Interview

‘We need to start the road to rejoin’: Gina Miller on Brexit, farmers and her ambitious plans for Epsom

Gina Miller is trying to convince me that she understands why I voted Brexit. The woman who went to the High Court in 2016 to effectively try to cancel my vote by insisting the EU referendum result be referred back to a Remain-dominated parliament, plunging Brexit into years of legal and parliamentary wrangling, says she feels my pain and always has. How can this be? Well, maybe it’s just the magic of politics. ‘My case was not to do with Brexit. It was to do with parliament’ Ms Miller is attempting to turn her single-issue, referendum-wrecking fame into a broader platform, by standing in leafy Epsom and Ewell as one

The legend of Lawrence

‘I could still be a pop star,’ says Lawrence, sitting on a footstool in his council flat, high up in a tower block above London EC1. ‘I know I’m not going to be a person who has a million hits on the internet. Do they call them hits? Views, or streams, whatever they are. I’m not going to be that person, but I still think I could have a hit record. For me a song like “Relative Poverty” is a song for this generation, and I don’t know why it shouldn’t be an anthem for today.’ Lawrence is now 57, and he has been trying (and failing) to become a

The return of the implausibly moreish Borgen

A decade ago the unthinkable happened: a subtitled TV drama about people agreeing with one another went global. On paper it bore the hallmark of a barrel-scraping pitch from Alan Partridge. Somewhere between youth hostelling with Chris Eubank and monkey tennis, he might easily have proposed a new ne plus ultra in implausible entertainment concepts: Danish coalition politics. Yet Borgen caught a thermal and soared. The show took its name (which, correctly pronounced, sounds like a Cockney saying ‘Bolton’) from the so-called fortress in the heart of Copenhagen where state business is conducted. It featured Birgitte Nyborg, a moderate heroine who snuck into Denmark’s highest office through a small centrist

Keith Allen discusses Pinter, Max Bygraves and the sensitivities of contemporary audiences

Keith Allen was cast in his latest show by Lady Antonia Fraser. He explains this odd circumstance when we meet during a break in rehearsals for Pinter’s The Homecoming. ‘I was asked if I wanted to do The Caretaker at the Theatre Royal Bath. And I said, “Yeah, I’d love to.” Then I had a conversation with Antonia Fraser who told me the script was licensed to someone else. She said, “Why not do The Homecoming instead – with you as Max?” And I said, “Yes.”’ Max is the thuggish head of an emotionally damaged Cockney family with criminal connections. His wife has died and he lives with his sons

Remembering David Storey, giant of postwar English culture

There is a famous story about David Storey. It is set in 1976 at the Royal Court where, for ten years, his plays had first been seen before heading away to the West End and Broadway. That same week he had won the Booker Prize with his novel Saville. With unrivalled success across fiction, theatre and cinema, Storey was a giant of postwar English culture. He was also, compared with most writers, an actual giant. This Sporting Life, his novel made into a groundbreaking film, grew out of his experience of playing rugby league for Leeds. Unlike Saville, his new play Mother’s Day was greeted by a raspberry fanfare after

I was Oprah Winfrey’s hero

Gstaad Some of you may have noticed that I have not commented at all about the ongoing soap opera and latest brouhaha concerning the halfwit and Meghan Macbeth. That’s because I decided long ago that the best way to counter their publicity machine is never to mention them. But I’ve also done something that most of the hacks writing about the couple have not: I’ve been a guest on Oprah’s show twice, on one occasion by my little old self for a whole hour. Although wince-inducing, squirming, cringeworthy and gushing, The Oprah Show always has a theme and, more importantly, a hook. The hook is what will make people’s ears

Spiky, sticky, silly: interviewing Van Morrison

Q: ‘How would you define transcendence?’ A: ‘Well, how would you define it?’ I interviewed Van Morrison last year. (I’m fine now, thanks.) While the exercise wasn’t quite the near-death experience of industry legend — he was polite and accommodating, if not always exactly forthcoming — it got sticky at times, as the above exchange illustrates. Let’s call it a solid 6.5 on the Lou Reed Scale. Morrison, who turns 75 on the last day of this month, was formed in an age when a people-pleasing public persona wasn’t essential for musical success. In rare interviews, he engages with informed questions about music but refuses to indulge in the game

‘Cocaine addiction is time-consuming’: the rise and fall of Kevin Rowland and Dexys

When Dexys Midnight Runners reached No. 1 in the singles charts in spring 1980 with the song ‘Geno’, the band had to travel to London for their coronation appearance on Top of the Pops. For the first time they could afford the train fare. But Kevin Rowland — their singer, leader, creative director, boss, whatever you want to call him — insisted they continue to jump the barriers at Birmingham New Street. ‘I said, “Come on lads, we’re still going to bunk the trains.” And they went, “What?” “Come on, the inspector’s coming. We’ve got to get in the toilets.” And the drummer said, “Kev. We’re No. 1 in the

Meet Dion, one of the last living links to the earliest days of rock ’n’ roll

Only two of the Beatles’ pop contemporaries are depicted on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. One is Bob Dylan. The other is Dion DiMucci. In a pleasing third-act twist, Dylan contributes the liner notes to Dion’s new album Blues With Friends — an act of deference that the recipient is still processing. ‘I asked him, I didn’t know if he had the time, but he sent me back those paragraphs and said that I knew how to write a song.’ He whistles. ‘That’s from a Nobel Prize winner. I thought, I’ll take it, I’ll take it!’ So he should. Dion — like Kylie, a single moniker

Everyman

Toby Jones shuffles into the café in Clapham where we are meeting. He’s wearing a duffle coat and a hat and carrying a rucksack. He looks just like one of those unsung characters that he specialises in, the kind of person you don’t take much notice of unless you have to. Today we are talking about his new ‘vehicle’ (sorry), Don’t Forget the Driver. It’s an everyday tale of an everyday coach driver (Peter Green) from Bognor Regis, his daughter Kayla, who turns ennui into an artform, and mother Audrey, who’s going downhill fast with Alzheimer’s. It is going to twang the nation’s heartstrings. What makes it different is that

The write stuff | 3 January 2019

Given their track record, you might think that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais would be spared the struggles that lesser screenwriters go through to see their writing on screen. But this, it turns out, would be naive. Clement and La Frenais may have written some of the best-loved programmes in British television history: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; Porridge; The Likely Lads; Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? Their CV may contain the huge hit film The Commitments — as well as more recently acclaimed TV dramas like The Rotters’ Club and Archangel. Yet, when I meet Clement on a solo visit to London, the two most striking things about him

Renaissance man | 13 December 2018

The first thing Gary Kemp bought when Spandau Ballet started making money was a chair. He’s very proud of that chair. He talks about his chair in tones midway between one of Monty Python’s four Yorkshiremen and Nicholas Serota. ‘I wasn’t making any money until “True” was successful, in 1983,’ he says. ‘The first thing I really bought was a William Morris chair. What the fuck is a 22-year-old boy living in a council house with his mum and dad doing going out and buying a William Morris chair?’ It was the first chair anyone in the Kemp family had ever owned outright, he says. ‘Everything in our house was

Now that’s what I call music

One of the members of the government’s HS2 Growth Taskforce is remembering the first time he went to a gay club. ‘There was a club in Coventry that was only open on a Sunday night, at the Quadrant, and a mate of mine said, “There’s a DJ there who plays some fantastic music that I know you’ve never heard, so why don’t we go down?” It was a gay club, or a queer’s club as it was known then. I loved it. Oh, I loved it. I couldn’t believe that blokes were dancing with each other. The music was awesome.’ A few years later, in the early 1980s, he ‘lived

Rod Liddle

‘And now for my next guest – Adolf Hitler!’

Having thoroughly enjoyed Graham Norton’s recent forensic cross-examination of Hillary Clinton on BBC1, I’m thrilled that the corporation intends to use Graham for yet further heavyweight political interviews. Here’s an exclusive preview of one coming up soon: GN: ‘Halllllllo! How lovely to see you all! I hope you’ve been behaving yourselves. [Audience titters.] Well, do we have a feast for you this evening — so let’s get started. My first guest needs no introduction. Probably the most famous man from the 20th century — ladies and gentleman, please welcome, Adolf Hitler!’ [Hitler makes his entrance, waves, shakes Graham’s hand and sits down next to him. Audience cheers wildly.] GN: ‘It

The Maestro, Ennio Morricone, interviewed: ‘I am a real composer’

Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning Italian film composer, has died at the age of 91. Here, Richard Bratby spoke to the ‘Maestro’. Ennio Morricone’s staff wish it to be known that he does not write soundtracks. ‘Maestro Morricone writes “Film Music” NOT “Sound Tracks”’, explain the printed interview guidelines. ‘Maestro Morricone is a composer. Composers do not use the piano to compose music with, they write their music down directly in musical notes without the interference of any musical instrument.’ Well, that’s Beethoven told. In the classical music world, you hear tales about ‘riders’, the Spinal Tap-like lists of minimum requirements that pop stars issue before consenting to walk among mortal

Not easily Suede

‘I always think they’re not lusting after me,’ Brett Anderson says of the middle-aged fans who still turn up to see his band Suede and leave the shows a little flushed and excited. ‘They’re lusting after something that doesn’t really exist. They’re remembering their wild youth. It’s faintly comical to me when I think about myself in the 1990s and the sexuality of it. That got a bit out of control, I suppose. And it’s odd, because I’m quite a reserved person in lots of ways, so I don’t really know what was going on there.’ Oh, Brett, you do yourself a disservice. Look at yourself! Not an ounce of

On the offensive

‘I’m an amateur,’ Barry Humphries tells me. The Australian polymath uses the word in its older sense of ‘enthusiast’ rather than ‘bungler’ and he feels no need to point out the distinction. He’s in London to perform a three-week residency at the Barbican — Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret — with his fellow Australian Melissa Madden Gray, who uses the stage name Meow Meow. The show was inspired by Humphries’ fascination with Germany’s culture during the interwar years. ‘It was the last song before the nation slid into moral squalor. And I have a long-standing interest — I won’t say “passion” because one gets “passionate” about deodorants — but I have

Of human bondage

Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the Harlem Renaissance. ‘Harlemania’ took off in jazz-age New York, as white thrill-seekers danced to Duke Ellington hothouse stomps and enthused over so-called primitive art. Hurston made a ‘black splash’ of her own in 1920s Harlem. Among her admirers was the dance critic and photographer Carl Van Vechten, whose deliciously Firbankian 1926 account of life uptown, Nigger Heaven, gloried in blackamoor jungle dances and other Uncle Tom minstrelsy. (‘Period piece’ would be the most charitable description.) Hurston was careful not to mock the ‘Negrotonians’, as she called Van Vechten and his

A man of many parts | 24 May 2018

A most excellent fellow, Roger Allam. On the stage he brings dignity to all he does, in the noblest traditions of the British theatre. Off it he is a fully paid-up member of the human race, admired by his comrades as a man no less than as an actor. Some mummers, eager to let off steam, occasionally let the side down. Allam is the sort of chap — star and team player — who brings the profession into repute. Three times a winner of an Olivier award, twice for best actor, he is currently to be found on the West End stage in The Moderate Soprano, David Hare’s touching portrait

Animal attraction | 30 November 2017

There are times when our national passion for cutting people down to size is a little tiring. I left Brett Morgen’s new documentary about Jane Goodall, the chimpanzee expert, in a rare flush of excited enthusiasm. ‘You’ve got to see it!’ I said to everyone. Most replied along these lines: ‘Goodall, didn’t she turn out to be a fraud?’ Or: ‘Wasn’t it all Leakey’s work she took credit for?’ ‘Yeah, what’s with that?’ says Brett Morgen hunched over his toast in a very hipster Soho hotel. ‘In the Times of London today, in the review, it says Jane can’t hold a candle to David Attenborough. I’m like, he’s a fucking