Lynn Barber - Access Interviews

David Baddiel

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

David Baddiel really wants to be liked. Yet his new film risks offending both Muslims and Jews. Meet this defensive, big-hearted, sex-mad neurotic

Max Hastings

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

The former Fleet Street editor and scourge of ‘wimps’ Max Hastings breaks his silence on his greatest struggle — with his family Imagine a noisy, gallumphing schoolboy who dashes round shouting “Golly! Gosh! Come on chaps!” — but imagine him 6ft 5in tall with a voice that can carry across grouse moors, aged 64. Sir Max Hastings claims to have grown up finally, but I wouldn’t be so sure.

Chris Evans

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

As he slips into Terry Wogan's BBC Radio 2 breakfast slot, the DJ tells how his family saved him from sabotaging everything. Chris Evans’s home near Ascot, Berkshire, screams “showbiz” as soon as you enter the electronic gates. The house is not particularly grand but it has an enormous forecourt featuring two Ferraris and a brand-new Rolls-Royce with the numberplate FAB l. There are eight more Ferraris in the garage, along with a wide collection of classic cars. The Rolls-Royce is out today, Evans says later, because his mother is going shopping with her friend Maureen, his driver’s wife, and they like to go to Lidl in the Roller to stock up on bargains. “I have tried to explain,” he laughs, “that you can’t really talk about bargains when you think how much petrol it uses, but she says, ‘That’s not the point!’”

Lady Gaga

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

She’s loud, brash, trashy and sexually ambiguous, but this shameless self-publicist claims to be traditional at heart. Lady Gaga is only 70 minutes late, which I suppose (sigh) is quite good by pop-star standards. This gives me ample time to case the pavements round the May Fair hotel for the packs of paparazzi who are supposed to follow her everywhere she goes — but there are disappointingly none. Her young English PR, Adrian, tells me that she is busy putting on her make-up, to which I respond rather forcefully that she really need not bother because I won’t notice whether she’s wearing 10 layers of slap or none. But according to Adrian, she won’t ever leave her room without full make-up. He takes me up to the penthouse suite where the interview will take place. All very Kelly Hoppen, black-and-gold upholstery, lacquer tables, buddhas, white orchids, bamboo, the usual. “Have a look at the bathroom!” Adrian says excitedly. It has a freestanding granite tub exactly like a sarcophagus. “And the master bedroom!” Circular white bed, ginormous flatscreen, more white orchids. Yes, the decor is impressive, but the waiting is long.

Agyness Deyn

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

Just before Christmas, I went to a daffy treasure hunt hosted by Katie Grand, who founded Pop magazine and is now about to launch Love. It was held at the Royal Academy and there was a great mob of paparazzi outside so I asked who they were waiting for. They said Ag, which wasn't very helpful, but I found out later they were waiting for the model Agyness Deyn, 25, who is supposed to be 'the new Kate Moss'. Of course she is not remotely like Kate Moss either in looks or in character, but she is the latest English model to take the world by storm. I found her wearing a pink satin dress, which Giles Deacon made her for the party, sipping tea with her friends, but when Grand introduced us, Deyn leapt to her feet with the sort of old-fashioned good manners I thought no one learned any more. She was friendly and sweet, so when Grand suggested I interview her, we arranged to meet at the Russian Tea Room in Primrose Hill.She looked extremely pretty at the Katie Grand party, but next morning, in the Russian Tea Room, she looked utterly amazing. She was wearing a man's black jacket and denim shirt, with a red beret perched on her platinum hair, her pale porcelain skin set off by black Alistair Darling eyebrows, her long long long legs encased in red snakeskin jeans ending in patent Doc Martens. Her delicate, almost ethereal beauty reminds me a bit of the young Debbie Harry, but she says her idol as a teenager was the model Stella Tennant - she liked her beetling eyebrows, pierced nose and unconventional attitude.Talking in her flat Rochdale accent, she explains that she always uses Primrose Hill as her base in London because she used to have a flat here and nowadays stays with a friend round the corner. She has lived in New York for the past three years but had come over to London for the Katie Grand party and a Mystery Jets gig and was planning to spend a few days hanging out with friends before going to stay with her parents (her mother and stepfather) in Manchester and catching up with her elder brother, a pilot, and her younger sister, an artist. Then back to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, Albert Hammond Jr of the Strokes, and her two dogs.Given that she is obviously such a sensible down-to-earth Mancunian lass, why does she have such an irritatingly affected name? It sounds all right - pronounced Agnes Dean (Agnes was her grandmother's name) - but then the silly spelling makes it an anagram of Deny Gayness, which is daft (although she has a big lesbian following, she is not a lesbian). Why couldn't she have stayed Laura Hollins? But she changed her name long before she started modelling, and explains as follows: 'I was into numerology at the time, and I was talking to my mum about it and saying: "Mum, I'm thinking of changing my name because I've added up all the numbers and I think I want to change it." And we were actually in a health food shop and walking round the aisles and we get to the counter still talking about it and on the counter was a magazine that said: "Change your name, change your life." And I was, like: "It's a sign!" So then I decided: "Right, I'll change."' I stare at her blankly. Does she really believe all that stuff? 'Well, it's not like your name is set in stone. I'm the kind of person that is not really attached to anything - I would never be attached to a name or a dress or a house or a car - so whatever makes you happy. And at that point in time I was like, wow!' Nobody in the family calls her Laura any more, and her mother and sister have also changed their names. Maybe she just wanted to shed her father's name.Her father works for the Royal Mail; her mother is an ENT nursing specialist at Liverpool Hope Hospital. Despite being practising Roman Catholics, they divorced when Agyness - or Laura in those days - was 12 or 13. Was that upsetting? 'Yeah. Yeah it was. But I was always quite quiet - I was never really a drama queen, so I kind of, like, blocked it out.' Her mother remarried and Deyn talks fondly of her stepfather, who works as a food technologist. But when I ask about her father, her beautiful eyes fill with tears. 'He remarried and stuff, but I don't really see him that much. Every now and then. It is sad. But sometimes it goes so far, you can never get back, you know?'She was born in Littleborough, near Rochdale; she grew up in Rawtenstall, Greater Manchester and went to a Catholic school where her favourite subjects were music and drama and, more surprisingly, maths and business studies. She claims to love maths, and I imagine she has a good financial head on her shoulders. Her mother encouraged all three of the children to take part-time jobs to pay for their extras, and one of her jobs was in the local fish and chip shop - a fact the tabloids will never let her forget. When she was voted Model of the Year at the 2007 British Fashion Awards, the Manchester Evening News produced the immortal headline: 'Chippie girl to conquer the world'.The great influence in her childhood, apart from her mother, was Henry Holland, her gay best friend. They met when they were about 13, and he remembers being struck by 'just this huge big smile, with braces on her teeth, and the fact she was so sweet and friendly'. He, Deyn and another friend called Jessica Fletcher, who now works with Holland on his fashion label House of Holland, spent their teens hanging out together - they all had their heads shaved and they'd sit in the pub and people would stare at them. When Holland moved to London to study fashion journalism, Deyn missed him so much she kept going to London to stay with him. He was living in university halls of residence where he wasn't allowed to have guests overnight but he used to sneak her in to share his single bed. Holland remembers that her style changed when she came to London and discovered charity shops and car-boot sales. 'Up north, it's much more about labels. In London she started to develop her own style.' And in one of her forays to a charity shop in Kentish Town she was spotted by a model scout, who signed her up. 'And then everything just kind of happened,' recalls Deyn. 'It's really funny, because both of us have always been such dreamers, and Henry would say: "When you're a famous model" and I'd say: "When you're a famous fashion editor", and then I was signed up by a model agency and he became fashion editor of Smash Hits, which was one of his dreams. So it was like we were ticking them off the list, and it was kind of: whoa, this is strange!'She was 19, still intending to go to university, when she started modelling. She loved the work. 'It didn't matter what the job was - I loved it, I just loved it.' But she hated all the go-sees and inevitable rejections. 'I used to go around London seeing clients, and you used to have to queue up for an hour with all these other girls to get a job and then you wouldn't get it, or you'd be down to the last two for a job and you wouldn't get it. But you just have to take that on the chin. People used to get really competitive with each other, but you know, no one looks the same, so it just depends on what they're looking for.' But it forced her to grow up quite quickly. 'I think modelling was like the university of life, really. You get to travel but you get thrown into this adult world, which is kind of quite scary.' She remembers one particular trip abroad when no one spoke to her and she felt very isolated. 'It can be really lonely sometimes if they don't talk to you and it was, like, a week. But there were lads on the shoot as well and they were great, so I just hung out with them. I've always got on with lads, more than I have with girls.'As a model based in London she was in demand, but mainly for poorly paid editorial work, and she often had to take bar jobs to make ends meet. It was only when she moved to New York three years ago that her career really took off. This was all thanks to Katie Grand, she says - 'She's great. She's been a real mentor for me.' Deyn had been sent to New York on a photo shoot for a British magazine and Katie Grand saw her sitting in a café and asked what New York agent she was with. Deyn said she didn't have a New York agent, so Katie Grand took a napkin and wrote down the number of the DNA agency and said: 'Ring Louie [Chaban].' So that's what Deyn did, and that's when her career took off.She walked into the agency and the receptionist said, 'Oh sorry, but we don't do walk-ins.' Deyn wailed: 'Oh, but I'm going home tomorrow and I don't think I'll ever be coming back!' So the receptionist went round the back, where Louie was having lunch, and said: 'You should really see this girl', and he groaned but came out and saw Deyn and immediately said he'd like to represent her. But when she told her English agency that she'd signed with a New York agent, they sacked her. So then she moved to New York and went to work for Louie, who totally supported her. In London, she recalls, her agency was always telling her to look more feminine, to wear heels and dresses, but when she asked Louie what to wear for her first casting, he said: 'I don't care what you wear - wear what you're wearing now.' 'And I was wearing Doc Martens and a ripped-up T-shirt and I thought: "Brilliant! I can just be myself!" And going to New York made me think: "OK, this is a career now."'She likes New York so much she'll probably stay there. She says it's much easier working there, and she loves the way of life. And of course her boyfriend Albert Hammond Jr is American. When I ask how long she has been going out with him, she says promptly: 'Since May 31st - that was our first date.' He is only her third boyfriend ever. 'I had one boyfriend from when I was 12 all the way through school and college, and then we split up and I went out with Josh [Hubbard, of the Paddingtons] for four years and, like, now I'm with Albert.' Had she already split up with Josh Hubbard? 'Yes, a few months before we'd officially split up, but it's hard, you know - you don't see each other for six months because we lived in different places and were both working [he lives in Hull]. It was kind of like a mutual decision.' So it wasn't too heartbreaking? 'Oh it was. Because you're with someone for so long and they're your best friend, so it's like losing a friend as well. But I'm just so happy at the moment.' One of the tabloids recently said that she was engaged to Hammond. She says she's not, but obviously would like to be - 'I suppose if you know, you know.'Recently Deyn did a shoot for Katie Grand when she had to spend the whole day jumping off a New York fire escape, naked, for the photographer Ryan McGinley. She did it for 11 hours, landing on a pile of mattresses, and was black and blue the next day. So why did she agree to do it? 'Oh, Ryan. I love his pictures, and I totally trusted him. But it was like the fourth leg of the fire escape and I was jumping off naked, and I was in a robe and I'd climb to the top and then you threw your robe down, so when you jumped down you could just put it back on. But once you've thrown the robe down, either you jump off or you walk down naked. So I would just have to jump off! But it was really funny because it was a residential building, and through the window where I was jumping off, there were two old guys playing cards. And the first time they saw this naked girl outside their window they looked a bit surprised, but then I was jumping off all day and by the end they were like: "Hi Agyness!" People were watching from the windows and there must have been some paparazzi there because it ended up in the Sun newspaper.'Paparazzi are a constant presence in her life but, unlike most celebs, she refuses to grumble about them. 'I don't want to stop being normal,' she says. 'Like yesterday, I was walking from Primrose Hill to Henry's office at Tottenham Court Road, a really nice walk through the park, and there were some guys taking my picture and I stopped and we had a chat and shared a few Wine Gums. I think they're just earning their wage and everyone's got to do their job. Or, you know, at the Katie Grand party there were about 15 of them outside, and I was like: "Guys, do you mind if I have a cigarette first?" And they're: "Sure, if we can have a picture after you're finished." And then one of them went to take a picture and the others were all like: "Hey, Agyness is smoking! You can't take her picture now." So I think if you're, like, give and take, you can get on with them. But in New York you never see them, because they use long lenses, so you never have any contact and they're always at the end of the block. I have more of a rapport with the English ones than I do with the Americans.'But she is sometimes annoyed by made-up stories in the British press, like a recent one that said she was going backpacking round Europe for a year. It was news to her. Or another that said she had lied about her age. It's true, she says, that when she first gave an interview to Pop magazine she said she was 15 or something, just taking the mick, but she was amazed when the Mail translated that as lying about her age. (For the record, she will be 26 on 16 February.) And she worries about reporters harassing her family and friends. 'It got a bit weird because newspapers started knocking on my parents' front door and asking around at my old school. But, you know, what are they going to find out? That I was in the netball team? I don't really read the papers anyway.'In the past she was sometimes photographed stumbling out of parties looking a bit the worse for wear, but she doesn't drink any more. She stopped when she started going out with Hammond because 'he doesn't drink or anything, so I decided I wouldn't either because it's weird if you're on different levels. Sometimes I'll have a glass of champagne, or a really nice glass of wine if I'm having a steak and chips in a good restaurant, so I'm not, like, never say never. But I don't really drink any more.'Anyway, she's not really a party girl. She used to be, when she first came to London, but nowadays she usually only goes to things like the Fashion Awards or the Katie Grand party when it would be rude not to turn up. Quite often she is in bed by 10. She gets up at seven, does yoga, walks the dogs, and sometimes gets up even earlier in New York to attend a 6.45 yoga class. She has no particular beauty routine - 'I tried going for facials, but they made my skin worse so I just stopped' - though she does try to keep out of the sun. She eats healthily and has never suffered from anorexia. She and Hammond like going out for dinner but often spend evenings at home listening to music. She has many acquaintances but few close friends - 'Henry and Jessica will always be there, but sometimes our schedules are so busy that I won't speak to them for a week.'Although she is reluctant to criticise the fashion industry, there are hints that she has seen its dark side. She was comparatively old when she started - 19 - but even so found it 'scary' to be thrown into this adult world and worries about what happens to girls who start at 12 or 13. And there are monsters out there. 'There are people - I've heard them saying: "Oh, you're too fat to be in the show" right in front of everyone. You've got to have a really tough skin. I hate to say it's all bad, because it isn't, but then there are people who are absolute monsters and make you feel like shit and you think: why? It's not as if I block it out - I'm aware of all the negativeness around - but I kind of don't choose to register it. I just think: "That's how they are, those people, and it's not their fault."' Will she name names? 'No!' she laughs. 'And then there are some amazing people who make you feel so inspired, like John Galliano, or Christopher Bailey from Burberry - he's just the nicest northern lad you'll ever meet. And Giles [Deacon] and Katie [Grand] - they're quite real at the bottom of it.' But when I ask whether she meet lots of very self-obsessed people in the fashion world, she agrees fervently: 'Yes, I do. I don't have that many friends.'Are there any models she would refuse to work with? 'No. I'd never do that. I've had people do that to me, though. I don't know why. But if a younger model came along and they were getting, like, really successful, I would never be jealous, because they don't even look like me. I think you should help people that are coming up in the industry, especially with it being quite scary sometimes.' She remembers that Stella Tennant was kind to her at the beginning, when she was working on her first Burberry campaign and very nervous, and Karen Elson has also been 'really nice'. How does she feel about being called the new Kate Moss? She answers diplomatically: 'I think Kate's had an amazing career - I mean, she still has an amazing career - and she's really beautiful. But no one's the same. I'm not the new anything; I'm just Agyness.'But there are hints that she is looking for a career beyond modelling. Until recently she sang in an indie group called Lucky Knitwear, but that has petered out. So now she is attending acting school in New York and has just made a short film called The Right Side of my Exultant Brain for a friend from New York Film Academy, and says: 'It was really good fun and it was great being surrounded by friends for the first thing I did, so you can kind of feel freer to explore it a little bit more.' Does she hope to do more acting? 'Yes. I need to have a lot of things going on; I can't just do one thing. Like, I can't only do modelling because then I'd hate it.'But in a way, she says, modelling is acting. 'It's so weird because it's like I'm pretending to be a model. And when I get on a shoot, and they say, "Be sexy" or "Be ladylike", I have to think: OK, I'm turning into that character. And then after the shoot I'm back to normal.' She once said: 'I'm not sexy' and I wondered whether she meant in photographs or in real life. 'I don't think of myself as sexy. But I think when I'm doing a shoot that I'm being sexy.' And in real life? 'I suppose growing up I didn't think I was, but now more and more I'm feeling comfortable with myself.'What does she expect to be doing in 10 years' time? 'I think I'll still be in New York. I want to have a family, but I want to start doing stuff - I don't know what it is, but I feel that in 10 years' time I want to be doing something that benefits people, and I don't know what it is, but I just have this feeling inside me.' Does she mean, say, like Angelina Jolie being an ambassador for Unicef, that sort of thing? Mmm, she says, doubtfully, obviously not meaning that but too polite to say so. And then she tells me where she is going after our interview - to Great Ormond Street Hospital, to visit some children who wrote to say they'd like to meet her. 'I love doing stuff like that,' she confides. It could be quite upsetting, I warn her. 'Yes,' she says earnestly. 'But if I can help in any way, even just by going in... And if it is upsetting, it just puts things in perspective and makes you appreciate your own life. When bad shit happens, you get over it. But some people don't, you know.' Agyness Deyn is more than just a pretty face.FashionCatwalkBeautyWomenguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Goldie

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

The star drum'n'bass producer and DJ stunned audiences last year by coming second in the BBC talent show for wannabe conductors, Maestro, and has just been commissioned to compose a new work for this year's Proms. What next for this unpredictable talent?Could Goldie be becoming a national treasure? Things are certainly moving that way. A few weeks ago, he was standing at the fish counter in Waitrose, Berkhamsted, when an elderly couple came up and said: "You were magnificent!" Which, as he says, "is not like some young kids in Reeboks coming up and saying, 'God, you were wicked last night in Bristol.' And it just felt really good that I'd actually got through to older people."This was all thanks to last year's Maestro, a BBC2 series in which he and a bunch of other celebs were trained to be conductors. At the beginning, it seemed impossible that Goldie, who couldn't read music and had barely heard of Brahms, could survive against piano veterans like Jane Asher, but he soon knocked that idea on the head.He didn't win – Sue Perkins did – but he was an unforgettable runner-up and there was a glorious moment when Sir Roger Norrington, the chairman of the judges, told him: "You are a conductor! Bravo!" And now he has been asked to compose a new work for the Proms. The making of the piece is the subject of a two-part BBC documentary called Classic Goldie, which will no doubt wow the Waitrose fish counter all over again.This is a whole different Goldie from the one I interviewed seven years ago for the publication of his autobiography, Nine Lives, ghosted by Paul Gorman. At that stage, he was still best known as a drum'n'bass producer and DJ, a former graffiti artist, jeweller (he made his own gold teeth), actor and ex-boyfriend of Björk, Naomi Campbell and Stella Tennant. He'd spent much of the 90s partying and told me that in his heyday he could "hoot for England". But he'd already decided that the drugs don't work and seemed to want to shed his former party animal persona.The first attempt to unveil the new mature Goldie was on Celebrity Big Brother in 2002, but he completely blew it. He behaved obnoxiously and was the first person evicted. He said afterwards it was because it reminded him of growing up in children's homes, his usual excuse when things go badly. But the next year he told the Mirror that he learnt a lot from being on Big Brother: "I've realised what a cunt I can be. Just feeling misunderstood sometimes, I guess, has been my biggest downfall. But I'm not going to be like that any more. I'm not going to be a victim of my childhood any longer."And it seems he has changed. For a start, he seems far more relaxed or perhaps it's just because I'm interviewing him at home instead of in a hotel. His house in Hertfordshire is far less showy than I expected; it's a 40s pebbledash job with a shaggy lawn and a sauna hut at the end of the garden. It was on the market for £500,000 three years ago, but evidently he decided to keep it. It reminds me a bit of JG Ballard's old house in Shepperton, a warren of rooms into which he has seemingly dumped at random all his favourite things – a gold Ducati Monster motorbike, stacks of paintings mainly by and of Goldie, a tottering mountain of trainers, two husky dogs and – eek! – a giant boa constrictor in a tank. "Come and sit on the Knole," Goldie tells me, patting an enormous orange velvet sofa. "Put your feet up. Relax." But how can I relax when there's a giant snake in the corner?He says he was thrilled when he got the letter from Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3 and director of the Proms, commissioning him to write a seven-minute piece on the theme of evolution for the Proms. "It was something I would never have imagined doing. You hear words like 'dumbing down', but I think the BBC has been quite brave in saying it's about time we did some other stuff."At first, he was disappointed not to have been asked to conduct his own work (Charles Hazlewood is conducting the premiere), but now he is happy. He has been working with a young composer called Christopher Mayo and is full of admiration – "He's like a watchmaker who has this hobby of making little carousels that all spin and turn and ballerinas pop out of boxes and woodmakers and cuckoos pop out."Mayo's role is to give him a choice of options – do you want this chord or this one or this? – and then he chooses. "It's the same as working with an engineer in your normal day to day." But it has meant Goldie has had to learn to work on a different computer programme – Sibelius – from the ones he is used to: "I think generally the software in the classical world is far behind the electronic world, but Sibelius is the programme the classical world use, so I've just swapped one set of tools for another."Roger Wright suggested his composition should be on the theme of Darwinian evolution, but in fact he's dumped Darwin and called his work Sine Tempore – "because it relates to time travel, the beginning, the end, relativity". It will have a 150bpm beat, which is slow for rap but fast for an orchestra and will begin with the big bang, using every instrument, including the Royal Albert Hall organ. "Why not? When in Rome, eat lions!"Goldie's strength has has always been his love of collaboration and learning new skills, which is how he keeps reinventing himself. He regrets the fact that "electronic people stopped collaborating about four years ago – we turned into these bedroom people working on our own. But then we realised, hang on, you need to share your idea, which is what classical musicians still do when they play together in orchestras. But I realised, God, there's no money in it. When I think how much money I make DJing every week – I can make 10 to 15 grand a weekend – and these people probably get paid that in a year. They are doing it for the love, they really are."He still DJs all round the world – recent gigs have included Russia, Austria, Japan and Canada – and says he is in the Premier League of drum'n'bass DJs. I thought maybe he would have got bored with drum'n'bass after Maestro, but he responds sharply: "No. Why would I? The weird thing is that Maestro has somehow improved my DJing. When you've been in this music as long as I've been, you can sometimes become jaded. And when I got back from Maestro, I realised the music is being kept in time for me – all I have to do is to wrap as much dynamic around it as I can. DJs don't realise how lucky we are. So then my sets became much longer and even more diverse because I thought: this is easy."So could he still be DJing when he's 70? "Quite possibly. I will certainly be making music as long as I live." His next project is to revive his hour-long composition Mother which failed abysmally when it came out on his second album Saturnz Return in 1998, but he thinks it was ahead of its time. Now he wants to reconfigure it as a stage show "with DJs, holograms, videos, actors, dancers, an orchestra on stage, more like an assault on your mind. I think it will be a triumph."I remember quite well when I was in institutions, and the only thing I had was 25 other kids from broken families that had nothing and we used to learn break dancing and go to all-dayers all round the country – it was a big thing in the 80s – and battle the guys in Nottingham, battle the guys in London, battle them on the dance floor and it was no longer about violence."Inevitably, with Goldie, one seems to end up talking about children's homes. His mother, a Scottish pub singer, put him into care when he was three, though she kept his younger brother, Melvin. The fact that Goldie turned out well, whereas his brother spent many years in prison and is "still a bit funny", according to Goldie, suggests that children's homes are not always as bad as they're painted. But it is a subject one raises with caution. Goldie says, on the one hand: "I learned everything out of children's homes. The kids had to stick together, we had to unify, and we did that, and I think that was a great thing." But he also remembers "the nights of sad times, crying my eyes out, wanting to get recognition, when I really wanted love and I just wanted nurturing, but all I got was abuse – you'll never make it, you'll never be anybody. You know, crushed."When he was l7 Goldie ran into his brother who took him home to stay with their mother. But it was a chaotic home – mother drinking, Rasta boyfriends smoking weed, no food in the house, so Goldie and Melvin had to steal in order to eat. He then went to America to find his father (a Jamaican-born factory worker who pushed off soon after Melvin was born) but was shocked to find his father had another son called Clifford Price – Goldie's real name – "in case one of you died".Goldie has four children by four different mothers, but says confidently that he is a good father. "I think I've made the same mistakes as any father – I've still got unfinished business, in that sense, but it's something I will personally deal with when the time is right." He is particularly close to his 10-year-old daughter, Chance, who lives with him five days a week, and says that he's gained empathy with women from her, but also through making peace with his mother. He has finally forgiven her for putting him in care: "I'd never actually imagined my mother when she was young. I'd never thought about the stuff she had to go through."Goldie says he's now sorted – he's over the drugs, over the womanising, over the issues with abandonment. But then he said exactly the same when I interviewed him seven years ago. At that point, he'd just married model Sonjia Ashby and said he was ready to settle down. But they divorced in 2005 and he made some bitter remarks about her: "She didn't want to go out to work and I'm used to being with career women." But also, more seriously: "With hindsight I think I was marrying someone who was a bit like my mother – who would let me down when I needed her."What really sorted him out, he says, was a course he did five years ago at the Hoffman Institute. "If I didn't do the Hoffman, I don't think I'd be alive now. Because I'd spent so many years searching for something and, like they say, the drugs don't work. I went to rehab and it never worked. It failed miserably in Antigua [at Eric Clapton's clinic, Crossroads Centre]. I felt, 'This is wrong, I'm getting whipped for someone else's sins here.' I did five-element acupuncture for many years, which I found fascinating, but then I got recommended the Hoffman and thought, 'This is for me.' It's not a cultish thing, but it's particularly good for spiritual people, people who vibrate differently. You go and stay for 10 days and you literally empty the box."He went to cure his addiction, but not his old addiction to drugs. "I was addicted to failure. I was addicted to beating myself up. Self-destructing. I just didn't want the boy to live, basically. And I would get wound up and have this violent temper, really mad. But the Hoffman pulls out all the fuses, defuses the bomb, gives you back the buttons and says, 'Go on, press them, see what happens', and you press them, and there's nothing happening! And you think, 'Wow' and understand where it was coming from. I think when they say life begins at 40, I was approaching 40 when I did the Hoffman and it was a complete meltdown. And I've never looked back."But he was also helped, he says, by a waterskiing accident (he shows me a huge, zip-like scar all down his leg) that kept him stationary for a year. "That was a useful accident, because I started making music again, and painting, because I couldn't run around. And also because it's the left side, the feminine side, which I really needed to address. So that really calmed me down and I thought, OK now, I know what to do."And now, he says, he has met his spiritual partner, Mika, who is "very, very beautiful", half-Japanese, half-Dutch, from Montreal. "She moved in about six months ago and we just do normal stuff and have a wonderful life." Because, he must admit, he wasn't really very good at relationships before? "No, but I'm good at this one. I need to become really humble."I do now feel very blessed, I really do. Because if I wrote a list of all my experiences, I'd think, 'Fuck it, this person looks really interesting.' I always had a sense of purpose, but I didn't quite know what it was, whereas I've got to grips with what my purpose is now. The two things that I've always had to deal with are abandonment and feeling misunderstood. And I actually feel a bit more understood now, because I've been able to create a dialect that people can understand. And, you know, I'm 43 and I think, 'Shit, I've just started doing this other new thing [working with orchestras] and who knows what it will lead to.' I just feel so creative."Goldie's Sine Tempore premieres at the Family Prom on 1 August. The two-part documentary Classic Goldie is broadcast on BBC 2, 31 July and 7 August at 9pm.Going for GoldieEarly life 1965 Born in Walsall, West Midlands as Clifford Price. His mother was a Scottish pub singer, his father a Jamaican factory worker. At three, he was put into care and brought up in various foster homes and institutions until the age of 17.Career 1980-1990 Joined breakdance group Bboyscorrect and began to make his name as musician and graffiti artist.1994 Co-founded drum'n'bass record label Metalheadzcollective.1995 Debut album Timeless under Pete Tong's label FFRR, reaches number 7 in the charts, a first for a drum'n'bass record.1998 Second album SaturnzReturncorrect, featuring an hour-longcorrect, 30-piece orchestral track "Mother", receives mixed reviews.1999-2002 Acting roles in The World is not Enough, Snatch and EastEnders.2002 First to be evicted when he took part in Celebrity Big Brother. 2008 Came second in BBC2's Maestro.Personal life Has previously dated Bjork, Naomi Campbell and was married to model Sonjia Ashby. Recently appeared on ITV's All Star Mr & Mrs with current partner, Mika. He has four children, twin huskies and a pet python.Quotations:Goldie - "Reinvention is one of the greatest things we have the ability to do"Goldie - "Creating art is like being sick – you bring up all your most innermost thoughts and then you have to ask yourself why you're doing it""He (bowled in the door and) was, I suppose, kind of frightening: shaved head, loads of gold teeth, gold watches, gold chains, gold ear-rings, gold knuckle-dusters – and a pitbull." Pete Tong"He's a good mate, one of those blokes you can count on. I'm just happy that he's happy now." Pete TongPromsBBCguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Michael Clark

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

He was the 80s enfant terrible who fell into depression and heroin addiction in the 90s. Now 47, the charismatic ballet star is back at the Edinburgh Festival this month for the first time in 21 years with a new work inspired by his 70s idols David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. If only he dared have a drink to celebrate, he tells Lynn Barber.Last time I ran into Michael Clark he was sticking cigarettes on gnomes for Sarah Lucas. She had a big cigarette period a few years ago when she covered all her sculptures in Marlboros, and she'd enlisted Clark, a friend, because he was out of work and needed the money, to do the sticking. But he wasn't good enough, by her demanding standards - "She's incredibly precise, the way she does things: she'll take some tobacco out to make the cigarette bend without breaking it" - so his career as a cigarette-sticker petered out. Anyway, Sarah was always urging him to get back to choreography - she coaxed him through one of his crises of confidence by telling him, "Why don't you just try and make the worst ballet you possibly could? How bad can it get?", and he is eternally grateful. Clark seems happy to rave about Sarah Lucas till the cows come home: I have to keep reminding him this interview is meant to be about him. But he is absolutely hopeless at blowing his own trumpet.We met at the St John Bar around teatime, and he started off so mumbly and incoherent I wondered if he'd been permanently damaged by all his years of drug abuse, but then he had two espressos and a cappuccino and perked up. He is still beautiful at 47, a gentle skinhead with a nappy pin through his ear, though he is beginning to get that slightly exaggerated puppet look that old pop stars get. As he says, "It's very difficult for a trained dancer to look like a normal person. They walk differently." I see what he means when he goes to the bar to order drinks - he leans diagonally along the counter and points his leg out behind in an arabesque, and a couple of straight men nearby eye him warily. Anyway, he is back working, that's the main thing. At one stage, in the mid-90s, he disappeared so completely that rumours swept around London that he had died, perhaps of Aids, perhaps of drugs. He was the boy from nowhere - in fact, a farm near Aberdeen - who went to his sister's Scottish dance classes when he was four, and ended up the brightest star of the Royal Ballet School. But then, to the grief of his teachers, he refused to join the Royal Ballet company and instead went to the Ballet Rambert and then the American Karole Armitage company. At 22, he founded his own company and spewed out an incredible stream of new works throughout the 80s, with titles such as No Fire Escape in Hell, Because we Must and I am Curious, Orange. He was the punk choreographer who strapped dildos on his dancers and had Leigh Bowery staggering across the stage in 10in heels with a chainsaw. The ballet world deplored such gimmickry but still admired the beauty of his choreography. He won commissions from the Paris Opera, Scottish Ballet, Deutsche Oper, and was just embarking on a major work for the Royal Ballet when, in 1994, he disappeared. He came back in the early Noughties, when he created a work called Before and After: The Fall featuring a giant wanking arm sculpture by Sarah Lucas. From 2005-7 he was artistic associate at the Barbican and developed three new Stravinsky ballets, his versions of Apollo (O), The Rite of Spring (Mmm...) and Les Noces (I do). These were hailed as signs of a new maturity, a return to his classical roots. But his new work uses music by David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop - "the holy trinity of rock" - which is bound to upset the purists. He unveiled the first piece, Thank U Ma'am, at the Venice Biennale, and will be showing it at the Edinburgh Festival at the end of this month, but he says it's still a work in progress. He wants to include a backdrop of Bowie's original video of Heroes so that it looks as if Bowie is onstage with the dancers, but he hasn't got the scale right yet. Anyway, it's a change from Stravinsky. "For myself, for the audience, for the dancers, I felt we needed something different... To be honest, it's more simple, musically, and that gives me a kind of freedom." The artist Elizabeth Peyton, who saw an early version at the Galway Festival, told me: "It was brilliant and electrifying, all of it. There is something in most all of Michael's work where he innovates from within the tradition of dance using contemporary references. These new Bowie pieces seem something like a miracle in how they are so alive, huge in feeling and so part of our time, and I think this is because they come from so deep inside Michael. He seems to focus closer, closer, closer to the thing that makes him live in a way that is impossible not to feel as a viewer."The work includes a solo for him - "But only because the dancers need to change costumes!" he says - and it is a "pedestrian" piece. At 47, he says, he can't really dance any more, except when he's showing his dancers new moves. "I can't just sit in a chair and choreograph. But I couldn't sustain it for an evening, as they do." He has had five knee operations and has learned his limitations. "It's sad, of course it's sad, but at least I can still choreograph." He would love it if David Bowie came to see the work, but he's never met him, and is not sure he wants to. "Maybe it's better just to let the fantasy live on." Bowie meant an awful lot to him when he was a boy growing up in Scotland because, "I'd seen this man on Top of the Pops put his arm round another man and I thought, 'O my goodness, there are other people like me! Maybe. Somewhere.' And I felt I had to understand what it was all about. It's unbelievable to think now that that was such a provocative gesture but I don't think I'd ever seen that before in my life." Had he even heard of people being gay? "Not then. I must have been nine or something. I think maybe I'd touched tongues with my best friend, that was all." Later, when he knew he was gay, he plucked up courage to tell his mother and she said "Don't worry, I won't tell anyone!", which rather missed the point of coming out. He is still extremely close to his mother, Bessie, and hopes she will be well enough to attend his Edinburgh premiere. Back in the 80s he actually had her perform on stage, bare-breasted, giving birth to him in his ballet O. She toured with the company for two years, and loved it. "It was a great way to spend time together and for her to see what was going on. I remember my nephew came home from school and said someone had said to him, 'Is it true your granny's a stripper and your uncle's a poofter?' That's when it dawned on me that things that I say or do have repercussions for other people. I didn't realise that my poor nephew was going to be picked on. But when he asked that question I said, 'Yes, it's true!'" He wears a big silver ring saying "Dad", but his feelings towards his father, Bill, who died when he was 18, are more ambivalent. He was a farmer who hated farming; he was also a gambler and a drunk. Clark remembers him as an entertaining drunk, "a bit like Hurricane Higgins", who would run through the room naked with a banana tied to his penis, but he also remembers how his hand used to shake in the mornings as he raised the first drink to his lips. And then - this is something Clark has not spoken about before - he committed suicide in the most painful way possible, by drinking weedkiller. "I was 18 when he died and I'd been fascinated by suicides like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. I thought it was a respect-worthy thing to do - why shouldn't one end one's life when one wanted to? But then when it really happened, with my Dad, it put me off altogether. Anyone who's experienced that in a family would never do it because it's such a loaded thing." But for some years, in the late 80s, early 90s, it seemed that Michael Clark was bent on self-destruction by other means. He dabbled in drugs and was caught glue-sniffing while he was at ballet school, but he knew they would never expel him because he was their star pupil. "And when I first danced at the school on speed, I remember knowing I felt amazing, but also knowing it was the drug - I wasn't suddenly an amazing dancer." But he was always looking for mind-altering experiences. "I was misled into believing that as an artist you were meant to explore different states and report back to normal people. Something a bit ridiculous like that. And I thought if I was going to dance on heroin, it wasn't enough just to take it, I had to become an addict. It was just because I was curious, really. I wanted to find out. And I didn't believe you could find out by reading about things, or believing whatever people told you, it seemed to me you had to experience it. But I didn't know that the whole narcotics thing was such a long process. I thought that once you'd taken it three days in a row, you were an addict and had to keep taking it every day. But then it took years really." Everything came to a head in 1994. He was deep into drugs, depressed by a knee injury and the death of Leigh Bowery, he'd split up with his boyfriend, choreographer Stephen Petronio, and he'd flunked out of choreographing a new work for the Royal Ballet because "I got to the point where I just couldn't make decisions - it was beyond Stanley Kubrick - and the dancers were getting very, very frustrated, so I had to withdraw." He fled to Cairnbulg, near Fraserburgh, to live with his mother - he only learned later that Fraserburgh is the heroin capital of Britain - and disappeared for four years. For the first six months he didn't leave his room. "I could hear human activity outside and I hoped I could be part of it again some time but I knew I wasn't ready. But I'm lucky in that I knew my talent hadn't gone away - that was always my anchor. And by chance I met two artists living nearby who said they'd moved there for the light. I thought, light? I couldn't see any light. But we became great friends and used to go on adventures together, so I was very fortunate in that way. It was a strange time." He says coming off heroin was relatively easy; it was his much longer addiction to methadone (prescribed as a heroin substitute) that was the real problem. "It was hard for me because I loved it. And it suited me because I'm a control freak and at least I knew what I was getting. But I kept getting more and more of it and it must have changed everything about me for a time. I had no sensitivities to anyone or anything whatsoever. And I probably damaged my body quite a lot. Sometimes I'd injure myself and it felt interesting, you know? Because you have no feelings, no pain. During the methadone years - as I now refer to them - I would try and drink myself to sleep but I couldn't. And then, before I knew it, I was drinking in the morning, taking the first drink of the day with a shaking hand. Which was an awful thing, when I'd grown up seeing my father like that."What saved him in the end was going back to his old Royal Ballet School teacher, Richard Glasstone, and taking private lessons. "That was great. I don't think either of us were under any illusions that I was going to be like the 13-year-old he taught, but it was almost like a sped-up version of being taught by him in the first place, and the work that we did probably reflected a cautious re-entering of the world." Another reason for re-entering the world was that in 1998 his mother announced that she was getting married again - to her first husband. She was married to him for just a day before he went off to fight in the war, but while he was away she had a child by someone else, and he divorced her. But in 1998 she found him again and they had a few happy years together before he died. Michael saw her marriage as a sign that she believed he could cope on his own. He is evasive when I ask if he will ever take drugs again. "I can't really answer that - it's an ongoing thing. My mum says: 'Just wait till I'm dead till you do drugs again.' She asked me if I was going to be all right, and I am, I will be all right. But like anything new, it feels different, you know? If you're used to having something, you sort of miss that support. I don't even drink now. Not at all. But I miss things about it - the bonding with your colleagues after a performance, when you've gone through this experience together which is almost life-changing - and it still feels a bit strange. Rescue Remedy is as far as I go - I think it's got drops of brandy in it." One regret about his methadone years is that he forgot to keep up payments on the storage unit in London that contained all his costumes, souvenirs and notebooks, so they were seized and auctioned off. He has always been useless with money. Three years ago art gallery owner Sadie Coles had to organise a big auction of artworks donated by his friends (Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Anish Kapoor) to keep his dance company going. For the past three years, while he was doing the Stravinsky Project, he was supported by the Barbican, and given a flat there, but he says he's lost the flat now because there were complaints about noise. He has a year's grant and sponsorship for his present work but no idea what will happen after that. The trouble with choreography, he says, is that there's no sellable end-product. "But that's the beauty of it really! I always hope it might change but it's still an ongoing struggle. And any money that I raise goes back into the work. But those dancers I work with are an investment really. The knowledge that they carry in their bodies - you can't put a price on that." He is looking forward to showing his new work at the Edinburgh Festival. It will be his first time there since 1988. "If I look at the work then and look at the work now, I can feel OK, things have moved on. I wouldn't show now what I showed then. That was an excessive time, in terms of the costuming and the theatricality - I find it kind of obscene. Whereas this one I hope is all about the choreography and not the extraneous stuff." He talks a lot about his admiration for Frederick Ashton, and says he has a dancer in his present company, now in his early 50s, who used to be Ashton's muse. "I just want him around to teach us, because I want my dancers to understand Ashton's épaulement - the use of the shoulders, use of the back - because it's becoming extinct and I really want that to be passed on. I love Ashton's work and those were the roles I fantasised about doing - there was a very fast solo in Enigma Variations which I would have loved to do."So does he ever regret not joining the Royal Ballet? "No! For the few times I would have been able to do the roles that I wanted, there were other things I would have had to do that I didn't want. I knew what my life would be like if I joined that company and it wasn't for me, it really wasn't. So I have no regrets there. And I'd tasted something I didn't understand. That was always the thing with me - finding the next thing to understand. But I'd still like to have danced those Ashton solos." • Michael Clark's new work is at the Playhouse, Edinburgh 28-31 Aug and then 28 Oct-Nov 7 at the Barbican, London EC2Step by stepLife story1962 Born in Kintore, Scotland. Begins dance lessons at four.1975 Enters London's Royal Ballet School.1979 Joins Ballet Rambert.1980 His father commits suicide.1982 Choreographs first piece at London's Riverside Studios.1984 Launches Michael Clark Company.1986 No Fire Escape in Hell features Leigh Bowery in 10-inch heels with a chainsaw.1988 Heroin addiction forces Clark, aged 26, into a form of retirement.1989 Begins relationship with American dancer/choreographer Stephen Petronio. 1992 Creates dramatic ballet Mmm1994 Depressed by death of Bowery, breakup with Petronio and a knee injury, he retreats to Kintore.2005 Becomes artistic associateat the Barbican.They say "[He was] always the compulsive rebel. Yet what was so impressive was... this gift for making lovely phrases, ballet steps with a modern twist." Richard Glasstone, Royal Ballet School teacherHe says "This God-given gift they think I've got... I think my responsibility is to abuse it, find a different way of using it."Helena GoodwynEdinburgh festivalBalletDanceMichael ClarkLynn Barberguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Rachel Cusk

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

Novelist Rachel Cusk, best known for her powerful book about motherhood, is now publishing her seventh novelI have never actually handled a highly strung racehorse, but that is what interviewing Rachel Cusk brings to mind. We meet for lunch in a restaurant in Brighton, where she lives, and get on fine at first while we are just making small talk, but as soon as I start asking questions she is bridling all over the place. "Oh Lynn," she sighs, "you can't seriously expect me to answer that." But then she apologises rather charmingly: "Part of what I thought would happen when I got my teaching job [she teaches creative writing at Kingston University] is that I would become better at talking and it hasn't happened!"She is good at talking, but when she talks about her novels, it often sounds like a literary seminar, all about process and structure and narrative method and absolutely nothing to do with her. I asked if her new novel, The Bradshaw Variations, represented some retraction of her previous feminist values, in that it is about a career wife and house-husband whose marriage deteriorates in the course of the book and whose child almost dies.Cusk, predictably, tosses her head up and snorts: "I guess that's what the publishers mean when they say on the proof, 'Many topics for book group discussion.' I wondered what that meant!" She has a fine contempt for book groups, having been to one once where everyone kept threatening to resign until she left. But then she has a fine contempt for many things. It is this fury, this divine discontent, that gives her books their characteristic energy and black humour. But it is disconcerting when you encounter it in real life. She once threw a shoe at a pigeon for cooing outside her window.It is difficult to see where Cusk's discontent comes from when, on the face of it, she has had the cushiest of lives. She is still extremely good looking, at 42, with a slim figure and long, dark, shiny hair. She comes from a wealthy Catholic family, was educated at St Mary's Convent in Cambridge and then read English at Oxford. She published her first novel, Saving Agnes, in 1993 and won the Whitbread first novel prize. There have been seven novels, including her new one, and two books of non-fiction.After a brief first marriage to a banker, she is married to a photographer, Adrian Clarke, by whom she has two daughters, Albertine, 10 and Jessye, nine, as well as a 17-year-old stepdaughter, Molly, from his first marriage. They live in a Regency house in Brighton and must be reasonably well off.However, Rachel Cusk is not one for counting her blessings. She hates what she calls the "cheer up, love" school of criticism that asks why she has to be so angry all the time. Unfortunately, it's the question always hovering on my lips. Someone actually asks it of the heroine of her fourth novel, The Lucky Ones (2003), and she says she is angry about "men. Marriage. Children. I don't know, everything". That seems to sum up Cusk. She sees herself as embattled, hounded by critics, loathed by other mothers, attacked with slings and arrows from every side. She says that when she cycles to school with her daughters, other women hiss abuse at her from Range Rovers. She used to describe herself as a red-blooded feminist but nowadays admits: "I find that I like women less than I did." She avoids school gates and places where other mothers congregate.This all started with the book she wrote about motherhood, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother in 2001. She wrote it when she had just had one baby and was already pregnant with the second and it is an excoriating account of the horrors of pregnancy, antenatal classes, parenting manuals, childbirth, breastfeeding, colic, sleepless nights and the disintegration of self involved in looking after a small baby. She says at one point: "I often think that people wouldn't have children if they knew what it was like."Many mothers were outraged by the book and accused her of hating her child, though others were secretly grateful that someone had articulated their own worst feelings. It is probably the most powerful book on motherhood ever written and has been reprinted many times.But she says she now almost wishes she hadn't written it because: "It's caused me so much grief. I think it's sort of labelled me – and I'm not someone who thinks very much, possibly not enough, about 'my readers' because I don't sell enough copies for that to be an issue. But I think it did put a suspicion of bleakness or depressiveness under my name, a feeling that I'm incredibly critical of everything and sort of miserable, which I have found amazingly difficult to shake off."This impression was compounded by her last novel, Arlington Park, which seemed to express a hatred of almost all aspects of family life. She says it went down brilliantly in France – "I think Frenchwomen enjoy intellectualising their own experiences" – but not here. "What I resented with the reviews was there being a sort of judgment made about me as a mother. I absolutely don't dislike children – I would choose their company over adult company any time."After Arlington Park, she published a travel book, The Last Supper, about a summer in Italy with her family that was partly meant to scotch the idea that she hated spending time with her children. I confess I wondered why she wrote it – it seemed a bit slack by her standards – and she laughs bitterly. "Oh well, it was just a travel book; it was meant to be harmless." But it wasn't harmless at all because someone brought a breach of privacy suit, which apparently is a big new legal hazard since the Max Mosley case. "You don't have to lie – no one said I lied – but if you describe people and they recognise themselves they can sue." The book came out in February and was pulped in March and she had to pay half the costs. "So when you say the book was a bit slack you're adding to my feeling that I'm not having a good year!"The Last Supper begins with a quotation from DH Lawrence: "Comes over one an absolute necessity to move", which is an urge Cusk obviously shares because she is always moving house. Since adulthood, she has lived in London, Oxford, Exmoor, Bristol, Italy and now Brighton, but is beginning to get itchy feet again. "I'd quite like to move but I don't think anyone will let me. I like Brighton but… it's because of my peripatetic childhood, I guess. I was born in Canada, but was still a baby when we moved to America and we moved twice in America, then came back to England and moved a few times. And my husband's father was in the navy so he moved a lot too."Even as a child, she realised that her parents' urge to move was not quite rational – "I felt they moved in order to escape feelings of unhappiness" – and has reluctantly come to see the same in herself: "I now see it as a syndrome whereas before I was completely convinced that there were these terrible things wrong and that we had to move, whereas I now see that it isn't that."But she also thinks that writers should move, should travel, seek new experiences: "I have a romantic conception of the writer's life and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life – I'm in awe of how much DH Lawrence managed to get around. But that's never been something I'm capable of doing. All I've ever done is work really hard, try and try and try to put down roots, marry and have children and lead this completely stable life."She would have liked to live abroad, but was not able to because her stepdaughter (who lives with them) had to make regular visits to her mother and now her own daughters are starting to put their feet down. "I wanted to apply for a fellowship in New York for a year and I thought they'd be excited about moving to New York. But absolutely not. It was never about overriding them or putting myself first. It was much more, at the stage when they were smaller and dependent on us, about trying to have an interesting life. I think most writers – except the Philip Larkin type – want to have new experiences and I have those desires very strongly."Cusk has always been a writer. She wrote poetry as a child and started her first novel the minute she left Oxford. "I have this theory that most artists never leave childhood, that you're endlessly trying to work out what happened. And leaving university and facing this idea that there is something called adult life that I was going to enter and get a job – I just couldn't. So writing became what I did as soon as I stopped studying."But what did happen to her in childhood? Why does she say she was so unhappy all the time? She recently admitted, in the introduction to a new edition of A Life's Work: "I have a bad relationship with my own mother and was pitched by motherhood into the recollection of childhood unhappiness and confusion."She is the second of four children, with an older sister and two younger brothers and once said: "I came wrathful from the womb." But, again, why? "I didn't feel accepted – that is my earliest memory of childhood. I was always unlike my parents and I was identified as that from early on. Both my parents were oldest children of quite big families, then they had an oldest child, my sister, and there were three of them waiting for this awful invader – that's my theory anyway."She thinks it was exacerbated by her childhood asthma and allergies that meant she often had to be rushed to hospital; the threat only receded when she was given a Ventolin inhaler when she was 15. But the real problem, she says, was that: "The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion – everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel. When I started writing books, my parents found that very difficult because writing was equivalent to emotion in their minds."Her early novels, she believes, were inhibited by "having my parents sitting on my shoulder, judging everything, and me trying to conceal what I was doing". She believes she was "writing in a sort of fog" and would have dried up if motherhood, and writing A Life's Work, hadn't enabled her to find a new honesty. But it has meant a breach with her parents. "I haven't spoken to my mother for two years. We just couldn't find a way of getting on."Does she speak to her father? "Not really. I have spoken to him but he supports my mum. And my siblings have found it difficult, but that's because there's this general fear of confrontation and emotion."She is clearly unhappy with the situation but feels there is no alternative. "I think there's something terribly wrong – on both sides, both for parent and child – and having children myself I know exactly what a dark and damaging thing it is. The relationship should not break down, at all costs. It is much better to honour the sense of duty and learn not to expose yourself or make yourself vulnerable. But I've never learnt that; I've never known how not to be vulnerable. So in the end, I've gone the never-speak-to-them-again route. I think it's just the feeling of not being accepted as I am."There is a haunting exchange towards the end of The Bradshaw Variations where the heroine, Tonie, meets a doctor at a party and tells him: "I want attention. I don't know why." "That is the tragedy of most people," he says. "What about you? Is it your tragedy?" she asks. "I had a good mother," he tells her.This, to me, seems the kernel of the book, but when I ask Cusk about it she wails: "Oh Lynn! You're just like everyone else!" and talks about Olivia Manning instead.Didn't she ever, even once, have the feeling that she was getting enough attention, that she was young and beautiful, the world was at her feet? "OK," she says glumly. "I did, I suppose, in my late 20s, when I'd published two books and I had my own house in London and I could support myself, I was free… but then I decided that that wasn't what I was looking for. I couldn't write at all in that period. I felt I needed to get back in touch with something serious, that I didn't want to live a party-going life in which I went to places and did things because I wrote books."There are so many writers who I, rather unkindly, think of as luvvies, who all hang out together. And you can see that some writers' talents are fed by great exposure to society and then there are others – DH Lawrence is a good example – who think they want acceptance but actually they can't stand it and they've got to annoy people by pointing out uncomfortable things, and that's more me."There's this really good line in Women in Love where Ursula says, 'I always thought it was a sin to be unhappy.' And actually I think that's very common, it's what a lot of people feel – that you have an obligation to life to be happy if you can. But to me, there's no moral difference between happiness and unhappiness – I just want to describe them, that's all I'm interested in. But that's why I resent this miserablist label, because I'm not happy or unhappy, I'm just interested in different states and how they feel."• The Bradhsaw Variations by Rachel Cusk is published by Faber on 3 September at £15.99 and is available from the Observer bookshop.A life's work: The Rachel papersBorn 8 February 1967 in Canada to English Catholic parents. Spends most of her childhood in Los Angeles before her family relocate to England in 1974. Married to photographer Adrian Clarke, with three daughters, including one from Clarke's previous marriage.1993 Wins the Whitbread first novel award for debut Saving Agnes1995 Publishes The Temporary1997 The Country Life wins the Somerset Maugham Award.2001 Writes her controversial memoir on motherhood, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother2003 The Lucky Ones is shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and Granta names her one of 20 Best Young British Novelists.2006 Arlington Park makes the Orange Prize shortlist.They say "What shines in Rachel Cusk's writing is the precision of her observation... she can pinpoint something profound with the merest detail." Author Carol BirchShe says: "[Writing is] like playing a musical instrument. It's a redeeming experience that doesn't happen anywhere else in life." Sam CreightonFictionLynn Barberguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Rosamund Pike

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

Actress Rosamund Pike invites Lynn Barber round for afternoon tea and a chat - about on-stage nudity, turning 30 and the heartache of being jilted by her ex-fiancé, director Joe WrightRosamund Pike has baked me a cake! She is so nice. I don't actually like cake, but this is an exceptionally light, scrumptious rhubarb and orange confection, so I have no trouble at all eating it. She also offers tea in delicate antique china cups and invites me to look round her extremely pretty Kensington mews flat. There is a lovely wisteria outside, forming great swags of flowers around the window - it feels like being in a treetop bower. She moved into the flat last November and is only renting it, but already, she says, she thinks it's the best thing that ever happened to her. She was planning to buy somewhere but every deal fell through, "so then I just decided: actually my parents never bought anywhere so I'll probably end up like them, just being nomadic, moving when I can't afford it any more".She is even prettier in the flesh than on film, wearing harem pants and a soft floral blouse that sometimes flops sideways to give glimpses of her breasts. The whole effect - the flat, the cake, the tea, the wisteria, this lovely porcelain girl - is utterly feminine and exquisite, and of course makes me feel like a great ugly toad. She reminds me a bit of Joanna Lumley (obviously without the gurkhas) and fills me with the same unease - can anyone really be this perfect? But I met Pike once before, at a party of Nick Hornby's, and found her really good fun. Better still, I was knocked out by her performance in "my" film (actually Nick Hornby's film, but based on my memoir), An Education, in which she plays a girl called Helen who is on the one hand very beautiful but on the other very thick. Who knew that Rosamund Pike was such a great comedian? Nick Hornby was so impressed he said he wanted to write a whole comedy film for her. "Well, it would be great if he did. I love making people laugh. But only my close friends usually see it.Naturally I was hoping to spend the whole morning talking about An Education, but Pike was keener to plug her next film, Fugitive Pieces, based on a best-selling Canadian novel by Anne Michaels which won the Orange Prize in 1996. It stars Stephen Dillane and is set in Canada, Greece and Poland, with some characters speaking in Yiddish or Greek. Pike plays Dillane's girlfriend and brings a much-needed breezy cheerfulness to an otherwise rather gloomy film. She is also in Freefall, the big BBC2 recession drama, playing a City broker who is having an affair with her boss - lots of bonking on desks - and is then dumped by him. Her scenes, though few, are absolutely electric, perhaps because they are improvised. And when I met her she was still acting with Judi Dench in Madame de Sade at the Donmar, and loving it. She always feels more at home in the theatre, she says, and has alternated films with theatre work, right from the start of her career when she came back from playing a Bond girl in Die Another Day to a West End run in Hitchcock Blonde. "It does teach you a helluva lot, being on stage," she says. Unfortunately, Madame de Sade got stinking reviews (though for the play, not the acting), but she claims not to have read them. "I don't read anything. You can rest assured I won't read this article. Because even if you read things that are nice, it's a bit disconcerting, really."She says all this while tucking into her excellent cake. I am amazed that someone so slim can eat with such gusto but she says: "I love food - I'm a foodie." She recently had a lunch with Jeremy Langmead, editor of Esquire, that lasted 10 hours. He eventually had to retire sick, but she went on to an Indian restaurant with friends. She says she doesn't weigh herself; she doesn't even own any scales. She seems to be completely free of body hang-ups. Most actresses, even perfect beauties, can reel off a long list of things they'd like to change about their appearance, but she says: "I'm sort of OK. I'm OK with it." She once said that she would rather pose for an artist as a nude than as a face - her face somehow feels more exposed. And in fact she has done a lot of nudity in films, and also once on stage, in Hitchcock Blonde, though she says she probably wouldn't do that again. "It's funny: I kind of perversely put on weight when I had to be naked on stage, which now I look back on it I think is quite strange. I look at pictures of that time - because my mum saves stuff - and I think: Oh gosh, I actually gained weight, which is not what people would normally do if they knew they had to appear naked every night."That reminds me: someone I met who knew her at Oxford told me she thought she'd had a nose job - did she? Rosamund goes into alarmingly loud peals of laughter: "What! That's the funniest thing I've ever heard! I'd be fascinated to know who said that. Go on, you've got to tell me. [No.] That's hilarious! For a start I wouldn't have the money to afford a nose job. I think I've been quite lucky with my nose. Now I feel like I'm protesting too much. I could show you pictures of me as a child... Or you can ring my mother; we can get her on the phone. Shall we ring her? Just to confirm that I haven't had a nose job?" She is reaching for the phone while I am shrieking: No! This is madness - I only asked the question out of idle curiosity - but she is reacting as if I accused her of murder. But she seriously hates and abhors any form of plastic surgery - "No way. No way. Not even Botox. You look at someone like Judi [Dench] and you just think she's the most beautiful woman. Because if you're a beautiful person then somehow all the lines fall into the right place."Right. Phew. I always forget how very dramatic actresses can be. To calm her down, I ask her about her childhood memories of growing up as a "backstage baby". She was an only child, but not a lonely one. Her parents, Caroline and Julian Pike, were opera singers (her father is now professor of vocal and operatic studies at the Birmingham Conservatoire) and she loved to watch them perform - "I spent quite a lot of time in rehearsal rooms or in the wings, looking at them being the stars. It was definitely what gave me the bug, seeing my mum playing the Merry Widow - it's a wonderful opera - and she had this boa and a big wig, and looked just gorgeous: like a film star, I thought. I was a bit of a frumpy child and she just looked incredibly glamorous and exciting." And hanging around rehearsals meant that she became observant and learned a lot of adult secrets: "I became quite watchful and curious. Interested in other people's emotional lives. From early on I understood about people having affairs."She and her parents lived in a big rented flat in Earl's Court, but when she was 11 she went off to boarding school, Badminton in Bristol. She told everyone she was going to be an actress, and they believed her. "I was weirdly serious about it from very young, about 10 or something. And watching my parents, there was a real analytical interest in what made something believable and what made it not believable, or what made something moving or funny, or why these lines didn't ring true." In school plays she was usually given men's roles because she was tall, but when she was 17, between A-levels and going to Oxford to read English, she was cast as Juliet in the National Youth Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet."Doing a part like that - which you can fly with - is the most amazing experience, just totally liberating. But I remember someone saying rather cruelly: 'Oh, Rosamund could never play Juliet because she's never been in love' - and I remember, at 17, being so scared of that comment. Children can be so cruel. It was true I'd never been in love - but I could use my imagination. But you know, a lot of people believe that there's a direct opposition between intelligence and emotion, that if you're clever you can't feel. Which is complete nonsense - in fact I'm an incredibly, dangerously emotional person, I think - but I remember being deeply worried that because I got good A-levels I wouldn't be any good as Juliet."Anyway, she was obviously so good as Juliet that an agent signed her on the spot and got her television work in her Oxford vacations. Halfway through Oxford, she thought she ought to go to drama school and applied to them all - but was turned down. So then she finished her degree and got a respectable 2:1. Almost immediately, she was cast as Miranda Frost, the Bond girl in Die Another Day. It was an extraordinary break - but instead of staying in Hollywood to capitalise on it, she went straight back to the theatre. Her next big film was Pride & Prejudice, playing Jane Bennet to Keira Knightley's Elizabeth, and it was on the set that she fell in love with the director Joe Wright.Joe Wright is the great looming elephant in the room. She has said all along she won't talk about him, and when I mention his name she mimes zipping her lips. They were together four years, during which he directed Pride & Prejudice, Atonement and The Soloist, and in every interview and photograph they seemed madly in love. They got engaged early last year, on Lake Como, bought a house together in Spitalfields and said they were getting married in the summer. And then suddenly he called it off. It was the most public and humiliating jilting imaginable, especially when he was later reported to have been seen "cavorting" in a lapdancing club that same week. The story in the tabloids was that he was furious because she'd sent out wedding invitations featuring photos of them together in a hot tub without consulting him. It sounded unlikely - I wouldn't have thought Pike was the sort of girl to favour jokey wedding invitations. She flatly refuses to talk about it when I meet her, but later emails to say: "I still have no idea why Joe called off the wedding. He was never clear about it. Part of what makes it so confusing. Our Save the Date cards had been sent out; Save the Date cards which had a 1950s-style picture of the two of us in LA, taken by a friend at Christmas, done like an old-fashioned postcard with slightly unreal colours - we'd both designed it and the design was to make people laugh! Which it did! - but no invitations. My mother had to write to everyone to say that the wedding was no longer going to take place. I also think that the stories about Joe being seen in lapdancing clubs are false. It really doesn't sound like him."But it was an incredibly public humiliation and still, she claims, a mystery to her as much as anyone. Perhaps she was always keener on getting married than he was. Perhaps he felt pressured. At all events she refuses to condemn him - "I still think he's an extraordinary man, I really do" - and says, wanly: "I don't think you ever get over something like that, do you?"Her love life seems to have been unlucky. Her previous boyfriend, actor Simon Woods, whom she met at Oxford and went out with for two years, turned out to be gay - he is now with Christopher Bailey, the creative director of Burberry. It slightly suggests that she is not very good at "reading" men, perhaps because she is, as she admits, a great romantic. "I think it's one of the great enrichments of life, romance. I can read significance into tiny, tiny things. If I'd met someone 10 years ago and not seen them again and then I suddenly bumped into them, I'd feel that that was 'meant' or there's a fate, you know?"She usually says in interviews that she has had two big love affairs (Simon Woods and Joe Wright), though actually, she told me, there was another one before that, when she was at the National Youth Theatre, someone "very clever, very kind, very wise". Still - just three boyfriends by the age of 30 - it's not many, I tell her. "I don't sleep around, if that's what you mean," she says stiffly. "Would you like some more cake? [The poor old cake gets a battering any time I ask a difficult question.] I'm not saying they're the only people I've been out with. But I take love quite seriously. I'm talking about the life-changing ones, the ones who somehow get inside you, who actually alter your chemical make-up, where you get butterflies and feel like your stomach's turning over - a whole physical world which you're not in control of at all. And I think one is lucky when one gets to feel this. Some people I don't think ever do."She turned 30 in January this year, and it must have been hard, entering her 30s single when she had expected to be married. She didn't have a big party because she couldn't afford it - instead she went to Whitstable for the day with two girlfriends and ate whelks. (Her father told her she was mad for eating whelks when she could have been eating oysters.) She was more nervous approaching 30 than actually becoming it - "I just didn't want it to happen. But now I really think it's great. Life has taken a different turn, but I'd never have been here, I'd never have had my own space. I've never before lived on my own, and I think that's something everybody should do. I like it that I can do what I want. So if someone says: 'Let's go to a rave after the show on Saturday,' I can do that and there's no one asking what time I'll be home. Suddenly life is quite good, really."And she's become braver in the last year. "I've thought: I've got nothing to lose, really. I'm not frightened of what people will think any more. Because, you know, when you're a teenager or in your early 20s, you're always frightened of what people will think. I used to get nervous just going to the stage door, seeing people waiting to talk to me. I was afraid of being caught out in some way or not being right. When you're young, you're trying on lots of selves, and then if you do something like the Bond film, it provides a kind of false self in a way, and you're trying to equate your real self to that person. And then suddenly at about 28 all the pieces of the jigsaw start to fit together comfortably."If she had married, would she have had children straightaway and put her career on hold? "No, because my career is so important to me and there are so many things I want to do. But it's very hard. Probably in a couple of years ... I don't know. I definitely want to have children, there's no doubt about that, but it can wait a couple more years. I've just become a godmother and it's the first time I'd actually been into a mother and baby unit and seen a newborn, and it's pretty emotional, isn't it? All that love. To feel you're in the centre of a life-giving place is extraordinarily powerful."But she has no boyfriend at present and if she goes round telling men she wants to have babies in the next two years ... "Oh God no, I would never say that, not at all. I'm not a needy person. Maybe I'll end up on my own - I just don't know. You just have to keep turning the pages, really, seeing what happens. But you have to have someone to fancy all the time, don't you? You have to always have a crush, I think. I do miss having someone to think about, to do lovely things for. I like doing surprising things, like filling the house with flowers or thinking of little jokes - you still think of things that would make someone laugh. And of course when the sun shines, you want to be out in the park rolling around in the grass with someone, don't you?"She has always refused to be imprisoned by her own fame. She travels by tube - "only because I'm always running late and it's the fastest way to get anywhere" - and drove around Mississippi by herself when she was preparing the Tennessee Williams play Summer and Smoke. She goes 40s dancing at the 100 Club, where she claims no one recognises her, and chats to people at the stage door or even on the street. "The other day this American stopped me and said: 'OK, now I've seen you three times, it's obviously fate.' And I said: 'Well no, it could be just that we live near each other.' He said: 'No, no - you're one of my favourite actresses and I just know it's fate.' But what can you do? He's probably great but I can't just say: 'OK I'll go out with you.' If I were in America I probably would, because if you're not on home soil you think, what the hell."Her next job after Madame de Sade is playing Bruce Willis's wife in a Disney sci-fi film called Surrogates. She also has a queue of films in the pipeline - Fugitive Pieces, Freefall, Burning Pond (which she describes as "a twisted black comedy") and finally the masterpiece, An Education, which comes out in October. It's an interesting list but seems a bit diffuse. But she says she just wants to keep working, and switching between films and theatre, with no particular career goals in mind. "I just sort of want to keep doing it. And to be able to look back and... I want to be respected, so that to have my name attached to a project means something. Obviously it would be great to do some wonderful enriching roles, but I want to just carry on doing it all my life. Because it just keeps you so young, it keeps you so fulfilled - it's the most fulfilling job in the world, really."• Fugitive Pieces is out on Friday. Freefall will be on BBC2 later this yearTheatreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Benjamin Zephaniah

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

Benjamin Zephaniah has lived in Birmingham, Jamaica, Newham, Egypt, Yugoslavia, South Africa, and now, at 50, divides his time between Beijing and a village near Spalding, Lincolnshire. It's the Spalding bit that I find incongruous. You just do not expect to find dreadlocked Rastafarian dub poets in Spalding, Lincs. Or maybe you do. I've never been there - maybe it's crawling with Rastafarian poets? But no, he assures me, he is the only one. I was going to visit him there but I had a cold and he said that, as a vegan, he has to avoid colds (something to do with having less mucus than carnivores) so I had to meet him later in London. We ended up in the stockroom of the wonderful Newham Bookshop, his London base and home from home, where, perched among boxes of books, he talked a storm and recited his poem Rong Radio. You can find it on his website, or on YouTube, but getting a private performance was one of the most thrilling experiences of my interviewing career.When Zephaniah refused the OBE in 2003, several newspaper commentators took the line that he was ungrateful, refusing this crumb from the white man's table. He, of course, objected to the word "Empire" which he associated with slavery. (Why do they still use it? Apart from anything else, it looks so self-deluded.) He'd already published a poem, Bought and Sold, which expressed his contempt for black athletes and artists who could be bought with a gong. In the same poem he was equally disdainful of the poet laureateship - "Don't take my word, go check the verse / Cause every laureate gets worse" - but I hoped he might have changed his mind. He absolutely hasn't: "I just think it's one of those outdated things. Go on the streets here and ask people if they know who Benjamin Zephaniah is and what he does, and most of them will tell you. Ask them what Andrew Motion does and silence. It's irrelevant." He is not anti-establishment - he does tons of work for the British Council - but he wants no truck with royal flummery.I made the mistake of asking why on earth he had moved to Spalding and suddenly his hackles were up, scenting racism. Why shouldn't he live in Spalding? "I was born in Britain, I've lived here all my life, I have the right to live anywhere I want to." Yes, of course. It's just that he always says he loves those multi-ethnic urban streets where you find a Mexican restaurant next to a Bangladeshi next to a Lebanese and I don't imagine you get much of that in Lincolnshire. Actually, he says, I'm wrong. Peterborough, which is the nearest big town, has as many different ethnic restaurants as Newham. And Boston, Lincs, is the most immigrated-to town in Britain - all the people who work on the land there are immigrants, though they are mainly eastern Europeans. But it is true, he concedes, that his particular village is not exactly rainbow nation. And although he has met some nice people, he doesn't have any close friends there. His mother and siblings all live in Birmingham, most of his friends are in London.So why did he decide to move? Until last year he lived in Newham and always said he loved it. It's a question he still seems to be pondering himself, possibly with a hint of midlife crisis. "I felt that I had to move from the house I was living in, that's how I started. No - actually, I felt I had to decorate the house I was living in so I spent quite a lot of money decorating it, stepped back and thought, 'This is really nice. I've always wanted wooden floors.' And then I thought, 'But you know? I don't want to live here any more!' It was really strange - I just got the feeling that I had to move. And I've always loved the English countryside, and I thought to myself - I was 49 at the time - if you want to live in a small village, this is the time to do it. It always upsets me when I hear older people saying, 'I wish I'd done this, I wish I'd done that,' and it's too late. And there was a type of place that I wanted, where I could jog straight out into the countryside - I love jogging, I'm a health freak - far away from the motorway network. And a place came up in Spalding and it was ideal."He has only twice encountered racism since he moved. One was a builder who was fine on the phone but then refused even to do an estimate when he met Zephaniah. Another - weirdly - was a man who put an ad in the local paper saying he collected old banknotes and wanted to buy them. Zephaniah rang him up and said he'd got some old Egyptian banknotes (he lived in Egypt at one stage) which he could have for free. So they agreed to meet in a pub and Zephaniah said, "You'll know me - I'm a black guy with dreadlocks." Whereupon the man said, "I don't do stuff with black people," and put the phone down.Spalding is Zephaniah's base for about seven months a year; the rest of the time he lives in China. He was led to China originally by his love of martial arts: he wanted to train with the monks of the Shaolin temple in Henan province who he believes practise the purest form of kung fu. He loved it and returned every year till eventually he bought his own flat in Beijing. He has written his last three novels there, although they are all set in Newham.Writing novels for teenagers seems to have taken over from writing poems for the past few years, and he admits that he feels "very embarrassed" about his lack of productivity. But poems either come or they don't. Sometimes he'll hear a phrase and think, "That could be a poem," and stop whatever he is doing to write it. Or actually not write it - he is too dyslexic. He composes it all in his head and memorises it. Sometimes poems come to him in dreams. "Rong Radio came to me at three o'clock in the morning - and it's a long complicated poem with lots of different rhythms in it - almost as though I'd been dreaming it. It sounds a bit airy-fairy but it's really true. I woke up and it was just there, the whole poem. That also happened with Naked. I think some of the best ones, it's like I've got to give birth to it. I can't sit down at the desk with a blank piece of paper. I'd much rather go and play football or run, just do something, and hope it will inspire me. You cannot force poetry, you cannot. But when I'm writing a novel, now that's different, I can sit down with a blank piece of paper and know I'm going to get from A to B. It takes over for a year or so and I find it very difficult to do anything else."And he's always doing something - writing novels, plays, making records, radio programmes, working with musicians, doing poetry readings (he has a new tour starting in February). He also does a lot of unpaid work: campaigning for victims of injustice, or animal rights or whatever. In the past, he used to do beer commercials (although he doesn't drink) to fund his work with children in the South African townships, but now he doesn't need to. Although his income fluctuates from year to year, he knows he'll never starve. He has no mortgage, no major outgoings; "living all on my own, having nobody to love, nobody to spend money on - though I give a bit of money to my mum - I don't need much to live on." So he can afford to turn down work he doesn't fancy. He has twice refused to go on I'm a Celebrity, and Celebrity Big Brother, and, when asked to act in films, always insists on reading the whole script so, "if I'm the black man who walks in and says, 'Where's my deal, man? What's going down here?' I say no."For someone who spent his teens in and out of approved school, borstal, prison (mainly for stealing), Zephaniah is almost absurdly respectable nowadays. His body is his temple. He doesn't drink, smoke, eat meat, use drugs (he says few Rastas do), doesn't have any vices. "I used to have this motto which was that at least once a day, every day, you should do something illegal. But now I can't find anything illegal to do, I can't get myself arrested! A policeman stopped me the other day and said, 'I saw you coming down the A1 and you were on a mobile phone.' I said, 'Search me then - I don't have a mobile phone.' And he saw me being so confident and said, 'Oh all right.' And then he goes, 'Are you the poet?' So you see - I can't even get framed any more!" But when he is stopped by the police, he insists on being addressed as Dr Zephaniah, which his 13 honorary doctorates entitle him to do.The eldest of eight children - but only the eldest by minutes because he has a twin sister, Velda - he grew up in Handsworth, Birmingham. His mother was a nurse from Jamaica, his father a postman from Barbados. When he was nine his mother ran away from her husband, taking Benjamin but leaving the other seven children behind. It's still a touchy subject. His siblings, he says, hate him talking about it. "They say, 'Why are you washing our dirty linen in public? Dad wasn't such a bad man.' They think of him as a hero because he raised seven children all on his own. But my mum and I, we saw another side of him. When my mum left the house, she left because she felt her life was in danger - that's what she felt and that's what I saw. There was something my mum said to me once and I suppose it's true, that when my father started, the rest of the kids ran for shelter - they ran one way, but I ran towards my father, shouting 'Leave her alone!' So when he turned on my mother, he kind of turned on me, too. And I know when I ran out the door with my mother, we couldn't find the rest of the kids - they were all hiding in cupboards. So just me and my mum went. But listen - I went back to my primary school the other day, and my mother was in tears. She said that when she left the other kids, she used to come to the school gate and watch them playing, but know she couldn't get them. And that image, to me, was just so powerful - her at the gate, hiding, looking at her children."Growing up with his mum, detached from his siblings, dyslexic, and often the only black boy in school, Zephaniah developed a love of animals that made him turn vegetarian at 11 and vegan at 13. "I didn't even know what the word meant. I just knew that I didn't want to eat animals - it was a real gut feeling. At the time I was in a school where I was getting so much racism, I found comfort in animals. A playground can be the loneliest place in the world when all the kids are playing and nobody will talk to you, so when a cat comes along, you play with the cat, you know? And then the cat comes again the next day and brings a couple of his friends, and you form a community. So that's where my love of animals started, and that was when I went vegetarian. And later on I decided that I just didn't want anything to do with any animal product." He is patron of the Vegan Society, and has written some great poems about animal rights, especially the one beginning, "Be nice to yu turkeys dis christmas" which brings him a crop of extra royalties every Christmas - although he always makes a point of being out of the country then.He first performed his poetry in church, aged 10, and by 15 was well known as a dub poet in Birmingham. But at 22 he decided he wanted a bigger pond and to perform to white audiences as well as black. So he went round the alternative comedy circuit in London, asking comedians such as Alexei Sayle if he could read a poem as part of their set - Dis Policeman Keeps On Kicking Me To Death always went down well. His first collection of poetry, Pen Rhythm, was published in 1980 and there have been six more since, as well as four novels for teenagers, six albums, numerous recorded readings and radio programmes, as well as all his work for the British Council.In his great poem Naked, he says, "I do all dis stuff for my mother and she cries because I will not go to church." Is that still true? "Yes. I think deep down she wishes I could have been a good Christian boy but there's more to it than just that. In the poem it's a metaphor for many things - that I am trying to do something for my people, but I'm not conforming." His mother still worries that he hasn't got a proper job, but at least now she's stopped telling him to cut his dreadlocks and find a nice girlfriend - she has given up on that.He married in his twenties but his wife left him after 12 years - "That was the worst thing that had ever happened to me" - and since then he has lived alone. "I love my independence, I love knowing that I can go anywhere without having to consult anybody. But I must admit - and this is a real personal dilemma and I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with it - that deep down my biggest fear is growing old alone. I always think that when you grow old you should have some companionship. I don't know how I'm going to square that circle." I don't know either. I get the impression he is very lonely. When I met him in Newham he said he'd just heard that a friend of his, an Urdu poet called Musarat Ahmed, was in hospital with throat cancer and he was going to visit her. Later, when I rang to thank him for the interview, he told me, almost in tears, that she had had her tongue removed. He talked about it at length and I was saying "How awful, how awful," but also thinking, how odd that he is telling me, a virtual stranger.In Naked he talks about the pain of being childless - "I need babies to recite to/ I need babies to recite to me/ my life is full of lonely childless eternities/ where only poetry gives me life." He first suspected he was infertile as a teenager when "We were knocking about and not using condoms and everybody was getting pregnant left and right and centre but my girlfriends never did. So I just had this feeling and then at one point I thought, 'Right, let's go and get tested,' and they said 'You're infertile'. They said that part of me hadn't developed - the water's there but there's no sperm in it." In the mid-1990s he agreed to go on a programme about male infertility with Professor Robert Winston, hoping that Winston could make him fertile, but Winston confirmed that he had "no sperm count, absolutely none, and it's never going to happen". He consoles himself with the thought of the hundreds of children who write to him, who come to his readings in schools, who chat to him on the streets of Newham or wait for him outside the Newham Bookshop. "So that makes up for it - or that's what I tell myself anyway."He gets on with children because he still thinks of himself as a child. He freaked out when he turned 50 in April and Saga sent him their magazine. "I couldn't believe I was 50. I still can't. And I don't allow my nephews and nieces to call me uncle - they call me Benji and I'm their mate. They tell me their problems, they tell me things they don't tell their mum and dad. I don't feel 50 - there's still something very childish or childlike inside me. I ride my bike like a kid you know, I love doing wheelies, I love climbing trees, I love exploring - I still love that stuff."Lots of his friends, he says have "mellowed" - people who used to be in punk bands now talk about interest rates and whether the neighbourhood is going down. They tell him, "Benjamin, when you have a mortgage and children, you'll know what it feels like." But of course he never will have a mortgage and children, he never will mellow. "Because I've got to tell you really honestly, if you look at a lot of my work in the early days, there was stuff I was really angry about, and deep down I still am angry about it. OK, I'm not getting arrested by police in the way that I used to, but there's lots of things in the world that I'm still angry about. I just think: why can't people see the bigger picture and not just think about themselves?"• Watch Benjamin Zephaniah perform Rong Radio at benjaminzephaniah.com/content/304.phpLife storyBorn Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah in Birmingham, 1958. Grew up in Jamaica and Handsworth. Expelled from school aged 13. Personal life Was married to Amina, a theatre administrator for more than 10 years, now divorced.Career 1968 Gave his first public performance in a church in Birmingham at the age of 10. 1980 Published his first book of poems, Pen Rhythm. Following its successful reception, three editions were published. His poetry, he says, came out of the rhythms of Jamaica and "street politics".1982 Received international acclaim for his reggae album, Rasta, which featured a tribute to Nelson Mandela and led to a meeting with the future South African president. 1990 Played Moses in the film Farendj1991 Dread Poets Society, his first television play, was screened by the BBC.1999 Published his first novel, Face2002 Published poetry collection We Are Britain.2007 Published latest novel, Teacher's Dead.Poetryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

AA Gill

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

Time was when Adrian Gill's daily diet consisted of Benylin and vodka. Then, aged 30 and on the brink of an early death, he reinvented himself. Some may wish he hadn't - such is the reputation of restaurant critic AA Gill in his cappuccino years

Lauren Laverne

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

The Culture Show is back this week (hooray!) with its 101st show, but in a new, supposedly better time slot - 10pm on Tuesdays - which, of course, means worse. One of the many joys of The Culture Show, I always thought, was that it came at a time - 7pm - when you expected to find only pap on television and suddenly there was this sparkling jewel in the surrounding sludge. Apparently, the later time slot counts as a promotion (new younger audience, blah blah blah, usual rubbish), but it doesn't lift the whole evening the way the early slot used to. I suppose being after the watershed means they can have more sex'n'violence, but they don't actually need it - they managed to cover The Wicker Man ('the Citizen Kane of British horror') and even A Clockwork Orange before kiddies' bedtime.Another ominous development is that the producers have been asking hundreds of people - 'real' people as well as profoundly unreal ones like the Duchess of York - to define culture. This is a mistake. Culture is one of those concepts that benefits from being kept a bit fuzzy around the edges. Is fashion culture? Is advertising? Who cares as long as it's interesting?But again, that's one of the great virtues of The Culture Show - it has never tried to define precisely what it does. When Andrew Graham-Dixon flies round in a helicopter admiring, say, the Cerne Abbas giant or Portsmouth's Spinnaker Tower, when Mark Kermode treats us to a history of British skiffle or nominates his 'best Antipodean killer sheep movie of the year', when Paul McCartney serenades Lauren Laverne or she, nine months pregnant, pulls a gun on Quentin Tarantino, we know we are not in standard BBC Kulture mode. For the last Man Booker Prize, they took piles of the shortlisted novels to a tiny Scottish village called Comrie - chosen, they blithely admitted, only because it was picturesque - and tried to hand them out to villagers. Many of them reacted as if someone had tried to hand them a snake. It certainly made a change from normal BBC Booker coverage.The great strength of the show, on BBC2, is the Laverne/Kermode double act - she so perky and pretty, he so grumpy and sour. His head-banging anguish when she tried to tell him Notting Hill was a good film was a joy to behold. They are both brilliant interviewers as well as presenters, though actually the best Culture Show interview was Graham-Dixon's with David Lynch. This was memorable not only because of Lynch's extraordinary hand flutterings, but also because it had bits of voiceover with AG-D's private thoughts about what Lynch might say or do next, which I thought seemed to offer a whole new future for television interviewing. It is this willingness to experiment and play with formats that makes The Culture Show so thrilling. I do hope its new slot doesn't consign it to the fusty bin of standard late-night arts coverage. Keep it fresh, keep it innovative and please keep it early.TelevisionTelevisionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Giles Deacon

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

Giles Deacon is so normal, so nice, so friendly, he was beginning to lull me into thinking that the fashion world was not as demented as I'd always assumed. We had a nice lunch at Shoreditch House and then he was showing me round his studio in East London's Brick Lane, where a dozen assistants were working away diligently - some at computers, some at sewing machines, some at pattern tables. He made a point of introducing me to each by name, and I was impressed by their air of quiet concentration and their obvious affection for Giles. And then I noticed one particular girl, who was holding a yellow inflatable armband (the sort children wear for swimming) and wielding a pair of tweezers. 'Giles!' I squeaked. 'What is that girl doing?' 'Ah,' he smiled, 'she is sticking Swarovski crystals onto the nozzle of an inflatable armband.' 'Yes, I thought that's what she was doing. But, umm, why?' 'To decorate it,' he said, as if it was the most normal activity in the world. But who on earth would want a crystal-decorated armband? 'Well, [long pause for thought] Victoria Beckham might. If she was drowning!' And Giles and his team crack up.I rest my case - fashion is completely mad. And yet Giles Deacon, who is one of our top fashion designers (British Designer of the Year 2006) - seems completely sane. He is a tall, loping, bespectacled 39-year-old, who wears ordinary clothes (jeans and T shirts, Converse trainers) and speaks with a soft Cumbrian accent. His hobbies are swimming, hiking and gardening (he is big on gunnera) and he describes his social life as meeting mates in the pub or going to Marks & Spencer in the Angel, Islington, or Waitrose on Holloway Road. He usually only goes to fashion parties when he has to receive or present an award. Oh yes, and he is straight, which is quite unusual in the fashion world.He says he doesn't see why fashion designers have to live on some other planet. 'That era of designers being away with the fairies is gone... You've got to live in the real world.' He shudders at the memory of once going to interview Karl Lagerfeld for Elle - his appointment was for 9.30am and he didn't finally get to see Kaiser Karl till 6pm. 'I just thought that was a little rude,' he says mildly. 'I mean he's an amazingly talented designer, but as a person to talk to... you're not chatting, you're listening to a well-practised, weird performance. And he was really foul to Lily Cole, who was modelling for the shoot, and I thought a man his age pressurising a 17-year-old girl was terribly unattractive.' You don't have to be a dictator, he insists. He takes pride in running a happy studio, where nearly all his full-time staff have been with him from the beginning. 'It's almost like a family in that you have your family rows, but everyone works together. We have breakfast at the studio sometimes and everyone gets working at about 11 and we all try to have lunch together and then we have fittings and usually a mini-row in the afternoon. Then 7.30 is wine time and everyone trundles off home. And it really works in terms of getting the best of the creative force. Because I'd worked in studios all round the world, and I kind of knew how I didn't want it to run, having worked in some that were pretty autocratic, almost to the point of being bullying. Whereas if you work as a team, you get the best out of everyone.'He seems so sure of what he is doing that it's odd to think he only became a fashion designer by accident: 'I backed into it - but I think casual careers are rather jolly.' He grew up near Ullswater in the Lake District, where his father worked in agricultural sales and his mother was a housewife, and their house was three miles from the nearest village. He had an older sister, but she was too old for him to play with and he spent most of his free time roaming the countryside alone - he thinks in retrospect those long periods of solitude nourished his imagination. At nine, he took up riding and became a keen competitor in junior dressage events, but he had to give up at 15 because it became too expensive to compete at senior level. And he wasn't interested in just riding for pleasure - he needed that competitive edge.The only thing that marred his otherwise idyllic childhood was school - a private boys' school near Barnard Castle, County Durham where, 'I wasn't kind of morosely, suicidally unhappy but I never found my footing there at all. It was terribly sports-oriented and I only really liked cross-country running because you could hide. I hated that sort of northern rugger-buggerness.' Things improved in the sixth form, when girls joined the school, but, he concludes, 'Single-sex private schools, especially in the middle of nowhere on a bleak hill in County Durham - I don't think they make sense.'As a teenager, he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He was always drawing, but he didn't even sit art GCSE. He thought he might like to be a marine biologist so he took science A-levels, but failed them. So then he was scrabbling round to find a college, any college, that would take him, and a friend of his mother's suggested he should try art school. He got a place on an art foundation course at Harrogate only because they had a late vacancy. His portfolio at the time consisted mainly of drawings of mice. But, once on the foundation course, he quickly gravitated to the fashion department because it seemed the most fun. 'It wasn't so laboured. Fashion was spontaneous and about getting things done.'From there, he went on to St Martin's college in London and loved it - loved the work, loved being in London (even though he was living in a dismal squat in Tottenham), and loved seeing all the Soho characters in the streets around St Martin's. He saw Francis Bacon walking down Greek Street almost the first day he arrived, and he became part of his audience at the French pub - he remembers that Bacon always smelled of Vim because he cleaned his teeth with it and 'He just sat in the bar, chatting away to folk, moving from being quite growly to quite comic to telling you to f*** off. It was great.'At St Martin's, Deacon was one of the stars of an exceptionally starry generation - Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Luella Bartley, Stella McCartney - and he also met stylist Katie Grand, who remains his great friend and champion. Katie Grand remembers her first sight of Deacon in the students' bar - 'He was of course very tall and handsome and kind of sure of himself and all the women tutors were fluttering around him'. She was impressed by his drawings and then knocked out by his graduation show - 'It was really phenomenal. I remember sitting there thinking, "that's so clever, that's so impressive".' But later, when she became his girlfriend, she found that, 'He was a nightmare to go out with, because he's so good at spending time by himself. He's very happy on his own with a sketchbook and a pint of beer, the most self-sufficient person I've ever come across.'He graduated in 1992 and there was talk, even then, that he should start his own label. But in fact he waited a long time. He worked for Jean-Charles de Castelbajac in Paris, and for Debenhams in London; he did illustrations for Dazed and Confused, and art-directed album covers for his girlfriend Beth Orton. Then Katie Grand recommended him as head designer to Bottega Veneta, an established Italian leather goods firm that wanted to revamp its image. His first show in 2000 made a huge impact and established BV as a hot label - so much so that Tom Ford of Gucci persuaded his backers to buy BV. Their next move was to sack Giles Deacon. To outsiders it certainly looked as though Tom Ford deliberately killed off a rival, but Deacon doesn't see it that way: 'Actually I think the truth is that Tom Ford thought it was a really great brand, irrespective of where we'd taken it to - that was almost irrelevant. He'd been aware of BV for years, because he's a very savvy, intelligent businessman as well as a good designer. And Gucci were in a very bullish period where they were doing lots of acquisitions, and they thought "We can turn this into another Hermès". And he was absolutely right because it's been phenomenally successful.'So, sacked from BV, Deacon took a holiday with friends in the States and then went back to freelancing in London. His career was 'not going anywhere, really. Only backwards, slowly.' And then he collapsed with a mystery infection which meant he was in hospital for many weeks. It turned out to be an infected saliva gland but it took some time to diagnose, 'and it's incredibly dangerous because of the speed at which it spreads - they were very worried that it would spread into my brain. So I ended up in the Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital for quite some time, on three antibiotic drips, and totally out of it. And being sat in a ward full of guys who'd had tracheotomies or emphysema and you're just sitting there thinking "Ohmigod, what is going on?" There was a guy my age on a ventilator machine reading a Maeve Binchy novel - the Maeve Binchy was the final straw! So I spent a lot of time lying on my back thinking, "What am I going to do with my life?"'The answer was that he should do what people had been telling him to do ever since St. Martin's - start his own label. He used his savings and a bank loan to make his first collection and showed it at London Fashion Week in February 2004. Katie Grand rustled up an incredible galaxy of international supermodels on the catwalk - Karen Elson, Eva Herzigova, Erin O'Connor, Nadja Auermann, Lily Cole, Linda Evangelista - and the fashion editors all came and duly fainted in coils. Since then, all his shows have been raved about and in 2006 he was voted British Designer of the Year.As it happens I saw one of his early shows when I was covering British Fashion Week in 2005 and remember being struck by how grown-up his clothes seemed compared to all the other stuff I saw. They were less overtly sexy but had a sort of mystery and femininity that others lacked. He says, 'I do like designing clothes that are - not exactly lofty but intellectual in their sexiness. It's not about getting your boobs out everywhere - that's never really been an interest of mine.'He thinks of that particular show as his 'Givenchy collection' because he was in the running for the top job at Givenchy at the time. Was he disappointed not to get it? 'Yes, in one sense, of course - the prospect of working for a Parisian couture house would be amazing - but I've gone on to do lots of other more personal things. And I think the world's moved on a lot and it's time for some new brands and labels to be established. I would have had to give up my own label if I'd gone to Givenchy - that was one of the major sticking points. And when you've worked so hard to develop a business from scratch in a relatively short space of time, you just don't want to let that go so quickly.'Since then he has doubled his turnover every year. But he has been deliberately slow to expand. 'I'd seen so many people get in trouble when they took on huge orders right at the beginning and then couldn't deliver. The American stores are particularly strict - you have to hit all these times and targets and if you're late, you start getting fined. And if you don't get good sell-through first season, they drop you just like that. So I was very cautious about only taking on a few new stores each season - usually three to five - and we now sell to 34 stores worldwide.' His markets include the United States, France, Russia, pretty much all of the Middle East, Hong Kong, China, but not Japan, not Germany and - much to his regret, because he likes going there - not Australia.His clothes sell for from £500 for a top and £4,000-5,000 for an evening dress, but he says that now, with the recession, he will concentrate on the middle range, and aim to sell most clothes at £1,000-£1,500. He also does two or three couture pieces a year, which can cost over £40,000, but he says that's not expensive, given that they involve multiple fittings and months of work. He has made dresses for Kylie Minogue, Scarlett Johansson, Drew Barrymore, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Thandie Newton, Princess Beatrice, Lady Gabriella Windsor, and Victoria Beckham ('She's really brilliant to chat to, hilarious, very smart, very straightforward - I really like Victoria'). He is currently working on a dress for Dasha Zhukova, Roman Abramovich's partner, to wear for the opening of her gallery in Moscow. He says making dresses for special events is fine - it's wedding dresses he dreads. 'For an event, they want to spend a fortune, have three fittings, fly in from wherever, you make them a cracking gown which fits perfectly, they feel fantastic and it's "Great - let's go". But you get the same person wanting a wedding dress, and it's a totally different discipline. They don't actually want to listen to you because they've been planning it for years and years - it's almost like you've become just a dressmaker. And they can't make up their minds and then their mother wants to see it, and my head starts spinning at that point.' He says even the wedding dress he made for his sister was a disaster, but luckily she has forgiven him.Apart from his own label and all these expensive couture clothes, he also makes a really cheap line for New Look, with skirts from £25, T-shirts from £15 - and enjoys it so much he has just renewed his contract for another two years. 'I do believe in the democracy of design,' he says, 'and we work really hard to make it as good as possible for the price. When I was first getting involved with New Look some people said, "You've got to be really careful, you might damage your brand" and I was thinking "Rubbish - if it's good, with all the work we put into it, why should it damage the brand?".' However, a similar contract that he had with Daks (one of those olde English labels, originally Dad's slacks, now Japanese-owned) was not a success and has not been renewed.He takes on consultancies, such as for Daks and New Look, or one-off jobs like designing a BlackBerry pouch for Carphone Warehouse, to help sustain cash flow in his own company. This is the great problem for fashion houses, he explains, and where many British designers come to grief - you have to pay your staff and overheads all year round but you only get two paydays a year, after the collections, and it is very hard to keep the ball rolling, let alone find money to expand. He still wholly owns his company, but has got to the point where he feels he must sell some shares to get more investment. It's a big decision and one he is nervous about. He's already had discussions with a few potential investors, who looked fine on paper but 'it just didn't feel right emotionally so I didn't go there - it's such an important thing to have that gut feeling. To have to hand over shares in the company I started up - it's quite a thing.' But he is in talks with an investor at the moment and thinks it should work out.Is he very ambitious? 'I am, in a quiet way. But I've never been money-driven. I've had to become much more financially aware, but through necessity really. I really like doing good work and working with good people - that's the thing that drives me. But as things have gone on, you have to analyse - do I want a get-out clause? Do I want to sell my company for £5 million? Do I want to sell a percentage of shares to an investor so we can open 10 stores worldwide? Do I want that, or do I want it to remain much smaller and much quieter? Or do I want to take it to a point where other people can take over and I can be in more like a consultancy role? There comes a point in your life where you do think about things like that because otherwise you're just going round in a hamster wheel. Things do need to move on, don't they?'Katie Grand says he's been sending her a lot of drawings of hamsters lately. He is obviously at a crossroads, approaching 40, wondering which way to go. He says he needs to achieve a better work-life balance. He would like to get married, have children, but he's been working so frantically hard the past few years, he's had no time for relationships. In his twenties, he had a succession of high-profile girlfriends - Beth Orton, Katie Grand, Sophie Dahl - but he hasn't had a serious girlfriend for the past four years. 'I know it's an easy excuse to say "because I've been so busy", but the self-imposed work regime somehow takes over - and of necessity, too, to sort situations out. I mean, over the past five years it's been so intense - we've had many periods when we've worked from 7.30 in the morning till 9.30 or 10 at night for months on end. And I put so much focus and energy into that, I often just get home and go to sleep. To then put the same energy and focus into a relationship - which I would want to do - I'd find that very difficult. So I think I need to temper one down to accelerate the other.'Fashionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

John Prescott

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

I thought John Prescott was bound to shout at me, if not throw punches. He has a history of bullying women journalists - he gave my colleague Rachel Cooke a hard time and once actually summoned the Times's Mary Ann Sieghart to his office so he could shout at her. Given that I recently reviewed his autobiography, Prezza, with something less than rapture, I fully expected to get the same treatment - he might conceivably have resented the description 'bog-standard illiterate bruiser'. But actually he had a great beaming smile stitched to his face almost the whole time I was with him; I found it disconcerting. Something else I found disconcerting was the habit first recorded by Rachel Cooke. When she met him, he hoiked one leg over the arm of his chair so that what she politely called his 'pelvis' was pointing at her like a gun. She said it was like a Desmond Morris seminar on mating. I assumed he did it because he fancied Rachel, but then he did exactly the same with me. He looked so uncomfortable, I wanted to say, 'There, there, you've shown us your impressive manhood - now sit up straight.'His office at the House of Commons is the sort of den any schoolboy would envy. One whole table is covered with model ships and planes, there is a line of model trains on the window ledge, and paintings of the cruise liners he worked on around the walls. There are also pictures of Ernest Bevin and Clem Attlee, a statuette of Nye Bevan, another of a miner - I think if you saw the room on Through the Keyhole you might guess it was Prescott's.

Boris Johnson

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

Interview: Since he became Mayor of London, Boris Johnson has shed his buffoon image and discovered a new dedication to work. The key, he tells Lynn Barber, is overcoming the need to be liked

Gary Hume

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

His trademark images made with household paint and draught excluder now sell for £250,000 each. But life hasn't always been so easy for Gary Hume. The YBA talks about stealing electricity, the boredom of painting hospital doors and why all he wants now is a little peace and quiet

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

The actress and model has lived a life of unparalleled excess: heroin addiction, alcoholism and affairs with Brian Jones and Keith Richards during her time on the road with the Stones. Now, as a recovering addict, and keen allotment holder, she reflects on the lost years and her journey back from the brink. By Lynn Barber

Delia Smith

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

Delia Smith is back - with a new BBC series and a book of recipes based on convenience foods. Lynn Barber talks to Britain's best loved TV cook about perfectionism, going to church and the wonders of instant mash

Antony Gormley

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

When the Angel of the North was unveiled in 1998, he became the most popular sculptor in Britain almost overnight. But what is it that draws him again and again to cover his own body in Vaseline and wrap it in clingfilm, asks Lynn Barber. It all goes back to his childhood, he says ...

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:52:07 +0000

The world's best female architect is sought - after everywhere - except Britain. Why? 'I'm not part of that boys' network'. Lynn Barber meets the hugely talented Zaha Hadid