Annual article: There was no love lost in 2005 between the ‘art’ and ‘middlebrow’ literary factions, but as long as Cormac McCarthy puts pen to paper, who cares? Plus round-up of the books of the year.
She made her reputation as a poet but Gil Adamson’s debut novel is no work of high-flying lyricism. Instead, it’s a gritty morality fable set in the Canadian wild frontier. She talks about making the transition from poetry to bloody reality.
Everyone knows Maxïmo Park’s Paul Smith is a fan of woolly hats and long, complicated novels. But did you realise Limerick is one of his favourite cities? Or that, as a teenager, he used to copy out all of Morrissey’s lyrics?
After a pair of critical and commercial misfires, Joel and Ethan Coen have returned with what many critics are hailing as the best film of their career, the dark noir No Country For Old Men.
'Girl From The Hills' opens Dot Creek's debut with a quietly twanging guitar, before a plaintive male voice urges someone to fetch water from the spring, and you think, 'OK, I'm in the middle of Nowheresville, Alabama.
No mere actor boy moonlighting as a rock star, Billy Bob Thornton is steeped in music and also in the kind of brooding Southern gothic aesthetic which informs his compelling album of song and story, Private Radio. Peter Murphy meets a singular man of stage and screen
In an exclusive interview, Once stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova talk about the love affair that sneaked up on them, recall their Oscar-winning adventures, give us the inside track on the movie's remarkable success and explain what it's like to hang out with the Coen brothers for an evening.
Mundy belted into his routine with gusto – a considerably better effort than his Vicar St. performance at the beginning of the summer, where sound problems evoked tantrums and gnashing of teeth.
After a career barely spanning five years, there is a definite feeling amongst those who know about such things that POLLY
JEAN HARVEY is destined to be one of the true rock music greats. Her darkly visceral, sexual and lacerating work has struck a
raw chord, and made her the object of passionate adoration. But it has also cast her in the eyes of some as an
"axe-wielding bitch cow from Hell."
LIAM FAY travels to meet ze monsta, but instead finds a home-loving Yeovil lass who likes nothing better than gardening and whipping
up pots of rhubarb marmalade.
It's been a long strange trip and no mistake, one that describes a discernible line from
Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music through to the Handsome Family.
But there's even more going on beneath the surface. GREIL MARCUS, the music critic's music critic,
is PETER MURPHY's guide on a mystery train whose other passengers include Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Mark Twain, Nick Cave, The Blair Witch, Bill Clinton, The Band, Siniad O'Connor, Beck, William Burroughs, William Faulkner and Bob Dylan. And that's just the first class carriage. All aboard
Fancy taking a trip down to Dr John’s bayou, with Andy Weatherall’s decks appeal, Nick Cave’s religious fervour, and Johnny Cash’s outlaws as your inlaws?
Nick Cave has confirmed that he and Warren Ellis will write the soundtrack to John Hillcoats forthcoming film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Maybe the best way to get a handle on Devils & Dust is by process of elimination. In other words, it’s not a big band extravaganza with sax and piano fanfares for the common man. It’s not Human Touch or Lucky Town, both of which suffered from pick-up pros trying to play E Street shuffles, and as any fool knows, the only ones who can do that are the original Jersey shower. Nor is it the bleak and beautiful lunar landscape of America under the Republican gun a la Nebraska. It’s not Tom Joad either, although it does share some of those album’s attributes, namely a writerly rigour with regard to research and character development, plus a slew of wetback protagonists inhabiting southerly borders both geographical and moral.
Annual article: From the strange to the mundane, from poetic champions to pornographic novels, from maverick auteurs to great lost crime novels: it was a hell of a year to be a reader.
