My interview with Corinne Bailey Rae: 'Fame is like being bullied'

Photo: Tierney Gearon

I interviewed Corinne Bailey Rae and the piece has now been published in A Style Guide to Leeds: Live It Love It 2012. It's an annual guide put together by Marketing Leeds, which goes out to places like high-end hotels and airlines to promote the city and its culture. It's a really nice looking publication.

I met Corinne at a record shop in Leeds called Jumbo Records, a great independent that's been going strong for over 40 years. It was really striking when I spoke to Corinne's manager Mark DiDia at the store how much he liked Jumbo; he mentioned that so much music is now bought online or in big supermarkets rather than in specialist stores. (And I guess in that last sentence you could replace the word music for wine, or meat, or cheese, or books, or pretty much anything else.)

You can read my interview with Corinne Bailey Rae here.

And here's Corinne with a great performance of I'd Do It All Again, from a 2009 episode of the BBC's Later With Jools Holland.

Oz Clarke on Robert Parker: "I do basically like the bloke"

© ozclarke.com

I couldn't resist asking Oz Clarke for his thoughts on Robert Parker, the American wine writer often referred to as the most powerful critic in the world. Parker is famous for his 100-point rating system, with a high Parker rating worth millions in sales to Bordeaux winemakers. A number of British wine writers, even those who deploy their own rating systems, have criticised Parker for the way he operates, in particular for apparently favouring a certain style of wine (big and full-flavoured), leading to the so-called Parkerisation of wines. Some have also questioned how he goes about tasting the wines and decides on his scores, with the suggestion that tasting some in the company of winemakers at their wineries is not necessarily conducive to objectivity. But then again – to play devil's advocate – all wine journalists go on press trips to wineries, and who knows how much those trips influence their judgments, either consciously or subconsciously?

I put it to Oz Clarke that Parker comes in for a lot of criticism from British wine critics. "Yes he does, but he asks for it, that's the trouble," Oz said. "Because he's so bloody rude to Brits all the time… and I can't understand… I've known Robert for donkeys' years, you know, we were quite good mates in the old days and we still would be if we ever saw each other, but he's too busy marking wines. You know we used to go out drinking and go to jazz clubs and drink beer, and I don't know whether we chased women together, perhaps not, but I certainly felt as though I did.

© erobertparker.com

"And you know, we had a really good time together. And I used to taste with him on his panels. And I just think poor old Robert's got, you know... when you're so powerful and so successful sometimes you lose slight touch with reality - or you don't, but all the people around you do. And I think he's got an awful lot of people… you know, some of the people around him are very good - people like Neal who's the English guy who works with him, but some of the people around him, you think, did you really want those people saying 'I'm the voice of Robert Parker'? Because I like Neal and Neal's a good taster and he does a good job in Robert's name as well as in his own name - he's not in any way a sort of sycophant for Robert Parker - he went out on his own and said this is what I think, completely different to Parker some of the time. But… basically I just think Parker… he's more powerful than anyone should be, but I do basically like the bloke and I do basically... I enjoy his tasting because I understand it, so I know what he's tasting, I know the stuff he likes, I know why he likes these kind of wines."

By "these kind of wines", does Oz mean Parker does favour the full-flavoured, what you might call fruit bomb style? "Well yeah, yes he does. But on the other hand I can interpret that now. Even now if I had to choose somebody and say, let's see what another critic says, I would probably think let's see what Parker says. Not because I'd necessarily agree with him, but because I know how Parker thinks and for me that's important to know how the guy thinks."

Oz Clarke: "If you're in a bad mood, it's really tough to taste red wine"

I got to interview Oz Clarke recently because he was coming up to Yorkshire for the Love Cooking food festival. It was absolutely brilliant having the chance to talk to him about wine - and he clearly still has so much passion for the stuff. I got his views on a number of interesting subjects: the best cheap wines; Robert Parker; his Christmas wine recommendations; his views on rating wines out of 100. We chatted about so many interesting subjects that I'm going to split this up into a couple of blog posts, otherwise this one would end up being ridiculously long.

What absolutely shone through is his passion, and without any hint of snobbery. That's partly why he's become such a successful wine writer and TV personality, I think - as wine writers develop their expertise, it must be very easy to lose sight of the fact that their job is to speak to consumers, not to each other. Oz very much speaks to consumers - he obviously gets to taste the very best wines in the world, and yet he is still able to enjoy a good supermarket wine. He appreciates there's a time and a place for both.

One thing that also came through quite strongly as we chatted was his love of a good drink that's packed full of flavour. I think sauvignon blanc was the grape he happened to mention more often than any other, and he also spoke with great passion about the bold crunchy fruit of Spanish garnacha, especially in the context of Christmas. As Oz himself put it: "The kind of stuff you slap into a glass and say 'here fellas let's have a glass of this' as against sitting around quietly and pouring out the Bordeaux and thinking, hey, let's talk about this. The garnacha you don't talk about, you just say bloody hell that's good, basically, let's have some more!"

Having said that, he did say red Bordeaux probably provides his greatest pleasure in the world of wine, when the mood takes him: "If I was rather more contemplative, quiet, you know mellow, wintry kind of mood actually; in December I'll be in a red Bordeaux mood."

I couldn't resist asking Oz about the scoring of wines - be it on a 20-point or 100-point scale, say - because it's one aspect of wine criticism that I sometimes find a bit daft. As much as I have great respect for professional wine writers' knowledge, giving an experience as romantic and subjective as a glass of wine a rating out of 100 seems both unwanted and misleading. Can you really be so specific? What does Oz think about critics publicly rating wines? "If that's how they wanna do it, let them, I mean, I just think it's all… it's not bollocks, because… I can mark a wine 89 or 90 or 91, I just don't wanna publish it. I might do that to help me over a range of 50 wines, thinking is that one just a bit better than that one, but I don't wanna put that down in black and white for the audience, I wanna sort of try and tell them why I like the stuff. Engage them."

 

And surely context affects the rating given to a wine? "Yes. Absolutely right. The idea of the context - a couple of points up, a couple of points down, with context. You can taste differently. Are you happy, are you sad, are you in love, are you out of love, you know, have you had an argument with your girlfriend, did you get out of bed the wrong side, is your mum playing up? All of these things change, you know. Especially with red wine - if you're in a bad mood it's really tough to taste red wine. You know, your mouth can taste bitter and dry and the wine tastes bitter and dry."

So is it better to opt for a fresh white wine in that case? "Yeah... or basically give up for the day and go to the pub, have a beer. That'll calm you down and you can go and do some red wine tasting." 

The original Leeds Guide piece can be read here.

Tommy Tiernan interview: "I don't think I'm controversial"

Stand-up comedian Tommy Tiernan is a huge star in his native Ireland. He's apparently second only to U2 in terms of live ticket sales in the country, and his DVDs sell more than anyone else. He's also an extremely popular figure in Canada and the US, where he's appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman several times.

I was fortunate enough to interview him a few weeks ago for Leeds Guide magazine, and I'm going to see him perform live at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds later this month. His storming performance as the headline act on the latest episode of Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow (you can see it again here) has whetted my appetite for seeing him perform his latest show, Crooked Man. Here are some snippets of my conversation with him. (Photo: Nick Hitchcox)

Do you notice certain material goes down better in certain places or is it universal?

No - I know that if I introduce an idea that could in any way be misinterpreted as something horrific, I think that the more civilised audiences are… it takes a minute or two for them to kind of trust me. Whereas I much prefer performing to the uncivilised because they know I’m joking.

You’ve been labelled a controversial comic. Do you think it's part of your job to be controversial - or do you not agree with the idea that you are?

I don’t think I’m controversial. I like to have fun with the world, if you know what I mean. I like to look at the world and have fun and laugh at it. And I think if people think that’s controversial then… honestly, now, it’s just like free-wheeling down a hill on your bicycle, and say you come down a hill and the road stretches out and you go through a town, two legs sticking out and you’re singing, people might think that’s inappropriate. But it’s not really, it’s just fun.

"One of the themes of the show is the desire to know less and not to confuse information with wisdom"

How do you go about writing your shows - do you have ideas you feel passionate about and then try to find humour in it?

I do have big ideas that I feel passionate about but I find them very hard to get into the show. So it’s almost like I have to be talking about something else in order for whatever theories of life I have to seep through. It’s just about having fun really. Say last night, I was doing an impression of an old rabbi walking along a dusty road, and that morphed into Paolo Nutini. Now that’s not something that I’d be able to think of sitting at home, and it’s not something that’s particularly clever. It’s just silly. That’s the kind of stuff that ends up in the show. It’s just fun. There are other things in the show - it’s intelligent, there are different types of storytelling going on - but it’s not something that’s overly manufactured. If a clever person gets drunk, that’s what my show is like!

What are the main themes of the show?

I think that one of the themes of the show is the desire to know less and not to confuse information with wisdom. Other themes of the show are… I don’t know, this isn’t like a breakthrough novel with great ideas. The show is complaining about sex and is talking about the recession, all kinds of things in there. What I say to the people at the beginning is that my ambition is that we both leave here knowing less than we did when we came in.

What's the most important ingredient for making people laugh - the material, the way you say it or something else?

I think it’s fun. I know I’m saying that word a lot but I was listening to an American comedian called Doug Benson last night and he has one of his albums on iTunes and I was sat listening to it in bed. I was rolling around the place laughing because he was talking about how he went into a men’s toilet and the guy beside him farted, and it was just the way he did it was so brilliant, because he wasn’t trying to be clever and at the same time he wasn’t gratuitous or cheap. There was just something, and it’s very hard to define what that is. The same person can like Bill Hicks and Tommy Cooper and a bit of Morecambe & Wise and The Two Ronnies and Dylan Moran. I think if everybody is honest to their own inclinations then that’s a good start.

Are you able to relax and enjoy other comics or do you find yourself analysing them?

I tend to analyse them more if they’re shit. If they’re good, I’m laughing; if they’re shit, I’m kind of going ‘hmmm, how did he get so shit?’.

Would you reveal who the two ends of the scale are for you at the moment - are there any comedians you like and dislike?

I’d say, last night there was Doug Benson, check him out on iTunes, he has an album called Unbalanced Load, and he’s a dope smoker, he talks about smoking dope and he’s really, really funny. The person I think is the worst at the moment, which I wouldn’t cross the street to see for love nor money and all my kids’ health…? That feeling is reserved for myself.

Full interview originally published in Leeds Guide

Alun Cochrane interview

Stand-up comedian Alun Cochrane is someone who has mastered his trade to the extent that he makes it all look so easy, deceptively so. His comedy is largely observational and it's intelligent without trying too hard to be, in fact almost while pretending not to be ("I'm making more of an effort to grow up… sometimes I watch Newsnight all the way through and then think shit, I forgot to listen"). As he suggests in this interview I recently did for Plush magazine, perhaps his understated style has worked against him when it comes to earning wider recognition.

"I would much rather spend the evening with all the guys off Mock The Week if there were no cameras there," he says on the subject of television panel shows. "I've had a couple of really good gigs on the night on panel games. It's just I find there's a certain level of aggression that goes with them that I find a bit disinteresting. And now that comics know that they could sell out a tour if they get a handful of regular spots on a panel game, then people are even more aggressive. And this isn't me being mean to any particular comic," he reflects, "it just brings out a side in people that I just find a bit dull. In truth, I was brought up by my mum, single-parent family, with a real interest in politeness and good manners, and I find it physically difficult to interrupt people. And on the shows you really have to. I sit there and think, oh I'd rather not interrupt folk, I'll be funny when they ask me!"

A well-respected circuit comic, perhaps Cochrane hits the nail on the head with the suggestion that his unassuming demeanour works against him in the cut-throat world of panel shows, which these days seem to form a big part of the standard career path for a successful stand-up, which begins with small gigs in pubs and ends with a well-paid TV presenter's role, with panel shows, stadium tours and a live DVD somewhere in between. But when he's been given the opportunity to perform stand-up on TV, Cochrane's talents have certainly translated well to the small screen, as his everyday tales of supremely observed incidents, and his warm delivery, carry a universal appeal.

We start discussing his current tour: "It's called Jokes. Life. And Jokes About Life. And it's basically that. It very much describes the show. So if you don't fancy it, don't come!" he laughs. I ask whether his comedy style has always been storytelling rather than gag-based. "Well, actually in this show I am doing joke telling," he reveals. "I've got a tub full of jokes that I've written that I pull out and I also contrast that a bit with doing what I do normally, which is jokes about life. So I'm mixing it up a bit. So there are moments of experimental stuff, because I'm doing joke-jokes, which isn't really my thing, but it's really good fun. And yes, in answer to your question, I like it when it's just about life. I love the fact that you can literally turn thoughts you've had on a train into comedy; I really love that experience."

Having performed stand-up for a number of years, Cochrane jokes that he can’t remember his life and work before comedy. "Last year I was on tour and I was going to Brighton and I jumped on the train from Manchester to London, and Gail off Coronation Street was in the same carriage as me, in standard. I then said on stage that night, 'I think if you've been doing stand-up as long as I have, you've got every right to expect to be the most famous person in standard class'. First class, different rules apply - you can be on there with Andrew Lloyd Webber - but Gail off Coronation Street is provably more famous than me. I've been quite good at this for a while - I should be more known than that, surely?"

Originally published in Plush magazine

David Baddiel interview: "I think I am 100% atheist"

I interviewed David Baddiel a couple of months or so ago. We were talking about The Infidel, a film he wrote, in which Omid Djalili plays a Muslim man called Mahmud who discovers that he was adopted as a child and that he was actually born a Jew. Baddiel told me that the film ended up with a smaller budget than he'd expected (about £1m, not loads for a feature film), but by and large the finished product is "pretty close" to what he'd anticipated, albeit with smaller crowd scenes and fewer "bells and whistles". Because of the film's theme, we ended up talking about all kinds of things - politics, religion, ethnicity, multiculturalism. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

SO'H: What inspired you to write the film?

David Baddiel: When I was young a lot of people thought I was Indian, loads of people. I actually got beaten up, once for being Jewish and once for being Pakistani, and then when I was on telly for the first time, loads of people used to write in saying 'you're the funniest Indian comedian I've ever seen', and I was always quite happy with that. So I always had around me a sense of people not quite knowing which ethnic box to put me in. And then when I saw Omid [Djalili], who was the first comedian to really kind of tackle race and religion as his main subject, not only was it interesting that he was doing that but also I didn't know, is he Muslim, he could be Jewish, whatever. He turned out to be Baha'i, which is a religion which believes that all religions are part of the same book, which made him perfect in a way. And so it was that really: it was a combination of the sense of ethnic confusion that hangs around me, and seeing Omid Djalili. It was always written with him in mind. Even though I'd had the idea for a while, I'd never really thought about doing it until I met Omid and he was up for it.

"There is a part of me that will be eternally grateful to this country" 

SO'H: You're on record as saying you're an atheist - can you ever be 100% atheist after your upbringing?

David Baddiel: I think I am 100% atheist. I mean I'm Jewish, there's no doubt I'm culturally Jewish, I think the tone of my comedy is pretty Jewish and the way I think is quite Jewish, and you know I'm neurotic and all that stuff, something of a hypochondriac and a depressive, I'm all those things because I'm Jewish, but I absolutely, totally, I don't just believe this, I know there is no god. I know it like I know that stone is hard. And for that reason I'm not that bothered about it… I quite like religion. I sometimes read Dawkins… Dawkins and people like that, because there's a tiny bit of them, like, he was brought up very religious, they seem to me to be shrill a little bit, because they're not relaxed with their atheism. I am so confident that god doesn't exist, I think religion's quite sweet and nice and got poetry and magic in it: it's fine, it's just completely wrong.

SO'H: How successfully do you think multiculturalism operates in Britain?

David Baddiel: Well one of the things I'm proud of about being British is that, for all the fact that obviously there are racial issues in Britain and there's BNP in Britain and whatever, I think that Britain has managed to be an incredibly tolerant country. I know this just because my mother is a holocaust survivor, my mother fought in Nazi Germany and she escaped with three weeks to go before the war started to come here where, you know, things were not easy to be honest, but she managed to build a life for herself, and her parents managed to build lives for themselves. And there is a part of me that will be eternally grateful to this country for that. And for all the fact that there are racists in this country, we've never had anything like... anything that looks like a fascist government in this country. We've never had real dangers like there still are in Europe, and parties that can create that. And yet we've got more races in this country than most other places. I mean, I spent some time in Belgium, for example, when I say some time I don't mean I was there for two years, I was there for three weeks in Belgium, doing a weird literary festival. And people would say to me, very kind of intellectual bohemian types, they would say 'we have to do something about the immigrants'. And I would say 'what immigrants?' and they would say 'haven't you seen them?' and I'd say 'I haven't seen any since I've been here'. They would mean the sort of four black people in Antwerp. And I'd say 'come to London, we're fine with that', you know. And I think that is a great thing about Britain, so even though there are problems, it's basically working alright.

SO'H: What would be your opinion on banning burkas?

David Baddiel: I wouldn't ban burkas obviously. I think it's an unbritish thing to do and also in terms of The Infidel, I think there is a way forward there with relaxation and comedy - the woman in the burka in that, who's Nina Anwar, who's a Muslim, you know, what I did with that was to make her not a frightening alien figure but to make her someone who talks about Grazia and fashion... and that is based on what Muslim people tell me is that lots of those women are like that. But she's still... what I didn't want was a moment like you've got in Sex and the City 2 where the women take off their burkas and they've got fantastic designer clothes underneath - I think that's shit in a way. What I think, it's a woman who's fine in a burka but is also not a stereotype either.

SO'H: What's your assessment of the coalition government?

David Baddiel: Well I voted Labour, but to be honest I'm not very interested in party politics. I voted Labour because Glenda Jackson's my MP and because she was great on The Morecambe & Wise Show in 1974. And that is the real reason why I can't not vote for Glenda, because of that. She once said on a radio show that she thought that was the high point of her career. And I love her for that. And in a way, that's more important to me than what her politics are. I was brought up in a very left-wing household, I will always have an emotional attachment to voting Labour, but to be honest, you know, I thought a lot of them were a shower of fools as well. So the coalition seems to be doing alright to me.

SO'H: You were doing your PhD when you had your big break in comedy - what would you have ended up doing without that break?

David Baddiel: I'd have been quite a bitter academic. I'd have stayed in academia, I'd have been quite bitter thinking that I should be a celebrity, and trying to have sex but being turned down by students.

The Infidel is out now on DVD.

You can read the original Leeds Guide article here.