I've always suspected that there will come a time when I finally understand what Lawrence meant in one of his most famous songs: 'all the people I like are those that are dead'. And while it has not yet come to that, mercifully, it still feels like time is beginning to move a little too fast. This January, it has been cruel and unforgiving. First my favourite filmmaker, and now this.
Marianne Faithfull always had that presence. I guess I could describe it as this effortless charisma that filled every inch of the image or the screen every time that I saw her. She filled the records and the speakers, too, with a voice that had the charm and the sort of playful wisdom that always felt so uniquely hers.
Also, unlike a million other pretty faces from the 60s, the ones that swirled around that glorious decade of madness and beautiful excess, she had substance. And that is not just "Sister Morphine" that she had once co-written with Mick Jagger. Albums like Broken English, Give My Love To London and Negative Capability (her late-period Renaissance was remarkable) are these rough, self-contained jewels that demand your absolute attention.
Presence and substance - when you encounter those two things in one person, hold on to that person until the very end.
And then she always had impeccable taste. The record that gets played in my house most often is a collection of Marianne Faithfull's live performances titled The Montreux Years. It features, among other things, songs from artists such as Van Morrison, Neko Case, Leonard Cohen and John Lennon. Her choice of material was nothing short of perfect, and it always felt as if the likes of Morrison and Cohen wrote those songs specifically for her to sing. She kept that taste until the very end, and that is regardless of where you looked: her Paris apartment or her last spoken-word collaboration with Warren Ellis.
Certainly she was beautiful, one of the most beautiful people you could ever see. A beauty that so effortlessly transcended the physical form as well as that long-gone decade that branded her Jagger's muse and yet another sex symbol.
She had presence, substance, taste, beauty. Very few people in the world can beat that. So few, in fact, that I'm not even too sure that they still exist.
With the exception of last year, when Bill Ryder-Jones released the masterful Iechyd Da, January is mostly dull, dry and uneventful. Which is, regrettably, more or less exactly what could be said about the latest Franz Ferdinand album. The Human Fear starts well, with the frankly rather enthusiastic "Audacious" single that could stand up to their early work. It is all donwhill after that, however. I still think there is a decent songwriter in there somewhere, but a few flashes aside (the riff of "The Birds", "Night or Day") - this is like their first three albums castrated and diluted with water.
If a career can contain only one masterpiece, then Tunng have already made it. It was 2020's Tunng Presents... Dead Club, their richest and most tuneful set of songs ever, and an album which managed to soundtrack that awful year for me. This year's Love You All Over Again is things going back to normal: lovely electronic folk pop with melodies that float around you rather than knock you down. Still, the one-two punch that opens this album is brilliant; and even despite some blatant filler ("Sixes"), I still find myself going back to this time and time again. For comfort, yes, but also for the melodies.
Ethel Cain has made quite a name for herself with her long-winded Christian slowcore that frankly just bores me to death. Perverts, her new EP (that runs for nearly 90 minutes, I'm obliged to say), deals with all kinds of human perversions that she sets to a bunch of dreamy, vaguely menacing ambient drones that go absolutely nowhere.
I honestly do believe that even at this late point in their career Mogwai can still come up with engaging music. The Bad Fire has some pleasantly dreamy grooves ("Pale Vegan Hip Pain") and intense crescendos ("If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some Of The Others") to keep me interested. A good album. One, though, that won't make a fan out of you. Also, the closing "Fact Boy" sounds just like Sigur Rós.
Finally, I have never cared for Ringo Starr's solo career, and the cursory listen to Look Up did not provide any interesting revelations. Decent, well-produced country music whose edge is so thin it is barely worth talking about. "Don't Pass Me By" would be a highlight on this collection, and "Don't Pass Me By" is not even a very good song (by far the weakest piece on The White Album, and that album features "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill").
I feel like I do not have it in me to write an obituary. I will only say that we will now be living in a world where a new David Lynch film is an impossibility. And that is a sad and pathetic world. Grey and increasingly more hopeless, and made even worse by two psychopathic clowns, Trump and Musk, who are about to compound the overwhelming misery. Oh how appropriate that scream at the end of the third season of Twin Peaks really is.
As for this piece, it is to do with three 2023 films that were released in the cinemas in 2024. When I do my annual write-up on cinema, in about a month or so, I will only focus on last year. In which case these three will be missed, and they deserve so much better.
The Beast (2023) dir. by Bertrand Bonello / France
There are bits and pieces of Henry James's great little novella The Beast In The Jungle behind this - but this is still very much its own thing. The Beast is this beautiful mindfuck of a film, with a plot that moves from distant to recent past to frankly rather disturbing future in a grotesque and at first somewhat confusing manner. After some time, though, it all falls into place, and when you understand what is going on here, the whole thing becomes very tight and impressive.
In the future, everything is controlled by AI and people's emotions are surplus to requirements. However, humans can undergo a certain 'cleansing' procedure to rid themselves of real feelings. Which is exactly what the character of Léa Seydoux is trying to do. The setting moves from early 20th century France to 2014 Los Angeles to 2044 Paris, and we go through some vaguely familiar scenes - the very last one being absolutely devastating, and quite Lynchean in its own surreal way.
La Chimera (2023) dir. by Alice Rohrwacher / Italy
Like The Beast, this felt to me like a total left-field masterpiece. Only this film has none of the slickness of the The Beast. It is set in Italy in the 1980s and tells of a group of looters who dig out Etruscan treasures and sell them to collectors. The main part is played by Josh O'Connor (who was great in both Challengers and Lee), and he is absolutely phenomenal here - but I was also really impressed by the Brazilian actress Carol Duarte who gives one of the most charming and natural performances I've ever seen.
It is a very arthouse sort of film, but La Chimera gives that word a good name. Because for all its playful eccentricities (the scenes where Josh O'Connor's character finds the treasures are truly bizarre), the film has real emotional depth. The last scenes in particular are some of the most powerful cinema in recent memory.
Perfect Days (2023) dir. by Wim Wenders / Japan
Back in the old days, one of my pet peeves was people telling me that Wings Of Desire was the greatest film of all time. I used to fight each and every one of those people. Much has changed since then and I have softened to it a little (that said, I still find it vastly overrated) - but it is only now, with Perfect Days, that I can safely state that Wim Wenders has finally made his masterpiece.
Not Wings Of Desire, not Paris, Texas - but this, a meditative, almost wordless film about a Japanese toilet cleaner in Tokyo whose daily life we witness over the course of several days. It is a mesmerising film, and it felt so great, and so calming, to be part of the experience of watching it after a long working day in a half-empty Polish cinema. Wenders forged something timeless out of routine (Kōji Yakusho is hypnotic in his role, and especially in that memorable close-up at the very end), and did it so well that Lou Reed's song is merely an afterthought.
Lawrence is the sort of man who believes The Mother And The Whore is the greatest film ever made. Now you may have heard of people who express that opinion, you may even come across a few of them in real life, but deep down you will always question their honesty. As this brilliant book by Will Hodgkinson demonstrates, Lawrence is an authentic character. His oddness is genuine, and so are his opinions. Lawrence truly loves The Mother And The Whore like no other film. He also believes Vic Godard is the greatest living songwriter. Oh and liquorice candy is the best food in the world.
One of the undeniable achievements of this biography is that you do not even have to be a Lawrence fan to be completely engrossed by the narrative. That I personally happen to love the man's music (Felt's Forever Breathes The Lonely Word, Denim's two studio albums and Go-Kart Mozart's On The Hot Dog Streets are all classics in my eyes) is a nice bonus, but really - you can't help but be fascinated by this strange, enigmatic artist who never washes his jeans, carries a WH Smith bag with him wherever he goes, drinks milky tea and dreams of writing the greatest pop song of all time. Bizarrely, we can all relate. No, seriously, we can.
The best books start in a way that can be described as inevitable. In Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence (published in 2024), we meet Lawrence in a Jewish district in London looking for a place to pee and talking about the exquisite, shimmering music from Felt's debut album. What a way to begin. From then on, Hodgkinson creates a fascinating portrait of a flawed, insecure, genuinely odd and talented man who has spent his career striving to break into stardom. As a matter of fact, Lawrence's relationship with fame is the central theme of the book. It is always there, peering from the corner, bubbling underneath every chapter and every sentence. Yes, the "Summer Smash" debacle is definitely mentioned (Lawrence wrote this potential hit single in 1997, it got great notices but was swiftly shelved due to Diana's death - this was the start of Lawrence's darkest years), but the frustration runs a lot deeper and the conclusion that Hodgkinson reaches towards the end is as bittersweet as it is inevitable.
Street-Level Superstar is not even an especially complimentary portrait. If anything, Lawrence is depicted as a difficult, exasperating man. Intriguing, too, but someone you would rather appreciate from a distance (Lawrence's preferred way of dealing with the world). He has a knack for driving other people insane (John Leckie lost it during the recording sessions for Back In Denim) and he seems to have a somewhat unhealthy relationship with money (embittered ex-girlfriend Michaela: "He loved rich people. They didn't even have to do anything for him to love them"). He is erratic and unreliable. "I was under no illusion", writes Hodgkinson in the final chapter of this biography. "His was not a life for any sane person to aspire". Throughout the book, Lawrence is full of painful self-deprecation but also pride in what he has achieved artistically. "When I was young", he says at some point, "I wanted to live in a matchbox". And this from someone who has spent most of his life pursuing the loftiest ambitions.
Basically, the book gives us one year spent in the company of Lawrence. During this year, we walk with Lawrence through London (and Birmingham, briefly - his hometown), attend his gig at Glastonbury and even the recording session for his latest world smash (titled "Deliveroo Delivery", how else?). And in the background, Will Hodgkinson goes through the man's entire life, from difficult childhood (in an area he hated, with parents he hated) to periods of frenzied creativity to rare friends (Pete Astor, Bobby Gillespie) to estranged girlfriends (both real and imaginary) to years of homelessness and obscurity to the 'grand' unveiling of his giant marble bust in a London gallery. It is quite an incredible story, and Hodgkinson succeeds in bringing the man alive, to the extent that you will be sad to let Lawrence go by the end of it. With his big shopping bag, his famous cap and his diluted tea (two thirds tea, one third milk) bought from Costa Coffee.
The writing is excellent all the way through, Hodgkinson's style is both humorous and poetic. "It was a glorious day in the city, one of those sunlit afternoons when being alive seems like a great idea. A perfect day, then, to go clothes shopping with Lawrence" (actually, a lot of space in the book is given to Lawrence's dressing style, the kind that puts shop assistants on guard). Or take this paragraph, for instance: "Not only did he never appear to eat anything, he rarely drank water either. The only sustenance appeared to come from the milky tea he liked to buy from Costa Coffee towards the end of our long walks. I, on the other hand, was a mere human, in need of water at the very least". Or when he writes about his personal favourite album On The Hot Dog Streets that opens with "Lawrence Takes Over". Hodgkinson calls the song "poignant because the chances of his taking over were by then as likely as his getting stuck into a cheese fondue".
Interestingly, towards the end of the book I started to see certain similarities between Lawrence and Mark E. Smith (who initially was quite generous towards Felt). On the face of it, he also tries to be an authoritarian band leader, stingy with money and unwilling to share writing credits. He also writes all the lyrics and does not play any instruments (you could, in fact, paraphrase the famous quote from Smith and say a Lawrence band is Lawrence "and your granny on bongos"). He also gives crazy instructions to his band members. Like he once told the bassist not to play the A-string and the keyboard player to avoid pressing the black keys. But herein lies that crucial difference. The keyboard player never stopped pressing the black keys, and the bassist kept hitting the A-string (he even suggests, half-jokingly, that Lawrence has no idea where the actual A-string is located).
But despite the failed guidelines, it was all very amiable on the car ride back to London. No bitterness, no threats. He was his usual Lawrence, drinking milky tea, avoiding small talk and writing that elusive hit single in his head. He even approved the draft copy of his biography without any major corrections. As Will Hodgkinson puts it at the very end of the book:
