It's been a while since we last talked, hasn't it? So let's have a little chat. Any subject(s) you like. I'll be hanging out in the comments box from now until Sunday night.

Considering her mother is Judy Garland and her half-sister is Liza Minnelli, I could be forgiven for expecting gushing over-exuberance and plenty of "fabulous, darling!" - but no. Instead, Lorna Luft turned out to be sensible, grounded, business-like, with no illusions - and equally, with no bitterness at being somewhat eclipsed by the showbiz legends within her family. Now read on...


(Photo of Lorna Luft taken at the Hollywood Bowl by npdxbear, September 23rd 2007.)

Tell us about your current tour, Songs My Mother Taught Me. I gather that this tells the story of your mother Judy Garland’s life in words and music?

Yes, it’s a two hour show of me telling you about my legacy. It uses screens; it has multimedia; there are stories; it’s how I grew up. It’s honest, which is why I think the audiences have been spectacular. They’ve laughed, they’ve cried; I wish I had the Kleenex concession! At Chichester, there were three standing ovations. I’m incredibly grateful. Someone said to me that “we were taken over the emotional runway of your life”.

Does the show deal with your own relationship with your mother?

Of course; that’s what it is. There’s a long medley at the end, which talks about how she grew up. But this is mainly about how I grew up.

Do we see and hear your mother on the screen? Are there duets?

Yes, there are. So it’s very personal, very funny… and I have a fantastic 11-piece orchestra.

Are all of the songs taken from your mother’s repertoire?

Yes, these are all her songs. It took me a very long time to do this – but then I don’t believe that you really get to know your mother or father until you’re in your forties. I don’t think you know them in your twenties or your thirties. In your forties, you’ve probably had children, and you’re at an age where you can look into your heritage, and really find out more and understand more about yourself. I’m 55 now, so it took me a long time.

I think there comes a time, especially if there was a difficult relationship, when you can see your parents through an adult’s eyes, and you’re prepared to give them a break. You stop being angry, and blaming them for things which you thought they hadn’t done right. You can see where the weaknesses may have come from.

I think you have more of an understanding, and I think in your forties you learn the most important lesson, and that is to forgive. You don’t need to forget; but you learn to forgive.

It’s one of the most empowering things you can do, as well. It sets you free.

Absolutely.

What personal qualities do you think you have inherited from your mother?

I know I’ve inherited her sense of humour. I’ve also inherited her work ethic. I show up on time; I hit the marks; I do the show at 110%. And that’s what she did. When she was on a stage, when she was on a movie set, when she was working: you saw 110%. And that’s something that’s lacking in today’s young artists. They have the opportunity sometimes to lip-synch, and a lot of artists today have the opportunity to get away with a lot of stuff that I find to be pretty shocking. I wouldn’t dare – dare! – subject an audience to it.

I’ve noticed that with some of the arena shows that I’ve seen. It can be surprising how many corners people will cut, and how much time they will spend off-stage.

Well, I was so pleased, because I just met this lovely, lovely girl, Melanie C. She invited me to the last Spice Girls concert at the O2. So I went, and I met all of the girls, and all of their families, and all of their kids – it was really lovely backstage. And I have to say that they gave 110%, and they were singing live, and it was so wonderful. It was absolutely great.

So there was a real warmth between them as individuals?

Yeah, and they did a whole tribute to their mothers. Melanie C even wrote me an e-mail the next day, saying “I thought you might like the show!” (Laughs)

That’s cool. So in what ways would you say you were most different from your mother?

I have a very good sense of reality. I really don’t like sycophants around me.

Was that a problem for her, do you think?

Oh yes. And I don’t like the people who come into my dressing room and start with all of the over-the-top praise. I shy away from that.

Maybe they think you have a more fragile ego than you actually do? They may think it’s required, in order to put you in a good place.

When my husband – who is also my musical director – comes in, he gives me notes. I appreciate that, because it means that I can improve. I don’t respect somebody who comes in and says that it was “the amazing thing I’ve ever seen”. That’s what’s different: I have a reality check. My manager was here earlier, and we had to go over some things. He knows: just cut to the chase. Just give me the bottom line of what’s going on, reality-wise. Then I can handle it. I’m not saying you have to be brutal or mean, but if you start to sugar-coat something then I’m going to see right through it.

I would imagine that the question that you’ve been asked most often in interviews over the years is whether you feel in the shadow of your mother. It must get tedious sometimes – but by doing this particular show, are you perhaps coming to terms with your position, as it relates to her legacy?

I would say that I was coming to terms with my legacy and celebrating it. It took me a long time to embrace it, to be grateful, and to say thank you, because I ran away from it for so long.

Until this morning, I had no idea that you went off and sang with Blondie…

Yeah! I died my hair purple, and sang rock and roll, and did all sorts of stuff. I sang on Dreaming, and I did a bunch of stuff on Eat to the Beat.

Dreaming is my favourite single of all time. In some ways, it captures everything about what it is to be a teenager.

She’s a lovely girl, Debbie Harry. She’s just a really really lovely, talented girl.

So you went kind of rock and roll for a while there?

Oh, I did everything. Everything that I could do to find my footing. The shadow was always there, and I kept trying to outrun it. But you’re not going to outrun your shadow. You’ve got to sit yourself down and say: I have to deal with this.

There has also been a renewed interest in your mother’s work, thanks to Rufus Wainwright’s exact re-creation of her 1961 Carnegie Hall show. Towards the end of his show, you guested on a couple of songs. Did you appear on every show of the tour?

We did New York, London, Paris, and L.A. together. Rufus is a very talented artist, and a very nice man. He and I talked at length, when he first wanted to do this, about what this all meant to him. He told me that it came from his heart, because of the despair and the depths of devastation that he felt after 9/11. He felt that he had really seen the horrors of what people could do to one another – and he put my mom’s Carnegie Hall album on, and it gave him hope.

Are there particular songs which stand out, which you think he does particularly well?

I think it’s more the feeling of the show. Vocally he’s not as strong, because he has his own vocal style and he’s not used to singing this kind of material. But the heart behind it is what stands out.

I think that’s true. I’ve heard the Carnegie Hall show that’s on the CD, and I’ve watched the London show that’s on the DVD, and he seems that much more polished by the time that we get to the London show. It’s a more controlled performance, but the emotion of the New York performance is also great to witness. I think that the song which really stands out for me is when he does Noel Coward’s If Love Were All. I think he was born to sing that. The whole show seems to lift at that point.

It’s also that he’s taking my mother’s name into pop culture. I think it’s really important that it goes on. The week after he did the Carnegie Hall show, my mother’s Carnegie Hall album spiked through the roof. There’s a whole new generation that maybe only knew her as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and didn’t know the performer – so they’ve now gone out and learned to appreciate the incredible live performer that she was.

What’s coming up for you after this tour finishes? What other projects have you got on the horizon?

I might go back to Los Angeles in mid-February. Around the 18th, I’m doing a concert with my friend Michael Feinstein in Palm Springs. After the concert, I’ll drive back to Los Angeles and get on a plane to Sydney. I’m going to Australia for about two weeks, on a promotional tour for the CD of Songs My Mother Taught Me. Then I come back, take a couple of weeks off, and then go back to Australia for two months, on tour.

Just missing their summer, unfortunately…

Listen: there’s a writers’ strike in Los Angeles, and there are so many people who are out of work. I am so grateful to be working. The other night, somebody looked at me and said “Ma’am, thank God you can sing!” (Laughs)

That’s really starting to bite now, is it? People are having difficulty getting the work?

What people don’t understand is that L.A. is a one-industry town. My friend Carol Thatcher took me to tea with her mom the other day, and Mrs. Thatcher and I were talking about the strike. I said that there was a trickle-down effect. When the writers walked out, the BBC and Sky news would say that “the writers are on strike”, but nobody ever understood that this has now cost L.A. over 300 million dollars. The make-up artists, the wardrobe people, and every single person that works on a television show now don’t have jobs.

Do the writers have a just cause?

Yeah! It’s all about downloading. You can download these television shows, and the writers aren’t getting paid! We knew that this strike was going to happen; we knew that the writers were not fooling around. They have said, over and over: we’re prepared to walk out for a year.

There has to come a point where someone’s got to start negotiating…

That’s what Mrs. Thatcher said! I said, Mrs Thatcher, nobody’s even talking to one another, and she said, oh, they can’t act like children!

But she was known as one of the toughest negotiators of all. It’s interesting that she was saying that’s what had to happen.

That’s what she said. And I said: you’re absolutely right. Carol Thatcher came to my show in Chichester. She’s a very smart, very bright, very well-read woman. And she said: well, this is just ridiculous.

You know, the trickle-down effect has even gotten to my daughter. My daughter, who’s seventeen, called me up before Christmas and said: Mom, I got a job in this big florists’ shop in Los Angeles, and I’m gonna make money for Christmas. She called me up two weeks later and said: Mom, I don’t have a job. I said: what happened? She said: all the Christmas parties were cancelled because of the strike.

Really? Wow, I hadn’t realised…

Think about it! All of the caterers, all of the limo drivers, and all of them – they don’t have jobs!

And is this damaging the cause for the writers? Are people beginning to turn against them, as their livelihoods are threatened?

I don’t know, but basically the producers have got to sit down with the writers. George Clooney said on television that they should lock them in a room, and not let them out until they come to an agreement. I’m with George Clooney! Lock ‘em in a room! Twelve Angry Men, I don’t care! Lock ‘em in a room!

Absolutely! I want Season Four of Desperate Housewives! It’s gone on too long!

Labels: celebs, eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

Well, this was an unexpected turn-up for the books! As I only had a couple of hours' notice of my interview with prog hero turned trance master Steve Hillage, I had to wing it somewhat - but Steve turned out to be a good egg, and I'm more than pleased with the results. Gong were my absolute favourite band in the universe when I was 12/13 years old, and I still enjoy their music to this day, so this was all a bit of a thrill...


(Photo of System 7 taken at the Glade Festival, Berkshire by louisiana, July 21st 2007.)

System 7’s latest album Phoenix, which was released at the beginning of last week, sounds like something of a concept album. Can you explain something about the concept?

It’s a special project for us. A few years ago, we met the daughter of one of the founding fathers of Japanese manga, which is a style of cartoon drawing that is related to the Japanese style of animated films. This gentleman who’s now deceased, was called Tezuka Osamu. He wrote many popular mangas, which have been very big hits in Japan and elsewhere. He also wrote some quite serious stuff, including a whole series of books called Phoenix, which is basically about the myth of the phoenix, but done in a sort of Asiatic way.

Rumiko Tezuka, his daughter, is a fan of System 7. She came to see us, and said that she thought our music was perfect to go with these phoenix stories. So we were interested in checking them out. She lent us some translations, and we were just blown away by these stories, and the designs, and the pictures, and all the various concepts involved. So we decided we’d like to base a whole System 7 album around it.

Does that mean that there’s quite a lot of vocal work on the album? I think of you more as an instrumental act.

There are a few little snatches of vocals, but it’s mostly instrumental. The CD comes with a 12-page booklet, which gives a lot of background information on how the music fits with the visuals.

Looking at your list of collaborators, there are some familiar names. There’s Jam El Mar from Jam & Spoon…

Yeah, Jam’s become a really good friend of ours. We’re doing more things with him.

I linked him to a much more commercial version of techno and trance than the stuff that you do, but maybe that’s going back a few years. I remember Jam & Spoon having some quite Euro-y hits.

No, Jam & Spoon are above all that. They were like founding fathers. They were doing trance before the term was even coined. They’ve done some absolute classic records that everybody loves, including one particular track called Stella. We actually did a kind of chilled out, flamenco-influenced cover of it on our Mirror System album, a few years ago. Jam really liked what we did on that, and said that he wanted to work with us.

You’ve also got Eat Static on the album, and you’ve got Daevid Allen, who you played with in Gong over thirty years ago. What’s his contribution?

We’ve had a big coming together with Daevid recently, particularly because we did a whole three-day Gong event in November 2006 in Amsterdam. We played various different sets together, including some of the older stuff, and we also played some System 7. We had one track that we were playing around with for the Phoenix album, which had a vocal line from an old Gong track, and we asked Daevid what he thought about it. He thought it was great, so he came down and added extra bits. He did some wild guitar, added extra vocals, and it was great.

What was the specific Gong track?

It’s a riff called “I am, you are, we are CRAZY…”

Oh, from Flying Teapot, yes. Wonderful!

We’ve basically done a techno version of that.

I have to hear this.

It’s great! Daevid came down the studio, and sang it again, and then he played his special glissando guitar. We’re big mates with Daevid at the moment, and there’ll be more things.

That’s good to hear. I’ve been going through a kind of Gong revival phase. I bought You on CD a couple of months ago, and I’ve been playing it a lot. There are tracks like A Sprinkling of Clouds, which does seem to hint at things to come, and the work that you’re doing now; it’s quite an electronic, trancey track.

Absolutely. For us, it’s all been one big progression, you know?

Well, some people might find it strange that you’ve journeyed from progressive rock to ambient techno, but it seems to me that there are a lot of common elements.

I sometimes question the use of the word “progressive”. (Laughs)

Why?

For me, “progressive”, if it means anything at all, it means the inclination to innovate and experiment. But for many people, it’s a very conservative concept. It means a specific style of music that happened at a specific time in the 1970s, and they’ve become very conservative. So I question the use of the word “progressive” in that sense.

I suppose that it all began to sour when people started codifying it, and saying: this is progressive, this is not. It got kind of fossilised.

Absolutely. I mean, we never considered what we were doing as “progressive rock”. We didn’t mind the use of the term “psychedelic”. That’s OK, and that applies to a lot of dance music as well.

Was there a moment of epiphany, where you suddenly got the point of dance music from the starting point of not getting it at all?

No, we were involved with dance music in the Seventies. We watched the whole thing grow. It grew up around us, and there was a point where the urge to actually make a dance-based project was irresistible. But this was in 1989, so it was quite a long while ago.

Your other main area of musical activity has been with Rachid Taha. I saw you perform with him in Leicester, three years ago, on the African Soul Rebels tour; Tinariwen and Daara J were on the same bill. Is that an ongoing partnership at the moment?

Yeah, I first worked with Rachid in 1983, and I’ve done nine albums with him. I’m not doing much with him at the moment, but I’m sure there’ll be more things to come in the future.

Does that involve adopting a very different approach to when you’re working on System 7 material? Do you have to change into a different headspace?

Not really. I mean, Rachid’s quite into System 7, you know? He’s been down to quite a lot of System 7 gigs over the years. I think that Rachid and I get on well because we’re very cross-genre sort of people. We like all different types of music.

The last few years have been amazing for African music, and for Northern and Western African music in particular. But I think that some Western audiences get a bit hung up on purity, whereas there should be a lot of scope for European and American acts to collaborate with African acts, or to learn from them. Would you agree?

(Laughs) It’s another variety of this musical conservatism which I mentioned in connection with progressive rock. Another variety of this conservatism inhabits the world of so-called “world music”. But Rachid hates the term “world music”.

Well, it was invented as a marketing term: as somewhere to put the stuff in record shops.

There’s a purpose to it in that sense, but it’s also a bit like a kind of ghetto, you know?

People can apply the wrong criteria, because they have this idealised version of, I dunno, “tribal” music, done in a very “authentic” way. But I think the reality is more complicated than that.

The thing is, people in all parts of the world have got the Internet; they listen to CDs; they go to discotheques. If we’re talking “world music”, that’s what world music is. Rap music and dance music are all over the world, and it’s what people growing up in Africa and Asia and South America listen to. Then they want to do stuff with those beats. But they also come from a certain culture, so they want to blend it with their own traditional things as well. It’s happening all over the world. It’s the way it is; it’s the 21st century thing. So for Westerners to make some kind of stipulation that so-called “pure” world music has to be acoustic and tribal and not using any kind of programming or anything, it’s a bit like colonialism, you know? Like apartheid: we can have all the technology in our society, but they’re not allowed to have it.

That’s right, it’s kind of patronising. Put on your robes, and sit outside your tent with your kora!

They might end up as rich as us, and we can’t have that, can we? It’s like bloody colonialism! Like the colonial wars we have, and our colonial invasion of Iraq. But it’s straight out of the 19th century. And that Tony Blair, he’ll walk around with a pith helmet with fins on it, and a big moustache, like Lord f---ing Kitchener – beg your pardon, not for the radio…

(Laughs) It’s alright, it’s for the newspaper, you can swear as much as you like.

Well, I hope you understand my point.

I do take your point; I quite agree, actually.

But I do like really rootsy traditional stuff as well, and so does Rachid. We’ve got very wide taste.

Do you get similar notions of purism in the world of techno and dance music? Do you have to stand your ground against techno purists?

Yup! Less so these days. Just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve made a bit of a breakthrough, particularly in the download area. There’s a specialist dance music download site called Beatport that dominates the scene, a bit like how iTunes dominates the mainstream scene, and we’ve had a lot of action there with our new tracks. We’re Number One in their main chart, with the Dubfire mix of our single Space Bird. And our album tracks are in the various genre charts, which is great, because we’ve got stuff in all different genres. We’ve got stuff in the techno chart, the progressive house chart, the psy-trance chart, the chillout chart – and that’s really System 7, you know? That’s where we always say we are in the dance music world. As we say on our Myspace page, our style hovers between techno, progressive house and psy-trance.

Did you say a Dubfire remix? Is that the guy from Deep Dish?

Yes. Oh, we love him. He told us that he’s been wanting to do a System 7 mix for a long time. We sent him this track, and he loved it.

Turning to the forthcoming tour, what sort of line-up will be appearing on stage?

Well, it’s basically me and Miquette, and on the gigs where Eat Static are there, they might join in for the track that we did with them on our album, which is called Wolf-Head. And also Slackbaba, another gentleman who’s on some of the gigs, might be collaborating on our set. It’s all fundamentally Miquette and myself, and a bunch of technology, and my guitar. But we’re using some new equipment on this tour; it’s going to be a bit different from our previous gigs. We’ve been trying it out, and it’s better.

What’s the balance between pre-recorded and live?

Well, obviously some stuff is pre-programmed. It has to be, because we’re not people with twenty arms. But I think that System 7 are about as live as it gets with techno music. A lot of what you hear is actually being played by us, with our fingers, on instruments. That’s one of the things that makes our live show quite special. We’ve been working on ways to fit electric guitar with techno music for getting on for twenty years now, and we’ve got pretty good at it.

I would imagine you get a very diverse audience at your gigs: everyone from young clubbers to old proggers. Do they find a common cause?

Yeah, if they like System 7, that’s their common cause! Jolly good, you know?

It seems to me that you’ve always been motivated by a certain strain of idealism, and it sounds like it hasn’t dimmed or altered much over the years. Do you still abide by the same sort of ideals and values that were motivating you thirty years ago?

Pretty much. I mean, I wouldn’t like to think I was fossilised; I like to keep an open mind. But my overall view of the world hasn’t shifted massively. The main thing is that our music has evolved. We don’t sing; we don’t do lyrics any more; we try and put it in the sound, and the music, and the beats. We still seek to elevate people. That’s what I think is one of the main functions of music, and we take that function on whole-heartedly. We enjoy it, and we think that if we’re enjoying it then everybody else will. If we get elevated by it, everyone else will.

Well, I’m gutted that I can’t come and see you on the 15th.

Oh, come!

I’m out of town. I’ve got to visit my aunty! It’s really bad timing.

Well, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!

Afraid so. Just one final question: like every hack in a hurry, I went to your Wikipedia page. I wasn’t sure whether it was someone on Wikipedia having a laugh, but did you really compose the theme tune to Channel 4’s Friday Night Project?

Channel 4’s Friday Night Project have used a fragment of one of our tracks. They’ve licensed it, and we’ve earned a considerable amount of money. So long may they continue to use it, because they keep paying!

Labels: eveningpost, interviews, popmusic

Is the world ready for yet another "new Amy Winehouse"? In these current Adele/Duffy dominated times, perhaps not quite yet - but it's hardly Gabreilla Cilmi's fault that vocally, she happens to be a dead ringer for everyone's favourite "troubled" diva.

Displaying an astonishing maturity for her sixteen years, this Australian singer-songwriter turned in a polished, practised set, mixing original compositions such as forthcoming single Sweet About Me with a sprightly, soulful cover of Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head. Although currently best known for her version of Echo Beach, as featured on the ITV drama series of the same name, there are already clear signs of a major marketing push, which may well establish her before the year is through.

There's a certain Smug Middle Class Dinner Party element to some of Nouvelle Vague's bossa nova reworkings of post-punk classics, which can frankly be a bit off-putting. Towards the start of their set, this element was very much at the forefront, leaving one wondering how soon the joke was going to wear thin.

Thankfully, as lightweight crowd pleasers such as Ever Fallen In Love and Blue Monday gave way to lesser known material, and as the band switched from pure bossa nova to a more rock based approach, the inherent darkness of the material came more to the forefront, and an altogether more satisfying experience began to emerge. Tackling One Hundred Years - possibly the bleakest song that The Cure have ever recorded ("It doesn't matter if we all die") - was a bold move, and a risk which paid off artistically, even if it failed to quell the increasingly irritating chatter from the dinner party brigade towards the back of the venue.

The four piece band was fronted by two new singers, Nadeah and Marianne, each radiating a strangely off-kilter kind of glamour: arch, arresting, and über-cool. In the middle of the Dead Kennedys' Too Drunk To F***, Nadeah jumped off the stage, tore through the crowd and sprang onto the bar, where she strutted precariously in a parody of wasted inebriation. Having secured a full pint of lager from the bar staff, she was back on stage in seconds, with barely a drop spilt. You simply had to admire the woman's style.

While as yet unreleased covers of Devo's Girl You Want and Richard Hell's Blank Generation (done as a jazzy strut, with liberal lashings of ennui) drew favourable receptions, the biggest cheers of the night went to The Clash's Guns Of Brixton and Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, the latter showing clear signs of turning into a Nottingham anthem by proxy. (Well, we've all seen Control, haven't we?) Its reception - and the massed singalong, which continued even after the band left the stage - seemed to take the band by surprise, but they capitalised on the moment magnificently, returning after only a couple of minutes, and picking up the song where they left off. Never was an "encore" more deserving of its name.

Labels: eveningpost, gigs, popmusic