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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Almost all our artwork has been designed by my best friend, John Thompson. A lot of the pictures were by Mik Meilon – friend from the Plaza. I discuss some ideas with John and give him the title. He comes up with an idea and we bounce it around a little. The idea was to do artwork that was more than a self-aggrandizing ego thing – note we never put our pictures on the albums except for Tenement Year which we only did because we had never done it. We break even our own rules. The artwork needs to set a mood that cooperates with the intentions of the music. What new records do you have in the pipeline? About to start writing a new Ubu. Writing with Cheetah for possible RFTT album. Working on a 2 Pale Boys live album. Compiling Director’s Cut editions of RGS and PA. More movie soundtracks for ICFOS and X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes. Compiling 18 Monkeys – The Film soundtrack. What writers do you like? BUY Pere Ubu music online from and Raymond Chandler. Any final nuggets of wisdom that you’d like to offer? I never volunteer information. All the greats have an edge, a certain intelligence and David Thomas seems to be one your more cerebral rock’n’roll musicians; so you can get away with asking questions like that. And the line ‘If you make good music people will search you out’, seems to be more than enough wise advice that you usually hear from your average rocker. Ubu fit into that cult category of being a band that made people want form their own bands. They were dangerous. Scuzzed out. Angular. Violent. Everybody in a rock band should listen to them. All the best ones already do. Any UK gigs would sell out in instant, although no future dates are confirmed; but with an Ubu record in the making, the live experience is on some distant horizon. The meantime can offer the opportunity to look for new bands that dare stretch those anarchic, outward boundaries set by Pere Ubu. � 516 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Feature [published March 2005] Hunter S. Thompson: A Real American Patriot Chris Mitchell on why Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most important figures in American letters I love my friends. Away from email for a few days, log in this morning to 5 different people telling me Hunter S. Thompson is dead. Distraught isn’t the word. Thompson was forever sidelined as a caricature in the last couple of decades, a victim of his own mythmaking, the crazy old bastard on the hill permanently altered, packing guns and delivering apocalyptic pronouncements on the rare occasions he could bring himself to look at a typewriter. Loaded magazine got to the point where they were interviewing him every six months, just so another bunch of wannabe fanboy journalists could make the pilgrimage to Woody Creek in Aspen, Colorado and meet the man. I periodically had a silly little fantasy of making that pilgrimage myself one day and spending some time shooting guns with the good Doctor. Yes, it’s embarrassing to admit and possibly even more so to read, but the point is, Hunter S. Thompson was one of those writers who changed your perception of the world. Irrevocably. So much so that you’d want to meet him just to check he was real and shake his hand. Because Hunter S. Thompson Got It. He saw the world as it truly is, and the drugs and guns and women were just a way to temporarily escape that. (Hence the famous Samuel Johnson quotation that prefaces Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man”). Similarly, they are incidental to his work, not the core of it. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas may be a depiction of a drug-crazed doomed sojourn in Sin City, but it is also what it says on the cover: “A savage journey into the heart of the American Dream”. That was what Thompson chronicled for four decades. He was first and foremost a political journalist of the highest calibre. Read the first journalism collection The Great Shark Hunt or his penultimate, Kingdom Of Fear – Thompson sees America through unmasked eyes, and as a true American patriot, he despairs of what he sees. And he has the guts to say so. Calling President Bush a “whorebeast” in print was funny, but Thompson meant it with deadly sincerity. He considered Bush worse that Nixon. There was no worse accolade he could award. There’s no irony involved with BUY Hunter S. Thompson books online from and 517 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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