David Bowie
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Julien TempleSaturday, 03 November 2012
Julien Temple’s directing career has been struck seemingly stone-dead twice. After working with Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle (1979), then again after the flop big-budget British jazz musical Absolute Beginners... Read more... |
Ian Hunter, Shepherds Bush EmpireSaturday, 20 October 2012
Can a septuagenarian wear skinny trousers? It is not a question that I ask myself very often, but it was my first thought on seeing the frighteningly fit 73-year-old Ian Hunter stroll onstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire last night. Life in America... Read more... |
10 Questions for Ian HunterMonday, 03 September 2012
Ian Hunter’s new album, When I’m President, is an almost obscenely vibrant piece of work for a man who – despite that impossibly golden mop of hair – is now 73 years old. But then Hunter has always been a rock'n'roll survivor. Born in Shropshire in... Read more... |
David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust, BBC FourSaturday, 23 June 2012
Given that Ziggy Stardust was a figment of David Bowie’s imagination it seems fitting that, for all intents and purposes, Bowie himself now appears to be a figment of our imagination. What’s he up to these days? Is he still living in New York with... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: David Bowie, The Association, Boban I Marko Marković OrkestarSunday, 10 June 2012
David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars 40th Anniversary EditionHoward MaleLet’s start with the bombshell. Yes, Ziggy is a landmark Seventies album but it’s not the masterpiece it should or even could have been,... Read more... |
Punk Britannia, BBC FourSaturday, 02 June 2012
“We didn’t have a real agenda. We just wanted to play some tunes and have a good time.” Thus spoke the immaculately suited but still mischievous-looking Mick Jones. And thank goodness he said it because, from the off - even before the off - I didn’t... Read more... |
Downton Abbey, ITV1/ Lulu - Something to Shout About, BBC TwoSunday, 16 October 2011
I suspect writer Julian Fellowes's guilty secret is that he has an attic stuffed with novels from Mills & Boon, such are the luridly romantic plotlines and cliché-flirting characters in Downton Abbey. If you think you can see it coming, then you... Read more... |
Imagine - U2: From the Sky Down, BBC OneMonday, 10 October 2011
Never knowingly under-mythologised, U2 have chosen to mark the 20th anniversary of their album Achtung Baby with this sizeable documentary about the making of the record and the traumatic soul-searching that went into it. It dovetails neatly... Read more... |
Interview: Film Director Nicolas RoegThursday, 23 June 2011
There is something rather bloody-minded and heroic about Nicolas Roeg’s films with their fractured narratives, macabre imagery and extremes of sex and violence which place him, along with film-makers such as Ken Russell and Roger Corman, within a... Read more... |
Top of the Pops: The Story of 1976, BBC FourFriday, 01 April 2011
Thank goodness for selective memory, because although I remember that pop music had something of a mid-life crisis between the sequin explosion of glam rock and the spittle tsunami of punk rock, I had been blissfully spared comprehensive recall of... Read more... |
DVD: The Man Who Fell to EarthThursday, 31 March 2011
It was bonkers then and it’s bonkers now. Nic Roeg’s space-power-environment fantasy was really only about David Bowie in the lead. In one respect, he didn’t disappoint. Caught between mid-1970s creative cul-de-sac and bodily burn-out, he resembled... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Photographer Mick RockSaturday, 06 November 2010
Mick Rock (b 1948) captured some of rock's most provocative and memorable images: David Bowie at the height of his Ziggy Stardust androgyny; Debbie Harry looking every inch the Marilyn Monroe of punk; Lou Reed sweating beneath his Kabuki make-up -... Read more... |
