Stand and Deliver!

In 1991, in a book shop that used to be in the Holme Building at the University of Sydney, I discovered a collection of scripts for a bunch of fundraising and awareness-raising AIDS benefits organised by Stephen Fry. The shows were titled Hysteria! and the book Amassed Hysteria!, and I guess I should add that the scripts were compiled by (one-time Young Ones co-writer and former Rik Mayall girlfriend) Lise Mayer and Rachel Swann. In it I discovered the genius of an unkempt stand-up called Steven Wright. Even without being able to hear the man’s delivery, the printed routines were hilarious:

Every morning I get up and make instant coffee and I drink it so I'll have enough energy to make the regular coffee.

Sponges grow in the ocean – that kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen?

After discovering that Steven Wright had an album – I Have A Pony – he soon became one of my favourite comics, up there with Billy Connolly, Robin Williams, Woody Allen and Peter Cook. So the opportunity to interview him was – well, let me put it this way: I’m still pinching myself.

As it happened, the interview was a bit of an ‘exclusive’. Not so exclusive that other media sources that didn’t land an interview would happily run mine; I offered it to a couple of slots on Triple J but they were holding out for his live appearance. A long edit was broadcast on ABC NewsRadio, with an excerpt accompanied by a sample of Wright’s comedy, broadcast on the ABC Local Radio network in one of my monthly chats with Richard Fidler. I also managed to stretch the material out to a couple of print articles in FilmInk and Last.

After all of this, I didn’t quite manage to make it to a performance – but I can’t complain. For the FilmInk article I managed to land a copy of a couple of Wright’s DVDs: One Soldier and A Steven Wright Special. But one day I intend to see Steven Wright live!

For now, a transcript of the interview appears below. Soon it will be moved to the Radio Ha Ha website at 2GB Plus. Meanwhile, you can hear the interview by subscribing to the Radio Ha Ha podcast: paste this link into your podcatcher: http://podcasts.2gb.com/radiohaha.xml. It appears as part of Episode 9.

Soundbite: Excerpts from the track ‘Ice’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony

One night I stayed up all night playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house house and four people died.

I broke a mirror in my house and I’m supposed to get seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.

Demetrius Romeo: Having a deadpan delivery and material that deals with a surreal outlook on life – is it a style that you developed or one that is essentially you, and always has been?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Well, the way I speak has always just been like that, y’know? That’s just how I talk. But the comedy… the surrealism of the comedy, that was kind of from the beginning when I was twenty-three, when I started writing comedy. I mean, I don’t know… I don’t know really what you’re asking me, really.

Demetrius Romeo: Well for one thing, you’re inviting your audience to look at the world from your distinct point of view, and my feeling is that it’s very different to any other point of view we usually come up against. So I’m wondering if it’s a hard thing to coerce an audience to see the world the way you see it.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Oh no, the audience really doesn’t care. They’re only concerned with whether it’s funny or not. I mean that’s just the style of jokes that I write; that’s just the way that it is. But I don’t think they’re thrown off by the style. They’re only concerned whether it’s funny or not.

Soundbite: Excerpts from the track ‘Ice’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony

I like to reminisce with people I don’t know. Granted, it takes longer.

Demetrius Romeo: Most of your material that I’m familiar with consists of if not quite one-liners, jokes with so minimal set-up and punch lines that happen so quickly that the gag’s gone in no time at all. Do you find yourself burning a lot of material?

STEVEN WRIGHT: It’s difficult to come up with long, new chunks of time, but that’s just how it’s been. I’ve never done it another way, so it’s just normal to me. It is hard, you know, you tell five jokes in a minute. But on the other hand, I don’t know any other way to do it.

Soundbite: Excerpts from the track ‘Ice’ and ‘7s and Museums’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony

I like to fill my tub up with water and then turn the shower on and act like I’m in a submarine that’s been hit.

Just got out of the hospital; I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark. I flew across the room.

Demetrius Romeo: Early on, in interviews, you were explaining how you can break your material up into three categories: ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ jokes, and you can analyse an audience before you’ve even seen them from the way they sound, and know what sort of structure and pace you need to give your show, and which category to draw the jokes from as you go. How do you get to a point where you can know comedy so intimately?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Well, I was just meaning that I was reacting to the mood of the crowd, so then I would arrange the material depending on how they were reacting. I don’t move it around like that anymore. I pretty much know what I’m gonna do before I even go out there. I do it a little differently now.

Demetrius Romeo: So that suggests that you’ve got your ‘show’ and it’s almost set in stone, nowadays.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Well I used to have the same amount of material but I would move it around depending on how they were reacting, but now I do it… it’s almost like a play to me, it’s one long flowing thing, depending on if I put some new material in there some how.

Demetrius Romeo: Is that because you’ve done it so many times that you’ve got the material that you know will always work on an audience?

STEVEN WRIGHT: No, what happened was, the other way I was wasting a lot of energy figuring out which joke was gonna be next. That was spending a lot of my energy on stage. Then I thought I could perform the material better if I actually knew which material was… the order of it.

Soundbite: Excerpts from the track ‘Ice’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony

I hate when my foot falls asleep during the day because that means it’s gonna be up all night.

When I get real, real bored I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot and then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I’m leaving.

Demetrius Romeo: From the way you’ve spoken about it in the past it sounds like you really know what you’re doing; it’s not just an instinctual thing – there’s actually a mental process involved that you’re conscious of in the process of doing it.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Yeah, I think it’s both. I mean, a lot of it is a gut feeling and then there’s thinking about it, but it really happens very fast. I never really break it down unless I’m being interviewed like this. Y’know what I mean? I just go about doing it.

Soundbite: Excerpt from the track ‘Dog Stay’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony

Recently I was walking my dog around my building. On the ledge. A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I’m afraid of widths.

Demetrius Romeo: Now, there are some schools of thought that suggest that the best stand-up involves physicality, yet you create hilarity by almost having no physicality. The physicality is so understated.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Yeah, but again, like, what you said, the audience doesn’t really care about rules or physical or word play. They don’t care about the style of anything, really. Again, if it’s funny, they’ll laugh at the physical. If it’s funny wordplay, they’ll laugh. They don’t really care, I think.

Soundbite: Excerpt from the track ‘7s and Museums’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony.

Today I was – no, that wasn’t me.

Demetrius Romeo: When you started out, did you know what made audiences laugh?

STEVEN WRIGHT: No. I knew what I liked. I knew what I liked to laugh at from comedians and films and everything, but I didn’t know what would make them laugh until I started going on the stage, started writing stuff. And I still didn’t know if that was gonna work. Going on in front of the audience is really where you learn everything, just from doing it over and over and figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

Demetrius Romeo: Is this the style that you’ve always had as a comedian, or did the audience determine that somehow by what they laughed at when you were starting out?

STEVEN WRIGHT: No, I pretty much had the style of short jokes, abstract jokes, right from the beginning. There was one difference though: in the beginning, sometimes I would connect the jokes into stories. I did that for about two years, and then I stopped. It was connected stuff, and a lot of it was also just floating around one-liners. And then I just stopped doing that: I didn’t connect them anymore. But in the last eight years I’ve gone back to having a lot of the new stuff connected into little stories. Still most of it is one-liners, but there’s a lot that is stories.

Soundbite: Excerpts from the track ‘Water’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony.

Yesterday I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but just for a second.

One time I went to the drive-in in a cab. The movie cost me $95.00.

Demetrius Romeo: How do you go about writing nowadays? When you’re young, you’re having new experiences all the time, so there’s a lot of stuff that you look and and say, ‘hey, life’s like this!’ After you’ve been doing it for a few years, is it easy to still find things that inspire you?

STEVEN WRIGHT: It’s the same. I’m really just ‘noticing’ stuff. I mean, it’s endless really: from when you wake up to when you go to sleep your mind is bombarded with words and images and sounds and things on the television and movies and conversations with people and… Writing is really thinking. It’s a specific way of thinking about something, and nobody ever stops thinking and nobody ever stops experiencing. So that’s why I think that it just continues.

Soundbite: Excerpt from the track ‘7s and Museums’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony.

I got up the other day and everything in my apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica. I called my friend and I said, ‘look at this stuff, it’s all an exact replica; what do you think?’. He said, ‘do I know you?’.

Demetrius Romeo: The other thing is, when you’re starting out and you’re doing a lot of little clubs all the time and you’ve got to always be writing new material if the same people are seeing you every week because they want to see new stuff – when you get to be a comedian that’s operating on the world stage, do you still have to be writing a lot of material, or do you get to develop and polish older ideas?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Well, even when I was in clubs, I was writing a lot but I was still adding to what I know already worked. And I still do that. That is an endless process. I mean, I haven’t been in Australia in seven years – I’ve done a film there but I haven’t done stand-up there in about seven years – so there’ll be a lot of stuff that I’ve written over that time that the audience has never seen before. But there’ll be stuff that I did that they have seen before.

Soundbite: Excerpts from the track ‘7s and Museums’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony.

It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.

I’ve been doing a lot of painting lately. Abstract painting. Extremely abstract: no brush, no canvass. I just think about it.

Demetrius Romeo: Now you said that you came out to do a film. Do you do a lot of film work?

STEVEN WRIGHT: No, I do it occasionally. I mainly do stand-up. I just do a film once in a while.

Demetrius Romeo: When you do do film and television work, you’re still portraying essentially the same persona – the Steven Wright I’m talking to right now; the one that I’ll see on stage. [Wright laughs] People don’t actually hire you expecting you to act as someone else; they’re hiring you as you. Does that make the acting harder or easier?

STEVEN WRIGHT: The actual acting it doesn’t affect. This is how I am, so when I’m acting, I’m really just acting like me saying some sentences someone else made up in their movie. I think it limits my opportunities, though, because they either want it or they don’t want it. I mean, I’m not going to go in and act completely another way; I’ve never done that. I’ve never really focused on acting, so it’s not disappointing to me. It’s not like, ‘oh, they should give me a chance, I could act like a high-powered lawyer in a courtroom scene’. That never was my goal anyway.

Demetrius Romeo: What about when you’re doing something like voicing a character on The Simpsons, when you’re hanging out with other funny people doing funny lines? Is that fun? Would you want to do more of that?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Sure, I would do more. But it was more like working… I mean, it was ‘light’ in there, but it was more like getting the lines down. They do them separately; it’s not like you’re even talking to many of the other actors.

I’ve done a lot of other movies like that. I mean I did Babe 2, and Swan Princess, an animated film where you’re not even talking to the other actors.

Demetrius Romeo: That’s the magic of cinema. In my head, everyone at The Simpsons was standing around the microphone making each other up.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Well they didn’t when I was there. I was only there that one time. Maybe they do that when the rest of the cast is there. I was just a guest.

Demetrius Romeo: Fair enough. I should have known what it was like.

STEVEN WRIGHT: No. How would you know, y’know? Nobody knows.

Soundbite: Excerpts from the track ‘Water’ from the Steven Wright album I Have A Pony.

I’m tired of calling up the movies and listening to that recording of what’s playing, so I bought the album.

Went to the cinema. It said ‘Adults - $5.00; Children - $2.50’. I said, ‘alright, gimme two boys and a girl’.

Demetrius Romeo: How did that role in Reservoir Dogs come about?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Sally Menke was the editor of that movie. She edits all of Quentin’s movies. They got to the end of the movie where everything was almost finished, and they didn’t have the guy on the radio yet, the DJ, and she suggested me to him. It was her idea. She suggested me and then Quentin Tarantino really liked it, so that’s how it happened. It was before he even had a movie out, and she told me that he was a different filmmaker and this film was really going to be very different and she really thought that if he wanted me to do it, I should do it. So I totally went on her. I knew her and I trusted her sensibility. So I went in and did it. She was very, very correct. I was happy to be in that film. To be in a movie that was such a milestone in cinema… it’s fun to be part of that.

Soundbite: Opening tracks of the soundtrack to Reservoir Dogs

K-Billy Supersounds of the 70s weekend just keeps on coming with this little ditty that reached up to 21 in May 1970: The George Baker Selection – ‘Little Green Bag’.

STEVEN WRIGHT: It was funny because I made some mistakes on some of the takes. When I said ‘behemoth’ I stumbled on that word and he used that one. He chose the one where I stumbled and he put that in the movie. That’s always amused me.

Demetrius Romeo: Directors tend to do that. I was watching a documentary on the making of Dr Strangelove and George C. Scott was annoyed that it was always an ‘over-the-top’ take that Kubrick used.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Oh really?

Demetrius Romeo: Yeah. But I think that makes the film.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Where did you see that? I’d like to see that. That’s cool. I didn’t know there was a Making of Strangelove.

Demetrius Romeo: It’s part of the DVD extras on the new re-issue.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Oh, okay. I love that movie. I’ll have to check it out.

Demetrius Romeo: Do you still live in New York?

STEVEN WRIGHT: No, I live in Massachusetts.

Demetrius Romeo: So you’ve moved back to your home town?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Not to my home town, but to near my hometown. I lived in New York. I went from New York to Los Angeles and then I lived in LA for seven years, and then I wanted to go back to where I started. I was gone about twenty years.

Demetrius Romeo: Are you happiest where you are now?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Yeah, I like being in New England. I mean, I’m from that area. I travel so much so it’s not like I’m just there, but I like that I live there again. I’m very comfortable there. From growing up there, with all four seasons, that area is really in my blood so I’m comfortable to be there just because of that.

Demetrius Romeo: Do you watch a lot of DVDs?

STEVEN WRIGHT: I watch a lot of movies on the movie channels – on Bravo and ANE. I don’t really buy or rent a lot of DVDs.

Demetrius Romeo: So you wouldn’t get to see a lot of ‘making of’ documentaries or hear directors’ commentaries when DVDs are re-issued?

STEVEN WRIGHT: No, not so far, no.

Demetrius Romeo: You were saying that Dr Strangelove was one of your favourite films; there are a few ‘bells and whistles’ included as bonuses with the new re-issue, like an extended interview with Robert McNamara, who was the US Secretary of Defence during the 60s.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Oh really?

Demetrius Romeo: And he gives a lot of good info about the milieu that Dr Strangelove was created in.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Yeah, I don’t know. I should do that. I don’t know.

Demetrius Romeo: What do you do when you’re not writing material or performing material? How do you kick back?

STEVEN WRIGHT: I like to visit with friends and my brothers and sister and just hang around. I’m a big baseball fan, and I’m from Massachusetts, and I was excited that the Red Sox finally won the World Series last year. I like to play the guitar, I fool around with the guitar, I make some songs, I recorded some songs with a friend of mine just for the hell of it, I have a couple of them on my website. There are two that we’ve recorded on there – serious songs. I like to read, I like to go to movies. Just tuff like that: normal stuff. I’m a bicyclist, I ride a racing bike almost every day. I like to exercise. I like to occasionally go downhill skiing. I like to be around in nature. I’ve lived in cities for so long; that’s one reason I wanted to go back to Massachusetts and live more in the country.

Demetrius Romeo: Now Steven, you said that you like to record songs. There was a time when you used to strum short songs on your guitar on stage, that were dedicated to your girlfriend. Does that sort of performance mode still enter into your live stand-up?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Yeah, I have about three or four really insane songs now in my act. That’s one of my favourite parts of the show. The one about my girlfriend’s not in there anymore, but the other ones, I really like doing that.

Demetrius Romeo: Would there be a time when you would release your more serious songs?

STEVEN WRIGHT: I don’t know. Sometimes I think of that, and at other times I think, I don’t know if I want to have that be criticised also. I go back and forth. Actually, I would like to do that some time. We’ve piled up a bunch of them. We have about ten or eleven of them.

Demetrius Romeo: May I ask permission to download the ones on your website and use them for this broadcast?

STEVEN WRIGHT: Um, maybe, you know, but let me talk to some people about that. That might actually be a good idea. That would be fun, actually. But first I want to make sure that they’re copyrighted. But if it’s okay, that would actually be fun to me.

Demetrius Romeo: Excellent. Well, Steven, I’m very happy because I’ve finally had a chat with you – you’ve been one of my heroes for a little while; I actually got you to giggle a couple of times through the interview; and you used the word ‘fun’ by the end of it.

STEVEN WRIGHT: Oh, thank you. Very nice talking to you. I appreciate it. And if you go to the show, come backstage and say hello if you want!

Demetrius Romeo: That you very much.

Soundbite: ‘Run to You (So Goes)’ from Steven Wright’s website

I managed to spin an interview with Steven Wright – conducted a few weeks before he got to Australia – out into a couple of mags. There’s a little bit of overlap, and I will get around to posting the entire transcript, give-or-take.

The FilmInk Article:

“I mainly do stand-up,” Steven Wright confesses in that laconic deadpan voice that seems to waste no word or effort in getting its message across. “I just do a film once in a while.”

Although film and television work has run parallel to his career as a stand-up comic, you may not have even realised that you’ve seen watching Steven Wright in action. But you’ve certainly heard him. His was the deadpan ‘K-Billy Supersounds of the 70s’ DJ’s monotone that introduced the songs of the Reservoir Dogs (1992) soundtrack, a gig that came to him courtesy of the film’s editor, Sally Menke. Menke, who has subsequently edited all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, suggested Wright to the director when they’d gotten close to the end of the film and still “didn’t have the guy on the radio yet”.

Since Reservoir Dogs was Tarantino’s debut feature, he didn’t have a track record. Steven Wright certainly did – he’d been a regular on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and he had a seminal hit record to go with it: the 1986 live album I Have A Pony. Tarantino went for the idea of having Wright’s voice in his film, and Menke assured Steven that Tarantino was “a different film maker” who was going to make it with a “really very different” film, so he should go for it too.

“I knew her and I trusted her sensibilities,” Wright says, “so I went in and did it. She was correct. I was happy to be in that film. To be in a movie that was such a milestone in cinema… it’s fun to be part of that.”

What about a gig like voicing a character on The Simpsons? Surely it’s fun to be a part of that, too – a bunch of people around a microphone, cracking each other up. But the comic assures me that, like Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and The Swan Princess (1994), it’s still work – a matter of “getting the lines down”. And, he says, there was none of this ‘standing around the microphone making each other laugh’ business: “They do the voices separately. You’re not even talking to the other actors.”

Ah, the magic of cinema. In my head, actors voice an animation together around the microphone, in one session. Without missing a beat or (of course!) betraying any emotion, Wright does his best to humour me, at least regarding the Simpsons episode. “They didn’t do it that way when I was there. But I was only there that one time. Maybe it’s like that with the rest of the cast…”

“Look, it’s okay,” I assure him, “I shouldn’t be so naïve. I should have known there’d be a more cost- and time-efficient way of producing an animation…”

“No,” he continues to try to let me off the hook. “How would you know? Nobody knows.”

It is for Reservoir Dogs that Wright reserves a particular fondness, not least of all for “some mistakes” he made on some of the takes. “Tarantino used the take where I stumbled over the words, and he put that in the movie. That’s always amused me.”

Of course, directors often opt for the ‘stylised’ take: Charlie Martin Smith almost dropping the bottle of grog thrown to him by the punk robbing the liquor store is what George Lucas wanted us to see in American Graffiti (1973); much to the consternation of George C. Scott, Stanley Kubrick chose to use all of the takes of him going ‘over the top’ in Dr Strangelove (1964). When I reveal the latter fact to the comic, he exclaims – well, as much as his deadpan monotone can convey ‘exclamation’ – “I’d like to see that! Where did you see that? I love that movie!”

In both instances, these facts are revealed in bonus features accompanying the films on their respective DVD releases, which is why Wright wouldn’t be aware of either of them, for although he likes going to the movies and watches a lot of films on cable, he admits that he doesn’t really “buy or rent a lot of DVDs.”

The interesting thing about Steven Wright’s acting is that it remains unchanged. Opposite Roberto Benigni in Coffee and Cigarettes (the 1986 short film Jim Jarmusch succeeded in turning into a feature by 2003) or in his own vehicles such as the Oscar-winning The Appointments of Dennis Jennings (1988, in which Wright eventually kills his psychiatrist, played by Rowan Atkinson) and One Soldier (1999; Wright’s ‘Woody Allen’ film depicting a stark Bergmanesque black-and-white existential absurdity in which the Russia of Allen’s 1975 masterpiece Love & Death is replaced with post-Civil War Americana), or even voicing an animated character, Steven Wright appears as himself. Or at least, that ‘self’ that he always appears as on stage and in interviews. According to Wright, the fact that he always only ever plays himself doesn’t affect the acting.

“This is how I am,” he insists. “When I’m acting, I’m really acting like me saying some sentences someone else made up in their movie.” Steven acknowledges that this limits his opportunities as an actor, since he’s only going to be offered jobs where they want him or his voice to appear as they are. “They either want it or they don’t want it,” he says, and if they don’t want it, he isn’t disappointed; acting was never really his focus. “It’s not like, ‘oh, they should give me a chance, I could act like a high-powered lawyer in a court scene’. That was never my goal.”

The Last Article:

Steven Wright stands out as a stand-up comedian. Stand-up comedy is about coercing an audience to see the world from the comedian’s point of view, and so most stand-up comics use some sort of vocal inflection, some sort of physicality, referring to observations of the world that the majority of people share or creating a convincing enough argument to make them see it in a new way. Steven Wright flies in the face of all of that. He has the most emotionless deadpan voice, and his take on life is surreal.

“It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it,” he’ll observe.

“I like to fill my tub up with water and then turn the shower on act like I’m a submarine that’s been hit,” he’ll confess.

“The other night I played a game of poker with some Tarot cards; I got a full house and four people died,” he’ll report.

Surely delivering such a surreal take on the world in a monotonous deadpan must make the comic’s job a bit harder.

“That’s just how I talk,” Steven Wright insists, employing a voice slower and deader than ever, as if he’s a record playing at the wrong speed. “I don’t think the audience is thrown off by the style. They’re only concerned with whether it’s funny or not. If it’s funny, they’ll laugh.” Too true. They will and they do. But the gags – virtually no set-up, and a minimal punch line – are so short that Wright must just burn up material. How do you keep feeding the beast when you’ve been clocked delivering 275 jokes in an hour? “It’s difficult to come up with long, new chunks all of the time,” Wright confesses, “but that’s just how it’s been. I’ve never done it another way.”

Earlier in his career, Steven Wright slaved over his performance. He used to divide his material into three categories so that he could pace his show: if the audience started to flag, two funnier gags closer together kept them on side, and when they were on side, less funny gags could be used for longer periods of time. Wright could judge the quality of an audience – and therefore vary (as much as an utterly emotionless deadpan comic may vary) his material accordingly – by listening to them for a few minutes from backstage, before the show. However, Wright doesn’t move the material around like that anymore. “I pretty much know what I’m gonna do before I even go out there,” he says, likening the performance to a ‘play’ – “one long, flowing thing. The other way, I was wasting a lot of energy figuring out which joke was gonna be next. I thought I could perform the material better if I knew the order of it.”

The comic has likened his style to looking at the world with the innocence and naivety of a child and then describing it with the language of an adult. I can’t help wondering if that was easier when he was younger, when he was still experiencing new things all the time. According to Steven, the process hasn’t changed at all. “Writing material is just a specific way of thinking about something,” he explains. “Nobody ever stops thinking and nobody ever stops experiencing. From when you wake up to when you go to sleep your mind is bombarded with words and images and sounds and things on the television and movies and conversations with people.”

Speaking of ‘things on the television and movies’, Wright has an interesting acting career that runs parallel to his comedy. Many were first made aware of him via his monotone, employed as the “K-Billy super sounds of the 70s” DJ in the soundtrack to Reservoir Dogs. His most recent cinematic appearance is in Son of the Mask. Yet with every job, Steven Wright is hired to play himself. Which isn’t a problem since he’s “just saying some sentences someone else made up”. Sure it limits his opportunities, not being able to play a criminal lawyer, say, unless the criminal lawyer spoke in an emotionless deadpan. However, as he never set out to be an actor, Wright doesn’t really mind.

However, when I raise this issue, I do so by referring to Wright’s ‘persona’. That deadpan guy who does stand-up, who is the one that appears in films, “he’s the one that I’m talking to right now,” I say. At which point, the comic falls out of character for the briefest moment and starts to laugh, as though the concept of there being more to Steven Wright than the deadpan comic persona is utterly ridiculous. The irony being that there has to be more to Steven Wright than the deadpan comic persona in order for that part of him to find the concept ridiculous.

Still quite early in the course of the 2004 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, comedian Matthew Hardy’s show Willy Wonka Explained [The Veruca Salt Sessions] was proving very popular. Of the one hundred eighty-odd shows on during the festival, Willy Wonka Explained was one of eight or so that had sold out. Hardy had tapped into our collective unconscious.

Be that as it may, Julie Dawn Cole, who played Veruca Salt in the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, whom Matthew Hardy has somehow coerced to be in his stage show, and with whom I had the pleasure of chatting to at one of the Sydney semi-finals of Raw Comedy, has been about the easiest person to interview. This is in part because Cole is an actress and voice-over queen, so she knows precisely how to communicate. There were no technical considerations to take into account – she spoke well, into the microphone, without ‘hissing’ or ‘popping’. The fact that we’d already chatted about much of this before the interview took place certainly helped. Julie Dawn Cole is a great story-teller. Most importantly, however, she is a sweetie – sincere and effusive in conversation.

Our chat was more extensive than the final edit would suggest; it dealt with the Festival show itself, and Cole’s involvement in it, and included her reminiscences of the other ‘kids’ from the film as well as the Oompa Loompas. However, the best edit was the one that dealt soley with Julie’s recollections of filming Willy Wonka, particularly when coupled with excerpts from the film’s soundtrack. Judiciously chosen to provide imagery and/or irony, the songs underline some of the key points beautifully. For that reason, I provide lyrics along with the dialogue below. The songs should be of some interest to the comedy lover because they are the work of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley who also wrote the song ‘The Joker’ (from their musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd) which Gina Riley sang as the theme to Kath and Kim.

With a little luck, Willy Wonka Explained will go on the road – not just in Australia, but also to Edinburgh for the next Fringe Festival.

With its talk of Easter eggs and chocolate, this interview was broadcast on Saturday 10 April 2004 – a fitting treat on the day before Easter.

Enjoy the print version below (at least until the transcript is moved to the Radio Ha Ha website), or, to hear the sound file, subscribe to the FREE podcast Radio Ha Ha by pasting this link into your podcatcher: http://podcasts.2gb.com/radiohaha.xml. The Julie Dawn Cole interview is now part of Episode 10.

Music: ‘I Want It Now’ - Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole) and Mr Henry Salt (Roy Kinnear)

Veruca Salt: Gooses! Geeses! I want my goose to lay gold eggs for Easter.
Mr Henry Salt: It will, sweetheart.
Veruca Salt: At least a hundred a day…
Mr Henry Salt: Anything you say.
Veruca Salt: …and by the way…
Mr Henry Salt: What?
Veruca Salt: I want a feast!
Mr Henry Salt: You ate before you came to the factory.
Veruca Salt: I want a bean feast.
Mr Henry Salt: One of those.
Veruca Salt: Cream buns and fruitcake with no nuts,
So good you could go nuts.
Mr Henry Salt: You can have all those things when you go home.
Veruca Salt: No, now. I want a ball…

Demetrius Romeo: Julie, how did you originally land the role of Veruca Salt?

JULIE DAWN COLE: I had just started at stage school in London – we have stage schools, where you do half a day’s vocational work and half a day, educational – and they had decided that the brat had to be played by an English girl, so they came to London to do the casting and I just went for a cattle-call audition. I’d only been at the school four months, so it was pretty well my first job, and I got re-called, and re-called, and re-called, and I found that I’d got the part.

Music: ‘Pure Imagination’ - Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder)

Come with me and you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination,
Take a look and you’ll see
Into your imagination…

JULIE DAWN COLE: The whole thing was magical. It was fantastic. It was filmed in Germany, Munich, for three months, so it was my first trip away from home, having this kind of weird experience, mucking around with the other kids. It was a bit like camp for us: we all hung out together. There was no TV so we played a lot together. And then being a part of this thing, which, little did I know, was going to be with me probably for the rest of my life.

Music: ‘I Want It Now’ - Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole)

I want a party with roomfuls of laughter
Ten thousand tons of ice cream
And if I don’t get the things I am after
I’m going to screeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaammmmmm.

Demetrius Romeo: You actually celebrated your thirteenth birthday during the production of the film.

JULIE DAWN COLE: That’s right. I had my thirteenth birthday when we were filming the scene where I went down the chute. I was sitting in another studio. I was a little bit frightened of the director, it was a bit intimidating and I was sitting there, I think with Denise, in another make-up room somewhere, and somebody came running in saying, ‘you better get down to the set, Mel Stuart’s going mad, you gotta get there, you gotta get there’. I was running, running, running, thinking, ‘oh my god, I’m in trouble now’. I ran into a completely darkened set, and there was a birthday cake there, and everybody was singing happy birthday. I blew the candles out and Mel said, ‘okay, right, now, on with the filming!’ and that was it, and they chucked me down the chute.

Music: ‘I Want It Now’ - Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole)

I want the world
I want the whole world.
I want lock it all up in my pocket,
It’s my bar of chocolate.
Give it to me now…

JULIE DAWN COLE: It was a chocolate cake, and the spooky and bizarre thing is that I don’t like chocolate. Can you believe that? I’ve worked on it since. I can now kind of eat some ‘chocolate’ chocolate – like Easter egg chocolate – but chocolate cake? No way!

Demetrius Romeo: So you were the one kid let loose in the chocolate factory…

JULIE DAWN COLE: …that didn’t eat the props! I was cheap – saved the budget thousands.

Music: ‘The Candy Man’ - Bill, the candy store owner (Aubrey Woods)

Willy Wonka makes everything he bakes
Satisfying and delicious.
Talk about your childhood wishes:
You can even eat the dishes!

Demetrius Romeo: Apart from not wanting to eat the walls of the factory, were there any other negative aspects to making the film?

JULIE DAWN COLE: Well mostly they were good, but there is a rather bizarre aspect. Bearing in mind I was twelve turning thirteen, and this is a very important time for a girl and things happen. You start sprouting in certain areas and you’re very proud of them even though they’re not bigger than a jellybean. I always remember this day when I had to stand in front of the direct and producer while they were scrutinising my chest, saying,

‘Well, no, I can’t see them.’
‘Yeah, I can see them. Look, if she turns this way you can see them.’
‘No, I don’t think…’

And I thought, ‘oh no, please…’

‘We’re gonna have to strap her down and put binders on…’

I was thinking, ‘strap her down and put binders on?’ And I was very proud of my little bumps. Anyway, I think my bumps were so frightened by the whole experience that they regressed.

Music: ‘Pure Imagination’ - Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder)

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it,
Anything you want to, do it,
Want to change the world,
There’s nothing to it.

Demetrius Romeo: Have you had any contact with Gene Wilder?

JULIE DAWN COLE: I saw him when he came to London to do ‘Laughter on the 23rd Floor’, which is the Neil Simon play. I wrote him a letter saying, ‘Dear Gene, you may remember me, I was Veruca Salt. I used to sit on your lap and you used to tell me stories. I’m coming to see the show and would love to say hello’. I gave it to the stage doorman who said, ‘well, Mr Wilder never sees anybody, he’s gone before the audience are out’. I said, ‘fair enough, but give him the note anyway and I’ll come backstage after the show’. So I rushed around there and Mr Wilder’s dresser was waiting to show me down into the royal sanctum, and he was there and he said, ‘Ah, well, I guess Veruca wasn’t such a bad egg!’

Music: ‘I Want It Now’ - Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole)

I want the works.
I want the whole works.
Presents and prizes and sweets and surprises
Of all shapes and sizes
And now!
Don’t care how, I want it now!
Don’t care how, I want it nooooooooooooow

Demetrius Romeo: Julie Dawn Cole, thank you very much.

JULIE DAWN COLE: Thank you very much, Dom.

And as if that weren’t enough, here’s the yet-to-be-published FilmInk version:

One of the most popular shows at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival was Matthew Hardy’s Willy Wonka Explained [The Veruca Salt Sessions], not least of all because it featured Julie Dawn Cole, the actress who played Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory nearly thirty-five years ago. Julie says that appearing in Hardy’s show was a risk and a gamble, but one that paid off. Partaking in this non-reverential look at one of the most popular kids’ flicks ever made, she says, has been “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

Julie Dawn Cole had been at drama school a mere four months when she attended the “cattle-call audition” to play “the brat” in ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. “Then I got re-called. And re-called. And re-called. And I found that I’d got the part.” One of her fondest memories of the production was of celebrating her thirteenth birthday – on the day they were filming the scene in which, desperate to snatch a golden egg, she is sent tumbling down a chute.

“I was a little bit frightened of the director and I was sitting in another studio somewhere, and somebody came running in saying, ‘you better get down to the set, Mel Stuart’s going mad’. I thought, ‘oh my god, I’m in trouble now’. I ran into a completely darkened set, and there was a birthday cake there, and everybody was singing happy birthday. I blew the candles out and Mel said, ‘okay, right, now, on with the filming!’ and that was it, they chucked me down the chute.”

Gene Wilder, a real sweetie who would tell the children stories, organised for a colour photographer to take a series of stills of the occasion. “It was my best birthday present,” Julie says. Better than the cake, it turns out. In the most bizarre stroke of irony, Julie Dawn Cole is one of those rare people who dislike chocolate, and it was a chocolate cake. “Can you believe it?” she says. Let loose in a chocolate factory, she was one of the kids who wouldn’t eat the props. “I was cheap – saved the budget thousands!”

Cole’s one negative experience was the day the director and producer scrutinised her chest, discussing whether or not it required strapping down. “I was twelve turning thirteen, and this is a very important time for a girl,” she explains. “You start sprouting in certain areas and you’re very proud of them even though they’re no bigger than a jellybean.” No action was taken in the end, her ‘sprouting areas’ so frightened by the attention that, she says, they regressed.

Speaking of ‘no bigger than’, what about those creepy Oompa Loompas? According to Julie, they used to have “wild parties” where they’d “drink the German beer.” It didn’t take much to fill them up. "Coupla pints," Julie says, "and they were up to the brim!”

When Julie recently caught up with Gene Wilder, he took a step back and surmised that “Veruca wasn’t such a bad egg” after all. This sweet memory is one souvenir amongst many that the actress has retained. They include a golden egg, two golden tickets and an everlasting gobstopper, not to mention a multitude of fans that share comedian Matthew Hardy’s obsession for the first character Julie Dawn Cole ever portrayed on screen.

Scrumdidilyumptious!

The Sydney heats of the 2004 Melbourne International Comedy Festival Raw Comedy Competition came to an end March 31, and while I feel I should provide some kind of ‘review’ of the final (or at least, a review of what of the final stood out enough that I may remember it nearly a week down the track) I would much rather convey the joy that was the first semi, which took place two days earlier. I can’t for the life of me remember much about the contestants (apart from the ones who made it through to the final – and only then because I got to see them again so soon afterwards), but the evening’s jollity began with a call from Andrew Taylor of Access Entertainment, the company that in addition to managing many great acts, runs the Sydney competition.

“Guess who the guest judge is for tonight,” Andrew began. I couldn’t, so he told me. “Julie Dawn Cole.” I suppose this was a kind of test, and I failed. I couldn’t get excited until I was told that Julie Dawn Cole had appeared in the cinematic classic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in the role of Veruca Salt. Then boy, did I get excited.

“She doesn’t mind talking about the film,” Andrew continued, “but she hates being referred to as ‘Veruca Salt’.” He advised that I should probably behave myself and not say anything stupid.

“Can I do my Roy Kinnear impression?” I asked, demonstrating it for him with the kind of expertise that, I dare say, would have fooled Kinnear himself, were he still alive to hear me do it: “Ve-RU-ca!”

“No, you can’t do your Roy Kinnear impression.”

“What about my Veruca Salt impression?” In perfect ‘Veruca Salt’ voice: “I want it now, Daddy!”

“No, don’t do your Veruca Salt impression.”

It turns out that Julie Dawn Cole is out here to appear in stand-up comic Matthew Hardy’s live show Willy Wonka Explained [The Veruca Salt Sessions]. It’s about his lifelong infatuation with Veruca Salt and the actress who played her. He approached Cole out of the blue and, amazingly, Cole said yes. If she has a history being contacted by weird guys who grew up infatuated with that saucy pouting princess (a kind of Hayley Mills gone bad), I’d love to know the vetting process she uses that enabled her to realise that Hardy was the safer, saner variety of the archtype.

The show apparently opens with both Hardy and Cole on their respective analyst’s couches. Hardy is in therapy because he never got over his infatuation with Veruca Salt. Cole is in therapy because she never got over playing the character.

Although I convinced myself that I would behave throughout the evening, by the first interval Julie had her script out and was telling us about what a lovely time she was having after accepting a questionable job offer on a whim. But it was all kind of fitting: Cole landed the role in Willy Wonka – her first acting job – after a mere few weeks at drama school. She had plenty of fantastic stories and shared them with little prompting.

Like the time she was told she wouldn’t be needed for the next little while, and encouraged to sit on her own on another set, away from the cast and crew. Suddenly a production manager-type flew in telling her that director Mel Stuart needed her immediately and was furious that she wasn’t on-hand. It’s been said that Stuart could be a bit frightening on set – so much so that Peter Ostrum, starring as principal character Charlie Bucket, allegedly turned down a subsequent five film deal as a result of his experience (although, now a practicing vet, Ostrum claims the experience was fun, but not what he wanted to do for a living). Swallowing whatever fear she had of facing the director, Cole hurried to join the rest of the cast before him, where she discovered a birthday cake. Julie had just turned thirteen.

“It was a chocolate cake, and I don’t like chocolate,” Julie confessed. “Imagine being a kid in a film that’s set in a chocolate factory, and not liking chocolate.” She has fond memories of her birthday, and fantastic photos: although it was customary for stills to be taken in black and white at the time, Gene Wilder, who played the lead role of Willy Wonka, organised colour photographs to be taken of that occasion.

Not all of Julie’s memories are as pleasant. There was the meeting during which she was scrutinised intently and spoken of in third person while the powers-that-be decided whether or not her newly developing bust required taping down for the sake of continuity.

Julie’s sweetest story is of her reunion with Gene Wilder a few years ago. He was appearing on stage in England and Cole left Wilder a message requesting a catch-up after a performance. Assured that Wilder never met people backstage after a show – “He has left the theatre before the patrons have begun filing out,” a stage manager assured her – Julie was pleased to discover that Gene Wilder would receive her backstage. Recalling her character’s exit from the film – trying to intercept the golden egg that she wants “now, Daddy!” Veruca lands on the apparatus that determines the value of the eggs, receives a poor rating and is duly disposed of – Wilder took a step back and acknowledged that Julie “hadn’t turned out to be a bad egg” after all.

Hopefully Willy Wonka Explained [The Veruca Salt Sessions] will do so well that Matthew Hardy and Julie Dawn Cole can take the show on the road. In the meantime, I’m trying to land some interview time with Julie for ABC NewsRadio and FilmInk.

However, before moving on from this topic, I want to briefly consider the name ‘Willy Wonker’. As a character name in English children’s literature, Roald Dahl’s creation is up there with Dick and Fanny, who appeared in Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. It is only one vowel away from being the sort of a character in a Carry On film that would well and truly have Kenneth Williams ‘oooo-errrring’. However, I assume the name was derived from the slang term ‘wonk’ which means about the same thing as ‘swot’ – a boring person who studies too hard and is too caught up with facts and figures to have a life or a personality. Willy Wonka, embodying the traditional eccentric English boffin archetype, is imbued with some of the ‘wonk’ characteristics: a genius who knows all there is to know about his work and more besides. When he first meets Veruca, for instance, he absent-mindedly asks himself if she doesn’t share her name with a kind of wart that grows on the sole of the foot [a ‘verruca’ is in fact “ a firm abnormal elevated blemish on the skin caused by a virus”].

I recall a time during the earlier stages of the Clinton administration (actually, during his 1992 presidential campaign) when Bill Clinton was described as a ‘policy wonk’ because he was a politician who could “spout data and statistics nonstop, a man with a quick answer for every question.” Isn’t it a pity that nobody had the brainwave to write a piece on this and name the article, and the presidential candidate, ‘Willy Wonker’, or, at the very least, ‘Billy Wonker’. Then his political campaign could have involved voters holding the ‘Bill Clinton How To Vote’ pamphlet, with the box next to Billy Wonker ticked, singing, ‘I’ve got golden ticket…’ Clinton could have done a television spot likening the USA under the Republicans as a paddle steamer that had lost its way, insanely intoning the words, “there’s no earthly way of knowing… which way the river’s flowing…” Of course, this would have proven damaging in the long run: it wouldn’t have taken the Republicans long to liken Clinton to ‘The Candy Man’, even if he never did inhale.

Amongst her souvenirs, Julie Dawn Cole has retained a golden egg, two golden tickets and an everlasting gobstopper, not to mention a multitude of fans that share comedian Matthew Hardy’s obsession for the first character she ever portrayed on screen.

David Bowie On Film

(Rather similar to the other Bowie piece that I put together for ABC NewsRadio, seeing as how it is based on one major quote from it, and a similar premise. Unless you’ve a bent for comparative studies or some such, there’s no need to read both; if you've already read the NewsRadio version, skip to ‘Off The Record’.)

Having brought so many characters to life in his music, it’s no surprise that David Bowie has been acting for almost as long as he has been singing. However, Bowie's current role is as a family man. Married to model Iman for a decade, he recently became a dad, and his mindset lies more towards being himself on stage and in his music. Likewise, David Bowie seems to have virtually turned his back on acting.

“I’d love to be a movie star and have my name on posters and photographs forty foot high and all that,” he said at his Sydney press conference. “But you’ve got to work so hard at it – the acting, and all that you gotta do. It really takes up time and I don’t think I’ve got a commitment to it, really. I don’t think I’m serious enough about it, and quite rightly, that’s why I’m not offered a huge amount of stuff to do because it’s not my profession.”

Bowie’s first significant film role was as an alien stranded on earth in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). By this point, having established himself as an international star, Bowie had ‘retired’ from the concert stage and was in need of other creative diversions. Roeg advised Bowie to “just play yourself” and Bowie did just that – his alien was another of the other-worldly characters he’d been playing on stage and on record. Thus, although the plot of The Man Who Fell To Earth was flimsy, Bowie’s acting was quite robust. No such luck with his next attempt, unfortunately, portraying Prussian soldier Paul van Przygodsky in Just a Jigolo (1979). “You were disappointed and you weren’t even in it,” Bowie has said of the film. “Imagine how I felt. It was my thirty-two Elvis movies rolled into one.”

David Bowie is most proud of his performance in the prison camp drama of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983). It certainly stands up better than his Dorien Gray-like vampire in The Hunger the same year, or his cameos in the ill-conceived Yellowbeard (also 1983) and John Landis’s Into the Night (1985). Bowie’s pantomime turn as Jareth the Goblin King in The Labyrinth (1986) was fun, as was his role in Julian Temple’s wretched adaptation of mockneyphile Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners. However, David Bowie’s born-to-play role was clearly that of Andy Warhol in Basquiat (1996).

Nowadays, Bowie is happy just to accept cameos. “It’s just wonderful if someone like a Scorsese says, ‘do you want to wander on and do Pontius Pilate for five minutes?’ ‘Yes, smashing, what a crack that’ll be just to do that!’ I still choose anything I do on the strength of the director. If it’s somebody that I really admire, or it’s a new guy and I think, ‘he looks like he’d be interesting to work with’, I generally go on that. But Russell Crowe can sleep safely…”

I put this story together from a series of answers David Bowie gave to questions I didn’t have an opportunity to ask, at the Sydney press conference, Monday 16 February 2004. It was broadcast Saturday 21 February. The dialogue is book-ended with the songs ‘Changes’ – yes, a bit crass and predictable, but it actually suits the story – and ‘Try Some Buy Some’. I also managed to recycle info for a FilmInk version of the article. You can also listen to the story as you read.

Music: ‘Changes’ - David Bowie

Demetrius Romeo: David Bowie’s been making music for the better part of forty years. His career has been punctuated by embracing various musical genres – from cockney music hall to glam rock to soul to heavy metal – and his bringing to life numerous characters on stage and on record, including Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane. Now David Bowie’s role is as a family man. After ten years of marriage to super model Iman, David’s a dad again, and, he says, he quite likes the role.

DAVID BOWIE: I mean I only got married because I was in a place that felt right about getting married, so I think that the change in me probably started a lot longer before. You know what I mean? I didn’t get married and suddenly I changed, I felt that I was, uh… I just felt that emotionally and mentally, I seemed to have come to a place where I felt grounded and I understood a lot more about myself and my immediate environment and how things are for me and how I react to things and all that. A lot better than I ever did before: and my writing has taken a turn for the positive, which, I think, if I were not married, and if things were as traumatic as they had been over the last few years, and being at the age that I am, I can quite see that I would have easily have found myself falling over into far more pessimistic, negative, even nihilistic frame of mind in my writing. And I do have to be careful; it’s very easy for me. I really swing. I can vascillate between very good moods and very bad moods, you know.

Demetrius Romeo: It seems that the contentment that David Bowie has with being himself in real life coincides with a contentment in being himself on stage. This is an underlying theme of Reality, his latest album, and his current tour. So, does the absence of the colourful characters on the stage and in the music rule them out of David Bowie’s future work?

DAVID BOWIE: I think it’s wise to say ‘never say never’, but I’m very happy as a performer doing what I’m doing at the moment. It’s never been so clean and so unencumbered with anything. It’s just a very simple performance in that way: I’m up with there with my really, really, great, strong band and we’re just interpreting my songs that I’ve done over the last thirty-five years. But I love writing little theatrical things and I can see it in the future as something I might want to do. Whether I’d be in it or not, I don’t know, these days, maybe not.

Demetrius Romeo: David Bowie has had an acting career running parallel to his music career. But, he says, the acting doesn’t seem as important these days.

DAVID BOWIE: I’d love to be a movie star, you know, and have my name on posters and photographs forty foot high and all that. But you’ve got to work so hard at it, the acting and all that you gotta do. And that really takes up time and I don’t think I’ve got a commitment to it, really. It’s great being offered little cameos now, which is generally what I have always been offered. I’ve had a couple of larger roles. But I don’t think I’m serious enough about it, and quite rightly, that’s why I’m not offered a huge amount of stuff to do because it’s not my profession, and it’s just wonderful if somebody like a Scorsese says, ‘do you want to wander on and do Pontius Pilate for five minutes?’ ‘Yes, smashing, what a crack that’ll be just to do that!’ I still choose anything that I do on the strength of the director. If it’s somebody that I really admire, or it’s a new guy and I think, ‘he really looks like he’d be interesting to work with’, I generally go on that. But Russell can sleep safely…

Demetrius Romeo: One place David Bowie does continue to engage in role-playing is in the performance of other people’s songs. Throughout his career, Bowie has frequently recorded cover versions, and there are three on the tour version of his current CD, Reality. One of them turns out to be an inadvertent tribute to George Harrison, ‘Try Some, Buy Some’.

Music: ‘Try Some, Buy Some’ - David Bowie

DAVID BOWIE: Ironically, I didn’t know it was a George Harrison song. Well, I must have known, but it never went in. For me it was the Ronnie Spector single that came out in 1974. And I knew it was the last – I think it was the last – single released by Apple Records at that particular time before it folded. It was just a phenomenal single. It didn’t do anything because I think Apple had run out of money, so they couldn’t promote it. Sounds like 2004, doesn’t it! I truly love the single; I thought it was just a wonderful piece of work. It was only when I was writing out all the data for the album cover that I recognised it as a George Harrison song. Course it is! It rather poignantly became an homage to George without actually trying… oh, you know what I mean.

Music: ‘Try Some, Buy Some’ - David Bowie