Quantum of Solace director Mark Forester explains how he wanted to rehabilitate the James Bond franchise with a nod towards classic '70s post-Watergate conspiracy thrillers such as The Parallax View and The Conversation
DAVE FANNING meets the inimitable ROBBIE WILLIAMS to talk about his latest album, his battles with the booze, the Take That legacy, his desire to play a politically incorrect James Bond, a vaguely remembered visit to Bono s loo and why he loves and hates The Beatles
Bourne Supremacy director Paul Greengrass on making it big in Hollywood, usurping James Bond and why Hot Press’ Eamonn McCann is one of his heroes. words Tara Brady
As Fatboy Slim is well aware, folks just can’t get enough of wacky dancing. In the past month unprecedented media exposure has been bestowed on Chicago’s OK Go, thanks to a $20 video of them dancing in their backyard.
Eclipsing even Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s infamous recording, it has since become the most downloaded video of all time. The song itself is a punchy guitar-led James Bond-type punk-funk tune. Though memorable, it’s not a patch on the video which accompanies it.
As lush as a James Bond theme tune, as sweeping as an orchestra in a brush factory, as rich as Hugh Hefner’s lawyers and as comfortable as an old shoe, the latest release from Zero 7 is a big, bruised masterpiece.
The second day of the Music Show brought together James Bond composer David Arnold, Enya producer Nicky Ryan, Christy Moore, Sharon Corr and... The Blizzards
Having resurrected James Bond in print, Sebastian Faulks has moved onto perhaps his most ambitious project yet – a multi-layered exploration of what it means to be modern.
The Alien vs Predator movie has resurrected two of the most successful action movie franchises of recent years. You’ll kick yourself – in slow motion, and with gratuitous blood loss, of course – if you miss it, according to the film’s star Colin Salmon.
They've masterminded recordings by Lily Allen, Estelle and Kate Nash, to name a few. In this exclusive interview, Future Cut lift the veil on their whizz-bang production techniques.
Charlie Parker may be gone – at least for the time being – but then he probably wouldn’t have survived crimewriter John Connolly’s latest outing anyway.
UK white hopes mansun have toned down their visual image but their music remains as defiantly maverick and angular as ever. Interview: deirdre cartmill.
From running a restaurant to writing best-sellers, Sara Sheridan has made the ricky business of career transformation look easy. Olaf Tyaransen catches up with an old friend in a new situation.
Heard the one about the Irishman, the Bronx and the tab of industrial-strength acid? Stuart Clark hadn t either until that most eligible of bachelors, David Holmes, talked him through the mad month in New York that inspired his Let s Get Killed album.
By dragging leprechauns into the new millennium, Wexford author EOIN COLFER has enraptured children and adults alike and given Harry Potter a right run for his money. FIONA REID meets the brains behind Artemis Fowl
Citing “irresolvable conflict”, grunge legend Chris Cornell has packed in his day job with Audioslave to pursue a solo career. Here, he explains why he’s decided to go it alone.
30th Birthday Retrospective: He was the original art-rocker and the quintessential ladies’ man. Bryan Ferry looks back at three decades spent at the frontline of pop.
With a hit Colin Farrell movie to his name, Martin McDonagh mulls over his early rejections at the hand of the Abbey, his "rivalry" with Conor McPherson and his run-in with Sean Connery.
Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous offers a pleasant and almost innocent view of the life of a rock hack - sort of Little House On The Road. The reality, as PETER MURPHY explains, is rather different. Certain names in this harrowing saga have been changed to protect the guilty - and the author's delicate bone structure
Olaf Tyaransen sings the reunion city blues as an unhappy DEBBIE HARRY forces him to take the scenic route through the rise, fall and rise of BLONDIE. But, hey, it all ends happily ever after...
As Barack Obama gets ready to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Bob Geldof, Josh Ritter and Laura Izibor offer their views on his presidency. Plus what the rest of the rock ‘n’ roll community including Bruce Springsteen and Ani DiFranco are saying about the new man in the White House.
She’s the post-modern starlet who is stalked by paparazzi wherever she goes but is as comfortable talking about Andy Warhol and John Updike as she is hanging with fashionistas. Say hello to Lady GaGa the good-time pop princess who went to school with Paris Hilton, cultivated a drug habit ‘cos that’s what David Bowie did in the ’70s, but thinks fame is just a game.
It's been over four intriguing years since Damien Rice's extraordinary debut album O was launched. That record went on to become a huge underground international hit, selling in excess of 2 million copies. Now his long-awaited follow-up – the similarly simply titled 9 – is finally ready to hit the shops. So how did Rice so successfully capture the collective imagination? And will the latest instalment in the Rice musical biography propel him to even greater heights? Hot Press talks exclusively to some of the key players in his remarkable rise and rise.
In the second and final part of an extensive interview, director Jim Sheridan discusses his troubles with Gabriel Byrne and Noel Pearson, explains why he could marry Daniel Day-Lewis but would fail to measure up against Richard Harris, and suggests the best way forward for the embattled Irish film industry. Plus: the ouija board prophecies which seem to have shaped his life. By Joe Jackson.
Thirty years ago Neil Armstrong took that famous first step on behalf of all mankind. That means me and you. But wait a minute wasn t it also supposed to be a giant leap? So what happened next? And what went wrong? ANDY DARLINGTON reports.
The Used furious mix of nu-metal and skate punk may not be the most original of cocktails but it’s the way they blend the ingredients (with just enough contradiction) that keeps them from sliding into mediocrity.
Chris Cornell is set to play The Olympia Theatre, Dublin. The former front man with Seattle trailblazers Soundgarden hit Ireland for a one-off show in the capital on Sunday 14th June, 2009.
The first solo album from ex-Spice Girl Emma Bunton produced one great single in the shape of ‘What Took You So Long’ but the overall consensus was that it sounded, like Emma, very sweet but that, like Emma also, it didn’t have any balls.
Okay, the film is very family orientated, and expects that the audience will erupt with laughter at the very mention of the word “poo”, but much more effort could’ve been put into the script, even as a relentlessly puerile exercise.
Thankfully, once you've sat through an opening hour, the film settles down to become a stylish and pacy yarn about missing nukes and sinister shadowy international neo-Nazi organisations
It’s seems that lately every time an Irish act release an album they promo it with a series of unplugged gigs in cafés and record shops around the country. And fair play to ‘em. But it’s not going to happen here. I’m a big fan of the singer-songwriter genre but I confess this record made me re-discover my inner rock chic.
THE TAILOR OF PANAMA
Directed by John Boorman. Starring Pierce Brosnan, Geoffrey Rush, Jamie Lee Curtis, Harold Pinter
A curiously flat black comedy-cum-thriller, The Tailor Of Panama squanders the myriad of talents involved, forming a limp and largely incoherent mess of a movie.
From psychedelic anime to Japan's answer to Trainspotting, the Japanese Film Festival 2008 brings a delightful miscellany of movies to Dublin, Cork and Limerick.
Phwoaarrr! Cor! Cop a load of the melons on that! This, at any rate, would seem to be the reaction Charlie’s Angels is intended to provoke among its target audience
THERE WAS a time when the magical words "for charity" were the guarantee of any old tat selling a million but nowadays, cynicism being what it is, there has to be musical substance to the good intentions.
An occasional series in which our TOM MATHEWS visits an exotic location and, under the guise of attending some class of conference, proceeds to get very drunk on the local hooch
*Well, it's 9th and Hannepin/And all the donuts have/names that sound like prostitutes/And the moon's teethmarks are/on the sky like a tarp thrown over this...*
The Electric Picnic couldn’t have been any more inspiring (weather excepted). Now, roll on the Music Show....
Electric Picnic. It marks the end of the summer, and the beginning of the academic year when people start to trudge back to schools and college. It is a moment when you start to anticipate the darkness falling down around us, the days getting shorter and then shorter again, till the watershed weekend arrives when the clocks go back, and the winter comes stealing in.
Q: Which top Irish quiz-masters’ pathological obsessions include Something Happens, Shamrock Rovers and the amount of shopping days left to the next Suede gig? A: George “You Started, So I’ll Finish” Byrne
...it was a year like any other year at Féile - except that there were dozens of extra acts on show, on not just two but three stages. There was also the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, the Chris de Burgh stripper incident, Michael Hutchence dispensing condoms...and a rather loud Little Red Rooster that nearly got itself strangled. And the crack Hot Press team of reporters who attempted to keep up with it all? Words: Bill Graham, Stuart Clark, Tara McCarthy, Lorraine Freeney and Chris Donovan. Pix: Cathal Dawson.
