Mark Ronson worked so hard on Uptown Funk that he fainted
Interview by Alexis Petridis, 5 January 2015
“We did 45 takes of it and I just couldn’t get it, it sounded like horrible bullshit, so we went to lunch, walked down to a restaurant. Everyone was saying: ‘Dude, what’s wrong with you? You’ve gone totally white.’ Because I was going on pretending everything was just fine; you don’t want to admit that you’re just not there, you’re not where you want to be. And I went to the toilet and just … fainted. I threw up, and fainted. They had to come and carry me out of the toilet.”
The Pub Landlord reckoned he would win a three-way lager-off against William Hague and Nigel Farage
Peter Bradshaw was among Guardian experts to question Al Murray, 19 January
“These men are amateurs. The drinking itself wouldn’t be a challenge – in fact, I’d say there isn’t a table in the land I couldn’t drink them under. No, it’s the company that would be an issue. You’d have Farage pretending he’s not a public-school stockbroker and actually some sort of man of the people – and what sort of muppet pretends to be someone they’re not, eh? I ask you. And then Hague droning on and on about the time he met Angelina Jolie. No thanks.”
Balmain designer Olivier Rousteing knows why he is successful
Interview by Hannah Marriott, 20 January
“I was born in an orphanage, so I feel like anything is possible – there are no limits. When you come from nowhere you feel like the world belongs to you.”
David Oyelowo has a movie dream
Interview by Ryan Gilbey, 2 February
The hazard of discussing these issues [representation in the movies], as Oyelowo understands only too well, is that it risks undercutting his efforts not to be defined by race. “It’s because films like Selma are so rarely made that we end up putting them under the microscope. One, maybe two, a year. As a white person, you don’t have that. You have the gamut. No one says to Oliver Stone: ‘Another film about Vietnam? White characters again?’ Benedict Cumberbatch is never asked, ‘What, you’re playing another historical character?’”
Patricia Arquette paid her dogwalker more than she made on Boyhood
Interview by Nosheen Iqbal, 3 February
“When you add up your budget and your life, when you’re paying your rent, you’re paying your life insurance, car insurance, kids’ school – all these things, and then you still have to stay at someone’s apartment for free … because [the film] is not paying you enough for any of those things? I wasn’t being disparaging to dogwalkers, but doing a really tiny budget movie doesn’t pay your bills. If you have a kid in college, good luck to ya. You have to do other work in order to pay for that.”.
Amitabh Bachchan believes Indian cinema puts the world to rights
Interview by Nikita Lalwani, 5 February
“We always overcome evil with good. During the last years of my father’s life, every evening he’d watch my films. I’d ask him, ‘Why are you watching these films?’ He’d say, ‘You get to see poetic justice in two and a half hours.’ You and me may not get that in a lifetime, perhaps several lifetimes, and that really is the strength of Indian cinema, to be able to seek poetic justice and actually see it enacted in front of you.”
Gillian Anderson has sympathy for gay actors who don’t come out
Interview by Simon Hattenstone, 9 February
“There are a lot of actors who are in the closet because they know if they came out it would be certain death to their career. It would. There’s still enough prejudice out there, also within the casting business, that their careers would shift as a result. I’m not saying they’re right [not to come out], I’m saying I understand it. They’re protecting themselves.”
Rotherham MP Sarah Champion says the job ruins your life
Interview by Helen Pidd, 10 February
“It destroys your personal life. You don’t have a personal life. At all. You can’t. It’s a nightmare.” She is not married but I ask if she has a partner. “I did have when I came into this job, but it got completely blown out of the water,” she says, adding that she doesn’t know how colleagues with children manage. “I don’t think they can. They are constantly pulled, constantly guilty.” She continues: “You get into a cycle, you’re working really hard, so you stop seeing your friends. Then, because you stop seeing your friends you throw yourself into work and the whole thing perpetuates. At Christmas, I actually took a week off, it’s the first time I’ve had a full week off. My friends were like, ‘who the hell are you?’. Things like Twitter and 24-hour news means you are always working. It’s horrendous. The job is fabulous. The lifestyle is living hell.”
Labour’s election strategist David Axelrod compared Barack Obama and Ed Miliband
Interview by Ed Pilkington, 16 February
“I think Obama’s a once-in-a-lifetime candidate. I can’t think of another person who I would put in his category in my experience of consulting. So I wouldn’t put that burden on Ed or anyone.
“Barack Obama had a made-for-TV story. Who has a story like that? But what Ed has is a comparable commitment to public service for the right reasons, and I think people sense that,” he says.
Lisa Kudrow thinks it’s sad how smart characters in HBO’s comedy-drama Girls let boyfriends abuse them
Interview by Rory Carroll, 23 February
“It’s the tragedy of young girls having no self-esteem but thinking they do, and allowing themselves to be treated horribly.” She and her own college-era friends did not allow it, she says. “Standards have just dropped, out of some sense of freedom to express yourself sexually. Why do you have to jump out of your comfort zone to keep someone sexually interested? When it comes to guys, it’s: ‘Oh, what do you want?’”
Line of Duty star Lennie James suffered racial abuse from a police officer as a child
Interview by Nosheen Iqbal, 24 February
“The first time anyone ever used the n-word on me, I was 12. And it was a police officer. It is indisputable, as far as I’m concerned, that when the police are confronted with a black male, they react differently.”
Salma Hayek thinks the pressure on women is crazy
Interview by Jess Cartner-Morley, 4 March
“You have to be much better than your male colleagues, just so you can maybe try and get the same salary as them. And you still have to be a good wife and mother. And now you also have to be skinny, and you have to look 20 when you’re 40. It’s too much. We need to stop with the crazy expectations, give ourselves a break.”
Mark Rylance couldn’t speak properly until he was six, just “vowelly yowling”. He believes in magic
Interview by Catherine Shoard, 16 March
Not in the kind that’s “an extension of the dominating mindset” but just “a very present and awakened state of being”. “Ideas come to me that I do not feel are self-generating. As an artist, you receive ideas from the collective consciousness.”
Ben Kingsley likes to wheel out the same anecdotes almost word for word
Interview by Zoe Williams, 23 March
Finally, I decide that it is a test: a mythological version of an interview, in which I have to prove my fitness to know stuff by having the courage to at least indicate that I have heard a story before. So, we are talking about his sons, Ferdinand and Edmund, who are also actors, and very talented ones. “I feel immense pride,” he begins, “and I know that my parents were quite indifferent to my craft.” Do you feel they were indifferent to your craft, or to you, I cut in (he had a famously poor relationship with both of them). He pulls back in horror. “Do you mind if I finish what I was saying?” Well, no, of course not. (Thinks: so long as it isn’t, “When they finish a piece of work, and I’m in the same building, their ribs are in danger of being crushed.”) He takes a deep breath. “When my sons come off stage, I crush their ribs.”
Michael Jackson repeatedly prank-called Russell Crowe
Interview by Alexis Petridis, 30 March
“For two or three fucking years,” he says. “I never met him, never shook his hand, but he found out the name I stayed in hotels under, so it didn’t matter where I was, he’d ring up and do this kind of thing, like you did when you were 10, you know. ‘Is Mr Wall there? Is Mrs Wall there? Are there any Walls there? Then what’s holding the roof up? Ha ha.’ You’re supposed to grow out of doing that, right?”
But it wasn’t as weird as when al-Qaida threatened to kidnap him in 2001.
“I still really don’t know to this day what the fuck that was all about. All I know is, I arrived in LA, got to my hotel, as I’d done umpteen times before, started unpacking, and there was a knock at the door and a team of FBI guys wanted to sit down and discuss something with me. And then, for nearly two years, they were always around. I remember going to the Golden Globes and having, like, 16 security guys with me. I don’t even know why. They wouldn’t give me any details. And of course, people were like: ‘Look at him, he thinks he’s fucking Elvis.’ And then one day they just weren’t there any more.”
Jon Snow was traumatised by taking part in Channel 4’s The Cannabis Trial
Interview by Sophie Heawood, 13 April
“It was a devastating experience. My soul was wrenched from my body and there was no one in my world.”
And he was mesmerised by the sound of Margaret Thatcher’s tights.
“She was the sexiest matron I ever met.”
Nancy Dell’Olio has her hair done three times a week. Maybe more, sometimes. She thinks Sven-Goran Eriksson is “a stupid”
Interview by Hadley Freeman, 28 April
He was not a gentleman to you, Nancy, I say.
“Well, no he wasn’t. I met him like a gentleman and then he acted like a stupid.”
Like a what?
“Like a stupid.” (She is probably making a direct translation of “uno stupido” – a stupid man in Italian.) “That’s what upsets me – such a stupid. But I never said anything because I was protecting my choices.”
Stella Creasy DJed at the Labour party conference in September
Interview by Esther Addley, 2 November
Her guaranteed floor-filler? “Oh, I have a mashup of Iggy Azalea’s Fancy and Get into the Groove by Madonna …” Creasy marks many of her tweets with the hashtag #indiemp, but resisted the urge to play anything by “the Weddoes”, as she calls her beloved band, the Wedding Present. “Not at the Labour party conference. They’re not ready for indie yet.”
Nadiya Hussain had to coach her family to keep her Great British Bake Off win quiet
Interview by Homa Khaleeli, 13 October
Keeping her win a secret was very difficult. Because the show is pre-recorded, her husband, sisters, mother and father (who were seen jumping in the air with joy when the result was announced) were all sworn to secrecy. Did her children manage it? “My kids needed the least coaching,” she says, mock-horrified at their ability to dissemble. “They took it in their stride. I said: ‘Never say: I can’t tell you – just say you don’t know.
“It was my dad I had to coach a lot. I said: ‘You have to work on your poker face. He said: ‘I gave you that face – you can’t hide a lie and nor can I.’ He literally stopped having people round in case they saw his face. He is probably the proudest man on earth right now.”
Vivienne Westwood enjoys visiting Julian Assange
Interview by Rebecca Nicholson, 21 September
“I go once a month. They give you such a nice cup of coffee at the Ecuadorian embassy. It’s really good. I pick his brains. I think he’s brilliant.”
Michel Houellebecq is “probably” Islamophobic
Interview by Angelique Chrisafis, 7 September
I ask him if, as he has been accused, he hates Islam. “I think about it very little,” he says. “Well, I suppose I thought about it a little more this time ...” he adds, trailing off.
After he was acquitted in court for saying Islam was “the stupidest religion”, has he changed his mind? “I don’t know if I’ve really changed my mind,” he says. “It’s true that reading the Qur’an is rather reassuring. So I said [when Submission came out in France] that I was reassured after having read the Qur’an. That said, maybe I hadn’t thought it through enough before saying that, because objectively, there’s just as little chance of Muslims reading the Qur’an as Christians reading the Bible. So what really counts in both cases is who is the clergy, or middleman, or interpreter. And in the case of Islam, that’s very open.”
Is he Islamophobic? “Yes, probably. One can be afraid,” he replies. I ask him again: you’re probably Islamophobic? “Probably, yes, but the word phobia means fear rather than hatred,” he says.
Harriet Harman didn’t want Margaret Thatcher to look at her child
Interview by Simon Hattenstone, 10 August
She wouldn’t have dreamed of socialising with her, she says. “Very early on, I brought in one of the babies to the Commons and I saw her at the other end of the corridor. She was bearing down on me with two adoring parliamentary private secretaries trotting at her side, and she looked as if she was going to come and admire the baby. I had this terrible feeling of thinking, ‘I don’t want her to look at the baby’, almost like one of those cartoons where the witch looks at the baby and the baby shrivels. I didn’t want my perfect baby to have Thatcher’s eyes upon him.” Did she hide her baby from Thatcher? “No, I just shot off down a side corridor. It was very visceral, very heartfelt.”
Blur’s Alex James is sick of that Cameron and Clarkson picture
Interview by Tim Jonze, 31 July
I feel bad asking James about the picture with Cameron and Clarkson, partly because he has been such good company – leaning back in his chair, regaling me with old Blur tales with a flourish of cigarette smoke – and partly because I see his face drop when I mention it.
“Oh, God. How long ago was it? Four years ago!” he says, before grimacing: “That picture will be on my fucking obituary, won’t it? I knew you were going to ask me about that fucking picture. Haven’t you fucking moved on? Jesus Christ ...”
He says he doesn’t regret the prime minister coming to his festival – Cameron is his local MP and he wanted all the big names there – and doesn’t understand why people assume he has turned Tory. “I’ve also spent the last 28 years as one-half of a rhythm section with a Labour party candidate ... and nobody assumes that means I’m a Labour voter.”
So did he vote Tory?
“Ummm ...” he gets up and paces the room. He sits down, then stands up again. He goes to make another coffee. “I really don’t want to talk about politics. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that, for anyone with a media profile, party politics is just completely toxic.” He allows himself a smile: “I remember speaking to [the band’s publicist] Regine after that photo was taken, and I said: ‘It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?’ and she said: ‘No, Alex, it’s a single-edged sword’ – it’s just bad. But I think the Guardian has had enough fun with that photo over the years and there are other things to talk about now.”
Were the band annoyed by it?
“No. Not at all. Dave and Graham were there when that picture was taken!”
Jeremy Corbyn claims Robert Kilroy-Silk pinned him to the wall
Interview by Simon Hattenstone, 17 June
“I had been on a programme on television the day before talking about why Militants shouldn’t be expelled from the Labour party. He thought they should, and he was extremely abusive, threw me against a wall in the voting lobby. His quote was: ‘I’m an amateur boxer, I can sort anybody out,’ and somebody said to me what do you do in your spare time, and I said: ‘I’m an amateur runner,’ which is true. I do enjoy running.” So did he run away? “No. I walked off. You can hardly run through the voting lobby. He thought it was a great triumph for his macho prowess.”
Sadiq Khan does standup comedy at Labour party functions
Interview by Simon Hattenstone, 1 June
What’s his best joke? “I went to hospital last week to meet the surgeons. I said: ‘What’s the easiest form of people to operate on? Surgeon One says: ‘The easiest form of people to operate on are accountants, because you slice them open and all their parts are numbered.’ Second surgeon goes: ‘No, actually you’re wrong, the easiest people to operate on are librarians because you cut them open and all their parts are in alphabetical order.’ Third surgeon goes: ‘No, you’re both wrong. The easiest people to operate on are politicians.’ I said: ‘Why?’ He goes: ‘Well, last week we had Jeremy Hunt in here and we sliced him open, and he was headless, heartless and gutless and his head and arse were interchangeable.’ Thank you. We’ve gotta go.”
Chris Rock is sad sometimes and divorce is hard
Interview by Hadley Freeman, 8 May
When news broke in December about Rock’s divorce, it felt oddly dispiriting: sure, he warned us all how tough marriage is, but it was hard not to hope that someone so attuned to its pitfalls might navigate them. How’s he been doing?
“I’m doing OK. You know, some days are better than others, some days you’re sad outta your fucking mind. But my daughters are good and I’m only an hour away. Two houses close by. It’s good,” he says, a little quieter than before.
Will he still talk about personal relationships now that his own situation has changed?
“Oh, totally! You learn more from failure than success, right. Everyone’s fair game and no one gets a pass.”
His fumbling steps back into the dating game could provide him with material. While he was being photographed he joked to the room, “I’ll be like, ‘What do you think of me?’ and she’ll be like, ‘I thought we were just going out for Mexican!’”
It is sometimes hard to know where you stand over a taco, I say.
“You do have to be careful when you make that turn [into making a declaration],” he laughs. “It feels like being the girl.”
Public Enemy’s Chuck D admires Kanye and Jay Z
Interview by Dorian Lynskey, 23 November
His main beef with modern hip-hop is simply that there are too many solo acts and not enough groups. “When I look at a guy like Kanye or Jay Z, the guys who are successful individuals, they’re fucking batty,” he says. “They’re out of their goddamn minds. They got no team. I’m a fan of Kanye’s rebellion. I’m not a fan of one-man teams as much. The thing that inspires me is I’m with my team. One person on stage, after 18 minutes they’d better be juggling lawnmowers or eating fire.”
RuPaul explained the power of drag
Interview by Rebecca Nicholson, 4 June
“People will never break their belief system because it’s too scary to look beyond what they were taught. That’s why in The Wizard of Oz she [Dorothy] says: ‘Why didn’t you tell me all I had to do was click my heels three times?’ Because you wouldn’t believe me. You had to go out there and own what it means to be a badass bitch.”
Van Morrison’s first ambition was to work with animals
Interview by Robin Denselow, 5 June
“When I was in school I wanted to be a vet, and one of the teachers said he thought I was going to be a singer. I sang at the school concert, and we had a skiffle group at school. He was going around the class, saying, ‘What are you going to be?’ and he pointed at me and said: ‘You’re going to be a singer, obviously.’ And I said: ‘Me?’ He knew more than I did.”
Keith Richards likes a quiet life at home
Interview by Alexis Petridis, 18 September
“I watch the wife garden. She loves to prune things sometimes, and I sort of sit there and go: ‘Oh, you missed a bit.’ I might get the hose out, do a bit of watering. God, I just do what any other old bloke does. I make sure the dogs are fed, I try to live as normally as possible.”
Producer Naughty Boy got his big break via a TV gameshow
Interview by Nosheen Iqbal, 1 October
A music and marketing dropout from London’s Guildhall University, he was delivering pizzas for Domino’s in 2007 when he appeared on Deal or No Deal and walked away with £44,000; the cash meant he could invest in equipment and a studio in the shed of his parents’ garden in Watford. “Half of Emeli’s [platinum-selling] album was recorded on a Dell PC in that shed.”
David Davis warned about government propaganda
Interview by Stephen Moss, 8 November
“The government had the most amazing propaganda blitz,” he says. “GCHQ had a three-day advertorial in the Times with gushing pieces from young journos, so we knew we were going to get some sort of heavy-duty spin on all of this, and the spin was in my direction – we’re going to be more transparent, we’re going to have more accountability, we’re going to bring in the judiciary, we’re going to limit it. All of it turns out to have been overstated. They’re making lots of rhetorical moves in the right direction, but the substance doesn’t add up. There are loads and loads of holes in it. My impression is they didn’t finish writing the bill until the day before they published it.”
Davis, who with Labour deputy leader Tom Watson mounted a successful legal challenge to controversial aspects of the 2014 act that currently governs the retention of communications data, is now readying himself to try to fill in those holes. But the problem for critics of the bill, he says, is that the public doesn’t care enough about encroachments on their freedom.
Rachel Dolezal lost her friends, but kept strong on her sense of self identity as a black woman
Interview by Chris McGreal, 13 December
Dolezal cannot find a job – she has spurned “unsavoury” offers to do reality television and porn – and is reduced to raising her teenage son on food stamps with a bit of hairdressing on the side. She has a baby on the way.
“I’m trying to regroup, rebuild, remember who I was before the frenzy. People telling me what to think, telling me what to do, telling me to go kill myself,” she says. “Locally, it feels like I am invisible. People don’t want to associate with me. This great leader that won all these awards no longer exists. It’s just like this disgust, and that was really hurtful, really hurtful.”
In the living room of her modest house in Spokane – still sporting the hair and skin tone, her “glow”, as she puts it, that so infuriated her critics – she weeps at what she regards as the injustice of the collective judgment against her. But Dolezal is not apologising for anything. She denies she lied to anyone. If people were confused, she says, it was because they didn’t ask the right questions. Above all, she remains firmly wedded to her insistence that she is black.
