PAUL McGANN II

Paul McGann famously hates having his photograph taken. Loathes and detests it. So, when at 11pm on a wet and windy evening after Paul had literally just jumped off a plane from Paris, not having slept for 30 hours, I was expecting trouble. To my surprise, he was a real trouper and without complaint traveled to a couple of locations around town to get a good film noir shot. He even chatted about Alien 3 and starring in the Doctor Who TV movie whilst trying desperately not to fall asleep in the back of the car. During the photo session on a Bristol bridge in Montpelier, we were accosted by a bunch of beered-up chavs. 'Ere, you famous or summet?!' they challenged aggressively.' 'No,' her replied quite calmly. 'We're students. It's a project.' And off they trotted.

Here is the original interview by Pat O'Brien that appeared in Naked - Magazine of the Weird and Wonderful:

McGANN THE MAN
Paul McGann steps into the Hobgoblin pub in Bath, looks around with bemused interest, and murmurs, "What a weird place…" The Liverpool-born actor has travelled the world from Krakow to Kathmandu, and has played roles that required him to inhabit the personae of everyone from a monocled mutineer to a famous timelord. Make no mistake, this is a guy who’s seen a lot. But he still can’t quite get his head around the concept of a goth-themed pub…

Hunched conspiratorially over a glass of red wine, McGann starts talking. The ensuing conversation is eclectic to say the least. He talks about some of his favourite writers - guys like WG Sebald and Jean Amery who we’re ashamed to admit we haven’t read. He talks about silent movie goddess Louise Brooks. He talks about the fact that you can have a really good time in Poland...

In person, McGann is open, articulate and hugely enthusiastic. An appealing mixture of fey bohemian and streetwise scouser, his slow-burning charisma and housewife corrupting good looks make you wonder why he isn’t as famous as Brad Pitt. On the other hand, you also can’t help but suspect that McGann’s best work may well be ahead of him. One moment neatly sums up our Hobgoblin conversation. McGann has been talking about the love-hate relationship of maverick director Werner Herzog and lunatic actor Klaus Kinski, when he suddenly remembers that he has actually met the great Herzog, at a film event in Germany. "And you’ll never guess who else was there!" he almost shouts with excitement. "Only Karl-Heinz fuckin’ Stockhausen!" I mean, could you imagine Brad Pitt coming out with something like that? Nope, thought not...

GLASTONBURY:
The world’s greatest music festival -

"We had a good time. There were one or two complaints from veterans who think it’s become a bit too safe. They really went to town on the security, it was like trying to get into a top football match. You couldn’t get near it without a ticket, the checks were stringent. Once you were inside it was nice, very mellow this year - not the usual mayhem. But not everybody liked it. One hippy said to me, ‘It’s like fucking Glyndebourne, man’. But it was good for us because we took the kids, who’re 12 and 14. Had it been the scally-fest that it can be, there might have been concern, but it was a bit of a picnic."

POLAND:
The nation most likely to -

"I went with the photographer Maria Mochnacz who was in the last edition of Naked. Maria was interested in finding out about where her family comes from. We ended up basing ourselves in Krakow for two days, and I loved it. I love the atmosphere. It struck me as being the real Europe, perhaps the Europe that was recognisable 50 or 60 years ago - a bit slower, a bit more rough and ready. Living in Northern Europe now you could easily mistake it for North America, so it was lovely. I found the people engaging, friendly and clever. Mind you, Krakow is apparently the hip and happening place to be.

I was surprised as well how the younger people we spoke to knew Bristol, or about Bristol. There’s already some sort of loose cultural exchange. Galleries, photographic exhibitions, swapping music ventures - yeah, watch this space, Krakow’s two hours away.

It’s 24 hours as well, it’s one of those places, but not in that mad, nuts way. Once you get out of England and there’s no drinking license so no-one’s chasing the ale, it’s great to be in places where you can just talk ‘til two in the morning in some lovely candlelit place and it’s a laugh, you know? I think it’s more lrish than anything, but maybe that’s just my peculiar way of looking at it. Interestingly, I read the other day that abortion’s illegal, so it’s got parallels with Ireland five or ten years ago, and it’s got the same problems. They’re desperately trying to be secular but they can’t throw off the Catholicism. But we’ll see…"

JEAN AMERY & WG SEBALD:
Two writers you should know about -

"I’ve always liked to read, I come from a family of readers. Jean Amery was someone I’d not come across until recently, by reading Sebald’s writing about him. Although I’d read Primo Levi and part of their backgrounds was identical, as they were both imprisoned in concentration camps.

In one of his books, The Natural History Of Destruction, Sebald specifically talks about the non-response of German writers after the war to confront this national catastrophe that was the allied destruction of their cities. There seemed to be this collective amnesia by German writers, a refusal to take this issue on. Apart from Amery, who, as Sebald describes, chose the essay form. And with spooky parallels to Primo Levi, he was later to take his own life.

So Sebald led me to Amery, but what led me to Sebald was I was on holiday last year, staying with Nepalese friends near Kathmandu. They have this house in the hills, and one of the time-honoured travellers’ traditions is to leave their books as they pass through, so they’ve got this ad-hoc library, and that’s where I first picked up one of Sebald’s books. And when I got home I chased him up.

What Sebald does, and the reason I’m such a fan of his books, is a bit like when you first get into George Orwell. He writes with a kind of ? I hate the term common sense, I’m not even sure if I mean that - but he writes with a kind of clarity and ease and a colloquial style. You’re almost thinking, ‘I know this stuff, I think like this…’ I love the impressionistic style that he adopts. He can have two or three subjects on the go at the same time, but it just shapes beautifully and reads beautifully, like a dream sometimes.

The Emigrants is about five or six individuals who for one reason or another were forced to uproot, to go and live there lives elsewhere. The Rings Of Saturn is a great one because it’s literally about a walk he takes, and so this style of his suits it perfectly because it’s a journey."

NEPAL:
War? What is it good for?

"Kathmandu at the moment is fairly tense. There’s a self-styled Maoist revolution taking place in the whole of Nepal, and it’s been violent and murderous there for nearly three years. Some 85 percent of the country is now in the hands of this Maoist movement, and there’s been pitched battles and sometimes scores and scores of police or paramilitary deaths at once. And of course it’s all been exacerbated by the death of the monarch and the royal family over a year ago, so it’s very unstable at the moment. Parliament was suspended again recently by the new monarch, so what you’ve seen in the ten years that they’ve tried to embrace democracy is that they’ve really stumbled. Only because we imagine that democracy must be such a revelation to a place - either it’s foisted on them or they choose to adopt it - that the benefits of it must be so patent that people would just rush to democracy. But not everybody does. There are places in the world where it might or might not take root. And Nepal, sitting where it does, with the covetous eyes of the Indians and Chinese on its mineral resources and strategic positioning, it’s a funny old place. It can be a tense place. It didn’t stop me going, though. We went with the kids last year, having been assured by friends that not one tourist had been targeted during the political violence. I’d been in Ireland during the Troubles, and it was the same - military presence, roadblocks, the airport was heavily defended… But, hey, that’s how I ended up reading WG Sebald."

THE SOMME:
Closest thing to hell on earth -

"Every year, around 1 July, the anniversary of the first day of the battle of the Somme in 1916, you’ll find me traipsing around the battlefield with my anorak. I was born in the 1950’s, I’m of that generation whose fathers fought in the second world war and our grandfathers fought in the first world war. When I did The Monocled Mutineer, I just tried to get into it and really inhabit the thing, and it stayed with me afterwards.

There are thousands of enthusiasts, I’ve got to know so many people. That whole area of Picardy and Pas De Calais must be one of the most fought-over patches of land on Earth. Over the centuries these armies have rolled backwards and forwards over this place. And there’s something peculiarly British about it.

My kids are doing the first world war as part of the school curriculum and I’ve seen a lot more interest in the last ten years. A lot more coach loads, particularly of kids, arriving at the Somme. I’ve been going for years and the Somme is so vast it would take you years to walk even half of it. On 1 July 1916 the line over which the allied divisions attacked was over 25 miles long, it’s nearly the distance between Manchester and Liverpool. This time I was determined to find the camera positions that one of the official war cameramen, Geoffery Mallins, had taken. I found a guide who helped me find it. And because it’s not an urban landscape the lay of the land hasn’t changed in 80 years. The sunken road is the same as it was, and the trench systems are still there, still visible. I can understand why it might not be everybody’s thing (laughs), but in a personal way I’m moved and fascinated and touched by it all."

FOOTBALL:
The ‘national’ game, for better or worse -

"The depth of association with the fortunes of your team for some of us runs deep enough for it to really make or ruin your day. On a daily basis, seriously. Me and my brothers are Liverpool supporters and when we were growing up we lived through the golden heyday of our team’s history, all through the ‘70s and ‘80s, and as a consequence we had an absolutely fantastic time as kids, it was a breeze, nothing could go wrong. A wonderful childhood, all well-adjusted. As I’m sure if you’d been growing up a Manchester United supporter for the last ten years it’d be the same feeling, of years and years of success. It goes very deep. It’s crazy, but it goes very deep, and I couldn’t even seek to explain it. Except perhaps - and it’s not an original explanation - but once you’ve been with your dad as a little kid, that’s it. There is a sort of paternal thing about it. But the most avid supporter in our family is my sister - an otherwise frighteningly intelligent person gets completely irrationally affected by the fortunes of her team. It can happen.” Yeah, I love Liverpool. It don’t matter if they’re crap or they’re going through a period of being crap - that’s your team, it ain’t gonna change. And, yeah, I know it’s chauvinistic and sometimes it’s silly and ultimately it’s only a game, but it can take you over. Me and my little brother Stephen were at Hillsborough, which was a catastrophe, and there’s still no justice for these people, these families who lost relatives and friends. It’s too hard to just ask them to accept it, you know? To just take it on the chin and get on with the rest of their lives. They’ve never been served by justice, never.”

SILENT MOVIES: 
The golden age of the silver screen -

"I should be out there now, there’s a festival on in Bologna, and Kevin Brownlow’s there, and some of my colleagues from Bristol Silents. In the early ‘60s Kevin Brownlow almost single-handedly began to raise the interest in silent movies - in the UK certainly. He bought a plane ticket and went to North America and interviewed a lot of the protagonists - directors, technicians, actors. Because in the ‘60s most of them were still alive. And his books, particularly The Parade’s Gone By, are the bible of the period. He didn’t rediscover Louise Brooks - she was writing film critiques for some of the top papers - but he met her in ‘63 or ‘64 and she was able to point him in the direction of different characters.

Bristol Silents is a club devoted to showing and screening and promoting information about silent pictures. We periodically show silent pictures in Bristol and try to simulate the original conditions. You know, on the big screen with real prints and piano accompaniments. There’s a genius in Bristol called Neil Brash who’s perhaps the greatest living exponent of the old silent movie piano style. The frame speed was slower then, it was 18 frames, rather than the old talkies which were 24. That’s why people think that in silent movies everyone appears to jump about and move too quickly. But that can be adjusted - they didn’t shoot them like that, they shot them on 18 and they looked perfectly natural at the time. These films had money lavished on them. Some of the technicians working on them were the greatest geniuses ever in movies. And also some of the actors, it must be said, were fantastic. This is beautiful cinema, it just happens there’s no dialogue."

EPILOGUE: McGann Revisited

A couple of weeks after our Hobgoblin conflab I receive a text message: “Upstairs at Patisserie Valerie, Old Compton St. Half four. Picc Circus.” It is signed simply “P.” I catch a train to London and meet him in the appointed place at the designated time. McGann is sitting alone, wearing an elegantly-crumpled summer suit. He looks as handsome as ever, but not to the extent that his looks would inhibit his slipping into other faces and other characters for the purposes of his work. In the prescribed ritual of the 21st century interview, the mobile phones are disabled and the tape starts rolling and McGann starts talking. Once again, the McGann magic asserts itself, and I soon forget I’m supposed to be conducting an interview, stop worrying about the next question, and allow myself to simply enjoy the flow of words. I’m reminded of what Kenneth Tynan once said about Brendan Behan: “If the English hoard words like misers, the Irish spend them like sailors.” McGann spends lavishly, picks up the tab, leaves a generous tip, shakes hands warmly and says goodbye. On the pavement outside I watch him melt into the Soho street scene, while I try to get my bearings. Unlike myself at this particular moment, Paul McGann knows where he’s going.