New U2 DVD characterized by hero worship of Bono
By Sydney Smith
Special to The Post and Courier
Thursday, May 14, 2009
I'm crazy about Bono and U2. I'm not talking about a little baby fan either: I had a poster of Bono in my college dorm room, I have an extra dessert for Bono's birthday every year (he turned 49 Sunday) and I won't stop talking about them once I start.
That said, I jumped for joy when I heard a new U2 DVD was being released this week. With the title "U2: A Rock Crusade," I envisioned something cutting recent performances with older shows, or perhaps something on the past few years while the band worked on its 2009 CD, "No Line on the Horizon." Whatever it would be, I was excited for anything U2 related to digest.
But it wasn't what I expected. It's a documentary, and a short one at that, coming in about 48 minutes long. A rock crusade, it is not. It would be more appropriately titled "Bono: A Philanthropic Crusade," or maybe something a little catchier.
After the opening few minutes, the other band members disappear from the screen, and Bono, lead singer, is the only U2 member mentioned.
The documentary, produced by Los Angeles-based Infinity Entertainment Group and unauthorized by the band, could pass for a BBC production stylistically. It is not about the band, but rather its frontman, and it's not about the music, but how the frontman uses his celebrity status to bring awareness to humanitarian causes he sees as important.
Old clips, interviews and narration mixed together illustrate many of the global causes Bono has involved himself in from relieving African debt to providing AIDS medications to poor countries. Regardless of personal opinions of Bono, it's hard to deny that he doesn't at least try to do good after seeing this. The documentary will hit you over the head in its praise for Bono. But most impressively, it provides a more subtle look at how Bono works with global leaders, uses his charisma and personal celebrity, and turns his ideas and goals into action. Bono has had enormous success getting support for his causes from leaders in the United States and the European Union.
The story is interesting, but the DVD is flawed. At times, it seemed not flashy enough, especially for Bono. U2 and Bono have used modern technology and advancing media to keep the band, their causes and their personal endeavors relevant over the years — just think about U2's graphically stimulating "Get on your Boots" video and marketing for the RED campaign as a few examples. Why would a DVD focusing on this savvy rock star come across like Musak at times?
For me though, the biggest hang-up wasn't the use of mostly older interviews, but the title and presentation. Going into this, I expected U2. Rock. Music. A little biography. I got Bono. Bono is good. Bono does good. Bono does well at doing good.
But, hey, did you know Bono has been nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a Grammy and the Nobel Peace Prize? Maybe you should check out a tribute of sorts to the only person to pull that off.
He sounds interesting.
source: postandcourier
16.5.09
4.5.09
Bono-fied Friends Helena Christensen and Ali Hewson - They were supermodel and campaigning supermom, respectively, and then Helena Christensen and Ali Hewson inspired each other to even greater things
April 30, 2009
By: Kevin Conley | Photograph by Matt Jones
Helena Christensen, left, and Ali Hewson in Edun
Helena Christensen was vacationing with her father in the south of France when Ali Hewson first invited them to stay at her place. It was the summer of 1991. Hewson had just had her second child, and her husband, Paul (whom she and nearly everyone else refer to by his stage name, Bono), was taking a break from recording “Achtung Baby” in Berlin. “I used to do my homework to loud U2 music,” Christensen says. “But Ali meant as much to me as Bono did because I already knew he must be inspired by a woman.”
Things have changed since then — Christensen has turned from supermodel to photographer, Bono has become nearly as famous for his diplomacy as for his music, and Hewson has started tinkering with her approach to the family’s second business — global relief. Through it all (including the births of Hewson’s third and fourth children and Christensen’s first), the two women have remained close, and their collaboration on the Hewsons’ latest project, the eco-fashion line Edun, has seen Christensen acting as unofficial brand ambassador, photographer and model. But perhaps most important of all, Edun is a new outlet for the two of them to inspire each other.
At first glance, the business plan for Edun, an organic-cotton fashion line connected to a beautifully photographed celebrity-ad campaign, looks suspiciously like the mission statement of a charitable operation. The business, with manufacturing operations in a constellation of developing nations that currently include Kenya, Mauritius, Peru, Tunisia and India, did grow directly out of Bono’s agitation on behalf of Africa. But the whole point of the Edun endeavor, Hewson says, is to make a profit — not because the executive board needs the money but to demonstrate to other entrepreneurs that it’s possible to do so in developing countries, paying fair wages and relying on local raw material entirely processed and manufactured by local labor, from start to finish. “We’re a tiny company, but we punch above our weight,” Hewson says. “And we don’t let Bono near the clothes.”
Designer Ali Hewson and husband, singer Bono of U2
Hewson has been throwing herself into relief efforts around the world for years — she has been especially active in the Chernobyl Children’s Project International. She also is a founder and partner with Bryan Meehan in an organic skin-care line based on community-trade principles. (Even the brand name, Nude‚ has something in common with Edun.) At Edun Hewson finds herself arranging presentations of the collections one day and meeting with sub-Saharan NGOs the next. The schedule astounds Christensen, who is no stranger to such shuttling. She’s been very active in her friend’s relief efforts — running a charitable auction in New York or donating the proceeds from her recent photo exhibit at the Dactyl gallery, in SoHo, to the Chernobyl project; appearing in Edun fashion shows in Dublin and Cork; and modeling the line in Harper’s Bazaar. But to a great extent, she’s proudest to simply offer an oasis in Hewson’s schedule, inviting her over whenever she’s in town.
At 20, Christensen’s high cheekbones and wide-set, unearthly blue eyes helped her become one of the original “supermodels”; at 40, the features have mellowed into a distinctive wryness. She’s a talker first, funny, opinionated; her high-ceilinged West Village apartment, with its long dinner table and tall stools arranged around a kitchen island, seems designed as a series of stages for casual conversation. But lately, she has turned to photography in earnest, and it was her photos of actors such as Sean Penn, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck that launched Edun’s “One” campaign, a sale of T-shirts funding AIDS relief to Lesotho, Africa.
Designer Ali Hewson and husband, singer Bono of U2Hewson has been throwing herself into relief efforts around the world for years — she has been especially active in the Chernobyl Children’s Project International. She also is a founder and partner with Bryan Meehan in an organic skin-care line based on community-trade principles. (Even the brand name, Nude‚ has something in common with Edun.) At Edun Hewson finds herself arranging presentations of the collections one day and meeting with sub-Saharan NGOs the next. The schedule astounds Christensen, who is no stranger to such shuttling. She’s been very active in her friend’s relief efforts — running a charitable auction in New York or donating the proceeds from her recent photo exhibit at the Dactyl gallery, in SoHo, to the Chernobyl project; appearing in Edun fashion shows in Dublin and Cork; and modeling the line in Harper’s Bazaar. But to a great extent, she’s proudest to simply offer an oasis in Hewson’s schedule, inviting her over whenever she’s in town.
At 20, Christensen’s high cheekbones and wide-set, unearthly blue eyes helped her become one of the original “supermodels”; at 40, the features have mellowed into a distinctive wryness. She’s a talker first, funny, opinionated; her high-ceilinged West Village apartment, with its long dinner table and tall stools arranged around a kitchen island, seems designed as a series of stages for casual conversation. But lately, she has turned to photography in earnest, and it was her photos of actors such as Sean Penn, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck that launched Edun’s “One” campaign, a sale of T-shirts funding AIDS relief to Lesotho, Africa.
Ali Hewson
The “One” campaign — that was a complicated shoot — with so many celebrities to fit in on a single day, one after the other. But it turned out to be a breeze, because Helena makes it all so easy. That’s what friendship is about in many ways. You become friends with someone because you see something in them that you admire. Apart from the fact that she’s just a 10 anyway, what’s great about Helena is her sense of style. Anytime you see her dressed, even casually, she’s got her own great understanding of fashion. And so when she wears Edun, it’s like a double compliment, because she wouldn’t wear it unless she liked it, and because with her strong sense of aesthetic, that approval has real value.
One of the reasons I like coming to New York is because I get to come to Helena’s after work at 6 o’clock, and I get a cup of tea, I get fed, I get talked to. She’s a one-woman show. She doesn’t even have a nanny. She’s able to organize her child, her private life, her business life — I think in the last week, she went to Frankfurt, she went to Milan.
She’ll always hit the funny side of any situation, and you can’t put her off. She just has unbelievable stamina. That’s Viking energy. You watch her, and you realize why the Vikings were so successful and how they conquered Ireland.
source: magazine.wsj
April 30, 2009
By: Kevin Conley | Photograph by Matt Jones
Helena Christensen, left, and Ali Hewson in Edun
Helena Christensen was vacationing with her father in the south of France when Ali Hewson first invited them to stay at her place. It was the summer of 1991. Hewson had just had her second child, and her husband, Paul (whom she and nearly everyone else refer to by his stage name, Bono), was taking a break from recording “Achtung Baby” in Berlin. “I used to do my homework to loud U2 music,” Christensen says. “But Ali meant as much to me as Bono did because I already knew he must be inspired by a woman.”
Things have changed since then — Christensen has turned from supermodel to photographer, Bono has become nearly as famous for his diplomacy as for his music, and Hewson has started tinkering with her approach to the family’s second business — global relief. Through it all (including the births of Hewson’s third and fourth children and Christensen’s first), the two women have remained close, and their collaboration on the Hewsons’ latest project, the eco-fashion line Edun, has seen Christensen acting as unofficial brand ambassador, photographer and model. But perhaps most important of all, Edun is a new outlet for the two of them to inspire each other.
At first glance, the business plan for Edun, an organic-cotton fashion line connected to a beautifully photographed celebrity-ad campaign, looks suspiciously like the mission statement of a charitable operation. The business, with manufacturing operations in a constellation of developing nations that currently include Kenya, Mauritius, Peru, Tunisia and India, did grow directly out of Bono’s agitation on behalf of Africa. But the whole point of the Edun endeavor, Hewson says, is to make a profit — not because the executive board needs the money but to demonstrate to other entrepreneurs that it’s possible to do so in developing countries, paying fair wages and relying on local raw material entirely processed and manufactured by local labor, from start to finish. “We’re a tiny company, but we punch above our weight,” Hewson says. “And we don’t let Bono near the clothes.”
Designer Ali Hewson and husband, singer Bono of U2
Hewson has been throwing herself into relief efforts around the world for years — she has been especially active in the Chernobyl Children’s Project International. She also is a founder and partner with Bryan Meehan in an organic skin-care line based on community-trade principles. (Even the brand name, Nude‚ has something in common with Edun.) At Edun Hewson finds herself arranging presentations of the collections one day and meeting with sub-Saharan NGOs the next. The schedule astounds Christensen, who is no stranger to such shuttling. She’s been very active in her friend’s relief efforts — running a charitable auction in New York or donating the proceeds from her recent photo exhibit at the Dactyl gallery, in SoHo, to the Chernobyl project; appearing in Edun fashion shows in Dublin and Cork; and modeling the line in Harper’s Bazaar. But to a great extent, she’s proudest to simply offer an oasis in Hewson’s schedule, inviting her over whenever she’s in town.
At 20, Christensen’s high cheekbones and wide-set, unearthly blue eyes helped her become one of the original “supermodels”; at 40, the features have mellowed into a distinctive wryness. She’s a talker first, funny, opinionated; her high-ceilinged West Village apartment, with its long dinner table and tall stools arranged around a kitchen island, seems designed as a series of stages for casual conversation. But lately, she has turned to photography in earnest, and it was her photos of actors such as Sean Penn, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck that launched Edun’s “One” campaign, a sale of T-shirts funding AIDS relief to Lesotho, Africa.
Designer Ali Hewson and husband, singer Bono of U2Hewson has been throwing herself into relief efforts around the world for years — she has been especially active in the Chernobyl Children’s Project International. She also is a founder and partner with Bryan Meehan in an organic skin-care line based on community-trade principles. (Even the brand name, Nude‚ has something in common with Edun.) At Edun Hewson finds herself arranging presentations of the collections one day and meeting with sub-Saharan NGOs the next. The schedule astounds Christensen, who is no stranger to such shuttling. She’s been very active in her friend’s relief efforts — running a charitable auction in New York or donating the proceeds from her recent photo exhibit at the Dactyl gallery, in SoHo, to the Chernobyl project; appearing in Edun fashion shows in Dublin and Cork; and modeling the line in Harper’s Bazaar. But to a great extent, she’s proudest to simply offer an oasis in Hewson’s schedule, inviting her over whenever she’s in town.
At 20, Christensen’s high cheekbones and wide-set, unearthly blue eyes helped her become one of the original “supermodels”; at 40, the features have mellowed into a distinctive wryness. She’s a talker first, funny, opinionated; her high-ceilinged West Village apartment, with its long dinner table and tall stools arranged around a kitchen island, seems designed as a series of stages for casual conversation. But lately, she has turned to photography in earnest, and it was her photos of actors such as Sean Penn, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Affleck that launched Edun’s “One” campaign, a sale of T-shirts funding AIDS relief to Lesotho, Africa.
Ali Hewson
The “One” campaign — that was a complicated shoot — with so many celebrities to fit in on a single day, one after the other. But it turned out to be a breeze, because Helena makes it all so easy. That’s what friendship is about in many ways. You become friends with someone because you see something in them that you admire. Apart from the fact that she’s just a 10 anyway, what’s great about Helena is her sense of style. Anytime you see her dressed, even casually, she’s got her own great understanding of fashion. And so when she wears Edun, it’s like a double compliment, because she wouldn’t wear it unless she liked it, and because with her strong sense of aesthetic, that approval has real value.
One of the reasons I like coming to New York is because I get to come to Helena’s after work at 6 o’clock, and I get a cup of tea, I get fed, I get talked to. She’s a one-woman show. She doesn’t even have a nanny. She’s able to organize her child, her private life, her business life — I think in the last week, she went to Frankfurt, she went to Milan.
She’ll always hit the funny side of any situation, and you can’t put her off. She just has unbelievable stamina. That’s Viking energy. You watch her, and you realize why the Vikings were so successful and how they conquered Ireland.
source: magazine.wsj
LEAVES IN THE WIND - WELCOME * EDGE * BACKGROUND * PROJECT * TEAM * MYTH * CONTACT
from the edge
Welcome
How to build homes responsibly in an area of natural beauty
like the Santa Monica Mountains?
This has been the prevailing question in the minds of all involved in every stage and aspect of planning the project at Sweetwater Mesa. The result is that the five homes designed for these 156 acres will be built on just over 1 acre of the total land, leaving most of the land untouched and in its natural state.
The homes being planned for Sweetwater Mesa will be some of the most environmentally sensitive buildings ever conceived of in Malibu.
These homes are designed to some of today's highest environmental standards. Solar energy will power the homes and heat the water. Water collection and treatment systems will enable re-use and extreme efficiency.
The innovative sustainability plans have the goal of attaining a LEED™(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold standard that very few homes today meet.
Wallace Cunningham, the homes' award-winning designer, has nestled each of the unique homes as carefully as possible into the natural landscape, minimizing their profile while maximizing the creative usefulness of interior and exterior spaces. The organic designs of the homes will make use of the soil and colors of the land, blending them into their surroundings to the greatest extent possible.
Award-winning landscape architect Pamela Burton completes the marriage of home and surroundings through her innovative planning and her strong commitment to sustainable landscape design.
Among the homes’ many environmentally friendly features are:
*California native landscaping
*Rainwater catchment system
*High-efficiency and low-flow water fixtures
*Onsite wastewater treatment
*Onsite electric vehicle charging
*Radiant floor heating system
*Passive cooling, natural ventilation, and daylighting
*Solar panels to heat water and provide electricity
*Recycled and renewable materials
*In bringing together the very best environmental, architectural and design principles, the owners have sought to create homes that will both set new standards and withstand the test of time.
We invite you to explore the website to learn more and to read a statement from The Edge, one of the homes' owners.
source: leaves in the wind
From the Edge
Dear friends,
Thanks for taking the time to look over the information on this website. I never thought I would have to resort to this form of communication, but because of recent inaccurate media coverage, I felt compelled to set the record straight.
I hope you will agree that my partners and I have worked diligently to design homes that meet the highest environmental standards; that fit appropriately and aesthetically into this beautiful part of Southern California; and that are truly remarkable examples of the best architecture and design.
Why did we go to so much effort? Because my family and I love Malibu. We’ve maintained a residence here for more than a decade, and once our new home is finished we expect to spend much of our time here. We want to create something that we can be proud of.
We all acknowledge and understand the concerns arising from our immediate neighbors and neighborhood about the disruption that any building project causes on daily lives. We take this into consideration and are doing our utmost at looking for ways to minimize this disruption.
I hope the facts and background we’ve included on this site will reassure anyone who may have concerns about our project. I know how quickly rumors can spread and misinformation can multiply. We’ve tried to address those as fully as possible.
The California coast is a true natural treasure, and I believe in responsible design that honors such a unique location. I am confident we have done just that.
Thank you again for visiting.
The Edge
source: leavesinthewind
from the edge
Welcome
How to build homes responsibly in an area of natural beauty
like the Santa Monica Mountains?
This has been the prevailing question in the minds of all involved in every stage and aspect of planning the project at Sweetwater Mesa. The result is that the five homes designed for these 156 acres will be built on just over 1 acre of the total land, leaving most of the land untouched and in its natural state.
The homes being planned for Sweetwater Mesa will be some of the most environmentally sensitive buildings ever conceived of in Malibu.
These homes are designed to some of today's highest environmental standards. Solar energy will power the homes and heat the water. Water collection and treatment systems will enable re-use and extreme efficiency.
The innovative sustainability plans have the goal of attaining a LEED™(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold standard that very few homes today meet.
Wallace Cunningham, the homes' award-winning designer, has nestled each of the unique homes as carefully as possible into the natural landscape, minimizing their profile while maximizing the creative usefulness of interior and exterior spaces. The organic designs of the homes will make use of the soil and colors of the land, blending them into their surroundings to the greatest extent possible.
Award-winning landscape architect Pamela Burton completes the marriage of home and surroundings through her innovative planning and her strong commitment to sustainable landscape design.
Among the homes’ many environmentally friendly features are:
*California native landscaping
*Rainwater catchment system
*High-efficiency and low-flow water fixtures
*Onsite wastewater treatment
*Onsite electric vehicle charging
*Radiant floor heating system
*Passive cooling, natural ventilation, and daylighting
*Solar panels to heat water and provide electricity
*Recycled and renewable materials
*In bringing together the very best environmental, architectural and design principles, the owners have sought to create homes that will both set new standards and withstand the test of time.
We invite you to explore the website to learn more and to read a statement from The Edge, one of the homes' owners.
source: leaves in the wind
From the Edge
Dear friends,
Thanks for taking the time to look over the information on this website. I never thought I would have to resort to this form of communication, but because of recent inaccurate media coverage, I felt compelled to set the record straight.
I hope you will agree that my partners and I have worked diligently to design homes that meet the highest environmental standards; that fit appropriately and aesthetically into this beautiful part of Southern California; and that are truly remarkable examples of the best architecture and design.
Why did we go to so much effort? Because my family and I love Malibu. We’ve maintained a residence here for more than a decade, and once our new home is finished we expect to spend much of our time here. We want to create something that we can be proud of.
We all acknowledge and understand the concerns arising from our immediate neighbors and neighborhood about the disruption that any building project causes on daily lives. We take this into consideration and are doing our utmost at looking for ways to minimize this disruption.
I hope the facts and background we’ve included on this site will reassure anyone who may have concerns about our project. I know how quickly rumors can spread and misinformation can multiply. We’ve tried to address those as fully as possible.
The California coast is a true natural treasure, and I believe in responsible design that honors such a unique location. I am confident we have done just that.
Thank you again for visiting.
The Edge
source: leavesinthewind
3.5.09
Island Records turns 50
The iconic company turns 50 this month. Its founder, Chris Blackwell, recalls how his tiny reggae label grew into a global phenomenon
May 3, 2009 - Rob Fitzpatrick
Grace Jones
There are three huge walls full of silver, gold and multiplatinum discs hung around the staircase that leads to the small, wood- panelled bar in Chris Blackwell’s Strawberry Hill hotel, 3,000ft up Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. U2, Bob Marley, Roxy Music, Grace Jones, Black Uhuru, Bob Dylan, Aswad and many, many more are all represented. But there’s one small picture — in fact, a copy of a picture — hanging behind the bar that means more to him than all the expensively framed awards combined. In the photograph, originally taken by Nathalie Delon, ex-wife of the actor Alain Delon, Blackwell, then just 33, sits next to Marley, his brightest, biggest star. Both men are laughing at some long-forgotten joke. It is the only image of the two alone together he has.
“Early on, I told Bob we would never have a picture taken,” he says as we shelter from the morning sun in his private garden set within the hotel’s grounds. “It was essential for what Bob represented that he had a black manager. Then one day, in September 1980, he turned up at my house in New York — he was with Cindy [Breakspeare, the Jamaican Miss World 1976] at the time — and there was a photographer present. Bob actually asked for a picture with me, and the guy took it. But my original was destroyed in a fire last year, and the photographer won’t give me a copy. He says it’s his pension. The really sad thing is, it was that very day that Bob told me he’d been diagnosed with cancer and had just six months to live.”
Marley died 28 years ago, in May 1981. “I loved him so very much,” he says. From the look on Blackwell’s face, it could have been yesterday.
Island Records is 50 years old this month, and Blackwell has just been named the most influential figure in the half-century of the British pop industry. In May 1959, though, he was simply the son of a wealthy Jamaican family whose trading interests ran to rum, sugar, coconuts and cattle. Just back from six months spent on the New York jazz scene, where he’d become friends with Miles Davis, Blackwell was working as a water-skiing instructor at the Half Moon hotel, on Montego Bay. It was there he first heard a blind Bermudan pianist called Lance Haywood, who played in the hotel bar every night. “He was a little like Oscar Peterson,” Blackwell says, “but more cocktail. I decided to record him, as that was my way to get closer to the music I loved. I pressed up 250 copies. I had a lot of stock for a long time! But I was in heaven — this was what I wanted to do.”
Then, as now, the Jamaican music scene was about records and the sound systems that played big open-air events every weekend, rather than bands and gigs. Blackwell began to feed this market, and soon he had three consecutive No 1s.
Suddenly, Island Records was a powerful voice in the quickly developing Jamaican music business. “This was the first popular music made by Jamaicans,” Blackwell says. “The sound systems and the radio stations loved them.”
Within weeks, all the B-sides had charted too. For a while, Blackwell, who, thanks to his local knowledge, had just accepted the post of production assistant on Dr No, had six songs in the Top 10. “The sound-system guys, like Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd [his nickname was derived from the 1940s Yorkshire cricket hero Alec Coxon], thought,‘Well, if this honky can make records, then so can we.’” he says. “Their records were the real thing, really rough. They knew their market and worked it.”
By 1962, Island Records’ smoother sounds were selling better to Jamaicans in England than to the ones back home. At the same time, the big producers were complaining about the bad treatment they were getting from UK record distributors. Blackwell put the two things together, moved Island Records to England and started promoting the records himself. In 1963 alone, he oversaw the release of more than 80 singles, each one selling between 10,000 and 15,000 copies, but the record that changed everything — the one that, to this day, is still a startlingly vibrant burst of pop genius — was Millie’s My Boy Lollipop. The daughter of a plantation overseer, Millie was just 17 when she recorded the single. Within weeks of its release in 1964, it had sold 600,000 copies. It went on to sell 6m.
“I went from bum to hero overnight,” Blackwell says. “Millie and I went to Hong Kong, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Singapore, Hawaii, all across America — the world opened up for me. It was the same time as the Beatles were breaking and this new world was exploding. This massive hit meant I was in the gang.”
It was while doing a TV show with Millie in Birmingham that Blackwell first saw the band who would change Island again. The Spencer Davis Group starred Steve Winwood, a 15-year-old multi-instrumentalist with a voice that amazed Blackwell. They would never sign to Island, though Blackwell produced their biggest hit, Keep on Running, and licensed it to the Fontana label. When they split in 1967, Winwood signed his new band, Traffic, to Island, and its reputation as an artist-centred label was born. In the same year, Blackwell signed the folk singer John Martyn and brought in Joe Boyd’s Witchseason Productions, which had Fairport Convention and the young singer-songwriter Nick Drake. Island signings Free, Mott the Hoople, King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Roxy Music all sold in huge quantities. Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman LP — “close to perfect” in Blackwell’s eyes — was a huge success, but there was room, too, for recordings of Tibetan bells and for artists like Blodwyn Pig and Amazing Blondel, whose appeal was somewhat more selective. Within a decade, Island had become highly influential.
In 1972, Jimmy Cliff, fresh from his success in the movie The Harder They Come, but near broke after spending so much time filming it, had asked Blackwell for £50,000 to stay with the label. Blackwell told him he’d make that figure soon enough, but Cliff wouldn’t, couldn’t wait. “I was devastated,” Blackwell says, “as I knew exactly what to do to break reggae music internationally. The character from that film needed to come alive — to step off the screen and onto the stage — but Cliff split.”
Ten days later, Bob Marley — “the real thing” — who had been stranded while on tour in the UK, walked into Blackwell’s office. “Bob had incredible charisma,” Blackwell says. “When he walked in a room, you knew about it. I gave the band £4,000 to make a record. I came down to Jamaica a few months later and the band played me the Catch a Fire album. It was one of the high points of my life.”
Reggae was still seen as novelty summer music; Blackwell was determined to launch Bob Marley and the Wailers as a black rock band, so he “messed with the recordings a little” to make their sound more palatable to the white rock audience. He knew the band had to tour, but only Bob was up for the challenge.
“He was a fighter. Bob’s father was white Jamaican, of English descent, but he only saw him once, so Bob grew up in a completely black world and suffered a lot for it. He was an outcast, a ‘brown boy’, but he thought black, took on the injustices and expressed them so beautifully. When he started to feel real success was happening for him, around the Exodus record, Bob could see he could touch people worldwide. Still now, when I travel in Africa and Asia, I carry Bob’s tapes, and because my name is on the sleeve, they act like a passport. I travelled through Africa without a single visa — that is an astonishing legacy.”
Four months before Marley visited Blackwell in New York, Island had signed a new Irish band, U2. “The thing I liked most about them was their name,” he laughs. “But they also had the sort of intelligence you must have for any longevity.”
By the mid-1980s, the band were so successful, they were able to bail Island out financially — the only time in history that’s happened. Blackwell was so grateful that he gave the band 10% of the company. They returned the favour by delivering The Joshua Tree, one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. By 1989, though, Blackwell had had enough. He sold Island to Polygram UK — now owned by Universal — for £272m. CD sales were still enormous, and nobody foresaw the problems the internet would bring. Since Blackwell sold the label, Island Records has had great success with PJ Harvey, McFly, Sugababes and, more recently, a rejuvenated Paul Weller.
“I couldn’t have started or sold a company in better years,” he says, barely able to contain a smile. “I navigated Island by input. My skill is to assimilate information. But that didn’t work in an increasingly corporate world, where people didn’t tell you what they really felt. I hate Universal — not in England, but the company in America is an example of the worst kind of bullshit corporate behaviour.” Of course, Blackwell still cares, still bangs the gong for the label he started, and is tremendously excited about this summer’s series of anniversary shows. He’s “particularly thrilled” that an artist like Amy Winehouse is on Island.
A helicopter buzzes above our heads. Blackwell is being picked up to go to a meeting at another of his hotels, the Goldeneye resort, which is arranged around Ian Fleming’s old villa.
“Island happened during a golden age of music,” he says, gathering up his things. “The truth is, I didn’t do anything. I was just in the right place at the right time. I only ever wanted to turn people on to new music, new things.” His assistant comes to chivvy him along. Blackwell smiles and says: “I’m just a borderline groupie who got lucky.”
Island Live, a week of shows at the Shepherds Bush Empire, W12, starting on May 26, features Amy Winehouse, Sly & Robbie, Keane, Baaba Maal, Paul Weller, Cat Stevens, Ladyhawke and more; island50.com
soure: timesonline
The iconic company turns 50 this month. Its founder, Chris Blackwell, recalls how his tiny reggae label grew into a global phenomenon
May 3, 2009 - Rob Fitzpatrick
Grace Jones
There are three huge walls full of silver, gold and multiplatinum discs hung around the staircase that leads to the small, wood- panelled bar in Chris Blackwell’s Strawberry Hill hotel, 3,000ft up Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. U2, Bob Marley, Roxy Music, Grace Jones, Black Uhuru, Bob Dylan, Aswad and many, many more are all represented. But there’s one small picture — in fact, a copy of a picture — hanging behind the bar that means more to him than all the expensively framed awards combined. In the photograph, originally taken by Nathalie Delon, ex-wife of the actor Alain Delon, Blackwell, then just 33, sits next to Marley, his brightest, biggest star. Both men are laughing at some long-forgotten joke. It is the only image of the two alone together he has.
“Early on, I told Bob we would never have a picture taken,” he says as we shelter from the morning sun in his private garden set within the hotel’s grounds. “It was essential for what Bob represented that he had a black manager. Then one day, in September 1980, he turned up at my house in New York — he was with Cindy [Breakspeare, the Jamaican Miss World 1976] at the time — and there was a photographer present. Bob actually asked for a picture with me, and the guy took it. But my original was destroyed in a fire last year, and the photographer won’t give me a copy. He says it’s his pension. The really sad thing is, it was that very day that Bob told me he’d been diagnosed with cancer and had just six months to live.”
Marley died 28 years ago, in May 1981. “I loved him so very much,” he says. From the look on Blackwell’s face, it could have been yesterday.
Island Records is 50 years old this month, and Blackwell has just been named the most influential figure in the half-century of the British pop industry. In May 1959, though, he was simply the son of a wealthy Jamaican family whose trading interests ran to rum, sugar, coconuts and cattle. Just back from six months spent on the New York jazz scene, where he’d become friends with Miles Davis, Blackwell was working as a water-skiing instructor at the Half Moon hotel, on Montego Bay. It was there he first heard a blind Bermudan pianist called Lance Haywood, who played in the hotel bar every night. “He was a little like Oscar Peterson,” Blackwell says, “but more cocktail. I decided to record him, as that was my way to get closer to the music I loved. I pressed up 250 copies. I had a lot of stock for a long time! But I was in heaven — this was what I wanted to do.”
Then, as now, the Jamaican music scene was about records and the sound systems that played big open-air events every weekend, rather than bands and gigs. Blackwell began to feed this market, and soon he had three consecutive No 1s.
Suddenly, Island Records was a powerful voice in the quickly developing Jamaican music business. “This was the first popular music made by Jamaicans,” Blackwell says. “The sound systems and the radio stations loved them.”
Within weeks, all the B-sides had charted too. For a while, Blackwell, who, thanks to his local knowledge, had just accepted the post of production assistant on Dr No, had six songs in the Top 10. “The sound-system guys, like Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd [his nickname was derived from the 1940s Yorkshire cricket hero Alec Coxon], thought,‘Well, if this honky can make records, then so can we.’” he says. “Their records were the real thing, really rough. They knew their market and worked it.”
By 1962, Island Records’ smoother sounds were selling better to Jamaicans in England than to the ones back home. At the same time, the big producers were complaining about the bad treatment they were getting from UK record distributors. Blackwell put the two things together, moved Island Records to England and started promoting the records himself. In 1963 alone, he oversaw the release of more than 80 singles, each one selling between 10,000 and 15,000 copies, but the record that changed everything — the one that, to this day, is still a startlingly vibrant burst of pop genius — was Millie’s My Boy Lollipop. The daughter of a plantation overseer, Millie was just 17 when she recorded the single. Within weeks of its release in 1964, it had sold 600,000 copies. It went on to sell 6m.
“I went from bum to hero overnight,” Blackwell says. “Millie and I went to Hong Kong, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Singapore, Hawaii, all across America — the world opened up for me. It was the same time as the Beatles were breaking and this new world was exploding. This massive hit meant I was in the gang.”
It was while doing a TV show with Millie in Birmingham that Blackwell first saw the band who would change Island again. The Spencer Davis Group starred Steve Winwood, a 15-year-old multi-instrumentalist with a voice that amazed Blackwell. They would never sign to Island, though Blackwell produced their biggest hit, Keep on Running, and licensed it to the Fontana label. When they split in 1967, Winwood signed his new band, Traffic, to Island, and its reputation as an artist-centred label was born. In the same year, Blackwell signed the folk singer John Martyn and brought in Joe Boyd’s Witchseason Productions, which had Fairport Convention and the young singer-songwriter Nick Drake. Island signings Free, Mott the Hoople, King Crimson, Jethro Tull and Roxy Music all sold in huge quantities. Cat Stevens’s Tea for the Tillerman LP — “close to perfect” in Blackwell’s eyes — was a huge success, but there was room, too, for recordings of Tibetan bells and for artists like Blodwyn Pig and Amazing Blondel, whose appeal was somewhat more selective. Within a decade, Island had become highly influential.
In 1972, Jimmy Cliff, fresh from his success in the movie The Harder They Come, but near broke after spending so much time filming it, had asked Blackwell for £50,000 to stay with the label. Blackwell told him he’d make that figure soon enough, but Cliff wouldn’t, couldn’t wait. “I was devastated,” Blackwell says, “as I knew exactly what to do to break reggae music internationally. The character from that film needed to come alive — to step off the screen and onto the stage — but Cliff split.”
Ten days later, Bob Marley — “the real thing” — who had been stranded while on tour in the UK, walked into Blackwell’s office. “Bob had incredible charisma,” Blackwell says. “When he walked in a room, you knew about it. I gave the band £4,000 to make a record. I came down to Jamaica a few months later and the band played me the Catch a Fire album. It was one of the high points of my life.”
Reggae was still seen as novelty summer music; Blackwell was determined to launch Bob Marley and the Wailers as a black rock band, so he “messed with the recordings a little” to make their sound more palatable to the white rock audience. He knew the band had to tour, but only Bob was up for the challenge.
“He was a fighter. Bob’s father was white Jamaican, of English descent, but he only saw him once, so Bob grew up in a completely black world and suffered a lot for it. He was an outcast, a ‘brown boy’, but he thought black, took on the injustices and expressed them so beautifully. When he started to feel real success was happening for him, around the Exodus record, Bob could see he could touch people worldwide. Still now, when I travel in Africa and Asia, I carry Bob’s tapes, and because my name is on the sleeve, they act like a passport. I travelled through Africa without a single visa — that is an astonishing legacy.”
Four months before Marley visited Blackwell in New York, Island had signed a new Irish band, U2. “The thing I liked most about them was their name,” he laughs. “But they also had the sort of intelligence you must have for any longevity.”
By the mid-1980s, the band were so successful, they were able to bail Island out financially — the only time in history that’s happened. Blackwell was so grateful that he gave the band 10% of the company. They returned the favour by delivering The Joshua Tree, one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. By 1989, though, Blackwell had had enough. He sold Island to Polygram UK — now owned by Universal — for £272m. CD sales were still enormous, and nobody foresaw the problems the internet would bring. Since Blackwell sold the label, Island Records has had great success with PJ Harvey, McFly, Sugababes and, more recently, a rejuvenated Paul Weller.
“I couldn’t have started or sold a company in better years,” he says, barely able to contain a smile. “I navigated Island by input. My skill is to assimilate information. But that didn’t work in an increasingly corporate world, where people didn’t tell you what they really felt. I hate Universal — not in England, but the company in America is an example of the worst kind of bullshit corporate behaviour.” Of course, Blackwell still cares, still bangs the gong for the label he started, and is tremendously excited about this summer’s series of anniversary shows. He’s “particularly thrilled” that an artist like Amy Winehouse is on Island.
A helicopter buzzes above our heads. Blackwell is being picked up to go to a meeting at another of his hotels, the Goldeneye resort, which is arranged around Ian Fleming’s old villa.
“Island happened during a golden age of music,” he says, gathering up his things. “The truth is, I didn’t do anything. I was just in the right place at the right time. I only ever wanted to turn people on to new music, new things.” His assistant comes to chivvy him along. Blackwell smiles and says: “I’m just a borderline groupie who got lucky.”
Island Live, a week of shows at the Shepherds Bush Empire, W12, starting on May 26, features Amy Winehouse, Sly & Robbie, Keane, Baaba Maal, Paul Weller, Cat Stevens, Ladyhawke and more; island50.com
soure: timesonline
BBC falls for Bono’s ‘poetry’
U2 singer's six-minute Elvis Pressley tribute underlines his apparent 'love-in' with the UK's state broadcaster
May 2, 2009 - Jan Battles
Just weeks after the BBC was labelled the Bono Broadasting Corporation because of its extensive coverage of U2’s new album, it is about to give the singer yet more access to the airways by broadcasting a lengthy poem he has written about Elvis Presley.
On May 13, BBC Radio 4 listeners will be treated to a “plain but intense” Bono recital of the 850-word verse, entitled American David. It will be part of a 15-minute feature interwoven with specially composed music and archive material, which the BBC insists will be “atmospheric and artistic”.
The poem was written in 1995 by the U2 singer who has a long-term fascination with the King of Rock’n’Roll. It opens with the lines: “Elvis son of Tupelo/ Elvis mama’s boy/ Elvis the twin brother of Jesse who died at birth and was buried in a shoe box.”
The BBC said: “Some lines are purposefully quintessential Elvis clichés while others make listeners view Elvis in a new light.”
Related Links:
Elvis: American David. A poem by Bono
Yet many may regard the broadcast as further proof of the BBC’s love affair with U2. The broadcaster was criticised earlier this year over the amount of coverage it gave to the release of No Line on the Horizon. This included a day of programming across BBC1, BBC2, Radio 1, Radio 2 and Radio 4 culminating in a “surprise” gig by the band on the roof of Broadcasting House.
Using the slogan U2=BBC, the broadcaster even dedicated part of its website to the band, offering tickets and providing links to u2.com. The page remains, with links to the various programmes featuring the band. Nigel Evans, a Tory MP who sits on the culture, media and sport select committee in the House of Commons, said it was “the sort of publicity money can’t buy”.
The BBC may have a defence this time. The Elvis by Bono project began before the recent album coverage and originated with independent producers.
Laura Parfitt of White Pebble Media, who pitched the idea to the broadcaster, said: “Bono did an interview about two years ago with Des Shaw for a series for BBC radio about Sun Studios [in Memphis where Elvis recorded]. At the end of the interview he said he had written a poem about Elvis and asked if Des wanted to hear it. So he pulled out the poem and just read it and recorded it. At the end he said, ‘Do whatever you want with it’. It was never broadcast.”
When Parfitt, a U2 fan, heard the recording she said she could immediately imagine sounds and music to accompany it. “It’s a very evocative poem that brings sounds into your head. I immediately heard a soundscape. I could hear the sounds of America, I could hear Elvis’s voice and the music.”
While pitching other ideas to Radio Four she mentioned the Bono poem and decided she and Shaw would make it into a 15-minute arty, musical composition. “When we got the commission, we contacted Bono’s office and they said, ‘Great’.”
The feature was produced by Chris O’Shaughnessy, who has composed music for film and television. He won a radio award for a similar programme entitled Malcolm McLaren’s Musical Map of London. “He’s taken the poem, cut it up and in the gaps he’s got Elvis archive, Elvis music, other people talking about Elvis and about America, news conference footage and he’s joined it all together with his own musical composition,” said Parfitt.
Bono’s text contains references to Presley’s films as well as his music and covers all stages of his career, including his fall from grace. “Elvis the bumper stickers/ Elvis the white knickers/ Elvis the white nigger ate at Burger King and just kept getting bigger.”
In 2004, Bono selected Elvis as his choice for The Greatest Artists of all Time issue of Rolling Stone magazine. “Elvis changed everything — musically, sexually, politically,” he said. “In Elvis, you had the whole lot; it’s all there in that elastic voice and body.”
For the band’s film Rattle and Hum, U2 went to Graceland and Sun Studios where they worked with Cowboy Jack Clement, Presley’s engineer. The studio was reopened specially so the band could record some tracks in the same place where Presley recorded Mystery Train. The tracks included Angel of Harlem with BB King. An earlier album, The Unforgettable Fire, featured a track entitled Elvis Presley and America.
Parfitt described Bono’s style as “a bit like the Liverpool beat poets. I think it’s interesting because obviously he’s a lyricist and this is a totally different approach to writing words. It sounds like a prayer at the end.
“The programme takes you on a journey through Elvis’s life and career but also through America of that era, all told through this incredible poem that Bono wrote,” she said.
source: timesonline
U2 singer's six-minute Elvis Pressley tribute underlines his apparent 'love-in' with the UK's state broadcaster
May 2, 2009 - Jan Battles
Just weeks after the BBC was labelled the Bono Broadasting Corporation because of its extensive coverage of U2’s new album, it is about to give the singer yet more access to the airways by broadcasting a lengthy poem he has written about Elvis Presley.
On May 13, BBC Radio 4 listeners will be treated to a “plain but intense” Bono recital of the 850-word verse, entitled American David. It will be part of a 15-minute feature interwoven with specially composed music and archive material, which the BBC insists will be “atmospheric and artistic”.
The poem was written in 1995 by the U2 singer who has a long-term fascination with the King of Rock’n’Roll. It opens with the lines: “Elvis son of Tupelo/ Elvis mama’s boy/ Elvis the twin brother of Jesse who died at birth and was buried in a shoe box.”
The BBC said: “Some lines are purposefully quintessential Elvis clichés while others make listeners view Elvis in a new light.”
Related Links:
Elvis: American David. A poem by Bono
Yet many may regard the broadcast as further proof of the BBC’s love affair with U2. The broadcaster was criticised earlier this year over the amount of coverage it gave to the release of No Line on the Horizon. This included a day of programming across BBC1, BBC2, Radio 1, Radio 2 and Radio 4 culminating in a “surprise” gig by the band on the roof of Broadcasting House.
Using the slogan U2=BBC, the broadcaster even dedicated part of its website to the band, offering tickets and providing links to u2.com. The page remains, with links to the various programmes featuring the band. Nigel Evans, a Tory MP who sits on the culture, media and sport select committee in the House of Commons, said it was “the sort of publicity money can’t buy”.
The BBC may have a defence this time. The Elvis by Bono project began before the recent album coverage and originated with independent producers.
Laura Parfitt of White Pebble Media, who pitched the idea to the broadcaster, said: “Bono did an interview about two years ago with Des Shaw for a series for BBC radio about Sun Studios [in Memphis where Elvis recorded]. At the end of the interview he said he had written a poem about Elvis and asked if Des wanted to hear it. So he pulled out the poem and just read it and recorded it. At the end he said, ‘Do whatever you want with it’. It was never broadcast.”
When Parfitt, a U2 fan, heard the recording she said she could immediately imagine sounds and music to accompany it. “It’s a very evocative poem that brings sounds into your head. I immediately heard a soundscape. I could hear the sounds of America, I could hear Elvis’s voice and the music.”
While pitching other ideas to Radio Four she mentioned the Bono poem and decided she and Shaw would make it into a 15-minute arty, musical composition. “When we got the commission, we contacted Bono’s office and they said, ‘Great’.”
The feature was produced by Chris O’Shaughnessy, who has composed music for film and television. He won a radio award for a similar programme entitled Malcolm McLaren’s Musical Map of London. “He’s taken the poem, cut it up and in the gaps he’s got Elvis archive, Elvis music, other people talking about Elvis and about America, news conference footage and he’s joined it all together with his own musical composition,” said Parfitt.
Bono’s text contains references to Presley’s films as well as his music and covers all stages of his career, including his fall from grace. “Elvis the bumper stickers/ Elvis the white knickers/ Elvis the white nigger ate at Burger King and just kept getting bigger.”
In 2004, Bono selected Elvis as his choice for The Greatest Artists of all Time issue of Rolling Stone magazine. “Elvis changed everything — musically, sexually, politically,” he said. “In Elvis, you had the whole lot; it’s all there in that elastic voice and body.”
For the band’s film Rattle and Hum, U2 went to Graceland and Sun Studios where they worked with Cowboy Jack Clement, Presley’s engineer. The studio was reopened specially so the band could record some tracks in the same place where Presley recorded Mystery Train. The tracks included Angel of Harlem with BB King. An earlier album, The Unforgettable Fire, featured a track entitled Elvis Presley and America.
Parfitt described Bono’s style as “a bit like the Liverpool beat poets. I think it’s interesting because obviously he’s a lyricist and this is a totally different approach to writing words. It sounds like a prayer at the end.
“The programme takes you on a journey through Elvis’s life and career but also through America of that era, all told through this incredible poem that Bono wrote,” she said.
source: timesonline
2.5.09
The 2009 TIME 100
Heroes & Icons - George Clooney By Bono
George Clooney is a dangerous man. He needs to be watched... to be monitored... He's a new kind of American radical... a post-'60s, post-obvious, post-postmodern radical, not the left-leaning Hollywood bleeding-heart do-gooder that many think. Oh, no...
Clooney, 48, is a pragmatic idealist, and a patriot in a very different sense than the way that word is normally used. He believes that his country is a contagious idea that should be embraced by the world — but not by force, and not out of fear.
So what's the radical bit? Well, it starts with his strategic sensibility, and his almost peculiar ability to sublimate his ego to win a point — something completely out of character and perhaps against the law for a performer. (I should know...) The pieties of the actor-slash-activist are absent in Clooney. Humor is his not-so-secret weapon. He's very, very funny. Especially when he's off-script.
It has been said that after meeting with the great British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, you left feeling he was the smartest person in the world, but after meeting with his rival Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking you were the smartest person. That latter touch is the essence of George Clooney.
His commitment to ending the atrocities in Sudan is not a role, not a performance. It is real — and it is serious work. Some people think celebrities should stick to the script, stay feted and fetal in their air-conditioned trailers. Some people think it's an appalling juxtaposition to see the rich and famous in a photo call with the vanquished and the vulnerable.
It is. George knows that. But he also knows that the cameras trained on you and the column inches dedicated to you could be covering something a little more important than, well, you. Like the slaughter of innocents in Darfur. Like the refugee camps full of starving Sudanese.
And he knows the details, the nuances of his and your sides of the argument. Hey, if you're going to pay attention to George Clooney, he's going to insist you pay attention to this stuff. Now there's a radical idea.
Clooney's smile is as brilliant as ever, but if you look closer, his jaw is clenched. What he brings to the discussion on Darfur is not just star power. It's the power of conviction, and a growing impatience, and an undiminished sense that what's still — still! — happening in Darfur is an affront to what we say we believe. Our response, as yet, is unworthy of us.
So take his picture, shake his hand, but whatever you do, don't make this man mad — he just gets more organized.
Bono is the lead singer of U2 and a co-founder of ONE
source: time
Heroes & Icons - George Clooney By Bono
George Clooney is a dangerous man. He needs to be watched... to be monitored... He's a new kind of American radical... a post-'60s, post-obvious, post-postmodern radical, not the left-leaning Hollywood bleeding-heart do-gooder that many think. Oh, no...
Clooney, 48, is a pragmatic idealist, and a patriot in a very different sense than the way that word is normally used. He believes that his country is a contagious idea that should be embraced by the world — but not by force, and not out of fear.
So what's the radical bit? Well, it starts with his strategic sensibility, and his almost peculiar ability to sublimate his ego to win a point — something completely out of character and perhaps against the law for a performer. (I should know...) The pieties of the actor-slash-activist are absent in Clooney. Humor is his not-so-secret weapon. He's very, very funny. Especially when he's off-script.
It has been said that after meeting with the great British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, you left feeling he was the smartest person in the world, but after meeting with his rival Benjamin Disraeli, you left thinking you were the smartest person. That latter touch is the essence of George Clooney.
His commitment to ending the atrocities in Sudan is not a role, not a performance. It is real — and it is serious work. Some people think celebrities should stick to the script, stay feted and fetal in their air-conditioned trailers. Some people think it's an appalling juxtaposition to see the rich and famous in a photo call with the vanquished and the vulnerable.
It is. George knows that. But he also knows that the cameras trained on you and the column inches dedicated to you could be covering something a little more important than, well, you. Like the slaughter of innocents in Darfur. Like the refugee camps full of starving Sudanese.
And he knows the details, the nuances of his and your sides of the argument. Hey, if you're going to pay attention to George Clooney, he's going to insist you pay attention to this stuff. Now there's a radical idea.
Clooney's smile is as brilliant as ever, but if you look closer, his jaw is clenched. What he brings to the discussion on Darfur is not just star power. It's the power of conviction, and a growing impatience, and an undiminished sense that what's still — still! — happening in Darfur is an affront to what we say we believe. Our response, as yet, is unworthy of us.
So take his picture, shake his hand, but whatever you do, don't make this man mad — he just gets more organized.
Bono is the lead singer of U2 and a co-founder of ONE
source: time
1.5.09
Still Life of a Painter
Dylan Speaks
“I gotta say, when I see it hung, I’m pleased.”
24 hours before the opening of his latest exhibition, Guggi, born Derek Rowan, reclines in an office room in the Kerlin Gallery, mere yards from where the fruit of his last few years of work adorns the walls.
“It’s a strange thing,” he says, “you don’t really know the exhibition you have just done until you see it hung.”
Guggi looks exactly like what he is: an ex avant-garde rock musician turned painter. Lean, with shoulder length hair and lupine features, he appears significantly younger than his 50 years. His paintings eschew the fireworks, flamboyance and shock-theatricality one might expect from a former Virgin Prune. No abstract expressionist action paintings or Bosch-like horror shows here. The work is simple, contemplative, Spartan. Vessels are his vessels: still life studies of jugs, cups and bowls, painted on board instead of canvas, and of late adorned with interpolations of text that look like the remnants of some lost Soviet dialect. This is his fourth exhibition with the Kerlin, located on Anne’s Lane, off South Anne Street in Dublin. A flip through the price list tells the casual browser that one of these paintings can be yours for anything up to 28,000 euros.
“I used to be a vegetable man when I was a kid,” Guggie says, “and the way the way I try to price things is the same as a bag of potatoes is priced in the corporation market: supply and demand. And the reality is, art is no different to a bag of spuds. So I try to get the pricing right, whereby the demand is a little bit greater than the supply. And the few quid that you don’t take in, that you could’ve, turns to a little bit of excitement. Whatever the market price determines your work is worth, you have a duty to your gift to get that, because if you don’t get it somebody else will. It’s all incredibly secondary to the art, but you can’t help notice things.”
What kinds of things?
“Just to give you an example, I had people coming up to me for so long saying, ‘I would so love to own one of your paintings but I can’t afford anything – I don’t know why you can’t do something small that ordinary people can buy.’ So I did these little oil paintings on canvas-board, and I said, ‘I’m gonna keep the price right down and put three or four in the gallery in a group show, and anybody that can’t afford to buy a big painting, if they really want one, they might like one of these.’ The four of them sold immediately and went to public auction a few weeks later for twice the price. That was a very cheap way of learning an important lesson.”
As the former member of a band of self-styled subversive artists, what’s Guggi’s take on the Biffo on the Bog controversy, whereby artist and schoolteacher Conor Casby came under fire from the Fianna Fail power bloc, and indeed the Gardai, for planting nude caricatures of Taoiseach Brian Cowan in the Royal Hibernian Academy and National Gallery?
“I thought it was a bit harsh. The artist probably didn’t do it for terribly bad reasons, I mean, it was a very good caricature. I really think the baddies in all of it are the newspaper that printed it and made a big deal out of it. They made the mountain out of the molehill. The lady whose newspaper it was in was on the Late Late Show giving painfully stupid, obvious answers: ‘We have the right to report the news, we think it’s newsworthy.’
“And in the light of him (Cowan) being a family man with daughters and so on, I thought it was wrong. Not on behalf of the artist, because it was well enough done to convince me that it was worth doing, I thought it was incredibly well executed. But about two days after that I saw part of the image in, I think, one of the Sunday papers. It didn’t show him actually sitting on the bog, but it did show part of the top half of him, I think, holding a toilet roll. And then somebody had done some naked thing of Bertie (Ahern), probably just for the same article, and it was dreadfully badly executed, absolutely clueless.”
One of ten Rowan siblings reared in the northside of Dublin, Guggi is self-taught. When asked if artists compensate for lack of formal training with an exaggerated approach to discipline, he says, “I do have what you described, but I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t formally study painting. While I would accept that for some painters it’s absolutely correct to study it formally, I really believed at a young age that it wasn’t right for me.”
By way of illustration, he recalls being enrolled for Saturday afternoon art classes by his mother when he was 12 years old. After Guggi had spent about an hour and a half sketching a still life study of a glass or a bottle, the art teacher used a heavy pencil to go over the lines he’d drawn, changing the shape of his composition. Guggi bristled at the imposition.
“Now it might have been my naivety,” he admits, “but I actually thought mine was so much better than his, and I didn’t want to draw like him, I wanted to draw like myself. And I think it was at that moment in time I decided, ‘I’m never gonna do this again.’ I was very sure I didn’t want to go to Art College.”
Instead he found a surrogate family in the form of the fabled Lypton Village collective that spawned the Virgin Prunes and U2. Part teenage gang, part secret Surrealist society, its members included Bono, Edge and Gavin Friday. A remarkably close-knit lot, their friendships have endured for most of their lives.
“My friendship with Bono goes back, I think I was four and he was three, he lived across the road,” Guggi says. “We were attracted to each other, all of us when we were young kids. In our early teens we met Gav and were fascinated by this other oddment on the street and realised we weren’t the only ones. One thing we probably had in common that a lot of kids maybe didn’t have was the importance that we put on friendship. And I guess looking back on it all we might have all been a bit lost.”
Guggi was the first to break from the Virgin Prunes fold to pursue art as a vocation. And while his mates devoted themselves to music, they never completely abandoned the visual arts. Before embarking on his solo career, Friday took a sabbatical to paint, while Bono used the medium as therapy to offset the pressures of the Joshua Tree sessions. They shared a studio throughout 1986. One wonders how the dynamic of the friendship changed within the context of painting – did they now regard Guggi as the master?
“I think they might have described it like that, but I certainly wouldn’t have seen it like that. I mean, the marks that Gav makes on a canvas with paint are very different to anybody I’ve ever come across. I don’t think I would have been any influence. He didn’t care about how you did it; he just knew the colour that he wanted and the mark that he wanted to make. Bono might have said to me, ‘What do you think about this?’ but while he would ask me, he’d never take my advice. But that was a wonderful experience for me, because painting with your mates, I think any situation that you find yourself out of the norm, and you’re painting, in some way stands to you.
“We had an exhibit in the Hendricks Gallery, it opened on the 12th of January 1988. I think my first solo show in the Kerlin Gallery was about 1990, and that would have been the start of trying to paint as an adult. Anything that went before showed technical understanding and good craft, but I don’t think it said an awful lot more than that. And I suppose it’s what you decide to do with the craft that is in some way part of you.”
And what Guggi does with the craft is bestow significance upon apparently humble objects. His paintings evoke an almost Buddhist regard for the correct presentation of commonplace things – a bowl of rice, a jug of water, a cup of tea.
“I’m a great believer in, if a stroke isn’t needed in a painting, it can’t be there,” he says. “But when the background starts to come together and you see how the jug should be shaped and where it should be placed and at what angle and what colour it should be, there’s a huge amount of information that can come across in what can seem like an extremely simple painting.
“This is what’s fascinating me more and more, and with the wooden paintings, they allow me to be a lot more immediate and more instinctive, and even if I change my mind regarding a mark that I wanted to put on it, I’ll paint over that, but you can still see the mark coming through, so the history of the thinking that has gone into this is still apparent. The very fact that I felt so strongly about putting it there in the first place I think should be represented in the finished result, it becomes part of the background, which means I was right, but I wasn’t right in the way that I thought I was. And that is what these paintings are about in some ways: that every mark is an honest one.”
source: wordpress
Dylan Speaks
“I gotta say, when I see it hung, I’m pleased.”
24 hours before the opening of his latest exhibition, Guggi, born Derek Rowan, reclines in an office room in the Kerlin Gallery, mere yards from where the fruit of his last few years of work adorns the walls.
“It’s a strange thing,” he says, “you don’t really know the exhibition you have just done until you see it hung.”
Guggi looks exactly like what he is: an ex avant-garde rock musician turned painter. Lean, with shoulder length hair and lupine features, he appears significantly younger than his 50 years. His paintings eschew the fireworks, flamboyance and shock-theatricality one might expect from a former Virgin Prune. No abstract expressionist action paintings or Bosch-like horror shows here. The work is simple, contemplative, Spartan. Vessels are his vessels: still life studies of jugs, cups and bowls, painted on board instead of canvas, and of late adorned with interpolations of text that look like the remnants of some lost Soviet dialect. This is his fourth exhibition with the Kerlin, located on Anne’s Lane, off South Anne Street in Dublin. A flip through the price list tells the casual browser that one of these paintings can be yours for anything up to 28,000 euros.
“I used to be a vegetable man when I was a kid,” Guggie says, “and the way the way I try to price things is the same as a bag of potatoes is priced in the corporation market: supply and demand. And the reality is, art is no different to a bag of spuds. So I try to get the pricing right, whereby the demand is a little bit greater than the supply. And the few quid that you don’t take in, that you could’ve, turns to a little bit of excitement. Whatever the market price determines your work is worth, you have a duty to your gift to get that, because if you don’t get it somebody else will. It’s all incredibly secondary to the art, but you can’t help notice things.”
What kinds of things?
“Just to give you an example, I had people coming up to me for so long saying, ‘I would so love to own one of your paintings but I can’t afford anything – I don’t know why you can’t do something small that ordinary people can buy.’ So I did these little oil paintings on canvas-board, and I said, ‘I’m gonna keep the price right down and put three or four in the gallery in a group show, and anybody that can’t afford to buy a big painting, if they really want one, they might like one of these.’ The four of them sold immediately and went to public auction a few weeks later for twice the price. That was a very cheap way of learning an important lesson.”
As the former member of a band of self-styled subversive artists, what’s Guggi’s take on the Biffo on the Bog controversy, whereby artist and schoolteacher Conor Casby came under fire from the Fianna Fail power bloc, and indeed the Gardai, for planting nude caricatures of Taoiseach Brian Cowan in the Royal Hibernian Academy and National Gallery?
“I thought it was a bit harsh. The artist probably didn’t do it for terribly bad reasons, I mean, it was a very good caricature. I really think the baddies in all of it are the newspaper that printed it and made a big deal out of it. They made the mountain out of the molehill. The lady whose newspaper it was in was on the Late Late Show giving painfully stupid, obvious answers: ‘We have the right to report the news, we think it’s newsworthy.’
“And in the light of him (Cowan) being a family man with daughters and so on, I thought it was wrong. Not on behalf of the artist, because it was well enough done to convince me that it was worth doing, I thought it was incredibly well executed. But about two days after that I saw part of the image in, I think, one of the Sunday papers. It didn’t show him actually sitting on the bog, but it did show part of the top half of him, I think, holding a toilet roll. And then somebody had done some naked thing of Bertie (Ahern), probably just for the same article, and it was dreadfully badly executed, absolutely clueless.”
One of ten Rowan siblings reared in the northside of Dublin, Guggi is self-taught. When asked if artists compensate for lack of formal training with an exaggerated approach to discipline, he says, “I do have what you described, but I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t formally study painting. While I would accept that for some painters it’s absolutely correct to study it formally, I really believed at a young age that it wasn’t right for me.”
By way of illustration, he recalls being enrolled for Saturday afternoon art classes by his mother when he was 12 years old. After Guggi had spent about an hour and a half sketching a still life study of a glass or a bottle, the art teacher used a heavy pencil to go over the lines he’d drawn, changing the shape of his composition. Guggi bristled at the imposition.
“Now it might have been my naivety,” he admits, “but I actually thought mine was so much better than his, and I didn’t want to draw like him, I wanted to draw like myself. And I think it was at that moment in time I decided, ‘I’m never gonna do this again.’ I was very sure I didn’t want to go to Art College.”
Instead he found a surrogate family in the form of the fabled Lypton Village collective that spawned the Virgin Prunes and U2. Part teenage gang, part secret Surrealist society, its members included Bono, Edge and Gavin Friday. A remarkably close-knit lot, their friendships have endured for most of their lives.
“My friendship with Bono goes back, I think I was four and he was three, he lived across the road,” Guggi says. “We were attracted to each other, all of us when we were young kids. In our early teens we met Gav and were fascinated by this other oddment on the street and realised we weren’t the only ones. One thing we probably had in common that a lot of kids maybe didn’t have was the importance that we put on friendship. And I guess looking back on it all we might have all been a bit lost.”
Guggi was the first to break from the Virgin Prunes fold to pursue art as a vocation. And while his mates devoted themselves to music, they never completely abandoned the visual arts. Before embarking on his solo career, Friday took a sabbatical to paint, while Bono used the medium as therapy to offset the pressures of the Joshua Tree sessions. They shared a studio throughout 1986. One wonders how the dynamic of the friendship changed within the context of painting – did they now regard Guggi as the master?
“I think they might have described it like that, but I certainly wouldn’t have seen it like that. I mean, the marks that Gav makes on a canvas with paint are very different to anybody I’ve ever come across. I don’t think I would have been any influence. He didn’t care about how you did it; he just knew the colour that he wanted and the mark that he wanted to make. Bono might have said to me, ‘What do you think about this?’ but while he would ask me, he’d never take my advice. But that was a wonderful experience for me, because painting with your mates, I think any situation that you find yourself out of the norm, and you’re painting, in some way stands to you.
“We had an exhibit in the Hendricks Gallery, it opened on the 12th of January 1988. I think my first solo show in the Kerlin Gallery was about 1990, and that would have been the start of trying to paint as an adult. Anything that went before showed technical understanding and good craft, but I don’t think it said an awful lot more than that. And I suppose it’s what you decide to do with the craft that is in some way part of you.”
And what Guggi does with the craft is bestow significance upon apparently humble objects. His paintings evoke an almost Buddhist regard for the correct presentation of commonplace things – a bowl of rice, a jug of water, a cup of tea.
“I’m a great believer in, if a stroke isn’t needed in a painting, it can’t be there,” he says. “But when the background starts to come together and you see how the jug should be shaped and where it should be placed and at what angle and what colour it should be, there’s a huge amount of information that can come across in what can seem like an extremely simple painting.
“This is what’s fascinating me more and more, and with the wooden paintings, they allow me to be a lot more immediate and more instinctive, and even if I change my mind regarding a mark that I wanted to put on it, I’ll paint over that, but you can still see the mark coming through, so the history of the thinking that has gone into this is still apparent. The very fact that I felt so strongly about putting it there in the first place I think should be represented in the finished result, it becomes part of the background, which means I was right, but I wasn’t right in the way that I thought I was. And that is what these paintings are about in some ways: that every mark is an honest one.”
source: wordpress
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)