Let us now praise famous women. 2003 was the year of the female condition in all its most gorgeous and gruesome. Sure, the boys – and men – acquitted themselves admirably, but this year oestrogen overload didn’t necessarily equate with PMT (Pro-Minstrel Attention).
He may be trained to kill, but recently James Blunt has been seducing vast swathes of the population with his poignant love songs. Lured to the Hot Press Chat Room, he tells all about his number one album, the Queen, being shot at in Kosovo and lesbian swim parties.
Juliette Lewis always seemed too visceral, too wantonly scuzz, for Hollywood. Troubled stars are no novelty but Lewis paraded her confusion like a gunshot wound. Her perma-sneer and ragged complexion glowered in defiance of the dream factory. Frantic and feral , she stank up the screen like a noxious perfume.
Understandably, it’s been a while since she was asked to front a rom-com. In the hiatus, Lewis has plumped for a career in guttural punk-pop. The question posed by You’re Speaking My Language, her frantic and debauched full length debut, is this: does she really mean it?
Oh how we chuckled at Casey Fischer and Warren Spooner when they first appeared as seemingly the only members of the short lived (blinked and you missed it) electroclash scene. The combination of deeply pretentious art posturing and fairly poor electronic music was not an appealing one and, after an initial burst of interest, we rapidly moved onto something else.
It falters on more than one occasion certainly, and the ballad card is played perhaps a touch too often, but Stripped proves that she is a major talent
30th Anniversary retrospective: From the murders of Tupac and Biggie to the bizarre implication of Marilyn Manson in the Columbine massacre; from Courtney, Axl and Spector’s falls from grace to the canonisation and demonisation of Peter Doherty... here’s a potted history of the most controversial events in the last 30 years of rock ‘n’ roll.
Has Madonna become the immaterial girl? Or will the Re-invention tour re-establish her as the foremost female icon on the planet? On the eve of her first ever Irish appearance at Slane, Peter Murphy takes a look at the strange twist the Queen of Pop’s career has taken – and how she is now fighting back, for all she’s worth.
With the release of M!Zundastood, Pink has already played her trump card at an early stage in her career, abandoning the ubiquitous notion of poppy R’n’B for a new life as a tortured rock star.
What Courtney doesn’t know about life in the Hollywood fast lane (rehab, drugs charges, child custody battles) simply isn’t worth knowing. In her own words, her somewhat ironically-titled opus America’s Sweetheart contains ‘a lot of God and a lot of sex’.
The star of cult movies such as Natural Born Killers, Kalifornia and Strange Days, Juliette Lewis appeared to have a direct entry to rock's premier league when she turned her attention to her punk outfit The Licks. Instead, she opted to embark on a small-scale tour and play a series of small venues throughout the US and Europe. Peter Murphy was on hand as Lewis' magical mystery tour reached Ireland, and was witness to some truly fascinating scenes as the singer and her band bewitched the Dublin indie cognoscenti, travelled south to rock Limerick and strolled the red carpet to join the glitterati backstage at the Meteor Awards. Photography by Liam Sweeney.
What’s a nice girl like her doing in a… well, okay, the Voodoo Lounge ain’t no dump, but it is your quintessentially dim-lit and cheerfully scuzzy north quay rock ‘n’ roll haunt. The choice of venue, not to mention the decision to spend a week playing clubs around the country, means that Juliette Lewis’s martyr-for-the-cause credentials can’t be called into question. The movie pedigree might open doors and get her a slot on the Meteor Awards, but this is obviously no moonlighting actor brat breezing in to play the swish palaces and then absconding with a satchel of cash.
THE SUITABLY gushing press release makes great virtue of the fact that 4 Non Blondes hail from San Francisco and follow in the same maverick musical tradition as Jefferson Airplane, Captain Beefheart and those other legendary left-fielders, The Grateful Dead.
