GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

Over reliance on caricature, is endemic in both. Kay as Penn in Carlito’s Way. Jack as the wide eyed drug fiend Paddy over the edge of the 60s nightmare. The sort a guy who swung tween Altamont bikers, Manson psychos and NIxon carpet bombers. Swearing surfeit - it wears, loses its affect. Scorsese has surrended his poetry, to so much mobile phone stuff and porocedural guff. Set up as an opera opening scene with Jack in silhouette moving thrugh corner store to the drugged langour of Gimme Shelter is immense. But thereafter the character portraits fail to live up to the bar. It all ends very messily, but a certain amount of “Fun” to be had in both.

Three cheers for Nick Cave!! Here is the Moustachioed Man on selling musical soul for a mess of advertising. Saint Nicholas was speaking in The Observer Music Monthly’s Jarvis Cocker chaired debate (October 2006 no 38) on the iniquity of musicians being drowned out by what George Orwell called “the sound of the stick that stirs the sick bucket” “I personally find that offensive. Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ was used for a car ad. I used to drive around in my car when I was 19 screaming that song, and it had an anti-establishment purpose. For it now to be appropriated by the advertising industry … I think that’s fucked. I don’t know what situation the people who have written the music are in, if they need the money or … I’m not trying to take the moral high ground but I wouldn’t allow my music to be used in that way.” By the same token isn’t another gross  insult to the sanctity of music the now  compulsory Lager company advertising spot reserved for  minstrels on the London Underground (the YounYounYouTube to those of us who don’t get out much or think buses are black with yellow lights on the front)? I mean there might be  a case for some sort of control (and, by the same token, there might not) but this alcohol company and another one  wants to have its sticky imprint over all over rock n roll. AND ITS NOT EVEN GOOD BEER!! This new Residents album is a blast and a half. Tweedles, Mute Records, released 30th October. I could write all I know about The residents on Nick Cave’s forehead but I’ve been suckered by this album. Recorded in Transylvania it incorporates a traveling circus, street musicians (the sort that I bet they aren’t sponsored by the Gnat’s Piss Makers) and church bells. The result is  like the soundtrack to a movie waiting to be made - a bad, mad trip into the diseased mind of an American Noir Villain come Total Shithead. The lead, spoken word, character goes deep into a lot of the areas the over stylised Jack Nicholson performance  in Departed merely touches on. And I like it when The Shithead has one of his many  poignant moments of reflection. “Sometimes I think I really don’t have any friends.. but then… I wonder” (track 5, Isolation) Indeed!