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THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
THE SHAPE MADCAP GEORDIE COMEDIAN ROSS NOBLE HASN’T GOT AUSTRALIA ON HIS ITINERARY FOR 2011 – BUT WE’RE GETTING TWO DVDS AND SCADS OF FREE YOUTUBE CLIPS TO FEED OUR ADDICTION, AS HE TELLS BAZ MCALISTER. It might be hard to believe, but it’s 20 years this year since Ross Noble first strode on stage with microphone in hand to make people laugh. “I was 15 when I did my first gig, and I was always the young kid on the bill, and now you see these young kids doing stand-up and you go ‘Bloody hell, when did I become one of the old ones’? Most people get to about 35 and then try and stop doing stand-up as quick as they can. Me? They’ll have to drag me off the stage and pry that mic out of my cold, dead hand,” he says with the gravitas of Charlton Heston at an NRA rally.
After 20 years of solid slog that’s made him a household name both here and in his native UK, Noble’s taking a well-deserved year off. Having lost his Victorian home in the Black Saturday bushfires he and his young family – wife Fran and daughter Elfie – moved to the UK, where they now live. “We did actually discuss the idea of moving somewhere in Australia that’s not as prone to fire, and we thought ‘Oh, we could move to Queensland’. Luckily we didn’t entertain that idea! That really could have been the worst idea anyone could have ever had.
Can you imagine? That would shit you!” he says. With the family safely relocated, Noble is taking it easy following a massive UK tour, saying that he plans to indulge his passion for riding motorbikes and also just spend time with his daughter, now two years old. “What I wasn’t expecting was the lying,” he says of Elfie. “She’s talking now, and she’s just coming out with all this stuff that I know to be lies. She told me the other day that she’d taken my car. ‘Daddy’s car, me drive daddy’s car’. She told me she’d driven down to see her equally
two-year-old friend, who lives two hours away, and apparently she was peeping the horn at the horses. “The crazy thing is not that she’s just created this scenario, it’s the detail. You just think, OK, if you’re gonna pretend to steal my car and go and visit your friend can you at least drive it responsibly? Don’t go hooning around peeping the horn. But I like the bizarre logic of it.” Bizarre logic, mixed with the ability to make up crazy stories on the fly? Wonder where she gets that from? “Yeah,” laughs Noble. “Between her and me, it’s not making a particularly smooth time for my wife – ‘Oh god there’s two of them’.” So, Aussie fans, to feed your Noble fix this year you’ll have to content yourself with two DVD releases – Things, out now, with Nonsensory Overload looking like making an appearance by Christmas. Noble says the plan for that is to include six two-hour shows from the same tour on the one DVD, to highlight his ‘no two shows the same’ approach to comedy. “Also – which probably isn’t helping the sales of the DVD – is I release ten-minute clips on my YouTube, the Ross Noble Channel,” Noble says. “There’s about two hours of free stuff up there now. Someone sent me a tweet saying ‘What happens when the clips run out’ and I sent a message back saying ‘Don’t worry about that, by the time that happens the sun will have burned out and we’ll all be long gone’.” WHAT: Ross Noble: Things on DVD (Shock)
MADE YOU
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WITH BETHANY SMALL So David LaChappelle is suing Rihanna over her video for her single S&M. I mention this in an art column because he is totally a photographer of legitimate talent and importance to contemporary culture and Rihanna is very fashion and postmodern, and because having it in here basically asks for accompaniment by some kind of sexy photograph by him or of her that will hopefully get people’s attention and encourage them to read this and send me admiration and job offers (bethanyleesmall@gmail.com). Also it is interesting in ‘industry’ terms as regards intellectual property and appropriation and how Shepard Fairey got in trouble over using that photograph of Obama and whether people need to make all their own stuff and ideas. Personally, I think the side-by-sides of stills from the clip and LaChappelle images show that the former seems pretty definitely to have been influenced by the latter, but this is more in terms of the overall vibe than of the specific images cited. David LaChappelle is not the first to have girls in dresses made of newsprint or with boys on leashes in his photographs (and whips and ball gags have of course a rich pictorial tradition in their own right). In terms of saturated colour, surrealism, hyperactivity and overt sexuality comedically treated Rihanna is a LaChappelle kind of a pop star, but then he has a couple of influences of his own, like maybe the whole working for Andy Warhol at Interview magazine thing and
concomitant fame-oriented high-low culture suture, right? In other art and celebrity news, Al Pacino is going to play Henri Matisse in a film (to be directed by Deepa Mehta) called Masterpiece, and you can interpolate yourself into the Wills & Kate story at a London gallery courtesy artist Jennifer Rubell, who has made a life-sized wax figurine of the prince and engagement ring as they appeared in the announcement photo. Visitors get to step up on a white pedestal and get their picture taken as if they, too, had the chance to have their common origins discussed in the papers. Somewhat less colourfully, it’s recently been worked out why some of van Gogh’s sunflower paintings went brownish, and no, it’s not dried blood from his ear. According to scientists with an enormous X-ray machine, there are extra pigments on the ones that’ve gone brown, which were originally white and designed to lighten and give a sheen to the flowers. Pigment actually does go bad pretty often, especially when artists mess around with it without knowing about chemistry, and there’s a great case of that right on our very doorstep. If you go through the 18th Century galleries at the AGNSW, take a close look at the complexions of Stephen Croft, Jr. and James, 7th Earl of Lauderdale by terribly important portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds. No, English people weren’t actually that pasty; the skin tone pigment has faded heaps. And the Earl’s ermines were not entirely unlike something you’d see in a Rihanna clip.
THE DRUM MEDIA 23 FEBRUARY 2011 • 69 •