Watched Metallica and Lou Reed
play Later with Jools Holland last night. White Light/White Heat was a satisfying mash up of poetry, french pop music and perky heavy rock, and while the album might be about sad things, tortured artists and wotnot, I found that one song poificktly cheery. Not sure what the Metallers think though. It's not exactly
Master of Puppets
I shuffled myself into a camera free corner and watched lots of familiar faces from Metallica's backstage world act really busy and important. I didn't have the balls to go and say hello, but they were all there. Lars' drum tech, the manager, the security guy, bald Tom who always wear boot cut jeans and looks really mean. Tom Spicer was slightly obsessed by him, and for a while I worried that his affections would shift from Lars to Tom the security guy mid filming.
This did not happen with Tom the security guy, but by the time we got really close to the centre of power there was a very great danger that Tom Spicer was going to do a capricious volte face and make James Hetfield the object of his affections.
I know that Lars is his one true hero but Tom Spicer does like to keep us on our toes.
And how was LwJH?
There were the great, the good, the bad and the ugly of the Metallica world in that TV studio. I didn't walk in front of a camera to press flesh network and sshnuffle up to showbiz-metal botty, but I did go and say hello to Louise Mensch and her husband, Peter, the big boss man at Metallica's management company Q Prime.
She was very lovely and charming and friendly and (to drop in a note perfect bad feminist detail here) has a ludicrously good body for a 40 year old mother of three. She told me she'd followed the blog when we were adventuring across America in our exploding toilet RV trying to find Lars; Peter Mensch didn't know what the hell I was on about until she did some wifely nudging and then he was very, very, briefly friendly. I suppose in music management terms Q Prime are like Barack Obama, but a lot better with money and planning, but slightly less urbane looking.
Man, for rock impresarios at the top of the premier league, Mensch was wearing some superbad jeans, as in, ugly, not 'bad' as in 'good'.
Mensch was the first person I spoke to in the management realms as we tried to make M2L happen. I rang him in NY from London late one night and I will never forget that phone conversation. The man was scary. I was lying on my sitting room floor, taking notes of the conversation (HOW I WISH I HAD RECORDED IT, a lesson to me there) and he was saying, with real big boy menace, words to the effect of, 'without our blessing at Q Prime you're fucked you little pip squeak nobody'
It was an exciting moment, and I knew that if I was working in, say, arms sales or organ sales, I couldn't have met a nicer guy. No, I'm joking, he was firm but fair. Frankly, I was seriously impressed. Working at home, alone, with occasional forays to the library and Ibiza, I have become a pussy. I'm wet. Occasionally I sally forth into newspaper offices where I always regret not having packed a helmet. The world of work is a tough place, and I am a freelance wetty. The world of heavy metal work is appropriately, a really really tough place. It's appropriate that Mensch's wife is an MP. Those two must be major hard asses.
Louise Mensch was a good egg. (She sits on the Culture Media and Sport Committee Murdoch inquisition but our glorious lady journalists are only interested in whether she has had a facelift or not - er, who gives a toss? I'd hazard fillers and botox, but what do i know, I only have them myself.) She asked me if Tom was at the filming and I said no, it's his birthday today (8th December) and he was in Cornwall having one of his beloved 'posh dinners' with his mate Bob, who is another hero of Tom's, but one we don't have to chase across America to find. She said he should have been there, and I felt sister shame and like those characters in Little Britain who use their kid's terminal illness to meet stars they want to meet.
Ah yes, the film, where is the film now. The film is waiting to hear which film festivals it has or has not got in to. And it is finished, fully graded, locked and all those other filmy business words I don't actually understand.
Anyway, better shuffle off to the library to be wet. Enough of this blog shaped wambling, it's time to do some efficient terse journalism.
Goodbye.
Ah hello again...
We have a
Facebook page now, please come and visit it and say something friendly, or rude, either's cool. Don't know where the promised website is. (OY, WEBSITE DESIGNER - you know who you are - GET YOUR FUCKING ARSE IN GEAR or I'LL COME AND KICK IT FOR YOU. HELLO!?)
Ah, sweet, I'm not such a wetty afterall....
PS. Check out Mencap's
Little Noise sessions, Being a wetty, I'm holding out for Chris Martin on 24th
