Latest news with #ArsenicandOldLace
The Age
04-07-2025
- The Age
When the proof is in the pudding – culinary mysteries through the ages
Since Shakespeare's Hamlet we have been a little fascinated by poisonings. Victims include Cleopatra, Hitler, Socrates, Rasputin and Phar Lap. Russian dissidents have been killed with the prod of a poisoned umbrella. Spies carry decoding devices and cyanide pills. Even Winston Churchill purportedly dabbled in the field. When Lady Astor remarked, 'If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee,' Churchill responded, 'If I were married to you, I'd drink it.' In Japan, the deadly fugu fish is a delicacy that can only be prepared by licensed chefs. I'll stick to the tinned tuna. In Australia, no one has died consuming our local delicacy – the dim sim. Although it didn't do Normie Lee much good. Normie was a member of the Great Bookie Robbery Gang and he also owned a dim sim factory. He was shot dead by the Special Operations Group in 1992 when he was pulling a million dollar stick-up at Melbourne Airport. Lee's co-offender Stephen Asling, who would later become a hitman, once became upset when a Chinatown restaurant refused to open when he wanted a post-nightclub snack. When he kicked in the door the chef presented not with fortune cookies but a meat cleaver, chopping at Asling's foot as if it were an errant Peking duck. When they presented at the same hospital they jumped from their trolleys to resume hostilities. MSG will do that. So why are we so fascinated by poisoning cases? The black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, the story of two elderly women who poisoned 11 lonely old men to 'end their suffering,' was a hit play turned into a hit movie. There was one case that took 17 years to resolve. John Moss, a Bendigo meat worker, first became ill in 1978. Five times he was hospitalised, making partial recoveries, before relapsing. It took him six years to die and by the time doctors found the cause it was too late. His wife, Lorraine, cared for him when he was released from hospital, feeding him home-cooked meals and taking him to the local pub in a wheelchair when he was too weak to walk. In August 1983, doctors took nail and hair samples to test for lead and arsenic poisoning. The results were lost for a time with Austin Hospital staff finally receiving them on January 12, 1984. Moss, 38, died the next day. The tests showed he had 80 times the normal level of arsenic. Believing there was a 15-year statute of limitations for murder, Lorraine made a half-baked confession to her daughter. Seventeen years after Moss' death, Lorraine was charged with murder and eventually sentenced to 18 years' jail. The homicide detective who charged her, Jack Jacobs, said, 'It was a case of cold-blooded torture. 'She always offered us a cup of tea. I always made sure I never took it,' Jacobs said. There has long been an interest with infamous last meals, with websites dedicated to what American serial killers order before their executions. John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection for committing 33 murders. His last feed was a dozen fried shrimp, a bucket of original recipe KFC, fries and strawberries. Just before triple murderer Allen Lee Davis was sent to the electric chair in Florida he ordered lobster tails, fried potatoes, fried shrimp, fried clams, half a loaf of garlic bread, and nearly a litre of root beer. Clearly cholesterol was no longer an issue. Ever since Eve tempted Adam with an apple, food and mysteries have been partners in crime, particularly in Melbourne's fruit and vegetable industry. Our introduction to organised crime was the 1963-64 market murders – a power struggle for control over industry kickbacks. Four men were shot, including Honoured Society leader Vincenzo Muratore, blasted with a double-barrelled shotgun as he left his Hampton home for Victoria Market. Loading More than 20 years later the syndicate was demanding a payment of 50 cents per case of produce even from the biggest retailers, with Coles paying $6 million a year. In 1992 Vincenzo Muratore's son Alphonso met with Coles Myer representatives in the hotel Parkroyal in Little Collins Street to explain the system and offer an alternative. Two weeks later Muratore was murdered – outside his Hampton home on his way to the market – a replica of his father's 1964 murder. In prison where hard men have too much time on their hands, grudges can be deadly. In 1975 standover man Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read was entrusted with the job of collecting 60 cooked sausages to be distributed – two to each inmate as a Christmas treat. Sadly, Read arrived empty-handed with suggestions he had eaten the lot, an allegation he dismissed as 'foul gossip and rumour'. It sparked the H-Division 'Great Sausage War' that lasted five years and resulted in 60 attacks and 11 attempted murders. According to Chopper, the most deadly food in H Division was a vegetable curry made by Russell Cox who spent 11 years on the run after escaping from NSW. According to Read the curry was so hot it could blow a hole in a bluestone wall. Melbourne's underbelly war was often linked to the culinary arts. Alphonse Gangitano (killed in 1998) was known as The Black Prince of Lygon Street; Michael Marshall (2003) was killed outside his hot dog van; Willie Thompson (2003) was a lollipop salesman; Lewis Moran (2004) was killed at the Brunswick Club near bar snacks; Flower Drum regular Graham Kinniburgh was shot outside his Kew home in 2003; and Des Tuppence Moran (2009) was killed at his favourite café. And hitman Andrew Veniamin was killed (in self-defence) by Melbourne identity Mick Gatto in a Carlton restaurant in 2004. When it comes to underbelly and food in your belly, no one topped former suburban pizza shop owner turned drug boss Tony Mokbel. At his Boronia pizza shop the favourite was Number 15, Tony's Special – tomato, cheese, ham, bacon, onions and egg. Once his favourite meal from Sopranos Restaurant (naturally) was an upmarket version of surf and turf – a medium-rare eye fillet steak topped with fresh shrimp and smoked salmon. Loading Soprano's manager Frank Sarkis said, 'He came for breakfast, lunch and dinner.' He also ordered in. Sarkis said, 'Money was no object. He'd regularly spend $200 a night on pizza and pasta. The staff cried (when Tony jumped bail). He was a big tipper [in] $100 bills.' Visiting a mate in the Melbourne Custody Centre he peeled off $350, persuading a guard to nip up to a North Melbourne Italian restaurant to pick-up 40 gourmet pizzas and soft drinks (anchovies make you thirsty) for inmates and staff. His love of fast food went as far as looking after a mate, Paul Howden, who took the fall when police discovered a $78 million lab owned by the Mokbels. While Howden was doing time in a country prison Tony would drive there to shout Paul a big feed of McDonald's. Howden passed away from a heart attack at the age 36. Perhaps the Filet-O-Fish would have been a better option. When Greg Lynn was arrested in the bush by the Special Operations Group in November 2021 for the murders of high-country campers Russell Hill and Carol Clay (he was convicted of Clay and acquitted of Hill) he was cooking a meal on his open fire.
Sydney Morning Herald
04-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
When the proof is in the pudding – culinary mysteries through the ages
Since Shakespeare's Hamlet we have been a little fascinated by poisonings. Victims include Cleopatra, Hitler, Socrates, Rasputin and Phar Lap. Russian dissidents have been killed with the prod of a poisoned umbrella. Spies carry decoding devices and cyanide pills. Even Winston Churchill purportedly dabbled in the field. When Lady Astor remarked, 'If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee,' Churchill responded, 'If I were married to you, I'd drink it.' In Japan, the deadly fugu fish is a delicacy that can only be prepared by licensed chefs. I'll stick to the tinned tuna. In Australia, no one has died consuming our local delicacy – the dim sim. Although it didn't do Normie Lee much good. Normie was a member of the Great Bookie Robbery Gang and he also owned a dim sim factory. He was shot dead by the Special Operations Group in 1992 when he was pulling a million dollar stick-up at Melbourne Airport. Lee's co-offender Stephen Asling, who would later become a hitman, once became upset when a Chinatown restaurant refused to open when he wanted a post-nightclub snack. When he kicked in the door the chef presented not with fortune cookies but a meat cleaver, chopping at Asling's foot as if it were an errant Peking duck. When they presented at the same hospital they jumped from their trolleys to resume hostilities. MSG will do that. So why are we so fascinated by poisoning cases? The black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace, the story of two elderly women who poisoned 11 lonely old men to 'end their suffering,' was a hit play turned into a hit movie. There was one case that took 17 years to resolve. John Moss, a Bendigo meat worker, first became ill in 1978. Five times he was hospitalised, making partial recoveries, before relapsing. It took him six years to die and by the time doctors found the cause it was too late. His wife, Lorraine, cared for him when he was released from hospital, feeding him home-cooked meals and taking him to the local pub in a wheelchair when he was too weak to walk. In August 1983, doctors took nail and hair samples to test for lead and arsenic poisoning. The results were lost for a time with Austin Hospital staff finally receiving them on January 12, 1984. Moss, 38, died the next day. The tests showed he had 80 times the normal level of arsenic. Believing there was a 15-year statute of limitations for murder, Lorraine made a half-baked confession to her daughter. Seventeen years after Moss' death, Lorraine was charged with murder and eventually sentenced to 18 years' jail. The homicide detective who charged her, Jack Jacobs, said, 'It was a case of cold-blooded torture. 'She always offered us a cup of tea. I always made sure I never took it,' Jacobs said. There has long been an interest with infamous last meals, with websites dedicated to what American serial killers order before their executions. John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection for committing 33 murders. His last feed was a dozen fried shrimp, a bucket of original recipe KFC, fries and strawberries. Just before triple murderer Allen Lee Davis was sent to the electric chair in Florida he ordered lobster tails, fried potatoes, fried shrimp, fried clams, half a loaf of garlic bread, and nearly a litre of root beer. Clearly cholesterol was no longer an issue. Ever since Eve tempted Adam with an apple, food and mysteries have been partners in crime, particularly in Melbourne's fruit and vegetable industry. Our introduction to organised crime was the 1963-64 market murders – a power struggle for control over industry kickbacks. Four men were shot, including Honoured Society leader Vincenzo Muratore, blasted with a double-barrelled shotgun as he left his Hampton home for Victoria Market. Loading More than 20 years later the syndicate was demanding a payment of 50 cents per case of produce even from the biggest retailers, with Coles paying $6 million a year. In 1992 Vincenzo Muratore's son Alphonso met with Coles Myer representatives in the hotel Parkroyal in Little Collins Street to explain the system and offer an alternative. Two weeks later Muratore was murdered – outside his Hampton home on his way to the market – a replica of his father's 1964 murder. In prison where hard men have too much time on their hands, grudges can be deadly. In 1975 standover man Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read was entrusted with the job of collecting 60 cooked sausages to be distributed – two to each inmate as a Christmas treat. Sadly, Read arrived empty-handed with suggestions he had eaten the lot, an allegation he dismissed as 'foul gossip and rumour'. It sparked the H-Division 'Great Sausage War' that lasted five years and resulted in 60 attacks and 11 attempted murders. According to Chopper, the most deadly food in H Division was a vegetable curry made by Russell Cox who spent 11 years on the run after escaping from NSW. According to Read the curry was so hot it could blow a hole in a bluestone wall. Melbourne's underbelly war was often linked to the culinary arts. Alphonse Gangitano (killed in 1998) was known as The Black Prince of Lygon Street; Michael Marshall (2003) was killed outside his hot dog van; Willie Thompson (2003) was a lollipop salesman; Lewis Moran (2004) was killed at the Brunswick Club near bar snacks; Flower Drum regular Graham Kinniburgh was shot outside his Kew home in 2003; and Des Tuppence Moran (2009) was killed at his favourite café. And hitman Andrew Veniamin was killed (in self-defence) by Melbourne identity Mick Gatto in a Carlton restaurant in 2004. When it comes to underbelly and food in your belly, no one topped former suburban pizza shop owner turned drug boss Tony Mokbel. At his Boronia pizza shop the favourite was Number 15, Tony's Special – tomato, cheese, ham, bacon, onions and egg. Once his favourite meal from Sopranos Restaurant (naturally) was an upmarket version of surf and turf – a medium-rare eye fillet steak topped with fresh shrimp and smoked salmon. Loading Soprano's manager Frank Sarkis said, 'He came for breakfast, lunch and dinner.' He also ordered in. Sarkis said, 'Money was no object. He'd regularly spend $200 a night on pizza and pasta. The staff cried (when Tony jumped bail). He was a big tipper [in] $100 bills.' Visiting a mate in the Melbourne Custody Centre he peeled off $350, persuading a guard to nip up to a North Melbourne Italian restaurant to pick-up 40 gourmet pizzas and soft drinks (anchovies make you thirsty) for inmates and staff. His love of fast food went as far as looking after a mate, Paul Howden, who took the fall when police discovered a $78 million lab owned by the Mokbels. While Howden was doing time in a country prison Tony would drive there to shout Paul a big feed of McDonald's. Howden passed away from a heart attack at the age 36. Perhaps the Filet-O-Fish would have been a better option. When Greg Lynn was arrested in the bush by the Special Operations Group in November 2021 for the murders of high-country campers Russell Hill and Carol Clay (he was convicted of Clay and acquitted of Hill) he was cooking a meal on his open fire.
Chicago Tribune
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Elmwood Park's Jordan Arredondo brings a lifetime of acting experience to the stage at Steppenwolf
Jordan Arredondo was in third grade when he first realized that he loved being onstage. The 30-year-old Elmwood Park resident has been nurturing that love ever since with a career that includes performing with some of Chicago's most prestigious theater companies. His latest is a role in Steppenwolf Theatre Company's Chicago premiere of 'You Will Get Sick' by Noah Diaz, running through July 20. While Arredondo was growing up in unincorporated Leyden Township near Franklin Park, he performed in that first show — an elementary school musical, 'It's Saturday.' 'It was very, very fun,' he recalled. 'I got so excited and it didn't feel scary.' He decided, 'I can get down with this because I do this by myself in my room with my toys.' Arredondo admitted that his parents didn't necessarily expect that experience would lead him to a career in the arts. 'My dad was very excited about the potential for having a sports son,' he said. Arredondo performed onstage all four of the years that he attended West Leyden High School. 'I started with plays and then slowly got roped into musicals even though I wasn't fully wanting to do those,' he said. 'That was my little segway into the choir in high school as well.' The actor had high praise for choir director Stacy Cunningham and her influence on him. 'She really instilled a lot of love for the arts in me,' he explained. 'She took us to a bunch of shows. And also instilled a very good hard work ethic.' One of his favorite roles at West Leyden was playing Dr. Herman Einstein during his freshman year in a production of 'Arsenic and Old Lace.' 'I had never auditioned for a play before that,' Arredondo said. 'The farcical aspect of that show was so fun to do.' He particularly enjoyed doing the part with a German accent. Arredondo credited his high school teacher Mark Bernstein, who directed him in several shows, with encouraging him to pursue a professional acting career. 'He saw something that I was not super aware of at the time,' Arredondo observed. He decided to attend the University of Illinois Chicago where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in acting. Arredondo's first professional production was playing the role of Lucky in 'Waiting for Godot' with Tympanic Theatre in 2017. 'The director had a very fun twist on it,' Arredondo recalled. 'We had just come out of the 2016 election. He placed it at the border and the cast was all Latino. We were able to try anything. That was a really fun and wonderful way to enter the professional world.' He fondly recalled his experience playing the role of Oscar in 'Sweat' at Paramount Theatre in Aurora in 2022. 'Something clicked there for myself and my family,' he recalled. 'I felt I had found a character connected to me as a person. You feel like all the training that you have done finally becomes an unconscious competence situation — something so ingrained in you.' Arredondo has been in a number of high-profile musicals, including 'In the Heights' at Marriott Theatre, 'Grease' at Drury Lane Theatre,' and 'Fun Home' at Paramount Theatre, among others. To prepare for these roles, the actor has been taking vocal training since graduating from college in 2017. He also praised the help he received by working with music directors on those projects. 'I have taken some dance lessons,' he added. 'I intend to still get better at dance.' He particularly loved the production of 'In the Heights' at Marriott last year, where he played Sonny. 'That production changed my life in so many ways,' he declared. 'It was a production I'd been chasing for a while, and the stars aligned. That was a show where I could bring so much of my acting training into it and go really deep into the characters and the situation. It was so wonderful to do that show in a community where that show had never been done.' That's also where Arredondo met his future wife, Addie Morales. They will be married in August. Even though he has had great experiences in musicals, Arredondo admitted that he prefers performing in plays. 'It's where I got my training in high school,' he explained. 'It's where I found a deeper love for what we do.' His latest project, 'You Will Get Sick,' by Noah Diaz, at Steppenwolf Theatre through July 20, is a play in which the actor takes the role of #5. 'All the actors are labeled numbers 1 through 5,' Arredondo said. '5 for most of the show is the voice that you'll be hearing — the narration.' He is enjoying the challenge of this role — but he can't explain why without giving away too much. You'll have to see the show to understand. For details, visit To unwind, Arredondo likes to hang around with his dog Liora, watch films and TV shows, and go to the movies. 'I'm also a big hotdog connoisseur,' he revealed. Arredondo is convinced that he made the right career choice. 'More and more I find comfort and a home on the stage,' he declared.
The Guardian
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pink smoke, pigs and Pixar: a dozen movie Easter eggs to feast on
One of Hollywood's most durable Easter eggs debuted in Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940) when Cary Grant's character says: 'The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat!' And in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) his character sits pensively in a cemetery where Archie Leach's gravestone is to be seen. In Charles Crichton's A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese's character is called Archie Leach. Leach is, of course, the real name of Cary Grant – a very goofy and unglamorous sounding name compared with the sonorous 'Cary Grant' – and a rare example of Hollywood alluding to the open secret of rebranding its stars and effacing the bland ordinariness of their origins. Peter Bradshaw My children dragged me to A Minecraft Movie recently. Packed screening. Loads of kids. A little way into the film, a pig crossed the screen wearing a crown, and a collective 'Awww' rose from the audience. For the life of me I couldn't understand why, and then my 10-year-old leaned over and explained it. The pig was the profile picture of Technoblade, a wildly influential Minecraft YouTuber who died in 2022. It was a sweet touch, both acknowledging Technoblade and the importance of the wider YouTube community to the game's success. Didn't like the film, but it was a nice touch. Stuart Heritage I'm a sucker for a fake trailer – the most delectable of ways the movie industry can disappear up its own fundament. So while the ones for the ecclesiastical Brokeback Mountain, AKA Satan's Alley, from Tropic Thunder and Edgar Wright's faux Britsploitation horror Don't, from Grindhouse, occasionally pop up in my head, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger's Hamlet from 1993's Last Action Hero that lives there rent-free. As 90s Hollywood was getting hip to postmodernism, this is a perfectly executed mashup of high and low culture, with the meathead as an Uzi-toting sweet prince, his payoff lines burning as bright as his stogie tip: 'Not to be!' And now surely the time is right for Arnie's Lear: 'As flies to wanton badasses are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport!' Phil Hoad Last Action Hero is a parody of the action genre so crammed with indiscriminate references to other films it's virtually one Easter egg after another. Mainstream audiences would have recognised nods to Basic Instinct, Amadeus, The Seventh Seal (already parodied in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey) et al, but are less likely to have clocked the screenwriters' homage to Akira Kurosawa's High and Low (1963). Alas, Arnold Schwarzenegger spotting the telltale pink smoke produced by incinerated banknotes somehow lacks the impact of Kurosawa's burning briefcases sending pink smoke into a grey sky, the only touch of colour in an otherwise black and white film. Anne Billson My childhood spanned the golden Pixar era: I was six when Toy Story came out and 20 by Up. I knew their films were different from other kids' fare because my grownup relatives loved them (Toy Story was my grandpa's favourite film). An ITV documentary on the making of 2001's Monsters, Inc. taught me why. It introduced me to the concept of Easter eggs: how the studio loved to reference itself and, moreover, cinema history. The rotund green monster Mike Wazowski and his snake-haired girlfriend Celia Mae go on a date to the restaurant Harryhausen's, which the doc revealed was named after Jason and the Argonauts animator Ray Harryhausen – something I knew nothing about aged 12. When you're young, films feel like closed worlds designed just for you. The realisation that they were actually part of a vast history, and that they contained layers below the surface, made me gawp, and I'm certain it stoked the interest in learning how things are made that I now get to pursue for a living. Laura Snapes I adored last year's film adaptation of Wicked – to the bafflement of a number of my friends and colleagues, who had found the film long, confusing and generally 'a bit much'. Which I get. Because if you weren't a musicals-obsessed seven-year-old when the original production became the latest Broadway sensation, I appreciate that the film might not have hit in quite the same way. But Wicked was unapologetically a film for the fans, and the breathless excitement of my seven-year-old self was awakened when Broadway's original Elphaba, every 00s theatre kid's icon Idina Menzel, sings the famous 'ah-ah-ah-ah' run of notes from Defying Gravity in her cameo appearance. It's testament to Cynthia Erivo's talent that when at the end of the film she sings them again, in their proper place, they're just as arresting. Lucy Knight Predator 2 – Stephen Hopkins' urban sequel to John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger's arboreal shoot-em-up – is a far more interesting film than it's often given credit for. It isn't a patch on the peerless original, of course, and only the maniacal would claim otherwise. But Danny Glover's haggard and really quite terrified detective is a far more interesting protagonist than an invincible bodybuilder brandishing a gun the size of his own leg, and the film is content, for better and worse, to do its own thing, critics be damned. One of its finest diversions from the first movie comes at the climax, when Glover's Lieutenant Harrigan finds himself aboard the extraterrestrial game hunter's spaceship. There, he discovers a wall festooned with trophies from the beast's previous hunts, and given centre stage is the ossified, banana-like skull of a xenomorph, the acid-blooded chief biters of the Alien franchise. This brief nod implied a vast, shared cinematic universe before such things were drearily commonplace, and suggested that one day we would see these two enthusiasts of gory space violence face off. Sadly, that dream was infinitely preferable to the reality of the two Alien vs. Predator films that resulted, which are only slightly less unpleasant than slamming your fingers in a door. But let's just forget about those. Luke Holland My favourite Spielberg Easter egg is in virtually every summer film of his, from Duel through Jurassic Park: his monster-in-the-rearview-mirror shot. You may remember it best from Close Encounters: Richard Dreyfuss waves on the lights he sees in his rearview mirror only for them to go up and over his truck. Dreyfuss said he could hear the audience react when he read that in the script. But ideally the two bodies, pursuer and pushed, are in motion: Indy using his rvm to spy a Nazi climbing along the side of his truck in Raiders, Dennis Weaver doing the same for the monster truck in Duel, or Bob Peck spying a T rex catching up with his 4x4 in Jurassic Park. Spielberg even includes the warning 'objects may be closer than they appear'. The visceral intent of every chase scene of his in just seven words. Tom Shone Admittedly, 'what a clever nod to Colin Firth/Mark Darcy' wasn't my first reaction when Leo Woodall emerged from the pool in a soaking wet white shirt in Bridget Jones 4. But I did appreciate the nostalgia for fans who have loved Bridge for 25 years. It wasn't the only thing that brought back the best memories with our favourite spinster: blue string soup cocktails, awful dinner parties with smug marrieds, Bridget's newfound knowledge of Chechnya, the massive knickers and a snowy end-of-film snog. The most special, though, was Darcy's son wearing his dad's reindeer jumper. Hollie Richardson One moment you are youthful beauty personified. The next, you are white-bearded and crinkled, and your once-worshipped visage is being staved in with a mallet. Björn Andrésen was 15 when he played the sailor-suited twink in Luchino Visconti's 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice, and 63 when he stepped off a cliff as a human sacrifice in Ari Aster's sunlit horror Midsommar. (The jump didn't finish him off: hence the mallet.) His cameo represents a highpoint in the tradition of the casting Easter egg. Andrésen, whose life was ruined by Death in Venice and the ensuing adoration, must have relished destroying the face that started it all. Ryan Gilbey My favourite series as a slightly nerdy teen was Spaced, Channel 4's homage-heavy flatshare sitcom, so I felt bereft when it was announced that the show would end after just two series. But there was a mega consolation prize on offer: a big-screen outing for Spaced's creator and cast, in the form of Shaun of the Dead. In the main, while I enjoyed Shaun, it didn't quite live up to its predecessor – marauding zombies weren't as funny as bickering Robot Wars contestants or a man dressed as a vacuum doing performance art – but I did appreciate a blink-and-you'll-miss it Spaced Easter egg at the film's climax: there, among a horde of the undead, was a zombified version of Tyres, the sitcom's wild-eyed bike messenger raver, still wearing his little yellow cycling cap and listening to thumping techno through his wraparound headphones. Gwilym Mumford Some Easter eggs are sly nods, others lazy studio cross-promotion, but The Lego Batman Movie (2017) dropped one so audacious it deserves its own Bat-signal. In a gloriously meta montage, Alfred dryly recalls his master's 'weird phases', including 1966's dance-happy caper and the infamous Bat-nipple debacle, effectively canonising every previous cinematic dark knight as just chaotic footnotes in this Lego loner's emotional scrapbook. Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney – all downgraded to painful fashion faux pas in the life of one emotionally constipated minifig. Which means Batman & Robin wasn't a cinematic travesty - it was Lego Batman's rebellious club-kid phase, complete with rubber codpiece and lashes of neon regret. Ben Child
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Thank you Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor – how my 1990s teenage self found somebody to love
I am of a generation that had no name: we slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials. We are the last generation that will wow our grandchildren by explaining that we came of age completely without the internet. We wrote letters through secondary school; we replaced these with email when we got to university and wrote 15,000-word screeds to one another, which we still keep in files in our Hotmail accounts. Some of us ended up internet dating, but I have far more friends who settled down with their first or second love. We are neurotic, and depressive, but we didn't know it until recently. The thing we do share with those who came after is that when it comes to music, we and our parents have no generation gap. The great songwriters of the 1960s soundtracked our childhoods in their best-ofs and their unfashionable 80s incarnations. In my house, the 'frog song' was given as much time as Sgt Pepper. Pop stars rose up like venerated family elders. Music was a communal activity; we were the cassette generation, and many families couldn't afford to fly. We took long car ferry trips to France for our holidays, listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue in the Volvo. The most alienating part of the traditional teenager narrative, to me, is that which claims that, at a formative age, we want to listen to stuff our parents hate. This idea informs every music documentary ever made, and every pop origin story: it is the only explanation for the power that music holds in the life of the young. I do think this was true of the generations before mine. I have asked my own parents. But it was different when we came along. Our parents were the grooving boomers. It was felt, in your heart, and with your music, that you were always striving to catch up with them. It is entirely possible that we failed to achieve the necessary rebellion against our parents because of the deathless power of their record collection. We are the forerunners of those infants today, dressed in Joy Division Babygros, who live at home for ever. My family moved from north London to rural Norfolk at the end of the 80s, around the time that Peter Mayle published A Year in Provence and many people were swapping their city houses for old barns in the middle of nowhere. My parents were both self-employed. My mother owned a vintage clothing shop called Arsenic and Old Lace, which she transferred from London to a small Norfolk town, renaming it Past Caring. My father was a journalist and went on to establish the world's leading magazine about potatoes: Potato Review. We left London in a snowdrift in February 1988 and drove our own removal van. If you look at our village, Guestwick, on Wikipedia today it says simply: 'Guestwick lies far from any high roads.' At our small primary in a neighbouring village – just 53 pupils – I was champion of a game called crab football, where players scuttled about, chest to the sky, on hands and feet, slamming a sponge ball into the wall. The strange possessiveness over music, in the lives of the young, is complex and rooted in a sense of the emerging self. Even without a generation gap, you will still try to find your own. By 1991, things had changed for me: I was attending a girls' private secondary school 20 miles away in Norwich, on one of those assisted places that Tony Blair would go on to abolish. High on exam results, and low on the kind of jollity that generally surrounds girls' schools in the popular imagination – school musicals, tuck shops, hockey – Norwich high school was a dour place. I was a tall, rather fat child with a single, thin plait that I did on Tuesdays and slept in the rest of the week. My individuality was marked out only by non-regulation, cherry-red Dr Martens shoes. I was very academic, and so tired out by my 6 am start for school, for seven years, that I never once did my homework at home. I completed it all in the library at lunchtime. After-school activities were out of the question, as there was only one bus home at 4pm. My mood was downbeat, but to be fair, so was everyone's. I came of age in the 90s, and I must say I have a bit of a problem with the 90s, because I hate them. My biggest problem with the decade was something I discovered I shared with the musician Liz Phair, writer of the cult record Exile in Guyville, when I interviewed her 30 years later. When she spoke of it, the room span, and I felt the full force of the past: 90s irony. No one lucky enough to have come of age in a different decade can truly understand 90s irony, and just how caustic it was. It is a taste, a smell, that cannot be picked up in historical revision of the decade and has been largely erased from social history – an entire way of living that might be summed up in the face of Mark Lamarr. In the 90s, the levels of irony in conversation among the young were exhausting. This was not communication; it was an exchange of taut, self-vetted opinion predicated on the understanding that one was not to express genuine enthusiasm about anything, even if one clearly loved it. In music – in Jarvis Cocker's pursed lips or Damon Albarn's feeling-free delivery – I felt a collective pressure to be joyless, which in retrospect seems so at odds with the flash, brash tone of the dominant musical culture. To create anything requires energy and joy, yet they all seemed so arch, so sneering, so over it. Perhaps it was fin de siècle ennui: after all, the secondhand nature of the music was lost on no one. While in pop culture, particularly in the work of the Young British Artists, the ironic pose was all part of the art, it was quite another thing to live in this dead-eyed way as an adolescent, to be unable to express pleasure just at the point your own heart and mind were trying to unfold. The irony of the 90s was a cultural straitjacket for me; a kind of spiritual death when I was trying to come alive. It drove me inside myself at a tender age, and – without really knowing it at the time – my heart burned for something else: for middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jackets and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before. My childhood obsession with Queen began in early December 1991, when I had just turned 11, after Freddie Mercury died, and ended when I went to university in October 1999. A BBC documentary was made about it – before Queen's revival but at the start of a cultural interest in fandom – possibly because it was clear to the producer, Mark Cooper, that the obsession veered into deeper (one could say darker) territory than many teenage obsessions, and therefore provided an unsettling, comic extreme against which viewers could measure their own experience. My own independent musical life began one night when I heard Queen's posthumous single These are the Days of Our Lives, sitting in front of Top of the Pops. I felt something within myself ignite when I looked up to see Freddie Mercury's cheeky, emaciated face in monochrome. While it was clearly the start of something for me – the start of the person I am now – it is entirely probable that the energy was driven by the sense of having just missed the boat, just missed the person. This is an energy, full of strange longing, that has driven my whole life. A modern audience will struggle to understand how unpopular Queen were in the 90s. Through the continued power of the music press, who hated them, and a barely disguised homophobic distaste, they were written out of music history. In my scrapbook, I had a cutting from a broadsheet list of rock star earnings in 1992. It put Brian May at £1m per annum and Roger Taylor at a very modest £500,000 (John Deacon, a good investor, got a cool £2m and Freddie was down for £0 because he was dead). The Ben Elton musical We Will Rock You was the start of a gigantic change in their fortunes and, after the appalling 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen were making £40m a year. But when I was a child, no one spoke of the band. I met Taylor in 2011, for the piece which follows, and the band was not yet at the peak of their revival, still slightly bemused by the change in fortune and suspicious of the sudden critical praise. In the 90s, Queen were so unfashionable that I ran my obsession with some shame around even my closest friends. God forbid I would have played them a song, or showed them one of my many VHS tapes. This secrecy produced a kind of intensity that makes me rather uncomfortable now. By the time I was an adult – certainly by the time I was a journalist and sent to interview Taylor by Mark Ellen, in my first job at The Word – Queen felt more like old flames around whom were clustered the shadow, the memory, of all sorts of stronger feelings: shame, neurosis and love. Always meet your heroes, I say: it'll help you get over them. When I interviewed Taylor, I had years of distance from the raw, painful times of yearning and I was a professional hack, yet the tone of this piece is unlike my others: oddly tender and involved. There is barely disguised eroticism in my descriptions – his wet hair, and my weird inference that he'd just got up – which I wasn't aware of at the time. I interviewed him for the Guardian years later, in another of his big houses, and it's the only interview I've ever done where I finished my questions 25 minutes early and stared at the clock in panic. I rushed my questions, transported into a place of urgency and tension that may or may not have been outwardly obvious, perhaps because on some level I will always love him, and there will always be something getting in the way. It was early December 1991, I'd just turned 11 and had no interest whatsoever in the charts. Pop music felt like growing up – it was vaguely embarrassing, to be honest, a bit like body hair. But as I sat in front of Top of the Pops that night, pretending not to be watching, it wasn't 2 Unlimited or Lisa Stansfield that caught my attention, or Simply Red with For Your Babies. It was a black-and-white video of a painfully thin man with big teeth wearing a patchwork waistcoat and singing a song called These are the Days of Our Lives. The thick cake makeup, the bird-like nose – Mercury looked like Joel Grey out of Cabaret. His frailty was at odds with his movement – he kept throwing his arms out in little bursts of energy, as though constrained by his own body. And he was grinning. What struck me about the video was its extraordinary lightness of touch. Here was an extremely sad song, yet the band communicated with little nods and smiles, as though they were having some private joke. I felt my skin prickle. I recognised Mercury from the front page of the local paper a few days earlier and retrieved it from the bin. I didn't know what Aids was (but I knew all about 'gay' because of our Joe Orton phase). A Freudian analyst might have sensed the two great mysteries of life – sex and death – colliding for an 11-year-old in the figure of Queen's frontman. Whatever, I went into overdrive, collecting newspaper cuttings, charity leaflets, red ribbons; tapes and videos followed, many from a local car boot sale. I struggled with Queen's image. My cheeks burned at the presence of Mercury's leather-clad crotch and onstage dry-humping, but for every overblown sexual gesture, there was a softer side – Brian May in his high-waisted jeans and too-short jacket, Roger Taylor acting up for the cameras, John Deacon with his bifro, looking painfully uncomfortable. This band was a really, really strange mixture. They were outrageous, yet they were straight; they were famously arrogant, but they spoke with soft, kind voices. The music was full of energy but often strangely unemotional, and I simply couldn't believe – as I worked my way through 20 years of hard rock, Byronesque storytelling, funk, disco, vaudeville, flamenco, pop and various alarming lapses of taste – that it all came out of the same four people. At first, I didn't pay much attention to Roger Taylor – he always seemed to be flashing his teeth or flicking his sunglasses – but by the age of 15, he had become the throbbing centre of my world. He had a social conscience, which I liked in a man, and he'd do strange, idealistic things, like donate cash to Manchester United in a bid to hold off the planned Murdoch takeover. He wrote a few genuinely decent songs, including, as I later discovered, that first one that pulled me in, These are the Days of Our Lives. Taylor was also the most 'available' member of the band, with a prolific, if chart-dodging, solo career. Between 1988 and 1998, he completed five solo projects. He was clearly making no money from them, but took himself out on the circuit anyway, playing tiny venues like the Waterfront in Norwich. Surprisingly, there were literally packs of teenagers in the front row of these gigs, most of them screaming girls of 18 or so. Taylor had always been good-looking – I once made a lino-cut of his face – but looking back, I wonder whether those girls had also been touched by the story of a band they'd 'only just missed', and inspired by the idea of wistful, independent discovery. 'I want him to know, even just for a matter of seconds, that I actually exist,' I wrote in my diary at 15. It's an odd experience reading over those journals now (there are seven of them) and recognising certain aspects of oneself but at the same time nothing at all. I wrote three or four letters to Taylor himself, care of the Queen fanclub – awkward, carefully wrought things which fell somewhere between Jane Austen and dull, academic analysis of his music (inexplicably, he never replied). Eleven am, Saturday 25 June 2011. Roger Taylor's house in Cornwall. The gates open. I pass the indoor swimming pool with a vague sense of children's limbs happily splashing about within (the three members of Queen have 14 kids between them) and the row of wellies lined up at the front door. Standing in Taylor's front room, I study the Japanese lacquered piano (the far east was always big with Queen) and the strange, spherical ship's clock on the coffee table, its numbers magnified by a thick glass face. I hear the familiar 'Rod Stewart after 20 Bensons gone posh' voice in the corridor. I'd love to say that I fall on the carpet in a swoon when Roger Taylor enters the room, but that's not the way it happens. The fact is, if you really loved your pop star, you'll have used a hell of a lot of intellectual energy building an astonishingly accurate picture of them. Years later, it puts you on an equal footing somehow; I certainly know him better than he knows me. He's got the casual rock-star-at-home look (jeans, white shirt and goatee), his hair is wet (I like to think he's just got up) and he has just the demeanour I pictured (relaxed, unflappable but faintly serious). He too has been fully apprised of my previous Queen obsession. It's taken me four months to pin him down for this interview. A hand shoots out: 'So lovely to meet you at last!' (We've met before but he doesn't know that. My brother and I followed him into the Plaza Cinema in Truro in 1998 and sat through the whole of Godzilla – a terrible film – just to be near him. We got an autograph afterwards.) Do you ever have that thing, I find myself saying when we're seated, where you go into a shop and there's a Queen song playing, and even though you know all the music like the back of your hand, you actually can't place which song is it? It's almost too familiar? 'I have that,' he says. 'It takes me a few seconds. I have a flash of 'God, which one is that?' Absolutely – it's almost like you know it too well, and there's so much of it.' I tell him Brian May's theory on Queen and advertising – that the Beatles should have allowed their music to be used on TV. 'I think he's right. I think it was naive of them. It's great to be part of the wallpaper of life – there's no shame in it. It's like bands who refuse to go on iTunes. Don't stand in front of the train, you're not going to stop it. If the music is in the air around people, it will get to them. What more could you want? There's a whole generation of very young kids that love Queen now.' Why is that? 'Because they relate to something in Freddie. He really didn't care, did he? He gave every molecule of himself.' I ask him about Queen's relationship with the press. 'We stopped talking to them in the late 70s because it was counterproductive, like banging your head against a wall. We decided: we don't need to be targets any more, we're already successful, the people like us and that'll do me – and maybe you'll all catch up one day.' The print media, he says, 'wasn't working as a promotional tool', so they turned to TV and radio. I've lost count of the number of people who've told me the recent acclaimed documentary on the BBC changed their minds about Queen, as though it was some independent exercise in historical revision. In fact, it was produced by superfan and comedian Rhys Thomas (who appeared on Celebrity Mastermind with Queen as his specialist subject) working closely with the band and featured very few talking heads and some rare footage from the Brian May archives. It wasn't drastically different from all the other documentaries Queen have made, but suddenly people were ready to watch it. 'I find it very cheering, the way tastes have changed towards us,' he says. 'People are much more broad-minded than they ever were before. I find it hilarious that one of the most anticipated acts at Glastonbury is the Wombles. People in this country have a great sense of humour and they're much less po-faced than they were in the past. Glastonbury took itself so seriously, it was so politically correct, and then Dame Shirl comes out on Sunday afternoon and that's actually what the people want. There is room for everything. It's only a bloody record!' Queen's final two albums, The Miracle and Innuendo, were the twin peaks of their achievement. Knowing Mercury was ill, the band decided to share all writing credits, and split all royalties, for the first time in their career. Then they turned into a kind of Fort Knox, decamping to a quiet studio in Switzerland, away from the growing paparazzi interest in his health, and recorded as much as they could against the clock. In those albums you can hear both the tremendous urgency and the strange, cocoon-like warmth of their final months together. When I listen to these songs now, I still feel like someone's putting a bicycle pump between my ribs and blasting me with air. The band were in their early 40s when it ended. 'I put my energies into organising that concert,' Taylor tells me, meaning the Freddie Mercury tribute at Wembley. 'Deciding what we would play, and persuading people to take part. It came off OK in the end, I think.' Personal inquiries are met with genuine surprise. When I ask Taylor how he felt when his musical career was ended in its prime, he goes: 'I suppose you're right, I was quite young …' Oddly enough, their fondest memories from the entire 20-year life of the band are those final weeks, tucked away working on the last album. 'We became very enclosed,' says Taylor, 'very focused, and we were in our own little world.' Our time is up. 'I've got to go and unveil a statue,' Taylor says, standing. Of himself? 'God, no. It's a drummer, though – a weird expressionist thing. I thought it would be a laugh. It's about 18ft high …' With the first band you love as a child, you experience something that adult life will never allow – a prolonged period absorbing one music to the exclusion of all others, the highs and lows, the moments of genius and the terrible errors of judgment. Records, videos and biographies merge until the voices of the band become as familiar as your own. I don't play much Queen at all these days, but it's all still there, especially the humour of it, in an image of Freddie on stage in his tiny, tiny shorts, a column of steam riding from his head. What I've taken away is the joy of recognising, and indulging, the start of these full-on musical love affairs whenever they decide to seize you. What happened on hearing that first Queen track, These Are the Days of Our Lives, nearly 20 years ago, has happened half a dozen times since, with songs by other artists – the gut recognition, familiarity and excitement rolled into one, the twang of your heartstring and the fierce desire to find out more. It's the musical equivalent of eyes meeting across a crowded room. Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell, Jesus Was a Cross Maker by Judee Sill – it will keep on happening, and the best thing is you never know when it's going to strike next. I take myself down to Lemon Street in Truro. In the centre of the town square, next to Marks & Spencer, a black tarpaulin is stretched over a strangely shaped, angular structure, with a growing crowd around it. Fifty drummers appear from nowhere, dressed like morris dancers and beating up a storm. In true English folk tradition, someone in the middle of the throng is holding a horse's skull on a stick and snapping its jaws. Taylor stands on a scaffold, next to a man from the Eden Project. The latter makes a speech about how drumming is appropriate to Cornwall, 'battered as it is by the sea and storms', adding that Roger Taylor is the perfect person to unveil this piece of art, 'a local boy who went out into the world and marched to his own beat'. Taylor steps down, pulls the tarpaulin back slowly and reveals … a naked man, cast in tin, poised atop a model of the world and beating a drum. Someone in the crowd wolf-whistles. The Queen drummer is supplied with a long stick, which he uses to beat the statue's tin drum solemnly, three times. The crowd cheers. Men of a Certain Age by Kate Mossman will be published by Nine Eight Books on 3 April (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
