Here’s a poser. What is the best interview on You Tube?

By now there are thousands to choose from and more being added daily. Many of these are light hearted chats or mere publicity slots used to plug albums, books, movies etc.

An exception I recently discovered is a good series called The Alcove which may be old hat to you but is new to me.

It features an earnest, but very bright, interviewee Mark Molaro who, get this, wants his subjects to talk rather than being concerned to impose his own personality on the show.

They are a decent length too so come across as much more in depth. In other words the speakers can talk in a relaxed style without feeling they’ve got to come up with smart ass one liners all the time. There’s also no studio audience to try to impress. The success or failure of the interview depends on the wisdom and articulacy of the speaker. So far I’ve watched interviews with Naomi Klein and Greil Marcus, both of which were genuinely illuminating.

Described as “smart talk for a new global generation” the show’s other guests on an impressively diverse list include: Mark Pesce (Web technology expert); Helen Epstein, (HIV/AIDS expert & author); Byron Hurt (”Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes”) and Naomi Wolf (”The End of America”). Interviews can also be seen on Mark Molaro’s website.

But for my money the best interview ever is a show I remember being entranced by when broadcast in the BBC Arena season in 1982. Over the course of over two hours, Orson Welles talks to Leslie Megahey about his extraordinary career which by his own admission is largely one in which he started at the top (with the Mercury Theatre and Citizen Kane) and worked his way down thereafter.

To call someone a larger than life character is something of a cliché but its a description that fits Welles to a tee. In his latter years he was gigantic figure both literally and metaphorically.

In this clip (# 11 of 16) he talks about the 1958 movie A Touch Of Evil where he played the grotesque cop Hank Quinlan. The movie also starred Charlton Heston and Marlene Dietrich. I like the way he describes this as “unreal but true” . The implication is that this is how he approached movie making as a whole, a process he describes as like working from an expensive paint box. Getting the funding for his idiosyncratic projects was always a major problem throughout his career.

In the course of the conversation you get a real sense of the man and what makes him tick. As a storyteller he is magnificent - you don’t always believe his version of events but you marvel at the anecdotal capacity and charm.

He maintains his mythical status yet is not afraid to show us his vulnerabilities.

Sir Richard Bishop

Sir Richard Bishop (SRB) was previously one of the three-piece Sun City Girls who the writer Erik Davis once memorably described as a “postpunk jazzbo tantric freakout band”. Sir Richard’s brother Alan was also in the band and both Bishops are tireless Third World travellers.

The fruits of this are evident in the 30 minute movie he made in 2006 which was one of my purchases on my recent visit to London’s Rough Trade East.

It includes graphic details from Buddist torture paintings from Burma, Laos and Thailand, film of a bizarre phallic shrine in Bangkok and Tibetan monks filmed in Dharamsala, India.

The numerous painted depictions of the devil are crude and grotesque - lascivious Satanic monsters with cruel leers and serpent tongues shown gleefully inflicting pain, principally upon women and children. The kaleidoscope of fast changing images in the movie as a whole is a horror show catalogue of gruesome deeds - bodies are burned, boiled, disembowelled, decapitated, garrotted, impaled on spikes, forced to climb thorny branches and devoured by animals or birds. In short it is not for the faint hearted nor is it recommended as something to watch on a full stomach. There is no let up on the barbarism even when the subject matter shifts to more familiar biblical scenes, as the focus is chiefly on the suffering of Christ.

As the title foretells, this movie is intent on highlighting the barbaric methods artists use to emphasise Hell as a place of genuine pain in order to strike fear into the hearts of we sinners. The clip of the extraordinary 1922 Swedish silent movie ‘Haxan’ puts most modern horror movies in the shade. These YouTube extracts give the flavour:

SRB’s atmospheric soundtrack is entitled Elektronika Demonika and the music comes as a separate audio CD when you buy the DVD. Anyone expecting examples of his virtuoso guitar playing that feature on his solo albums will be disappointed. Here he uses synthesized sounds, interwoven with effects such as a menacing whispered voice which sounds like a deranged version of the Lord’s prayer and demonic laughter.

I suppose the chief moral to the drawn from all this blood letting is that the pursuit of carnal pleasure and the practice of religious belief are activities which are mostly violently at odds with each other. SRB describes his film as:

“a diabolical experiment in hypnotic mind control—a phantasmagoric presentation of demonic and divine imagery, meticulously assembled and designed to put the viewer into an altered state of darkened awareness“.

The scenes of torture illustrate the price fanatics dream of reaping on those who succumb to the sins of the flesh.

You have been warned!

Like many, I first came across the name of Dredd Foole in David Keenan’s cover feature article in the August 2003 ‘Wire’ magazine about the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival. Foole’s album ‘Quest of Tense’ was cited as a major influence on artists like Matt ‘MV’ Valentine and Sunburned Hand of the Man so helped to give birth to the New Weird America scene.
Foole, real name Dan Ireton, is now 58 years old but it’s good to know that the fire in the soul that burned for ‘Quest of Time’ is still aflame for his latest release on Family Vineyard records - a magnificent double album entitled ‘Kissing the contemporary bliss’ remastered from a limited edition release on MV’s Child of Microtones label in 2005.
The album demonstrates that the mind over matter ethos, much vaunted during the recent Olympic games, also applies to creative arts. To do what Dan Ireton has been doing for over three decades demands stubborn intransigence and unwavering self belief.
Above all, there is a wilful disregard of trends at work here. This is music far removed from the dictates of fashion or passing fads. What you hear is the paradox of sounds which are disjointed and chaotic yet at the same time miraculously coherent. Take for example his deconstruction of ‘Girl From The North Country’ where one of Dylan’s simplest songs becomes fragmented and is thrillingly reinvented by Foole.
It’s hard not to think of Tim Buckley as you listen to his vocal gymnastics because Foole has the same way abandoning the idea that songs need to be direct and tightly structured to work. Instead the tracks follow an internal logic of their own which only works because the performers inhabit the pieces, you can’t imagine any two versions of the songs here being alike. There is the invigorating quality of capturing something immediate and unique. Like Buckley, improvisation and spontaneity comes to play a key role in the emotional expressiveness of the singing, the voice serving as an instrument to communicate raw feelings not abstract ideas.
For this to work requires performances heedless of the barriers that come with heightened self consciousness. Dredd Foole never gives the impression that he is holding himself back as primal yelps and moans replace any notion of adhering to static verse-chorus-verse conventions. In lesser mortals the whole could become pretentiously Arty or a disastrous mess but Foole never strays into either territory.
That this album embraces the true meaning of ‘free’ music is evidenced by the sense that you feel alive and empowered just by tapping into its brilliant energy.

New Folk at Rough Trade

One of my ‘must dos’ of my recent trip to London was to visit the new Rough Trade East flagship record store off Brick Lane, a stone’s throw from the City square mile. Rough Trade were forced to close the basement store in the heart of Covent Garden due a hike in rental charges and this new shop is an ‘up yours’ to any logical economic assessment of the future of CD sales - down 10% in the first half of 2007 and continuing to slide as digital sales and file sharing escalates. In the longer term, Rough Trade’s existence as a physical entity looks to be highly fragile but for the moment it’s good to browse and look for new discoveries just like in the old days!

Rough Trade has a special place in my heart - I remember making a pilgrimage to their store off Portobello Road during the heady days of Punk and soaking up an atmosphere a world apart from standard high street outlets. Something of that cutting edge character still remains intact. The day before I went to Ray’s Jazz Shop in Foyles to see if their Avant-Garde radar and ‘independent’ credentials had extended into the realm of Free-Folk (it already has large sections devoted to old time Folk & world music). I found a paltry three CDs behind a hand written label stating ‘Avant / Free folk’ . Admittedly, this is more than you get in the ubiquitous Borders or Virgin’s Zavvi shops that have sprung up to fill the gap left by the demise of Fopp and Tower records.

In contrast, Rough Trade proves its contemporary credentials with a handsome ‘New Folk /Psyche’ section. I asked the guy who served me how these were selling - he told me that it was one of their most popular sections although he admitted “to be honest most of what’s there isn’t folk at all”. It’s certainly a strange mix where Brit-Folk’s current acoustic pin-up boy Seth Lakeman gets to rub shoulders with the weird/ wonderful artists of the Finnish underground and tribal/primal excursions of The Sunburned Hand of the Man. The more plugged in freak out sounds (Acid Mothers Temple / Yellow Swans etc) find a home in ‘Metal’ - if I was in charge of the shop I’d tuck Seth up in contemporary Folk section and celebrate the rest under a ‘New Weird’ banner to avoid using the F-word entirely.

The 9 year old son of a friend I visited while in England was mad on Batman. Not the latest dark incarnation or even Tim Burton’s gothic version, but the 1960s TV shows. He had all the episodes on DVD and watched them continually so was able to tell us what was coming next and quote key lines. I asked his Mom & Dad if he liked the recent movie versions and they said that he hadn’t seen them yet. This was a deliberate policy on their part to preserve the innocent pleasure he is getting form Adam West’s camp depiction of the caped crusader. I grew up watching these shows so could understand the appeal. They are hugely dated now and were oddities pretty well as soon as they were made.

Certainly, the contrast between the colourful comic strip action and the shadowy sense of menace in the new Dark Knight film could not be more pronounced. At the cinema in Brighton where I saw it, the parental guidance alongside the 12A rating said that the movie contained “moderate violence and continuous threat” which I’d say was quite accurate.

The censor’s classification is a massive fudge as it allows young kids of any age to see it provided they are accompanied by an adult (responsible or otherwise!). It effectively dares children to watch with the added frisson of viewing something that is perceived as being on the margins of suitability. The more feature articles are written warning concerned parents against taking their young children, the more those kids will pester until a designated adult will take them.

What makes it hard for censorious souls is that it is difficult to point to any one scene that shows explicit sex or violence. Heath Ledger’s incredible performance as The Joker is the embodiment of a demented terrorist with sadistic tendencies but it is his unrepentent rejection of moral codes and logic (”Do I look like someone who has a plan?”) that makes his character so subversive. Some would argue that this is enough to merit an 18 rating on the grounds that it provides a negative role model for impressionable young minds but they are not really living in the real world.

It is understandable that for parents to want to protect children from the cynical and corrupt world depicted in Christopher Nolan’s makeover of Gotham City for as long as possible. Nevertheless, they know in their hearts that this is merely to postpone the moment represented in one Simpsons episode when Bart was persuaded to watch a violent movie by his peers on the basis that the time had come for him to be de-sensitised.