Fact #159497
When:
Short story:
Howard Jones is interviewed at The Red Fort restaurant in Soho, London, England, UK, Europe, by journalist Johnny Black for Smash Hits. On the same day, Mr. Black interviews young pop hopeful Tracie.
Full article:
Johnny Black (diary entry) : I began the day by interviewing a young pop hopeful, Tracie, for Stereo magazine. Tracie is a protégé of Paul Weller, so we met mid- morning at Weller’s studio beside Marble Arch, where I had previously interviewed Weller and the playwright Tony Marchant for Blitz. Tracie turned out to be a thoughtful lass, ultra-talkative, self-assertive but friendly. She made me a cup of coffee and we discussed incest, tampons, drugs … all the usual stuff. She says she is a spiritualist, regularly visits a medium and thinks she used to be psychic and could predict deaths.
Immediately after interviewing Tracie I zoomed across to Soho where I spent a frantic fifteen minutes trying to find a restaurant which I’d lost. I thought I knew exactly where it was, but it turned out to be two streets away. Happens a lot in Soho. The restaurant was The Red Fort, where I had my second meal with Howard Jones, a performer I took to immediately when I first met him. We ate vegetarian Indian delicacies.
I was pleased to note that he coped graciously with an almost constant stream of autograph seekers, although he obviously finds it a bit embarrassing. I was also delighted that, when I asked him to contribute something to my diary, he wrote out some lines from The Book Of The Tao, possibly the most wonderful book of enlightened philosophy for simple folks like me ever written.
Earlier this week, I interviewed the enigmatic Scott Walker, once the front man for 60s teen idols The Walker Brothers. These days he’s pursuing a solo career rather slowly (one album in seven years?) Now domiciled in Hammersmith, he seemed more interested in living his life and trying to understand himself than in making music, which is fair enough. Indeed, the music on his new album, Climate Of Hunter, seems more like an exorcism of his internal demons than a sequence of songs.
He talks like a man with a huge knot tightening inside him. We met in the Kensington Hilton at 5.30pm. He doesn’t get out of bed until 3.30 every day. He likes the Hilton, though, because it has a very good Japanese restaurant. He describes his earlier works as sins for which he must atone. Seriously. He’s clearly very intelligent, but one very strange puppy. When I asked him to write something in my diary, he wrote, ‘Thanks for not asking about the material.’
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Immediately after interviewing Tracie I zoomed across to Soho where I spent a frantic fifteen minutes trying to find a restaurant which I’d lost. I thought I knew exactly where it was, but it turned out to be two streets away. Happens a lot in Soho. The restaurant was The Red Fort, where I had my second meal with Howard Jones, a performer I took to immediately when I first met him. We ate vegetarian Indian delicacies.
I was pleased to note that he coped graciously with an almost constant stream of autograph seekers, although he obviously finds it a bit embarrassing. I was also delighted that, when I asked him to contribute something to my diary, he wrote out some lines from The Book Of The Tao, possibly the most wonderful book of enlightened philosophy for simple folks like me ever written.
Earlier this week, I interviewed the enigmatic Scott Walker, once the front man for 60s teen idols The Walker Brothers. These days he’s pursuing a solo career rather slowly (one album in seven years?) Now domiciled in Hammersmith, he seemed more interested in living his life and trying to understand himself than in making music, which is fair enough. Indeed, the music on his new album, Climate Of Hunter, seems more like an exorcism of his internal demons than a sequence of songs.
He talks like a man with a huge knot tightening inside him. We met in the Kensington Hilton at 5.30pm. He doesn’t get out of bed until 3.30 every day. He likes the Hilton, though, because it has a very good Japanese restaurant. He describes his earlier works as sins for which he must atone. Seriously. He’s clearly very intelligent, but one very strange puppy. When I asked him to write something in my diary, he wrote, ‘Thanks for not asking about the material.’