I got teased by Nick Cave last week. A fortnight before his new studio album with The Bad Seeds, titled Push the Sky Away, was to be released , he released a video of one of the songs, Jubilee Street. It stars the English actor, Ray Winstone, whom you may have watched in many movies playing tough, gritty roles. He’s been in tons of movies but my favourite Winstone movie is Sexy Beast from 2000 where as a retired burglar and an ex-convict, he is being menacingly coaxed by Ben Kingsley (who plays a former associate) to pull off another heist. I’ve a DVD of Sexy Beast somewhere and sometimes while looking for other films, I discover it and before long it’s running on my TV screen. Winstone is great in the movie but Kingsley as a violent sociopath is super – a far cry from his role in Gandhi! Read more

The box set comprising the entire second season of Treme had been lying on my bedside table for months without being watched. One reason for that was, of course, time. Watching a box set can become an addiction and even if you start by watching the first couple of episodes, before you realise it, you’ve spent the entire night, eyes glued to the television screen, watching the entire truckload of episodes and, in effect, killed any prospect of functioning normally at work the following morning. Read more

Had it not been for an email from a young colleague at work (“Have you heard Hanni El Khatib? The guy is awesome. Very Black Keys. Shazamed it on Californication”), I’d probably have never heard El Khatib. Till he became more famous, that is, and I’ve reasons to believe that he may well become so. Read more

Every time I listen to Baba O’ Riley, The Who’s marvellous song off their Who’s Next album, I simply have to crank up the volume to as high as my ears can take. Always. Ever since I first heard that album in the early 1970s with its cheeky cover photograph of members of the band having just peed on a huge concrete piling, when Baba O’ Riley comes on, it just has to be full on—the highest volume level that I can manage. Attribute it to the violin solo on the song. Apparently, putting the violin solo into that Pete Townshend-composed song was the idea of the late Keith Moon, The Who’s pretty mad drummer. It was a great idea because that solo is brilliant and one that begs you to turn the volume knob or your iPod touch wheel or whatever works the loudness on the device that you get your fix on up high. Read more

I’ll be completely honest. I sought out Grinderman 2 because I read it described somewhere as being Nick Cave’s midlife crisis project. Cave’s 53, not much older than me and that phrase “midlife crisis” struck a chord (make no mistake, I’m dealing with mine with finesse: I just bought a motorcycle. Yes, go ahead, laugh). Read more

My trainer is an ogre and I’m his guinea-pig. Or, his lab rat at the gym. What else could explain the torture he subjects me to every morning? Pull-ups, push-ups, presses of different kinds, squats, deadlifts…. till everything becomes a blurry haze and my body feels as if someone’s put it through a sugarcane juice maker. Of course, I willingly do his bidding—in what you could call a valiant attempt at postponing the sag of age with the help of a quotidian dose of extreme physical discomfort. It would be unfair to blame my trainer for what I go through every morning because the poor chap is only trying to help me do what I’ve signed up for. But it is a tough proposition: he is an insistent coach, firm and no-nonsense, but that alone is not nearly enough to see me through my workouts. For that I have to reach out for music. Read more