THE THING EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT LIV TYLER
She is Steven-Tyler-from-Aerosmith’s daughter.

It is the coldest day of the New York City winter so far. Liv Tyler is late for lunch, and I’m getting twitchy. Not because Liv Tyler is late. Not even because she is almost half an hour late. But because Sant Ambroeus – a West Village newcomer rammed with well-heeled thirty-somethings – is possibly the noisiest restaurant Liv Tyler could have chosen.

I have the second cheapest tape machine for sale on Tottenham Court Road: a machine guaranteed to pick up nothing but the Frank Sinatra medley thumping from eight wall-mounted speakers. Outside, the windchill factor dips to minus 18. I begin, quietly, to sweat.

THINGS YOU CAN READ ABOUT LIV TYLER ON THE INTERNET
She is 31. She is Cancerian. She married Royston Langdon, a musician from Leeds, in 2003. He used to front Spacehog. They separated in May 2008, are now divorced. They have a four-year-old son called Milo. She did a striptease for Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s Crazy video when she was still a schoolgirl. Her mother is Bebe Buell, rock chick, ex-Playboy Playmate and supergroupie (as well as Tyler and rocker Todd Rundgren – the man Liv thought was her dad til she was eleven – Buell’s conquests include David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger and Elvis Costello. Not a bad haul).

The table Tyler has selected is at the back of the restaurant, in a corner, three inches from a Spanish tour group loudly debating Sant Ambroeus’ charms. I count eleven voluble older women in fur-trimmed puffer jackets and expensive blow-drys before I raise my own voice, try ‘Testing, testing 1,2,3’ – the tape-machine pretty much in my mouth – and record nothing but the Spanish for ‘I’ve heard they’re famous for their cakes.’ Shit.

THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT LIV TYLER
She laughs all the time. She likes Marks & Spencer’s carrots. She hates public speaking of any kind, once blacking out at a press conference from nerves. She turns into a wanton nymph in front of a still camera. Her voice is childlike, soft, like Marilyn Monroe’s. She says the word ‘normal’ eight times, with reference to herself, during our two-hour conversation. She uses English words like bloody and brilliant and spazzed and wanker. She fancies Johnny Depp.

A sudden flurry of snow in the street conveniently heralds Tyler’s arrival. Black wool cape, black tights, black eyeliner and black pumps. Her hair, cut in a long bob with a fringe, is darker than I thought it would be. She’s tall, but not big. She looks tired. And she is grinning sweetly.

“Hello! I am really sorry I’m so late.”

Not at all, I say. Think nothing of it. It’s fine. I’m Louise, I offer.

“Oh,” she smiles, “I’m Liv.” We shake hands, embarrassed. Because of course she knows I know she knows I know her name and it’s all a bit awkward for a moment. There is a pause.

WHY LIV TYLER WAS LATE
“Bobby, my best friend who’s living in my house, said ‘If you are still sleeping late, do you want me to wake you up?’ and I was like, ‘Bobby – Milo wakes up at five-thirty. I’m going to be wide awake at five!’ Then I woke up at ten. And I kept dozing and I came down to have a cup of coffee with him and I looked at the clock and it was a quarter to twelve. And I ran upstairs and I was like ‘Wait! What am I going to wea-a-a-r?’ And I couldn’t find any stockings – all my Wolfords were in L.A. or had runs, and then I found a bag of some new ones and I was very excited.”

I love your cape, I say. She frowns: “I’d completely forgotten it was Sunday. It’s far too loud in here, isn’t it? What can we do?” I don’t know, I reply. Um. Go somewhere else?

Tyler looks at me strangely, makes a decision. “I’ve got it! Why don’t we get a take-out from here and sit round my kitchen table and I can make coffee?” She orders scrambled eggs and a salad to split.

We briskly walk the single block to her house, both a little nervous. It is ridiculously cold. Tyler’s cape is beautiful, but it doesn’t look remotely warm enough. She talks to fill in the gaps.

No questions about her divorce, I’ve been expressly told by her publicist. Yet by the time we arrive at her front door, Tyler has spoken of nothing but the fallout from the end of her five-year marriage: “It’s a little bit sad… because this is the house I’ve lived in forever with my husband, and this is the first time I’ve been home in four months, and I just got in last night from L.A. and, well, a lot of stuff has gone. Roy moved a lot of stuff out.”

Tyler’s candour about her break-up and the obvious pain behind it are instantly disarming. It feels perverse not to tell her that you’re sorry, that you understand. So I break the first rule of the celebrity interview, and confide back.

We arrive at her front door. Tyler touches my shoulder and smiles. A kind, generous smile that says she knows just how it feels and that it’s all going to be alright: “You know, Louise, what’s hard when you are going through the pain of a break-up is when everyone says, ‘It’ll get better one day’ and you’re like, ‘Fuck off! You don’t know how I feel.’ But the truth is that, it takes a long time, but you do kind of wake up one day and you just feel a little tiny bit better…”

LIV TYLER’S HOUSE IN MANHATTAN
Is a three-storey brownstone. She uses the basement door, which opens onto a sitting room. There is a single chair and a coatstand with “matching Alpaca wool hats for me and Milo”. A black-and-white photo of David Bowie sits on the sideboard. A white upholstered armchair faces the door. The stairs going up to the rest of the house are to the left. To the right, there’s an archway through to a little room with green wooden cupboards and a butler sink. Beyond that is the kitchen.

Liv Tyler: [Hanging our coats] I won’t take you upstairs to the sad parts. There are pictures off the walls, and furniture gone… It’s freaky, it’s really weird. Thank god the kitchen doesn’t look too bad… I’m crap at interviews. I get really nervous and stressed. And afterwards I always think, ‘Oh my god what did I say, what did I do?’ No one’s ever been in my kitchen before. Not that it’s that exciting… [Laughs]

LB: Oh I don’t know. Yours is the biggest fridge I’ve ever seen. It’s like a shed.

LT: Isn’t it ridiculous? Usually it’s very full, but it’s empty because we’ve been gone.

LIV TYLER’S FILMS
Tyler was sweet in an angora jumper in cult hit Empire Records but got her real break losing her virginity in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. Since then she has been in love with Ralph Fiennes in Onegin, Joaquin Pheonix in Inventing The Abbotts (he was her real-life beau for three years), Ben Affleck in Armageddon, Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, Ben Affleck again in Jersey Girl, Casey Affleck in Lonesome Jim and, most recently, Edward Norton’s Incredible Hulk. Last autumn, she was terrorized by mask-wearing ne’er-do-wells in The Strangers.

LB: So. I watched your films back-to-back on the plane and in the hotel last night.

LT: And you fell asleep!

LB: No, I didn’t. Well. Only in the big slug-out at the end of The Incredible Hulk!

LT: [Laughing] I never watch my movies. I was actually just thinking that Milo might be ready to watch Lord of The Rings, because he’s really into dragons and princesses. He always calls me his princess: he comes into my closet and there’s this one dress, which is like a long kind of tie-dye dress to the floor, and he asks me to put it on every day. And I was just like, ‘Wait! I am a princess in that movie!’ I can’t find the coffee. Bobby must’ve moved it. [She goes to stairwell and shouts] Where’s the coffee? [An inaudible response from the first floor] Thank you!

LIV TYLER’S KITCHEN
The room is dominated by a pine table and big black shiny units. There are three tiny stickers on the fridge. Two of them say Milo, in a child’s handwriting. On the worktop is a mock-fifties diner-style CD player, a small watercooler, two blue storage jars, one saying coffee, and a bottle of lemon juice.

There is a mark on the wall above the fireplace where a clock belonging to Langdon used to hang. On the floor is a child’s red chair, a fire engine, a white-board. There are white metal bars on the window. On the table is a bowl with a single apple, a bottle of stain remover, a jar of Himalayan pink salt and an ashtray with an empty packet of Marlboro Lights.

LB: You smoke?

LT: I do sometimes. And now that no-one’s here I can smoke here! [She sits down, her knees under her chin] So… the trauma! I thought, ‘I’m going to be cool: I have a house full of clothes so I’m just going to bring a carry-on bag with my essential toiletries, my computer, my books and my underwear.’

And then I get here and I realise that just before I left I did a huge closet clean-out. I gave away everything. So I was like, ‘Fuck.’ And then I remembered Stella – McCartney – had given me that cape for my birthday! I opened my coat closet and it was sitting there with a golden halo around it. So thanks for saying you love my cape.

I haven’t been shopping for five months. I stopped reading all fashion and trash magazines. I don’t want to be influenced any more by what’s in and what’s out and what makes somebody cool or not cool. In the middle of the night I’d go and take a pee, and on the bathroom floor would be a magazine, and I found myself memorising banal headlines like 500 Best Black Tops. So I read only books – A Farewell To Arms, it’s a heartbreaker, oh god – and decoration magazines.

LB: Where’ve you been decorating?

LT: I’ve been doing a house in L.A.

LB: But you’re a New Yorker!

LT: I am a total, no-doubts-about-it, one hundred per cent New Yorker. It’s been reallyhard. My boy says to me probably every two days, ‘Mommy when are we going home?’ Basically what happened is that ever since I had Milo, I was feeling a bit stressed being in this neighbourhood. It changed so much here; I felt like I was being watched all the time.

LB: And were you?

LT: Well there are a lot of people and a lot of tourists. There’s even like a Sex And The City tour where they walk past everyone’s houses. And I just, for my boy, I wanted him to have the things that I had growing up in Maine; and Roy had, growing up in Leeds. I was confused about what to do. And then when Roy and I broke up, it was very hard to be in this house without him. So we decided to move to L.A. for a little. I kind of thought, ‘Well I’ve been an actress since I was sixteen and I’ve never lived in L.A., so let me see what it’s like.’ [Liv goes to the phone and orders full fat milk, a New York Times and two packets of Marlboro Lights]

LB: So when do you think you’ll want to get back to work?

LT: When it was all happening, I went through six months where I didn’t read a single script. I just wasn’t ready to work in any way. I feel like now it’s the New Year I’m ready.

LIV TYLER’S NEW HOUSE IN L.A.
Is Spanish-style, 1920s. Terracotta tiles. Lots of grass and a single lime tree. Her dog Neal loves it. When she moved in there was nothing in the house: “Not a telephone, not a fork.” All the towels and glasses are from Calvin Klein: “I had this amazing gift certificate for going to an event for them, and I was like ‘Yes! I finally used one of those things. Swag is great!’” Tyler sleeps in pajamas with Milo’s blanket.

LT: I miss the seasons. I got back last night and it was snowing which was incredible. [She goes to the front door to get the delivery, shouting back] I grew up in New York and Maine so I love the cold. I’m a complete Eskimo. [She comes in with a brown paper bag and unpacks it] Ciggies. One for you, one for me… It’s strange. I have more privacy in L.A. because you can run around in your yard. But the paparazzi are very weird, because they actually stalk you. Like they have someone wait in the car all the time, so whenever you leave –

LB: What?

LT: Yeah. I’m really boring: I take my son to school; I go to the grocery store. So I don’t play their game. But it’s confusing because they kind of trick you. Some days they’re really obvious, and then some days you’re driving and you look back for them, and they’re not there, and you’ll feel like a weird narcissist. And then you’ll think: ‘Oh, I’m free.’ So you’ll have two weeks where you can be in your sweats with no makeup on. And then, suddenly, you realise they have been there all the time, just hiding out.

LIV TYLER’S ADVICE FOR MENDING A BROKEN HEART
“There’s nothing worse than heartache, being lovesick. It’s like there’s a physical sickness. You go through a couple of weeks where you think, ‘Oh, I’m okay, I feel better,’ and then suddenly, out of nowhere, it hits you again… You also realise who your friends are.

“When Roy and I broke up, Bobby literally moved in with me and helped me get through everything. And my other best friend, Victoria, she’s with me in L.A. right now. The hardest part is when they leave… It also brings up a lot of issues: you might feel like a failure, or like there is something wrong with you. I see a lot of people run away from it, or they act like they don’t care. But if you don’t let yourself mourn, it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass. You can’t run away from yourself: you kind of have to just deal with it.”

LT: Oh! You have to listen to Gram Parsons, he’s my favourite.

LB: Ah. ‘We’ll Sweep Out The Ashes In The Morning‘.

LT: Oh my god! You know him? ‘Hearts on fire…’ [Starts singing]

LB: ‘Love Hurts’ is my favourite.

LT: Ah, ‘Love Hurts’ is my favourite. It’s so true. Ah, how does it go?

BOTH SING: “Love hurts, love scars/Love wounds and mars/Any heart not tough nor strong enough/ To take a lot of pain…”

LT: I can’t believe you know that! I love that. [We dissolve into laughter] Music gets you right in your gut. He’s literally all I listen to at the moment…I must have it here. [Liv goes to the CD player, looks for his CD] Oh no! I can’t find anything. [The doorbell rings. It’s the food. She gets the intercom. “Oh yeah, Hi, can you come down to the basement?” She comes back in with two paper bags] Okay, this is so fun. Where are the plates? Oh they’re over there. Everything’s mo-o-oved!

LB: So you literally haven’t been here for four months?

LT: Not once… It has been really good for me because it’s a new place without memories. Without stuff, you know? Excuse me I’m just going to the bathroom. [I hear a little voice from the toilet singing ‘Hearts on Fire’. We both laugh. She comes back in, smiling] I can’t believe you know that song. I went to this little spa in the desert by myself two weekends ago because I had a cold and I needed to sleep for two days.

And on the whole journey, I was so nervous to drive: I only really learned how to pump gas on my own the past six months because Roy would pump gas! I’m always afraid it’s going to come out and spray! I listened to Gram Parsons the whole way and sang at the top of my lungs and I fucking loved it. [I take a piece of kitchen towel over to the two enormous silver bins. On one is a label saying ‘Crap’, on the other, ‘Recycle’. I laugh] Yeah, Roy did that.

LB: So what’s a kitchen towel?

LT: That’s crap.

LB: Let’s do some childhood questions. Was there a recurring theme on your school report?

LT: I used to get in trouble for speaking without raising my hand a lot. And even the year before I graduated, when I was a fully working woman, I would get sent out for speaking out of turn! And I remember standing in the hall going, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ And my headmaster, who was really sweet, would walk by and roll his eyes at me.

LB: Did you feel different to the other kids?

LT: I definitely knew that my family was eccentric. My mom was this wild woman who was in rock bands.

LB: All everyone goes on about in interviews is –

LT: My dad. Well, it’s because people always glorify it. No matter what I tell them, they invent their own version. I remember reading once that I was friends with Mick Jagger when I was a kid. All these weird things that never happened…

LB: So what did happen?

LT: When I was born my mother was very young and she was struggling, she needed help. So I lived in Maine with my aunt and my uncle and my cousins.

LB: She left you with them when you were born?

LT: When I was three months old. For three years. And she would come and visit a lot. She was trying to sort her life out and figure everything out.

LB: Okay. So was she working out of town?

LT: She was probably here. Modelling and stuff.

LB: But you won’t remember any of that…

LT: I do. I remember being with my aunt in Maine. And it really feels like home to me… Then I lived with my grandparents in Virginia. And then I kind of lived with my mom full time. And Todd Rundgren was my father. Todd basically decided when I was born that I needed a father so he signed my birth certificate. He knew that there was a chance that I might not be his but…

LB: Did you feel any sort of resentment towards your mother?

LT: It was hard for me as a kid, because I was definitely sad and angry that I didn’t have this Perfect Mommy thing. But now I have a lot of empathy for her. I mean going through everything that I’ve been going through the last couple of years, I really understand… so…Todd was my father. He completely supported me and put me through amazing private schools and I would go see him three times a year, he lived in Woodstock –

LB: And did you call him dad?

LT: Oh yeah. I still – I sort of stopped calling him dad but, you know, when he… He’s the most, I mean, I’m so grateful to him, I have so much love for him. You know, when he holds me it feels like Daddy. And he’s very protective and strong.

LIV TYLER’S FIRST MEETING WITH STEVEN TYLER
“I was like eight. I didn’t know who Aerosmith was. And my mom said, ‘Come here I want to introduce you to someone,’ and I was watching Todd play and I was like, ‘Ugh, I don’t wanna come!’ And she pointed to this guy standing at the bar and I was like, ‘Is that Mick Jagger’s son?’ And he bought me a Shirley Temple, which is grenadine and soda bubbly water with little fake plastic cherries. I was such a tomboy, I had an 80s skirt on and I was sitting with my legs open and I remember him saying, ‘You need to cross your legs, young lady.’ I fell madly in love with him. I had no idea who he was.”

LT: After we met, he, Steven, started calling and we’d go see him. He was just out of rehab, so part of going through those steps is making amends by reaching out to my mom after years of being a drug addict and not ever being there. He’d never met me before.

LB: But he knew?

LT: He knew. I mean he knew something… You know that relationship is still sort of hard. He’s very busy, my dad. He’s not around very much; it’s sort of hard being the daughter of a rockstar. There’s definitely, at times… it can be painful… especially for me, I can’t speak for all of his…[She trails off]

LB: Do you talk much?

LT: Honestly? In the past few years we haven’t been very close. He has been going through a lot of things on his own and he has not been the… he hasn’t been around that much for us. So that’s been hard. But I probably shouldn’t be talking about this… I wish, I wish, I really wish he was around more, to know Milo more, and… but he has to go through what he goes through.

LB: I read a piece where you interviewed Kate Hudson and you talked about the fact that people don’t understand that having famous parents can be difficult. I guess they just think about –

LT: The glamour of it. [Putting plates away] You look at people’s lives from the outside, and everything seems a certain way. But Kate and I are completely different: she grew up in the middle of California with movie star parents; and when my mom finally moved to Maine we lived in this tiny apartment and all my friends lived in fancy houses… In order to feel good about myself, I need to do normal things, whereas Kate probably grew up in a house with a lot of help and nannies and housekeepers, and that’s normal to her.

LB: How does that need to be normal sit with moviemaking?

LT: Well. That’s why often in my career I’ll go to work intensely and then I really won’t work for a year, because I need to come home and just be my version of whatever normal is.

LB: Is there ever a time when you think, ‘I would trade it all in, to be a regular Joe?’

LT: No, because if I want to do that I go to Maine, to New Hampshire, to Boston, to Upstate New York.

LB: Do you worry that if you got more famous, the celebrity thing would get worse?

LT: I don’t really think about it.

LB: Okay. But to be Angelina Jolie-level must be unbearable, right?

LT: I know, but that’s her. That’s why I stopped reading all those magazines. I just don’t even want to be thinking about it… I mean, so far, it’s okay. Maybe I’m living in the past in the sense that when I had my first big moments, there was no such thing as paparazzi in that kind of a way.

LB: Well it used to be that the general public wanted that distance between us and film stars. Now all everyone wants is to know –

LT: What toilet paper they use! [Laughs] I do interviews all the time where they say, ‘We’re not going to ask you any personal questions; we just want to know all about your skincare routine and what you eat.’ You don’t get more personal than raiding my medicine cabinet and knowing every ounce of vitamins in my body!

LB: Are you ever affected by what people write about you?

LT: I remember when Stealing Beauty came out and there was some review. The journalist said I looked like a horse eating out of a trough!

LB: Nice.

LT: And I’ve never forgotten that as long as I’ve lived. Although I’m okay with it now, because I am kind of horse-like!

LB: Have you seen Stealing Beauty lately?

LT: I was at home the other night in LA and I’d just put Milo to bed and I came into the TV room and the nanny was sitting watching it on TV. And it was the scene where I am lying in bed crying and I wipe a tear away and it’s a bit ambiguous as to what I do with my wet finger, and then Jeremy Irons walks in and he sniffs my finger. And I was like, ‘Oh my god. Linda, you can’t watch this.’ And I watched it for five or ten minutes… It’s weird because I am always looking back. All the images that I see, or all the interviews people ask me about, or all my films are me as a young child or a younger woman.

LB: Did you notice any differences between then and now?

LT: I remember thinking I seemed a little bit tougher and stronger; I’ve gotten a little bit softer in my old age… I often think I should watch these so I can remember who I am, or who I was at that time. And I never do. I kind of get scared to.

LB: Are you ever shy when you meet someone famous?

LT: I am, shockingly, a pretty shy person. With my friends I’m opinionated and talk a lot and am kind of an extrovert, but I would never just walk up and introduce myself to someone. You know whenever you meet people like Lauren Bacall or Jack Nicholson or Martin Scorsese, that’s always like ‘Huuuuhh!’ for anyone, no matter who you are.

LIV TYLER’S DINNER WITH MARLON BRANDO
“He was so naughty. He had this real child-like personality and he was doing all these funny magic tricks for us. Like he had this red scarf stuffed in his pocket of his jacket and he did a trick where he took it out and did this thing with his hands and then went [she waves her hands] and none of us could see where he’d put this scarf. It turned out he had a fake thumb on. And the scarf was stuffed in the fake thumb! That was pretty amazing.”

LB: What traits do you take from your parents?

LT: God that’s hard… I would say that both my mother and my father have this child-like joy and optimism that comes out of them. My mom has definitely been through some painful things in her life, and she has always taught me that everything happens for a reason. And that has really helped me a lot in the past couple of years. I’m a very grateful person: I see that there is a lot of beauty in the world. There’s a lot of sadness and pain too.

LB: But when you’re full of sorrow, it can intensify the world around you.

LT: Yeah. You feel everything. It smells different. You think when you’re younger that you have it all figured out, and you have all these plans and goals… And then certain things happen that stop you in your tracks.

LB: You mean you learn that if you love, there is the possibility that you lose, and that’s how it has to be.

LT: Yeah. And the scary thing about that is, that it might make someone not ever want to give fully or passionately again because they don’t want to feel loss. I am the opposite of that. There is an incredible sense of loss when you move on, but I just wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Because I want to feel that, I want to… It’s huge. So, that’s what I’ve been trying to live this year: stop trying to be the person everyone wants you to be, or the person you think you need to be to please everyone; just be yourself. [Bobby comes in] Hello. What’s the time?

LB: It’s 2.46.

LT: Wait – I have to be somewhere at three. Fuck!

The interview has overrun by fifty minutes. Tyler sprints to the loo, grabs her bag, shrugs on her cape, apologising all the while for chucking me out. On her doorstep, a hasty but warm embrace.

“Thank you!” she says. “See you at the shoot tomorrow. I can’t wait to see what they want me to wear.” I tell her that her cape is much too thin for this cold. “I know,” she laughs. “I’d normally be bundled up in about twenty coats and scarves. But I wanted to look glamorous for you! I’m fucking freezing.” And, with one last smile, she’s gone.

Photography: Miguel Reveriego
Fashion: Grace Cobb
Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009.

The post Liv Tyler Interview appeared first on Wonderland.

I’m just a worker. I am an entertainer. Don’t say that what I am doing is art.

My mother is an actress and that always made me a little suspicious of acting. She’s been working for fifty years, and when I was young I saw everything. I saw years and years of unemployment with three kids. The profession is so fucking hard. People read about the actors that work but that’s only five per cent of them.

The whole Oscar thing is surreal: you spend months and months doing promotion and then come back to reality with this golden thing in your hands. You put it in the office and then you just have to look at it sitting on the shelf. And, after about two weeks, you go, ‘What is that doing there?’ It would be stupid to believe that they give it to you because you are a better man. I was just lucky.

I think that those who don’t believe in God try to believe in fate because you have to have something you believe in, otherwise life can be too random. When things go really wrong I wish I could pray to someone. But I think hope comes from yourself. When you rely on yourself, in a profound way, I call that grace.

I remember the moment when my father died. I wasn’t a very committed Catholic beforehand, and when that happened it suddenly all felt so obvious: I now believe religion is our attempt to find an explanation, for us to feel more protected. My truth — what I believe — is that there are no answers here, and, if you are looking for answers, you’d better choose the question carefully.

My parents divorced when I was young, but I don’t remember it being particularly bad at the time. I guess when you grow up you understand much better how it affects you in your unconscious. A lot of therapists make a living out of it.

I don’t need to like the characters that I play. There is this great actress in Spain called Victoria Abril, who said a line that I love which is: ‘We, the actors, are the defending lawyers of the characters we play.’ It’s true. You are a lawyer. You have to defend your character. If I was defending Chigurh from No Country For Old Men, I’d say he’s a man with a broken soul, a broken mind, but I would prefer not to see him at a bar; I wouldn’t call him to have a drink!

When you want to create a good performance, the key is not to make an exhibition of your skills. It’s about being honest; but it’s also about creating behaviours. We see people and we bring those people into our work. We construct people.

Growing up I wanted to become a painter. But after that thing with my sister, I realised that I was pretending. It is funny that in Vicky Cristina Barcelona my character is a painter. I could never be as confident as my character in this movie, either as a painter or with the way he is with women… When I painted alongside the professional, we’d do the same things but his would look amazing and mine would look like a piece of crap! You go, ‘Why? Why him?’ Well, the answer is very clear: You don’t have it. You just don’t have it. It’s something about the fingers… I belong to acting now.

I listen to a lot of music, and I am a huge, huge Pearl Jam fan. The early stuff, Ten, in particular was very important to me: the music, the sound, the fury, the instincts, the thoughts, the energy, the words. I’ve seen them playing four or five times now. I can’t stop jumping for about three hours when they hit hard, man. I go nuts, I’m in pieces and then the next time they put me together again. It’s like ‘Wallop! What a journey!’

My other big passion in life is rugby. Playing rugby in Spain is like being a bullfighter in Japan. I loved to play rugby — I have many scars — but you have to quit if you want to work as an actor. I did Jamón, Jamón for Pedro Almodóvar, and it was a great success and I kept on playing but the other players were always going, ‘He is the guy from ‘Jamón, Jamón’, let’s go for him.’ I was like, ‘Don’t give me the ball, don’t give me the ball!’

Being famous in your own country is fun at first because you’re twenty years old and everyone is giving you all this attention, but after a very brief while – I would say maybe a couple of months – I remember thinking, ‘This is bad, there is nothing good in this’, and I still think the same. I mean I’m doing this job, so it’s a contradiction, but there’s always a moment where you go, ‘Enough. It’s only a movie, for Christ’s sake!’

I hope for change with the election of Obama. In this modern world there has been a sheriff called George Bush who wants to kill the bad guys, like in a bad Western, but not everybody is bad. He made it into this the war between evil and good. What the fuck is that? Life is a little bit more complicated.

Sometimes I say to myself, ‘What are you doing in this absurd job? Why don’t you go to Africa and help people?’ But I cannot help people, because I am a hypochondriac and I don’t know how to drive a car. The only thing I can do is act, and it’s not something I even feel comfortable doing. It costs me a lot, because I’m a shy person, even if I don’t look it. But I don’t know how to do anything else.

Words: Will Lawrence

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Javier Bardem appeared first on Wonderland.

Marc Almond and Gene Pitney have knocked Jason and Kylie off the top of the UK charts. Reagan has just left the White House. The last Soviet tanks are rolling out of Afghanistan. Madonna is filing for divorce from Sean Penn. Ayatollah Khomeini has slapped a $3million bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head. The poll tax that will bring down Margaret Thatcher is a month away from being introduced.

Oblivious to these international convulsions, a small grey-brown wren, native to Washington State, cocks its head. A sawmill belches smoke. Machines whirr, giant rusty cogs spin, sparks spray. A forlorn town sign, crudely painted with two mountaintops, stands against a background of Douglas Firs. Music swells. Water falls.

Lumberjack Pete Martell says goodbye to his indifferent wife and steps outside their lakeside lodge into the crisp North Western morning. “The lonesome foghorn blows,” he murmurs to himself. On the shore, next to a massive fallen tree bleached to concrete by the elements, Martell sees a white bundle. He edges closer. The package has come unstuck like some vile, abandoned birthday present. It’s a human parcel, tied with string round the torso and at the knees. A golden spray of hair tumbles from the nearest end. Martell begins to shake uncontrollably. He calls the sheriff’s office, trying to figure this thing, this terrible thing, but can’t find the words. “She’s //de-e-ead//,” he cries in a wavering voice. “Wra-a-a-apped in pla-a-stic…”

So begins the pilot episode of Twin Peaks. The director is David Lynch. The girl is Laura Palmer. And, as of the show’s debut on ABC in April 1990, not only is she Homecoming Queen of the local high school and the apple of her father’s eye, she’s the most famous corpse in television history. Each week, millions will tune in to watch FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) find her killer…

Lynch and screenwriter Mark Frost were struggling. For three years the pair had been working on a film adaptation of Goddess, the best-selling biography of Marilyn Monroe. After a trio of dark, challenging outings (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet) Lynch was keen to edge towards something a little more mainstream – and Goddess fitted the bill. But it just wasn’t gelling. “I loved the story of this woman in trouble,” says Lynch, “but I didn’t know if I liked it being a real story.”

When the studio refused their script, the duo’s agent, Tony Krantz, had an idea. Frost had been involved with the hit cop series Hill Street Blues, and Krantz suggested they collaborate instead on a TV project. At the back of Krantz’s mind was Peyton Place – the torrid 60s soap juggernaut in which illicit passions, insanity, murder and secrets ran amok. Lynch and Frost loved the idea of a soap opera with bite, and came up with a new idea they called Northwest Passage, which they took to ABC in 1988. “We just described a murder-mystery loosely set in a small town in the Pacific north-west,” says Frost. “And that was about all we had at that point. We said we wanted it to have the feel of a lush 50s melodrama; David made some strange motions with his hand as he described the wind. And they seemed to like that.”

Six months later, ABC greenlit the pilot. And in a booth at DuPar’s coffee shop on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevard in downtown LA, Lynch and Frost came up with the newly christened Twin Peaks’ most enduring image: a girl’s body bound in plastic sheeting. “We developed the town before the people,” explains Frost. “We drew a map. We knew it had a lake and a lumber mill, but the specifics we weren’t sure of.” Lynch continues: “We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story.” Frost admits that it took them a while to solve the murder: “We had to know the town before we could make up a list of suspects. Only after we knew most of its people was the killer revealed to us.”

Though its roots were in the soaps of the past, the action would take place just one year before Twin Peaks aired; in this fictional world, Laura Palmer drew her last breath in the early hours of 24th February 1989. “We always felt it should be in the present,” says Frost, “but that it should have a kind of timeless feel, as small towns in America often do. This is a place where time has stood still for a while.” Having grown up in a succession of Montanan small towns, Lynch was only too familiar with the atmosphere it needed. “I love a small town,” he smiles. “But it has to be a certain size. It can’t be too small. It has to be big enough so that you don’t know everybody and yet there’s these pleasant places and then strange secrets and sickness there as well.”

The crime-solving elements came from Frost, a longtime fan of Arthur Conan Doyle. Thanks to him, the series’ hero emerged as Agent Cooper, Sherlock Holmes with Bryl-cremed black hair and a biscuit-coloured macintosh. “When you come down to it,” ponders Frost, “the art of the detective is pretty basic. Whatever period you’re in it’s ratiocination, deductive and inductive reasoning, and then a smattering – sometimes mysterious – of intuition. Though I think we pumped intuition a little bit more than people were used to seeing!” Cooper’s unorthodox methods of investigation involved mystical Tibetan and Native American shamanism, and visions in his bedroom of a helpful giant in a bow-tie.

The Twin Peaks pilot was written in just nine days and shot in 23. Lynch embraced the chaos of such a fast turnaround. Mistakes ended up in the show – like a flickering fluorescent light that distracted one extra so much that when McLachlan asked him to leave the room he inexplicably answered, “Jim”, his real name. Lynch loved that. But not as much as he loved a scene in which Laura Palmer’s mother Sarah (a skull-faced Grace Zabriskie) looked into her daughter’s bedroom. Set-dresser and sometime actor Frank Silva had been moving furniture, and Lynch shot some footage of him crouched at the foot of Laura’s bed. At this point, Lynch had no idea what he’d be doing with it. Later, he shot a scene in which Sarah Palmer wakes up screaming. It was ruined because a crewmember was visible in a nearby mirror. The crewmember was Silva; and the film’s supernatural villain, Bob, was born.

Lynch always planned Twin Peaks to be the soap to end them all; a show so twisted that even its own soap-within-a-soap, Invitation To Love, was eventually phased out because it exhausted the writers. “I really like soap operas,” he explains. “I got hooked when I was printing engravings at art school. This lady I was printing with was so completely addicted to two particular soaps – Another World and The Edge Of Night – that I got hooked as well. I dug them. But the frustrating thing about them is that they draw the smallest torments out forever. It works, but it’s frustrating.”

For Twin Peaks, Lynch didn’t want drawn-out torments. He wanted detail. And lots of it. He daydreamed about a mysterious red curtained room, which he put into the show. There, Agent Cooper encounters the Man From Another Place, a dwarf dressed in a red three-piece suit and brown cowboy boots, who dances a funny little jive, feeding Cooper lines like “When you see me again, it won’t be me” and “That gum you like is coming back in style”. To achieve the strange-sounding dialogue, diminutive actor Michael J Anderson had to say his lines backwards for them to be flipped around in the edit. For most performers it would have been a Herculean task but, bizarrely, Anderson had actually used backward-speak as a secret language with his school friends. What Anderson did have a problem with, however, were last-minute scenes that he believed had “no context”. He even claims to have heard Lynch in the edit suite whooping, “I’ll betcha that’s what I meant by that!”

McLachlan, who had previously starred in Dune and Blue Velvet, knew Lynch better than anyone. “Whenever David would come in and do an episode,” he remembers, “the script would just end up being destroyed. He would take out pages, we’d rearrange scenes, we’d change dialogue. I mean, we’d just completely bastardise what we had. And that was fun. It really felt like the inmates were taking over the asylum for a week, which he enjoyed as well. But it was always with a purpose.”

When it came to the Twin Peaks score, Lynch was just as purposeful. He brought in composer Angelo Badalamenti – Isabella Rossellini’s music coach from Blue Velvet – and together they created a nightmarish wall of sound, alternately mournful and playful, with 50s fingerclicks, Roy Orbison guitar licks and snare-drum shuffles. “David would say that the music should begin very dark and slow,” recalls Badalamenti. “He said, ‘Imagine you’re alone in the woods at night and you hear only the sound of wind, and possibly the soft cry of an animal.’ I’d start playing and David would say, ‘That’s it, that’s it! Now keep playing for a minute, but get ready for a change because now you see a beautiful girl. She’s coming out from behind a tree, she’s all alone and troubled, so now go into a beautiful melody that climbs ever so slowly until it reaches a climax. Let it tear your heart out…’” Not a single note was ever changed.

When it debuted in April 1990, facing off against Cheers in a Thursday-night slot that had been tough to Dynasty and killed off The Colbys, the pilot took a third of the available viewing audience. This show had everything; deliberately steeped in teenage sex, it made instant pin-ups of the sultry Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), the demure Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle) and the moody bad-boy Bobby (Dana Ashbrook). At its height it was watched by 35 million Americans. “We were in exact the right place, at the right network, at the right time,” believes Frost.

Inevitably, though, the moment couldn’t last. Frost and Lynch had resisted constant network pressure to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer, ensuring that Twin Peaks was commissioned for a second season. And then – in episode 16 of series two – they caved in. “The question of what happened to Laura Palmer was the goose that laid the golden egg,” Lynch says. “Then ABC asked us to snip the goose’s head off, and it killed the goose. And there went everything.

“The murder of Laura Palmer was the centre of the story,” he continues, “the thing around which all the show’s other elements revolved, like a sun in a little solar system. It was not supposed to get solved. The idea was for it to recede a bit into the background, and the foreground would be that week’s show. But the mystery of the death of Laura Palmer would stay alive. And it’s true: as soon as that was over, it was basically the end. There were a couple of moments later when a wind of that mystery, a wind from that other world, would come blowing back in, but it just wasn’t the same.”

Lynch’s hunch was right. With the murder solved, the audience lost interest. And so did ABC, who finally put it on “indefinite hiatus” in February 1991. Bowing to massive fan demand, the network agreed to six more shows, including a brilliantly baffling final episode in June 1991, directed by Lynch. It was both too much and not enough. Lynch being Lynch just walked away. “I left it because you can’t do everything,” he shrugs. “I have misgivings about the way it went but I still – and always will – love that world.”

Words:Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post David Lynch appeared first on Wonderland.

Moments later the lift doors part again and the unmistakable voice – that Pepé Le Pew cartoon French accent – of Jean Paul Gaultier booms around the space: “Bonjour!” A quick chat with the chef about what’s on the menu today, followed by a raucous laugh, and the 56-year-old designer appears around the corner, in black from head to toe, hand outstretched and an unstoppable smile across his face. “Bon!” he blasts, plonking himself down at the head of the table. He delicately unpeels a napkin, places it on his lap and pours himself a mineral water. “I em zo ‘ungry!”

Not many fashion designers become household names. Fewer still become household faces. But Gaultier is both. Since launching his first solo collection back in 1976, he has consistently provided the industry with wit, eccentricity and outrageous headline-grabbing moments: macho sailor pin-up boys; fetish all-in-ones with eye and mouth slits; men in dresses; an entire show based on Hasidic Jews; and his most enduring stamp, underwear worn as outerwear.

Even away from the catwalk, Gaultier could never be called a shrinking violet. During the 90s he hurled himself with gay abandon into the public consciousness. He dressed Madonna in corsets, a breast-exposing pinstripe suit and that conical bra for her iconic Blonde Ambition tour. He turned up at the 1995 MTV awards in a floor-length skirt. And throughout the decade, dressed in his trademark kilt and Matalot shirt, he co-hosted Eurotrash, Channel 4’s late-evening lavatorial flesh-fest. He and the even more absurdly accented Antoine de Caunes giggled about “penizes” week-after-week, like a pair of schoolgirls.

Gaultier hasn’t changed much. The peroxide crop might have been replaced by longer mousey-brown hair and the numerous earrings have gone, but the puerile humour remains. The chef brings over two bowls of Topinambour soup, an old WWII favourite made from a white root. Gaultier starts to explain that the dish’s nickname is ‘Tapine à Hambourg’ and disintegrates into hysterical laughter. “The ‘pine’ in ‘Tapine’ is slang in French for penis!” he guffaws, pounding his fist suggestively into his palm.

“C’est bon!” he says, slurping from his spoon. “I need to learn how to cook. I can only make simple things like pasta. To make good food takes time and I enjoy eating more than cooking. My grandmother was a super-good cook; she fed me well when I was a boy.” Gaultier’s grandmother, Marie Garrabe, did more than just cook for little Jean Paul, whose dream job back then was to make patisseries (as an adult he is a self-confessed cake addict). She opened his eyes to another world.

“I was very close to my grandmother,” he explains. “I was fascinated by her clothes and fabrics; all from the beginning of the century. Hats with feathers and things like that. She lived in an old lady’s apartment surrounded by objects that sparked my imagination. My grandfather had lived in England for 12 years – he was supposed to become a Protestant pastor – and he brought back objects like a long shaving razor and a sepia photo of himself from 1914. I liked all that, not because it was old, but because it was different. I love difference! I was more attracted to things that weren’t of the modern day: it was like they weren’t from reality.”

Gaultier was born on 24th April 1952, the only child of book-keeper Paul and secretary Solange. The family lived in Arcueil, a bleak, working-class suburb, three miles from the centre of Paris. School wasn’t a pleasant experience: he felt “ugly, boring” and, useless at football, remained a solitary figure in the playground. “But I lived in my own world so I didn’t feel embarrassed about not having any friends,” he shrugs. “I was curious and learning everything by myself. It’s stupid but sometimes I would look at the clouds and see faces. It was a game for me. I think all that educated me in ideas.”

Thursdays, the day he stayed with his grandmother, were the highpoint of Gaultier’s week. He’d often pull a sickie on Friday to avoid school and stretch his visit into the weekend. Her home offered rare treats like central heating, a fridge and, most importantly, a TV. But they weren’t the only draw. “Nana did faith healing, beauty treatments and gave Tarot readings for the local women,” Gaultier explains. “Once she did my Tarot and said, ‘You’ll be famous and do well in life.’ She always told me positive things; I think she did it to help my confidence.” Granny Gaultier also encouraged her protégé to express himself creatively: “I remember rolling and cutting up some paper to make the first pointed bra for my teddy bear!” he laughs. “He was flat-chested and I wanted a girl to play with. Et voila! I turned him into a transvestite.”

Gaultier recalls hours spent quietly sat in the corner of Marie Garrabe’s parlour, studying the gestures of Arcueil women as they had homemade perm solution administered, and eavesdropping on their gossip. He began to draw her clients in evening gowns, jewellery and extravagant hair-dos – “as I wanted them to look”.

Sketching was fast becoming an obsession. One night, aged nine, Gaultier sat crossed-legged on the floor in front of his grandmother’s TV set. It was late but she always let him stay up to watch whatever he wanted. A documentary about the Folies-Bergère came on and he was immediately transfixed by the dancers in their “fish-nets and feathers” – and not much else. At school the next morning, Gaultier sat at the back of his class feverishly drawing the glamorous women of the Folies-Bergère. His teacher caught him and, incensed, pinned the artwork to his back and made him parade down the corridors for his fellow pupils to humiliate him. The punishment backfired. “All the boys cheered me,” Gaultier says excitedly, still amazed. “It was the first time they had a positive reaction to me. I instantly thought, ‘Oh! By drawing, people like me.’ It’s only now I realise that was a super-positive moment for me… it gave me a passport to make people smile.”

Gaultier was hooked. He began skipping school to draw costumes for imaginary theatre productions. Aged twelve he saw Falbalas, the 1945 drama about a Parisian couturier, featuring the designs of Rochas. It’s a movie Gaultier has now seen hundreds of times, and it is no exaggeration to say that it set him on the path to fashion. “I love that film,” he says, tucking into his main course of sea bream and artichokes. “The details of the couture house, the description of the people working there… incredible! I met the actress Françoise Fabian once, the wife of Jean Becker, Falbalas’ director. She told me that he was a close friend of Marcel Rochas, so he knew all the inside stories of couture… And then I was in Robert Altman’s film Prêt-à-Porter, because he was a close friend of Sonia Rykiel. But his movie was very, very bad. It was a catastrophe, non?”

With Falbalas as his bible, Gaultier launched into his teenage years hungry for all things Haute Couture. “At that time couture was in all the newspapers,” he remembers. “I especially liked Yves Saint Laurent and Cardin because they were very Parisian. I started drawing my own collections, sometimes up to three hundred sketches, and even wrote my own show reviews!” By now, Mr and Mrs Gaultier – whom their son describes as “simple people, but open-minded” – had accepted that he was not going to be a Spanish teacher, as they’d once hoped.

Gaultier began designing dresses for his mother, who had them made up by a seamstress friend. Another of his mother’s friends worked in the Dior design studio and took in his drawings to show to its director Marc Bohan. The verdict came back that Gaultier’s work was “too gaudy” for Dior’s delicate tastes – “It may have been the fact that the faces of my models were bright orange!”

Undeterred, Gaultier began mailing out his drawings to other fashion houses. “It was my eighteenth birthday and I came back home from school,” he recalls. “I walked in and my mother said, ‘We had a phone call from Pierre Cardin and he is waiting for you.’ I said, ‘You have to come with me. I’m too scared to go by myself.’ So we took the Metro together and she waited on the pavement while I went inside. I was so nervous that all I can remember Cardin asking me was what I did. I told him I was at school. He replied, ‘What days can you come in?’ I said, ‘Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons.’ It was the only time I didn’t have classes.’ He said I would be paid 500 francs. ‘A day?’ I asked. ‘No. A month.’ Et voila! That’s how I started.”

What did Cardin – the man behind 60s space-age womenswear – see in his drawings? “I don’t know! To be honest they were awful,” he winces. “I’m embarrassed just thinking about them. But Cardin was incredible; I hadn’t been to college, I didn’t have any references and he still gave me a job. He judged everything by himself. I suppose he could see I loved fashion and recognised my obsession and energy.”

In July 1970 Gaultier should have been studying for his Baccalaureate. But instead he was living out his childhood fantasy, slaving away in Cardin’s studio in the run-up to the couture shows. “It was my summer holidays, so instead of just doing three afternoons a week at Cardin, I worked for a month and a half flat-out.” Needless to say he flunked his school exams. Then, eight months later, he was laid off. “There were too many people in the studio,” he says, handing his cleared plate to the chef with an appreciative nod. “I was the last person in, so I was the first person out!”

Gaultier was unfazed by his sudden unemployment: “I had begun my fashion life.” He was armed with an outlook that has served him well throughout his thirty-year career. “I learnt to have pleasure and fun from Cardin, and to enjoy fashion,” he says. “The most important thing with him was freedom. He was very open creatively. Everybody criticised him for doing so many licences: from chocolate to toilet paper. But he believed everything could be art. He was a businessman. I am not at all business-minded. I am only creative.” This from a man sat in a $9.5 million beaux arts building, who oversees a vast fashion empire with ready-to-wear and haute couture collections, the youth-orientated JPG By Gaultier range, a denim line and almost a dozen fragrances. “It’s a lot, non?” he giggles. “But I never did it for the money. I mean, I enjoy the comfort, but it isn’t my //goal//. If it all went, I would be fine. I started with nothing so I’m not frightened of that. As long as I have my eyes I am happy because my eyes are my most precious thing.”

The chef delivers two small glasses filled with lychees and cherries. “Oh-la-la!” Gaultier chirps and digs straight in. “I just do what I love, which is to play,” he says. “Work is my game. I love it. But there are so many collections that sometimes there is more stress than fun. To think about designing, I have to find space away from all //this//. I have to find a place for myself. Somewhere that I am truly alone. Just like when I was a child.” Gaultier sits back with a contented grin; an empty dessert glass in front of him on the table. “Et voila!”

Photographer: Simon Thiselton
Illustrator: Peter Quinnell
Fashion: Way Perry
Words: Ben Cobb

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Jean Paul Gaultier appeared first on Wonderland.

It’s only now, after forty years of neglect – and a desperate email from his wife Jackie that miraculously found its target – that the British Film Institute has finally acknowledged his position as one of the country’s seminal filmmakers with a season of his work on the South Bank and the release of Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen on DVD. Better late than never, you might say. But the BFI’s art-gallery arm needs a hard slap. In a feat of spectacular short-sightedness, not one of his dazzling paintings, sketches, photo-novellas, posters or installations – many of which, as he puts it, “sprout out from” his extraordinary animations – will be on show. So, even as his cinematic endeavours are celebrated and saved for posterity, Keen’s art will be completely ignored. Again.

A Jeff Keen film is singularly difficult to describe. But it’s no exaggeration to say that he has melted, burned, blasted, torn, cut, scribbled and spray-painted his way to a new understanding of cinema’s potential. Almost forty movies since 1960, all made on a pittance by a man on a mission to rip up the medium and start again. The titles give you a sense of the gleeful spirit with which they were created: Marvo Movie, Meatdaze, Joy Thru Film, Mad Love, Omozap, Artwar. Together, they function as a series of barely controlled animated explosions, the celluloid embodiment of Picasso’s maxim that ‘every act of creation is first an act of destruction’. They’re what the projected contents of Topol’s mind – as he has his brain washed in Flash Gordon – ought to have looked like. Legendary New York filmmaker Jack Smith came closest to capturing the assault of wild colours, graffiti, plastic toys, home nudity, comic-book graphics, melodrama, carnival, and hardboiled men’s mags, when he wrote of Keen’s Autumn Feast that “it sends us spinning into the street, undone and toothless”.

Today though, Keen is drained of fervour. His memory is not what it was; his appetite for some sort of recognition as an artist, even as the BFI pumps thousands of pounds into his cause, is gone. It’s all too little, too late. He’s 85. He’s tired. And he has cancer. “They’ve left it too long,” he says, without bitterness, when I ask how he feels about all the attention. “If they’d done it even a couple of years ago, I could’ve been much more… flexible.” But Jackie – whose once striking beauty is captured in many of her husband’s films – still burns with the kind of rage that inflamed Dylan Thomas. The fuel is not the fact that Keen is growing weak. But the fact that it is happening here: in penury and in obscurity.

Jackie and Jeff have been married for 53 years, but before his illness, were in fact living apart. Keen’s own tiny rented flat is five minutes’ walk away. It’s a journey he has been strong enough to make only once in recent months. Today he’s too ill to come with me. Jackie gives me the key. It’s like walking into someone’s mind. Every available scrap of space is filled with evidence of his deep love of pop culture. Plastic guns form a collage on the wall; Sindy dolls are crammed into accidentally compromising positions with Action Men; melted plastic sculptures litter the surfaces. The effect is overwhelming; and somehow desperately sad. Fifty years of paintings and drawings – page after page of green-bound books with felt-tip squiggles, sketches or exquisitely rendered pen-and-wash creations – are stacked against the walls, piled in drawers, crammed in shoeboxes, wardrobes, or on the floor… “I’ll have to get someone in to get rid of it all,” says Keen, back at Jackie’s place. “I’m going to go round and just stand in there and decide what to do. The last time I was there I had ideas, you see. Now I have none at all.”

Incredibly – ridiculously, when you see the skill and wit obvious in even his crudest doodle – Keen has never sold a piece of his art. Last summer, an unscrupulous acquaintance from Jackie’s college days offered the Keens ten thousand pounds “for everything”. Mercifully, they felt uncomfortable with the offer and, although desperate for the cash, turned her down. But the strain is beginning to show. The council are threatening to stop paying the rent on Jeff’s flat because he is being cared for round the corner. “It’s like the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads,” says Jackie, turning to her husband. Her voice cracks: “I just… I wish for the impossible, that someone could help us find somewhere warm with a bit of space where you could be comfortable and you could have your work with you and it would be safe. Instead you’re imprisoned here with me, sitting in that chair all day.” His reply is gentle: “Yeah. I’m okay. Don’t worry about me, love.”

WONDERLAND: Why are people finally taking notice of your films?

JACKIE KEEN: A year ago I wrote to the BFI saying that it was disgusting that my husband had been sidelined. I explained that I had seen him devoted to making movies for decades working on a shoestring, doing the whole thing by himself, and never stopping –

JEFF: Well, I’ve stopped now. [Laughs]

WONDERLAND: Why have you been ignored for so long?

JACKIE: Partly it’s his fault, because he’s not interested in chatting people up. He’s too shy. In fact, I said in the email to the BFI that if Jeff knew I was writing at all, he’d be cross with me.

JEFF: Oh well. It’s old stuff, that is, Jackie. I’ve given up film now.

JACKIE: Yes. But it hasn’t given you up.

JEFF: Well, it has in a way, I think.

WONDERLAND: How do you mean?

JEFF: I’ve kicked the film habit.

JACKIE: But you haven’t kicked the drawing habit.

JEFF: No. I can’t kick that. I fall back on that. I’m still drawing all the time.
[Jackie goes into the next room and comes back with her arms full of boxes, plastic wallets and folders. She hands over the sketchbooks]

WONDERLAND: These are incredible.

JEFF: These are just from the top of the pile… It’s all part of it. It’s all part of the story.

JACKIE: He was never //not// drawing, were you Jeff?

JEFF: No, love. [Little laugh] I used to sit in my flat; I have a chair that’s convenient, and I used to sit there until it got too dark, every night. So I’ve got quite a lot of books lying about.

WONDERLAND: These are the contents of your mind, Jeff!

JEFF: Pouring out. But they don’t want to see them, that’s the damn trouble. The BFI obviously are just thinking in terms of film and I understand that but… I have been bored by it. To be honest, I am exhausted by it. And I don’t want to talk about it.

JACKIE: Now, don’t say that.

JEFF: Anyway, a lot of my stuff was outdoors. It’s gone.

WONDERLAND: Did you used to go around Brighton graffiti-ing?

JEFF: I started doing graffiti in the 60s. I remember the first time, it was the other end of town, the road running underneath the railway bridge where the London trains go over.

JACKIE: I was keeping watch to see nobody came to arrest him. And you were spray-painting ‘Deep War Hurts Says Doctor Gaz’

WONDERLAND: Why did you first move here?

JEFF: I came on a chance a few years after the war. It was a very different place then, almost like life on another planet. I got a summer job working in parks and gardens and stayed on for 12 years. That job came to an end in ’63: we had a very bad winter, and I remember going along the seafront scraping up sludge and snow, throwing it into the road for cars to spin it back at me again as I walked along the road, and that was the end for me.

WONDERLAND: And how did you get into film?

JEFF: I wasn’t thinking about film at all when I was younger. I was an artist, really, from the start. It was only much later that filmmaking was thrust upon me, when Jackie was at the art college.

JACKIE: There was no film society, so Jeff did everything, behind the scenes. It was ostensibly me, but it was all Jeff: he was the backroom boy.

JEFF: I found I liked getting behind a camera. I was the only person with spare time, so I finished up making the films to show.

WONDERLAND: Did you teach yourself?

JEFF: Yeah. Nothing in it really. [Laughs] You can learn to use a camera in a few days, and the rest follows.

WONDERLAND: Do you think in pictures?

JEFF: I suppose I do.

JACKIE: That was one of your slogans, ‘Kill The Word’ –

JEFF: ‘Don’t Let It Kill You!’

WONDERLAND: How did you meet?

JEFF: In a coffee bar called Tinkie’s.

JACKIE: Jeff saw me in the street first.

JEFF: Oh yes, actually, when I first saw her, it was rather terrific. She was walking down from the Clocktower, all in green: green hat, green coat, green shoes. And I thought, ‘God, there’s someone with style.’ [Laughs] She was being chased by a loping man.

JACKIE: Oh Jeff you make it sound –

JEFF: No, it’s true. [Laughs]

WONDERLAND: Have you always felt like an outsider?

JEFF: Living here in Brighton I’d always been outside the mainstream. From the very outset I never really fitted in, even as a filmmaker. Not that it mattered much, you know, I didn’t mind. I just carried on filming.

WONDERLAND: Did you want to be accepted?

JEFF:No. Not really. I never really tried for it.

WONDERLAND: Let’s talk a bit about your childhood. Where were you born?

JEFF: Trowbridge, Wilts. I remember the road. I don’t remember the house. It was a bad birth. My mother was quite old, forty-something. And I was the first one. And it was November and from then on it has been a difficult road!

WONDERLAND: What did your parents do?

JEFF: My mother took on local nursing. And my father didn’t do anything really. He was out of the war, the First World War, where he’d been in a minesweeper off the coast of Ireland, rescuing bodies from the Lusitania, when it sank in 1915, all that sort of thing. Over a thousand people died, a hundred children. And he didn’t want anything more to do with that.

JACKIE: Jeff’s father was amazing. [Jackie goes to the shelf and brings down a photo album] He had the most fantastic sense of humour, and he used to love dressing up.

JEFF: Actually these photographs say far more than words. They need sticking back in again, Jackie.

JACKIE: [Takes one out, a headshot of Jeff in soldier’s uniform] I love this one of him as a soldier. His face radiates warmth, intelligence and his poetic nature.

WONDERLAND: Did you do a lot of destroying things when you were a kid?

JEFF: No I don’t think I did. I was very mild-mannered. [Laughs] I didn’t like the destruction of birds’ eggs, all that. The things I destroy in my films don’t answer back! I remember my cousin, who lived next door, he had this habit of shooting little birds, he got a Diana air pistol for Christmas. He had these starlings down from the nest, on a little table and he put them out on there and shot them and it was a bit of a shock. That night I felt this irritation in the throat, and that was the Scarlet Fever starting.

WONDERLAND: What did you want to be when you grew up?

JEFF: I think I always wanted to draw. I used to draw birds, natural history. My first job was at the local store in Trowbridge just before WW2. Sainsburys, actually, and I remember drawing aeroplanes there. Bombers and things like that. Everyone was talking about war. It was in the air.

WONDERLAND: Comics are obviously crucial to your art. Did you read them when you were a boy?

JEFF: I discovered comics when they started to become popular in this country in the late 50s. They were quite sensational: you could buy them in corner shops, you’d get a collection of comics down beside the door as you went in, mostly national comics, not Marvel then. But I don’t draw like comics. I love them, but I don’t set out to imitate them, you know?

WONDERLAND: Do you remember your first trip to the cinema?

JEFF: My mother took me. It was Chaplin’s film about the circus, I was less than five and I remember screaming out: I was upset when the horse goes on the loose, and everything started to fall about. I was frightened… It’s difficult to imagine really how important the cinema was to us. During the war, of course, it became even more important. People would just flock to them, it was the only entertainment… and the smoke from all the cigarettes used to rise.

WONDERLAND: What did you do in WW2?

JEFF: Nothing much! I was at a secret location about ten miles inland from Great Yarmouth, fitting reject flying fortress engines into Sherman tanks for D-Day.

WONDERLAND: You said earlier that you’ve given up film –

JEFF: I haven’t been making films for some time. And I feel now I’m too weak. [Laughs] You’ve got to be strong, I think, to make films. Unless you’ve got other people to help you. I work in that precarious place of being without money most of the time… It’s strange, you know. I was always happier making films than trying to explain them. Now it’s come to an end, I should be stopping and thinking, but I’m not really. I’m trying to forget.

Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Jeff Keen appeared first on Wonderland.

Let’s get one thing straight: Gregor Schneider is not a modern-day Grim Reaper. Well, two things straight: he is not a modern-day Grim Reaper, and neither is he a headline-grubbing shock tactician. In fact, for someone whose art relentlessly explores fear and destruction – and, yes, mortality – Schneider is actually rather good company. He’s not the sort of person you would traditionally describe as a barrel of laughs – the intense stare and black polo-neck don’t help – but he is warm, polite and friendly to a fault. Last Spring, however, the unassuming German artist caused a media feeding frenzy when the red-tops jumped on his plans to “liberate death from its taboo, to make it a positive experience, like the birth of a child” by displaying a real person dying in an art gallery, a project he dubs The Dying Room. Schneider chose to answer his critics – who accused him, among less polite things, of failing to understand the idea of art as metaphor and missing the entire point made by Duchamp and his urinal – with a 1300-word column in The Guardian.

The 39-year-old has in fact wanted to show a person passing away since 1996. A Düsseldorf-based private doctor has now agreed to help find volunteers willing to die in public in the name of art while the Haus Lange Museum (a modernist villa designed by Mies Van der Rohe) is Schneider’s venue of choice. “My aim is to show the beauty of death,” he insists. “I’m advocating enlightenment on the subject and a turn away from apocalyptic visions… In Germany, the reality of dying in clinics, in intensive care units and operating theatres is horrible. Fifty percent of humans die there in ‘public’ surrounded by strangers. Dealing with death my way can help dispel the fear. I reckon that an artist can build humane rooms for death where people can die in a dignified, protected way.”

It’s fair to say that some of Schneider’s other rooms have been less benign in intent. He has been building rooms-as-art since he was sixteen years old. After his father’s death, Schneider began to turn the family home in Rheydt, Mönchengladbach, into Haus u r, his first installation. It’s a project that has dominated his creative life ever since. Over the decades – by obsessively layering walls on walls, removing mod-cons, inserting dead-end corridors and sealing windows – he has painstakingly converted this nondescript chunk of suburbia into an unnerving intervention. Haus u r’s rooms are devoid of human presence, their vacuity underlined by odd features like the black glitterball twirling in a passageway and a cabinet of stuffed animals and skulls. Schneider lived there permanently until 2004, interspersing its transformation with stints at art colleges in Hamburg, Münster and Düsseldorf. And, in the 90s, he began to identically replicate parts of the house in museums and galleries.

It’s not a huge leap to imagine some sort of well of darkness deep inside of him. Schneider, though, would claim otherwise: “Primarily, I am a sculptor, not ‘the madman carrying materials into the house’. I am fascinated by the unknown. The more I deal with it, the more unknown it becomes. That’s the challenge for me, to keep running on the spot.” In fairness, anything approaching evil appears to alarm him: he was shattered by the recent revelation that the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was born in a house just twenty metres from his own. Still, there is no denying that few artists mess with your head as succinctly and profoundly. The Chapman brothers can flaunt their phallus-nosed mannequins and visions of hell all they like; but it is not unusual for a visitor to one of Schneider’s installations to flee, nauseous and panicked, from one of his disorientating sealed chambers, places he describes as “a second skin”.

His forte is banal architectural spaces that develop into a nightmare in which familiar things are not what they seem. Places that you can easily leave, but which still make you feel trapped. The use or withdrawal of sensory stimulants induces a range of new sensations and emotions. For Sußer Duft (Sweet Smell), a show of his works in Paris last year, individuals were instructed to wander by themselves through a series of dark fetid-smelling spaces, entering bunker-like holes and fridge-cold concrete warrens. It was difficult, in the final pitch-black space, not to contemplate horrid thoughts of profound loneliness and loss.

He rarely moves away from ‘the room’ as inspiration, but Schneider’s other sculptures are scarcely less unsettling: a performance piece in Warsaw in 1997, when the artist lay motionless in a corner of the gallery enveloped in a black bin liner, was a stroke of twisted genius (this later became the inspiration for the 2004 Man with Cock sculpture, a lifeless body with a bulging erection wrapped in a rubbish bag). And his highly theatrical design for a new black-hole style entrance to his local museum in Mönchengladbach, is equally outlandish. Visitors must feel their way along the pitch-dark walls of the tunnel and enter a copy of one of Haus u r’s rooms via a trapdoor.

Undeterred by the media’s response to The Dying Room, Schneider is set to develop his grisly riff on annihilation and displacement with his next major work, Kinderzimmer (Children’s Room), at the Whitworth in Manchester. Schneider plans to reconstruct a children’s nursery from the region of Garzweiler, near his hometown, which was razed by an energy company to carry out open-cast brown coal mining. “For the Garzweiler project, eighteen villages in total will have been torn down,” he explains, showing me images of the gargantuan, apocalyptic cavities in the North-West German landscape where houses and schools once stood. “Five villages have been destroyed, seven villages are currently being relocated and six villages will follow in the next years. The surface mining will be finished in 2045.”

The idea of Kinderzimmer, says Schneider, is “to reconstruct the idea of a children’s room” on the basis of photographs made before these villages were torn down. “This room will be built up in the museum,” he methodically elaborates. “It has to be coloured totally black, the walls, the ceiling and also the floor. You have to imagine the following: you walk into this totally black exhibition room and in the middle is the children’s room. You can only see the entrance or window.” The piece is a fitting culmination to the show, called Subversive Spaces which, say the exhibition organisers, promises a “succession of visceral encounters with objects and spaces” by Schneider and other artists with a taste for the macabre, including Tony Oursler and Sarah Lucas.

Meanwhile, though, Schneider continues to transform his boyhood residence. A key element of this work-in-progress is the creation of facsimiles of rooms-within-rooms in the house. Cubbyholes and corners are replicated. He often removes the rooms, brick by brick, and rebuilds them elsewhere. Back in 2001, he won the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for reconstructing a maze of dark and unsettling rooms from Haus u r in the German pavilion, which he called Totes Haus u r (Dead House u r). “We had to move these rooms under bridges and over canals,” he recalls, with a beatific smile.

But the more logistically complex and controversial a venture, the more the artist seems to thrive. In 2005, the organisers of the Venice Biennale caused a furore when they panicked at the last minute and refused to erect Schneider’s extraordinary Cube project in St Mark’s Square. The 50-foot square aluminum scaffold draped in pitch-black muslin was inspired by the Ka’ba in Mecca, the holiest part of the holiest site in Islam. A statement by Venice authorities announced that: “It could have harmed the religious feelings of the Islamic community.” Schneider wanted to publish his documentation of the controversy – including emails between government officials and Biennale organizers – but he was forbidden to do so. In protest, his entry consisted of six all-black pages. An incensed Schneider finally succeeded in mounting the Cube at Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2007. “Fear and ignorance caused the sculpture to be banned,” he asserts. “But Cube Venice 2005 was planned without cynicism and with a clear conscience. I could have looked every Muslim openly and honestly in the eye.”

Cube may be considered by many to be Schneider’s landmark project, but the essence of his sinister appeal is probably best understood by anyone ‘lucky’ enough to have seen his sell-out UK debut in 2004, the masterfully manipulative Die Familie Schneider (Schneider Family). Visitors were given twenty minutes only to explore (alone, of course) two adjacent London townhouses. The second interior turned out to be an exact replica of the first: same room layout; same ghoulish settings; same locked doors; and even the same freakish people, ‘played’ by real-life twins. There can be few experiences more disconcerting than standing a few feet from identical strangers wanking alongside you in consecutive identical bathrooms… The moral of the story? Don’t head for Manchester if you’re afraid of the dark.

Words: Gareth Harris

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Gregory Schneider appeared first on Wonderland.

Keith Flint is shivering. It’s a cold afternoon in West London and his Prodigy bandmates Liam Howlett and Keith “Maxim” Palmer are wearing substantial overcoats – Palmer’s even has a fur lining. Flint, foolishly, has opted for a neon pink blouson that barely reaches the waistband of his jeans. “It’s the price of fashion,” he grimaces, as we retreat to the relative warmth of a gastropub. With his facial piercings, abstractly cropped hair and tattoos – the index finger of his right hand forms the barrel of a futuristic weapon – Flint still cuts a striking figure. Even if the vivid red horns of his //Firestarter// days are long gone. It turns out Flint bought the jacket on a whim in Bristol a few years back and has been looking for opportunities to wear it ever since. “It’s by that well-known Irish designer,” he says with a mischievous cackle, “George O’Marney.”

In some ways it’s a surprise that Flint, Howlett and Palmer are here at all – let alone in such good spirits. For much of the 90s The Prodigy were the biggest, loudest, most exhilarating live act on the planet. To the post-acid house generation, they were a raved-up, revved-up Sex Pistols, a sonic middle-finger to rock and pop convention. They charged up the UK charts, notching successive Number One singles with Firestarter and Breathe; and galvanised crowds from Glastonbury to Moscow, where they played a now-legendary set in Red Square in 1997. The same year, rock-rave landmark album //Fat Of The Land// sold over eight million copies and turned them into a global phenomenon.

But the punishing tour schedule that followed; the pressure to produce an equally all-conquering follow-up; and, of course, a penchant for very hard partying eventually took their toll. “Well,” confesses Howlett, the 37 year-old producer and Prodigy mastermind, “it was more of some things than others…” Either which way, by 2000 the band had begun to disintegrate in earnest. Dancer and original fourth member Leeroy Thornhill quit after suffering a knee injury. Howlett scrapped an entire album’s worth of new material. The derisive critical response to 2002 single, Baby’s Got A Temper – its controversy-seeking lyrics included a reference to date-rape drug Rohypnol – helped convince him that the band were headed in the wrong direction, fast. “That was a particular low point,” Howlett admits between mouthfuls of French onion soup. “I probably didn’t speak to the guys for nearly a year. Though we never actually split up.” Flint concurs: “I don’t think any of us thought we had or even were going to,” he insists, dunking hunks of bread in Howlett’s soup. “But we knew it was pretty down.”

What seemed the band’s death-knell came in 2004 when Howlett went off and recorded a new album on his own. //Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned// used a rotating cast of guest vocalists including Juliette Lewis (who unleashed blood-curdling screeches over explosive opener Spitfire) and, virtually unrecognisable on the abrasive Shoot Down, Howlett’s future brother-in-law Liam Gallagher (Howlett is married to All Saints’s Natalie Appleton; Gallagher is married to her sister, Nicole.) But despite a collection of inspired moments, the album seemed half-formed, receiving a tepid response from critics and hard-core fans alike. Where, after all, were Palmer’s prowling rhymes and Flint’s Sid Vicious-on-E snarl? It seemed an ignominious end for the brash lads from the Essex hinterland who had gatecrashed the pop charts in 1992 with cheeky rave anthem Charly. In fact, another incarnation of The Prodigy was just around the corner.

The 2005 tour which followed the band’s greatest hits collection Their Law, a swansong to original label XL, unexpectedly connected them with a new, younger audience. Howlett, Flint and Palmer began to patch up their differences, talking through their issues into the early hours in hotel rooms and tour buses. “There were a few late nights,” says Howlett. “Just setting it straight. And from then onwards it’s all been fine.” That’s about as close as they come to self-analysis. Individually and as a group they’re not much interested in going over the past (“People only need nostalgia when they’re not going anywhere else,” says Palmer). Besides, they freely admit that their memories of their 90s heyday are hazy at best. “When you’re in it,” says Howlett, “you don’t remember any of it.”

They do, though, still cherish the outsider ethos of the early-90s rave scene. After all, it was during that helter-skelter period that The Prodigy came into being. Howlett, a hip hop fanatic turned sometime DJ, would spend hours splicing together breaks in his bedroom studio in Braintree, Essex. At weekends, he’d play at local nightclub The Barn, then a magnet for young ravers thanks to the Ecstasy pills flooding in from nearby Harwich. And he’d always be bumping into Keith Flint, an affable if somewhat over-excited local rave fanatic who pestered him for tapes.

Like Howlett, Flint grew up in Braintree (for a time they even attended the same secondary school) and lived for the buzz of the weekend. A notable failure at school, he found his feet at The Barn, where he and his mate Leeroy would practise their dance moves and dream of new careers performing on the emergent rave circuit – Leeroy actually had a job as an electrician, but Keith was merely scraping by on what he made dealing pills and grass at parties. Technically, Leeroy was the better dancer, more sinuous and funky. But Flint had a manic energy no one else could match. When Howlett finally gave him a tape containing a selection of his tracks, written with a view to doing some live PAs, Flint suggested he take him and his mate on as dancers. Howlett agreed, boosting the line-up with an aspiring MC from Peterborough who called himself Maxim Reality.

Where Flint was manic, Palmer exuded quiet authority. He had stage presence, too, and knew how to work a crowd. And while none had ambitions far beyond the scene which had united them, once Charly hit in 92 there was no looking back. A string of equally brilliant rave cut-ups (including the Max Romeo-sampling Out Of Space) followed, their music and attitude a triumphant celebration of the here-and-now. Even so, two decades on, don’t they wince just a little at the idea of being the “elder statesmen” of rave? “Not at all,” says Howlett. “We’re surrounded by people that are older than us and in bands so it never bothers me. It would if we were bald and looked old and felt old.”

Today, Flint has lost none of his eccentric charm. He remains the band’s ambassador, joking, chatting and shaking hands with anyone who steps within arms’ reach. (Palmer, by contrast, lurks on the fringes; even when the tape-recorder gets switched on, he talks almost entirely in one-liners – though nearly all get a nod of assent from Howlett.) And while Flint has quite clearly put a lot of effort into making sure he looks every inch the popstar, he’s perversely keen to display his man-of-the-people credentials. “I want to show you something,” he says when the conversation touches on the subject of fame. Opening his wallet and removing an Oyster card he brandishes it at the Underground line which passes outside the window. “I know where that tube line goes because I sit on it. That’s all part of being in touch. We live it large because we live it.”

Musically, The Prodigy has always been Howlett’s baby. “We represent Liam’s music,” admits Flint, chewing a mouthful of artfully prepared chicken (Palmer has opted, sensibly, for a hearty-looking pie). “Whatever it is, however it comes, we’re there.” But Howlett himself has always insisted that however it might look to outsiders, they are a band. Indeed, Howlett now refers to his two bandmates as being “like brothers”. He also recognises that post-Firestarter, it was Flint and Palmer who took the limelight. Flint remains a talismanic figure, the one who takes the crowd’s energy and enacts their fantasises of anarchic release – not just the public face of the band but a kind of cyberpunk Pied Piper to the post-Ecstasy generation.

Yet following the success of Fat Of The Land it seemed both Flint and Palmer were about to abandon The Prodigy and launch their own solo careers: Palmer as a rapper, Flint as frontman to thrash punk outfit Flint. Both now state such ambitions have been forgotten – not a huge surprise given that Flint’s debut album was scrapped and Palmer’s is now a footnote in UK hip hop history. So there was surely a sense of relief when, following the success of the Their Law compilation and subsequent tour, Howlett felt they should seize the moment and start work on a new album. The only trouble was, Howlett was having difficulty getting down to work. Having built a studio at his house in the Essex countryside, at a cost of some £70,000, he found he couldn’t bring himself to use it. “It felt too much like, ‘You have to write great music in this room,’” he says. In the end he removed all the equipment and sold it. “I’d never have a studio in my house again. It’s a bad vibe. I like to drive to work.”

To break his writer’s block, he ended up hiring a large studio near his London base in Ladbroke Grove. Having parted company with former label XL, at the outset Howlett funded the sessions himself, keeping the studio open 24 hours so that he or Flint or Palmer could stop by any time the mood took them. Perhaps inevitably, it ended up becoming a “party space”. They even installed their own sound system. “It was ridiculous,” grins Howlett. “When we moved in the people who run the place were like, ‘What have we done renting the studio to these nutters?’”

Palmer chuckles, shaking his braids in disbelief: “The only thing missing was a couple of mirrorballs.” After four or five months of “messing around” they’d only sketched out a few tracks, but crucially the “buzz” was back. At this point, Howlett decided to call a halt and move into a smaller studio upstairs, leaving the partying behind. “I used to put my empty champagne bottles behind the settee in the studio,” he says. “When we finally moved out there were 60 empty bottles of Veuve Cliquot back there. Everyone in the building laughed about it.”

Yet when the serious work started in the upstairs studio, the old adrenalin quickly started to flow. New album Invaders Must Die – their first as a trio since Fat Of The Land – is a head-on collision of rave energy and rock’n’roll bravado. Delivered with fearsome intensity, any suspicion that they might have mellowed in the past decade evaporates instantly on hearing the vamping synth riffs of Warrior’s Dance or Omen’s eruption of distorted bass. It’s also instantly clear that The Prodigy still sound like The Prodigy. “Well, it fucks me off when people talk about Oasis saying why don’t they do something different,” says Howlett, actually in reference to his own, fundamentally unchanged, production style. “But why should they? They’re great at what they do, people love it. As long as the songs are good, they don’t need to change.”

You’re not just saying that because Liam Gallagher’s family? “No, I never talk to Liam about music at all.” Because you’d disagree? “No, not at all. It’s just boring, isn’t it? It’s like work. So we just talk about other shit, like babies.” With his bleached crop and shy grin, even at 37 Liam Howlett still has a boyish air about him. Articulate and opinionated, he can also turn defensive in an instant, and is always looking to assert his independence. Whichever way everyone else is headed, Howlett wants to be going in the opposite direction. His bizarre grey-checked ankle boots were originally a bright tartan, but he ended up spraying them black because they looked “too Burberry”.

Like Howlett, The Prodigy have remained impervious to changing trends. Even at the height of 90s rave mania they were never considered cool – to the point of being accused by dance magazine MixMag of being the band who “killed” rave. And their infamous 1997 hit Smack My Bitch Up deliberately offended the sensibilities of the liberal establishment. (Flint claims that the front rows at their shows are packed with “badass girls” who scream out the song’s refrain.) Yet their abrasive, kill-your-idols attitude has recently proved infectious. There are traces of The Prodigy’s aural aggro in both Justice and Crystal Castles, as well as new-rave acts like The Klaxons and Does It Offend You, Yeah? (the latter’s James Rushent has become a friend of Howlett’s, even lending production assistance on Invaders Must Die).

Howlett, true to form, steadfastly refuses to be impressed by the competition. “I’m not into any bands,” he says. “At the point when our record comes out, I’m not a friendly guy. They’re the enemies out there. We want to roll over everybody. But I think everyone should be like that. You’ve got to be like, ‘Here we come, get out of the way.’”

In the late-90s, The Prodigy earned a reputation for playing hard and partying harder. Howlett admits that those days are not entirely behind him, but reveals he has recently taken up running in an effort to offset the excesses. Flint, on the other hand, has decided enough is enough. Towards the end of our conversation he describes his decision to clean-up his act (bar “a bit of caffeine”), and while his eyes still show glimmers of the old fire, his voice sounds almost apologetic. When Howlett orders a glass of red wine, he eyes it carefully, before commenting with mock-surprise, “What’s that, Ribena?”

“I’m actually really ashamed to say I’ve given up drugs,” says Flint. “But I was greedy and I pushed it as far as I possibly could – to the edge of insanity and lost reality. But I couldn’t fuck up this album. There’s always another line, another pub open, another 24-hour off licence. But I wasn’t going to fuck it up this time, and I was heading that way.”

Warming to his theme, he expresses a horror of ending up a “a fat has-been” and reveals that he’s now more likely to spend his evenings in the gym than propping up a bar, attempting to ready himself for the fevered release required by a Prodigy performance. “People don’t come to see me for my beautiful tones. We can’t just dress me up with a few dancers and a nice outfit and say there’s Keith Flint the lovely singer from Essex. They’re there to see a fucking lunatic shouting his lungs out.”

Howlett grins at him. “You’d still do it even if you weren’t in shape,” he says. “But you’d be a fat lunatic.”

Photographer: Jon Bergman
Words: Rupert Howe

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post The Prodigy appeared first on Wonderland.

When Francisco Costa left his family home in rural Brazil in 1981 for the bright lights of New York City, he was a wet-behind-the-ears 20 year old who didn’t speak a word of English. But he had a dream: he was determined to work in the fashion industry. Fashion was in his blood; his mother, Maria-Francisca – whose death prompted Costa’s move to the States – owned a children’s wear factory where he worked after school. And even as an industrious teenager, her clothes-mad son organised fashion shows for local charities.

Once on American soil, this unrelenting work ethic stood the young Costa in good stead – by day he took language classes; and by night he trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Twenty years of being in the right place at the right time later, he bagged the top job at Calvin Klein. Taking over from Klein could have been like accepting a poisoned chalice. But the Brazilian has more than proved himself. He has maintained the brand’s minimal aesthetic whilst injecting cutting-edge design and luxury fabrics. He has transformed a company best known for its jeans and underwear advertising into a catwalk fixture. And, perhaps most impressively, he has emerged from Klein’s shadow as a designer in his own right.

Costa himself isn’t having any of it. “My legacy here is miniscule compared to what Calvin has done,” claims the self-deprecating 47-year-old. “It’s just like an update deal.”

What was your first fashion moment?
Very scary. It was the early 70s and I was invited to spend a week with my uncle and aunt because there was a state fair on with horses and cows. Anyway, I insisted on getting a new wardrobe. So I went to the seamstress in my tiny hometown and had a burgundy wool gabardine safari suit made, with bell-bottoms and a belt. My cousins were looking at me like, ‘Who is this freak?’ It was so embarrassing. I should have learnt then!

How did you get to where you are today?
Work, work, work. In New York I enrolled on a language course at Hunter College – I couldn’t understand a word the teacher was saying. Then I entered a contest at the Fashion Institute of Technology and won a scholarship. My first break was a job with the head designer for Bill Blass. It was owned by a major company then, called the He-Ro Group, who promoted me to assistant designer at Oscar de la Renta. When they folded, Oscar invited me to work with him at Balmain. Then I got a call from Gucci to meet with Tom Ford one morning. I didn’t have enough time to get a portfolio together but Tom said, ‘I’d love you to come in with me. Get a lawyer!’ A year before leaving Gucci, Calvin called me up.

Why do you think you got the Calvin Klein job?
I know that Calvin was bored at the time. He wanted something different. I think he wanted something fun, and my background was very diverse.

How did you grow into the Calvin Klein brand?
By making mistakes! I could never recreate what Calvin has done and it would be mediocre of me to try. I just go on. The collection I just showed was tailored. Last season was all about dresses. I’ve evolved. That’s how we do it.

How did you feel about taking over from such a legend?
I never felt it. I worked with him for a year and a half, then the company got sold and immediately most of the studio left. I had so much work ahead of me that it was all about getting the next collection out. There wasn’t time to think.

How would you explain the label’s forty years at the top?
The label will never die because it is amazing. PVH (Phillips-Van Heusen) that owns Calvin Klein is like 130 years old… what I have to do is bring it forward. Respect the past, but move things on. In a way, I feel like we’re just starting out.

How will fashion change in the next forty years?
I think it will go through a tough period. I feel like I want to say fashion won’t exist. Seasons won’t, that’s for sure…

Is it accurate to describe the Calvin Klein aesthetic as ‘minimal’?
I think it is so much more than that. Calvin is thought of as an American minimalist because he took that position later. But he never would have been if he hadn’t explored other phases first. He was a reductionist; it came down to editing. Today the word ‘minimal’ is less relevant. It’s about creating a product that ages well.

What was the most important lesson he taught you?
He was very curious and very excited about the process. He was very genuine in his approach to everything. He loved fabric. I’ve never experienced that with anybody else. We would go and spend weeks looking at fabric. It was insane. Like a fabric lobotomy.

Who was your favourite Calvin Klein poster boy or girl?
Brooke Shields was a huge influence. I was still living in Brazil when the whole thing started and she would come on television in those commercials and was the craziest, sexiest thing. I didn’t know who Calvin was, really. But Brooke we knew from those incredible commercials – “There’s nothing between me and my Calvins.” Of course I remember Marky Mark’s body all over New York City too.

Is New York still vital to the Calvin Klein brand?
I think so. There’s a coolness and openness about it. It’s full of action, full of movement. Calvin was a very New York person.

What has been your favourite collection for Calvin Klein so far?
My favourite collection is Spring 2009. It’s very challenging. It wasn’t the most commercial but I had fun doing it. It sounds pretentious but for Spring the clothes had an identity. Everything had a pulse; they had a personality and a sense of humour. They had energy. I took pictures of my previous collection, cut them up, then mixed them up like a puzzle. I moved the shapes around to create different things then tried to make that happen in reality.

How important is it to push boundaries with silhouette and construction?
Very. As a concept becomes reality you have to take it all the way. Maybe we don’t do it enough but we try. It’s very much a Calvin trait. Calvin was all about the future. He used to tell me: ‘There’s nothing that is right, and there’s nothing that is wrong. It’s the timing that makes it work. Don’t get intimidated, look forward.’ That was his curiosity coming through. What’s new? What’s next? How do we do it? I love that.

Portrait: Beau Grealy
Photography: Kent Larsson
Words: Ben Perdue

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Francisco Costa appeared first on Wonderland.

Two-fifths of Boston buzz band Passion Pit talk porn, stagefright and why they want to fuck up arch-rivals Vampire Weekend.

Does the world really need another lo-fi experimental pop sensation from America? Probably not. But the cyber-din generated over Massachusetts quintet Passion Pit is fast becoming real-world acclaim. Founder-frontman Michael Angelakos wrote the band’s debut EP Chunk of Change alone in his bedroom as a belated Valentine gift for a (now ex) girlfriend. Classmates at Emerson College clamoured for copies, inspiring Angelakos to flesh out the band with four like-minded souls to play live sets. Since then, they’ve set the US indie circuit on fire with their blissed-out tunes that combine hand-claps, gooey lyrics, synths and Angelakos’ bizarrely appealing falsetto. He now counts Columbia Records’ Rick Rubin, the most influential man in music, as a mate; and Columbia just signed them in the UK. Not bad for a group that are just a year old and have yet to finish their first album.

When I arrive at the allotted time at the Tribeca studio where Passion Pit are recording, there’s no sign of the band. There is however a ridiculously big black leather sofa and a producer, Chris Zane, beavering away at a computer. Zane saves the day by tracking down Angelakos to his bed – he has completely forgotten our meeting – and rousing him from a deep sleep. The 21-year-old prodigy finally arrives wearing an electric blue woolly hat that he has no intention of taking off and looking a bit confused.

Wonderland: You’ve got a much lower voice than I expected.

Michael Angelakos: Well I just woke up. [Laughs] I do have a pretty normal voice. I used to sing mid-range. I started singing high on Chunk of Change because it just sounded right.

W: Why do you need so many band members?

MA: We didn’t want to be an i-Pod band. We’re all musicians and we don’t consider ourselves DJs; so we were pretty adamant about arranging the music so that we could play it live. A lot of electronic-based bands tend to use backing tracks; they can go onstage and it’s almost like karaoke. And we really had no interest in that.

W: Who does what?

MA: I sing lead and play keyboards; Ian Hultquist plays keyboards and sings and plays guitar; Ayad Al Adhamy plays synthesizers, early 80s Moog synthezisers; Jeff Apruzzese plays bass and Nate Donmoyer plays drums and samples.

W: How does it all work out in terms of egos?

MA: I think the live shows help make it more collaborative. We all do the arrangements. That makes it’s easier for when we go into the studio. There’s just less of the banal minutiae that gets over-examined and over-analysed to the point where bands break up.

W: But you did Chunk of Change by yourself?

MA: Completely. It wasn’t mixed by anyone, it was mixed by me, which is why it sounds horrible. I did it in my bedroom. I did it on my laptop.

W: And it was a Valentine’s Day present for your girlfriend?

MA: Valentine’s Day 2007. I didn’t do much for Christmas and I didn’t really do much for her birthday. I was a bad boyfriend. So I was like, ‘Oh man, how funny would it be if I wrote her an album for Valentine’s Day?’ So I did.

W: How long did it take?

MA: Not long. It doesn’t take me very long to write songs. I can write a song in a couple of hours. I just know how it’s supposed to sound so it comes out pretty quickly.

W: How long after Valentine’s did you deliver it?

MA: In true fashion it was late. But she didn’t care, she was totally in love with it. Every time I finished a song, I’d go over to her house and we’d listen to it. She’s the only one that really got it. Because it was so ‘me’, it repeated the same kind of parts that I like, it had these childish vocals. I wrote it to capture that feeling when something feels //too// good.

W. So. Did you name the band after the John Holmes porn movie?

MA: No. I was taking this class in American fashion and in the 50s they used to call the drive-in movie theatres ‘passion pits’, because people would go there and just neck. And I thought it was kind of cute! I mean we’re not like a sexual band.

W: I’m glad to hear it.

MA: Ayad broke the news. He was like, ‘Traci Lords was in that film, she was underage…’ and he just went on and on, because he knows quite a bit about porn.

W. Have you now seen it?

MA: I haven’t seen it. Actually that’s not true, I’ve seen clips of it on Youtube. I’ve seen the non-sexual parts. It’s one of the most famous pornos ever made. When I found that out, I was like, ‘Really? That really //had// to happen to me?’

W: What’s been your best gig so far?

MA: I think we rose to the occasion and became very comfortable with ourselves at The Bowery show last year. It was when we were dealing with all the labels. I kind of started feeling comfortable in my own skin at that show. I started getting very active on stage. I used to just hide behind my keyboards. Because I was scared; I had a lot of stagefright. But that show, there were just so many important people there, we’re just like, ‘Holy shit we really need to make this happen.’ And we just did. And ever since then it’s just been like we know how to be Passion Pit.

W: Were there competing labels there that night?

MA: Yeah, there were a number of labels there. Like any other buzz band. I’m sure there are a hundred different bands right now that have like a hundred labels coming out to their shows.

W: Is it not exciting?

MA: It’s exciting, but it’s also nerve-racking.

W: You seem quite laidback about the buzz thing. Is that because it’s been happening for a while?

MA: Yeah, I’m not interested in the buzz thing. I just wanted to get signed to a label that I really liked, and put out a really awesome record. That’s about it. Now if we drop off the face of the earth, I could not care less. I’m just so sick of all these bands being so competitive and trying to dominate the world. You’re missing the point! Do you really love making music or are you just in it for the perks, to get your ego stroked? Most people just get really vain. They just love the adoration.

W: Speaking of which – your hat is cute. It’s because the top of it is folding over forwards, like a smurf’s. Just don’t grow a big white beard, that’s my advice. Because that might be a bridge too far, high-pitched singing voice and all.

MA: Yeah. I’m friends with Rick Rubin, and I should, next time I see him, put this on him. Because he’s a walking Garden Gnome and so I can just imagine in him in this hat.

W: Have you had any totally shambolic gigs?

MA: So many. When we signed with Frenchkiss Records we started getting better. But holy shit were we bad before that. I’m hard on myself, but I fucking hated the way we sounded. We used to have two different members, that we asked to leave. The worst gig was probably at a Vice Party at Le Royale. Both skins of Nate’s bass drum broke through. Ayad’s synthesizer just got zapped, gone. My keyboards were all out of tune. It was just a comedy of errors.

W: What do you argue about? [Nate comes in]

MA: What do we argue about Nate?

Nate Donmoyer: Covers you want to do.

MA: Wait, you //still// want to cover that Annie Lennox song?

W: Which one?

MA: The More I Love You. You don’t want to do Sweet Dreams?

W: Could you describe your music?

ND: It’s a lot of synthesizers, but we try to make them not sound like synthesizers, by making them sound like synthesizers.

W: That is brilliant. Thanks, Nate.

M: We like to think that we’re a pop band. We’re just looking at pop from different angles. You know that electro-pop style was something we did. But I think the new album is a little more organic, or is that a really lame word to use?

ND: We use real instruments, which is the same thing as organic. We use real drums, real piano instead of Reason samples.

MA: I never used Reason, dude.

ND: Abelton.

MA: Abelton… We think of this as a danceable record.

ND: But it’s like brisk walking.

MA: Brisk-ish. We want it to be a very groove record. But without being like, ‘Oh this is a dance-pop record by another MGMT or Friendly Fires.’

W: Who else have you been compared to?

MA: Hot Chip.

ND: Postal Service.

MA: Which are just the laziest comparisons in the fucking world. I like Hot Chip, but, I mean do you //know// how many bands use synthesizers?

ND: Since the 70s?

MA: Since sometime around then, Nate.

ND: I’d say it’s been thousands.

MA: Maybe more than that, right?

ND: Tens of thousands.

MA: I would say so. So it’s irresponsible for a music journalist to describe us as a crossover between MGMT and the Postal Service. It’s like, ‘Dudes, get the fuck over it.’ It’s literally some of the most amazing highly revered journalists…

W: Is there anyone you don’t mind being compared to? I think someone said Kate Bush.

MA: If you compare me to Kate Bush I’ll give you five dollars. Lets make it ten. I love Kate Bush. Peter Gabriel, any of those like bigger 80s, 90s power pop –

ND: We love Tears For Fears.

MA: Really? I didn’t know you were a Tears For Fears fan.

ND: For like a year when I was 17 all I used to listen to was Tears For Fears, every day on my way to school.

W: Which band is your nemesis?

ND: We’re not going to say that.

MA: Yeah we’re not going to fall into that trap.

W: Do I look like I’m trying to get you into trouble?

ND: We’re kinda looking to get into trouble.

MA: Vampire Weekend. We want to fuck them up.

ND: There’s a good reason for that –

MA: They took a cover from us…

ND: … without asking for permission.

MA: It came down to two labels: XL, the label that had Vampire Weekend, or Columbia: the label that had MGMT. We’re much happier being on the same label as MGMT because even though I’m not a fan of their music, I think they’re artistically more open-minded. Anyway the bottom line is that –

ND: Vampire Weekend suck.

MA: I don’t think anyone will be very happy with this!

ND: They suck. Fuck those motherfuckers.

MA: [Laughing] We don’t love everyone. We’re very selective.

W: Describe your fans.

ND: Nice. Thoughtful.

MA: Scenesters. The official answer is it’s a pretty wide range of people. For example, we’ll play to a frat party and there’ll be a lot of pretty hammered kids there that want to have fun with us, and those are sometimes the best people to play to.

W: How old are they?

MA: Young, but you see a lot of older people too. It goes up to I’d say 35.

W: Wow, that old?

MA: Yeah. Real old.

W: Which song do you wish you’d written?

MA: Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush. What do you wish you’d written, Nate?

ND: Everything In Its Right Place, Radiohead.

MA: Oh, well Kid A. Everyone wishes they did Kid A. That’s like, ‘Let’s write an album that is going to piss off every single musician.’ There’s that point where you listen to that record and go, ‘Fuck! I’m useless.’

ND: I never thought to put myself on the same plane as them.

MA: Yeah, but you’re still playing music.

ND: Yeah, but they’re Radiohead.

MA: They’re still human.

W: How have you found recording in New York City?

MA: To be completely frank, doing a record here is really hard. It’s very stressful: I just want to be in the studio, and everyone’s talking saying, ‘Oh we’ve got to go out’. And I just want to be a hermit.

W: How would you describe the new album?

MA: It’s an antidote to misery. It’s a really pretty record. We’re just trying to make people feel better. This is my way of making myself happy. It’s euphoric stuff.

ND: And not cheap, like drugs.

MA: Not cheap like that, because that shit doesn’t last.

ND: Like Myspace relationships.

Photographer: Andreas Laszlo Konrath
Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Passion Pit appeared first on Wonderland.

Moviestar, poet, painter photographer…Is there nothing Viggo Mortensen can’t do?

Viggo Mortensen’s always getting it out. His camera, that is. He takes his trusty Leica wherever he goes (although he’s just as happy using single-use disposables), snapping away on his travels. It’s a useful way to focus the mind, apparently. “A lot of times I don’t take the picture,” he explains, “but the fact that I have it and I’m considering that I could take one means that I’m looking at things a little more closely than I would if I wasn’t.”

Sipping a toxic-looking brew of green tea, Mortensen is the picture of exhaustion, having touched down in seven countries in the space of a week while promoting his new film, Good, based on the CP Taylor stageplay about a literature professor who falls into the embrace of the Nazi party. “I’m in a sort of dream state. Everything seems a little bit unreal,” he confesses.

Happily, chatting about his artistic endeavours gradually puts the colour back in his cheeks. Taking photographs, it transpires, has been a crucial element of Mortensen’s movie-role preparation for a few years now. On most projects, he undertakes his own personal journey before filming begins, in order to slip into the skin of his character. He travelled through Russia for Eastern Promises and camped out in the New Zealand wilderness on The Lord Of The Rings. The images here are those that the immersive, just-turned-50-year-old shot on his odyssey through Germany and Poland prior to Good’s 2007 shoot in Budapest.

“I wasn’t just looking at old WW2 documentary footage or photographs in museums, I was going into it because I was looking for myself,” says Mortensen, who clocked up 2000km on his tour across Europe, which took in several death camps. “It was interesting because it was nice weather,” he continues. “It gave me a different perspective because we’re used to having this grim picture, but in reality… I’m lying on the grass in Auschwitz or Treblinka and the sun’s out, it’s blue skies, birds in the air – and they saw that too. It’s kind of strange. Perfectly nice people – carpenters, professors, whatever – built these places and ran them and had their lunch breaks there. That’s what’s terrifying: how normal and mundane it is.”

For Mortensen, who’s published volumes of poetry, recorded jazz albums, and exhibited paintings and photography from Iceland to Japan, the creative drive is often concerned with pinning down his own memories. “I think the impulse to express yourself has to do with wanting to record your feelings at that moment. I know my feelings may change and what I painted or wrote or how I performed, I may look on later as quaint or odd. It’s like this story that keeps evolving and surprising me… It’s certainly a way to not get bored.”

His camera has proved the most powerful preservation tool because he can ferry it everywhere. The painting, however, has had to take a back seat. Between 1998’s A Perfect Murder – when he convinced the producers to let him create his artist character’s abstract murals – and the multi-year Lord Of The Rings, Mortensen immersed himself in mixed-media composites. Only now, though, is he ready to get stuck in again. “For the last three years I haven’t been able to finish paintings properly,” says the actor, who’s been turning down film offers so he can use 2009 to “get on some kind of regular sleeping pattern and be in more contact with friends and family” as well as complete “all these half-finished paintings”.

He’ll also be compiling another book for his own publishing label Perceval Press, which will include a raft of the sketches that he never stops doing of “landscapes, strangers, passengers, things I see out the window of trains and buses and cars and planes”. “The world is a bewildering assortment of images,” he smiles wearily, “and certainly at the pace I’ve been going now for the last seven, eight years, it’s all a record of a journey that just seems to be going faster and faster. I’m trying to slow that journey down…”

Words: Matt Mueller

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

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