Interviews & Features
A small and slightly haphazard selection. In a box under my desk is a huge pile off pre-digital work which one day we'll get round to scanning and uploading. Also kicking around are video interviews with the likes of Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, David Cronenberg, Anton Corbijn, chats with John Peel and several hundred record reviews. It's quite a big box.
Condition Critical
I've spent a lot of my working life reviewing films. What's the point of film criticism?
Best Films of the 2000s
My personal and deeply idiosyncratic pick of the decade. On another day it might have been different, but on that day it was this.
Video interview: Anvil on Anvil!
For a brief period, round about 1982, when I was suburban nipper worshiping at the altar of metal, Anvil were granted a coveted spot on my bedroom wall. Twenty-seven years later I told Anvil's singer Lips this when I went to interview them about Sacha Gervasi's brilliant film. Lips looked less than stoked, but he liked my Hawkwind T-shirt. Conducted for Film4's online and broadcast show Movie Rush, directed by Matt McNally
Interview: director Julian Temple remembers Clash frontman Joe Strummer
I met the director of The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle to discuss punk and his old mate Joe Strummer, subject of The Future Is Unwritten
Florian Von Donnersmarck on The Lives Of Others
I met the Oscar-winning director of The Lives Of Others. I think he'd just flown into London on the red-eye, but he was an extraordinarily sharp and fascinating guy. The conversation ranged from music and art to philosophy, which we both studied at university in the early 1990s. Not together, mind. He's one of the tallest people I've ever met.
Gerald McMorrow on Franklyn
Franklyn got a bit of a rough ride on its release in 2009, but I thought it was a fascinating and ambitious attempt to bend diverse genres into a strange new shape. I spoke to McMorrow on the phone. I think he'd just finished a TV interview in Ireland and was still in the studio. He was a lovely guy, bubbling with enthusiasm, and it turned out we both loved obscure 1970s Brit psychodrama The Shout...
The Great Spacemen of Dub
An old one this, hence no acknowledgment of dubstep, but I'm fond of it anyway. From that great beacon of literary dissent, The Idler.