Jay Clifton

Which film star/musician/artist/writer do you admire?

I am a film buff, but my primary love has always been literature – some plays, but mainly novels and poetry. I particularly admire writers who had to struggle against adversity – I’m thinking financial hardship and destitution, they are the usual definitions of adversity – and who write what they really feel, even if it goes against the grain of the times and is too bleak or weird to be popular.

Writers such as Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Jean Rhys – they all got famous late in life but for a long time they were broke and their books didn’t sell.

There’s a recording artist called Sandy Dillon I really admire, her music is a kind of avant-garde blues and her songs always come from somewhere offbeat and personal rather than from a tactical idea of what might be commercially successful.

Which TV programme couldn’t you live without?

There’s never been anything on TV I couldn’t live without. Californication I like for its antiheroic lead, played with a seedy charm by David Duchovny. He even smokes cigarettes! American TV has no problem with crystal-meth dealing and handguns but cigarettes and alcohol seems to be too much for the American viewer. And of course, Duchovny’s character is a novelist. That might be part of the appeal for me.

Do you remember the first record you bought? What was it, and where did you buy it?

It was probably a Blondie record. I remember seeing Blondie do a still pretty new thing called a “video” on TV around 1980, I was ten years old. It started a lifelong love for Debbie Harry – not just her slightly otherworldly good looks but the kind of screwball, “devil may care” attitude she seems to have. I remember having the Blondie Eat To The Beat video collection on VHS tape and I played it to death during the 1980s.

I never felt the same way about Madonna.

Tell us about any guilty pleasures lurking in your CD or film collections...?

Just possibly, amongst all the art-house DVDs I own, a few 1980s Steve Martin comedies somehow got in there. God knows how. Dad’s Army is in no way cool but it is probably the funniest English TV comedy ever made. Like a lot of the show’s fans, my favourite episode is where they capture a German U-boat crew – or is it the other way around?

Do you have a favourite film?

I’m going to say Tetro by Francis Ford Coppola. It’s naïve, passionate, poetic, visually perfect and it resonated with me strongly.

What about a favourite book?

I have read thousands of books, though there are a lot of culture gaps in my reading because I’ve tended to be more interested in cult writers than the classics – I can tell you all about the work of Barry Gifford or Terry Southern but I’ve only ever read one book by Jane Austen. However, if I have to pick one book as a favourite I’ll go with a classic: Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Is there a song or individual piece of music you always come back to?

Ebben from the opera La Wally by Catalani, and sung by Angela Gheorghiu. The lyrics are very moving and it reminds me of the kindness and romantic soul of my mother, who passed away earlier this year. And I cannot hear the first few seconds of The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction on a radio without trying to turn it up, even if it’s not my radio.

What are you reading at the moment?

I’m re-reading sections of Jayne Joso’s Perfect Architect in readiness for my discussion with her at the next Ace Stories, and working my way slowly through Homer’s The Odyssey. I should have read it 20 years ago, but as my Greek friend Theodore, who gave me this copy, said to me, “Better late than never”.

Tell us about a live music/theatre/cinema experience that sticks in your memory...?

I was sitting in the Duke Of York’s cinema around 1988, when it was still a bit wild at the late-night double-features, with people smoking and drinking from bottles of wine in the balcony seats. The double feature that night were two Roger Corman movies from the Sixties – The Trip, in which Peter Fonda takes a tab of LSD and goes batty in a kaleidoscopic kind of way, and The Wild Angels, in which Peter Fonda leads a biker gang straight to hell.

Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream was a well-known personage at Brighton events of a Sixties theme at that time, and I had noticed he’d sat down in the row in front of mine.

In the film, Fonda’s biker chieftain gets fed up with a reverend’s eulogy for a dead biker-buddy and the reverend, equally fed up with Fonda and pals disrupting an already pretty second-rate funeral, asks Fonda what it is he actually wants. Fonda is thrown by the straight question and responds, “Well, we wanna be free – to do what we want to do—we wanna be free – to ride our bikes – and we wanna get loaded”.

About a year later the same quote opened Primal Scream’s first hit single, Loaded. Back then it was a lot harder to get hold of cult movies on VHS tape, and DVD hadn’t been invented, so it’s very likely it was at this moment that Gillespie got the idea to sample the quote used on the single.

Though it’s not quite the same as passing the HP Sauce to Paul McCartney while he hums Yesterday over his scrambled eggs, I was present that evening at a moment of minor pop history.

Is there a book/record/film/play/person that made you want to do what you do now?

Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. Instead of becoming a private detective who turns down 70% of the work offered to him on moral grounds, I decided to get a degree, and then a Master’s degree, in American Literature… which is marginally worse as a career decision.