When I finally got home, it was dark. I’d been walking for five hours. I was wet, bloodied and almost sub-human with boredom. I’d seen so many dull, half-empty rain-ruined streets that I’d started to believe they might actually affect my personality, and make me permanently dolorous. I lay down on the sofa, barely conscious. My brother was over for a visit.
“I’m training for the marathon,” I said, by way of explanation.
“The marathon?” he said, impressed. “Blimey. Well done, Paula Radcliffe.”
“It’s not the running marathon,” I said. “It’s the Moonwalk. A walking marathon.”
“Ha!” he said. “That’s not really a marathon, then, is it? That’s just a walk.”
It was then that I realized the truth: walking a marathon is much, much, much harder than running one. Because everyone thinks it’s easy.
Another one of my noble campaigns to make humanity a better place: this time, arguing for international recognition of the supremacy of Ghostbusters above all other films. I have a long-standing pact with my sister that, if we ever get nominated for an Oscar, we will eschew ballgowns, diamonds and £20,000 make-overs to go up the red carpet dressed as Venkman and Spengler from Ghostbusters—each with a REAL unlicensed nuclear accelator on our backs. For us, there is no more glamorous look. These are our sex-clothes.
GHOSTBUSTERS IS THE GREATEST FILM OF ALL TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME.
Last week, iTunes announced that they were celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Ghostbusters. This they did by renting it out at 99p, as their “Film of The Week.”
I had two, quite intense and simultaneous, responses to this news.
The first was somber. It was, if I may be frank, bordering on maudlin.
“Twenty-five years? Twenty-five years? My God, this is worse than when I realized it was ten years since ‘Vogue’ by Madonna was Number One. I never used to be able to remember things from twenty-five years ago. I am beginning to have the memory span—the reminiscing capabilities—of an old woman.”
The second response was, thankfully, much brisker. It was: “99p! For the best film ever made? That’s an INSULT! It’s like iTunes saying you can have sex with the Queen for a pound! It won’t stand, by God! IT WON’T STAND!”
But—on reflection—in many ways, the two responses kind of merged together in the middle. For the simple truth of the matter is that Ghostbusters is the greatest film ever made—and yet, currently, the world is too scared to admit this. In 2009, if you stood up at a party and spoke factually—“Ghostbusters should still be nominated for an Oscar every year, even now—that’s how good it is”—you would probably experience great feelings of squirminess, and embarrassment.
And that is because the generation before us have done an excellent propaganda job installing Star Wars as the best film ever made, and we—their younger brothers and sisters—never realized how late in the day it was getting. If we’d realized that twenty-five bleeding years had passed a little sooner, we would have got a hustle on with shooting George Lucas’s over-rated, po-faced bundle of space-tat out of the water. As it is, I think we all still thought it was, like, 1992 or something, and there was plenty of time to make the case for Ghostbusters, after we’d got over how good this new Blur album was.
So with the startling jolt of the quarter-century anniversary, the urgency of the task is now revealed. The Great Ghostbusters Campaign must start today. Here. Starting with this inarguable, scientific fact: Ghostbusters is still the most successful comedy film of all time, with a 1984 box-office of $229.2m. But this, of course, in turn, makes it the most successful film OF ALL TIME, FULL STOP—given that comedy is the supreme genre, and rules over every other format, such as “serious,” “foreign” or “black & white.”
Of course, there are those who will argue that comedy isn’t the greatest genre. “What art should be about,” they will say, “is revealing exquisite and resonant truths about the human condition.”
Well, to be honest—no it shouldn’t. I mean, it can occasionally, if it wants to; but really, how many penetrating insights into human nature do you need in one lifetime? Two? Three? Once you’ve realized that no one else has a clue what they’re doing, either, and that love can be totally pointless, any further insights into human nature just start getting depressing, really.
On the other hand, what humans do need is “things to say.” They need a huge supply of them. Amusing, essentially inconsequential things, which will make as many people in the room feel as relaxed and cordial as possible. In this respect, Ghostbusters reveals itself, once again, as the greatest film ever made. When I mentioned this column on Twitter, I had over fifty suggestions as to what the best line in the film is—nearly all of them useful in everyday life.
“Back off man—I’m a scientist” is the one I find myself using the most often; most recently when the logic in opening a bottle of warm rosé at 3 AM was brought into question. “Listen—do you smell something?” is equally handy. “I think he can hear you, Ray,” can be utilized whenever you think an indiscreet conversation has been overheard, but also when a large animal suddenly looks up, as if it might run towards you, and attack you. Whenever you buy takeout, it is traditional to nix all conversation about future plans with the line, “This magnificent feast represents the last of the petty cash.” And there is no more succinct way of explaining why certain table placements would be ill-advised than, “Don’t cross the streams.” There are literally twenty more great lines; but one of them involves a piano, and another needs someone to mention sponges before you can use it.
By comparison, what has Star Wars got? “Luke—I am your father.” I tell you what—you never get to wedge that into conversation.
Because if this is the start of the campaign to rightfully install Ghostbusters as the best film of all time, Star Wars is the one that has to be beaten. It is Connors to Ghostbusters’s Borg.
To those who still deludedly think they prefer Star Wars over Ghostbusters, all I need to do is ask you is this: You don’t really want to be a Jedi, do you? In a greige cowl, getting off with your sister, without a single gag across three films? I think if you thought about it a little while longer, you’d realize that you’d far rather be a Ghostbuster: a nerd in New York with an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on your back, and a one-in-four chance of being Bill Murray.
I urge the world to greatly accelerate their acknowledgment of Ghostbusters’s true canonical placing—for, in this period of uncertainty, terrible things are happening. Last week, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the film was marked by a celebrity party, attended by, in descending order of fame: Dizzee Rascal, Nikki Grahame from Big Brother 7, DJ Ironik, Dave Berry and Rick Edwards. I know. I’m not trying to be rude but, really, if you’re at that level of fame and someone invites you to a party in honor of something you love, the most effective way to show you care is to stay away.
For the rest of us—the ones who have realized the Great Truth about the Greatest Movie Ever Made—the serious campaigning must start now. Let’s go show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown.
And then, a couple of months later, I interviewed Keith Richards. At the time I was going insane writing How to Be a Woman, and working seven-day weeks for months on end—but couldn’t let pass the opportunity to meet the man who, more than any other on Earth, could claim to be rock’ n’ roll on two, very thin, legs. I mean, really thin legs. It’s like two bits of string covered in denim.
This was another time I was attempting to give up smoking, but was derailed by someone legendary offering a fag. The next time I tried to give it up, it was when Benedict Cumberbatch, dressed as Sherlock, offered me a Marlie outside 221b Baker Street. WHO WOULD EVER SAY NO TO THESE CIGARETTES?
KEITH—NODDY HOLDER SAYS YOU WEAR A WIG
I meet Keith Richards on International Talk Like a Pi
rate Day. It feels only right to inform him of this.
“International Talk Like a Pirate Day?” Keith says, with his wolfy grin, wholly amused. “ARRRGHH! ARRRHHH! Oh, I can’t do it with without the eyepatch,” he sighs, mock-petulantly. “I can’t speak like a pirate without an eyepatch. Or being pissed—HARGH! HARGH!”
But of course, he can: to be frank, everything Keith Richards says is in the cadence of Pirate. With his black eyes, bandana and earring, even at sixty-seven, he has the air of a rakish gentleman forced to steal a frigate and abscond from polite society—due to some regrettable misunderstanding about a virgin daughter, a treasure map and a now-smoldering Admiralty building. You can see why he was the inspiration for Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. Richards apparently taught Depp how to walk around a corner, drunk: “You keep your back to the wall at all times.”
Today, Richards is a pirate in onshore mode. The mood is tavernish. Even though we are in the Royal Suite of Claridge’s, which has a grand piano (“Shall I have a go? You can bootleg it—HARGH HARGH HARGH.”), and so many rooms we never even go in half of them, Richards still brings an air of a man who’s left his parrot, cutlass and Smee in the hallway—lest he need to make a quick getaway. On walking into the room he spots me, and does a double-take.
“I had no idea I was going to talk to a lady,” he says, ordering a vodka and orange. “I need a drink when I do that.”
Spotting a pack of Marlboros on the table, he eschews them, and brings out his own supplies.
“Those are the ones that say they’ll kill you,” he says, pointing at the pack on the table, with their large “SMOKING KILLS” label. “They are English, and they would kill you; they’re bloody awful.”
“Are they different from American ones?” I ask.
“Oh yes. You take them apart, if you’re going to roll a hash joint, and there’s bits of stalk and crap in there. It’s unacceptable to a smoker.”
He takes one of his own out of his pocket, and lights it. The smell of the smoke mingles with his cologne.
“What have you got on?” I inquire.
“I’ve got a hard-on—I didn’t know you could smell it,” he says—and then starts laughing again, in a fug of smoke. “That’s a rock ’n’ roll joke—one of Jerry Lee Lewis’s,” he explains, almost apologetically. “We’re at the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and Jerry’s got his rig on—frilly shirt and tuxedo—and he’s coming down the steps and this chick rushed out and was like, ‘You smell great—what have you got on?’ And Jerry says, ‘I’ve got a hard-on—I didn’t know you could smell it.’ Pure rock ’n’ roll.”
Keith takes another drag on his fag, beaming.
“ ’Ere,” he says, suddenly concerned, looking at the cigarette smoke. “I hope you’re not . . . allergic.”
Apologizing for a hard-on joke, and worrying that a journalist might develop a tickly cough from passive smoking, is a long way from Richards’ interviews in his outlaw heyday—he once spent forty sleepless hours with the NME journalist Nick Kent “pinballing” around London in a Ferarri and consuming ferocious quantities of cocaine and heroin—a cocktail quaintly referred to by Richards as “the breakfast of champions.”
But then, Richards has mellowed considerably over the years—possibly out of necessity, if one considers how difficult it would be to parallel park in modern-day London on a 1.5mg speedball. Giving up heroin in 1978, after his fifth bust, Richards reveals today that he’s finally given up cocaine, too—in 2006, after he fell from a tree in Fiji, and had to have brain surgery.
“Yeah—that was cocaine I had to give up for that,” he says, with an equinanimous sigh. “You’re like—‘I’ve got the message, oh Lord.’ ” He raps on the metal plate in his head. It makes a dull, thonking sound.
“I’ve given up everything now—which is a trip in itself,” he says, with the kind of Robert Newton-esque eye-roll that indicates how interesting merely getting out of bed sober can be after forty years of caning it. Not that Richards is disapproving of getting high, of course:
“I’m just waiting for them to invent something more interesting, hahaha,” he says. “I’m all ready to road test it, when they do.”
Richards’ image is of the last man standing at the long party that was the sixties—and the man who’d invited everyone over in the first place, anyway. During his junkie years, Richards spent over a decade on the “People Most Likely to Die” list—“I used to read it, check I was still on there. I was on it longer than anyone else. Badge of honor, hur hur.”
But having spent from 1968 to 1978 with everyone expecting him to keel over in a hotel (the classic Richards quote: “Which I never did: it’s the height of impoliteness to turn blue in someone else’s bathroom.”), Richards has now, ironically, gone on to be one of those people we now think will just . . . live forever. His tough, leathery, indestructible air gives the suggestion that heroin, whisky and cocaine, when taken in large enough quantities, have a kind of . . . preservative quality. Richards has been cured in a marinade of pharmaceuticals. He both gives off the aura of, and bears an undeniable physical resemblance to, to the air-dried Inca mummies of Chachapoya.
“Well, I’m not putting death on the agenda,” he says, with another grin. “I don’t want to see my old friend Lucifer just yet, hurgh hurgh. He’s the guy I’m gonna see, isn’t it—I’m not going to The Other Place, let’s face it, HARGH!”
We’re here today because—having resolutely, persistently and, in many ways, unfeasibly—not died, Richards has finally published his autobiography, Life. When Richards announced the project, he was subject to a massive bidding war that ended with Richards getting a £4.8m advance—acknowledgment of the fact that, barring Bowie or McCartney deciding to write their stories, Richards’ was the motherlode, in terms of understanding that most incredible of decades—the sixties—from the inside; recounted by one of the very people pinballing the psychedelic charabanc off the bounds of “decent” society.
“Have you read it?” he asks—trying to look casual, but unable to suppress an incongruous note of eagerness.
“Oh God, yes,” I say. “Oh man, it’s a total hoot. Really, really amazing.”
“Oh good,” he says, relaxing. “You know, you start off thinking you can spin a few yarns—and by the time you get to the end of it, it’s turned into something much more. One memory triggers another, and before you know it, there’s 600 rounds per second coming out.”
“Did you want to write your version because other books on you, and the Stones, had got it wrong?” I ask.
“I read Bill Wyman’s book, but after three or four chapters—where he’s going [assumes dull, priggish Wyman monotone], ‘And by that point, I only had £600 left in Barclays Bank’—I was like, ‘Oh, Bill.’ You know what I mean? You’re far more interesting than that; do me a favor. And Mick attempted it once, and ended up giving the money back. It was ten, fifteen years ago, and he’d keep ringing up and going [does Mick impression], ‘’ere, what were we doing on August 15th nineteen-sixty-somefink?’ I’d be like ‘Mick, you’re writing it. I can’t remember.’ And knowing Mick, there would have been a morass of blank chapters—because there would have been a lot of stuff he would have wanted to put to one side, hur hur.”
Richards is dismissive of Stones books written by non-Stones—claiming the authors would have been ‘too scared’ to write the truth: “Who’s really going to put Mick Jagger, or Keith Richards, up against a wall and say, ‘I demand you answer this’?” he says, eyes suddenly flashing black.
“Because, you know . . .” he takes a drag on his fag. “You end up dead like that.”
The reason Life attracted such a bidding war is because the life of Keith Richards and the Stones is one that—even in today’s modern, anything-goes pop-cultural climate—takes in a still-astonishing amount of, for wont of a better word, scandal. “Would You Let Your Daugh
ter Marry a Rolling Stone?”, the Redlands bust, Marianne Faithfull in her fur rug, “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?”, the still-controversial death of Brian Jones, the Hell’s Angels running amok at Altamont, the Marianne Faithfull/Mick Jagger/Anita Pallenberg/Richards four-way love-rectangle; numerous arrests, heroin, cocaine, acid, whisky, infidelity, groupies, Margaret Trudeau, riots, billions of dollars, and four decades of sweaty fans, screaming without end.
And, at the center of it all, arguably the greatest rock ’n’ roll band that ever existed. “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar,” “Start Me Up,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Satisfaction”—each one with the ability to alone answer the question, “Mummy—what is rock ’n’ roll?,” and, when taken en masse, the reason why Keith Richards is referred to, almost factually, as “The Living Riff.”
For those expecting an explosive story, Life certainly doesn’t disappoint: it opens in 1975, with Richards in a diner in Fordyce, Arkansas, about to be busted for the fourth time. Written like a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with infinitely more resources for getting wasted—Richards is driving to the next gig because he’s “bored” of the Stones’ private jet—it joins Richards at the highpoint of his caner years.
As Richards describes it, he is the sole long-haired man in a room full of rednecks, and is basically wearing a hat made of drugs (“There was a flap at the side in which I’d stowed hash, Tuinals and coke”), and driving a car made of drugs (“I’d spent hours packing the side-panel with coke, grass, peyote and mescaline.”).
High on cocaine (“Merck cocaine—the fluffy, pharmaceutical blow” as he describes it, lovingly), Richards is arrested, dragged to the courthouse, and becomes the center of an international news incident (“There were 5,000 Stones fans outside the courthouse”)—until Mick Jagger sweet-talks the local governor, and bails him out.
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