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A Teatime Dub Encounter with Iggy Pop & Underworld by Irvine Welsh
07.09.2018
07:40 am
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Photo credit: Rob Baker Ashton

A Teatime Dub Encounter with Iggy Pop & Underworld by Irvine Welsh

You know the drill. I’ve idolised Iggy Pop since the seventies, loved Underworld through the burgeoning dance music scene in the late 80’s. In the 90’s I did a novel, Trainspotting, about being fucked up, practically ghostwritten by Iggy and underscored by the beats of dance music. It was made into a movie. The two iconic tracks of the film, “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” and “Lust For Life” were by Iggy and Underworld. So now, in stormy Miami, they are collaborating on a four track EP and I’m pretty damn thrilled to take a smidgen of indirect credit for that.

Like Iggy, I’m now a resident of Miami, and something of a buddy of his, though to me that still feels a bit like a royal family biographer pretending to be bezzy mates with the Queen. To be fair to him, Iggy never makes me feel like the semi-awkward fanboy I am, but there’s a lot of angsty teen baggage on my part to get through, when Raw Power, Kill City, Funhouse and The Stooges were the soundtrack to youth well-spent misspending. Iggy was the liberator, ossifying a petulant punk sensibility, which has never completely left me: both a personal boon and occasional curse.

Karl Hyde is, like Iggy, an old trailer park resident, in his case in the West Midlands, rather than Michigan. I remember Karl from the 90’s, his flat in Soho was a legendary retreat for casualties stuck in the West End. I haven’t met Rick, before and doing so, is a pleasure. So we chatted all weekend, at a restaurant, a plush hotel over cream tea, and Iggy’s swamp man pad on the river. Here’s a massively summarised version of what we said:

IRVINE
Did you ever smoke on an airplane, Jim?

IGGY
I used to enjoy it when I first just got a little tiny bit of money, just enough to have $50 in my pocket. I had a girlfriend in Cleveland, which was like, what a 48 minute flight from Detroit, and it was 25 bucks, and I was like, “I have enough money to fly to Cleveland, and hit on the girl, and go home!”

IRVINE
And you could light up anytime?

IGGY
Well I was smoking cigarettes constantly at this time, but then in the incident described in the song “Bells & Circles,” I was out with the last gasp, truly derelict desperate Stooges, in ‘74. We were on our way to DC and I did snort a gram.

IRVINE
A gram of cocaine?

IGGY
Yeah I put down the tray table, and snorted the whole gram, and this beautiful tall, very dark stewardess was available, but then I started drinking: I had to take the edge off.

IRVINE
What you do after a gram, yeah…

IGGY
When I got to the hotel I realised I’d forgotten her number, which was terrible, and because I didn’t hook up with her, I got together with a notorious groupie who had a friend who had some angel dust, so I took it before the gig.

IRVINE
They didn’t mind about coke on planes in those days?

IGGY
Well, I didn’t mind!

Iggy and I then swap cocaine stories, before agreeing that it’s terrible drug but you need to test it thoroughly and repeatedly to be absolutely sure.

IRVINE
So what about this 4-track EP, how did it come about? How did you guys get together?

RICK
Danny Boyle, asked me to help with T2 Trainspotting, and we got quite excited how to look at music differently from the first film, because then there was no composer involved. We thought, ‘What if we had an original piece of music from Iggy, that would play in this particular scene’, so my manager chased a connection with Iggy. The timing kind of worked out, and you were in London, about to do some shows?

IGGY
I was on tour doing the Post Pop Depression tour with Josh Homme.
         
RICK
You were at The Savoy and graciously said yeah, because you know, we both felt a strong connection to Trainspotting and I turned up thinking I’ve got one chance here to convince this gentleman that we should work together on a piece of music. So I brought basically half my studio and we hired a hotel room and I set it up and sat waiting.

IGGY
Well yeah the thing was traumatic for me really, the whole thing, the way it came at me was I was on this tour with guys 25 years younger than me doing the rock tour schedule and I get ‘Danny Boyle wants to talk to you about doing something for a movie’. I thought ‘well that sounds great but I’m in the middle of a tour. My performance is a big deal to me, but they had this song “Shotgun Mouthwash” (a track by Underworld collaborator High Contrast that ended up as the opening music in T2 Trainspotting). So I listened to it and I thought ‘well that’s fine, what do they need me for?’ And Danny said ‘well we like that but we wondered if we could get some Iggy Pop into “Shotgun Mouthwash,” and I thought ‘no you can’t fucking get Iggy Pop into the fucking “Shotgun Mouthwash” but I didn’t say that, I said ‘well I could just see what I can do.’

Time for some editorialising from me: the venue for collaboration for this fusion of punk and techno was The Savoy. That’s right, none other that the posh hotel on the Strand where Churchill held cabinet meetings. It does have a rock n roll connection though, Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video was shot in the adjoining alley for that ‘street’ feel. But, uh, how come chaps?

IGGY
I was at the Savoy just getting ready to play London and met with Rick, whom I liked as he was very polite and that goes a long way with me. We were able to get to know each other a little. He had a number of tracks ready. And then my mind was racing because when you are confronted with somebody who has a whole damn studio there in the hotel room in front of you and 30 finished pieces of very polished music, you don’t want to be the wimp that goes ‘uh uhhh’...

IRVINE
That view of friendship that you have on that track, “I’ll See Big,” is fairly consistent in everything you’ve done and written throughout the years. If you think about it, “I’m Bored” on New Values, “I’m free to bore my robot friends…” So has that been a kind of theme or an issue: that you’re keeping old friendships, but also sort of you being conscious of being successful and that possible tension?

IGGY
I wrestle with the whole concept, about half the time I feel like a chump. And then the other half of the time it’s like ‘well what else am I gonna do, like just be empty all the time’. You know you go back and forth, because there is an extreme to which some people can operate through dominance, acquisition, manipulation. I was able to talk about these things because this was still in my mind, somehow connected to the hapless heroes of Trainspotting. You know like when the war is over the old buddies break up.

Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.09.2018
07:40 am
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Mark E. Smith: A brief tour of Edinburgh

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Mark E. Smith has occasionally claimed that Edinburgh is his favorite city. He lived there between 1988, when he performed I Am Kurious Oranj, with The Fall and Michael Clark’s Dance Company at the Edinburgh Festival, until around the mid-nineties, when he returned to England. Edinburgh has long captured the imagination of writers and artists - in part because of the city’s mythic history and role as “the Athens of the North” during the Enlightenment. But also because of its darker and more murderous associations.

This symbolic division is reflected in the city’s design of Old Town, with its original fortress and fishbone wynds off a cluttered HIgh Street; and the New Town, to the north, with its Georgian and Victorian splendor. This physical division symbolically underlines the duality at the core of the Scottish psyche and literature.

It was G Gregory Smith who first noted and defined the division in Scottish psyche and literature as Caledonian Antisyzygy - the “idea of dueling polarities within one entity”:

“...[Scottish] literature is the literature of a small country…it runs a shorter course than others…in this shortness and cohesion the most favourable conditions seem to be offered for a making of a general estimate. But on the other hand, we find at closer scanning that the cohesion at least in formal expression and in choice of material is only apparent, that the literature is remarkably varied, and that it becomes, under the stress of foreign influence, almost a zigzag of contradictions. The antithesis need not, however, disconcert us. Perhaps in the very combination of opposites - what either of the two Thomases, of Norwich and Cromarty, might have been willing to call ‘the Caledonian antisyzygy’ - we have a reflection of the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn, in his political and ecclesiastical history, in his polemical restlessness, in his adaptability, which is another way of saying that he has made allowance for new conditions, in his practical judgement, which is the admission that two sides of the matter have been considered. If therefore, Scottish history and life are, as an old northern writer said of something else, ‘varied with a clean contrair spirit,’ we need not be surprised to find that in his literature the Scot presents two aspects which appear contradictory. Oxymoron was ever the bravest figure, and we must not forget that disorderly order is order after all.”

This notion of “a zigzag of contradictions” was further developed by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid who saw it as a key influence on Scottish Literature, for example R L Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. It was also a theme in MacDiramid’s greatest poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, in which he wrote his own definition:

“..I’ll ha’e nae half-way hoose. But aye be whaur extremes meet – it’s the only way I ken…”

Jekyll and Hyde may be set in London but it is one of the best novels about Edinburgh and the Scottish psyche. Here is a fictional representation of such infamous Edinburgh characters as Deacon Brodie, who was a cabinet-maker by day and a burglar by night, or its Resurrection Men (Burke & Hare), and indeed, of Stevenson’s own experiences as a visitor to brothels with his student friends, one of which, a respectable family man, was implicated in the murder of a prostitute. This split continues today Irvine Welsh and his Edinburgh of Trainspotting, Filth and Porno.

Unfortunately, in this quirky and very brief tour of Edinburgh, Mark E. Smith only highlights his rather superficial likes and dislikes. His main dislike is the statue to Field Marshall Douglas Haig, the First Earl Haig, on the Castle Esplanade. It was Haig’s whose mismanagement during the Battle of the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres, that led to the needless slaughter of thousands of soldiers during the First World War.

However, Smith does like the military statue to Blackwatch Regiment, situated at the top of the Mound. Smith’s old man was in the Blackwatch, and he claims he likes to visit it when he feels sentimental. But it’s the Scotch Malt Whisky Society that Smith describes as favorite location in the city.
 

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Bonus track ‘Edinburgh Man’ by The Fall, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Alan Shields
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.11.2012
07:13 pm
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Dean Cavanagh: Exclusive interview with the writer and director of ‘Kubricks’

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Dean Cavanagh is that very rare breed – a maverick whose talents have been successfully proven over several different disciplines.

He is an award-winning artist; a screenwriter and playwright, writing the highly acclaimed Wedding Belles with Irvine Welsh and the forth-coming movie version of the hit on-line series Svengali. He has also been a journalist, with bylines in i-D, NME, Sabotage Times and the Guardian. Dean is also a documentary-maker, a film and TV producer and a musician, with along list of collaborators, including Robert Anton Wilson.

Now the multi-talented Cavanagh has written and directed (with his son Josh), his first movie - the much anticipated Kubricks.

In this exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Dean talks about the ideas and creative processes behind Kubricks. How he collaborated with Alan McGee, and developed the film with his son Josh, discussing his thoughts on cinema and synchronicity, and explaining howKubricks came to be filmed over 5 days, with a talented cast this summer.

Dean Cavanagh: ‘Stanley Kubrick has always fascinated me in that he was clearly trying to convey messages through symbols, codes and puzzles in his films.

‘For me his genius was in the way he presented the ‘regular’ audience with a clear narrative structure and for those who wanted to look deeper he constructed hidden layers of subjectivity. He was clearly a magician working with big budgets in such an idiosyncratic way that it’s hard not to be intrigued by him and his oeuvre.

‘I’ve been following Kubrick researchers like Rob Ager and Jay Weidner for the last few years and I really wanted to dramatize a story based around Kubrick as an inspirational enigma. There is a wealth of material about the esoteric side of Kubrick on the net and Ager and Weidner are great places to start the journey from.’

DM: How did you progress towards making ‘Kubricks’?

Dean Cavanagh: ‘I’ve been writing screenplays and theatre on my own and also with Irvine Welsh since the 1990’s. Up until last year, I never really had any desire to direct a film but Alan McGee encouraged me to have a go. He offered to produce a film if I would write and direct with the emphasis being on us having total control. This was music to my ears after having mainly dealt with people who are always looking for reasons not to make a film.  Alan’s credo was “just do it and let’s see what happens”. There’s a great freedom in working with him.’
 
Read more of Dean Cavanagh’s exclusive interview, plus free ‘Kubricks’ soundtrack download, after the jump…
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Alan McGee: Talks Magick, Music and his new Movie ‘Kubricks’


 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.16.2012
07:57 pm
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3 Trailers for Irvine Welsh’s ‘Ecstasy’

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Award-winning director, Rob Heydon’s film version of Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy opens this fall.

Starring Adam Sinclair, Kristin Kreuk, Billy Boyd and Carlo Rota, it’s based on Welsh’s novella, “The Undefeated”, taken from his book Ecstasy - Three Tales of Chemical Romance.

It’s 15 years since the film version of Trainspotting kicked in the doors and launched the careers of a young and new generation of talent, and while negotiations continue for its follow-up Porno, it’s hoped Ecstasy will be as good, if not better. Here’s hoping.

Here’s the most recent teaser for the Ecstasy, plus 2 others. For more information check here.
 

 
Alternative trailers for Irvine Welsh’s ‘Ecstasy’, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.29.2011
05:07 pm
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