Dennis Hopper

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

Jarvis Cocker still has the voice – and the moves

From our UK edition

For bands of a certain vintage, the art of keeping the show on the road involves a tightly choreographed dance between past and present, old and new, then and now. It’s not a one-way transaction: there should be some recognition that the people you are playing to have also evolved since the glory years of the indie disco and student union. Halfway through the first date of Pulp’s UK tour following the release of More, their first album in 24 years, I started thinking about Withnail & I. Watching the film repeatedly as a young man, the booze-soaked antics of the dissipated ‘resting actor’ and his addled supporting cast seemed like great larks, albeit in extremis.

Thursday

Max Décharné

The glamour of grime: revisionist westerns of the 1970s

From our UK edition

In 1967, the unexpected worldwide success of Bonnie and Clyde blindsided the Hollywood film industry, which then spent the next half decade attempting to adapt to the changing tastes of the new youth audience it had apparently captured. No matter that the picture took a pair of vicious, sociopathic thrill-killers who in real life were about as appealing as the Manson family and reinvented them as glamorous Robin Hood figures, there was obviously money to be made, and the studios wanted a slice of it.

Monday

Gavin Smith

You had to be there

Do you worship Dennis Hopper? Do you get your kicks from sagas dedicated to the lives of the rich and famous? And do you eat up rehashed accounts of the far-out West Coast zeitgeist in the 1960s? If so, Mark Rozzo’s Everybody Thought We Were Crazy is the book you’ve been waiting for. Rozzo starts in medias res: it’s November 1961, and Bel Air is burning. As the firestorm approaches, Hopper and his unlikely wife, blue-blooded poor-little-rich-girl Brooke Hayward, grab her kids and abandon their house — but not before Hopper grabs a Milton Avery painting and throws it in the back of the car.

rozzo