ICONIC: Winona Ryder

Isn't it everyone's dream to have eternal youth? Dorian Gray sells his soul for it, Michael Jackson built Neverland in an attempt to cling on to it, and 'Winona Ryder' made a whole career out of it.

Contrary to popular belief, 'Winona Ryder' only lived from 1986 to 2001, when her star was tragically extinguished by an unfortunate brush with reality in Saks Fifth Avenue, Beverly Hills. The incident left Ms Ryder fighting for her life and her career, but the outcome was not positive. She enjoyed just fifteen years under the Hollywood sun.

The slim-limbed and fresh-faced Winona, who was born with the surname Horowitz, was one of our last great actresses. Her star was born on the back of a small but hugely significant role in the football comedy Lucas in 1986. As Corey Haim's best friend she shone with winsome charm amidst a rabble of teen co-stars (among them Charlie Sheen), and even when puffing on a clarinet maintained dignity and grace.

The rebirth of Winona Horowitz as 'Winona Ryder' ranks with the greatest of Tinseltown transformations, like the legends Norma Jeane (Marylin Monroe) and Audrey Ruston (Audrey Hepburn) before her. Winona's entrance to this Hollywood pantheon of stars came just a decade before it was brought to ruins by the Internet and reality television shows in the late nineties.

Winona's 'type' was The Hyperbolic Heroine: a regular kind of person multiplied by ten. When faced with an alienating high school clique in Heathers, Ms Ryder takes the drastic measure of poisoning her best frenemy with bleach before blowing up the school. The rebellious daughter to Cher's hip-swinging beehived Mom in Mermaids? A retreat into devout Catholicism is really our young heroine's only option. And as a misfit teen in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, founding a sanctuary for farm animals and casual goth styling will surely help with the playground teasing.

Throughout her defining roles she remained a beacon of dewy insouciance and an immortal vision of youth, but the tragedy of 'Winona Ryder' is that she never reached adulthood. As she entered her thirties, she was still playing a closeted sorority leader in love with Rachel in Friends ('I can still hear the coconuts knocking together!'), and the high-school cool girl subjecting a 46-year old ex-junkie to a makeover in Strangers With Candy.

'Winona Ryder''s death-by-shoplifting is to Hollywood what Macbeth is to theatre, a cursed legend only referred to in pseudonym or hushed tones. Alas, her last great performance – on the witness stand – was not captured on celluloid, and she was consigned to the Hollywood scrap heap.

After noncommittally haunting The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and A Scanner Darkly, the ghost of 'Winona Ryder' horrifically returned in Darren Aranofsky's Black Swan last year. As the washed-up ballerina Beth Macintyre, Winona rattles through the picture like an unhinged poltergeist, a psychobiddy caricature of middle-age. Like Bette Davis as Baby Jane before her, she is a spectre of youth; art and life were never so cruelly and deliciously intertwined. 'Did you suck his cock?' she drunkenly slurs at Natalie Portman before throwing herself in front of a car. Winona's visage, once the face that launched a thousand scripts, is brutally torn to shreds by her own fair hand. 'I'm nothing!' she cries, stabbing her porcelain cheek with a nailfile. 'Nothing!' she shrieks, writhing and foaming at the mouth. She lays down dead, finally exorcised.

As Jocelyn Wildenstein discovered and continues to discover on a daily basis, the elixir of youth is a double-edged sword. What Winona Horowitz does now is neither here nor there; like River Phoenix before her, 'Winona Ryder' never grew up.

Stevie Nicks - In Your Dreams Review

Joni may have turned to jazz, but in her seventh solo album Stevie's sticking to her folk-rock guns. There's nothing here to rival the bootylicious swagger of Edge of Seventeen, but Stevie's self-consciously witchy chanteuserie remains incomparable. Plundering Edgar Allen Poe in Annabel Lee and, bizarrely, Twilight: New Moon in Moonlight (A Vampire's Dream), Stevie reworks occultist narratives into driving pop melodies. The album's best song is the sparse ballad For What It's Worth, the swansong of an impossible relationship and the song that she needed to live through addiction and heartbreak to write. In more ways than one, it's the record of a lifetime.

4/5

Boys' Own Story: Interview with Nico Muhly

For Nico Muhly, there are two types of people: those that are good at being online, and those that are bad at being online. 'I live a life which is basically online/offline all the time,' the 29-year old composer says from his apartment on the Northern fringes of Chinatown, New York. 'I heard a report on the radio two days ago about how young people have different online and offline identities, and you think 'hmm, kind of...' But there's a huge permeability there.'

Nico has a deft hand at merging the esoteric and the ultra-modern. In addition to releasing his own acclaimed, genre-eschewing modern classical releases Speaks Volumes (2007) and Mothertongue (2008), in recent years Nico has become the most sought-after collaborator for indie bands experimenting with orchestral arrangements. Anthony Hegarty, Jonsi, Grizzly Bear? Check, check check. Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson? He's known them for years. Bjork? Duh. Essentially, he’s the Nicki Minaj of the classical world.

For the past two years, Nico has been working on Two Boys, an opera about gay cyber-homicide that opens in London this month and will transfer to New York in 2014. The piece is loosely based on a notorious 1990s internet murder which happened in Manchester.

'The opera begins with the fact that there's a boy that's been stabbed, and another boy who's been seen stabbing him on camera,' he explains. 'And there's a policewoman who has to figure out how and why this happened; she's essentially a creature of the analogue world, and we trace her journey into understanding what the dangers, possibilities and ecstatic moments of a life online could mean.'

The policewoman, played by the 'wonderful' Susan Bickley, uncovers a digital world previously unknown to her, where physical location is irrelevant and identity mutable.

Two Boys

'I think one of the things the Internet does is de-specify people,' Nico says. 'You can be chatting with someone that’s saying they're in London, but actually they're in Singapore and a different gender and the wrong age. When the boys are IM-ing in Two Boys and one says 'what do you look like?' all of a sudden there's a picture of a girl. That moment is an intimacy; it also happens to be a lie. To me, that is an enormously exciting dramatic moment, and it reminds me of the shifting identities in Mozart or Rossini, and which you see as long as there’s been opera.’

If anyone was going to transpose the old world of opera into a digital context it would be Nico. He talks enthusiastically and expansively, casually littering his conversation with polysyllabic bon mots and Classical references, with his tone falling somewhere between music dork and old-school camp.

The latter is not particularly surprising, given his upbringing surrounded by gay separatists. 'It's fair to say that my parents were pretty bohemian, and some of my Mom's best friends were Radical Faeries,' he says nonchalantly. 'It was a very queer-normative household in a genuine sense. It didn't feel different.'

But amid the 'strange polygamist configurations' that went on, the 11 year-old Nico took to his piano and joined a boys' choir. 'It was incredibly rigorous,' he recalls of the Tudor hymns that he memorised as a boy. 'But if your mind is open to it, it can turn very quickly into an academic pursuit while never abandoning the beauty of it. I feel like if you're gonna know a thing, you might as well know it to the bottom of it.'

There’s a frenetic energy to his conversation which perhaps goes some way to explaining his extraordinary work output. I wonder aloud where his drive comes from. 'At the moment there's this unspeakable debate about whether gays should be in the military in America, which is so crazy on a really fundamental level. If you're putting a flaw on someone's willingness to perform a public service you're basically saying they're not citizens! So for me as an artist, I feel an especial drive to achieve consistent excellence, just to prove that I am citizen of something, if not the country where I live.'

After all, the majority of Nico's indie-world collaborations have been with gay musicians. 'I sometimes find myself in these weird situations, where the only answer is just this weird queer supremacy, where you just think 'let straight people be late for the bus, and let straight people not know their music, and all us queens are gonna get our shit done.' It doesn't mean anything, it just means that it's done! There's no connotation except the fact that we're awesome.'

Like the narrative of Two Boys, Nico's story bridges the gap between analogue and digital: bookishly steeped in tradition and literary references, but constantly travelling and tied to his iPhone. Throughout our conversation, an image of him struggling with opera manuscripts on the seat-back table of an aeroplane keeps popping into my mind.

After our conversation I get home and check Facebook. I have a Friend Request from Nico. "I'M E STALKING YOU!' reads the message. I'd expect nothing less. Say what you like about Nico Muhly, but this queen is getting his shit done.

An edited version of this article appeared in the June issue of Attitude.

Jessica 6 - See The Light Review

The offshoot of New York nu-disco darlings Hercules and Love Affair, Jessica 6 delve into soul and synthpop on their mesmerising debut. Trans frontwoman Nomi Ruiz is a 21st century Amanda Lear, giving the three-piece's oft-eerie electronica a liberal coating of androgyne honey. Album highlight is reunion with past collaborator Antony Hegarty Prisoner of Love, where the chilling refrain 'why was I born only to be a slave?' takes the clipped strings and Game Boy bloops into 4am anti-anthem territory. The early-90s RnB groove of Freak The Night sounds like a lost Babyface production, while In The Heat shimmers with the instantly-timeless feel of a disco floorfiller. Forget Hercules, this is your new love affair.

4/5

Bon Iver - Bon Iver Review

Past collabs with Kanye and Nicki aside, no-one trades in six-stringed falsetto isolation like Justin Vernon (a.k.a. Bon Iver). Marching drums on opener Perth pummel us into vulnerability, but the emotional soccer-punch is in the spare, looping instrumentation, which veers from glitchy feedback to Orinoco Flows ambience. As in life, the heartbreak's in the things that can't be said. Breathtaking.

4.5/5

Patrick Wolf - Lupercalia Review

Taking its name from an ancient pagan festival to purify health and the city, Patrick Wolf’s fifth album finds the notoriously obtuse singer in a newly joyous mood. Lupercalia strips away the conflicted rawness and theatrical aestheticism, replacing it with humble themes of urban domesticity and love. The pop melodies are bolstered with oom-pah horns and lush strings, but the lyrics are emotionally expansive and the songs have room to breathe. Bermondsey Street is an anthem of bisexuality and the universality of love, while Patrick extols ‘scatter my ashes on this place’ in forthcoming single House. It’s not a death lament but an ode to life; the album’s working title says it all: The Conqueror.

4/5

Marques Toliver Feature

‘That’s fresh!’ says Marques Toliver when I tell him that listening to his EP, Butterflies are Not Free, is like a bolt from the blue. The 24 year-old Floridian turns up for our chat with his afro towering above other pedestrians and boyfriend in tow.

'This is Tom,' Marques introduces us, his white teeth gleaming and eyes twinkling. Given that so many musicians choose to remain sexually ambiguous when launching their careers, his candour nearly knocks me for six. Actually, it makes sexuality into a non-issue.

Butterflies Are Not Free is a unique fusion of Marques' influences (think of a jam session between Vivaldi and Stevie Wonder with Destiny's Child on backing vocals). It’s a 4-song multi-instrumental mythopoeia that tells of one man's journey to find himself, and contains some of the most beautiful gay love songs you’ve ever heard.

Marques sings from the heart, howling and caressing the soul of his compositions with his expansive baritone voice. I'm inspired by stories,' he tells me. 'The first track 'Charter Magic', is named after the magic in Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials - but I also get inspired by some little poetic blurb posted on Twitter.'

Who's his dream collaborator? 'I'd have to say Beyoncé. I couldn't say what kind of record we'd make though - it would probably be a whole new style of music!'

This article appears in the May issue of Attitude, out now.

Planningtorock - W Review

W is a sublime synth chamber piece from Bolton-to-Berlin Wanderer Janine Roston (aka PTR). Less upbeat than her 2006 debut, W creates a layered soundscape which is sometimes threatening, but utterly entrancing. Living It Out shimmers with Roisin Murphy-esque Italo, while Roston’s vocodered vocals have an uncanny alien empathy. This isn’t wilful obscurism – W has the off-beat anxiety of the best pop.

5/5

Tanjong Rhu Article

Boo Junfeng

Boo Junfeng’s film is a cry in the dark, a howl against the insidious homophobia of the Singaporean Government, who in November 1993 entrapped 12 men in a coastal cruising ground called Tanjong Rhu. The victims were charged with 'outraging their victim's modesty' and punished with prison sentences ranging from two to six months, along with three strokes of the rotan cane, which leaves permanent scarring on the buttocks.

For the then 10 year-old Junfeng, the events left an indelible impression. ‘I remember my teacher in class telling us not to go there because there were perverts lurking in the forest’, he recalls, speaking from his Singapore bedroom.
The film Tanjong Rhu was banned in its own country just days before its premiere ('I still haven't received any official response why', says Junfeng) the film is now seeing the light of day as part of the latest instalment of the ‘Boys on Film’ DVD series, which is titled ‘Pacific Rim.’ Pun intended, presumably.

Still from Tanjong Rhu

The facts are ugly, but from them Junfeng weaves a beautiful and meditative film about love in the face of institutional homophobia. His 19-minute short focuses on a young man named Kelvin and his reflections on Tanjong Rhu a decade after being arrested there by a plain-clothes police officer. The clincher: Kelvin was not just looking for sex, but returning to the place where he met his dearly-missed ex-boyfriend David.

‘I’m actually quite a romantic,’ Junfeng tells me. ‘I wanted to suggest that a relationship beyond just sex that could have come from a place like Tanjong Rhu. Especially in the pre-internet early 90s – these were the only places that gay people knew how to socialise and communicate.’

Shockingly, gay sex is still criminalised in Singapore. 'In the Seventies, Bougis Street in Singapore was well known for its drag culture, but now it's just a shopping street,' Junfeng says sadly. 'They're trying to project an image of being a progressive world-class city, but they're desperately making all these symbolic gestures that really don't mean anything.' Tanjong Rhu counters this, showing the film’s titular cruising ground not as a place of illicit sex, but as a locus of desire in the face of a society dominated by tradition and conservatism.

In the film, Kelvin's flashbacks show the romance and physical intimacy between him and his ex David. While happily accepted by Kelvin's grandmother in her home, theirs is a love that cannot be communicated in public. Particularly heartbreaking is a close-up of the lovers' hands as they walk down the street. They brush fingertips, longing to touch but unable to. The image speaks volumes about the Singaporean attitude to homosexuality: don't ask, don't tell.

'But I feel most at home in Singapore,' Junfeng says, his love of his home city clear. 'If you come here, you have to come to the gay district - on Sunday it's Boys' Night!' For now, it seems, Junfeng is happy where he is. 'All we need to do is constantly challenge the authorities and hopefully things will get better.'

And with the tenderness of Kelvin and David's relationship as memorable as the beauty of Tanjong Rhu's frames, it might just be that love can save the day.

This article appears in the May issue of Attitude, on sale now.

Yelle - Safari Disco Club Review

If Yelle were jumping rope on their 2007 Pop-Up, Safari Disco Club is when they come back bloody-kneed. Less bouncy than their debut, the three-piece’s sophomore effort takes the party into darker, more emotive territory. The synths by turns recall the swooshy warmth of fellow Gallic knob-twiddlers Air, before going all glacial Twilight Zone on us. The sad, sweet C’est Pas Une Vie hand-claps and bleeps its way through winsome vulnerability, while Mon Pays is a riff on the age-old ‘love you or leave you?’ dilemma, rendered in the coldest of Italo beats. It’s not quite The Party’s Over, but Safari Disco Club is crammed full of melodies to get stuck in your head and your heart.

4/5

This review appears in the April issue of Attitude, on sale now.

Hunx and His Punx - Too Young To Be In Love Review

On paper, Seth Bogart (aka Hunx) ticks all the boxes. Catchy three-chord songs, a badass backup girl group called The Punkettes, lyrics about heartbreak and (not) being too young to be in love. Last year’s Gay Singles was a witty twist on the conventions of Spector-esque pop – it queered up rock and roll. But on Too Young to Be In Love, Bogart’s bubble rather droops. This pastiche of 60s girl groups is missing the heart of darkness present in the best of the genre. The songs are catchy enough: title track Too Young To Be In Love chugs along melodically, but the stroppy Bad Boy lacks bite. And while it’s all in good fun, you’re left wishing there was more.

3.5/5



This review was originally published in the March Issue of Attitude.

Freddy Ruppert Interview

For the past couple of months, I've been listening to Former Ghosts' intricate and quietly devastating record New Love on pretty much a daily basis. Just before the album's release, I talked to the frontman Freddy Ruppert about facials, rap music and dipping things in peanut butter. An edited version of the article below appeared in the November issue of Attitude.

When a photo flashed up in my inbox of Freddy Ruppert with a face full of spunk, I couldn't quite believe our eyes. "It's not a reference to having sex in bushes!" he insists, laughing. "It's more of a metaphor for being caught up in that insane post-relationship sexual stuff, and how i'm kind of crazy with jealousy issues regarding that."

Freddy could easily pass muster as an indie pin-up with his handsome looks, but that was never part of the plan. He's the frontman of Former Ghosts, a synth supergroup of sorts which also includes Jamie Stewart of post-punk experimentalists Xiu Xiu and Nika Roza Danilova, a.k.a. noise-popstar Zola Jesus. Hot on the heels of last year's critically-lauded debut Fleurs now comes the trio's latest release New Love, which Freddy admits is "a lot darker of a record, but kind of poppier." Album highlight 'Chin Up' is a synth-led paean to self-effacing love, with vocalist Nika's plea of 'I need you right now' coming with the admission 'this will bury me', her operatic vocals driving the song to its desperate crescendo.

In person, Freddy is warm and easily tickled, and effuses self-deprecating charm. "I listen to a lot of American Top 40 R'n'B, where the lyrics are about real straightforward, universal themes," he explains in his LA twang. "I think that influences the way I write lyrics - I don't consider myself a good lyricist, I just want to sing exactly what I feel."

When he's not covering himself in fake semen for photoshotos,or drinking himself into vomit-inducing oblivion (see Former Ghosts' 'Hold On' music video), Freddy's adding to his burgeoning tattoo collection. He's a man who wears his heart on his sleeve - really - it's a 50s-style design with a 'Mom' scroll. "My Mom passed away when I was 19 so me and my brother went and got that. It was the first tattoo I'd ever gotten, and I thought it would be a nice tribute to my Mom - but also funny that I had a tattoo that was so sailor-tough or biker-tough!"

So what makes Freddy Ruppert happy? "Peanut butter!" He lights up: "I feel like it's one of the top five reasons I actually stay alive. It's so good to just open up a jar of peanut butter and just dip chocolate items into the peanut butter jar. That's just, like, perfect."

When I went to see Former Ghosts play with Zola Jesus and Xiu Xiu earlier this month, I couldn't help myself popping into Sainburys and picking up a Kit Kat and jar of Skippy for Freddy. When I presented it to him he creased up laughing: 'You know I'm gonna dip this into the peanut butter!' Well, yes. Unfortunately I didn't get to see him eat the confection in person, but luckily Upset The Rhythm TV immortalised the moment at the end of the charming video below.

Upset The Rhythm TV #13: Former Ghosts vs. Zola Jesus vs. Xiu Xiu from Charles Chintzer Lai on Vimeo.