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 Back to: Archive · 2000
Heroes And Villains

From the NME, 17th June 2000.

Hero - Lili Taylor

"I didn't know anything about her until I saw that I Shot Andy Warhol film. The bloke who plays Andy Warhol I thought was really good but it was her performance as Valerie Jean Solanas that got me to read the SCUM Manifesto. I don't know whether I agree with it or not but it's a brilliant essay. I'm not sure if the Y chromosomes went wrong or if it was the X though, but I do think Valerie Solanas was onto something. Lili Taylor was in Short Cuts as well, which is another film about the mundane and people's lives and how they relate. Damon and I watched it on a tourbus in the States and it was really beautiful. I don't really like Raymond Carver's books, though; too much whiskey and bitterness going on. It's a really perverse film in places but she's just one of those women that you can watch for such a long time because of the power of her face and movement and expression. She always seems like the weirdo in her films, you know, the most interesting, even though she normally plays what are superficially normal characters."


Hero - Paul Auster

"Paul Auster was an American writer who wrote City Of Glass, which is part of a collection called The New York Trilogy. He also wrote The Locked Room, which is brilliant, and of course the screenplay for the movie Smoke, which had Harvey Keitel in it. He tends to have an extremely awesome talent for putting into words what people think. And how they think. The abstract happenings that go on in a bloke's mind. Which I think is my idea of genius. To be able to express something that everybody knows but nobody can see clearly enough to articulate. It's a great, kinda meditative quality in his work, especially in Smoke. There's the last scene after the Christmas story and there's obviously an amazing fondness between these two characters and they're contemplating each other to see if it's serious. It's so vivid and real. A sense of truth about it. He's a real heavy romantic but he's also impartial to his characters and he even doesn't mind destroying them."


Hero - Pete Townshend

"Without him I'd probably never have picked up a guitar. Without him I'd have worried too much about my nose. Without him I'd never have got into '60s sort of garage music. Without him I wouldn't be able to behave onstage like I do. I've read that he was always so frustrated that he couldn't play like Clapton, but it's like who cares, man? You're Pete Townshend. I know he really hated Woodstock but I love watching him at Woodstock. He's great when he's angry. I remember hearing The Who on the radio and recording it onto cassette, I think it was 'I Can See For Miles', then I realised the mod connection with violence and played it very furtively in my room thinking my mum would think that I was becoming a hooligan mod. I've got these photos of me aged 13 doing the jumps and everything. There's an incredible photo of The Who playing the Filimore in San Francisco taken about '76 and Townshend launches his Les Paul so far up in the air and all of the band are just staring at it while Keith Moon is just haunched over his kit with his sticks completely blurred with an insane laughter in his eyes and it's like, wow, I'd like to hear that split second of noise. Probably a 'grrrzzzzzzzheeeeee'. Pete Townshend. Bloody hell, what a geezer!"


Hero - Doris Lessing

"I've got a short story book of hers and I used to read it on the bus going to college, the art school in Colchester. I read this story called Plants And Girls (in the collection The Sun Between Her Feet) which really did my head in. I never can quite understand what the hell's going on in it, but it's about this girl who has this boy who's obsessed with her and he refuses to move from outside her house. And eventually he's been there so long that he sort of becomes one with this tree that's outside her house. It's a really crazy ending to this really intense story. He tries to do something quite rude with the tree, I think. It's just one of those weird things that you see or read or hear or whatever and really strikes a chord and totally stays with you. It's a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre, who I was also reading at the time. I think I was trying to figure out if I was a humanist or not. Those sort of ideas are quite appealing when you're 16."


Hero - Tom DiCillo

"Probably for similar reasons. It's not particularly for Johnny Suede, though I love how surreal that movie is. Me and my girlfriend really laugh our head off when he's in bed with that girl and is so horribly nervous, and afterwards he thinks he's the Don of sex. He's so cool but also so naïve it's heartbreaking. But my favourite one is The Real Blonde. It's got to be one of my favourite films ever, that. There's an English character in it who gets into this really bad TV soap opera and becomes obsessed with finding a real blonde girl in this world of false blondes. I really like the simplicity of that sort of obsession in the really false world of the film that the director creates. It's another thing about almost normal lives, but I never want the film to end. He makes you take such a shine to the characters that you end up missing them after the film is over."




Villain - Prehistoric Man

"The biggest villain in history has to be the first caveman to hit another caveman with a rock or a stick or something. That's gotta be where the world started going wrong. Just because the other caveman was wearing a different colour mammoth skin or something. Not much else you can say about that really, 'cos the implications of that act are eternal and you'll go mad thinking about it."


Villain - Peter Stringfellow

"Because he won't drag himself out of the most disgusting era of the last century: the '80s. He invited us to his club years ago when we were all pretty broke and I went to the bar and they rejected my card and I was like, 'Well, I thought it was free, y'know.' And then there was a little, er, incident and he threw us out. He told the Daily Mirror we were a bunch of amateurs. Stringfellows is all Tequila Sunrises and cocaine. All that egotist shit. What a w***er!"


Villain - Camden Council

"Partly because of their attitude to planning permission but mostly to do with the bloody potholes on the roads and pavements. It's got to the point now that I can't even go down the shops on my skateboard without ending up flying through the air and landing on my arse. I mean you can be going along very nonchalantly and all of a sudden the board isn't going any further but you are, through the air in slow motion and landing on your head in front of a gaggle of schoolgirls who recognise you. 'Ooohh look, it's Graham from Blur with mild concussion!' I'm going to have to start skating masked, maybe dress up like Sqwubbsy like Julian Cope did. Wouldn't laugh then, would they? I do have a skateboard hero too, Jamie Thomas, but as I've already done a song about him on the album I didn't want to mention him here too much in case he thinks I'm stalking him. I'm also being constantly hassled by Camden Council for Council Tax. They hassle me for that every week. Pain in the arse."