Untold Magazine

Vol.1

May 2017

U$9

THE ALTERNATIVE CHOICE

DAVID LYNCH SAYS HE’LL never make another movie. AHHHH

BJÖRK IS GIVING A TALK ABOUT VIRTUAL REALITY THE ICELANDIC artist will also be performing a special four-hour DJ set at this year’s Sónar festival

COSEY FANNI TUTTI: ART SEX MAGIC ‘I’VE BEEN A rude little girl, haven’t I?’ - revealing exclusive images from her new autobiography, Cosey Fanni Tutti reflects on a lifetime of unflinching art and sound.

FINDING JUSTICE IN THE WORLD TODAY THE FRENCH electronic duo are back with their first album in five years – they tell us how they wrote a disco record celebrating freedom and femininity.

THE BRISTOL TIME LEGACY RICHARD PRINCE, Sally Webster, George Horner and Jack Pierson are a few of the works in a collection that Clark admits could have filled

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IRVINE WELSH ON 25 YEARS of choosing life

THE NOVELIST from Edinburgh’s docklands started writing his seminal debut novel at the same time that we launched its first issue – we discuss the failures of capitalism, the imminent release of T2 and being free.

HOW PRINCE ALMOST ENDED UP IN THE FIFTH ELEMENT THE PURPLE ONE backed out because Jean Paul Gaultier’s costumes were ‘too effeminate’

THE PUSSY RIOT PROTEST MANIFESTO GROUP MEMBER Nadya Tolokonnikova lays out her advice on how to get political in an increasingly volatile world.

AUGUSTO DOS ANJOS Monologue of a shadow, translation by Wylks Weindhardt and Peter O’ Neill the work of a brazilian poetic icon. {Make it a poster edition}

BROKEN ENGLISH SERIES

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THE NOVELIST from Edinburgh’s docklands started writing his seminal debut novel at the same time that Dazed launched its first issue – we discuss the failures of capitalism, the imminent release of

music

BRISTOL

TIME

The return of a

trip-hop legacy

THEY CALL IT “BRISTOL TIME” As well as being a historical reference to when Bristol’s clocks struck the hour later than they did in the capital, it’s a dismissive term for a city whose musicians live far enough from frenetic London to get up when they’re ready and, cliché has it, smoke a spliff or two before considering options. Somehow, the early Nineties saw a series of such apparently slothful types seize control of the musical agenda. Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead were at the vanguard of what they hated to be called trip-hop, while Roni Size won the 1997 Mercury Prize for turning jungle music into avant-garde dance-jazz with New Forms.

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“We were very aware that we weren’t a personality-driven band,” Del Naja tells me. “We were coming much more from the collaborative world of sound systems, and creating a look for each record that is based around the mood of something, rather than the people, which always changed from project to project.

Always trying to be radically different is one of the philosophies behind working with different people. Bowie, The Beatles, important on that level – those artists all had a really big influence,

by Marc Enno

The Clash and Public Image Ltd were very

music

PORTISHEAD OF THE WHOLE BRISTOL scene, Portishead seemed the most likely to be destroyed by their own success. Dummy’s distressed, vinyl-scratched samples simply seemed unimprovable, to the band as much as anyone. The nature of its adoption by the mainstream also worried their leader, Geoff Barrow. “The idea of people having dinner parties with it meant that the mood of the record was overlooked a bit,” he told Uncut. “Because that wasn’t really very nice.”

Listen to Dummy today, now its mid-Nineties over-exposure has worn off, and it is still a shockingly strange record.

Its combination of abrasive scratching, ambient vinyl hiss, the spy-movie guitar of jazz veteran Adrian Utley, and the sensual but untouchably distant vocals of Beth Gibbons, remains potently unique. So unique, in fact, that Portishead themselves were unable to capitalise on it.

Portishead responded in a mood of self-sabotage. Where Dummy had seen obscure, digital samples from soundtrack albums and Isaac Hayes put on vinyl acetates for that authentic crackle and hiss, Portishead was made with samples recorded from scratch by the band, with full orchestras an insanely timeconsuming method. The Fender Rhodes organ and tremolo guitar sounds that defined Dummy were banned at first. In the long decade since, as we’ve learnt to live without any Portishead music,

its emotionally and sonically extreme recasting of their original template sounds strong. But Roseland NYC Live (1998), in which an orchestra helps reimagine their songs without samples and Beth Gibbons cuts loose, couldn’t shake the suspicion that the band were a onetrick pony – however fine that trick was.

Beth Gibbons’ collaboration with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, aka Rustin Man, on Out of Season (2002) was a well-received surprise. But for four years in their seeming-

'Third' by Portishead is out on Island on 28 April

by Marc Enno

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GOLDFRAPP

Goldfrapp play the Royal Festival Hall on 18 April

GOLDFRAPP’S SECRET isn’t so much what they did next, as what Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory did first. Gregory arrived in the wake of Bristol’s only previous rock success, Pigbag’s punk-funk in the Eighties. While he played sax with Portishead, Goldfrapp became her friend Topley Bird’s substitute singing with Tricky. The pair’s first album as Goldfrapp, Felt Mountain (2000) seemed very much in Portishead’s film noir/trip-hop mode, though Gregory says: “We shared a sensibility, but I didn’t want to explore their territory.”

After their debut, the duo retreated to Somerset and reinvented themselves.

Black Cherry (2003) and Supernature (2005) saw Alison’s conceptual artistic background in play, kitting out herself and her dancers in mirrored horse’s heads and tails, or Brazilian showgirl undress. It was hard to equate with the non-glamour of the Bristol scene. But the desire to shape-shift, not to repeat music, is one Massive Attack would recognise. It brought hits such as “Ooh La La” and huge sales.

by Marc Enno

But it’s characteristic of me that I got bored with that after a few songs. It’s deliberately more direct, simple and solid. Brian Burton [Danger Mouse] was really eager to make it psychedelic he played me some

MASSIVE ATTACK BLUE LINES (1991) and “Unfinished Sympathy” still define Massive Attack, the moment dance and rock sparked into something new. Their story since has been one of unmet expectations, although Mezzanine (1998) was perhaps their masterpiece. Since then, it has been a struggle. Only Robert Del Naja (above, left) remained to make 100th Window (2003); Grant Marshall (right) was absent.

The album was a UK No 1, but the suspicion remained that this was Massive Attack in name only.

New album Seventh Tree abandons all that for rustic psychedelia.

Drawing on Nick Drake and The Wicker Man’s folk-horror soundtrack, Alison’s new image as a clown undercuts her sexiness.”We can’t do it any other way,” Gregory considers. “If something

However, the band enter 2008 stronger than ever. Del Naja is a committed political activist, using his artistic skills for a gallery show of antiwar album art. Being invited to curate the Meltdown Festival seals the band’s status. A new album, tentatively titled Weather Underground, will test their musical future.

When Portishead’s debut, Dummy (1994), fuelled by its use on Nineties twentysomething zeitgeist soap This Life and winning the 1995 Mercury, famously be-

music

Martina’s new album is out in june and fans can’t wait to hear the new sounds of the artist .

MARTINA TOPLEY BIRD

But an audience remained who remembered her coolly feminine counterpoint, vocally and on video, to the often equally feminine, cross-dressing Tricky in his prime. It was Mercury-nominated. Its follow-up, The Blue God, produced by Gnarls Barkley’s Danger Mouse, fulfils much of her early promise. Its slightly psychedelic torch songs are all sugary threat and noir mystery. These days, she sounds more Portishead than Portishead. Here, she looks back on Bristol’s effect on her. “I spent three years in Bristol,” she recalls. “It was the most crucial period of growing up for me, from 13 to 16. We’d been in West Sussex, and it was a bigger town, a bigger school. I’m a West Country girl and we’d go on the Downs, to escape and be a bit mad. I had my share of adventures there. But Bristol’s an old port town, it’s mixed. It’s weird – you could call it cosmopolitan, because it’s not got that big-city vibe. But it’s been

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Typically of the Bristol scene, Topley Bird only really arrived with her solo debut, Quixotic (including collaborations with David Holmes and Tricky) in 2003.

“I find it weird when people remark that it takes a long time to make a record,” she tells me. “I find that rude, ignorant and ridiculous.”

there long enough to have an entrenched character. It’s not a transient place, like most university towns.”

With her looks and fashion sense, Topley Bird could have parlayed her start into stardom long ago. But, as with her fellow West Country chanteuses Beth Gibbons and even Goldfrapp, such hungry, London notions mean nothing to her. “It is a weird anomaly that none of the musicians who’ve come from there have any interest in being stars,” she agrees.

“I suppose if you start out with a certain ethos, then you won’t think about playing the pop game. I didn’t even know

by Marc Enno

Martina Topley Bird was discovered as a 15-year-old, when the then-equally unknown Tricky saw her waiting on the wall outside the house of Mark Stewart (of The Pop Group, the linchpin in Bristol’s post-punk scene). He asked her if she could sing, and they started recording, and a relationship. They had a child, and made four of his albums together (Maxinquaye [1995], Nearly God [1996], Pre-Millennium Tension [1996] and Angels with Dirty Faces [1998]), before splitting. “It was highly acrimonious between those two, and I was caught in the middle,” Alison Goldfrapp remembered, of replacing Topley Bird in Tricky’s band.

TRICKY

Trick’s new album is out in june and fans cant wait to hear the new sounds of the artist .

Later albums such as Angels With Dirty Faces (1998), Juxtapose (1999) and Blowback (2001) saw him attempt to re-en-

by Marc Enno

But it’s characteristic of me that I got bored with that after a few songs. It’s deliberately more direct, simple and solid. Brian

Tricky abandoned Britain for New York in the late Nineties, leaving behind “silly bad boy behaviour”. The change didn’t do him much good. The Tricky I had seen in mesmeric control of something like genius in two 1997 London shows was, by the next year, croaking in a half-empty hall. Prodigious dope-smoking seemed to have shaken an already delicate sense of self.

gage with the US hip-hop that had so inspired him. All three records were largely self-pitying. Tricky’s problem has been a bit like Prince’s; constant material from a natural musical mind, with no one on his wavelength to help sift it.

Vulnerable (2003), an attempt to return to basics, found few fans still interested. But, five years on, Knowle West Boy could be different. Cautiously, welcome back. atmosphere of Bristol then. The Cambridge music scene was quite hippie, there wasn’t one black person. The only racist bad stuff that ever happened to me was there. It was empty and bleak and lonely. Whereas Bristol was quite melancholy. But we weren’t lonely. Maybe we were happy being melancholy together.

“My musical identity was still forming when I left Bristol. I had beliefs then that I still have now. But I’ve changed 100 per cent, even from Quixotic to The Blue God. I almost feel sorry for people trying to compare my work now to what I did with Tricky, or other people from Bristol.

The new record’s hooky, direct, not too subtle. But it’s characteristic of me that I got bored with that after a few songs.

It’s deliberately more direct, simple and solid. Brian Burton [Danger Mouse] was

“Bristol was the backdrop for my teenage years of massive change, 13 to 16,” she says, recalling how she left it. “And I met who I met, and that had quite a long-reaching effect on my life now [she has a 12-yearold child with Tricky]. I was sorry I left for a little

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Directors

Chris Cunningham

C

Chris Cunningham (born 15 October 1970) is a British video artist. He has primarily directed music videos for ambient music and electronica acts such as Autechre and Aphex Twin. He has also created art installations and directed short movies. He was approached to direct a movie version of the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, but nothing came of early discussions.

In the 2000s, Cunningham began doing music production work. He has also designed album artwork for a variety of musicians.

After seeing Cunningham’s work on the 1995 film version of Judge Dredd, Stanley Kubrick head-hunted Cunningham[2] to design and supervise animatronic tests of the central robot child character in his version of the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Cunningham worked for over a year on the film before leaving to pursue a career as a director.

Earlier work in film included model-making, prosthetic make-up and concept illustrations for Hardware and Dust Devil for director Richard Stanley; work on Nightbreed for Clive Barker; and on Alien3 for David Fincher. Between 1990 and 1992, he contributed the occasional cover painting and strip to Judge Dredd Megazine, working under the pseudonym “Chris Halls”; Halls is his stepfather’s surname.

Cunningham has had close ties to Warp Records since his first production for Autechre. best known. His video for Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” won multiple awards, including an MTV music video award for Breakthrough Video and was nominated for a Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video. It was also the first ever music video to win a Gold Pencil at the D&AD Awards. It can still be seen at the Museum of

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Chris Cunningham - Phhoto by - Clark Kent

Cunningham has created photography and cover artwork for various people including Björk’s “All Is Full of Love”, Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker” and “Come to Daddy”. Cunningham has directed a handful of commercials brands.

Modern Art in New York. His video for Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker” was nominated for the “Best Video” award at the Brit Awards 2000. He also directed Madonna’s “Frozen” video which became an international hit and won the award for Best Special Effects at the 1998 MTV Music Video Awards. Cunningham also came out of a seven-year hiatus from making music videos to direct the video for “Sheena Is a Parasite” by The Horrors.

His video installation Flex was first shown in 2000 at the Royal Academy of Arts, and subsequently at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery and other art galleries. Flex was commissioned by the Anthony d’Offay Gallery for the Apocalypse: Beauty & Horror in Contemporary Art exhibition curated by Norman Rosenthal and Max Wigram at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2000. In 2005, Cunningham released the short film Rubber Johnny as a DVD accompanied by a book of photographs and drawings. Rubber Johnny, a six-minute experimental short film

My Fucking Sound” from their album Go Plastic; and to a piece called “Mutilation Colony”[8] which was written especially for the short, and was re-

cut to a soundtrack by Aphex Twin remixed by Cunningham, was shot between 2001 and 2004.

Shot on DV night-vision, it was made in Cunningham’s own time as a home movie of sorts, and took three and half years of weekends to complete. The Telegraph called it “like a Looney Tunes short for a generation raised on video nasties and rave music”.

The short film was set to Squarepusher’s Commercials unningham has directed a handful of commercials for companies and brands, including Gucci; Sony (PlayStation); Levi’s; Telecom Italia; Nissan, etc.

During this period Cunningham also made another short film for Warp Films, Spectral Musicians, which remains unreleased. His video installation Flex was first shown in 2000 at the Royal Academy of Arts,

Directors

Jonathan Glazer Jonathan Glazer was born into a Jewish family in London, and studied in a Jewish school.[2] After studying theatre design at Nottingham Trent University, Glazer started out directing theatre and making film and television trailers, including award-winning work for the BBC. In 1993 he wrote and directed three short films of his own (“Mad”, “Pool” and “Commission”), and joined Academy Commercials, a production company based in London. He has directed popular campaigns for Guinness (Swimblack and Surfer) and Stella Artois (Devil’s Island). Since the mid-1990s he has directed a number of music videos, and was named MTV Director of the Year 1997.

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He named his video for Radiohead’s 1996 single “Street Spirit” as a “turning point” in his work: “I knew when I finished that, because [Radiohead] found their own voices as an artist, at that point, I felt like I got close to whatever mine was, and I felt confident that I could do things that emoted, that had some kind of poetic as well as prosaic value. That for me was a key moment.”

In 2000, he directed his first feature, the British gangster film Sexy Beast, starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley.[4] In 2004 he directed his second feature film Birth, starring Nicole Kid. In 2001, Glazer directed the “Odyssey”

Under the Skin, an adaptation of Michel Faber’s science fiction novel of the same name starring Scarlett Johansson.

Glazer delivered a follow-up to 2014’s “Under The Skin,” but it appears we won’t have to wait that long after all.

spot for Levi Strauss Jeans.[5][6] In 2006, he directed the second Sony BRAVIA TV advertisement, which took 10 days and 250 people to film. It was filmed at an estate in Glasgow, and featured paint exploding all over the tower blocks.[7] Later the same year he was commissioned to make a television advert for the new Motorola Red phone. The advertisement, showing two naked black bodies emerging from a lump of flesh rotating on a potter’s wheel, was due to air in September 2006 but was shelved by Motorola.

The advertisement was to benefit several charities in Africa. In 2013 he directed Under the Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s science fiction novel of the same name starring Scarlett Johansson.

The film premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival and received a theatrical release in 2014, garnering positive, sometimes ecstatic reviews.

English director Jonathan Glazer has been a feature filmmaker since 2000, but he’s only made three movies in 17 years: Breakout debut “Sexy Beast,” the criminally overlooked Nicole Kidman psychodrama “Birth” and the modern classic “Under The Skin.” 9 years separated the releases of his last two movies, so many of us have been worried that it would be another decade until Glazer delivered a follow-up to 2014’s “Under The Skin,” but it appears we won’t have to wait that long after all.

Speaking to the Nottingham Post (via The Playlist) after picking up his honorary doctorate from Nottingham Trent, Glazer revealed he is starting pre-production on his new movie after working on the script for the past year. The screenplay is finished and will mark his first solo outing as a writer. Glazer co-wrote “Un-

I like genre but I like the idea of films that break out of a genre. I have co-written the last two films but this is the first time I am writing solo.”

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Poetix Poetix Poetix

Translation by Wylks Weindhardt and Peter O' Neill

Poetix

A

AUGUSTO DOS ANJOS was born in the modern named town of Sapé, in the state of Paraíba, near the north east coast of BraZil. He only published one book in his lifetime, two years before his death, with the help of his brother. The collection is called Eu , or I in English. Hailed as the father of modernism, in a short interview granted in 1912, when asked about influences, Dos Anjos cites two names; those of Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe. He could have added Baudelaire, for the poetry of Augusto Dos Anjos underwent the same Copernican effect as the Parisian master, in terms of both content and form. Rigorously academic in his approach to rhyme and meter, Augusto Dos Anjos, like Baudelaire before him, is a master of the sonnet. This would perhaps partly explain the absence of translations of his work into English, for like Baudelaire, they are notoriously difficult to render in English.

As for subject matter, death is ever present in Dos Anjos work- Poe’s influence being all apparent. But Dos Anjos’ lexicon, and treatment of his many morbid themes is uniquely his own, as indeed will become instantly apparent in a reading of Monologue of a Shadow. Augusto Dos Anjos was to die of pneumonia, although some argue it was TB, when he was only thirty leaving his wife and two children behind him.

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WylkysTranslation Note: What we have tried to give here is the best possible literal translation of the poem sacrificing any attempt at following the very strict rhyming scheme of the Portuguese original for actual content and meaning. Dos Anjos uses rhyme a lot in his work, he is very much like Baudelaire in this respect and so proving incredibly difficult to translate into English. Wylkys and I preferred to retain the force of his work which we felt would be diluted, to a certain extent, if we attempted to retain the rhyme. Besides, rhyme suits so much better Latin languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, the undulating vowel sounds which all of these languages share are distinctly absent in English and so rendering rhyme less of a pleasure to experience, or such, at least, is how we feel.

For the same reason the original line order has been jettisoned, this is a very dramatic soliloquy. In an attempt at rendering a similar force in the original, I have changed the sequence of lines to suit English syntax sometimes more happily than others.

I alone am responsible for this re-ordering much, at times, to the desperation of my colleague. I have reproduced below the original Portuguese and our English translation so that you can see clearly the changes which have been made.

The soul

of rotary movements

Pulse widely inside my ignoti monad, While the symbiosis of all things balances me.

the modern philosopher 20

Reducing the orographic rou

Only Art, chiselling away at human so g h ness of the world Without dis-

happy prairie.

rock,Liquefying the deep telluric fire, it down, To the condition of the

row, Can soften the hard integrating it, watering