My publishers are copy-editing THE LAST KING and I'm racing through book three, now titled GOD'S LONELY MAN. BORIS AKUNIN has been known to write a book in three weeks. I'm figuring three months...
Astanga vinyasa folk comme moi have long known that if you don't have an hour to spare doing that form of yoga there's a 20 minute regime, more focused on getting fit than getting stretched, called the Five Tibetans.
Tibet has nothing to do with it since these are four classic Indian yoga positions plus one spin. The only difference is that, for fitness, you do them 20 times.
Turns out Bruce Forsyth swears by them. Good for him. Bad that all the moronic press have been making stupid stories out of it.
Some fitness bozo on GMTV the other morning was suggesting that what are known in yoga circles as the downward dog and the cobra - two very basic yoga positions, taught in every Adult Education yoga centre for the past 70 years - might be bad for your back. As are the GMTV sofas. Popular culture - I love it.
Back in Brighton at the start of June for PETER JAMES's book launch on the Brighton Pier. The place was heaving - and full of cops, pathologists, CSI folk etc. The car Peter donated to Sussex police was parked on the pier, emblazoned with his name. Great event and two days later I was interviewing him on stage at Hay.
Hay was magnificent. This year I was just chairing fiction events, which I feel very comfortable with, so had a ball. The weather was magnificent and I was staying at Penrhos Court, a staggeringly beautiful Elizabethan farmhouse, where I could spend quiet hours editing The Last King of Brighton, the second of my Brighton trilogy, before heading back into the bustle of Hay.
And Hay was a bustle. All the holes-in- the-wall ran out of money sometime Saturday so there were hordes of people looking for dosh.
Authors aplenty, naturally. (I don't mean looking for dosh, though CHRIS EVANS was waiting patiently in one queue when the machines still had money, playing happily with his young child as the queue inched slowly forward.)
MELVYN BRAGG, my all-time favourite interviewer (and a great interviewee when he allows himself to be) nervous before quizzing ANTONIA FRASER about her memoir of Harold. TOM STOPPARD hanging out in the Green Room even when he hadn't an event. The great historian ERIC HOBSBAWM,born 1917, unsteady on his feet but sharp as a pin
I was sitting with VAL McDERMID when he walked in. She was part of a panel talking about AGATHA CHRISTIE which turned out to be a hoot thanks to her and fellow-panellist JASPER FFORDE. No surprise, perhaps, that the audience voted Joan Hickson the best Miss Marple and David Suchet the best Poirot. MARK BILLINGHAM was around that day too so it was a bit of a mini-crimefest.
JONATHAN COE and DAVID NOBBS were a delight to interview together. They're friends and admirers of each other's work but it wasn't a love-in. It was hilarious.
I made a point of visiting Baskerville Hall, down the road from Penrhos - because, as I told my listeners in Torquay some weeks earlier, the Hound of the Baskervilles was inspired not by old Dartmoor legends but by old Herefordshire ones...
Bristol was a delight. My stint there started a few days early with a talk in Torquay to a touring trip from the Smithsonian about Arthur Conan Doyle and Dartmoor. (Torquay is most closely associated with Agatha Christie, of course, and I was delighted to discover in my researches that there was a link with Conan Doyle. When Christie did her famous disappearing act, Conan Doyle was asked to help in finding her. Deeply into spiritualism by that period of his life he sought to do so by psychometry - giving a medium one of her gloves from which he might deduce her whereabouts. Didn't work.)
It was fun meeting GYLES BRANDRETH who, needless to say, didn't need many questions from me on stage. We shared a table at the gala dinner where he remained effervescent.I zipped over to Brighton halfway through the festival to interview the great SCOTT TUROW in the Corn Exchange. Had a lovely dinner beforehand with Scott and his partner and Camilla from his publishers plus the wonderful GRETA SCACCHI. She, of course, had made her Hollywood debut in the film version of his Presumed Innocent. She and Scott had never met - novelists are even less welcome on film sets than scriptwriters.
Back in Bristol I showed, in the Criminal Mastermind quiz, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the films of Jean Pierre Melville and a wood mite's knowledge of crime fiction generally - drawing gasps from the audience at my ignorance. Actually, my brain froze. Honest.
I like Philip Glass's music for sentimental and musical reasons - I have a particular fondness for his collaboration with Robert WIlson, Einstein On The Beach, which I have on old-fashioned vinyl.
I like listening to him. But do I like watching him perform his four and a half hour Music In 12 Parts?
No.Actually, I'm interviewing a (most entertaining) MARTIN AMIS for two of those 4.5 hours but the answer remains the same.
The music is magnificently, movingly hypnotic. But Glass and his fellow musicians (three are playing keyboards) don't have much moving around to do. Which in a live performance is unfortunate.
Essentially, the musicians just sit there. Glass has terrible pianist's posture but tries to instil a little energy, occasionally throwing back his head then throwing it forward like a rock musician. That would normally mean a change in tempo, chord or volume. Here it seems totally arbitrary - nothing in the music changes.
The most exciting visual element is when the singer walks on stage, settles herself in her seat and takes a swig of water before joining in.
I think there were 600 people in the audience at the start of the concert and about 200 at the end.
Bank Holiday Brighton is wonderfully chaotic - apparently only two hotel rooms still vacant in all the hotels in town. So buzzy - and plonked down in the middle of it is the Brighton Festival. I loved programming and running the Literature festival for four years and it's a treat that my successor, Liam Browne, invites me back to chair some stuff.
Today I'm doing COMPASSION with JULIA NEUBERGER, RICHARD HOLLOWAY and PHYLLIDA LAW. They are all great and we cover some ground, though (with the deepest respect) actor PHYLLIDA overplays her "I'm just a ditzy old actor" schtick.
In the evening, I hosted a JAMES BOND event. From Russia WIth Love was the City Read this year. I know the film well - aside from anything else I did all the research years ago for a biography (that didn't work out) of Robert Shaw, who plays "Red" Grant in the film. The discussion was a hoot.
However, I was envious that next door, in the Dome, BRIAN ENO was presenting his wonderful Apollo music-scape. And I'm even more jealous that as I write this the Dome has a concert by ANOUAR BRAHEM, one of my all time favourite musicians. Guy, who programmes the music, was looking understandably smug when I bumped into him after the James Bond event. But then he's got PHILIP GLASS - another favourite of mine - coming too.
I was pleased to be asked by the Independent to write an obituary of Alan Sillitoe, who died this month [published Wednesday 28 April and available online if you want to read it]. I only met him once but, like many working class lads in the 60s, I had long admired his treatment of young working class lives in Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and Loneliness of A Long Distance Runner.
I knew them first, of course, as films, although, I have to admit both my brother, Michael, and I got a bit confused about a couple of scenes that we thought were in Saturday Night but were actually in A Kind of Loving, the film version of Stan Barstow's own slice of kitchen sink realism.
My brother was an extra in the latter, filmed as a bit of it was in Burnley, our home town. Thinking about the film versions of those various accounts of working class life it's perhaps no surprise that all were directed by rather posh, highly intellectual chaps, most of whom were part of the Free Cinema movement. John Schlesinger (Uppingham and Balliol) doing A Kind of Loving; Lindsay Anderson (Cheltenham College and Wadham) did This Sporting Life. And Karel Reisz, who did Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - well okay, he was a different kettle of fish, as a refugee whose parents had died in Auschwitz. He fought in the RAF then went to Cambridge before turning to film-making.
I interviewed Reisz at his home in, I think, Highgate once and it was a chilly experience. My fault for getting lost trying to find his well-hidden home. I arrived about an hour late, which was a bad start. Then I made an embarrassing cock-up because I hadn't done my research properly (unusually for me, I hasten to add).
At the time I was working my way through classics of Russian literature (where literature is concerned I'm a self-taught bore as opposed to other areas in which I was taught to be a bore). I had bought but not yet read Dostoevsky's The Gambler. I had seen a striking Reisz film, starring James Caan, called The Gambler. You see where this is going?
Reisz was about as chilly as any interviewee has ever been (on a par with James Clavell - but that is definitely another story). I distinctly remember thinking 'I'm the kind of working class oik you make films about - cut me a bit of slack here'. Alas no.
Sillitoe - back to where I started- wasn't at all like that. I was honoured to interview him at the Edinburgh book festival a couple of years ago and both on-stage and off-stage he was a delight. Self-deprecating but rightly proud of his achievements, tolerant of my ignorance of some of his work (the man wrote over 50 books) - and boyishly keen to demonstrate his morse code skills on the kit he had brought with him in a big holdall. I was pleased to meet him and hope I served him well in the obit.
It's five in the morning and the sky is pink behind Scarborough castle. Seagulls are screeching. I've got a panoramic view of the town and the sea from my hotel room but I'm flicking TV channels for something to watch. A programme called Philosophy catches my eye among the shopping channels. A little bit of early morning mental gymnastics can't hurt.
Two well groomed women discuss philosophy - but not as we know it. This is "Philosophy When Hope Is Not Enough Neck Cream". Hmm.
The Scarborough Literature Festival is among my very favourite book festivals. The organisation by the library service is first rate. Scarborough is a gem of a place and writers like to come.
Yesterday I had fun quizzing LINDSEY DAVIES & PAUL DOHERTY. I'm in awe of both of them. LINDSEY single-handedly created a sub-genre of crime fiction involving a comic Ancient Roman detective. PAUL, who has a full time job as headmaster of a big comprehensive, is a dizzyingly prolific writer. I heard that before their lunchtime event he'd written two new books - mind you, he did skip breakfast.
JACQUELINE YALLOP has written a really entertaining book about the great (but now forgotten) Victorian collectors. I've always enjoyed stories about the remarkably industrious Victorians. Two of my favourite books, although they cover a wider span than the 19th century, are Herbert Wendt's Before The Deluge, about early fossil hunters and palaentologists, and C W Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars, about the early archaeologists. Jacqueline's book, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves should take its place alongside them.
I remember buying Gods, Graves and Scholars years ago with a book that has my favourite combination of author and title: P V Glob's The Bog People. A page-turner if there ever was. (No, honestly.)
Back in Scarborough I enjoyed listening to STELLA RIMINGTON, former head of MI5, again. She's got a pawky sense of humour allied to her formidable intelligence. She put me firmly in my place - but with an amused glint in her eye - when I asked her if she'd enjoyed being duplicitous all her life. Maybe it was a cheeky question to ask a Dame.
Bumped into HELEN RAPPAPORT back at the hotel. I've enjoyed her Russian histories but now she's come up with a cracker of a biography about a 19th century blackmailer who was also an expert in anti-aging cosmetics - she blackmailed her clients. I too am now an expert in ant-aging cosmetics - that neck cream was too much of a bargain to ignore...
An interview I did with TOM WAITS way back in 1983 is suddenly doing the rounds on the internet and in a couple of books about Waits.
The interview was no great shakes - no major insights - but he told me some good stories. It was one of my first interviews as a journalist and I was really nervous as I admired him so much.
I met him in a cafe in the Gloucester Road towards the end of the day. He'd been there all afternoon, drinking coffee and cognacs, and I was his last interviewer. In those days I wrote stuff in a note pad - couldn't afford a tape recorder. Early on in the interview I'm enjoying his one-liners when he reaches over and taps my pad. "I should write that one down if I were you," he says.
I was into photography at the time - had a developing room and everything - and he let me take some photos which are great because he knew how to pose. At the end of the session he borrowed all the money I had on me to pay his tab for the day.
Anyway, this is the interview, placed here for curiosity's sake.
A Simple Love Story
Tom Waits, gruff-voiced romanticiser of the seamy side of urban life, spent much of 1981 holed up in a two-room office off Santa Monica Boulevard working on the music for Francis Coppola's 'One From The Heart' which is released this week. On his last visit to London he talked to Peter Guttridge about writing music for the movies and the mogul.
With his obsessive interest in hookers, hoodlums and wasted lives, Tom Waits might seem to have more in common with Scorsese than Coppola. But the collaboration on "One From The Heart' worked well artistically. It needed to. Coppola, with his customary brinkmanship, had gambled the future of his Zoetrope company on the success of the 'simple love story'. For Waits the movie offered an opportunity to reach a wider audience than the cult following his albums had garnered.
The film opened in the US to lukewarm reviews. The soundtrack album sat on a shelf for months until legal wrangles were sorted out in Britain. The album was finally released by CBS earlier this year and the film has its long-overdue London opening this week. "What's "One From The Heart"? Son-of-a-bitch is what it is, ' says Waits, 'I've never been in that kind of situation before. Doing a film score requires an application to detail I'm not accustomed to. Plus I was working for someone else's approval, which was hard for me at first.'
How did the collaboration come about? 'Got a call in the middle of the night and went over. It was like having an audience with the pope. I used to think directors were genies with wings you know...' Coppola had heard Waits' entertaining barstool duet with Bette Midler, 'I Never Talk To Strangers', on the Foreign Affairs album and wanted Waits to duet with Midler on the soundtrack. Midler had other commitments so Waits worked with Crystal Gayle: an eccentric combination if there ever was, but one which works. Waits was happy to get involved 'since the project was so interesting and I was new to it. The money didn't matter - money's not a barometer for me, never has been.' Waits and Coppola worked very closely together. Waits wrote about twelve different songs to be used wherever the were required. 'I strung them together like an overture for a musical. What he wanted was a glass of music that you could add to or take from. Then we got together and made a scratch tape where we spotted the story for music. I was reworking themes so I got about 175 musical cues to be extracted from the score. It ain't fun doing that.
'One From The Heart' was to be a relatively low-budget musical, a 'fable with music' set in Las Vegas, and featuring three of Coppola's repertory company - Frederick Forrest, Raoul Julia and Terri Garr - with the addition of Nastassia Kinski. But the real Las Vegas didn't suit Coppola's image of Las Vegas so he constructed a new Las Vegas on nine huge sound stages. The budget soared accordingly. Initially all the music was to come from a Las Vegas act - piano, bass and drums (which, with muted sax, is Waits’s favourite combination) - but that too changed.
'Francis was very open to suggestions. For example there's a Used Car Lot piece conducted with a dipstick. The main lead (Forrest) owns a wrecking yard for abandoned cars. It's a perfect set-up because he loves cars - he's a little mad but that's why he's in the business - then he has to sell his Studebaker - breaks his heart. So I came up with this idea for a used car lot piece where the music is conducted with a dipstick. Coppola shot it. I gave him a few other ideas too.
'But you know that man is incredible. there's no distance for him between imagination and execution. It's devilish. I have an idea, Francis says great, starts working out ways to do it. I'm saying yeah well it's em, only an idea just occurred Francis - next day he's set up the machinery and doing it.'
Waits thinks highly of Coppola: 'Coppola is an angel, a man with vision. He wants to be one of those old moguls with big cigars but he's not your typical cigar - he really cares. I admire his courage because he's getting into a lot of trouble over his social conscience thing - he cares about cinema, where it's going.'
Waits has had a nodding acquaintance with films before. Strangely a couple of years back he was touting around his own screenplay 'Why is the dream so much sweeter than the taste?' about a used car dealer on downtown L.A. 'He was a guy who was a success at being a failure.' All the action takes place on New Year's Eve, which makes the whole thing uncannily like Coppola's own movie set on the eve of July 4.
'On The Nickel', a haunting song off the Heartattack and Vine album, was written by Waits for Ralph Waites' film of the same name. 'It was a wonderful picture, I mean it, but it didn't make it. It wasn't no "Towering Inferno", just a small picture with a lot of feeling. It was set on skid row in Los Angeles, Fifth Street, downtown. The locals call it "the nickel".
'Nicholas Roeg asked me to write a title song for "Bad Timing" but I was busy. Roeg took some off one of the albums.' What he took was 'Invitation to the Blues', a drifter's paeon to a roadhouse waitress which might have fitted 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' but certainly not Roeg's coffee table psychodrama. What did Waits think of the film? 'Well… I don't know anybody who wants to see Art Garfunkel with his shirt off.'
Sly Stallone hired Waits for a cameo role in the ill-fated 'Paradise Alley' as a Hoagy Carmichael bar pianist. A few snatches of his music make it onto the soundtrack, though Waits did not score the movie nor write the main theme, sung over the credits by Stallone himself. Intended as a Damon Runyan comedy the film didn't fare too well with either critics or public. 'I went and sat in front of a piano for three weeks and then I went home. I didn't go to see it after.'
Waits' appearance seems rather truncated in the film. He agrees. 'I had more scenes but they got cut. I finally saw it on TV with my wife (a script-writer from Twentieth Century Fox he married in '81 after breaking up with long-time partner Rickie Lee Jones). I sat her down to watch it, got really excited - look honey, here I am - shit where'd I go?'
Given my link to the crime world - excuse me, make that "crime fiction" world -I was amused that my talented nephew, RICK GUTTRIDGE, and his equally talented wife and business partner, VANESSA, have called their new Public Relations company SMOKING GUN - although neither of them have criminal tendencies...so far as I'm aware.
Manchester-based, they've both got a lot of experience on the national PR scene. One of their associates is that fine journalist, MARTIN HEWITT - who happens to be another of my three nephews. As the headline indicates, this is a family affair. And if this reads like a little plug for the new business- well, it is. But check out the website anyway as there's some good stuff on it.