accelerating the overlap between white and black youth cultures, which he did with his reggae-only playlists between the live performances at the Roxy, and later with his many appearances at Rock Against Racism events. But Letts emphasises that he was only a link in an evolutionary change that had been happening for years. “A lot has been made of the punky reggae party that I’m supposed to have brought together in the late 1970s,” he says. “To a small degree, it’s true. But back in those days, x amount of my white friends had grown up with people like me sort of living next door. To them, black wasn’t this alien culture. Paul Simonon or John Lydon or Joe Strummer, they knew reggae. They didn’t need Don Letts to introduce them to it. But in the late 1970s there was also a shitload of white people who didn’t live next door to black people. People who lived in the suburbs, who came in from out of town. Those are the people I hipped to reggae. “So the stage was set for Don Letts. I was visible because I was black in an otherwise very white situation. Yet, I did my bit in a dynamic that had already started. Before punk, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the skinheads – and we’re talking about the fashion version, not the fascist version, the horrible

boots and braces stereotype – had already embraced black music, particularly reggae. Skinheads, when they started, were the first true multicultural subculture, black and white kids who’d grown up together in the inner cities. I was one of them. But there was a lot of confusion in the late 1970s. The National Front were trying to make the most of an ill situation and they played the divide and rule card. I’m immensely proud of using my culture to turn my contemporaries on, and in so doing creating a better understanding between us.” In 1976, Letts and punk achieved that. In 1977, Jamaican vocal trio Culture’s ‘Two Sevens Clash’ was not only a roots-reggae anthem,

Soo Catwoman, London, 1976 Photograph © John Selby / Rex Features / PYMCA

it was also one of the most popular singles on punk dance floors. There were other examples, coming from both directions. There have been some two-steps-forward, one-step-back moments since then. But it remains a legacy worth celebrating. Punk.London, a year-long series of events celebrating 40 years since the birth of punk, takes place across London throughout 2016 punk.london The Death of Photography, a book on the work of punk photographer Peter Gravelle, and Punk London 1977, by Derek Ridgers, are out in April carpetbombingculture.co.uk

Debbie Harry, the Roundhouse, London, 1977 Photograph © Philip Grey / PYMCA

Coventry, 1981 Photograph © Janette Beckman / PYMCA

England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock by Jon Savage is reissued by Faber Modern Classics faber.co.uk 171

/Andy Thomas

Words

Henry Rollins as the priest

Gutterdämmerung It’s a twisted fairytale inspired by everything from David Lynch and Wagner to Scandinavian noir and the Antwerp fashion scene, with a show including film, live action and ear-splitting rock’n’roll.

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n 17 August 1876, Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung premiered as the final part of his Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle), at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in Bavaria. The four operas that formed this most epic of Wagner’s masterpieces were based on stories from Norse mythology. The name Götterdämmerung was a German translation of the myth of Ragnarök, an apocalyptic war among the gods that led to the birth of a new world. Now, 140 years after Wagner’s production stunned audiences in southeastern Germany, the story has inspired an ambitious rock opera, renamed Gutterdämmerung, by photographer and filmmaker Björn Tagemose. “Imagine Iggy Pop as an insanely ripped fallen angel called Vicious; Grace Jones as an African goddess from hell; Henry Rollins as a sinister puritan priest; and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme as Death armed

with a bazooka,” wrote journalist Mandi Keighran after a screening in London at the end of last year. With the film premiering across Europe this spring, the expansive vision of Tagemose and co-writer Henry Rollins is now being fully realised. Tagemose was born in the Belgian city of Antwerp in 1969. “My parents came here from Sweden to be artists and then I lived in both places,” he tells me over the phone from Antwerp. It was here that he turned to film and photography, after spending his teenage years drawing, like his parents. “I only started in film at the age of 20 when I got hold of a cine camera. Then I just threw away the pencil and moved from drawing to film. It was so expensive to film 16mm back then though, you’d shoot for three minutes and then you would have to work for a week to pay for the development and buy new film again. So I started studying photography because that was a lot more affordable.” Tagemose got his first break in photography through the Antwerp fashion scene. “When I was studying photography I was next door to the fashion academy [at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts], so I had a lot of friends in fashion,” he says. “And what really inspired me about these people in Antwerp was that they were all into trash, Patti Smith, Bowie and things like that. They weren’t interested in what Chanel was doing or the pompous kind of fashion. It was a very rock’n’roll version of fashion. When you look at Ann Demeulemeester, she is the goddess of punk fashion and very much a contemporary of my great heroine, Vivienne Westwood.” Demeulemeester was part of the Antwerp Six, a group of influential fashion designers who graduated from the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the

early 1980s. It was through another member of that group that Tagemose got his first assignment. “Walter van Beirendonck was teaching at the fashion academy and had seen some of my shots of his students,” says Tagemose. “He called me one day and said, ‘Do you want to make pictures for me?’ I told him that I wasn’t a fashion photographer and he just told me, ‘That’s great.’ So he dragged me to all these strange shows and I was like, wow, if this is fashion that’s what I want to do. Walter reminded me very much of Jean-Paul Goude and was such an inspiration to me, in that you can be an artist, a stylist, a fashion designer, a stage designer and a photographer, all at the same time. Back then that wasn’t really done, you had to be one or the other. So I wanted to do everything just like Walter.” After working with Van Beirendonck, Tagemose was picked up by other designers and was soon in demand as a fashion photographer with a creative flair for the alternative. 173

“I was still living in both Sweden and Antwerp and I think they saw me as a kind of exotic person here,” he says. “What was so great about the Antwerp fashion scene was that they were much more interested in getting younger blood doing crazy stuff. They used guys like me rather than

It reminds me of what Lemmy said, that ‘rock’n’roll is the best way to get back at people’. That’s pure democracy the big star photographers, which made them so cool. I met a lot of people during that period, like Raf Simons, who was a protégé of Linda Loppa, a very big driving force behind the Antwerp Six. It was a small town and so I made these connections very quickly.” As well as shooting fashion, Tagemose pursued video, and went on to create adverts for

the likes of Adidas and Louis Vuitton. He has also made a name for himself creating multimedia rock shows and music videos for artists such as Grace Jones. It was through an inspired collaboration with Swedish group the Hives that the seeds of Gutterdämmerung were sown. In 2008, Tagemose designed a short film as part of the band’s show in Barcelona. The dramatic film concluded with a missile fired over the crowd and an explosion through which the band entered onto the stage. “It was a one-off show and the people who organised it wanted me to do something really spectacular and larger than life,” says Tagemose. “So I wrote this really dramatic film sequence. The film was a big success and I was very lucky because the people who booked the Hives were German promoters who were connected to all these festivals. They also knew everyone, including all the musicians I liked such as Lemmy. And the main promoter said, ‘If you wanted to write something like that on a larger scale I would push the show for sure.’ He told me he’d never seen such a crazy show in all his life. So that gave me a bit of self-confidence to pursue the idea. “The other person to really help me to have the nerve to stick my neck out and create something so ambitious was Grace Jones. I had done several shows for Grace and I told her my idea: that I had done this weird show for the Hives and I now wanted to do this crazy blackand-white, bombastic rock opera. And she said, ‘You have to do it, and I’m going to back you all the way.’ And with her backing I went to Iggy [Pop]. The first thing he said was, ‘You’re crazy, absolutely nuts, but I love it and want to do it.’ Then I contacted Henry Rollins to help me write the dialogue and I knew he was a very big Iggy fan, so I knew I had a strong asset there.” With Tagemose’s wife Katarina Vercammen acting as producer, the pair started to think who their ideal

cast would be. The list, drawn up from many of the artists Tagemose had worked with over the years, included rock legend Slash and his good friend Lemmy, Slayer’s Tom Araya, Mark Lanegan, and actor and singer Nina Hagen. “It was amazing because everyone I contacted just said yes,” says Tagemose. He wanted to create a work that was as epic as it was ambitious, and for inspiration he looked back to the operas of Wagner. “I think Wagner was somehow connected to me and my work in scenography when creating these really advanced video stage shows,” he says. “He was the first opera creator who understood that scenography and the way you stage an opera is as important as the music yourself. He really was the first to do that and to do all these weird stunts like EDM or rock artists might do.” It was Wagner’s most famous opera, The Ring Cycle, that would be the basis for Tagemose’s own mythical tale. “We don’t have the exact same story that Wagner had with Götterdämmerung,” he says. “But the relationship between

Iggy Pop as the fallen angel Vicious

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the two is that both stories are based around the rebirth of the world after a war between the gods. That’s what we have in common, our rock’n’roll gods are also at war, but they are fighting for a guitar.” Alongside the big names in rock, Tagemose cast Olivia Vinall, a young British stage actor, as the “purest girl in the world”, tasked by Rollins’ puritan priest with destroying Satan’s evil guitar, and Tuesday Cross [girlfriend of Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes] as a dark rock’n’roll girl who is determined to stop her. “These two women really are the heroes of the film,” says Tagemose. It was important for him to have women as the two main protagonists of the film. “It was absolutely key to the film and very Scandinavian I think,” he says. “It relates to the powerful women we have in Scandinavia as well as the people who brought me up. I was raised by a feminist artist who was a very liberated person, so that has really inspired me.” Powerful women play a key part in the books and films of Scandinavian noir, and

I am interested in how close Tagemose feels to this movement. “I feel very connected, absolutely,” he says. “I think Gutterdämmerung is a very dark film and people will ask, ‘Why are you people so dark in your writing and films and why are you attracted to these things?’ That is something I share with a lot of my friends from Sweden. I have friends who produced Let the Right One In, the Swedish vampire film that is one of the best films we have ever made.” The dark and mystical overtones of Gutterdämmerung owe much to Tagemose’s times of isolation in the woodlands of Sweden. “You do find a lot of weird people in the forests there,” he says, laughing. “I think it goes back to my family spending several months of the year in the forests amongst nature. And even now in the winter I go there and write. You really are alone there and the only thing you might hear is the distant chopping of wood. So there is a certain atmosphere and it brings a darkness. You really do feel the forest. There are not many places in Europe quite like that, where you feel that kind of energy. That has had a big impact on me. It’s interesting because now it feels like in some places, especially in the north, where fewer people are now living, the animals are taking over again. It’s very powerful, this link to nature.” So for Tagemose, the roots of Gutterdämmerung reach all the way back to Norse mythology and the power of nature over man. “It’s all connected,” he says. “And also to films like Häxan, the first silent horror film made in Sweden, and then the imagery that many Scandinavian bands use.” When it came to putting words to his ideas, Tagemose recognised his limitations. “I’m definitely someone who writes with images and uses the camera as a weapon, so everything in the film is shot by me,”

he says. “But I’m not a writer, more someone who dreams up a story then films it, rather than creating dialogue. And also I would have found it very intimidating to write for people of such stature because all of them are so iconic. I thought to myself, how am I going to write words for them when they would write better words than me. So that’s when I had the idea for Henry Rollins. He is a rock’n’roll god himself and also has a certain morality but with a very weird edge. He has this strange dark side as well, so he fits very well with the mood of my film.” To create the dark visual aesthetics of the film, Tagemose looked to the rich heritage of Antwerp fashion. “The Antwerp fashion scene actually goes back to medieval times, when the city was a very big power in the textile industry,” he says. “And it was the textile industry that paid the painters like Rubens. So there are a lot of interesting connections there between art and fashion, and that was something that was very much in my mind when making the film.”

Grace Jones as the goddess from hell

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Jesse Hughes as the bounty hunter

Central to the dark gothic atmosphere of Gutterdämmerung are the costumes and styling of Tim van Steenbergen and Audrey Heselmans. “Audrey has a very similar DNA to the whole Antwerp scene and it’s incredible what she has done,” says Tagemose. “The way she has made all these characters look is very cool. It has these connotations to fairy tales and at the same time it has a contemporary look to it.” Before Gutterdämmerung, Belgian fashion designer Van Steenbergen created the costumes for Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at Teatro alla Scala in Milan. “Tim’s costume for Grace really is his pièce de résistance, just absolutely beautiful,” says Tagemose. “What made it even more incredible was that after we shot the film, the dress was enlarged digitally by 3D artists at a post-production house in Paris called St. Louis. These guys do everything from Chanel to Dior and are absolutely incredible. The cool 176

thing is that it’s not Hollywood 3D, it actually looks like it could have been made by Fritz Lang if he had had access to the tools.” Tagemose’s cinematography and the overall mise-en-scène help to give the film a 21st-century twist on the expressionist cinema of the 1920s. “It has this old school stamp to it, so it doesn’t look like modern technology has been used,” he says. “Gutterdämmerung is very expressionistic in a similar way also to David Lynch’s films such as Eraserhead, which I absolutely love. There are lots of deeper hidden messages in there if you want to look for them. I think people will have a lot of different interpretations of the film as well. And that is what I like about Lynch also. Another great influence was Robert Wilson. What he is doing in avant-garde theatre and opera somehow connects with the work of Lynch, Walter [van Beirendonck], Jean-Paul Goude and people like that.” Gutterdämmerung was filmed at locations across the world to fit in with the busy schedules of the many stars, from the Mojave Desert to medieval churches and First World War trenches in Flanders. It was here that the film picked up much of its strange atmosphere. “We filmed in the real trenches from the First World War where many people died, and that is important when you think about the film,” says Tagemose. “Gutterdämmerung is really an anti-war film and is also weirdly up to date when you think about events such as what happened in Paris.” The band playing on that horrific night at Le Bataclan theatre in November 2015 was of course Eagles of Death Metal, whose founders Josh Homme and Jesse Hughes both star in Gutterdämmerung. “My film is very much about people who abuse other people’s beliefs,” says Tagemose. “It’s criticising this false morality we see

in religion. And when you think about Paris it reminds me of what Lemmy said, that ‘rock’n’roll is the best way to get back at people’. That’s pure democracy.” I suggest to Tagemose that the film also raises some interesting questions about the misappropriation of Norse mythology throughout history, in particular through the Nazis. “That’s right. Everyone hijacks faith or religion for some reason,” he says. “For example, Bush hijacked the Christian religion to invade Iraq. There are a lot of people using religion to target the weakness in people. Others who are smarter than them easily influence those people. I don’t think these people are religious, they just use it.” “The loudest silent movie on earth”, as the film’s tagline has it, Gutterdämmerung has been designed to be adaptable to different audiences. “The format is of a silent movie, like the old films, but instead of an orchestra we have a live rock band,” says Tagemose. “We’ve got a great band that is most of Iggy’s people led by Kevin Armstrong. But the idea is that it changes. So you may see Gutterdämmerung in a small venue with more stage actors, opera singers and stuff and then if you see it at a metal festival it will have more pyrotechnics and be much more in your face and faster. And then we will always bring in different guests that might not be the same people as in the film. So that really is the fun thing, that everyone will see a different version and there will always be surprises coming out of the box.” One of those surprises relates to Belgian artist, director and designer Jan Fabre. “We are really excited because Jan celebrates the 30th birthday of his Troubleyn Opera House this year, and he wants to show Gutterdämmerung,” says Tagemose. “Jan said, ‘Come on, let’s shock everyone.’” Gutterdämmerung, a rock opera film and live show by Björn Tagemose, is at the Isle of Wight Festival, Newport, 9-12 June, and Download Festival, Derby, on 10 June isleofwightfestival.com downloadfestival.co.uk gutterdammerung.com

Olivia Vinall as the heroine Juliette

/courtesy of Bjรถrn Tagemose

Stills

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Words

/Mark Webster

Graphic

Novels From traditional book form to webcomic and even board game, this slippery genre has posed more questions than answers since its inception in the 1960s.

hat is jazz?” is a question that has confounded fans and aficionados across the decades, with an answer never standing still long enough to become definitive. And in the world of literature, the question “What is a comic?” seems to have a similar ability to set pulses racing among fans, scholars and creators alike. The debate took off in the 1960s, when the term “graphic novel” was first introduced as a concept. “It was in 1964, in a monthly newsletter published by the Comics Amateur Press Alliance, that it was first introduced in a review,” says Paul Williams, senior lecturer in 20th-century literature at the University of Exeter, where he teaches a module called “From comics to graphic novels”. We are sat opposite the Comic Museum in central London, where he is in the process of curating an exhibition celebrating the British graphic novel. He says that, like a lot of scholars, he has now come to terms with the problem of what a comic is and is “willing to accept the greyness”.

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In pragmatic terms, the graphic novel is very much the adult take on comics that were originally aimed at a youth market – with Marvel and DC as the prime catalysts for the sustained interest in picture-driven storytelling, or sequential art. There are particular traits that set graphic novels apart on a physical level. “It implies a long comic, often published as a book, says Williams. “So it goes into bookshops, is lent esteem and sells units for it.” For many, a major turning point was 1986’s Watchmen graphic novel, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Around the same time another game changer, this time with its roots firmly placed in superhero comic book history, appeared with Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Prior to that, however, Marvel had already published a series of what the company itself called graphic novels in the early 1980s. Yet even a decade before that, Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin’s paperback Blackmark was called a graphic novel in its synopsis, while 1976’s Bloodstar by Richard Corben boldly put the phrase on its cover, as did 1978’s A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories, by one of the pioneering comic book greats, Will Eisner. Williams is also keen to include the work of the infamous, multi-talented artist Robert Crumb in the conversation, because of the way in which his work managed to tap into a certain generation and culture – giving the development of the graphic novel art form a real boost in the process. “R. Crumb, even though he was underground and subversive, was among the first people to be producing special editions – and they were being marketed as limited,” says Williams. “So that notion of collectability is really being introduced. And you’d have to go to ‘head shops’ to buy them, amongst the bongs. So there’s a community building up around

it. And as the 70s progress, and Nixon is waging his war on drugs, these books become an economic necessity because it initially helped keep those shops going, before T-shirts took over.” All of which has a distinctly American flavour to it. Indeed the US has been the source of a vast amount of comic book literature from the very beginning. As Williams sees it, “It really settles down into an industry in the 70s.” But those giant cogs are being greased from that time onwards by the finesse of what he also calls “the British patchwork”. “The scene is incredibly varied,” he says. “Which is part of its distinctiveness. There have always been so many different pockets going on. And what’s amazing is how many British people work in the US comics industry – and you don’t know they’re British. In the States that’s a real asset, that ‘Britishness’. It’s been researched as such. It is even called the ‘British Invasion’.” That Britishness is borne out in the embracing of the island’s history in so much of the literature, and in particular the

V for Vendetta, volume three, 1988, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd ÂŠ DC Comics

Ex Machina, volume 4, 2008, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Tony Harris

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political and satirical cartoons that began to target wealth and privilege in the 18th and 19th centuries. “We’re right to make that connection,” says Williams. “There’s a clear link between the history of cartoons and today’s graphic novels. Someone like Eddie Campbell, who illustrated From Hell. He’s really reappropriating a William Blake painting. Others are doing riffs on Hogarth. It’s part of the enjoyment – spotting it, seeing it developing, continuing the tradition.” Like the aforementioned Watchmen, From Hell was written by arguably the leading writer in the genre, Northampton-born Alan Moore – who was also responsible for penning one of the great graphic novel success stories, the dystopian fable V for

entertainment comes in rectangles. So in the end it worked exactly the same way as Dickens. It was episodic, but actually it came together as a novel.” Lloyd was born in Enfield, north London, towards the end of the Second World War, and because his father worked night shifts, he was a “TV kid”. “Lots of programmes, lots of movies,” he says. “And I ingested that, as well as a love of art. Stick it all together. But I discovered I had the skill set after I realised I wanted to do comics myself. I had lots of comics when I was a kid, but not the classy ones like Eagle, just the cheap ones. And it was when I was about 12 that I was inspired by one particular magazine, called Boys’ World. Not the whole thing, but a spread in the middle called Wrath of the Gods, drawn by a guy called Ron Embleton. Ron was one of the great names in British comic illustration. And it really made me believe you could create totally believable worlds, like a movie. So at 13 I made my first strip, which was an adaptation of an Arthur C. Clarke story called Security Check. And I’m very happy to say, I was a natural!” Lloyd went into the advertising industry as an artist, “doing comic strips in my lunch hour”, but by the late 1970s he had committed full time to comic books – most notably with Steve Parkhouse, with whom he

We got rid of thought bubbles and gave it a TV narrative. And I changed the shape of the frame to a rectangle, because everyone’s entertainment comes in rectangles. So in the end it worked exactly the same way as Dickens. It was episodic, but actually it all came together as a novel Vendetta. The artwork was created by another of the leading lights, David Lloyd. “V for Vendetta began as a part work in the early 80s, although it does work as a graphic novel [published as such in 1995],” Lloyd tells me. “And the great value in that term is it gives a much better image to comics, because of the baggage that goes with that word. There is gravitas in a novel. And book publishers getting involved was very important. But for us, it really came about as an accident. It was in a British indie mag called Warrior, which was published by an ex-editor of Marvel UK, Dez Skinn. “But because he was an indie, there wasn’t a lot of money, so the compensation was that we had creative freedom and we owned the characters. Which was a first for me and Alan. So we got rid of thought bubbles and gave it a TV narrative. And I changed the shape of the frame to a rectangle, because everyone’s

created the Marvel character Night Raven, who debuted in the March 1979 edition of Hulk Comic. Lloyd also worked with Parkhouse on Doctor Who Magazine, where he collaborated with his V for Vendetta partner Moore. “We both did back-up stories,” he says. “We were on the same wavelength. And it turned out we had kind of met before because we had both worked on one of the fanzines – it was called Shadow. He’d written articles and I’d done illustrations – these were the very early indie comics over here from where so many in the ‘British Invasion’ got their break. People like us, the 2000 AD people – we were a crowd that all had the same influences. Stuff like US TV, The Prisoner, Clint Eastwood. Judge Dredd was Clint Eastwood. And we were political. There were no Conservatives.” Since those groundbreaking days, the graphic novel and comic books in general have gone on to maintain incredible levels of innovation and invention. They have also become a staple source of inspiration for both television and film, while in Japan, the creation and rise of manga has effectively created its own comic book world, one that is now successfully exported globally. A prime example of the latest variation on a theme is the graphic novel Building Stories by Chris Ware, published in 2012 by Pantheon Books. It is a book, but it ostensibly appears to be a board game, coming in a box with all the elements of the book as separate pieces. “I actually teach that book at university,” Williams tells me. “And there is a story, but I don’t think there’s a best way to read it. The whole text is about human disconnection in the media age. The

nature of the book addresses the way we take media in.” Then there is artist and selfpublisher Andy Stanleigh, who I talk to in his native Toronto. Working from home and with copies of his work piled up in his garage, he has used his skills and experience as a graphic designer and illustrator to develop his own publishing house, AH Comics, which stands for Alternative History. AH has already established a diverse range of publications, beginning with more traditional-looking graphic novels such as Titan (2011) and Hobson’s Gate (2013). More recently he has spread his wings with the Jewish Comix Anthology – “not religious, but more a collection of folk tales that are funny, exciting, everything” – and

Titan: an Alternate History, 2011, written by Michael Tymczyszyn, illustrated by Andy Stanleigh © AH Comics

Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection, which gathers together stories from indigenous peoples of North America. “Some of these have never been written down before,” says Stanleigh. “In some cases, we even had to get permission to use them from the elder of a tribe.” There is even a comic book that is the CD sleeve for a new album, Delta by Toronto band the River Pilots, of which Stanleigh says, “It may well be the first jazz graphic novel!” But it is perhaps Lloyd who is working on the most contemporary of all graphic novel manifestations. For nearly three years, Aces Weekly has joined the burgeoning field known as webcomics, and in doing so has become an award-winning publication. It delivers a wealth of famous graphic novelists and builds into a series of complete books from serialised volumes, all for a small subscription. And it’s built from original artwork 181

that is then copied for the screen. Lloyd got the idea when he was in San Diego for a convention. “I met up with Pepe Moreno, who is a bit of a pioneer – one of the first recognised digital-only comics,” he says. “He did a Batman book that he used just software for. He did it because he’d had some bad experiences with traditional publishing, where he’d had stories printed but would be told that after print, distribution etc, there’d be nothing left for his cut. So much money has to be spent on all of that, but this is the 21st century. We can use cyberspace. We can use a laptop. The bottom line is this: you can do great comics on screen. You’ve just changed the surface. It’s not on paper, but it’s still a great art form. So you can tell the same stories. It gets to more people, and it’s cheaper, so the money goes straight to the creators.” Of course this kind of access to such a wealth of creativity can only be a good thing. But it does seem to distance itself from one of the major reasons why comic books, and graphic novels, became so popular in the first place – namely the exclusivity, the collectability and the sense of community that has built up around them. As an integral part of that tradition himself, Lloyd is looking to do something about this. “The area of cooperation I’m interested in is the comic stores,” he says. “Those guys are on the cutting edge of this world. And I want to work with them by selling volumes of Aces Weekly on coded sketch cards through them. It’s something that we already do at conventions. It works. It’s just like selling comics.”

From Hell, 1999, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Eddie Campbell, courtesy of Top Shelf Productions / IDW Publishing

Self-Portrait with Maus Mask, 1989 Artwork Art Spiegelman

The Great British Graphic Novel exhibition opens at the Cartoon Museum, 35 Little Russell Street, London WC1 on 20 April cartoonmuseum.org The graphic novel The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded by Jim Ottaviani, illustrated by Leland Purvis is out now abramsbooks.com AH Comics ahcomicsshop.com

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Watchmen, 1986, written by Alan Moore, illustated by Dave Gibbons © DC Comics

Building Stories, 2012, written and illustrated by Chris Ware

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Photographs

/Kevin Davies Words/Chris May

Lighting

Design Once almost a postscript in the staging of live performances, it is now close to the heart of a show’s creation, if not at its very nexus.

raditionally, lighting design was the final element to be considered by choreographers, musicians, theatre directors and fashion designers. And it had a strictly prosaic dimension, there to ensure the audience could see what was going on, and sometimes – the height of sophistication – cloak it with a little crepuscular mystery. But things have changed, and four of Britain’s leading practitioners – in the fields of rock, electronica, dance and fashion – tell us how.

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Willie Williams, creative director for U2

Williams has been creative director of U2’s live shows since 1982, designing the lighting and video of such landmark tours as Zoo TV in 1992 and U2 360° in 2009. He also worked on David Bowie’s Tin Machine and Sound and Vision shows, and has worked closely with Laurie Anderson for the past ten years. In 1976, when Williams was 17, he was about to start a physics degree in London. But it was also the year punk exploded, and that was the game changer for him. He got to know the band Writz, later to morph into Famous Names and become part of the Blitz scene. “I started playing with lights and generally helping out,” he says. “And there was another band, Deaf School, from Liverpool. I would follow both bands round like a lost sheep. When my A-level results came in, the thought of having to stop all this and go to study something I wasn’t passionate about was horrible, so I took what is known today as a gap

year. My mates were saying, ‘If you take a year off you’ll never come back.’ And they were right.” Williams worked with Stiff Little Fingers from 1981 to 1982 and, when they split, introduced himself to U2, who were looking for a lighting designer. “The relationship clicked,” says Williams. “They were just doing theatre-sized spaces then, and because we were the same age, we could grow up together creatively, which was really helpful. The first time U2 did an arena show, at Wembley, was the first time any of us had done a place that size. “The relationship between band and designer is based on trust. What’s unique about a rock show, compared with opera or theatre, is that the cast are in charge, and because they’re paying for it they’re also the producers. But they are the only people who can’t sit and watch the show. So trust is crucial. With U2, the creative process is a genuine collaboration. They have a vision, which I share, and the vision has always been: if you aren’t going to reinvent the form, why would you even do this? “The work tends to come out of conversation. What I think about it isn’t ultimately crucial, because I’m not the one standing there having to be Father Christmas for tens of thousands of people. If I can see my work through their eyes and it looks good, then I know I’m on to something. With artists like David Bowie and Laurie Anderson, on the other hand, there isn’t always a place for someone like me, because their concept is more pre-formed. So it’s not really a collaboration.” Does Williams ever hanker for the pre-digital days? “I always look on digital technology as a mixed blessing,”

he says. “From the 1980s onwards, new things would be introduced and you’d think, the sky’s the limit. But I noticed that the design of rock and pop shows became homogenised very quickly. You’d go and see Simple Minds and Tina Turner and it was essentially the same show. So I was not an early adopter of moving lights – intelligent lighting, as they call it now, which is an oxymoron if ever I’ve heard one. “Video has become the leading aesthetic in modern rock and pop shows, mostly done in a pretty mundane way. But it’s still light ultimately, and lighting is everything. I embraced film and video imagery very early, through Bowie and ultimately through U2’s Zoo TV tour, which was the sort of landmark. But I never thought of light and video as separate. For me the whole thing – the scenery, the lighting, the video – it’s all part of one toolbox.” willieworld.com 185

Tupac Martir, lighting designer for Alexander McQueen, Moschino and Thomas Tait

Known as ‘Mr London Fashion Week’ for his lighting designs at the eponymous shows, Tupac Martir’s activities extend far beyond fashion. Born in Britain to Mexican parents, and educated in Mexico, Italy and the US, Martir’s creative pursuits include painting, graphic novels, installations and performance art. He has made an opera and worked with Nederlands Dans Theater. In 2014, he curated the multidisciplinary Looking Outside My Window festival at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green. In 2015, he lit the façade of the British Museum for its Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations. After high school in the US, Martir went to Creighton University, a small Jesuit college in Nebraska, to study psychology. He ended up dropping psychology in favour of photography and painting and decided to become an artist. In 2002, he returned to Mexico. “Mexico City in the early 2000s was an incredible place artistically,” says Martir. “A lot was happening and 186

everyone was working in the arts – painters, artists, musicians, designers, writers, actors – they all lived in Condesa, an area of about a square mile. We all knew each other and socialised together all the time. But I took the bohemian lifestyle a little far, getting drunk, not doing very much, just hanging out with friends and talking. Eventually I got bored with it. I decided I wanted to do something different.” After a spell in an ad agency in Mexico City, Martir became art director of MTV in Latin America. “I did 40 shows a week,” he says, “coming up with ideas and with very small budgets. Some of them were beautifully lit, but others were really bad, and I decided I needed to learn how to do the lighting myself. In 2005, I went on a course in Mexico City. A friend was lighting concerts and I did work experience with him. I started picking up my own bands and my own shows to light. Then in 2008, I realised that all the interesting openings were taken, and unless I moved away I would not grow creatively. So I came to the UK.” In London, Martir landed on his feet, quickly picking up work with Givenchy and Stella McCartney. Other designers soon followed. He began ongoing relationships with Alexander McQueen and Thomas Tait in 2010 and with Moschino in 2012. How does Martir approach lighting runway shows? “For me, a fashion show breaks down into several distinct parts,” he says. “The actual show is often the shortest part, though it’s also the most important. First there’s the walk-in state, which lasts 45 minutes, an hour maybe, when the audience take their seats. That has to set a mood for what’s about to happen. You involve the audience without being too much

in their face. Then you have the show. The lights go down, the music starts, and you have to think about how the first model should look when she walks out. Then there’s the rest of the show. Then you have how the last model walks away, and what happens in the finale, and the little transition before they all come out together with the designer. “The key thing with the garments is that the audience and the photographers need really clear, crisp lighting. Most of my shows are super lit. I take great pride in the fact that my lighting is so crisp and bright that photographers at the shows can always get great shots. They never have to use a flash and the shots are clean. You can see whites, you can see blacks, you can see shapes. You don’t need any Photoshop. The photographers can take the shots and send them straight to their picture editors at the magazines and can get them on the internet immediately.” tupacmartir.com

Michael Hulls, lighting designer for choreographer Russell Maliphant

In 2014, Hulls won the highly prestigious Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance. He is only the second lighting designer to win the prize, which is usually awarded to choreographers or dancers. He is best known for his work with Russell Maliphant, with whom he began collaborating 20 years ago. He also works with a select number of other choreographers, including, most recently, Akram Khan. “I never trained as a lighting person,” says Hulls. “I trained in theatre and dance at Dartington Hall [in Devon]. Acting, directing, dancing, writing for performance. I wanted to learn how to make shows. And eventually I did, and designed sets for theatres and drama productions. After a time I decided it wasn’t doing it for me. Then I bumped into Laurie Booth, who’d been at Dartington a couple of years before me. I told him I was dissatisfied with theatre design, but I didn’t know what direction I was going to go in next. So Laurie said, ‘Why

don’t you come and do some lighting for me?’” Booth was making his name in improvised dance. “He felt comfortable asking me to come and improvise lighting,” says Hulls, “because I’d had the same training in contact improvisation as he had, by Steve Paxton at Dartington. Laurie said, ‘You just do whatever you want and I’ll improvise.’ So I started out as a lighting designer by improvising lighting live, without any sort of training or background. I’d go along to a theatre and set up the lighting desk and then the theatre technicians would say, ‘Do you want to plot the show?’ I’d say, ‘Oh no, I’ll make it up as I go along.’ And their jaws would drop. But for me, it was just another way of performing or creating a performance.” Hulls met Maliphant when he was dancing in one of Booth’s shows. “Russell was just at the point where he had decided he wanted to choreograph, and I was at the point of wanting to use lighting as a creative medium,” says Hulls. “So we decided we should get together and make work that is a genuine collaboration between light and dance. The traditional process is that a choreographer sets the steps to music, and then it is costumed and at the very end of the process somebody applies some lighting to it. But they can’t change the choreography because by then it’s all fixed. What we wanted to do was take lighting from the back end of the process and put it right at the beginning. That’s how we still work together today.” What does Hulls regard as his signature? “That it’s too bloody dark to see what’s going on,” he jokes. “When Russell and I worked on Sylvie Guillem’s farewell tour we had old-school ballet fans saying they couldn’t see her… anatomy. You felt like telling them

to buy a book of photographs if that’s what they wanted. For me, light and dark are two sides of the same coin and you can’t have one without the other. And it’s important to pay attention to the quality of the darkness, which is often quite a struggle because in theatres you may have lights in the wings or in the fly tower – or in the auditorium fire exit signs near the stage, which you’re not allowed to turn off. “I hope, too, that I’ve brought a new degree of fluidity to the way the space expands or contracts, or moves from one part of the stage to the other. Sometimes that’s imperceptible, because we don’t want people to watch the lighting; we want them to watch and experience the synthesis, the conjunction of all of the elements, to create something that is greater than the sum of the parts. The choreography of light, how it moves and transforms… I’d hope that would be part of my legacy.” russellmaliphant.com 187

Adam Smith, creative director for the Chemical Brothers

“When I began, you’d often be paid in bags of ecstasy pills or speed,” says Smith. “They were exciting times.” He started out in performance design at the height of the late 1980s rave era, and began working with the Chemical Brothers around 1994, when the duo (Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons) were still calling themselves the Dust Brothers. Smith was originally trained in film and video at London College of Printing. He was thrown off the course during his second year for being absent too often, lighting parties. He has made a partial return to TV and cinema, and later this year his feature-length movie – Trespass Against Us, starring Michael Fassbender – will be released by RSA Films. “I creatively design the whole visual aspect of the Chemical Brothers’ shows along with my design partner, Marcus Lyall,” says Smith. “Marcus and I began when we were still students, when a friend was throwing a party and asked us to put some visuals up. We’d been going to raves and thinking that most of the visuals weren’t very good. The 188

prevailing aesthetic was very much new age fractal nastiness, while we were coming at it with more of a film sensibility – scratching and painting on film, disembodied faces, Man Ray resonances, strange, otherworldly stuff, using 8mm film. “The big difference between us and everyone else was that we were shooting all our own footage. Video projectors were just coming out but we shunned them too, and we used 16mm projectors with loops and overhead projectors with oil. We worked a lot with a band called the Sandals. And then, around 1994, we met Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons. We had mutual friends and they were doing some of the clubs that we were doing visuals at – such as for Andrew Weatherall, who had this club in a railway arch at London Bridge. Dank, dark, dripping with whatever. “We met Tom and Ed just at the point when they had been asked to do a live show. In those days, live electronica wasn’t something people were really up for. Even Tom and Ed weren’t sure that having two guys onstage twiddling knobs would cut it. We realised that light and video had to be seen in a new way – they weren’t framing a band as in the past, it was more like they were standing in for a lead singer. The shows got bigger as the Chemical Brothers got bigger. We embraced new technology but we also kept a lot of our original aesthetic, like shooting all our own stuff.” But plenty has changed. “What started with a projection screen and a couple of Kodak slide carousels is now this massive LED screen with a bank of lights behind firing through,” says Smith. “We worked with various lighting designers but we were never really satisfied doing that. There was always this massive battle going on between lights and visuals, while what we were interested in was the synergy between them. On the last tour there was this piece we’d shot with

Akram Khan, using motion capture and turning him into this abstracted figure. It was happening on the LED screen but it was interacting with the lights, and it also had a synergy with the music. “LED screens lack some of the quality of projected film but the impact they offer is so much greater, this massive quantity of light. We programme the visuals into a bank of lights behind the screen and the lights bring the visuals out to the audience. They shoot it out for hundreds of yards – and keep on going. It’s basically putting a pixelmatched movie through the lights. And you need that LED to compete with the lights that are on festival stages. You might have Metallica on one stage, and the Chemical Brothers on another, and you need to be the show that someone sees from a distance and says, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m going down to see the Chemical Brothers.’ So one of Tom’s big things is: ‘Is it going to be noticed from right back there?’” flatnosegeorge.com

Jocks&Nerds x Lacoste

Lacoste L.12.12 Photograph Elliot Kennedy Styling Richard Simpson

For René Lacoste, athleticism and style went hand in hand. In 1926, tired of the tennis court’s stifling formal attire, he created his own uniform: the short-sleeved piqué cotton jersey that he called L.12.12, now known as a polo shirt. Named after Lacoste’s original icon, the L.12.12 shoe pays tribute to its inspiration. A classic tennis shoe that’s designed to complement summer trousers as much as tennis whites, its piqué lining and woven tongue label replicate the shirt’s features. A minimal exterior in soft premium leather belies the breathability and comfort of its internal moulding. The L.12.12 carries wearers from the courts to the clubhouse, then out onto the city streets. Available at flannels.com

James Patmore, bespoke product designer jamespatmore.com

/Chris May Photograph/Sean Alexander Geraghty Styling/Salim Ahmed-Kashmirwala

Words

College Paul Newman / Aero Leather Clothing / Marquee Club / Talon Zips and Goatskin / 1950s Ivy League

he college jacket acquired its name after it was taken up by students at American Ivy League universities in the early 1950s. With its short length and snug fit, goatskin suede body and sleeves, and knitted waistband and cuffs, the classic college jacket is a less militaristic cousin of the US Air Force A-2 leather bomber jacket, which was first issued to airmen in 1930. With the ending of the Second World War in 1945, manufacturers of the A-2 were looking for a replacement garment with peacetime sales potential. The college jacket is also a subtly smarter, though still fundamentally casual, cousin of the knitted-body letterman baseball jacket worn on US campuses from the mid-1920s onwards. The college jacket has enjoyed less screen stardom than either the letterman or the bomber, both of which have been immortalised in many Hollywood movies. The college jacket’s main claim to celluloid fame remains the 1956 movie Somebody Up There Likes Me, in which it was worn by Paul Newman as well as Steve McQueen. Ken Calder is co-founder of Aero Leather Clothing, which makes reproduction 1950s college jackets true to the

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Jacket classic design specifications in every detail. Calder saw his first college jacket when he arrived in London from Scotland, aged 15, in 1960. “I’d seen photos of Paul Newman wearing them,” says Calder, “but it wasn’t until I got to London that I saw one I could actually handle. There was an American clothing store in Shaftesbury Avenue that had them. Then in the mid-1960s I was working at the Marquee Club when the mods were into college jackets. Lots of people would turn up wearing them. They were buying them from Millets, who were importing them from America.” Aero began producing college jackets in limited numbers in 1988, but it was not until a couple of years ago that Calder found a reliable source for the authentic goatskin, tanned on both sides, from which the jackets were originally made. “They just don’t work if the material’s not right, and we thought it was worth waiting until we could source it,” says Calder. “To make the jackets properly, the leather side and the suede side should both be tanned, to the point where it’s almost like reversible leather. Most leathers are finished on one side only, which is cheaper, and most suede today is cowhide or pigskin, which has got a completely different surface look. To use that would be like reproducing a classic car that was made with aluminium but doing it in fibreglass. It doesn’t look right and it doesn’t wear right.” Aero’s jackets also use original 1950s Talon zips produced in the US. “About 20 years ago we bought a big pallet of them,” says Calder. “We haven’t got through them yet.” Modern English usage sometimes conflates the terms college jacket, letterman jacket and bomber jacket, and further confusion arises from the description varsity jacket, widely used

as a synonym for the letterman jacket. Though interrelated, each of these jackets has distinguishing characteristics. “The letterman jacket was originally made with leather sleeves and a cloth body with a chenille letter sewn on to it,” says Calder. “It was a warm-up jacket for college baseball players, and the letter was awarded by the college for accomplishment in the game. College jackets came in after the Second World War and used goatskin suede for the body and the sleeves. Lots of manufacturers started producing them in the late 1940s. They were adopted on campuses as a kind of dressy jacket that could be worn with a shirt and tie.” Another difference between letterman and college jackets is the front fastening of the body of the garment. Lettermans typically used buttons or press studs, and evolved from what was basically a heavy-knit cardigan first known to have been worn by campus jocks in 1865, when Harvard issued it to members of its baseball team. The classic 1950s college jacket, on the other hand, is fastened with a zip, like the A-2 bomber jacket. But unlike the A-2, which had snap-flap patch pockets with the openings cut horizontally, college jackets, like letterman jackets, had diagonally or vertically tailored side pockets you could slip your hands in to keep them warm. Diagonally tailored pockets were designed out of A-2s because US military authorities thought they encouraged casual body postures, which were not conducive to good discipline. The classic 1950s college jacket may well have struck a chord with student sartorialists as a peacetime version of the A-2. Few people, after all, wanted to be reminded of the Second World War in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Craig Kenneth Smith, actor, wears jacket by Leviâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Made and Crafted; trousers by Universal Works; shirt by Harry Stedman. twitter.com/actuallycks

Directory Acne

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Lock and Co

Richard Anderson

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www.driesvannoten.be

www.lockhatters.co.uk

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Stone Island

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Barbour

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Matches

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Beams

Flannels

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The Vintage Showroom

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GH Bass

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Hackett

Mr Porter

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Harris Elliott

Neil Barrett

Topman

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CA4LA

Harry Stedman

Nixon

Triumph Motorcycles

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Canali

Hawksmill Denim Co

Nomos Glashütte

Tudor

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Caruso

Illy

Norman Walsh Footwear

Turnbull and Asser

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Carven

Issey Miyake

Oliver Spencer

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J Crew

Orlebar Brown

Universal Works

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Cenci

John Smedley

Pal Zileri

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Christopher Kane

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Comme des Garçons

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Corneliani

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Peter Non

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Costume National

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Pokit

Waven

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CP Company

Lee

Polo Ralph Lauren

Wood Wood

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Cubitts

Leftfield NYC

Prada

Wooyoungmi

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DC Shoes

Levi’s Made and Crafted

Pretty Green

Y-3

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Dents

Levi’s Vintage Clothing

Pringle of Scotland

YMC

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Dita

Levi’s

Ray-Ban

Yohji Yamamoto

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Lewis Leathers

Raymond Weil

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www.zegna.com

Drake’s

Loake

Red Wing Shoes

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www.loake.co.uk

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Jocks&Nerds

Style History Culture

Jocks&Nerds

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