Showing posts with label Michael Hann. Show all posts

Saturday, February 27, 2021

'It was tribal and sexual' / Alice Cooper on the debauchery of Detroit rock

Interview

'It was tribal and sexual': Alice Cooper on the debauchery of Detroit rock

When the shock-rocker returned to the place of his birth in the 60s, he found a raw paradise of unsegregated rock’n’roll. As Cooper releases an album celebrating the city, he and his peers relive one of the US’s greatest music scenes

Alice Cooper: "I once lost a 12ft-long boa constrictor in a hotel"

Michael Hann
Friday 26 February 2021

n the beginning there was the production line; the hammering and the pumping and the noise. Always the noise. “Detroit was an industrial city,” says Alice Cooper. “It was like Newcastle. Everybody worked for Ford or Chevrolet or GMC. Everybody’s parents worked on the assembly line. The kids were street kids. I think the Detroit sound has something to do with working with big machines; it made people feel at home hearing big, loud, rock music.”

Cooper’s new album Detroit Stories celebrates the city he was born in and that made his name, full of songs that evoke the spirit of Detroit’s 1960s rock’n’roll scene, where the bands were faster, harder and tougher than in any other American city, and the records sounded like they were recorded with everything pushed into the red. “You had to come on stage in Detroit with attitude, and that’s what crowds loved,” recalls Cooper, now 73. “For some reason, that midwest mentality was not sophisticated at all. It was tribal and kind of sexual. Here’s the difference: in Los Angeles, if a Detroit act was in town, people would come home from work, put on their torn-up Levis, put on a black leather jacket, and try to look like they belonged. In Detroit, they’d just go from work like that because that’s the way they dressed; they had combat boots on. There was nothing phoney about it. So if you were a Detroit band, you better bring it or you’re not going to be there.”

Get Carter / No 7 best crime film of all time

Get Carter: No 7 best crime film of all time

Mike Hodges, 1971

Michael Hann
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.49 BST

t a distance of nearly 40 years, Get Carter has as much value as a piece of social history as it does as a thriller. The Tyneside it portrays isn't one of hen parties in Bigg Market, but of poverty that grinds Newcastle and its inhabitants into an inescapable and unendurable greyness. At times, too, it seems as if Mike Hodges has thrown his actors into real life – the faces of the old men in the pubs and betting shops, and the revellers at the dancehall take the movie into something akin to cinéma verité, even as mayhem erupts in the foreground.

As a thriller, though, it's colder and more brutal than anything British cinema has produced before or since; its mood so unyielding that the viewer does not even question whether Michael Caine really could be a Geordie hood returning home for his brother's funeral. There's humour, but it's so bleak it causes grimaces more than laughs: when the husband of Carter's lover (played by Britt Ekland) walks in on her having phone sex with Carter, he asks, puzzled: "What's the matter? You got gut trouble or something?" That's entirely fitting with regard to the subject matter, for when Carter investigates his brother's death, he discovers the dead man's daughter has been coerced into porn films by the local crime syndicate, setting Carter off on a trail of vengeance.

At the centre of it all is Caine, playing with such chilly authority that even his most geezerish moments – "You're a big man, but you're in bad shape. With me it's a full time job. Now behave yourself" – retain their threat, when a few years later they might have teetered over into self-parody. He's aided by a top-notch supporting cast, with the playwright John Osborne an unlikely but wholly convincing ganglord, and future Coronation Street mainstay Bryan Mosley as the hapless hanger-on Cliff Brumby, who makes one of British cinema's most notable exits, from the upper stories of the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead.

Watching Get Carter now is like reading accounts of the first westerners to cross the Gobi desert: did this world ever exist, and in such recent times? It seems wholly remote from 21st-century Britain, even as its themes of coerced sex and utter amorality chime with contemporary fears.

THE GUARDIAN