The New Yorker - Playlist
Dec 10, 2007 19:42:02 GMT
Post by ukelelehip on Dec 10, 2007 19:42:02 GMT
Playlist
by Nick Paumgarten December 17, 2007
Everyone has a music life, or a life in music. Rufus Sewell’s goes something like this: “Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers, Elvis, Beatles, Stones, David Bowie, Crass, Killing Joke, Elvis again, bebop, never country and Western, except as a joke.” Sewell is the star of the Tom Stoppard play “Rock ’n’ Roll,” at the Jacobs Theatre, on Broadway, in which the music-life playlist, very distinctly Stoppard’s, goes more like “Bob Dylan, Stones, Plastic People of the Universe, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Beach Boys, U2, the Cure, Stones again.” Rock music, and especially the flameout of Syd Barrett, the former leader of Pink Floyd, serves as a kind of metaphor for Marxism, and, each night, between scenes, the Jacobs fills with a hale sampling. It’s a soundtrack that Sewell—as Jan, a Czech at Cambridge who returns to Prague in 1968, after the Russian intervention, and, in the next two decades, endures the disintegration of both his idealism and his record collection—has himself endured hundreds of times. “I thought, regarding the music in the play that I already liked—the Stones, the Velvet Underground—I’m going to really hate this before long,” he said last week, the morning after a two-show Wednesday. “That hasn’t happened. I can be damn sure, though, that this music has now been completely fused to this time period in my life.”
Sewell is forty, English, handsome, garrulous, and profane. To the American moviegoer, he may be familiar from costume dramas—his first and most persistent pigeonholing problem, in a career that (he feels, at least) is full of them. If he were a pop act, he’d have several acclaimed albums, a few unnoticed ones, in styles diverging from the earlier ones, and, weirdly, no recording contract. (Having resolved to be picky, he has no current film commitments.)
In Sewell’s career arc, the Astaire overture recalls his father, Bill, who died when Rufus was ten. Bill Sewell, an animator, employed an impressionistic approach to Rotoscoping—the technique of tracing over film negatives—in his own film “Half in Love with Fred Astaire” and then in the famous “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sequence in “Yellow Submarine.” Bill Sewell also bestowed on his son an early familiarity with the ways of Bohemia (both big and little “B”): the English animation business, post-’68, absorbed “an influx of bewildered, talented Czechs,” Sewell recalled—“scruffy, beer-drinking, roll-up-smoking, very droll old Czech F***ers.”
At fourteen, Rufus entered a Bowie phase, which has been unabating. “At the time, David Bowie felt like my own little secret,” he said. “My brother called me the Fat White Duke. I dyed my hair—blond in the front, orangey on top. I was an early adopter of ‘bad haircut.’ I was really into ‘David Live.’ 1974. Bowie was absolutely drug-F***ed. That’s when he was living on peppers and milk.”
His interest in American music was limited to early funk and groove. “I got into early Stevie Wonder, like, massively,” he said. “Really early Stevie Wevie, as we used to call him: ‘Fulfillingness’ First Finale,’ ‘Talking Book.’ I used to play a little bit of boogie and funk piano. I always played drums in bands. As a drummer, I’m a really proficient thirteen-year-old.”
Though the time and place were ripe, Sewell skipped the Clash. “I went really hardcore really quickly,” he said. “Suddenly, I was into Killing Joke and Crass”—a pair of British anarcho-punk bands. “I wasn’t quite sure if I thought they were really good or absolutely S**t. The decision has since been taken. The trick was, as soon as you discovered someone, you’d disparage them as not being good anymore. I did that with Adam Ant.”
“The music that defines a period, the music that evokes memories, is not the music you loved,” Sewell said. “It’s the music that you treated as background. It’s the music I neglected—the semi-light, detested and ignored music—that brings me back in a flash. Everything else you take with you. If I hear ‘Tainted Love,’ by Soft Cell, it’s a quite good track, really, but it absolutely—bang, I’m back there.” Fourteen again.
Sewell went on, “To me, Pink Floyd has the very strong whiff of bong smoke still. I actually was listening to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ a few years back, and almost had a panic attack, a sort of flashback to being stoned, because it was so reminiscent of being in certain rooms on beanbags.” Sixteen. ♦
www.newyorker.com/talk/2007/12/17/071217ta_talk_paumgarten
by Nick Paumgarten December 17, 2007
Everyone has a music life, or a life in music. Rufus Sewell’s goes something like this: “Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers, Elvis, Beatles, Stones, David Bowie, Crass, Killing Joke, Elvis again, bebop, never country and Western, except as a joke.” Sewell is the star of the Tom Stoppard play “Rock ’n’ Roll,” at the Jacobs Theatre, on Broadway, in which the music-life playlist, very distinctly Stoppard’s, goes more like “Bob Dylan, Stones, Plastic People of the Universe, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Beach Boys, U2, the Cure, Stones again.” Rock music, and especially the flameout of Syd Barrett, the former leader of Pink Floyd, serves as a kind of metaphor for Marxism, and, each night, between scenes, the Jacobs fills with a hale sampling. It’s a soundtrack that Sewell—as Jan, a Czech at Cambridge who returns to Prague in 1968, after the Russian intervention, and, in the next two decades, endures the disintegration of both his idealism and his record collection—has himself endured hundreds of times. “I thought, regarding the music in the play that I already liked—the Stones, the Velvet Underground—I’m going to really hate this before long,” he said last week, the morning after a two-show Wednesday. “That hasn’t happened. I can be damn sure, though, that this music has now been completely fused to this time period in my life.”
Sewell is forty, English, handsome, garrulous, and profane. To the American moviegoer, he may be familiar from costume dramas—his first and most persistent pigeonholing problem, in a career that (he feels, at least) is full of them. If he were a pop act, he’d have several acclaimed albums, a few unnoticed ones, in styles diverging from the earlier ones, and, weirdly, no recording contract. (Having resolved to be picky, he has no current film commitments.)
In Sewell’s career arc, the Astaire overture recalls his father, Bill, who died when Rufus was ten. Bill Sewell, an animator, employed an impressionistic approach to Rotoscoping—the technique of tracing over film negatives—in his own film “Half in Love with Fred Astaire” and then in the famous “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sequence in “Yellow Submarine.” Bill Sewell also bestowed on his son an early familiarity with the ways of Bohemia (both big and little “B”): the English animation business, post-’68, absorbed “an influx of bewildered, talented Czechs,” Sewell recalled—“scruffy, beer-drinking, roll-up-smoking, very droll old Czech F***ers.”
At fourteen, Rufus entered a Bowie phase, which has been unabating. “At the time, David Bowie felt like my own little secret,” he said. “My brother called me the Fat White Duke. I dyed my hair—blond in the front, orangey on top. I was an early adopter of ‘bad haircut.’ I was really into ‘David Live.’ 1974. Bowie was absolutely drug-F***ed. That’s when he was living on peppers and milk.”
His interest in American music was limited to early funk and groove. “I got into early Stevie Wonder, like, massively,” he said. “Really early Stevie Wevie, as we used to call him: ‘Fulfillingness’ First Finale,’ ‘Talking Book.’ I used to play a little bit of boogie and funk piano. I always played drums in bands. As a drummer, I’m a really proficient thirteen-year-old.”
Though the time and place were ripe, Sewell skipped the Clash. “I went really hardcore really quickly,” he said. “Suddenly, I was into Killing Joke and Crass”—a pair of British anarcho-punk bands. “I wasn’t quite sure if I thought they were really good or absolutely S**t. The decision has since been taken. The trick was, as soon as you discovered someone, you’d disparage them as not being good anymore. I did that with Adam Ant.”
“The music that defines a period, the music that evokes memories, is not the music you loved,” Sewell said. “It’s the music that you treated as background. It’s the music I neglected—the semi-light, detested and ignored music—that brings me back in a flash. Everything else you take with you. If I hear ‘Tainted Love,’ by Soft Cell, it’s a quite good track, really, but it absolutely—bang, I’m back there.” Fourteen again.
Sewell went on, “To me, Pink Floyd has the very strong whiff of bong smoke still. I actually was listening to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ a few years back, and almost had a panic attack, a sort of flashback to being stoned, because it was so reminiscent of being in certain rooms on beanbags.” Sixteen. ♦
www.newyorker.com/talk/2007/12/17/071217ta_talk_paumgarten
