Originally published in the Stool Pigeon, photography by Spencer Murphy

As Beastie Boys videos go, it’s an understated affair. Adams Yauch and Horovitz – MCA and Ad-Rock respectively – are seated in front of a large mixing desk. Yauch wears a red collared shirt and does most of the talking; a bearded Horovitz stares blankly at a point somewhere in the distance, as though weighing up the news for the first time. What few laughs there are appear due to nerves, and neither man seems particularly comfortable looking into the camera.

“About two months ago I started feeling this little lump in my throat,” says Yauch, “like you would feel if you had swollen glands or something like that, like you’d feel if you had a cold. So I didn’t really think it was anything…”

He says that the cancer is localised in the perotic gland and the neighbouring lymph node, and wants to reassure fans that it’s both easily treatable and unlikely to affect his vocals. But the main reason he’s making the video is to apologise to those who have made plans to see the Beastie Boys in the near future: forthcoming tour dates will have to be cancelled, something he describes as “a pain in the ass”. He thanks Adam for coming along, and there’s a moment of surreal humour as the pair go off on a tangent involving fake beards and country music side projects. Then the gravity of the news swings back into frame, and there’s a lingering silence, eyes finally meeting the camera before the clip suddenly ends.

The first video responses were up on Youtube within hours. Some were unduly morbid – one gentleman went to great lengths to shoot down Yauch’s assertion that the cancer is easily treatable, a clip that single-handedly justified the decision to disable comments on the original announcement. Most, however, were simple messages of goodwill from fans of all ages, sentiments echoed by countless artists over subsequent weeks. At the All Points West festival in New Jersey, which the Beasties were due to headline, Chris Martin made a typically execrable stab at turning Fight For Your Right into a piano ballad; Jay Z performed a commendable cover of No Sleep Till Brooklyn; and the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O took to the stage wearing an armband that read ‘Get Well MCA’.

The subject of affection had by this time emerged from surgery and returned home “to relax, have home-cooked food and hang out with the family”. He was avoiding painkillers for fear they would slow his recovery, and remained optimistic, though he admitted he wasn’t looking forward to radiation therapy.

“No sooner am I on the mend from this first torture than they are lining up the next one,” he said in a statement, which ended by thanking all the friends, fans and artists who had sent positive thoughts his way. “I do think that all of the well wishes have contributed to the fact that my treatment and recovery are going well.”

***

I’d met Yauch and Horovitz a few weeks earlier on the promotional tour for their now temporarily shelved LP, Hot Sauce Committee Part 1. The interview was preceded by an album listening session at the EMI offices in Kensington – the music industry equivalent of a communal wank with complete strangers. There were the usual cavity searches for recording devices and disclaimers guaranteeing worldly possessions against any financial loss incurred by the label, after which we were shepherded into a small room and seated around a table laid with bowls of flavourless crisps. In one corner was a small fridge stuffed with beers and soft drinks, a sign taped to its door reading ‘Beastie Boys: Help Yourselves!’, as though Horovitz, Yauch and Diamond had popped out for five minutes but would be back to serve hors d’oeuvres imminently. There was no press release. No track names. Not even an album title. We were simply made to sit nodding along to a nebulous stream of party music, coughing awkwardly in pauses that would normally be filled with the sound of crowds cheering and glass breaking. On top of that, the CD started skipping halfway through.

It’s not easy to appraise a record under such circumstances, but it sounded decent – which is to say that it sounded like a Beastie Boys album, all fuzzbox basslines and breakneck beats, and shouty vocals distorted as if through a megaphone. It appeared to be more heavily produced than their last hip hop offering, To The Five Boroughs (the largely forgotten all-instrumental The Mix-Up was released in 2007). There was a track on there with a laser bassline that bordered on sounding like a drum ‘n’ bass tune, and a couple of collaborations – Santigold, I think, and Nas. Oh, I don’t know. Go and listen to it yourself. It’s probably been leaked on to the internet by now. Though not, I should emphasise, through any fault of my own.

***

Mike D

The interview itself took place at the swanky Soho Hotel in central London. Mike D was on his way out the door when I arrived, which left me with the two Adams. Both had the air of men unexcited by the prospect of their tenth interview of the day: Ad-Rock sprawled across a couch in his slippers and struggled to keep his eyes open; MCA sipped tea and gazed absently at the far wall. Part of me wants to say that he kept rubbing his throat, but I may be imagining it. Either way, it seems pretty obvious with hindsight that concerns about his health had begun to sour the tour. At the time I registered their apathy as understandable behaviour for men in their mid forties, if not quite in keeping with the party personas on their latest album.

“Oh, I still party all the time,” yawned Horovitz. “Do you know Party All The Time, by Eddie Murphy? I listen to that song pretty much on repeat. I’m basically a party machine.”

Yauch said that the record captured the sound of old friends having fun in the studio – their own Oscilloscope Laboratories in New York, which has hosted MIA and the reformed Bad Brains, whose Build A Nation LP Yauch produced.

“It was definitely a silly time, for sure. All three of us know how to use Pro Tools, so most days it’s just us in there and we can mess around as much as we like. That’s when the craziest shit happens, when we’re just playing.”

I told them that travelling across London I’d seen a kid who couldn’t have been older than fifteen wearing a Beastie Boys T-shirt; on arriving at the hotel, a receptionist in her fifties had asked if I was interviewing the same band who advocated stealing VW emblems for necklaces in the 1980s. (“Because if so they still have one of mine, and I want it back.”) How did it feel to have taken what was initially dismissed as fad music and developed it over decades? What was it like to straddle so many generations of fans?

“It’s definitely interesting,” said Horovitz, sounding anything but interested. “I remember the first time I noticed kids in the audience that were younger than the band, and that was a long time ago.”

“Our music has always been about having fun,” added Yauch. “If we’ve been popular all these years then that’s because having fun never goes out of fashion, however old you are, whatever generation you belong to.”

At the same time, the guys acknowledged the importance of certain musical transformations along the way. Charting the development of the Beastie Boys is a little like recounting the evolution of hip hop itself, from their ’86 frat hop debut, the Rick Rubin-produced Licensed To Ill, which Rolling Stone reviewed under the headline ‘Three Idiots Create A Masterpiece’, to their 1988 follow-up, Paul’s Boutique, which the same magazine referred to as ‘the Dark Side Of The Moon of hip hop’. Their output in the first half of the 1990s – Check Your Head and Ill Communication – both coined and captured the trend for scuzzy funk, monster basslines and old school skate aesthetics. After that they began embracing flamboyant theatrics and wild experimentation: from 1995’s Aglio e Olio, an eight track EP of punk numbers clocking in at just eleven minutes, to 2006’s Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That, a movie of a Madison Square Garden gig filmed entirely by audience members.

“There have definitely been some landmark moments,” said Yauch. “The sampling thing made a huge impact on our music, and on music in general. When we recorded Licensed To Ill people were using these enormous machines that could trigger single fire, second long samples. Two years later the Dust Brothers were producing Paul’s Boutique, and the amount of samples being layered on there was just insane. That whole cut-and-paste approach is taken for granted these days, but back then it took the whole world by surprise.”

“But sampling is just one part of our music,” said Horovitz. “We’ve never stopped using live instruments, partly because of the warmth they bring to a cut, partly because it’s so much easier to just sit down and play a riff you have running through your head than spend weeks rummaging around your record collection looking for a sample that sounds vaguely similar.”

I suggested that playing live instruments also linked them to their punk roots – the trio first started performing as a hardcore outfit in 1979, and a tendency to rock out still surfaces regularly.

“Possibly,” said Horovitz, “but we never record with an agenda. We make the music we’re compelled to make at the time. If that happens to be punk, we make punk music. If we felt compelled to mess around with flutes, we’d make flute music.”

To which extent, said Yauch, the inimitable Beastie Boys ‘sound’ was more a lyrical than a musical trademark.

“I think we’ve experimented a lot with tracks over the years. Some of the instrumental stuff could be by any number of bands. But when the three of us start rhyming it’s always going to sound like a Beastie Boys tune. I don’t think there’s any way of getting around that.”

***

Ad-Rock

At which point the interview was brought to a close. Not the worst of all time by a long shot, but muddied by an unpleasant sense of irritation on the part of two men clearly wanting to be somewhere else.

What had I expected? That they’d ask me to go skateboarding with them in the car park? That they’d dress me up in a Godzilla costume and throw toy planes at my head? The poor guys probably heard the same questions in every interview the previous week, and no doubt had plenty more of the same to look forward to.

At the time I assumed that being absorbed into the belly of a beast like EMI had effectively taken the fun out of promoting their record, and that knocking on for fifty probably didn’t help either. But I couldn’t help but feel cheated: I worshipped the Beastie Boys growing up, and seeing them so drawn and deflated had seemed like the final nail in the coffin of the party they’d long ago told me to fight for.

Now, of course, I know better, and I’m ashamed for having doubted them even for a second. It’ll never happen again.

Originally published in the Sunday Telegraph, photography by Spencer Murphy

We’ve been speaking barely ten minutes when Sarah Bridges shifts her enormous upper body in the dollhouse dimensions of her chair and clocks a young man, kit bag in hand, framed in the doorway of the Dartford pub she runs with her husband Bill.

“That’s my three o’clock,” she says, smiling and waving at the newcomer, who it transpires has travelled from Dover for a physical appraisal from Sarah, one of the world’s most experienced female bodybuilders. Ten minutes later we’re crammed into the pub kitchen, invited to watch as the 26-year-old is ordered to strip and stand posing in his pants while Sarah points out his various strengths and weaknesses. At the bar, a trio of locals sip Kentish ales and pass around a bag of pork scratchings as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

Yet Sarah’s dedication to bodybuilding is out of the ordinary. Fewer and fewer women in the UK are taking part in the sport; of those that do, the majority are opting to adhere to more conventionally feminine classes like ‘figure’ and ‘body fitness’. By contrast, the bulkier frames of women like Sarah are seen as a throwback to bodybuilding’s 1980s heyday, when bigger was better and Arnie was king.

“She was eight stone when we met,” says Bill, limping his way across the pub on slipped discs and shot hips, dubious trophies of decades spent at the top of the UK wrestling scene. “She didn’t like being tall and gangly, so I encouraged her to hit the weights. I wasn’t expecting her to stick with it, but after three months she was showing a dramatic change in muscle tone, and was sounding more enthusiastic than ever. Soon after that she started coming to the gym with me and my wrestling buddies.”

Bill rummages behind the bar for a photograph of the couple in the mid-80s; Bill buffed and quiffed, Sarah impossibly pale and fragile. It’s a hard image to reconcile with the person who eventually returns from the kitchen and lowers herself carefully into her chair: at 14.5 stone, Sarah is now almost a third heavier than the ten-stone Rottweiler she walks between workouts in the run up to a competition. For all that, she remains profoundly attached to her femininity: in the height of summer, she takes pride in parading up and down Dartford High Street in the shortest skirt she can find, immune to the taunts of those brave enough to articulate their amazement.

“I’ve grown thick skinned,” she says, playfully rearranging her blonde hair. “I admit it was hard at first, and I found myself crying a lot of the time. People are still pretty backward when it comes to female bodybuilding in the UK. In America they come up and shake your hand, hug you and ask for advice. Here they bark snide comments from the other side of the street.”

America is somewhere Sarah has visited regularly since turning pro in 2003, a step that has left her unable to take part in the UK’s amateur-only competition circuit. Instead, she most regularly attends shows as a judge, a role that has given her a unique insight into a national community of female bodybuilders that she says is extremely close-knit.

Sarah Bridges

“I often go backstage before shows and stand around having a natter with the girls,” she says. “We chat about training and share a piece of chocolate – we eat chocolate just before going on stage to help bring up the veins. There used to be a lot of bitchiness, but that seems to have disappeared.”

Such closeness may well stem from the female bodybuilding community’s ever decreasing size. While last month’s UK Bodybuilding and Fitness Federation championships featured almost 200 male competitors across a range of disciplines – from juniors and over-50s to various weight divisions from under 70kg to beyond 100kg – there were just eight women standing in the catch-all female bodybuilding category, long ago conflated from light, middle and heavyweight divisions due to a lack of competitors.

More controversially, the federation recently introduced a new American-style bikini class division in what many see as a blatant attempt to appeal to the largely male audiences at bodybuilding tournaments across the country. It’s something that Lisa Cross, crowned UK champion at last months final, sees as a dangerous shift in principles.

“I’ve read forum posts by girls getting ready for bikini class contests, and all they talk about is teeth veneers, false nails and hair extensions. That’s a beauty pageant, not a bodybuilding competition. It’s another example of the authorities undermining the hard work done by women who treat bodybuilding as a way of life. Everyone knows that we’re a dying breed, and this is just another nail in the coffin.”

A former police officer, Lisa left work to pursue full-time the hobby that had brought her so much mockery on the force. Now 32, she struggles to empathise with the conversations about marriage and babies that define the lives of former co-workers, many of whom look at her as though she’s crazy.

“What I do with my life definitely alienates me from other women my age,” she says. “But I talk to other female bodybuilders and we get each other straight away. That week leading up to a competition when you drop carbs altogether, and then stumbling on stage and struggling to pull poses when you can barely stand up: it’s impossible to go through that and not feel a connection with other women who have done the same.”

At the same time, Lisa admits that it’s physical elitism that has proved to be bodybuilding’s ultimate undoing. It’s a sport that attracts very few women; of those it does, even fewer have the time, dedication or genetic makeup necessary to get past the early hurdles. On top of that, the lack of a national pro circuit means that there’s no prize money involved in what is, in itself, an expensive sport to pursue. Sponsorship is the traditional method of making ends meet; less traditional, but potentially more lucrative, is modelling for muscle worship websites, something Lisa has done in the past, and which has brought her into occasional conflict with her peers.

“Some people argue that it’s bringing bodybuilding into disrepute,” she says. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s putting bodybuilding on a pedestal, making it available to people who would never consider attending an actual show. It’s a huge industry in the US, and it allows me to spend 99 per cent of my time totally focussed on my career. The federation would probably have less of a problem with it if they were making money from it themselves.”

***

Hollie Walcott

For Hollie Walcott – sister of footballer Theo and poster girl for the more feminine figure discipline – the idea of muscle worship is something she struggles to take seriously.

“I find the whole thing pretty baffling,” says Hollie, sipping green tea in the café of her local fitness centre while kids tear around the crèche behind her. “I’ve always been aware that there are people who get off on the whole bodybuilder thing, but for me it’s so asexual. Even at competitions, when you’ve got all those men and women oiled up and standing around in the skimpiest of costumes, its more anatomical than anything. It’s a performance art, at the end of the day.”

Hollie’s success is all the more impressive for her being entirely self-taught. She fell into bodybuilding two years ago after settling on the gym as the best place to find space after the birth of her second child; she has no personal trainer, and no dietary regime save that she’s concocted herself through trial and error and a rough reading around the science of nutrition.

Despite this, she’s quickly become the best-known face in figure, which – like the affiliated body fitness discipline – serves as a respectable stopgap between conventional bodybuilding and the bikini contests bemoaned by traditionalists. She’s been on the receiving end of column inches and competition glory both at home and abroad (most recently winning the under-35s ‘short’ category at the US National Bodybuilding Championships in Washington DC), though she admits that there are still elements of the female bodybuilding community that look down on what she does.

“There are people who see figure as an easy alternative, but we diet just as hard, and we put in the same hours down the gym. The only difference is that we aren’t looking to build the same amount of muscle, or aiming for such a lean figure. It’s important to me that my look is completely natural, and I would never consider taking steroids: for me it’s about being healthy, and that’s a lifestyle choice. But nothing comes close to the feeling of competing. It’s impossible to put into words.”

The thrill of competition is something that 37-year-old body fitness contender Jo Griffiths understands only too well. Seated in her kitchen in the Welsh valley town of Aberdare, a drizzling fog shrouding the hills beyond the window, Jo describes how she won her first Welsh national after entering as a bet following only eight months of training. By the time she won her second – four years, a marriage and a separation later – she had qualified as a physical therapist and opened a sports massage parlour a few doors down the road.

“It’s easy to assume that there’s always a reason why a girl gets into bodybuilding – that she’s running away from an eating disorder or a disastrous marriage. That might bring a person to the gym, but it won’t keep them there. It’s a torturous sport, and you either enjoy it or you don’t. For those that do, it becomes an addiction, pure and simple. You take yourself right to the edge in the run up to a competition, and afterwards you swear you’ll never do it again. Then you get your strength back, and before you know it you’re back in the gym.”

True to her word, Jo followed her recent appearance at the British champs by announcing to her 1,500-odd Facebook friends that she was hanging up her costume to spend more time with her daughter, who she admits suffers from her mother’s exhaustion and occasional mood swings at the peak of her dieting. She’s also acutely aware of how much money she’s pouring into her pastime; she estimates that £4,000 this year alone has gone on costumes and heels, fake tans and travel expenses. Some of that she’s hoping to make back through legitimate modelling and TV work, though she’s constantly turning down less salubrious requests.

Jo Griffiths

“Obviously there are muscle worshippers out there, and you do get asked to take part in some pretty creepy things. And it’s not hard to see why some girls end up getting involved: a year’s worth of training and dietary supplements costs a fortune, and most girls wouldn’t think twice about spending £1,000 on a costume. There are times when I seriously consider calling it a day, but it’s so hard to let go.”

For all the hurdles facing the UK’s female bodybuilding community – from being undermined by bikini pageants to being unable to turn pro and win prize money on home turf – Jo believes that the biggest problem is a wider public misconception of what female bodybuilding actually entails.

“Some people think women’s bodybuilding is a watered down version of the men’s, when if anything we train and diet harder, because we don’t have testosterone to help us along the way. Other people think that we’re doing it to appeal to the opposite sex, that we’re actively encouraging all the wolf whistling and seedy forum advances. And that’s not true either. It’s a sport, and it’s one that I take very seriously. I just wish it wasn’t so difficult for me to do so.”

Originally published in Quart, photography by Edgar Martins

I had no idea how they had arrived, or how long they had been there, but they ranged around that icy plain in pairs and small parties, the snow-shrouded mountains rising dramatically on all sides.

Some carried drinks, though I saw no waiters in attendance; some lounged in upholstered wooden chairs of the type normally found in members’ clubs, though most stood in the snow amid small, frost-feathered plants. The men wore dark suits and ties, the women black dresses and the occasional hat or veil. No one seemed cold despite the weather: the atmosphere was genial and relaxed, the conversation easy and affable, and those who stood alone did so out of choice, gazing into the distance at the pale disc of a sun setting behind the rugged mountain range.

As I approached I began to recognise faces in the crowd, disconnected characters from my past who appeared not to have aged in the years since I’d last seen them. Mrs Cantley, for example, the old woman who lived next to my grandmother and whose red-faced husband collected miniature gargoyles from the Greek island they visited each summer. I saw Mrs Dale, the primary school headmistress in whose office I was berated for spreading a rumour that a girl absent with chicken pox had in fact been kidnapped, and Mr Jones, the maths teacher who had caught me with one hand in the school payphone, a sock full of silver coins in my pocket.

There were old friends: Richard Hunt, who had laughed at my home-cut hair and cheap plastic shoes and shown me my first pornographic magazine; Leigh Dane, who had lifted his shirt to reveal scars on his arms and back as we’d walked together to school. And there were lovers: Teresa Gersten, whose mouth had tasted of cigarettes and bitter German chewing gum; Anna Morgan, who would lie awake half the night worrying about a ghost in her flat; Sara Najafi, with whom I’d visited a French beach town and danced at midnight to the sound of distant waves, the moon splintering on the black surface of the sea.

As I walked through the crowd I realised that not a single face was entirely unknown to me. I recognised dentists and bus drivers, girlfriends of former flatmates and travelling companions with whom I’d once shared hostel rooms on a smoke-smothered gap year. No one, it seemed, was a complete stranger, though not even my closest friends appeared to register my presence as I passed across the plain: no eyes alighted on mine, no head so much as nodded in my direction.

I threaded my way through the congregation entirely unheeded until I had passed the stragglers standing at its farthest edge, striding out into the shadow of the mountains to the place where my mother and my sister stood waiting for me, as I’d known they would be. By the time I arrived the sky was flushed blue and black, and we greeted each other with smiles and silent embraces before the women turned and began walking toward the hills, my sister’s blonde hair slipping in a silken river down her back, my mother’s thin curls the colour of crushed snow.

As I walked behind them I became haunted by the feeling that I’d seen the same view of both women only moments earlier: my mother at the wheel of her car, my sister in the passenger seat and me gazing absently out the window from the back. I remembered the song that had been playing on the stereo, and the way the roar of the rain had paused as we’d passed beneath motorway bridges. And I felt I could recall a flash of light, and a noise like thunder, and my mother’s cassette boxes seemingly suspended in the air as though strung on invisible threads. But I couldn’t be sure.

All I could be sure of was what surrounded me on all sides: the sky and the plains and the pale frozen plants, and the sound of the crowd lost beneath the crunch of snow underfoot as we rose into those darkening hills.

Originally published in the Stool Pigeon

There’s an uneasy moment following my interview with Kode9 and the Spaceape when I realise I’ve left my dictaphone running on the mixing desk of the former’s south London studio. I return to his front door to find him standing there grinning, said apparatus in hand. “I think you might have a minute or so of us talking about what a twat you are,” he says as he passes it to me. We both laugh.

Yet as I find myself transcribing the end of the recording the following afternoon – as the last couple of questions turn into a conversation about who embarrassed themselves at the Brits the previous evening, and I hear the three of us rise from our seats and wander downstairs, leaving behind an eerily empty room – a tightness clutches at my chest. What if I am forced to listen to a distant kitchen conversation about what a twat I am?

Mercifully, it was indeed a joke (Spaceape: What are you up to this afternoon? Kode9: I need to get something to eat, I’m starving. Oh look, he’s left his CLICK). But my fears weren’t exactly unfounded. Kode9, real name Steve Goodman, isn’t known for his tolerance of lazy journalists. The track Black Sun was reputedly inspired by a moment of rage in which he set fire to a copy of white van Britain’s favourite tabloid during the height of their 2008 Burial witch hunt; more recently, a subeditor friend at the Sunday Times received an angry email from the producer after suggesting he invented dubstep in a standfirst.

All of which is understandable given Goodman’s own close relationship with the written word. A lecturer in music theory at the University of East London, he recently completed a book on aggressive applications of audio (Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect And The Ecology Of Fear); more pertinently, Hyperdub was itself once a blog documenting the scattered seeds of UK bass culture – from garage and the tail end of DnB to the first black flowerings of dubstep.

“Hyperdub was initially focused on the reggae and dancehall side of garage: artists like El-B, Zed Bias, Horsepower Productions, Pay As U Go. Later we began featuring grime artists like Dizzee and Wiley, and people involved with proto-dubstep. We were posting unedited transcripts of long interviews, offering readers more detail than they’d ever find in magazines. I think that had a big impact in spreading stuff overseas as well as across the country.”

Around the same time, Goodman began sharing a Kennington flat with Steven Gordon, then a video artist making abstract, afrofuturist shorts that would later influence the visual and non-linear nature of his lyrics as the Spaceape. Gordon would often tune into his flatmate’s shows on Rinse FM, or catch him DJ at venues across the capital, but their musical collaborations were limited to lengthy conversations about classic albums in Steve’s bedroom studio. Until one lazy Sunday in 2004, when the pair decided to record something for fun.

Hyperdub honcho Kode9 is known for seeing red

“There was no plan behind it,” says Goodman. “I told him to grab one of his favourite records and just read the lyrics off the sleeve, and he came back with Prince’s Sign O’ The Times. I manipulated his voice a bit, threw down a bassline with enough space to layer a few effects on top. It was one of the quickest and easiest tracks we ever made, but it was an experiment, and there was no intention to release it. Not long after, I went to interview the Bug for XLR8R, and I gave him a CD with some bits and pieces I’d been working on. He really liked Sine Of The Dub, and suggested we start our own label and put it out ourselves. So all of this started with him, really.”

The sound the pair had hit upon was undeniably unique: a brutal futurism bolted together with minimal beats and sewn up with the sinister drawl of the Spaceape, a sort of patois-spitting Charon leading deceased souls across molten rivers of bass. Not that it was easy for Gordon to invoke this new persona in public during those early months, and never less so than at their first live pairing – a launch at the End for the second Rephlex Grime compilation in 2004.

“I was still very self-conscious at that point,” says Gordon, whose real voice is soft and affable, a million miles from the murmurings of the Spaceape. “There was already a scene happening, and there were MCs there that I knew of, and I felt uneasy stepping into that arena with my own thing, which was still only half-formed at that point. In the end, I did the show sitting under the decks where nobody could see me, with my voice coming out through the system. It’s funny to look back on, but now I understand the route I was taking.”

Not that it took long for the Spaceape to find his feet; soon not even the DJ booth could contain him, and he was demanding a wireless mic so that he could wander into the crowd and unspool ever more twisted reels of imagery amid circles of fascinated ravers. As the pair’s live shows gathered momentum, so their Kennington studio experiments developed a narrative thread, and by the time their debut LP Memories Of The Future dropped in 2006 on the still embryonic Hyperdub, Kode9 and the Spaceape had cemented their status as one the UK’s most interesting acts.

Part of their allure lay in a refusal to fit into any one musical pigeonhole: even in the steadily fragmenting world of UK bass culture, Kode9 and the Spaceape were sonic wanderers making music without genre. On one level this was a result of their drawing on so many musical influences: Goodman was himself influenced by everything from the psychedelic rock he listened to growing up in Glasgow (and to which he dropped his first pill in Edinburgh), to the Madchester movement, the late-90s Metalheadz nights and the grime and dubstep he was DJing on Rinse. Gordon, for his part, was channelling everything from the soundsystem reggae he’d been exposed to by his older brother, to Parliament, Prince and the rare groove he and his friends would queue to hear Giles Peterson drop at Dingwalls on Sundays (while Goodman, a short cab ride across town, was getting ready to brock out to Goldie and friends at the Hoxton Blue Note).

On another level, the pair’s statelessness seems a direct result of Goodman’s cynicism for the cyclical nature of specific dance music movements, and a desire to create something self-defining and unfettered by fashion.

“We’re old enough to have seen several of these scenes go through their hype cycles and get to the point where they’re just not making new sounds anymore. And you only have to go round that cycle a couple of times to realise that your infatuation with a certain sound drifts at a certain point. As much as new scenes appear to come through with original sounds, they tend to evolve in much the same way: part of the scene will get harder and darker; part will access the mainstream through appealing to a more indie audience. So I think we’ve become less invested in the idea of specific scenes as time has gone on.”

The Spaceape: "a sort of patois-spitting Charon leading deceased souls across molten rivers of bass"

We’re speaking in Goodman’s second-floor studio amid banks of analogue synths, shelves stacked with vinyl and teetering piles of Hyperdub test presses. In one corner a mic stand looms over a small chair clearly beloved of Kode9’s impossibly furry cat; through the window a group of Camberwell arts students stand smoking and drinking away the bright February afternoon, their increasingly high pitched babble leading Goodman to half-jokingly suggest assembling an arsenal of water balloons. Reverentially tacked to the wall above the monitor is a poster for Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, a sample from which opens the pair’s second LP, Black Sun, a more uptempo affair than Memories Of The Future, although one still shot through with despair.

“One of the things we wanted to do from the beginning was make it less bleak than the first album; make it more upbeat, more rhythmic, both in the vocal delivery and the tunes themselves. But I don’t think we can make music that your average person would find upbeat. Whatever we do has always got a ‘weight of the world’ feel to it.”

And while as stubbornly difficult to pigeonhole as its predecessor – from ethereal dub soliloquy Promises to the sonic brutality of Bullet Against Bone and the swimming head house of Love Is The Drug – it is, at least, a record that sits perfectly on Hyperdub. In the five years since its foundation the label has brought credibility and cohesion to the fringes of UK bass music, and currently stands as a bastion of hope for those disillusioned by dubstep’s decline into lobotomised jump-up and discredited chart fodder – a subject Goodman refuses to be drawn on, though he does note that one good thing dubstep has done for the world is “make people realise how shit their sound systems are”.

Instead, he chooses to focus on the positive things happening in UK electronic music, of which he says there are many. The sight of so many former grime artists tarted up and paraded like peacocks across the stage of the previous evening’s Brit Awards may not have been to everyone’s tastes, but Goodman recognises grime and dubstep breaking into the mainstream as a largely positive force, and one that could lead to a musical future that is anything but bleak.

“They’ve ram-raided the music industry and now they’re changing it from the inside, and that’s got to be a good thing. I try not to pay too much attention to the negative stuff, as there’s a lot of interesting music out there. In a world where an artist as unusual as James Blake can become a major seller, anything is possible.”

Originally published in Little White Lies

In June 2011 the Economist ran a headline that it claimed summed up a sense of international despair. ‘The End Of The Space Age’ was a withering obituary on what it saw as the mortified remains of space exploration: the space shuttle, which would complete its final mission the following month, had been ‘nothing but trouble’; the ‘benighted’ International Space Station (ISS) was ‘the biggest waste of money, at $100 billion and counting, that has ever been built in the name of science’. China might still be talking about a manned mission to Mars sometime before 2060, but for the western powers at least, the lure of the stars had lost its lustre.

Such accusations rest on any number of factors; some believe that federal sponsored space exploration is too bound up by bureaucratic red tape; others blame the politicisation of space travel, or the monstrous costs involved in sending men and women beyond Earth’s atmosphere. But underneath it all lies a more serious claim: that the ancient hunger for exploring worlds beyond our own no longer exists. It might be less than 40 years old, but John F Kennedy’s rousing speech about choosing to go to the moon “because new hopes for knowledge and peace are there” is of another age entirely. Buoyed by Cold War politics and the spread of science fiction, the astronauts of the ’60s and ’70s were popular heroes, their achievements seeming to momentarily unify humanity as it reached for the stars.

No more. Instead, many believe we’ve learned nothing in the subsequent decades but our limitations; that we’ve blanched at the emptiness surrounding Earth and rushed home, tails between our legs, fulfilling a prophecy envisioned in 1959 by Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens Of Titan, in which astronauts flung ‘like stones’ into space found only ‘what had already been found in abundance on Earth: a nightmare of meaningless without end’.

It’s a view given short shrift at the California offices of Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, set up by PayPal cofounder Elon Musk in 2002 – the same year his online payment provider was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. In less than a decade SpaceX has positioned itself at the forefront of a raft of private space exploration companies vying for both commercial and federal contracts: in June 2010 it inked a $492 million deal to deploy Iridium telecommunications satellites with its Falcon rockets, and it will soon begin running cargo missions to and from the ISS via its Dragon spaceships as part of a twelve-mission, $1.6 billion contract with NASA, filling the hole left by the retired shuttle in the process. For SpaceX, at least, the end of the space age is nowhere in sight.

“It’s the absolute opposite,” says spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham. “It’s the end of one era, but it’s the necessary end of that era if we’re going to move forward. NASA has always hired private companies to build its craft; the difference now is in contracting. We’re looking to have a private partnership where we bring in private investment and free market principles. And when you bring in competition, that forces every company to compete on cost, reliability and safety. It may start as a race for Earth’s orbit, but it’s going to expand opportunities for space travel that we’ve never seen before.”

SpaceX founder Elon Musk harbours a boyhood dream of colonising other worlds

The cost issue is a critical one. Despite the enormous sums being signed away by federal and commercial contracts, SpaceX’s success over its competitors is largely due to its ability to reduce prices. It has been the expense of space exploration, rather than technological limitations, that has stalled progress in the past: the iPhone may be a billion times more powerful per unit currency than the room-filling supercomputers in operation around the time man first stepped on the moon, but the amount of fuel needed to break out of the atmosphere means that a similar upscaling of efficiency has so far proved impossible in space travel. Yet through a willingness to experiment with new designs and invest in new materials and fuels, SpaceX is managing to offer comparatively cut-price flights. Its forthcoming Falcon Heavy rocket is expected to carry up to 53,000kg payloads for $100 million per launch, one third the cost of the Delta IV rocket sold by major competitor United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Cheaper launches mean more missions; more missions mean mankind can progress faster and go further. Ultimately, however, all companies circle the somewhat mythological idea that a craft will one day be entirely reusable, taking off, entering orbit and returning to Earth without having to jettison rocket stages en route. The shuttle was only partially reusable (the solid rocket boosters could be reused after several months refitting work, but the external fuel tank was typically discarded); if a completely reusable, quick turnaround craft were invented, it would revolutionise space travel. A fanciful idea, some think, but not to those at SpaceX.

“That is our goal,” says Kirstin. “Every time you burn up a rocket on re-entry it’s the equivalent of having to buy a brand new $200 million Boeing 747 each time you fly from Washington to London. Of every $100 million space launch, perhaps only $100,000 is fuel. Once we figure out a way of reusing vehicles, we’re talking about an amazing decrease in costs. Some people think it’s impossible, but to us it’s the holy grail of space exploration.”

Yet this isn’t the whole story. There are those who would argue that SpaceX’s true holy grail is a far more fanciful idea than slashing prices on satellite deployment or supply missions to the ISS. Indeed, SpaceX’s commercial and federal work is largely a way of bankrolling research into the driving ambition that led Elon Musk to establish the company in the first place: his dream of colonising other planets.

It’s a dream that rests on the assumption that an evolutionary disaster of the type that eradicated the dinosaurs is a real threat, and one that needs to be insured against by establishing human outposts on habitable planets. It’s not some crank ulterior motive that SpaceX is trying to hide: the company has already signed up to facilitate a forthcoming unmanned NASA mission to Mars, the main aim of which is to explore the presence of macrobiotic life and – by association – its potential as a sustainable ‘stepping stone’ from Earth.

“The idea is that even if the odds are very small that something catastrophic could happen on this planet,” says Kirstin, “we should prepare for that instance. We’ve gone from single to multi-cellular life, from living in the water to living on land, but this is the first time in the history of human evolution that we’ve had the ability to live on other planets. And we need to take advantage of that before it’s too late.”

Elon Musk is just one of a number of billionaires seeking to push the progress of human evolution beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and in doing so secure their place in the history books for having made something other than money. Robert Bigelow, who amassed his fortune with a chain of budget hotels, has already launched two prototype space stations through Bigelow Aerospace, and has plans to put a working station in orbit as early as 2014. Jeff Bezoz, founder of Amazon, has his own more secretive space exploration company, Blue Origin, which operates a spartan website, boasts a bizarre symbolic crest and offers only occasional media insights into the development of its vertical launch and landing New Shepherd rocket program.

Amid the pantheon of gracefully greying, boyish billionaires – affectionately known as ‘thrillionaires’ – one voice is, as usual, more vocal than most. In 2004 Richard Branson bought the design of SpaceShipOne, winner of the privately funded Ansari X Prize, which aimed to speed up technological developments by offering $10 million to anyone successfully launching a craft into suborbital space and recovering it twice in two weeks. SpaceShipOne was designed by engineer Burt Ratan and funded (to the tune of considerably more than the prize pot) by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and comprised of a small craft that detached from its White Knight mothership at an altitude of around 50,000ft (15.42km), before igniting its rocket and powering up to around 150,000ft (45.7km).

Virgin Galactic's suborbital craft flying over the Mojave Space Port, from where the company will operate

The space tourism arm of Branson’s empire – neatly named Virgin Galactic – is set to employ a six-passenger, two-crew member variation called SpaceShipTwo, also designed by Ratan, operating 3.5-hour flights from lift-off to landing (of which only a fraction is suborbital, and barely six-minutes weightless) from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Sceptics draw attention to the environmental impact of regular rocket flights, not to mention the inherent dangers – the latter highlighted in 2007 when an explosion during ground testing killed three engineers – but nothing seems capable of stemming the tide of people pre-booking $200,000 flights with $20,000 deposits.

It might sound like a lot of money, but it’s a snip compared to what civilians have paid in the past for the privilege of seeing the Earth from space. In 2001, American engineer Dennis Tito paid $20 million to spend seven days at the ISS; he was followed by South African software mogul Mark Shuttleworth in 2002 and US entrepreneur Greg Olsen in 2004. Virgin Galactic, by comparison, has dreams of one day offering a significantly cheaper service to the general public, but BBC science correspondent Martin Redfern remains dubious of it ever becoming a truly democratic way to travel.

“It’s always going to take a huge amount of energy to get somebody into space,” he says. “I imagine the cost will come down eventually – you might knock a zero off the price tag in 20 years time, but it’s still going to be comparable to the most expensive luxury round-the-world cruise you can imagine. I don’t think Rynanair will be running them.”

Nor, as Redfern points out, should potential customers lose sight of the fact that what they’re buying is still only a suborbital flight – a stunning view of the Earth and a wonderful rush of weightlessness, but a short and bone-rattling experience that remains a long way from the fantastic voyages of science fiction. If anything, suborbital space tourism is a glorified exploration of Earth’s immediate atmosphere rather than a space odyssey in the conventional sense. And that’s largely in keeping with the current shift in how we as humans ‘use’ space, which is now seen less as Vonnegut’s vacuum of ‘meaningless without end’ and more as a near-Earth resource richer than any oil field, teeming with satellites that control everything from televisions and credit card transactions to phones, farms and weapons of modern warfare.

“The shift has been from exploring space for space’s sake to using space for achieving X, Y or Z,” says Ben Baseley-Walker, one of a new generation of ‘space lawyers’ and head of a global stability program at the UN. “We’re standing at the end of the era of romanticising space exploration, and we’re talking about the application of space, about how best to use it for our various ends. And as more and more nations get involved – over 60 states now operate their own satellite systems, and more than 190 countries rely on space services in some way – the more important it becomes to make sure that their aims are likely to create a secure space environment for the long term.”

The likes of Baseley-Walker have been instrumental in championing the emerging field of space regulation – defining the legal responsibilities surrounding everything from the creation of space debris to the weaponisation of space, all issues with huge potential importance in mitigating future disasters, but which seem to take us ever further from the heroics of the golden age of space travel. To which end, it seems, the Economist may have had a point: inner space, it claimed, was useful; outer space was history.

Or perhaps not. Because even in the comparatively workmanlike task of taking tourists into suborbital space on Virgin Galactic flights, the brilliant engineers and boyish billionaires who themselves grew up with noses pressed to their black and white television screens hope to reignite dreams of space travel in a new generation of potential astronauts, putting mankind’s post-Earth evolution back on track, and the hunger for exploring other worlds back in its heart.

“We stand a very big chance of losing our ability to inspire our youth,” said an impassioned Burt Ratan at the TED talks in 2007. “I feel very strongly that it’s not good enough for us to have generations of kids that think it’s okay to look forward to a better version of a cellphone with a video in it. They need to look forward to exploration. They need to look forward to colonisation. They need to look forward to breakthroughs. We need to inspire them, because they need to lead us and help us survive in the future.”

Originally published in the Sunday Telegraph, photography by Spencer Murphy

It’s no accident that the Stonham women’s refuge in Slough is a non-descript house on a non-descript street. Even inside the untrained eye struggles to pick out the signs: a coin-operated washer-dryer in the laundry; an Islamic prayer finder pinned to the corkboard by the payphone; kitchen cupboards padlocked and stickered with individual names, those of past clients ghostly and peeling.

It could be a hostel or student accommodation block, and were it not for the way she fights back tears as she tells her story, 20-year-old Aneeta could be a student like any other. Aneeta was 15 when her father left Gujarat for London, where he spent two years setting up home before returning to pick up his wife and children. She says the difference in him was remarkable – that he had grown gaunt and distant, lost his warmth and the laughter in his eyes – but she threw herself into her new life with gusto, completing her GCSEs and a summer internship at Brent Youth Parliament. Yet when she began speaking about A-Levels, her father and younger brother closed in.

“They told me a girl my age shouldn’t be wasting time on education,” says Aneeta, sporting metallic blonde highlights and a hoodie that muffles her miniature frame. “They told me I should find full-time work and support the family financially. Slowly things got worse: my father began telling me I was ugly and a burden on the family, and my brother started to beat me.”

Aneeta spoke to a teacher who put her in touch with the police, who in turn relocated her to Stonham. She admits she barely left her bedroom for the first two months of her stay; that she cried for hours each day, and that it fell on other female residents to draw her out by taking her food shopping, or having her stir the curries they made in communal pots each evening. Then the phone calls began – from her father and brother telling her that everything was forgiven, and from distant relatives insisting she return to Gujarat for a holiday.

“That frightened me,” says Aneeta, “because nobody ever called me from India. I phoned my mum, and she whispered that they were planning a marriage for me, and that I should stay where I was. She told me to carry on with my studies, and never to reveal my location, because they would find me if I did.”

In a neighbouring office, the walls tacked with drawings by children of residents past and present, manager Parvinder ‘Pinkie’ Matharu describes a shock rise in the number of girls like Aneeta at the house.

“It’s partly because there’s more awareness out there,” she says. “The previous generation was reluctant to talk about forced marriage for fear of bringing shame on the family, but kids today know more about their rights, and they know there are people they can go to for help.”

Not that it makes Pinkie’s job any easier. She still suffers the heartbreak of returning with girls to pick up possessions from their family homes, where not even the police escort can stem the flow of invective from distressed parents. She’s still forced to juggle fourteen residents and their children between just three staff members, and she still has to negotiate budget limitations and legal obstacles to her clients’ wellbeing – the current threat to 19-year-old Sumita’s indefinite leave to remain, for example, which could see her deported to Bangladesh despite having been beaten by her father and threatened at knifepoint by her brother for resisting a forced marriage.

“In many cases the abuse has gone on so long that the girls are depressed and mentally unstable. The good thing about the refuge is that there’s no pressure on them to worry about paperwork or getting their stories straight; we move them in, make sure they have enough money and introduce them to other women in the house, who will usually welcome newcomers with a meal and a friendly ear. After a couple of days we’ll sit down and get as much out of them as possible, but at their own pace. It’s a refuge at the end of the day, but we try to make it a home for them too.”

***

Jasvinder Sanghera

Such sanctuary was unavailable to Jasvinder Sanghera in 1980 when, aged 15, she tore a page from her school exercise book, scribbled a reassuring note to her parents and fled Derby with her lower caste boyfriend in defiance of a marriage being prepared for her in Punjab. On her first call home she was told that she was dead to her family, and she spent subsequent decades struggling to come to terms with her emotional exile while moving from city to city, a journey she describes in her autobiography Shame.

So complete was Jasvinder’s excommunication that not even the suicide of her older sister could heal the breach. Robina, herself the victim of an abusive husband, took her life by dousing herself in paraffin and striking a match, but when Jasvinder called to ask about funeral arrangements she was told to stay away for fear her presence would further tarnish the family honour.

“The common thread in all cases is this concept of izzat,” says Jasvinder, “the honour that the daughter must uphold. The reputation of the family rests on her ability to make a good marriage, and that reputation can be dented by rumours about her behaviour, even if those rumours are unfounded. When Robina died my mother told me I couldn’t come to the funeral or ‘they’ would talk, but she could never say who these people were, because she didn’t know.”

Robina’s death galvanised Jasvinder to draw on her experiences and begin working to help those in a similar position. She returned to Derby (where she was regarded with shock by erstwhile schoolfriends who’d been told she was dead) and set up Karma Nirvana, then a women’s health charity whose workshops on menopause and post-natal depression veiled a more pressing agenda; one that Jasvinder discussed one-on-one with those women brave enough to approach while others filed out. Soon there was lottery funding, a dedicated office and – most importantly – a helpline, which 15 years later receives over 300 calls each month.

“Sometimes girls will call the helpline and not speak for the first five minutes. It’s our job to coax them out of that silence, and slowly we’ll learn that they’re being sent abroad for marriage, or that their brother is beating them up because of a text he found on their phone. We try to make them understand that they’re the victim, because even now the number of excuses people make for their families is shocking. We’ve come a long way these last few years, but there are still a lot of myths that need exploding on both sides of the cultural divide.”

One such myth surrounds the phenomenon of honour killings, a subject familiar to Yorkshire-born Zena Briggs. Hers was a privileged, culturally integrated childhood; she describes reading Elle and tottering around in three-inch heels aged 15, and inviting friends over to watch Hollywood movies, her favourite of which was West Side Story (she was, and still is, “an incurable romantic”).

Zena herself became a star-crossed lover of sorts aged 21, when she eloped with a local biker, Jack Briggs, to escape a Pakistani marriage to her sister’s brother-in-law, whom she’d never met. Zena describes the night of her departure with haunting clarity; lying in bed listening to Bach’s Air On The G String and watching lights from passing cars paint the ceiling; the heart-stopping thud of her bags hitting the street as she lowered them from her room with bedsheets; the cold January air on her legs as she climbed out the kitchen window, and the frost glimmering like stars underfoot.

The sadness of departure turned to dread with the first phone call home. Her father’s assertion that Zena was ‘dead to him’ was given a literal twist by her brother, who told her that she and Jack would end up in a series of bin bags – a threat he compounded by kicking down Jack’s mother’s door and introducing himself as the man who would murder her son. Zena and Jack spent subsequent weeks travelling between B&Bs and struggling to stay one step ahead of her family, until it was revealed that there was a private investigator on her tail and a £9,000 bounty on her head. At that point the police intervened, giving the couple a complete identity makeover on the witness protection program and dispatching them to Norfolk.

Zena Briggs

“I had my first major breakdown a few weeks later,” says Zena. “We’d fled because we wanted to live our own lives, yet here we were leading someone else’s entirely. The routine was soul-destroying: as soon as we left the house we were double checking every car that passed; if an Asian man looked twice at us in the street we started wondering why. We slept with knives and baseball bats under the bed, and we met a firearms unit who took our mugshots so they’d know who not to shoot in a hostage situation. How do you deal with that when you’re trying to build a normal life?”

Zena soon gave up on her dreams of a baby with Jack – she knew they could never subject a child to a life of such crippling paranoia. Instead the pair began recording their experiences in a book, Runaways, a project they were encouraged to embark on by former hostage John McCarthy, who later became patron of the Zena Foundation, a charity offering support to girls fleeing forced marriages.

“That book paved the way for a lot of the changes that came later,” says Zena. “Up until then forced marriage was a taboo subject that politicians avoided for fear of upsetting the Asian community. But when Anne Cryer MP read parts of Runaways out in the House of Commons, it began a landslide of activity that eventually led to the creation of the Forced Marriage Unit.”

***

Olaf Henricson-Bell, Joint Head of the FMU, agrees that his department wouldn’t exist without the efforts of organisations like Karma Nirvana and the Zena Foundation. Since 2005 the FMU has occupied a partitioned space midway down the consular corridor of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, its team constantly scribbling notes as they offer reassurances to potential victims over the phone.

“It’s important to understand the difference between forced and arranged marriages,” says Olaf, the shelves around him lined with box files labelled with girls’ names, the walls plastered with world maps covered in flags. “We’re not clamping down on the cultural practice of families introducing sons and daughters to potential partners and letting nature run its course – that’s fine. What we’re talking about are human rights violations. No culture says that rape is acceptable, or that abducting and holding someone against their will is acceptable. Teachers we talk to freely admit that a few years ago they’d watch whole swathes of their classroom go abroad on summer holidays to get married, but they never said anything because they believed it would be culturally inappropriate. That’s not the case any more. It’s everyone’s responsibility.”

As a joint effort between the Home and the Foreign Office, the FMU regularly mobilises overseas units in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh to rescue and return British citizens who have been taken abroad for forced marriages: the team responded to almost 1,700 calls in 2009, and assisted in 240 cases, 88 of them in the UK. Yet some, including Jasvinder, believe there’s still much to be done. She’s lobbying David Cameron to make good on his electoral promise to criminalise forced marriage (the current Forced Marriage Civil Protection Act works on a system of injunctions that she says are “essentially toothless”).

Others claim that victims are still falling into gaps between government policy and practice: Bita Ghaedi, for example, who the Home Office has been trying since 2005 to deport back to Iran after she fled the home of a man she was forced to marry. Bita was first arrested at Heathrow airport for travelling without a passport; she subsequently spent 45 days in Holloway Prison, and has been repeatedly removed to Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre from the Barnet flat she shares with her partner Mohsen, the front door of which is splintered from forced entries by the authorities.

Bita Ghaedi

Bita has constantly asserted that she would be executed on returning to Iran, and has embarked on several hunger strikes to drive her point home – the longest of which, in January this year, lasted 54 days. A recent intervention by the European Court of Human Rights looks set to solidify Bita’s position in the UK for the foreseeable future, but still she lives in constant fear.

“I feel I’ve been persecuted here as well as Iran,” says Bita, seated on a bench overlooking the green patchwork of Mill Hill Park and pulling her collar up as grey clouds gather overhead. “All I want is for the government to accept my story and allow me to remain in the UK. I have nightmares about being taken back to Iran, but I still dream about leading a normal life too. I still believe it’s possible, even after everything that’s happened to me.”

Certain names have been changed.

Originally published in the Navidson Record

I once almost got into a punch-up at a press screening. I’d turned up less than a minute into the Mexican football comedy Rudo y Cursi and been pushed by a panicky usher into the diminutive theatre, which was pitch black thanks to a moody voiceover that introduces the movie. Without so much as an opening credit to light my way, I stumbled blindly forwards, whispering apologies as I trod on feet and accidentally placed my wildly flailing hands on heads. The chorus of tuts and mutterings that marked my progress culminated in a sudden cry from a middle-aged man in the back row: “For fuck’s sake, sit the fuck down.” At that moment the screen lit up, revealing a room packed with irate reviewers and just one spare seat in the house – directly beside my foul-mouthed antagonist.

The exchange of words that followed me squeezing in beside him was heated to say the least, nor did it help that his phone went off twenty minutes into the film, providing yet another excuse for us to start barking into each other’s faces. By the time the movie had finished, the red mist had evaporated into a cloud of shame, and I was only too happy to slink out quietly and forget the whole thing. Or would have been, had the editor of the magazine for which I was writing not forwarded me a subsequent Guardian article by film critic Peter Bradshaw, who had been sitting a few rows forward, and who described the encounter as one of the worst experiences of his reviewing career. Needless to say he censored the swearing and was selective of facts in his drive to tell a story (I had ‘moseyed’ into the theatre and ‘taken my own sweet time’ to select a seat), but there was no avoiding the conclusion that the whole thing had been a heroic failure on my part. I’d been so angry that I couldn’t even remember what had happened in the film, and so the review never got written.

Which is one good reason why ‘fighting’ doesn’t make it into Mark Kermode’s list of essential skills for the modern film reviewer in his enlightening and entertaining second book, The Good, The Bad And The Multiplex, a withering attack on all that is wrong with the mainstream movie business. The fourth chapter, ‘What Is A Film Critic For?’, instead suggests five simple checks for any credible review to tick off: it should offer opinion on the film in question, description of its subject, contextualisation of its place in the wider scheme of what has come before it, analysis of how and why it succeeds or fails and – finally – entertainment for the reader.

His adherence to this same template has made Kermode a reliable and much loved critic in the 25 years he’s been reviewing movies (a 2010 YouGov poll ranked him as the nation’s ‘most trusted’, although – as he notes with typical self-effacement – that’s based on the ringing endorsement of just three per cent of the population). For those of us who have come to rely on his voice over the years – from his weekly DVD digest in the Observer and review slot on Radio 5 Live to a host of former columns (from Flicks to Fangoria, from the New Statesman to the NME) – it also helps that his opinions so regularly coincide with our own.

The rare questionable observation aside (Barton Fink being the Coen brothers’ best film, for one), Kermode takes exactly the stance we want from our film critics: ruthlessly intolerant of pretension but striving to celebrate genuine artistry in films that might otherwise fall off the radar (his praise for Jim Jarmusch’s criminally underrated Dead Man made me almost tearful with gratitude); shamelessly absorbed by horror films (he never tires of raising eyebrows with his claim that The Exorcist is the best film ever made), but berating Hollywood’s encouragement of the teenage affection for ‘torture porn’, or its insistence on reductive English-language remakes of endlessly layered foreign horror films like Japan’s Ringu or Sweden’s Låt Den Rätte Komma In.

POTC: Appeals to 'multiplex dwellers who have become used to living in the cultural freezing cold'

It’s an attitude that makes this 300-page treatise on the decline and fall of mainstream movies a pleasure to read, even when the facts are at their most painful to absorb. It seems to have taken all of a few weeks to write – barely halfway through Kermode mentions the Kevin Smith shock vehicle Red State, released in UK cinemas two weeks after the book’s publication – yet it’s well-researched, articulate and absorbing from the start. Best of all, it’s also angry: a literary embodiment of Kermode’s ‘jowly scowl’ (his description), and a ‘mad-as-hell, not-gonna-take-it-any-more’ rallying cry to those sick of watching artistic integrity fall victim to the capitalist crusades of studio accountants.

Kermode’s is a smart, sarcastic, very British sort of anger, but it’s all the more rousing for it: from his opening eulogy on the dying art of film projection and accompanying tales of digital multiplex misery, to his hand-wringing take on blockbuster economics (why, if they’re virtually guaranteed to make money, do they have to be so bloody awful?); from his exasperated denouncement of 3D movies (rejected by audiences time and time again since the turn of the century), to his scathing attack on America’s small-minded ‘appreciation’ of UK cinema (Oscar nominations for films that show a king or queen transgressing social boundaries to commune with a commoner, sod all for everyone else).

Along the way there are countless insights into spectacular egos and less than spectacular intelligences both in front of and behind the cameras: from Danny Dyer (who was so furious at Kermode’s impression of him on Radio 5 Live that he threatened to ‘put something right across his fakking canister’), to Kevin Smith, so horrified by the media mauling of his lobotomised buddy movie Cop Out that he felt compelled to defend his art in an online rant, comparing the harsh reviews to ‘bullying a retarded kid who was getting a couple of chuckles from the normies by singing Afternoon Delight’ (an analogy he inexplicably repeated at a later date).

And of course there’s great satisfaction to be had in reading Kermode’s stinging reviews of movies we’ve hated for years. Sex And The City 2 is ‘a vile and pernicious slice of imperialist propaganda which celebrates misogyny, belittles non-Americans, insults audiences and wallows in greed, avarice and bulimic vomit’. People who enjoyed Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End are ‘simply suffering from the cinematic equivalent of long-term deprivation from the basics of a civilised existence… multiplex dwellers who have become used to living in the cultural freezing cold’.

All of which reinforces what is perhaps Kermode’s most endearing quality, and the book’s greatest strength: the sense that he is ultimately an affable nerd who, if we saw him in the foyer of his beloved East Finchley Phoenix, we’d feel perfectly at ease sidling up to for a chat about the horrors of Avatar, perhaps even suggesting a quick pint after the movie. His writing occasionally comes across as overly conversational – a little too much like a transcript of one of his inimitable radio rants – but it’s a small price to pay for such an amusing, informative and important testament from one of the true defenders of proper cinema.

Originally published in Little White Lies

For legions of Lynch fans worldwide, the events unravelling in the logging town of Twin Peaks are only ever partly as interesting as those reputed to have taken place behind the camera, most of which centre on the unconventional methods of the show’s renegade director.

One example concerns David’s decision to cast wild-haired set dresser Frank Silva as Bob, the malevolent spirit responsible for Laura Palmer’s murder. During filming of the pilot’s closing scene, Frank was accidentally caught in the mirror behind Laura’s mother (Grace Zabriskie) as the camera framed her screaming face. Lynch stopped the photography director from setting up a second take, telling him the first one would be fine. Watch that scene now and you can freeze-frame the moment that the character of Bob first took form in David’s mind – a blurred shape, grey and feral, hovering between two worlds in the grieving Palmer home. It’s a neat insight into the processes that informed Lynch’s vision, and that helped define Twin Peaks – which celebrates its 20^th anniversary this year – as one of the most influential television events of all time.

For all that, the show’s beginnings were less than auspicious. Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost had met in 1986, and already had a pair of unproduced screenplays behind them when they were told there was interest from ABC in a television show. Their pitch to the network was vague: Frost recalls Lynch spending the majority of their meeting describing – with suitably jazzy hand gestures – the way the wind whispered in the pine forests surrounding the town. When ABC were intrigued enough to commission a pilot, the pair saw it as an opportunity to confound expectations and inject a dose of madness into the mainstream.

“We didn’t approach it as a television show,” says Frost. “Remember that we were coming out of a decade in which the tone of major television was set by shows like Dallas, shows that David and I wouldn’t be caught dead watching. It felt like we’d been led into the big machine inside a Trojan horse, and that seemed all the more reason to make Twin Peaks as strange and subversive as we possibly could.”

Writing took place at Frost’s home in LA, Mark typing while David lay on the psychiatrist-style couch and batted ideas off the walls (he professed to be unable to type). Casting adhered to a typically Lynchian anti-process: Dana Ashbrook was required to stand on the roof and bark like a dog, a role he later reprised as a jail-bound Bobby Briggs; Richard Beymer and Russ Tamblyn were cast as Ben Horne and Lawrence Jacoby simply because it tickled David to see the former arch-enemies of West Side Story reunited on screen; and roles were regularly adapted to fit actors that Lynch particularly liked (meeting Joan Chen led to him rewriting the Italian maid Giovanna, originally pencilled for his then-partner Isabella Rossellini, as the Chinese Josie Packard).

Kyle MacLachlan photographed by Spencer Murphy, London 2010

Cast and crew assembled in late ’89 in the location town of North Bend, Washington State, and filming of the pilot took place over a winter of record-breaking bleakness; of blizzards and freezing fogs that regularly postponed shoots and added to the sense of otherworldliness permeating the set.

“David’s way of working was unlike anything I’d encountered at the time,” says Kimmy Robertson, who played squeaky sheriff’s secretary Lucy Moran. “He was meditating every afternoon, and he’d conduct exercises to get cast members on the same wavelength. I remember a lot of us started having strange dreams. It was definitely a different consciousness to your average television set.”

But if there was a sense of being part of something special, there was also a nagging concern that the end result would be too leftfield for the conservative commissioners at ABC.

“We were amazed they were giving David Lynch two hours on television,” says Kyle MacLachlan, who played FBI Agent Dale Cooper. “We saw it as the inmates overrunning the town, and we knew it would be fantastic, but we didn’t think it would get picked up because it seemed so incomprehensible.”

Kyle’s concerns were unfounded; after mixed reactions to test screenings of the pilot, ABC commissioned seven episodes – a partial vote of confidence that proved they were as edgy as excited to be working with Lynch – and reluctantly agreed to the director’s condition of complete creative freedom from the network.

Shooting relocated to a former warehouse in the San Fernando Valley that Lynch had decked with timber and stone, allowing cast and crew to pass from the Double R Diner to the grand foyer of the Great Northern Hotel in a few easy steps. Guest directors were cherry picked to oversee individual episodes, but Lynch and Frost continued to write the show, which descended into a maelstrom of drug taking, underage sex and supernatural evil so dark that many feared it would be axed before it was aired.

Those fears dissipated on April 8^th 1990, when the word-of-mouth buzz surrounding Twin Peaks saw the pilot score the sort of viewing figures usually reserved for the Super Bowl. The show’s popularity snowballed as the season progressed: its layered mysteries combined with a Thursday night slot to make it perfect water-cooler conversation fodder for office workers the following morning, a fact played upon by a slew of publicity posters claiming that ‘If you miss it tonight, you won’t know what everyone’s talking about tomorrow’.

Not that watching it was any guarantee of understanding it. Not even cast members were wise to the show’s deepest secrets: actors were given scripts for their scenes only, and would gather in an LA bar each Thursday to watch the show en masse and marvel at its twists and turns with hordes of admiring locals. Theories abounded, rumour mills went into overdrive, and a telephone help line (voiced by Kimmy Robertson in character) was set up to satisfy those who couldn’t wait a week for further clues.

“I remember about halfway through the airing of the first season,” says Frost, “someone came in and dumped on my desk maybe 500 pages of internet chatter about the show – and this was at a point where the internet was only just emerging as something people used for basic communication. But here were these entire forums dedicated to exploring just one aspect of plotting, something that had taken maybe 15 minutes to think up. That was the point when I realised this had become more than just a television show, that we’d tapped into a collective unconscious.”

Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne, one of three girls to grace the cover of Rolling Stone

Before long, ‘Peaksmania’ had turned into a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Shops couldn’t stock enough cherry pie; women were spotting carrying logs in tribute to the cryptic Log Lady; and sorority houses held mock Laura Palmer funerals in which swathes of girls would wrap themselves in plastic and lay down for hours on end.

Elsewhere, the female leads of Twin Peaks lined up for the cover of Rolling Stone, while Lynch found himself celebrated as a genius on the front of Time magazine. MacLachlan, for his part, was dragged on to Saturday Night Live, guest hosting an episode that sent up wackier aspects of the show. The audience’s laughter concealed their hope, however misguided, that Kyle would somehow slip up and answer the question on everybody’s lips: who killed Laura Palmer?

***

That question, on which the show’s early success had been founded, eventually led to its downfall. ABC wanted the mystery of Laura’s murder resolved quickly – some suggest they were sceptical of sustaining public interest in the subject, others that they feared drawing it out would lead to rioting or copycat killing. Either way, they commissioned a second season of 22 episodes on one condition: that Lynch reveal the killer’s identity at the first available opportunity.

The murder was something neither Lynch nor Frost wanted resolved. Solving the mystery was, in Lynch’s words, “killing the goose that laid the golden eggs”, and the pair had gone to extreme lengths to keep the culprit’s identity a secret: from numbering scripts to writing and occasionally shooting fake scenes. When they finally capitulated, they filmed the unmasking of three separate killers before tacking one on to the end of the episode and sending it to edit. Only then did they sit down with actor Ray Wise and tell him that his character, Leland Palmer, had murdered his daughter – a revelation that Wise was reluctant to accept, not least because it was followed by his character’s death and exit from the show.

In some ways, Ray was the lucky one. Lynch and Frost lost interest in the wake of the revelation – Lynch heading off to direct Wild At Heart, Frost Storyville – leaving the final twelve episodes in the hands of guest writers and directors who struggled to regain the momentum lost by Leland’s confession. The show became characterised by oddball cameos (David Duchovney as a cross-dressing FBI agent) and storylines (Ben Horne’s campaign to save the local pine weasel), making a self-parody of its once subtle sense of the macabre and edging it closer in tone to the mainstream soap operas it had previously outmoded. As audience figures plummeted, ABC shifted Twin Peaks to a graveyard Saturday night slot in a barely concealed effort to hasten its end, and a sense of alienation took root among a cast that had so recently been more like a family.

“I remember sitting in my dressing room,” says Kimmy Robertson, “listening through the wall to Catherine Coulson (the Log Lady) calling David and begging him to come back. I remember a sense of panic and a definite feeling of abandonment. It was as though God had put us in Eden and then left us to fend for ourselves.”

Lynch returned to oversee the end of the second season, rewriting and directing a final episode culminating in a series of cliffhangers that he hoped would compel ABC to commission a third season. But it was too little too late. The network seemed happy to be rid of a show that it had never known quite what to do with, and for many cast members it was a curtain that came down with an audible sigh of relief.

***

Michael Ontkean (Sheriff Truman), set dresser turned star Frank Silva (Bob) and David Lynch

Like any major event, the effect Twin Peaks had on those involved in its creation was far from uniform. Some, like Kimmy Robertson, swore allegiance to its memory, attending annual festivals and making themselves available to fans; others, like Michael Ontkean (Sheriff Truman), refused to speak about the experience, grimacing when it came up in interviews and seeming to blame the show for the subsequent downturn in their careers. Even MacLachlan tried to distance himself from his character, requesting only a bit part in Lynch’s 1992 prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a movie received with hostility even by some hardcore fans for its heavy-handed dramatisation of the last days of Laura Palmer’s life.

For all that, the legacy of Twin Peaks seems barely to have diminished in the decades since the town beauty was first found on the riverbank wrapped in plastic. It regularly tops lists of the best shows of all time, and its influence can still be felt in more sustained television success stories like Lost and The Sopranos, many of which might not exist were it not for Lynch’s vision of a world in which arthouse movie making and mainstream television worked hand in hand.

“Twin Peaks was too far ahead of its time,” says Charlotte Stewart, who played Betty Briggs. “It was a completely immersive experience filled with incredible characters and creepy secrets, and it had this dreamy quality thanks to its bizarre dialogue and haunting soundtrack. But it was a show that demanded viewers approach it with an open mind, and it expected them to pay attention. Nowadays those things are taken for granted with ground-breaking television, but back then I don’t think people were ready for it.”

Originally published in the Stool Pigeon

There comes a point in any first airing of Kuedo’s debut Severant when the word ‘different’ becomes an inevitable descriptive crutch. Not different in the way you might condescendingly flatter your housemate’s curry omelettes, but different in the way literature students might refer to dislocated protagonists in Camus novels. It’s an album both out of place and out of time, set in what seems to be an ’80s vision of the future, its eerie synths and fluttering digital effects recalling the sci fi soundtracks of Vangelis and John Carpenter.

“It’s not a nostalgia thing,” says Kuedo, real name Jamie Teasdale. “I’m old enough to remember bits of the ’80s, but I have no desire to go back. It’s more about trying to reclaim that sense of wonder at the future. People were so excited by the idea of computers back then, whereas now they’re these mundane objects – they were always going to be with familiarity. But we can still look at things afresh and get excited all over again.”

The blossoming replicant romance of Severant is a big shift from the brutal, more mechanised tracks with which Teasdale made his name as one half of Vex’d, work that led to him becoming so embedded in the UK dubstep scene that he ended up moving to Berlin in 2008 to escape the suffocating sense of familiarity.

“Genre forms are guidelines – they’re prefabricated structures that you apply to help support you when you’re trying to create something new. There’s nothing wrong with that: if you’re genuinely inspired by those things in and of themselves, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t make decent genre music. But I don’t find at this point that the current genre forms are inspiring enough to stick with. I feel there’s something I’m trying to get across, and if I were to adopt a pre-made structure in an attempt to communicate that, I simply wouldn’t capture it.”

While Teasdale acknowledges Severant’s indebtedness to certain elements of new electronic music – the rapid BPMs and rushing percussion of modern rap in particular – he was determined to ignore trends and make an album with a unique and coherent character, something he knows is increasingly rare.

“I think it’s to do with how people’s attention spans are affected by technology. We skim through records so quickly, and I’m no different. They just fly by our eyes and in a second we make an assumption about how worthy they are in a way that we didn’t used to. And that’s a shame, because it takes a while to get under something’s skin, to get to its heart and understand what it’s saying beneath the surface.”

Originally published in the Stool Pigeon

As first Glastonburys go, DJ Shadow’s appearance at Worthy Farm last month didn’t have the most auspicious build up. Not only was he performing at a John Peel stage ankle deep in the worst kind of slop – not only did his headline slot coincide with Friday night’s single biggest downpour – but he was scheduled to play after Example, whose tooth-filled face intermittently appears under the Urban Dictionary’s entry for ‘talentless wanker’.

As such, the majority of the mostly teenage audience stumbled their way through the mud and headed out into the rain – presumably to hunt down Ed Sheeran and pester him into a game of kiss chase – as Shadow’s crew began their pre-show preparations. Those that remained, however, quickly became transfixed by the strange apparatus being assembled on stage: the white sphere wheeled into the centre, the crosshair calibration of projectors beamed on to its curved surface like a Death Star amping up to destroy a small, diplomatic planet. By the time Shadow ambled on stage in his trademark cap and trimmed beard, the tent had once again filled with a sea of curious onlookers. He smiled and waved at the crowd like a geeky Great Oz before turning and stepping inside his god machine.

The live show is known as the Shadowsphere, and the turntable impresario has been using it to wow audiences for over a year. From inside the sphere, Shadow weaves a seamless collage of material from across his back catalogue and beyond, while on to its surface is projected a synchronised series of visuals that bend both the mind and the eye: from a cloudburst lighting storm coinciding with a DnB remix of Six Days to time lapse flowers celebrating the mournful string section of Stem. At various points the sphere turns into everything from a bouncing basketball to a frantically panning eyeball, a slowly rotating planet Earth and a mirrored marble rolling over the keys of a pipe organ (for Organ Donor, naturally).

“I treat the live show the same way I do an album,” says the softly spoken, 39-year-old Shadow – real name Joshua Davis – when we meet a few days later at the Island offices in an equally rain-lashed west London. “It’s got to be better than the last one, it’s got to reflect something new and different. On top of that it’s also got to compete with any other act. The show has to be able to please not only the people that come to see me play in Norwich or Edinburgh, where I have my own night, but also at Glastonbury, or any other event where the audience isn’t made up of DJ Shadow fans. It’s got to have entertainment value, to put it crassly.”

Shadow’s ability to entertain has never been in question, but he’s seldom been as intent on saturating the audience’s senses as he has in the Shadowsphere – his fourth major solo tour (not including the series of dates in 1997 that he cancelled due to the nightmarish production of the UNKLE album). As the venues have become larger, the sets more seamless and the visuals more spectacular, so the producer’s producer who made his name recycling vintage vinyl into abstract cinematic opuses seems to be slipping ever further under the sway of the ‘DJ’ half of his moniker.

The audio and visual onslaught of the Shadowsphere

“In the last ten years things have shifted with regards to what a DJ is allowed to be. The fact that I’m able to be there with The Coral and I Am Kloot and all the other bands on the John Peel stage is a huge step forward from the DJ culture that I started out in. It’s nice to think that I was part of the movement of DJs that helped legitimise DJs, and that now I’m sort of living off the spoils. When Endtroducing… came out it was as if you were only supposed to play banging house – everyone had a perception of what a DJ was, and if you deviated from that it was very unexpected for people. Now you can be a DJ and go any number of ways.”

Not that he’s able to spontaneously wing it in ways that he might have growing up. Throwing on records to see how they go down is fine in front of crowds of between 300 to 800, but any more than that, he says, “and you’re dealing with a lot of disappointed people.” He recalls with a wince certain shows on the Hard Sell tour with Cut Chemist, an hour of 45-inch vintage vinyl juggling that bombed in front of festival audiences who couldn’t have cared less for the pair’s DJ purism. The Shadowsphere set is thus programmed for the most devastating mix imaginable; there’s no vinyl (major venue systems can’t deal with it), and no deviating from the pre-ordained sequence of tracks. But this is no mere display of audio and visual trickery: there remains a no-net live element to the show that means Shadow can still miss cues and fumble scratches.

“In this day and age, if you have a DJ show and you have visuals, then there’s going to be an element of your set that is prebaked. Fine. But time and time again I see these big name electronic acts performing turnkey shows. It’s literally a case of pushing a button to set the show rolling and that’s it. And the hip hop side of me, the competitive, skills-fixated side of me, truly believes that you can do both: you can have kick ass sounds, you can have a kick ass visual show, and you can control it at the same time.”

But despite regular appearances from the man himself thanks to a cut away section in the sphere – through which Shadow can be seen doing everything from scratching to banging out a solo on a MIDI drum kit – the biggest cheers of the night are reserved for tracks from Endtroducing…, the instrumental epic that turned both DJ Shadow and James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax label into household names, and downtempo hip hop into the soundtrack for everything from after-school bong sessions to city boy dinner parties.

It’s also the album by which subsequent DJ Shadow releases have been judged, often with unrestrained vitriol: from 2002’s follow up The Private Press, on which Shadow reluctantly returned to sample-based mood music but struggled to achieve the otherworldly ambience of his debut, to 2006’s The Outsider, on which he threw caution to the wind and collaborated with a raft of Bay Area rappers extolling the virtues of hyphy – San Francisco’s indecipherable take on the crunk movement at that time putting Memphis on the hip hop map.

If The Private Press had resulted in muted disappointment among fans of Endtroducing…, The Outsider led to unrestrained outrage: they gawped as Shadow tweaked his cap to one side and cavorted around with mumbling hoods like Keak Da Sneak, clearly oblivious to the fact that he’d been producing hip hop albums (including Paris’ Sleeping With The Enemy in 1992) long before he’d been making cinematic beats. Shadow was visibly rattled by the backlash, but defended his decision by insisting that constantly repeating the formula of Endtroducing… was not an option; he was moving forward, and it was time for his followers to decide whether they were ‘fans of the album or the artist’.

DJ Shadow: self-effacing

It’s a stance that Shadow continues to hold firm for his fourth studio album, The Less You Know, The Better, which drops in September. At the time of writing only a fragment was available for preview: lead single I Gotta Rokk, a lumbering, guitar-driven mosh monster best known for damaging dancefloors in its Shadowsphere incarnation, and its two B-sides; I’ve Been Trying, a soulful psych-folk number complete with wistful lyrics and Pink Floyd-style effects overdubs, and Def Surrounds Us, an experimental foray into dubstep featuring 8-bit bleeps, brutal bass waves and a collarbone-crushing snare drum.

None are tracks likely to please fans of Endtroducing…, but that’s something that Shadow says he long ago made peace with. The new album may boast a press release replete with self-doodled characters cynically sniffing at attempts to market the record, and released on an imprint called The New Futility – Shadow’s comment on the devaluation of recorded music in the disposable download age – but the artist insists that he’s not bitter for having had what many would see as his one true musical moment.

“I feel like I know enough about the history of recorded music to know how lucky I am to have had a zeitgeist album, to have had a record that was – for that summer, or that month, or whatever the timespan was – THE album that you had to get if you were living in this country or a few others. I can also now legitimately look back and say: okay, that doesn’t mean that all the people who bought Endtroducing… are DJ Shadow fans. A lot of them bought it because it was a zeitgeist album that they felt they had to have. And coming to understand that has helped me stop worrying about all the chatter that was bothering me for a while – all the people asking why I didn’t just record another Endtroducing….”

Nor is he deliberately trying to rile up his critics by making albums as far removed as possible from Endtroducing…. If anything, he says, he never knows what reaction his records are going to get. He recalls thinking that James Lavelle was going to hate Organ Donor and demand it be dropped from the record, and being pleasantly surprised to learn how well it had gone down in the Mo’ Wax offices.

“In the same sense that I never perceived of contextual failures within The Outsider, I never perceived of contextual brilliance in Endtroducing…. To be honest, I don’t have the capacity to know what even the people in this building are going to think about my music, let alone the general public. And that’s the single best reason I can think of for making the music that I want to make, regardless of the public reaction.”