I always used to avoid any film that had Mark Wahlberg in it, because he seemed to have the acting skills of a park bench. Then I saw The Departed - because you have to see Marty's movies - and thought he was brilliant as the astonishingly foul-mouthed Sergeant Dignam. Now I've seen Contraband and regrettably, it may be time to revert to Plan A.
He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws… Ah wait now, that’s The Gruffalo. Mark Lanegan doesn’t have any of the above (although he does have tattooed fists and a considerable jaw, and past heroin addiction probably hasn’t played too well with the old teeth).
In Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala, an aspiring beauty queen becomes an unwitting accomplice in the dirty deeds of a criminal gang. If it sounds like the plot of a cheap thriller, it isn’t – it’s visceral and uncommon, capturing the ferocity and reach of Mexico’s criminal underworld and the terror of being caught in its crossfire.
Mark Lanegan, ex-junkie and one-time singer with Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, so fully inhabited his cover of “The Beast in Me” on last year’s Hangover II soundtrack you could easily have assumed he'd written it. With Blues Funeral, his first full solo outing since 2004, he again uses his grated baritone to express the twilight zones of the soul. The result? A magnificent account of a life lived to within an inch of its limits.
Exactly three years ago, late in the morning of 29 January, 2009, the news began to circulate that John Martyn had died at the age of 60. I spent the following 24 hours or so talking to many of his cronies to help assemble a tribute feature for a music magazine. Chris Blackwell, the man who had signed him to Island in 1967, had just stepped off a plane in Jamaica. He sounded fuzzy and uncertain. He knew Martyn was dead but needed details. “What happened, I haven’t heard?” he asked. Pneumonia, I told him. “Ah, God, that’ll do you in.”
Debut albums often set the bar high. How are you going to top a Psychocandy or a Piper At The Gates of Dawn? The answer is, not easily and, with rare exceptions, not at once. All those ideas that had been growing forever splurge out in those first excited studio sessions, years of passion and imagination explode into the open and the thrill carries to the listener.
Gonjasufi, AKA Sumach Ecks (b 1978) was raised in San Diego by a Mexican mother and an American-Ethiopian father. His musical ability first came to more than local prominence when he appeared on the Flying Lotus album Los Angeles in 2008. His own debut album, A Sufi and a Killer, produced by Flying Lotus, Gaslamp Killer and Mainframe, appeared in 2010.
I have been an admirer of Mike Doughty as a singer and songwriter since picking up Soul Coughing’s first two CDs at a car boot sale for 50p each. I was drawn by the sinister, Lynchian art work and dryly witty song titles such as "Sugar Free Jazz” and “White Girl”. You can’t always judge a CD by its cover or its song titles, but in this instance I hit gold. Here’s the opening line of "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago", the first song on their debut Ruby Vroom: “A man drives a plane/ Into the/ Chrysler Building”. I was hearing this post 9/11, but it was recorded in 1994.
Every now and again there's a TV series that lives up to the hype, and in 2011 it was Channel 4's Top Boy. Although this crushing saga of gang violence, drug dealing and conflicted loyalties in Hackney was written by Irishman Ronan Bennett, it felt hauntingly authentic, though Bennett admitted that he'd almost despaired of getting the street-level patois right.
The passing of Jackie Leven, who died last night from cancer, comes with a sense of real sadness. One of our most distinctive and original singer-songwriters, the Fifer maintained a doggedly low commercial profile throughout almost four decades spent weaving his rich, rather brave musical tapestry.