Tag Archives: Interview

2010 ➤ Kylie dazzles London with laser-love

Posted on 11 Jul 2010 | Leave a comment

➢➢ VIEW ♫ ♫ Get Outta My Way! – Ropey iPhone video of Kylie’s next single live at Heaven this morning, but a visual feast, jam-packed with energy:

❚ AN EYE-POPPINGLY CREATIVE LASER SHOW capturing every colour of the rainbow was hurled towards a bouncing audience of Londoners in the early hours of this morning at Heaven. A euphoric Kylie Minogue was making a surprise 40-minute PA in the sweltering heat of high summer. This week she launched her 11th studio album in the UK, the dance-driven Aphrodite which marks her return to joyous pure-pop, and moves her on from the tragic events of adult life she calls her “dark period”.

Kylie Minogue, Heaven,London,live,All The Lovers

All The Lovers, live today: photograph © Christie Goodwin

According to host Jeremy Joseph, Aphrodite had gone straight to No 1 in the album chart – her fifth No 1 album – and he produced a multi-candled cake by way of congratulations. He also reminded us all that this was Kylie’s tenth appearance at London’s G-A-Y venue since its predecessor Bang! became the mainstream gay mega-clubnight that virtually launched Kylie’s British pop career in 1988. Since then the Australian-born singer has become the most successful female artist in the UK charts and the second richest British popstar from the 1980s.

Onstage from 1.35 this morning she performed six numbers in a clingy-and-swishy shredded gold Cinderella dress plus golden knuckle-duster, then three encores in a bewitching mirrored black top with thigh-high Puss-in-boots, climaxing with her erotic new single All The Lovers elegantly framed by five of her beefcake dancers and as many more females. Heaven had, perhaps foolishly, handed out whistles to everybody in the audience, so whether you could hear Kylie’s vocals above the non-stop barrage became slightly theoretical – a fact she accepted by just letting the audience get on with the verses as well as choruses to almost every number.

When asked in a recent interview with Popjustice if Aphrodite would make a good farewell album, 42-year-old Kylie responded: “I think so. It’s joyful. It’s like the jus of all the best bits of my musical career.” We also discover exactly what “a Kylie moment” is.

Kylie Minigue, Heaven, London ,Aphrodite, interview

Kylie’s own tweeted pix: backstage at G-A-Y with her female dancers, and with the monster teddy presented by Jeremy Joseph to mark her becoming an auntie for the third time

➢➢ VIEW ♫ ♫ Delectable rendering of All The Lovers – Kylie Minogue on the Jonathan Ross show, June 25, 2010 (spot Dawn Joseph and David Tench in support) – Oops, this has been removed from YouTube. Instead here’s her UK TV performance one month later with Alan Carr:

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2010 ➤ Vince Clarke on how to make the perfect pop song

Posted on 2 Jul 2010 | 1 comment

Here’s a smashing video interview with the co-founder of Depeche Mode at Motherboard.tv

Vince Clarke, Motherboard.tv, Maine, Depeche Mode, synthesisers

“Something from nothing”: Clarke’s term for the alchemy that makes music. Picture © VBS IPTV

❚ VINCE CLARKE IS A MAN SYNONYMOUS WITH SYNTH POP and a legend in the history of electronic music. He’s famous for founding three of the most popular and lasting musical acts of the 80s: Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure. But his distinct sonic output depends upon another feat: he has spent the past 30 years amassing one of the world’s most impressive collections of rare, “holy grail” analogue synthesizers. In 2004, Clarke left England for the woods of Maine, on the Atlantic coast of the USA, where he constructed for these monolithic machines a temple he calls The Cabin . . .

➢➢ VIEW ♫ ♫ Vince Clarke’s cabin of synths

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Posted in Culture, Pop music

Tagged Depeche Mode, Interview, Video, Vince Clarke

1979 ➤ Unbelievable! The voice of sweet reason in George’s TV debut

Posted on 28 Jun 2010 | 5 comments

George O'Dowd, Martin Degville, TV debut, BBC, Something Else

George and Martin Degville: facing the punks on Something Else. Video © BBC

❚ IT WAS ALBERT EINSTEIN WHO SAID: “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” So listen up, kids, to the words of wisdom being expressed in George O’Dowd’s first known TV appearance at the age of 18 sporting the mauve tartan clownsuit he used to wear to Barbarella’s club in Birmingham. When this show went out nobody knew the faces in the studio crowd and as you can hear, other kids took their clothes just as seriously as George, but listen how his quiet Sarf London tones – not yet modulated into his posher popstar accent – take over the studio discussion in the face of sarcastic punks.

Punkette: “Everybody who looks different gets aggression. You always get picked on.”
George: “You don’t have to get involved in it though. I don’t fight. If you’re really into dressing up … you wouldn’t care what other people thought.”
Lad: “Yeah but say somebody hit ya?”
G: “So what? You don’t have to hit them back.”
Lad: “So are you gonna stand there and take it?”
G: “I do! It’s more cool to walk away from people.”

This newly discovered footage dates from October 1979 and the endearingly innocent freeform discussion magazine called Something Else, presented by a team of teenagers and made by the BBC Community Programmes unit, years before trendy Channel 4 was invented. Broadcast on Saturday evenings on the intellectual’s channel, BBC2, the show ran for six years until October 1982, closing down at the very moment Channel 4 launched. It is the clear inspiration for the torrent of yoof TV the new network spawned.

In this edition from Birmingham, the Coventry band the Specials had just finished playing and George is sitting beside Martin Degville, just in front of Jane Kahn, partner in the seminal outrage shop Kahn & Bell. In the spring of ’79 George was sharing Degville’s flat, an old dental surgery in Goodall Street, overlooking the Walsall market. George was earning £3.50 a day at Degville’s Dispensary, Martin’s clothes stall in the Oasis market at the Bull Ring.

George described Martin as “cool and alien” in those days, and one of his few remarks on the show nonchalantly raises the biggest laugh. A few months later, he opened a London branch of Degville’s Dispensary where he was always charming and polite and surprisingly shy for somebody who dressed to shock – only visually a precursor of the pop monster he became with Sigue Sigue Sputnik in 1986.

➢➢ VIEW VIDEO of George O’Dowd on Something Else, 1979

George O'Dowd, Martin Degville, BBC, TV debut, Something Else

George holds his own: Note the white glove four years before Jacko debuted his glove along with his signature dance move, the moonwalk, in May 1983. Video © BBC

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Posted in Media, Social trends, TV, Youth culture

Tagged Birmingham, Boy George, Interview, Jane Kahn, Martin Degville, punk, TV debut

2010 ➤ Step up Martin Kemp – movie mogul

Posted on 24 Jun 2010 | Leave a comment

Martin Kemp,Jonathan Sothcott, Black and Blue Films,Expose

Kemp and Sothcott: director and producer with Hammer Horror in mind

❚ ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLAR. Who’s this relaxed and expansive dude sitting in smart restaurant with his business partner talking about their upcoming horror movie? Yes, in the week that his band of 80s popsters Spandau Ballet wind up their year-long reunion tour with a posh send-off concert at Newmarket racecourse, bass player Martin Kemp presses the button marked Publicity for his next project.

Kemp at 15: scene-stealing in The Glittering Prizes

At the ripe old age of 48 he’s now a writer and director of films, which might seem a logical next step after a lifetime of watching how it’s done. His long list of acting credits stretches back to that first child-star cameo in the coolest TV serial of 1976, The Glittering Prizes, which made an international star of Tom Conti, after which Kemp made his mark as those folk villains Reggie Kray in The Krays and Steve Owen in EastEnders.

Even while his pop career was being reanimated with Spandau, Kemp had formed a British company called Black and Blue Films in partnership with 30-year-old producer Jonathan Sothcott and actor Billy Murray, a familiar face from TV soaps. In a video interview with Kemp he says his directorial debut is a remake of a notorious 1976 video nasty called Exposé, given the new title of Stalker (click through for trailer). It’s an old dark house psycho-drama, with plenty of blood, if clips from the new version are any indication. “People start dying,” says Sothcott and Kemp adds: “All in one house. That’s a good premise for low-budget film.”

Expose, Black and Blue Films, Anna Brecon, Martin Kemp

Anna Brecon in Exposé: says it all

That was the cleverest lesson Kemp learned about screenplays, Sothcott maintains: “He wrote it low-budget! So we could shoot it fast and cheap, which so many writers in this country don’t do.”

For Kemp, the hardest challenge as a director was to keep the story rolling. “That’s what I learned on Exposé, pacing the story. That’s where I’ve seen lots of my friends fall down on their first feature, never on the acting or photography – it is telling the story.

“This is my 40th year in entertainment, so it’s nice to mark it with a something new. Every project throws up different problems that you have to solve – directing means you have to solve everybody else’s as well.”

Sothcott lays his own cards on the table: “The model I’m trying to rip off with Black and Blue is Hammer [the much-loved tongue-in-cheek horror studio of the 50s and 60s, which churned out gothic potboilers calculated to make audiences laugh as much as scream]. Next year I hope we’ll be making six crime-horror-comedy movies that will sell all round the world – stuff that isn’t just Brit-centric. Stuff that’s fun.”

Despite the chaotic economic climate, Kemp maintains that their company is thriving. “We’ve had a funny couple of years. All around us are production companies closing down, not able to get money, and we’ve had possibly the best two years ever. We’ve got Just For the Record [see trailer below, a Spinal Tap-type spoof, but of the film industry: “This wouldn’t have happened on Grange Hill”] and we’re in talks about another couple of films. Exposé was so much fun, I can’t wait to do my next.”

Watch out also for Dead Cert, a fast-moving vampire frightener starring cockney Craig Fairbrass: “Kill ’em, that’s the only thing we can do.”

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1966 ➤ When John Lennon became US public enemy number one

Posted on 23 Jun 2010 | Leave a comment

Beatles, burnings, Alabama,more popular than Jesus

Birmingham, Alabama in 1966: a warm welcome awaits The Beatles

Beatles, tour, USA 1966, burnings, Shea Stadium,more popular than Jesus

From the extreme right to another: God-fearing fans burn Beatles records in the Bible Belt in 1966 . . . while 45,000 more pack Shea Stadium in New York City. (Picture by AP)

❚ FAME FASCINATES NOW NO LESS THAN IT DID THEN. Interest in John Lennon intensifies this year because it brings the 70th anniversary of his birth and the 30th of his murder in New York. There, a prestigious 70th birthday celebration is being held at Radio City Music Hall on September 25 starring The Fab Faux, a premier-league tribute band. Soon after, Liverpool goes into overdrive for two whole months of Lennon worship.

Lennon Naked, an unflattering new drama-doc: Christopher Eccleston stars as John Lennon with Naoko Mori as Yoko Ono. © BBC

Tonight and tomorrow BBC4 steals a march with Lennon Naked, a robust drama-documentary charting the musician’s activities from 1967 to 1971, a turbulent period which included the dissolution of The Beatles as the most popular group in pop history, huge enough to have pioneered the stadium concert. The sudden death in 1967 of gifted Beatles manager Brian Epstein was devastating for each of the Fab Four – Lennon most of all. He leaned ever more heavily on the bewitching catalyst for change in his own fortunes, the artist Yoko Ono, whom he had met the previous November in London.

With Beatlemania at its height, and the Fabs the coolest ambassadors for Swinging London, 1966 had precipitated its own trauma. Not only was Lennon taking his first steps exploring the not-yet fashionable halucinatory drug LSD, but in July a bombshell exploded in his lap, as The Beatles’ world tour was about to descend on 14 cities in North America.

An interview was published in an American teen magazine in which he boldly asserted of The Beatles’ fame: “We’re more popular than Jesus now.” Across the American Bible-belt and beyond, God-fearing Christians were outraged. Anti-Beatle demonstrations and public burnings of their records ensued, the Ku Klux Klan – a right-wing hate group – vowed vengeance and death threats were reported. Such was the pressure on the whole entourage that when a fan threw a lit firecracker onstage in Memphis and it went off, the Beatles’ press agent Tony Barrow recalls: “All of us at the side of the stage, including three Beatles on stage, all looked immediately at John Lennon. We would not at that moment have been surprised to see that guy go down.”

Though repeated apologies were issued at press conferences across the States, after the San Francisco concert on August 29, 1966, the whole furore persuaded the band to stop touring ever again.

The now notorious “Jesus” quote had arisen in conversation with the British journalist Maureen Cleave, a clear-sighted interviewer on the London Evening Standard where it had been first published without raising an eyebrow in the increasingly secular UK. Today, Shapersofthe80s republishes her riveting account of her tour of Lennon’s Weybridge home, which set out to explore the then novel phenomenon of four popstars who were so famous they couldn’t set foot in public without being mobbed. Thanks to the trust the Fab Four placed in her, Cleave sought to put Beatlemania under the microscope by interviewing John, George, Paul and Ringo separately and successively, under the series title How Does a Beatle Live? Lennon, for one, would ask when you rang, “What day is it?” – with genuine interest.

➢➢ Click to read the original article on Lennon,
How Does a Beatle Live?

Maureen Cleave, The Beatles, Evening Standard,more popular than Jesus

Maureen Cleave recalls: “Ringo used to say the only place he felt safe was in the lavatory; so the Standard once took a photograph of them all there, with Paul sitting on the washbasin.” She never mentions that she was sitting in the middle.

➢➢ Beatles pics from 1966 – Daily Mirror slideshows

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