On tour with the Darkness

The lobby of the Jury’s Hotel in Cardiff resembles a Barratt’s town square built of brick, with an enormous clocktower that usefully shows the time in New York and Tokyo. Piped insidiously into the atmosphere is a loop of orchestral arrangements of popular songs. Handbags and Gladrags evokes the awful image of po-faced Welsh whinge-rockers the Stereophonics. It’s hard to imagine a band less like the Darkness. Finally I manage to escape and arrive in the beer-sticky warren that is Cardiff University students’ union to meet the band. Well, all of the band except singer Justin Hawkins, who is still in bed. They had a “heavy night” last night in Stoke, involving depth charges of Bailey’s in pints of Guinness. Continued →

Interviewing William Gibson

For a long time William Gibson has threatened to become respectable; now he might have done it. His new novel, Pattern Recognition, hit number four on the New York Times bestseller list shortly after its US publication in January. The Washington Post called it “assuredly one of the first authentic and vital novels of the 21st century”; the Chicago Tribune acclaimed “a masterful performance from a major novelist who seems to be hitting his peak”.

Yet fans of the early Gibson may be mystified to discover that it features no imaginary futuristic technologies or hallucinogenic descriptive passages about cyberspace — a word he invented in 1982. Gibson was the progenitor of what became known as “cyberpunk” — a mode of dystopian and technologically visionary science fiction whose brightest flowering was his own first novel, Neuromancer. What seemed mere pulp SF to some critics at the time quickly attained a sophisticated glamour to which even the academy was not immune. Literary theorists such as Frederic Jameson compared his work to that of Thomas Pynchon (whom Gibson has named his “mythic hero”), as constituting the authentic literature of the postmodern condition. Continued →

In the cockpit with Bruce Dickinson

Bruce Dickinson is teaching me to fly. We are in the cockpit of a Boeing 737 simulator in the British Airways flight training facilities at Heathrow. Through the windows we see the winking nightlights of Gatwick airport. “You’re doing extraordinarily well here, sir,” says the legendary heavy-metal frontman, as I wrench the joystick around and yellow alarm lights wink on. While he solicitously explains the functions of the banks of switches, levers and luminescent screens, I’m waiting for him to start hollering “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter”. “Too low - flaps,” says a stern electronic voice in an American accent. Buzzers sound. The runway looms up to meet us. Groundrush. I have information overload.

We land safely - thanks, I suspect, to Dickinson’s finessing of my controls. The hydraulic cabin comes to a shuddering halt and the whine of the engines and air-conditioning subsides. Which leaves only one question. What on earth am I doing in a £10m airliner simulator with the lead singer of Iron Maiden? Continued →

Smoking with Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard’s lecture in London last Friday did not take place. But don’t be alarmed: the aim of thought, after all, is not truth or reality. Thinking is the art of making things disappear. Let’s try, then, to make this impish, septuagenarian matre à penser disappear too.

Picture, if you will, Baudrillard in the chemistry lecture theatre of University College, London. Gazing down from a side wall is a vast chart of the periodic table, whose elements huddle together for comfort, anxious at the appearance in their midst of this unpredictable catalyst. Baudrillard looks wonderfully like a hyperreal cafe Frenchman: short, rotund, in a crumpled suit, with tufts of golden-grey hair poking out from his temples. But that appearance is a mask. Continued →

With Julian Barnes

Normally, reading a book without a pencil to scrawl incredulous marginalia leaves a critic feeling naked and offenceless, like riding into battle without a sabre. But halfway through our interview, Julian Barnes unfolds his limbs and, with the surprising alacrity of a recently dozing reptile, snatches his new novel from my hands. “This is where I skip through it,” he mutters mischievously, “searching for ‘Bloody hell, he can’t expect us to believe that!’ or [sneeringly] ‘Question mark, question mark’.” Luckily, the pages are unmarked: the great Pencil-Eating God has earned a rare oblation.

Barnes is fearsomely intelligent. What irks some people is his concomitant sense of fun, as if the exercise of intelligence ought to be a dour, Calvinist abrogation of pleasure. He kicks off one of the short stories in Cross Channel, “Experiment”, with a trio of sparkling French puns. Perhaps today the celebrated author of Flaubert’s Parrot would proffer a salver of plump, womanly fruit and ask, “Pear OK?” Continued →

The church’s interior is glowing with amber, red and cerulean blue spotlights, hung with sumptuous drapes. Impossibly glamorous dancers smooch around in evening dress with lazy, fluid virtuosity, while from the six-piece band at the side comes an exquisitely haunting soundscape. Two violins alternately caress melodies and scrape vicious, piercing accents; piano and double bass lollop and thunder; and two men pull and squeeze their bandoneons, playing wistful, bohemian cafe tunes or giving off thumping atonal growls. The faces of the musicians emanate a melancholy so deep and powerful that its only expression can be one of glittering lightheartedness. This is the music of Dutch ensemble Sexteto Canyengue, who have hooked up with the Argentinian dancers of the Tango 5 for Destino Tango, one the most fiercely joyous experiences on this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Forget everything you know of cheesy ballroom tangos from Come Dancing. No bloody roses between the teeth. Destino Tango’s is an altogether darker, more modernist and more blatantly sexual aesthetic. The band’s twinkly artistic director and first bandoneón, Carel Kraayenhof, explains: “The ballroom tango is a kind of stereotype derived from the original tango, which is really like jazz. It’s an art form — with music, lyrics, dance, poetry; even films are made about it. It’s a really full culture in Argentina.” Continued →

With Eddie Van Halen

You are a young, unemployed American singer who used to play with an extremely successful but rather banal rock band. Now you need a new gig. Surely the last outfit you’d audition for would be the legendary Van Halen, whose 20-year punk-metal career has been marked by an unfortunate tendency to eat up singers and spit the chunks out with acrimonious relish. You’d feel like a drummer auditioning for Spinal Tap after your predecessors had all mysteriously exploded on their stools.

But Gary Cherone, ex-vocalist with Extreme, did exactly that. Now he’s part of the gang: the band has released a new record, Van Halen 3, and they’re a couple of months into a mammoth world tour. On Tuesday the band were in Berlin, holed up in the ridiculously opulent Schlosshotel Vier Jahreszeiten, a toy-coloured castle where oil paintings of worried-looking Prussian generals circa 1934 eye you beadily as you prowl around the Kaiser Suite. I am summoned by the tour manager, a gregarious fellow who collects BMX bicycles and whose odd beard is probably a sculpted homage to the Gibson Flying V guitar. Eddie needs to “sit down” for a moment, so we will begin on the balcony with Gary. Continued →

With the Art of Noise’s Anne Dudley

She doesn’t look like an experimental art-pop terrorist, but then you’d expect them to come in disguise. There could be one sitting next to you right now. The only clue to Anne Dudley’s identity as a founder member of the thrilling 1980s electronic collective The Art Of Noise, when her tall, blonde figure strides into a cosy top-floor London studio, lies in the ascetic, Bauhaus functionality of her clothing. Plain white shirt, slate-grey trousers - the purist colours of a minutely pencilled musical stave.

In fact, no one was ever quite sure who The Art Of Noise were, as they refused - a viciously clever stroke, in the heyday of New Romanticism - to pose for publicity photos. But Dudley has found a quite different fame lately, as the only British artist to be honoured at this year’s Academy Awards, for her musical score to The Full Monty. When the news broke, Dudley was out of the country, but a gang of craven hacks from the Express found out where her parents lived and camped outside their house, harrassing them for quotes. She finds the sudden media interest bizarre. “People always want a soundbite,” she observes, colouring the last word with a subterranean disgust. Continued →