Scala!!! It’s cinema, Jim, but not as we know it

The Scala cinema was a lifeline for me when I first moved to London in the ‘80s. Living on the dole while I wrote a book, I couldn’t afford to indulge my film habit – except there, where you could attend a triple bill or all-nighter for the price of most cinemas’ single tickets.

And what an education it was – ranging from highbrow European art movies to exploitation flicks, sci-fi and horror, all beyond the reach of the censor due to it being a “club”.

It’s at the Scala that I saw Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead (1987), which climaxes with an alien bisected from head to crotch by the hero, who dives on it from above with a chainsaw. Take that, Tolkien. And a long-forgotten B-movie resurrected by a live Ozzie improv team, who’d turned off the dialogue and supplied their own, hilarious version over the top.

But it’s not the eclectic programming that is the true subject of Ali Catterall and Jane Giles’ loveably low-fi documentary Scala!!!. The clue is in second half of the subtitle: “Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How it Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits.”

Really the film is a love letter to the fans – the oddballs like me who were drawn to spend hours in this huge, draughty cinema with its uncomfortable seats and its startling cats who kept the rodent population under control. For many of them it was a lifeline, a community.

The film is full of great interviews with these fans, many now famous. John Waters, the “Pope of Trash”, describes seeing one of his own films there and getting the noisiest reaction of any he’d encountered the world over. He describes the Scala, approvingly, as like “a country club for criminals and lunatics and people who were high.”

Stewart Lee observes that “You could sit with your back to the screen and see something just as enjoyable”.

Adam Buxton says that entering its grand old building in King’s Cross was like a portal to some dystopian future, where they’d said to themselves: “Let’s set up a cinema in this abandoned embassy from the old times, and all the survivors and mutants can gather together to watch.”

I can remember feeling, on my first visit, a bit like Brad in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, stepping unwarily into a huge old building filled with “unconventional conventionalists”. It was indeed a safe haven for out, proud and loud LGBTQ+ cinema-goers, as the likes of Paul Burston, Mark Moore and David McGillivray recall.

Really, there’s been nothing like the Scala since, and London is the poorer for its passing. The one small fault in the film is that it rather glosses over the catalyst for its demise, which was the legal fall-out resulting from illegally showing A Clockwork Orange, described here simply as a “banned” film. That’s a half-truth, one that makes the screening sound like a brave act of defiance against censorship by shadowy powers that be.

Really, it was withdrawn from circulation in the UK by the director, Stanley Kubrick, himself, in horror at the copycat crimes and attendant publicity it engendered when first shown.

But that’s a small criticism indeed of a riotously entertaining, often laugh-out-loud funny documentary, peppered with eye-popping film clips.

For those who remember the Scala with the same affection as I (I literally got the T-shirt – designed by Wigan & Yuval who had painted the Scala mural), it’s wonderfully nostalgic. For those too young to have been part of this mixed-up generation of weirdos and misfits, it will act as a hallucinatory gateway drug to better, stranger days.

Eras defining: how necessity made Taylor Swift the mother of reinvention

So Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film absolutely is the dazzling, five-star extravaganza of much-loved songs, inventive stage sets and kinetic camerawork that we were promised. As someone who tried and failed to get gig tickets for the UK leg of the tour, I am truly grateful for a front-row seat.

But there’s just one niggle I’m surprised no other reviewers seem to have pointed out. Half an hour in, I started to find it odd that Taylor hadn’t missed one note. I mean, dancing and singing at the same time is tough, let alone with 70,000 fans screaming along. You could be forgiven the odd fluff.

But no: as the 40 songs unfolded, I couldn’t hear a single one. Is Taylor really that superhuman?

Google led me afterwards to this fascinating article in the New York Times. It suggests that the best bits of three nights’ filming will have been stitched together, and notes digitally tweaked, to create the illusion of live perfection.

If so, I wonder if that’s a shame. Taylor’s brand is authenticity, and loving yourself despite your flaws. And surely part of the excitement of live performance is the danger, the feeling that on the night anything might happen – good and bad. Removing this reduces the film to a succession of beautifully stitched together music videos. And Taylor has already released a string of the best vids in the biz.

Then again, creating filmed perfection does play into the other part of Taylor’s brand: the artistic control freak (I mean this in a good way) and hard-headed businesswoman who set about rerecording and rereleasing all her albums when she couldn’t buy back the rights to them, and who set the Eras film ticket prices in the US at $18.89. This was celebrated by fans as being in honour of the soon-to-be-released “Taylor’s version” of her album 1989, recently named by Ed Potton in The Times as the best pop record of this century. It’s also considerably higher than the average film ticket price, which in 2022 was $10.53.

Taylor negotiated directly with US cinema chain AMC, cutting out the usual Hollywood studio route, to retain a bigger share of the pie. Which, at a $100m opening weekend gross in the US alone, will be considerable. (The tour, meanwhile, is predicted to make $2.2bn revenue from its US dates alone.)

If I was a man…

I don’t resent this. I admire it. Taylor celebrates her own business acumen in one of the best-staged songs in the film, The Man, which attacks the casual industry sexism that holds her back. “If I was a man,” she sings, “what I was wearing, if I was rude/ Could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves” – before concluding, “If I was a man, I’d be the man.”

The song was also, in its own way, an act of defiance and statement of intent: that she was becoming more political, with both a small and a big “p”. Another song on the same Lover album (2019), the bouncy You Need to Calm Down, joyously stands with the LGBTQ+ community against hate-mongers: “You just need to take several seats and then try to restore the peace and control your urges to scream about all the people you hate. ‘COS SHADE NEVER MADE ANYBODY LESS GAY.” [Sidebar: I swear Taylor came up with the “uh-oh” chorus of multiplying ascending voices by asking herself, “I wonder what a rainbow sounds like?”]

That this departure is A Big Deal is made clear in the excellent documentary Miss Americana (on Netflix), where Taylor is seen arguing with execs over her desire to break political neutrality and declare for the Democrats – which might antagonise her Country base. (Remember what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they spoke out against the Iraq War?)

And you know what? No one burned her records. She’s bigger than ever. She’s come into her own power, and, as is clear from watching her on stage, she’s loving it.

She’s so big, in fact, that she’s in danger of losing the “outsider” status that makes her so beloved of fans. My guess is that she is alive to that danger. Is it a coincidence that, on her most recent album, Midnights, the strongest song is the self-deprecating Anti-Hero? “Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby, and I’m the monster on the hill/ Too big to hang out, slowly lurching towards your favourite city/ Pierced through the heart but never killed.”

To underline the point, Taylor sings this in the Eras film in front of a huge video screen showing her as a gawky giant, accidentally destroying tower blocks.

Taylor may overtly be singing about body-image insecurity, but there’s surely another layer. Most stars who get as “big” as Taylor face a backlash – what Australians call “tall poppy syndrome”, the desire to tear down the over-successful. This song seems to artfully pre-empt and thereby defuse this.

What will become of me?

If so, Taylor has form. Back in 2012, she wrote Nothing New for her album Red. On it she sings of the fickleness of stardom, “Lord, what will become of me/ Once I’ve lost my novelty?… Will you still want me when I’m nothing new?” It didn’t make the final cut for the album, resurfacing only on the recent “Taylor’s version” rerecording. I’d theorise that it was dropped because it mournfully painted herself as a passive victim.

It was on her next album, 1989 (released in 2014), that Taylor worked out how to “own” her detractors by clapping back with head-held-high defiance – and with work that soars effortlessly above that of her competitors. In its hit single, Shake It Off, Taylor creates a compendium of the criticisms levelled at her (“I stay out too late, got nothing in my brain… I go on too many dates, but I can’t make them stay…”), in order to own the abuse and then give it the finger through a breathtakingly catchy piece of dance-pop and one of the most joyous videos ever filmed.

Look What You Made Me Do joined this lineage of clap-back songs in 2017. The video is filled with snake imagery, and her dress for this Era in the film is also wreathed with serpents. This references her second public spat with Kanye West: the one where she expressed horror at his lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous” (this was by humiliating her on stage at the 2009 MTV video awards), after which Kanye replied that he had her permission for the lyric, then Taylor said she didn’t, then Kanye’s (later ex-) wife Kim Kardashian released partial footage of the conversation, then Taylor went to ground, and then #snake started trending against her name.

Phew. Just writing that makes me feel tired, let alone what it must have been like to live through. So, again, the snakes are Taylor’s way of owning and reclaiming this rare downward turn in her trajectory.

“But I got harder I got stronger in the nick of time/ Honey I rose up from the dead I do it all the time” is the chorus to Look What You Made Me Do. The song also contains a section in which Taylor stops singing to answer the phone: “I’m sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh – ‘cos she’s dead!” The 2017 music video hammers home the point with the new, harder, stronger Taylor lording it over an army of bickering ex-Tay-Tays, each wearing the different clothes and hairstyles of genres and videos past.

Truly, Taylor’s career has been a masterclass in reinvention, all backed by stoking the fervent adoration of her fans (now up to 275m Instagram followers). I didn’t realise it was possible to flirt with 70,000 people at once, but there’s Taylor in the film waving coquettishly, winking, pointing at fans one by one when she sings the word “you”. But the most telling moment is when she thanks her audience for “allowing” her to keep shifting musical genres, to keep reinventing herself. And it’s true, they – we – stay with her loyally through all her different phases, even the quieter, more introspective pandemic albums.

Pop is the most unforgiving genre. There are few who manage to remain relevant for more than a few years. Madonna managed it. Taylor’s one-time rival, Katy Perry (publicly reconciled on You’d Better Calm Down), has not.

You kept me like a secret

So how has Taylor done it? By applying a savvy business head, yes. By never forgetting her fans, of course. Addressing political and social issues at last, rather than just navel-gazing at her own relationships, now that was a plot twist. But most of all, it’s because she is quite simply the peerless songwriter of our century, a wordsmith and storyteller who can hold her own with, say, Bruce Springsteen – whose The River her best song, the 10-minute All Too Well, thematically resembles.

If anyone doubts Taylor’s gift for poetry (we’re looking at you, Damon Albarn), here’s just a few zingers from it: “You called me up just to break me like a promise/ So casually cruel in the name of being honest”; “Every time you double cross my mind…”; “You kept me like a secret/ But I kept you like an oath.”

I cried at Taylor’s acoustic rendition of All Too Well in the dark of the cinema, as I often do on listening to it (ditto The River). To move an audience to tears one moment with the expression of lost love, and to dancing with joy the next – or, as she puts it, to write some songs with a fountain pen, some with glitter gel and some with a quill – is quite some gift. Though “gift” is the wrong word, as it suggests this all comes naturally.

I mean, yes, she wrote the charming and clever Our Song (also featured in the Eras film) in ninth grade, so she’s not short of native talent. But Taylor works bloody hard at her craft.

Of the 40 songs in the Eras film, I found myself mouthing all the words to about 30 of them. As I have perhaps only at Paul McCartney, Springsteen and Bowie concerts. And as did most of the audience.

That level of recognition and memorability across ten albums is something special. Here’s to Taylor’s next reinvention in her next era, whatever it might be.

Far more than Dumbledore: interview with the late Michael Gambon

In 2010 The Times sent me to Dublin to interview Michael Gambon, who passed away this week aged 82. He was hilarious company – far from relying on that famous honeyed voice, he used his whole body in telling an anecdote, of which he had many. He also talked, even then, a lot about mortality. I reprint my interview below. Should his children come across it, I hope it comforts them to know how much delight they gave him. “Ha ha ha! ‘F**khead’! This child is three!”

Sir Michael Gambon, or “The Great Gambon” as Ralph Richardson used to call him, wears his greatness lightly, like the rumpled overcoat he sports in Dennis Potter’s peerless TV drama The Singing Detective. “I’ve got a terrible cold,” he apologises as we meet in Dublin’s historic Gate Theatre, and blows into a tissue by way of illustration. “Had to cancel our rehearsals today.”

It doesn’t slow him down long. Painfully shy by nature, which he reckons is why he became an actor, he nevertheless wears white and pink striped socks under his sober suit. And if it takes half an hour or so to gain his confidence, that famously sonorous voice is soon in full flow.

He loves to tell how, when he auditioned for Sir Laurence Olivier at the newly formed National Theatre, he dared in his ignorance to recite Richard III, then tore his hand open on a nail before he could begin. He and his fellow spear-carriers were in awe: “We used to know if we walked at a certain time along a certain corridor at the Old Vic, we’d pass him. ‘Evenin’ Sir!’ ‘Hello.’ Then we’d present ourselves at the stage door when he was leaving after Othello and come out after him, past all the people with their autograph books, as though we were his friends.”

He reserved similar adulation for Robert De Niro. A notorious prankster, Gambon used to install a photo of the Hollywood star in his dressing room wherever he performed, signed: “To Mike, best wishes and love forever. Bob.” Gambon, of course, wrote it himself. But four years ago the dream became reality when De Niro directed him in The Good Shepherd.

“I was walking down St Martin’s Lane with Robert de Niro, on a busy Saturday night, and you walk as though you’re his mate, you know. There were a few of us, and he said we were going to Sheekey’s. I said, ‘You won’t get in there without booking.’ Ha ha! To De Niro! He looked at me as though I was mad. Packed Saturday night, he walked in, and suddenly there was a big table, cleared!”

De Niro is just one of “The Three Os” Gambon has worked with: Pacin-o and Brand-o being the other two.  “Ooh, Brando was wonderful. All he did was f**k about all day and tell jokes. He pretended one day he didn’t know what ‘Action’ meant. And the First Assistant Director was terrified of him, it was like meeting God! And he said, ‘Um, oh, you have to start acting when I say that.’ And Brando said, loftily, ‘I haven’t acted for about 30 years, and I don’t intend to start now!’ Ha ha haaaah!”

When Gambon spins an anecdote, his surprisingly long and elegant fingers weave the story into a tapestry of air. They are craftsman’s fingers: trained as an engineer, like his father before him, he likes to repair cars and watches, and does intricate engraving and inlay work on the antique guns that he collects at huge expense – that’s where the cheques go from playing Harry Potter’s Dumbledore, or the villain in the forthcoming Christmas episode of Doctor Who. For a particularly choice reminiscence, such as how Top Gear named a section of race track “Gambon’s Corner” after he took it on two wheels, or how Kenneth Macmillan offered him the priest’s role in the Royal Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet (sadly Macmillan died two weeks later, and Gambon’s dream to be the first person in the company with size 13 feet died with him), he’ll leap up and use his whole body.

Shorter than you’d expect, Gambon is still an imposing physical presence despite his 69 years. Which, whether by coincidence or design, is exactly the age he is called upon to play in Krapp’s Last Tape, one of Samuel Beckett’s most autobiographical plays which transfers to London’s West End this week.

The script is just eight pages long, the production just under an hour. For the first 20 minutes, Gambon does not speak at all. It’s perhaps the role he was born to play, even if he had to wait 69 years to play it: the perfect combination of silent physicality and vocal mastery, of pathos and black humour.

Krapp, a writer who never achieved the literary success he once hoped for, celebrates his 69^th birthday in solitude, as he has for decades, by recording his thoughts on tape. But he also plays back the tapes from previous birthdays, notably his 39^th, when he’s forsaken the love of his life for the art that someday, a day that clearly now will never come, could make him immortal.

“I’ve never seen Krapp’s Last Tape,” says Gambon, “not even when Harold [Pinter] recently did it, sadly, so I don’t really know how it’s meant to go! But whatever I’m doing seems to be right. I’m told I do play him more frail, perhaps with more pathos than others. He’s near death, you can tell from the title, and if you’re big and bulky, like me, you don’t walk well. So I stagger around a bit, my hair askew.”

He hunches into himself as he speaks, suddenly looking every one of his 69 years. It’s a painful role for an actor coming to terms with his own mortality. On Boxing Day 2008, Gambon reduced mourners to tears with a reading at his friend Harold Pinter’s funeral. And earlier this year he had to pull out of playing the poet WH Auden in The Habit of Art, a part written specially for his saddlebag face and honeyed voice by Alan Bennett, due to a major medical malfunction.

“I basically had a leak of blood, inside me. You just go… ‘boom’.” His whole body slumps limp and lifeless in his chair. “Then you revive and they put you on a drip, they put microcameras up your bum and down your throat, and you go home, and three days later, ‘bfffff…’ again. They could never find out what it was, and I’m all right now, but it was very annoying.”

That’s something of an understatement, though one typical of Gambon. He’s the same when dredging up his first brush with death, as an eight-year-old growing up in Camden, North London. He was a solitary child, with just one best friend, Kevin, a quiet Asian boy with whom he spent his Saturdays breaking into London Zoo and fishing in the canal. They would take the spokes out of a bicycle wheel, tie a burlap sack to the rim, put half a loaf of bread in the centre, and lower it into the water. The gudgeon fish would feed, you’d slowly raise the sack – Gambon’s nimble fingers mime the scene, rendering his words superfluous – and they would flog the trapped fish as bait.

One day, Gambon reveals almost as an afterthought, he fell in. And in those days, inner-city children never learned to swim. “I just remember looking up through the water at the sky, and seeing all the colours of blue. A man dived in from the bridge – I never saw him again – and dragged me out. I’d certainly be dead otherwise. I don’t remember any fear, I just remember being lifted out into the air, and placed on to the bank. I stayed there till I dried. Then we went to the zoo, went home, and never told anyone.”

It was, without being too fanciful, his first glimpse that there was something beyond the self. Raised Roman Catholic, he became a dedicated altar boy, up for mass at six in the morning, but found it was the spectacle, the ritual, the dressing up that moved him more than religion, and credits that for his move on to the stage aged 19 despite never having even seen a play. He thinks it’s a terrible shame that the Catholics abandoned Latin mass – though he was told off for changing the words from “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” to “me a cowboy, me a Mexican cowboy” – and would love to be accorded an audience with the Pope on his visit this week. Nearly as much as he would like to meet Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David.

Our allotted time is long up. Gambon has already batted away questions about his late brother and his tangled love life – ten years ago he fell for Philippa Hart, a set designer roughly the same age as his son, though he has only half left his wife – with a curt “I don’t talk about that.”

But the sun crosses his weathered face when asked about the two small sons he’s recently fathered with Hart, aged three and one. “I’ll just say this. I have two little boys, one is called Tom and one is called Will, and I just… love them. I can’t believe it. They make me laugh. I said to Tom the other day, and I’m sorry but this is a bit rude, I said ‘what’s that?’ And he said, ‘That’s a Lego fireman.’ I said ‘What’s his name?’ And he said, ‘F**khead.’ Ha ha ha! ‘F**khead’! This child is three! He’s already picked it up from kids at school. That really makes me laugh. They are life-enhancing, aren’t they? And Tom’s name, when he’s playing a fireman, is Elvis.”

Clearly Tom’s already picked up his dad’s gift for invention. We share a last cigarette outside the theatre, the Great Gambon and me – let the record show, since Gambon says that he would otherwise get into big trouble, that he absolutely did not light up a crafty fag in the Green Room an hour before – and he starts to tell me about how he drove a car up this busy Dublin highway, O’Connell Street, when he was just nine years old…

But the lost photographer breathlessly intervenes, with only five minutes left in which to get his shot. That story will have to wait for another journalist’s tape. Perhaps on Gambon’s 79^th birthday.

Writing A Bird Flew In, my first feature film to be released in cinemas (at last!)

So it’s finally happening. After winning 11 awards at film festivals around the world, a feature I’ve written is getting a cinematic release through Soho Studio this coming Friday, Sep 30.

The film is called A Bird Flew In, and it has a starry cast: Sir Derek Jacobi, Frances Barber, US star Jeff Fahey, French actress Julie Dray, Sadie Frost, Morgana Robinson, Charlotte Rutherford and Bill Fellows, to name but a few. On Saturday I did a Q&A at the New Renaissance Film Festival (the audience loved the film, though there were enough sniffles – in the right places – that I apologised for upsetting them on a Saturday afternoon), where I talked about some of the challenges involved in writing it.

For a start, I was given less than three weeks to write the first draft. But as a journalist by trade, deadlines are in my DNA.

Then there’s the fact that it’s an ensemble movie: a dozen-odd intertwining characters in half a dozen loose pairings. There’s no set road map for this sort of film, so I rewatched a couple of Robert Altmans for inspiration. His style was too freewheeling for me, so in the end I imagined the structure as a series of concentric circles rippling out from a central life-changing event, as from a stone dropped in a pond. Every two weeks between March 26^th and June 1^st 2020, I would explore what each character in turn was up to on that day.

Why those dates? Because the film is set during lockdown, which began on March 26^th. In fact I started writing it the day after lockdown restrictions were first eased on June 1^st, and A Bird Flew in became the first UK film to be shot after restrictions had relaxed enough to permit film production, in July.

The premise came from the director, Kirsty Bell, who is also the founder and head of Goldfinch Films. That March she had been shooting a film when she discovered that the first lockdown was about to be declared.

So they scrambled to cut scenes and locations and lines to get the final ten days finished in just 48 hours. At the end, Kirsty turned to her fellow producer, Philippe Martinez, and said, “Phew, that was like a film in itself”. He agreed: “Why don’t you make it?”

That became the opening scenes of A Bird Flew In: a busy, tight-knit crew wrapping a film, and then being sent home, alone. I loved the idea of these show-people with no show, actors without a script, forced to confront themselves in the mirror. But only one couple lived together. The rest would have to conduct any romance or even conversation remotely – and that was the biggest dramatic challenge of all.

So I gave Peter, the writer, an internal monologue; Rebecca, an unravelling actress, a teddy bear to talk to over her vodka (lead pic, above) and fans to talk to on a video stream; David, the ageing and ailing thespian, a carer. And I added a couple of new characters to Kirsty’s roster who were inspired by a scene in Altman’s The Player, in which Tim Robbins’ film exec holds a flirtatious phone conversation with Greta Scacchi’s artist character while – unbeknownst to her – watching her through her window.

This became the obsessive compulsive assistant director, Miles, who spends his lockdown watching and mirroring the actions of one particular girl on his laptop via the security cams in her home. I can’t say why – that’s a spoiler. Watch it and find out. But it fulfilled a dramatic need for two people to be visually together while still isolated by lockdown.

Writing the first draft, of course, was just the beginning. I made many changes as a result of intelligent notes from Kirsty and her talented young producer Ben Charles-Edwards (with whom I had previously collaborated on several successful shorts as well as some abortive features), as well as new developments in casting – the Russian character became French, the romance between two men changed to two women, the British writer became American, the veteran American actor became a British thesp! But I embraced every one as an opportunity to improve the screenplay.

Me answering the Q&A after the New Renaissance screening of A Bird Flew In

Seeing the finished feature film (for the third time on Saturday) is also to appreciate fully the collaborative joy of film-making. As well as Kirsty and Ben, there’s the cinematographer, Sergio Delgado, who decided it should be filmed in black and white. The composer, Al Joshua (also a talented screenwriter), whose score gives the film its emotional heart and whose song lyrics, stripped of music, provide some of the poetry spoken in the film by Peter the writer. The universally brilliant actors who brought the words I had written to heart-rending or comic life – and, in the case of Sir Derek Jacobi and Frances Barber, improved on my dialogue through improv’ing it. The location, props, costume and lighting crew who performed wonders on impossible deadlines and tight budgets. And after all that the editor, John Smith A.C.E., who rose to the challenge of creating a polished mosaic from the fragmented scenes.

I’m exceptionally proud of the finished film, as should be everyone involved. And, from a selfish point of view, I particularly love some of the lines I wrote for Peter, the character in the film who is most like me:

“If we’re not reflected in someone else’s eyes, do we really exist? If there is no one to laugh at a joke, is it funny? If we are alone, truly alone, are we really alive at all?”

“Social distancing. What an invention. It’s the opposite of what we need as a species. But somehow I feel I’ve been practising for it all my life. Then along comes Anna, dusting at the cobwebs of my heart.”

“Nought point one millimetres. That’s all that separates us: the thickness of human skin. Ten ounces: that’s all a human heart weighs. So why can it feel so heavy? We are all of us prisoners of our flesh. Trapped in our rib cages. Alone in our skulls. It’s love that sets us free…”

“F*** the Seventies! I don’t remember them at all.” When I interviewed Christopher Plummer, RIP

Christopher Plummer at TIFF in 2009, the year I met him. (Photo by gdcgraphics from Wikimedia Commons)

I haven’t posted much recently… busy working at The Times by day and writing screenplays by night… but the death of Christopher Plummer leads me to repost an entertaining interview I did with him in 2009 for The Times, on the occasion of Pixar’s Up!. I’d forgotten almost everything about it till re-reading it just now (even the bits about William Shatner and Peter O’Toole), except for Plummer’s insistence on donning a neckerchief for the photographer — “It’s the neck that really shows your age,” he confided. A fellow Canadian, a great actor, an entertaining raconteur, and a true gent.

In the storybook town of Weston, Connecticut, 50 miles north of New York, Christopher Plummer is holding court. The white farmhouse he shares with his wife of 39 years is only a little older than he (nearly 80). The manicured lawns are exquisitely maintained. But when he unleashes the first of many F-words, giving it as much welly as any Shakespearean soliloquy, it’s evident that The Sound of Music star has little in common with the stuffy prig he played in the film.

Plummer, it turns out, is a hedonist of the first order. The scion of a distinguished Canadian family (his great-grandfather was Prime Minister), he was drinking wine with his meals from the age of 12. By his teens he’d taken up the bottle in earnest. Stumbling home as usual one winter night, he passed out in a snowdrift. Had his mother not come to find him he would have frozen to death. His recent autobiography, not yet out in England, is called In Spite of Myself to commemorate his attempts at career suicide. He was nearly fired from a couple of early stage roles after drunkenly missing the matinee.

By the time of The Sound of Music (1965) — which Plummer famously refers to as “the sound of mucus” — he was a fully fledged hellraiser. In a break of a few weeks from filming he went on a bar crawl around Austria, Bavaria and Hungary, cut short only by crippling back pain. He was laid up in his hotel for days with sciatica, but still managed to have his needs attended to by a local beauty. When he returned to the film they had to let out his costumes to accommodate his ballooning frame.

“If you were playing Captain Von Trapp,” Plummer exclaims, “you would have done exactly the same. What an empty carcass of a part. I asked his [real-life] nephew once, and he said Von Trapp was the biggest bore in the world.”

The theatre, Plummer says, you do for love; films you frequently do for money. This helps to explain why, out of 100-plus Plummer movies, none has eclipsed The Sound of Music in the public imagination. And though he was lucky to live in Montreal in the Forties, New York in the Fifties and London in the Sixties — fine decades for all of those cities — he then lost his way. His autobiography devotes 500 pages to his life up until then; only 100 pages to the four decades thereafter. “The Seventies,” Plummer reflects wryly, “I wanted to put in my book and outline in black, and simply say, ‘F*** the Seventies!’ I honestly don’t remember them at all.”

And yet now Plummer’s time has finally come again. He has three big movies out within a month of each other: Up, the tenth and arguably finest Pixar animation; The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, Terry Gilliam’s latest piece of flawed genius; and 9, a quirky animation set in a dystopian future, produced by Tim Burton.

Plummer is splendid in Up as the voice of the explorer Charles Muntz, who devotes his life to finding a rare bird in the Venezuelan mountains. At first Muntz welcomes the arrival of an elderly widower and a 12-year-old Boy Scout in a floating house carried by 10,000 balloons. But solitude breeds paranoia, and it’s not long before he’s trying to kill them both.

Plummer is often at his best playing villains: he has that patrician bearing and slightly sardonic smile that suggests he’s mocking the world. “That sardonic thing is mostly when the dialogue is puerile,” he laughs. “You want to let the audience in on the fact that, ‘Yes, I know this is shit.’

“Villains can be great fun to play, but you need to find the good in them, then they’re all the more horrible. That’s the only way to play evil, I think — to play against it.”

His Muntz is strangely sympathetic, even when trying to toss an innocent 12-year-old from an airship at 20,000ft. “I thought it was a terrific film,” enthuses Plummer, who is by no means shy of knocking his own movies when they fall short. “Terribly clever. And not cute. I was so relieved, no Disney sentimentality there, thank God. Pixar are wonderful.”

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus gives Plummer his first lead in a major film since, perhaps, playing Sherlock Holmes in Murder by Decree (1979). He’s worked with Terry Gilliam before, in Twelve Monkeys, so knew to expect the unexpected. “He’s half genius and half madman. I’m crazy about him. But I did say: ‘For God’s sake, Terry, don’t give us too many plots or too many characters. You’re always putting in someone you’ve fallen in love with on the street and the audience can’t follow it!’ And he’d say: ‘I know, I know, I will.’ And then introduce five or six other people as if he hadn’t listened to you at all.”

This time, ironically, Gilliam had no choice. He had to bring in Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to complete Heath Ledger’s role after the actor died of an accidental overdose. “None of us could believe it,” Plummer, says. “Terry least of all. He’s a very dear soul underneath all that wacky stuff, a very emotional man, and he was shocked to the core, saying: ‘It’s my fault, it’s me, everyone who comes into contact with me, I’m a jinx’ — because of course his film Don Quixote had to be abandoned halfway through filming.

“Heath was a very good actor and a real sweetheart. At the Christmas break he flew all the way out to Australia and back the next day, just to surprise his parents! As to the press [reports implied that he committed suicide] … f*** ’em. Heath was dying to direct and he was dying to play great parts. He loved his daughter [Matilda Rose, now 4] and she worshipped him. He had everything to live for.”

Then there’s 9, which he hasn’t yet seen but knows will be “very original to look at”, and he’s more recently filmed The Last Station, in which he plays Tolstoy opposite Helen Mirren as the writer’s wife, Sophia. But his real love is still the stage. He hopes to do something in London in a year or so, and is never more animated than when the talk turns to Shakespeare.

He’s a mine of tales. Playing Henry V in Stratford, Canada, he was hospitalised with gall stones. His understudy won raves and launched his career by playing it the exact opposite of Plummer. The plucky young man in question? William Shatner. Captain Kirk was to return the favour by casting Plummer in Star Trek VI, which explains the many Shakespearean digressions in this otherwise turgid blockbuster.

Conversely, Plummer played Henry V in Stratford-upon-Avon — for which he won the Evening Standard Actor of the Year award — because Peter O’Toole gave up the role to be in Lawrence of Arabia. O’Toole later burst into Plummer’s dressing room, where a group of rather proper well-wishers had gathered. “Look at this,” O’Toole screamed. “It’s all your fault, you colonial p***k. You’re playing my part and this is the thanks I get” — and O’Toole dropped his trousers to show off a behind that was raw after riding camels bareback.

Plummer’s wife, a former actress and dancer named Elaine (he calls her “Fuff”, rhyming with “pouffe”), wafts in to offer more coffee. Plummer had two marriages before her, and an actress daughter, Amanda Plummer, whom he seldom saw. His memoirs don’t stint on his sexual exploits. Was it hard on Fuff to read the details? “She’s too secure for that,” he says. “Anyway, that was all before I met her.”

Also, the impression shines through that he was promiscuous, not through chauvinism, but because he loves women. “And I needed them! One found oneself getting terribly involved, and vulnerable, about a relationship that you thought you were just going to toss off.”

His mother died when he was 25. She haunts his memoirs. “I always felt frustrated that I hadn’t shown her the right courtesy, the right affection. I’d like to have done something for her, but it was too late. So you create that … not necessarily guilt, but longing, for something, that you find in other people.”

We wrap it up there. He dons a jaunty little neckerchief for the Times photographer. Outside, the September sun still shines like summer. The cicadas sound like water sprinklers. Two young bucks have been locking antlers in the nature reserve beyond his 25 acres. The Plummers don’t entertain much, why should they? They have each other. Whatever it is Plummer once looked for at the bottom of a bottle, he seems to have found it now.

Top 50: the best David Bowie songs of all time, ranked

Ch-ch-changes: some of Time Out’s Bowie covers over the years (mine in the centre)

This weekend The Guardian published a list of the top 50 Bowie songs. I mostly loved Alexis Petridis’s choices, but, inevitably, started griping about the omissions. I mean – no Ziggy Stardust?! Anywhere?!?

I heard a voice say to me, “If you think you know so much, why don’t you make your own list?” So I did.

Those who know me know I’m a Bowie nut. I could sing most of his albums (the good ones!) word for word. I spent over an hour interviewing him in a hotel room (for the central Time Out cover, above). I’ve seen him playing Wembley Arena, and I’ve seen him playing to just 20 people when recording Later With Jools Holland. I bought a biography of him in my teens and then tore out the portrait pages to hang on my bedroom wall. He has visited me in dreams.

So whether or not you agree, know that this list is informed by at least dozens and in many cases hundreds of listens to these songs.

50. Various

I was left with a list of 20 “possibles”, from which to choose just one as my No. 50. It’s as random and doomed a task as pinning a tail on the Don Qui-xote at this stage, but I’ll pick… um… oh, sod it. I’ll say The London Boys, Prettiest Star, John I’m Only Dancing, Velvet Goldmine, Time, Lady Grinning Soul, Stay, Fascination, Breaking Glass, Move On, Yassassin, Because You’re Young, Blue Jean, Absolute Beginners, Slip Away, I Would Be Your Slave, Stars Come Out Tonight, 5.15 The Angels Have Gone, Seven Years in Tibet, Loving the Alien, Buddha of Suburbia and Blackstar.

49. Please Mr Gravedigger

I felt I should have something from Bowie’s early years, and chose this over sweet tunes like Love You Till Tuesday or the nearly great The London Boys because it’s a good example of Bowie’s storytelling – and his very dark streak. It starts off as a simple character study of a gravedigger: “He seems to spend all his days puffing fags and digging graves/ He hates the reverend vicar and he lives all alone.” It gets a little darker when the narrator reveals he’s seen “Mr. GD” take a locket of a girl’s hair; and darker still when the narrator reveals why the gravedigger sees him every day standing at her grave: “Mary-Ann was only 10 and full of life and oh-so gay/ And I was the wicked man who took her life away.” There’s one final dark twist I won’t spoil if you don’t know the song… Bowie was just 19 when he recorded this – and 69 when he recorded his final album.

48. Somebody Up There Likes Me

I hope so, David. I do hope so. But Somebody Up There is not in fact a religious paean, as you might think if you listened only to the chorus, rather a warning against charismatic, telegenic, autocratic leaders – “Hugging all the babies, kissing all the ladies… he’s the savage son of the TV tube.” If only US radio stations would play it before the next election. Extraordinary, soulful backing vocals from a trio that includes Luther Vandross, later a huge star in his own right.

47. Jump They Say

Bowie’s sputtering comeback after the failed experiment of Tin Machine is not one I’d play over and over, but its lyrics – “My friend don’t listen to the crowd/ They say ‘Jump’/ Gotta to believe somebody/ Got to believe” – are more affecting when you realise they are inspired by his schizophrenic half brother, who killed himself several years before.

46. Memory of a Free Festival

This song hit the news in 2013 when a fan started a campaign to save the Beckenham bandstand that inspired it. It’s some of Bowie’s best writing: essentially a poem set to music. “The Children of the summer’s end/ Gathered in the dampened grass/ We played our songs and felt the London sky/ Resting on our hands”. And the end: “And we walked back to the road… Unchained…”

45. We Are The Dead

One of the refugees on Diamond Dogs from Bowie’s failed 1984 musical project, this counterpoints garbled dystopian lyrics with some exquisitely tender verses about forbidden love. I particularly love Bowie’s breathy voice and dramatic delivery.

44. I’m Deranged

Bowie’s dreamy, siren-sinister vocals – “I’m deranged/ Deranged my love/ So cruise me cruise me cruise me baby” – sit over typically bonkers Mike Garson piano and a driving beat. The song sticks with me partly because David Lynch used it, in a tougher remix by Trent Reznor, above footage of a night-time road unfurling in the opening and closing credits of Lost Highway, Lynch’s weirdest and most baffling film – and there’s some pretty stiff competition for that title. If you’d like to read my interview with David Lynch on Lost Highway, in which I play “word association” with the director, it’s here.

43. Cat People

I remember this getting hella radio play in North America, where I lived at the time; it’s probably less well known in England. Giorgio Moroder wrote the music, Bowie the lyrics. It was originally released in a superior seven-minute version as the theme song to Paul Schrader’s 1982 horror movie of the same name, and later re-recorded, shorter, for the Let’s Dance album. It was also used over the opening credits of Atomic Blonde (really fun film, incidentally) and, thrillingly, over the arson scene of Inglourious Basterds.

42. Lazarus

Blackstar, Bowie’s last album, came out on January 8, 2016. Two days later, Bowie was dead. “Look up here, I’m in heaven/ I’ve got scars that can’t be seen” is how Lazarus begins. It ends: “Oh, I’ll be free just like that blue bird/ I’ll be free, ain’t that just like me.” I don’t know what else to say 😦

41. Fashion/ Fame/ Let’s Dance

Right, let’s get all these out of the way in one go. They’re all big and enduring hits, from successive albums (Young Americans, Scary Monsters, and Let’s Dance). They’re all brilliant in their own way. So I feel I have to include them. And I’m sure they “ought” to be higher. But tbh, after hundreds of hearings, I’ll usually skip past them if they come on. And Let’s Dance, despite the title, you can’t even dance to, despite Nile Rodgers’ best efforts, which pissed me off at the time. Despite their “classic” status, I’ve found them more and more irritating over the years. So sue me.

40. Queen Bitch

Inspired by Velvet Underground (a debt acknowledged in hand-writing on the sleeve of the album Hunky Dory), this is a precursor to glam rock, but the guitar riff also sounds thrillingly like punk – four years early. Great lyrics, too: “She’s an old-time ambassador/ of sweet-talking, night-walking games/ And she’s known in the darkest clubs/ for pushing ahead of the dames.”

39. Hallo Spaceboy

Another return to Major Tom, and to Brian Eno as producer. The album it’s from, Outside, also marked Bowie’s first real return to form since Let’s Dance. That was 12 years in the musical wilderness; 12 years treated as a figure of fun (anyone remember The Heebeegeebies parody “I think that I’m losin’ my miiiind/ I’m disappearing up my behiiiind”?), rather than a chameleonic genius. Something people gloss over, these days. But I remember vividly. I’d become Editor of Time Out, which meant I could realise a cherished dream: meeting and interviewing my teenage icon. But with a star of Bowie’s stature, it would have to be a cover. And I couldn’t in all conscience do that with the dross he’d been putting out. The experimental, baffling, often brilliant pseudo-concept album Outside was the excuse I’d been waiting for. My interview then is now enshrined in the book Bowie on Bowie, or you can read it here. Oh, and check out the Pet Shop Boys remix of Hallo Spaceboy. It’s a banger.

38. Soul Love

My favourite lyric is actually a misheard: “the bleeding hours of morning” brilliantly captures the raw sensitivity of staying up all night till the small hours, mixed with the look of the dawn sky. Years later, I looked up the lyrics and found it was the more prosaic “fleeting hours”, not “bleeding”. I told Bowie this, when I interviewed him. He laughed, agreed that would have been better, and said he’s always delighted when people read things into his songs that he didn’t intend.

37. Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing

Absolutely not a clue what most of this apocalyptic love song is on about, mostly, but it features some of Bowie’s campest, most over-the-top vocal pyrotechnics, some wonderful imagery, and a skirling saxophone (played by Bowie himself) following the closing lines that always send a chill up my spine: “I guess we could cruise down one more time/ With you by my side, it should be fine/ We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band/ Then jump in the river holding hands.”

36. Sense of Doubt

I’ve got a soft spot for an album with an all-instrumental side, like Caravan’s gorgeous The Land of Grey and Pink, or Pink Floyd’s pretentious Atom Heart Mother or (apart from some brief singing) their lovely Echoes, whose seascape Sense of Doubt calls to mind. A repetitive series of four descending piano notes set an ominous tone, washed by simulated waves and the creak of ropes, giving away to a piping keyboard as though shafts of sunlight are breaking tentatively through the clouds. Eno’s ambient influence is clear.

35. It’s No Game

My God what an opener to the Scary Monsters album. In stark contrast to China Girl, co-written with Iggy Pop three years before, which presents Asian women as submissive victims of Western Imperialism, this starts with an assertive woman barking a string of Japanese. The usual dystopian worries follow, except this time it’s clear Bowie is talking about the present day, not some imagined future, and it all ends with a discordant guitar over which Bowie screeches, as to the voices in his head, “Shut up! SHUT UP!” It’s as ballsy as Muse starting Absolution with Apocalypse Please.

34. Quicksand

Pretentious, lui? I like to burst Bowie’s bubble by calling this “The Philosophers’ Song” – after Monty Python. I’m sure I thought it was deep in my early teens, and I got a thrill whenever I came across anything connected with the lyrics, but now I just love those blissful “aaah-aaahs” and Rick Wakeman’s swirling piano.

33. TVC15

The lyrics are hilariously preposterous: they are said to have been inspired by Iggy Pop hallucinating that his girlfriend was being eaten by the television. But it’s got the most extraordinary, tipsy-sounding boogie-woogie piano, courtesy of Roy Bittan of Springsteen’s E Street Band (so, yes: the God-like genius behind the piano on Jungleland and Thunder Road), who says Bowie asked him to play like Professor Longhair.

32. Always Crashing in the Same Car

I was tempted to include Breaking Glass, also from the album Low, but in truth this is the one I’d rather actually listen to. It’s the dreamiest evocation of alienation and isolation this side of Sound and Vision, worth it for the “yeah, oh oh ooh-ooh ooh-ooh ooooooh-oh” alone, which starts anguished and ends as an accepting croon.

31. Five Years

One of the most straightforwardly short-story-like of all Bowie’s songs, this details public reaction to the news that the end of the world is nigh. Which feels rather topical now… There are some detailed character observations and some wonderful lines: I particularly like the meta-ness of “Don’t think you knew you were in this song”, and the self-awareness of “It was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor”. But jeez – “Five years, what a surprise/ Five years, my brain hurts a lot”. Couldn’t someone have asked him for a rewrite?

30. Cygnet Committee

What a glorious mess this is: an overblown, relentlessly building, near ten minutes of pseudo-psychic-revolutionary dystopian babble. The lyrics are preposterous, pretentious, Sixth Form stuff, aspiring to Depth and Poetry and Meaning but never quite delivering, but God I love it all the same, and can sing along to every word.

29. Drive In Saturday

There are some awkward rhymes and lyrics in this evocation of a future world whose jaded inhabitants have forgotten how to have sex (“We’ll try to get it on like once before/ When people stared in Jagger’s eyes and scored”), but the massive chorus more than makes up for it. And I love the line, “She’s uncertain if she likes him/ but she knows she really loves him.”

28. China Girl

Nile Rodgers takes the credit for re-arranging this song, originally co-written by Bowie with Iggy Pop for his album The Idiot, into a commercial hit for Let’s Dance. It’s one of Bowie’s most assured vocal performances, and has some of the most coherent lyrics. The chorus is a straight love song to a man-pleasing Asian girlfriend, while the verses are a warning: “My little China girl/ You shouldn’t mess with me/ I’ll ruin everything you are/ You know it/ I’ll give you television/ I’ll give you eyes of blue/ I’ll give you a man/ who wants to rule the world.”

27. Modern Love

Bowie keeps reinventing himself. Even when dead. This time it’s as a meme that’s been circulating for the self-isolation, social-distancing age, that references Modern Love’s opening: “Bowie knows when to go out, and when to stay in. Be more like Bowie.” Gorgeous harmonies, great saxophone (not by Bowie himself this time). Side-note: I modelled my hair (and trousers) on Bowie’s at the time.

26. Jean Genie

With a blues-inspired riff nicked wholesale by labelmate Sweet on Blockbuster (though all concerned swear it was a coincidence), Jean Genie is a seemingly effortless, throwaway pop classic – the sort that would be a one-hit wonder in anyone else’s hands.

25. Slow Burn

I adore the album Heathen (his 24th studio album including Tin Machine!), and this is perhaps its most commercial song. It benefits from a virtuoso guitar part by The Who’s Pete Townshend, and lyrically returns to Bowie’s comfort zone of unspecified dystopia: “Oh, these are the days/ these are the strangest of all/ These are the nights/ these are the darkest to fall.” His voice on this album is stronger than ever: controlled, abandoning the pretentious pyrotechnics of yore, and justly nominated here for a Grammy for Best Rock Male Vocal Performance.

24. Boys Keep Swinging

A proudly silly song, all strut and swagger and mocking faux-machismo, but I love it, from the opening drum beat to the wandering bassline to a guitar solo by Adrian Belew so crazed it can still make me burst out laughing. I also love the story that, to get the garage band feel they wanted, they adopted a suggestion to swap roles from Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies cards: guitarist Carlos Alamar played drums, and drummer Dennis Davis played bass.

23. Ashes to Ashes

Uniting ‘80s synth and a New Romantic look in the video with a crisp funk bass and off-beat percussion, the bits of the nonsense lyrics that are comprehensible (Bowie has described it as a “nursery rhyme”) are a dreamy revisit of Space Oddity’s Major Tom. Less “important” than it seemed at the time, it’s still accessibly strange and ethereally beautiful.

22. Where Are We Now?

Just when you thought Bowie had retired into a life of domestic bliss in New York, he comes back, aged 66, with his first album in ten years – crashing the internet by releasing it without any advance warning. This was the plangent, meditative, quietly beautiful single, and with hindsight it sounds like a man who’s heard he’s terminally ill – and is okay with that. The closing lines break my heart: “As long as there’s sun/ as long as there’s sun/ As long as there’s rain/ As long as there’s rain/ As long as there’s fire/ as long as there’s fire/ As long as there’s me/ As long as there’s you.”

21. Everyone Says Hi

A welcome return, on his 2002 album Heathen, to the days when Bowie was a fine short story writer, and not jumbling his lyrics with a computer programme inspired by Burroughs’ cut-up technique. This is incredibly British, with a world of repressed emotion beneath an apparently simple postcard to a friend who has gone abroad. You can see it in “Shoulda took a picture/ Something I could keep” being immediately undercut, as though realising he has been too bold, with “Buy a little frame/ Something cheap”. And, conversely, the platitude of “Hope the weather’s good/ And not too hot” is tenderly bookended by the single line, “for you”. He finally reveals himself in the doo-wop bridge, “If the money is lousy/ You can always come home/ We can do all the old things/ We can do all the bad things… We could do it, we could do it we could do it”, before retreating back into the polite, platitudinous chorus of “Everyone says hi”. <Sigh.> Only Springsteen and Dylan can match Bowie as a storyteller in song.

20. The Man Who Sold The World

Long before Kurt Cobain covered this song, helping to rescue Bowie from the remainder bin of uncool has-beens in which he was then languishing, I was obsessed by it. “We passed upon the stair, we spoke of was and when/ Although I was not there, he said I was his friend.” WTF? All with Mick Ronson’s hypnotically repetitive riff allowing the bass, unusually, to carry the tune.

19. Look Back In Anger

“‘You know who I am,’ he said/ The speaker was an angel/ He coughed and shook his crumpled wings/ Closed his eyes and moved his lips/ ‘It’s time we should be going’.” That opening line alone justifies the song’s inclusion, let alone the furious chorus and the driving percussion. I bought Lodger when it first came out, and was so baffled by the album that I assumed it was a joke, an unlistenable experiment/contractual obligation like Lou Reed’s recent Metal Machine Music. I took it back to the record shop (which was still a thing, back in the day), and swapped it for Diamond Dogs. Now that’s music, I thought. I say this because it’s hard for younger listeners to realise just how alien and experimental so many of Bowie’s albums were at the time, even to ardent fans – especially after they have influenced subsequent generations of bands and passed into the musical lexicon.

18. Oh You Pretty Things

Youth is wasted on the young, they say. I once conceived of a thriller set in two time periods – teens and middle age. I thought then, I have no idea what middle aged people are like – I’ll shelve it till I’m older. Now I have no idea how I felt back then. Bowie wrote with wry detachment about being young while he yet was, here counterpointing the deliriously beautiful chorus about pretty things driving their mamas and papas insane with the deep thoughts that are actually going through their supposedly pretty little heads.

17. Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide

What an extraordinary opening: “Time takes a cigarette/ Puts it in your mouth.” We’re all in front of the firing squad, we just don’t know when the trigger will get pulled. This is probably a song best listened to in your troubled teens, but it stands in good company with the anti-suicide ballads of REM (Everybody Hurts) and ELO (Living Thing) – and in contrast to Blue Oyster Cult (Don’t Fear the Reaper) and The Only Ones (“Why don’t you kill yourself, you ain’t no good to no one else”). But I digress. Bowie just about teeters on the cliff-edge of ridiculousness without toppling over in the “Give me your hands” finale (not helped by the bathetic backing vocals), and that final violin note that ends the whole Ziggy Stardust album is a tribute, I like to think, to the resounding piano chord that closes The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s.

16. Teenage Wildlife

Absurd, camp, overblown, over-dramatic, and utterly glorious. An anthem to all the young dudes who are cut down in their prime, it has moments of real poetry amid the bombast: “You fall to the ground/ Like a leaf from a tree/ And look up one time/ at that vast blue sky/ Scream out aloud as they shoot you down/ ‘No… I’m not a piece of teenage wildlife” still has the power to affect me, with that swirling, keening guitar. Though I could never get my kids to understand why “As ugly as a teenage millionaire/ pretending it’s a whizz-kid world” was a great metaphor. “Why would that be ugly?” they asked, dollar-signs lighting up their eyes. Somehow my friend Frank Wynne and I always end up singing it at two in the morning.

15. The Bewlay Brothers

This is supposedly about Bowie’s mad brother, but really it sounds like the gayest of his songs bar John I’m Only Dancing and Queen Bitch: “I was stone and he was wax so he could scream and still relax – unbelievable. And we frightened the small children away.” “The dress is hung, the ticket pawned, the Factor Max that proved the facts is melted down.” Not to mention “the crutch-hungry dark”. It’s mysterious, tragic and haunting: “Sighing they swirl through the streets like the crust of the sun, the Bewlay Brothers.” Another favourite late-night singalonga with my friend Frank.

14. ‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore

If Bowie proved anything over a career spanning six decades, it’s that he always has another surprise up his sleeve. But how the hell could a 69-year-old come up with this? Long-time producer Tony Visconti says they were listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar, which perhaps accounts for the hip-hop beat; Bowie had long experimented with jazz, hence the chant of the ever-circling skeletal sax; and it’s a fantastic, expectation-defying melody. Every time you think Bowie will soar up, as he so often does, he goes down instead. As to the lyrics, the title obviously comes from the Jacobean tragedy; the second line, “‘Hold your mad hands,’ I cried”, from a 1797 sonnet by Robert Southey; and Bowie has said the song was inspired by the destruction of the Vorticist movement by World War I. Hmm, if you say so, David. I just like “Man, she punched me like a dude.”

13. All The Young Dudes

Sorry, David: Mott the Hoople’s version of your song is way better than when you recorded it yourself. So it’s that one which makes this list. The way John Travolta walks down the street at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever – that’s how Ian Hunter sings this. You can hear the swagger. I particularly love the later remix with added Bowie where, as on Lou Reed’s Satellite of Love, he proves that even as backing singer he can lift a chorus to the heavens.

12. Ziggy Stardust

It was Alexis Petridis’s wilfully perverse omission of this song from his Guardian Top 50 that inspired me to compile my own. I get that it’s “nothing more” than a great classic rock song. It doesn’t innovate musically. But I love every note, down to the loud exhale after the thundering drums of the intro. And it’s a key part of the Bowie mythos: the first time he’d invented a character to “be” (followed by Aladdin Sane, Thin White Duke etc), and one that proved strangely prophetic. “Making love with his ego/ Ziggy sucked up into his mind” is pretty much what happened to Bowie in his coke years. “When the kids had killed the man/ I had to break up the band” is just what Bowie did (minus the killing) to the Spiders on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon, much to the surprise and dismay of the drummer and bassist, who had not been informed in advance. Extra points for inspiring the Rosette of Sirius on the forehead of The Mighty Tharg, editor of the sci-fi comic 2000AD.

11. Golden Years

What a beautiful, languid, honey-voiced dreamboat of a song, from the finger-snap, doo-wop opening through the soaring “Nothing’s gonna touch you” to the casually whistled outro – with it Bowie became only the second white guy (after Elton John) to appear on Soul Train. Superficially it’s one of his happiest, most optimistic love songs: “Look at that sky, life’s begun/ Nights are warm and the days are young”… “I’ll stick with you baby for a thousand years/ nothing’s gonna touch you in these Golden Years.” But you soon realise he’s pleading, not stating, and that the object of the song is a depressed, past-it diva: “There’s my baby lost that’s all/ Once I’m begging you save her little soul”… “Don’t cry my sweet don’t break my heart/ Doing all right you gotta get smart”… “Some of these days and it won’t be long/ Gonna drive back down/ Where you once belonged/ In the back of a dream car/ Twenty foot long.”

10. Lady Stardust

I so love this song. It’s partly because I read, way back, that it was about Marc Bolan, whom I had a crush on. But also, just everything. The held note on “stare”, the soaring “ooh” in “ooh how I sighed”, the piquancy of “I smiled sadly at a love I could not obey”, the depths hinted at in “Lady Stardust sang his songs of darkness and dismay” (quite at odds with Marc Bolan’s lyrics, that description, but never mind), the top piano note following “he was alright”. Perfection.

9. Starman

I’m amazed by the number of people I speak to who don’t know what this song is really about. So let me spell it out for you. The imminent descent of beneficent aliens is a cosmic chat-up line, an excuse for a young (I hope!) boy to get his end away with a credulous young girl. He tries to convince her that “He told me let the children use it [ie their dick], let the children lose it [ie their virginity], let all the children boogie [‘boogie’, or ‘rock’, is always a synonym in songs for ‘have sex’].” Still not convinced? Try “If we can sparkle he may land tonight/ Don’t tell your papa or he’ll get us locked up in fright.” So there you have it: the most original chat-up line ever committed to music. Have sex with me now, little virgin, or the nice alien man won’t visit. Oh, and the soaring chorus was, famously, nicked from Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

8. Changes

Oh my god, what a delirious chorus, underpinned by that gloriously descending bassline. It never gets old, no matter how many thousands of times I’ve heard it. Some of the lyrics are trite – Bowie was never a good editor of his own stuff – but THIS: “So I turned myself to face me/ But I’ve never caught a glimpse/ How the others must see the faker/ I’m much too fast to take that test.” Later, when David Live came out, I enjoyed the change of lyric from “these children that you spit on” to “these children that you shit on”.

7. Station to Station

This song! This long, long, crazy song! There are fully three minutes of guitars and keyboards somehow coalescing into train noises before Bowie even starts singing. And when he does, what the hell is he on about? Mystical Kabbalah stuff, he’s said in interview. Whatevs, it sounds amazing – that repetitive, slow-building beat, his purring vocals, then suddenly leaping ecstatically into “mountains on mountains and sun birds to soar with”… to hear that for the first time, discovering it in a rented house in Aix-en-Provence not long after release, was one of the most joyful and mind-blowing moments of my life. “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine,” he sings, self-referentially. Oh, but it is, David. It most certainly is.

6. Life on Mars

I admit it. This is finally getting old for me – a few years ago I might have placed it higher. I blame the radio stations who seem to have chosen this as the only Bowie song they will play. But it’s extraordinary, of course. Rick Wakeman’s “marzipan piano”, as Charles Shaar Murray memorably called it… that sudden octave jump in the chorus… and the near-nonsense lyrics of all the crazy stuff going on on the silver screen while the poor girl tries to escape her dead-end life and parents who don’t understand, but can’t – because she’s “lived it ten times or more”… then going all meta when Bowie changes the lyric at the end to “I wrote it ten times or more”. See, it’s not just because of the “take a look at the lawman beating up the wrong guy” lyric that the TV series chose it as a title.

5. Sound and Vision

I love that Alexis Petridis put this short, perfect song at No 1. As he says, “musically it transcends time: completely original, nothing about it tethers its sound to the mid-’70s”. It’s also, as I recently had to explain to a friend, one of the most beautiful songs ever written about depression – a state the song’s protagonist has slipped into acceptingly, almost gratefully, like a warm bath. “Blue blue, electric blue/ That’s the colour of my room/ Where I will live”… “Drifting into my solitude/ Over my head”. Major Tom recurs in several Bowie songs, and here it’s in spirit: the mind-set in Sound and Vision is the same as when Major Tom is “floating in my tin can”.

4. Diamond Dogs

What. The. F. Is this song. It makes more sense when you go to the V&A exhibit, and see the lavish musical Bowie conceived this as a part of. But my God! For a sci-fi obsessed teen, to hear this absurd, overblown post-apocalyptic romp was purest heaven. “Just another future song”, he sings at one point, in a typical meta self-reference. Perhaps, but it’s one of the rockin’est.

3. Space Oddity

In one of the great examples of the squares not listening to the lyrics (see also Reagan adopting Springsteen’s Born in the USA as a “rousing” campaign song), NASA made this its theme tune. It’s so well worn that it’s hard to listen to it fresh, but try: there’s the counterpoint between the urgency of Ground Control in the verse and Major Tom’s dreamy acceptance of his imminent death in the chorus; the pathetic fallacy in “Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do”; the dig at the tabloids in “the papers want to know what shirts you wear”. The stripped-down, orchestra-less version, which I still have somewhere as a B-side, is well worth checking out.

2. Young Americans

Lyrically one of Bowie’s most coherent and mordant songs. You’ve heard it a million times, but how often do you actually listen? Just the opening lines: “They pulled in just behind the bridge/ he lays her down, he frowns/ “Gee my life’s a funny thing/ am I still too young?”/ He kissed her then and there/ She took his ring, took his babies/ It took him minutes, took her nowhere/ Heaven knows, she’d have taken anything.” It’s all that good. And with backing vocals on the chorus to swoon to. When it came up, uncut, over photos of the Great Depression in the closing credits of Lars Von Trier’s remarkable, brilliant, exhausting Dogville, I could have died of happiness.

1. Heroes

It’s hard enough to whittle Bowie’s songs down to 50 (what other artist could you say that of, except perhaps The Beatles?), let alone pick the very best. But this crowd-pleaser stands the test of time. Where Bowie mostly does intimate songs that whisper stories in your ear, or sonic experiments that assault it, this is an unashamed, fist-in-the-air stadium anthem. The fact that it was inspired by seeing two people kissing under the Berlin Wall gives it an enduring resonance. But though the Wall has since been torn down, making the song sound prophetically optimistic, it is the reverse. The ironic quote marks around “Heroes”, the naked anguish with which he sings “Nothing could drive them away”, and the codicil that they could be heroes “just for one day”, show that the singer knows their love, and their defiance, and indeed life itself, are fragile, fleeting things. Unlike this song, which, 43 years later, still has the power to drag the odd fat tear from my eye on long drives.

In memoriam Polly Higgins, lawyer who inspired Extinction Rebellion: never before published interview on Ecocide

Ecocide campaigner Polly Higgins, back in 2011

Shockingly, the lawyer Polly Higgins has died at just 50. She devoted the last decade of her life to trying to pass a game-changing, planet-saving law on Ecocide. This law is one of the key demands of the current Extinction Rebellion movement — as well as paralysing central London, Extinction Rebellion protestors occupied the International Criminal Court in the Hague a week ago to demand the adoption of Ecocide as the fifth international crime. Below is an interview feature I did with her in 2011, when her Eradicating Ecocide movement was in its infancy, for an eco-magazine which, sadly, folded before publication.

“Of course the slave trade is justified. It’s only subjugating blacks and heathens; and besides, it’s vital to the economy.” It’s hard to believe that, just two centuries ago, this was the prevailing view. Who now could look back on it with anything but abhorrence?

Yet, according to the lawyer and campaigner Polly Higgins, our children and grandchildren will regard our own era with similar disbelief. Multinational corporations have been allowed to strip the Earth of natural resources that have taken millions of years to build up, while climate change threatens a global disaster of unguessable proportions. And these companies haven’t merely a licence to do so, but practically an obligation: a CEO will be voted out if he fails to make the most profit he legally can for his shareholders.

“In essence,” Higging sums up wryly, “the law says ‘go ye and destroy the planet if you can make a profit out of it’.”

The slave trade was abolished in large part due to the efforts of William Wilberforce, who saw that economic arguments would always favour slavery, and that businesses were incapable of self-regulation despite their promises. Instead, he argued the legal case for abolition on moral grounds. Put simply, the slave trade was just plain wrong.

Higgins has come to a similar realisation. The quantifying of environmental damage, and the international trade in carbon credits, leads only to a mindset in which anything is permitted to those with a big enough cheque-book. Fines are simply built into a company’s balance sheets. A recent UN-sponsored survey placed the global cost of environmental damage by business at $6.6 trillion in 2008, predicting that this figure would rise to $28.6 trillion by 2050. Yet the majority of this is down to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, an argument susceptible to endless counter-argument and speculation. Governments have been debating the point for decades, and show no signs of action.

Instead, like Wilberforce, Higgins proposes simply that environmental damage be termed a crime. Because it’s just plain wrong.  She is calling this crime “Ecocide”, and wants it enshrined in international law alongside Genocide – which, lest we forget, has itself been a crime only for the last half a century. And just as army generals and heads of state are accountable for crimes of Genocide, Higgins proposes that company directors be prosecuted directly for crimes of Ecocide. Only then, she argues, will they be forced to clean up their act.

Higgins has written a powerful manifesto, “Eradicating Ecocide”, which in July won the 2011 People’s Book Prize. Reader comments start at 10 on the dial — “inspiring… best book of the decade” — and go way past 11 to “probably the most important book in all history”.

Ecocide mock trial

She makes an unlikely eco-campaigner. There’s not a whiff of patchouli in her des res in Islington. Even the graffiti in this area is posh: a Banksy-style stencil of Wills and Kate adorns a nearby wall. Her mother was an artist, her father a scientist. It’s a winning genetic combination. There is a lot of woolly thinking around environmental issues, but she’s done her research.

Higgins has already pitched Ecocide as an international crime before the United Nations. And on September 30 the case will be debated in a mock trial in the UK’s Supreme Court. The trial has no legal standing, and the CEO in the dock will be fictional, but everything else about it will be real: some of Britain’s foremost lawyers and expert witnesses will present a real-world case – the Deepwater oil drilling disaster, perhaps, or the Alberta tar sands – before an impartial jury.

According to Simon Hamilton of the non-profit Hamilton Group, who is staging the trial, “This is very much not an event which is openly in favour of making Ecocide a crime. It’s to raise awareness of the issues, to have a debate.”

The event will be streamed live on the internet (including the deliberations of the jury), and Hamilton hopes also to make it the centrepiece of a bigger documentary. The event will cost £20,000 to stage, with half coming from corporate sponsors and half from individuals. A week before we spoke, he entered a plea for donations on the Crowdfunder website. With 44 days left to go to reach his target of £10,000, he had already raised £3,440.

It’s clear that the issue has captured the public imagination. And this, says Higgins, is vital. “Governments will not move unless public pressure gives them permission to move.”

She desperately wants this issue to build up a head of steam. Next June is the Rio Earth Summit: 194 delegates from around the world, most of them heads of state, will be debating issues such as Ecocide. It will be the 20^th anniversary of the gathering in Rio where a whole raft of environmental legislation was on the agenda, but taken off again thanks to corporate lobbying.

“The businesses said that they would self-regulate,” says Higgins, “that there was no need for laws. Well, that gave birth to climate negotiations, and the concept of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), and 20 years on we’re in an even worse position. Just like Wilberforce said, voluntary mechanisms do not work. So, they’ll be looking at all this again, and this is our chance.” Bolivia, she says, is very much on board, and swinging the rest of South America behind it.

All the same: she can’t really believe this could actually happen, can she? The Ecocide debate is a great way of raising public awareness, but the things she is calling for – jail terms for CEOs who flout the rules, potentially even for the bankers who fund them; an eventual end to the exploitation of non-renewable resources such as oil – are surely too radical ever to reach international agreement.

“Absolutely I believe it can happen,” she retorts. “But I can’t do it alone. It’s about finding the voice of the people, but I am also trying to find someone higher up who will take it to the next level.”

Again, she cites the slave trade. “Wilberforce had a friend, Charles Grant, the CEO of the East India Company – the Shell or Exxon Mobil of its day. It derived enormous profit from slavery. All the same, Wilberforce got Grant on board, and he eventually went public, saying: ‘This is adverse to my company’s interest but still we must stop it.’

‘Today, I’m looking for the Charles Grants of industry. Richard Branson perhaps – at the climate negotiations last year, Branson said, ‘give us the laws and we’ll work with them’. I’m like the Apache Indian, creating smoke signals. Others will get it, and pass it along. And then hopefully the cavalry will ride into town.”

Yes, and we all know what the cavalry would do to the Indians. It’s a rare slip in an otherwise impressive flow. In conversation, Higgins demonstrates a winning combination of passion and logic. Of the controversial surface mining of Alberta’s tar sands, she says: “Shell says that the tar sands deposits only affect 1.5% of Canada. They say that to minimise it, but that’s a huge territory. It’s kind of like saying, ‘We only killed 1.5% of humanity, and they’re Jews so it doesn’t matter.’ It does.”

When asked how we would replace fossil fuels, Higgins has an answer for that, too. Desertec is a non-profit foundation dedicated to harnessing solar power on a massive scale, using solar panels in the world’s deserts. “Within six hours,” points out research leader Gerhard Knies, “deserts receive more energy from the sun than humanity consumes within a year.” This means that concentrated solar plants covering just 0.5% of the world’s deserts could, theoretically, power the whole world’s energy needs.

As to the expense, Higgins points out that the fossil fuel industry currently receives $600 billion in subsidies. “It’s the last gasp of a dying dinosaur,” she says. Both literally and figuratively.

Climate change eureka moment

Higgins had her Eureka moment on stage during the climate change debates in Copenhagen in 2009, when someone in the audience commented that we need a whole new language to deal with environmental destruction. “The word ‘Ecocide’ came into my head,” she remembers. “I went home buzzing, immersed myself in the problem, and didn’t come up for air for three months. By then, I’d convinced myself the argument was water-tight.”

The ground covered by her resulting book is wide-ranging. Nuclear waste dumping is “one of the great unarticulated problems of the future”, and it’s estimated that the use of warheads tipped with depleted uranium during the first Gulf War will cause 500,000 additional cancers in Southern Iraq over the next ten years. Not for Higgins the argument that nuclear power can be green. Pesticides have helped deplete the mineral and vitamin content in fruit and vegetables by up to 75%, yet up to 31,000 tonnes of pesticides are used in the UK each year, filling food with poison which we then ingest.

How much of this would be covered by the crime of Ecocide would be open to legal argument, though her definition is simple enough: “Ecocide is the extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.” There are existing precedents for defining terms such as “extensive” and “severely diminished”.

The key to deterrence is, she maintains, to prosecute individuals, not companies: to make CEOs personally liable for environmental destruction. Ignorance would be no defence. Witness the worst oil spill of recent times, the Deepwater disaster. In 2009, BP’s Environmental Impact Analysis stated that it was virtually impossible for an accident to occur. Yet occur it did, with catastrophic consequences. If Ecocide were a crime, BP chairman Tony Hayward would be in jail right now.

Not everyone’s heart will bleed for the fat cat on over £2 million a year who grumbled after the spill, “I want my life back” — but is it really fair to hold him personally accountable? Can you prosecute crime without intent? ”It’s completely fair,” Higgins shoots back. “Think of it as the difference between death by dangerous driving, and murder. If you’re driving too fast, you’ve still caused death. The sentence will be less, but you’re still going to jail.

“That said, I have no appetite for locking up CEOs; I have an appetite for changing what they are doing. These multinational companies have a colossal infrastructure, some great brains working for them. We need those leaders in the field. I want to turn the causes of the problem into the solution. BP at one time were genuinely going to go Beyond Petroleum, but they didn’t have the legislative framework to encourage them to do so.”

Her second book, which she has blocked out the whole of August to write, will deal with the practicalities of getting businesses onside, properly motivated and compensated. Like Wilberforce, Higgins is prepared to devote her life to this cause, though she is hoping that the internet age, with its ability to mobilise pressure groups, will speed things up. Just look at how quickly a simple Twitter campaign to pressurise the News of the World’s advertisers resulted in the closure of the paper and Rupert Murdoch being hauled up before the House of Commons.

Of next year’s Rio summit, she says: “Of course, all the campaigners can turn up and speak, and nothing happens. Everyone has a jolly good conference, everyone claps, and everyone goes home. Or we can give our leaders a mandate to act, by bringing pressure to bear, by the public, by the youth, by children having a voice and saying we want this.

“People can go on my site, sign on to the newsletter. We will have a tool kit up there soon to help pester politicians and heads of state, which can be very powerful. It’s about getting more and more people to use the language of Ecocide, about changing the emphasis to ‘I owe a duty of care’, not ‘I own’. Remember that children and wives used to be covered by Property Law. But now children are about trusteeship. Your child is not your property. If you abuse your child you can go to prison. It should be the same for the Earth.

“It all comes down to building a campaign. I have a year.”

She’ll need all the help she can get. The Slave Trade Act of 1807 imposed a fine of £100 for every slave found on board a ship. As a result, some captains simply threw their slaves overboard to escape prosecution. No matter what the law says, big business will be slow to change its ways.

Further information about “Eradicating Ecocide” can be found at https://eradicatingecocide.com/. 

 

Solo: more Star Bores than Star Wars (spoiler-free)

A young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and an already ancient Chewbacca in Solo: A Star Wars Story

Oh dear. This is the origin story of one of the most iconic characters in cinematic history? One that Lawrence Kasdan (who co-wrote Solo as a duo, with his son) has had 40 years to prepare for?

It’s by no means a bad film, despite the ill omens of the original directors leaving due to “creative differences” to make way for the solid, dependable but seldom inspired Ron Howard. But it is the worst so far in the Disney-era Star Wars franchise. I can’t think of a single stand-out scene that would make me grab a friend by the lapels and say, “you gotta see that!” It also returns uncomfortably to a past action era of “no consequences” – when a character suffers a tragic loss, it’s all forgotten by the next scene.

If, like me, you’re a Star Wars die-hard, you’ll see it anyway, so I won’t detail any of the plot – not that there are too many surprises to spoil. But here’s a thing that strikes me as curious. It has been said for some time that actors can get cast to some degree for their social media presence. But the casting of Solo: A Star Wars Story takes brand synergies to a whole new level. Look at it this way:

–Woody Harrelson (typically good as a cynical, “trust no one” adventurer) brings in the Hunger Games crowd.

–Thandie Newton (magnificent, if underused, as his partner in crime) adds a dash of Westworld appeal.

–Emilia Clarke (Han Solo’s love interest) brings in the fanatical Game of Thrones fan base.

–Paul Bettany (the bad guy) adds a dash of mighty Marvel.

–And Phoebe Waller-Bridge (great as an independent-minded robot)… well, she’s no franchise star, but Fleabag made her the coolest and edgiest woman on screen since Lena Dunham, so she brings Solo a hip transplant.

–As does the multi-talented Donald Glover (as Lando Calrissian), currently tearing up social media with his new Childish Gambino video.

A recipe for success, then, you’d think. Sadly, you’d be wrong.

Disney and diversity: Thandie Newton on the BFI trainees with Solo: A Star Wars Story

Thandie Newton as Val in Solo: A Star Wars Story

With diversity the current buzzword in Hollywood, there is one major studio that is actually walking the walk. Disney, previously pilloried on social media for churning out pretty princesses who need saving and villains whose inner ugliness is telegraphed through physical deformity, has undergone a radical change of philosophy: making inclusive animations such as Moana, and even feature films with black leads such as Queen of Katwe and, having acquired Marvel Studios, Black Panther. These are the films which, watched by children now, will shape the global citizens of tomorrow. The importance of Disney using its enormous influence for social good can hardly be overstated.

The Star Wars franchise was desperately in need of such a makeover from its new parent company to banish the shuddering memory of Jar Jar Binks. The latest, Solo: A Star Wars Story, always had to feature Lando Calrissian (played by the multi-talented Donald Glover), since one of the few canonical pieces of Han Solo’s back story is that he won the Millennium Falcon from Lando in a card game. It also throws in the magnificent Thandie Newton as partner in crime to Woody Harrelson’s cynical, “trust no one” adventurer.

Even more impressively, Disney is also seeking to effect change behind the camera. At a special preview at BFI Southbank last night, Disney fielded an impressive panel composed of Thandie Newton, Phoebe Waller-Bridge (of Fleabag fame, playing an independently minded robot) and producer Simon Emmanuel, together with the BFI’s Ben Roberts and Gaylene Gould. They were there to talk about the BFI Film Academy Future Skills programme, which aims to counteract decades of under-representation by attracting trainees who might otherwise never have considered a career in film: 75% of their intake last year were women, 45% BAME, 68% from outside Greater London, and 36% from poor households that received free school meals.

“If you live in the North of England,” said BFI CEO Amanda Nevill in her opening speech, “the notion of working in the film industry is quite fantastical: in fact it’s far more than a galaxy far, far away.”

“Diversity always has a huge impact,” said Waller-Bridge. “We instantly grow from a diversity of voices. It results in less stereotyping, better characters, and the truth can sing.”

Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Thandie Newton with BFI trainees Nathan Lloyd and Maria Moss at the preview screening of Solo: A Star Wars Story

Thandie Newton brought her own personal experience to bear on the subject: “Growing up in Cornwall, I didn’t see other people like me anywhere. I grew up deeply insecure as a result. My sense of self-worth was crippled by not seeing other people like me, because the characters of films and television are our heroes, they are a way of feeling less alone.

“I have three children,” she continued, “and they’ve always played with dolls, and when they do it’s important they are exposed to diversity. I will go in with felt-tip pens and change the colour of characters’ skins in story books!”

There was an emotional moment when Newton mentioned Oola, “one of the few people of colour” in the original Star Wars trilogy: Oola was a Twi’lek slave who was killed by Jabba the Hutt when she resisted his advances. “She’s here in the audience!” someone shouted out. “I know,” Newton shot back. “I invited her!”

It transpired the actress, Femi Taylor, had also played Newton’s mother in her debut movie, Flirting. (Newton was so good in that 1991 Australian drama, incidentally, aged 16, that I insisted on running an interview feature with her in Time Out at the time).

But starry as the panel was, the greatest applause was reserved for two young trainees in the BFI Film Academy Future Skills programme. Neither had known during their interviews, indeed not until they walked on to the set, that the film they would be working on was not some indie drama but the latest behemoth in the Star Wars franchise.

Nathan Lloyd, a black youth from Birmingham, was inspired at being put to work as a camera trainee for Bradley Young, only the second black cinematographer ever to win an Oscar, and has since worked on Sky One’s Bullet Proof and Gurinder Chadha’s Blinded by the Light. Maria Moss, a half-Filipino girl from Manchester who said how surreal it was to take tea to “Chewbacca” and have him respond in a Liverpudlian accent, will be working as assistant director on the Wonder Woman sequel over the summer.

It was an inspiring evening. And following the success of the pilot scheme, in which 28 trainees were put to work on Solo, 30 more youths are to be given a new hope (see what I did there?) by working on the next main Star Wars film, Episode IX, from July.

Change won’t come about through talk and good intentions. It will come about through training a new generation with the necessary skills. Big up the BFI, and Disney, for starting the ball rolling.

The 10 films that changed my life

I was asked to do this Facebook thing of “In no particular order, list 10 all time favourite films, which really made an impact on you. Post the poster and nominate a new person each day.” But a) I’ll only forget each day and b) I imagine it all started as a way to harvest data on sharing and friends. So here it is as a blog instead.

NOTE: this about impact, not objective quality. The dates are when I saw these films, not always when they were released. Inevitably, they are concentrated in my formative years. I have seen many brilliant films since, but nothing can rock your world and change your life like films you see in your youth.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). When I won a scholarship to Winchester, my dad said he would take me to London, where I could do or have anything I wanted. I chose to see this. I had never laughed as much. But mostly, it’s here for the father-son bonding thing. And the Black Knight. And the questions three. And the shrubbery. And the farting in your general direction.

Star Wars (1977). Blew my head clean off and made me swear to be involved with film in some way for the rest of my life (leading me to Time Out, and later to write shorts of my own).

Aguirre: Wrath of God (1979). My first art-house film in a rep cinema. Realised belatedly there was a whole world of film out there, which I spent my uni years devouring.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1979). Any film you’ve seen 40+ times has got to be on this list. This was in the early days of call-and-response and dressing up at midnight screenings. I’ve shown it to people since, and they’re like, “Nice songs, quite fun, but what’s the big deal?” People forget, now, how liberating and transgressive and attitude-changing the film was at the time. I’ve since been sung to by both Richard O’Brien and Patricia Quinn (now Lady Stephens) 😊

Apocalypse Now (1980). I saw this loads of times at the Towne Cinema midnight screenings in Ottawa, with bongs being passed up and down the aisles. Epic sweep that never loses touch with the human drama; very much of the drug culture but with a coherent plot; horrifying and hilarious and equal measure.

Napoleon (1983). I saw the restored version at the Barbican with, if memory serves, triptych screens and a live orchestra. I’ve seen it in cinemas twice since, as well as on TV. I studied the French Revolution for my degree, but more than that, it is astonishingly modern for a film made in 1929 – and started me off on a whole silent movie kick.

Blue Velvet (1986): Because obviously. I mean, imagine seeing it on first release, with no expectations or preconceptions about what David Lynch was capable of. It was, to quote Colonel Kurtz above, “like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.”

Akira (1988). My gateway to the astonishing world of anime.

The Lion King (1994). It amuses me that the plot is filched from Hamlet, but really this is here because it makes me think of my boys. I took Theo to the premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square when he was seven months old! Start ‘em out young. He slept through much of it, but we watched it a gazillion times subsequently on DVD. My mum would take me to films when I was young, and I’ve extended this to the next generation. Sam’s even made two excellent shorts of his own, one a nominee for student film of the year.

Animal Charm (2012). The idea for this 20-minute featurette came to me in a flash in the gym: a fading fur fashion designer kidnapped by animal rights activists, with a grand guignol horror twist ending. Sadie Frost and Sally Phillips starred, with Michael “Ugly Betty” Urie and Boy George in small roles. It was really good. Kate Moss came to the premiere the W Hotel and sat in the aisle as there were no seats left. Director Ben Charles Edwards (who also co-wrote) has since gone on to make two feature films, while I have gone back into paid journalism, but it was still the culmination of a life-long dream to see something of mine up on the big screen. Thanks, Ben. You’re an extraordinary film-maker.