Word #67

Word #67

September 2008

Cover star – Lemmy

Word shuffle

1). P17 – Rhona Cameron speaks to Graeme Thomson for a Facetime feature. He asks her about appearing on the first series of I’m A Celebrity… “It was just a job. A big, well-paid job, and I hadn’t had one of those for a while. I was in a bit of a hole and it really helped me out. It was only 15 grand in those days. Well, about 25 if you take in the reunion show, plus a first-class airfare.”

2). P119 – the second of three pages devoted to the latest film releases. Jim White enjoys the new, softer side of Shane Meadows displayed in his movie Somers Town but is less keen on Paris Leonte’s Daylight Robbery. He compares it, unfavourably, with The Italian Job and says “There is little wit, less pace and a script that rather than crackling in sharp one-liners at times sags like damp wallpaper. It seems unlikely in 40 year’s time that movie buffs will be reminding each other of lines like ‘Always do more than is required of you’, an instruction I’m sure many a top boy emits in the run-up to a shoot out.”

3). P92 – the second of seven pages devoted to Rob Fitzpatrick’s interview with Lemmy. Rob asks him about growing up in Anglesey. “All the kids with bikes used to gather round the phone box in the village square as it was the only place with a light on. We’d just stand around and talk about birds. There were nice girls there too. I worked at the local riding school – I loved that. I took riders out, mucked out, all the usual stuff. I still love horses; they are the best animals in the world. Much better than dogs or cats that are chained to you. Fucking horses have a sense of humour. Horses are funny as shit. I used to have a couple but as soon as I heard Little Richard that was it.”

4). P18 – the first of a two and a half page Charles Shaar Murray piece on Monkey: Journey to the West, a theatrical collaboration between Damon Albarn, Jamie Hewlett and Chen Shi-Zheng.

5). P13 – a page of Robert Crumb record sleeves to accompany a short article by Larry Jaffee. “Crumb always detested rock music – and once turned down a Rolling Stones cover.”

Interesting

David Holmes chooses his favourite things in the Word Of Mouth pages. “…probably my favourite film ever is Funeral Parade Of Roses. Oh man! It’s a direct influence on A Clockwork Orange – watch it and you can see all the stuff that Kubrick nicked. It’s set in the late-1960’s Tokyo underworld and it’s like everything that people weren’t doing in movies back then is in that movie: drug taking, naked bodies, transsexuals. It’s all in there!”

Jude Rogers reviews one of my favourite albums of that year – Fantasy Black Channel by Late of the Pier. “Bold, bonkers pop has been one of this summer’s tastiest trends and now four 21-year-old scruffs from Leicestershire want to bring their pickles to the picnic.”

Beth Orton recalls the time she visited Leonard Cohen’s house on “….New Year’s Eve a few years ago, because I knew his daughter. I had to stay there by myself for half an hour drinking a glass of wine. It was a truly bizarre moment. And yes, I did go around touching things.”

John Naughton celebrates Molesworth on the 50th anniversary of Geoffrey Willans’ death. “Willans had spent his war on North Atlantic convoys, while Searle (illustrator) had been a Japanese POW and a tough cynicism born of these hardships permeates the pages of Down With Skool! The belief that life is hard and frequently unfair, but you might as well get on with it as best as you can, forms the core of Molesworth’s redoubtable philosophy.”

Longer article

Fanclubs through the ages by different writes.