Fully Furnished

I met David Furnish at the Hazelton Hotel in Toronto's Yorkville and staff seemed to have no idea he was something of a big thing--we got bounced around a bit trying to get seated and had to firmly ask for a corner table even though the inside of the hotel restaurant was mid-afternoon empty.

Furnish was honest and humble. I think being chosen as parade marshal in his hometown had made him reflective about his life's journey from Scarborough to LA/Windsor/Etc. But I would say that our interaction was pretty formal until my prepared questions ended and we started talking about the cult Canadian musician Jane Siberry. I had interviewed her in 1996 for a Vancouver magazine I was editing; he had interviewed her the same year for Interview magazine, when her album Teenager came out.

We both agreed that she has cleared the way for the commercial success of the many female Canadian singer-songwriters who had followed (especially Sarah McLachlan). Even though Furnish had already talked to me in great detail about how he and Elton John parent their two kids, it seemed like his enthusiasm for Siberry was our first totally unguarded moment.

When you're married to one of the world's most famous men, I suppose, you probably welcome moments where you can speak about something with passion, where that passion won`t likely end up in the tabloid headlines.

Read the exclusive IN magazine here.
interview

Electro Calvinism

As much as I loved "I'm Not Alone," the first single from Calvin Harris' new album Ready for the Weekend, I knew there was trouble on the horizon when I read an interview with him talking about how, at 25, he was starting to feel old, wondering about the merits of club life. Oh God. The man who sang, "I like all the girls" is getting philosophical and world-weary. Most young turks manage to get a couple of albums to market before they consider themselves codgers.

But maybe there is a finite amount of energy in each of us and Harris front loaded most of his. His fantastic debut album I Created Disco was the kind of pure deadpan chutzpah only the British can get away with. Each song contained such audacious and catchy ideas, the execution hardly mattered. "I've got my car and my ride and my wheels, when I go to Vegas," he sang, glorying in the stoned redundancy. The songs on I Created Disco may not merit a place in the immortal canon of pop music, but they grabbed you immediately, gave you a laugh on the dancefloor and stayed with you for weeks, at least. Call it vapid, the album knew it was vapid and let you in on the joke.

The songs on Ready for the Weekend aren't so starved for attention. The world, it seems, is a more serious place and Harris has had to impose some structure in order to survive. The humour, which had made Harris a peer of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk, is notably absent.

It's like Harris is pacing himself. Each of the songs has its role to play, sometimes dance-y, sometimes more--it freaks me out to say this--reflective. "Burns Night," for example, is a loping late-night instrumental jazz jam, seemingly designed to encourage drunk patrons to roll home, while "Limits" is full of robotized regret.

Ready for the Weekend is simultaneously a more utilitarian and more serious album. Its 90s aesthetic aims to please with its piano chords and house-soul backing vocals. "Stars Come Out" reminded me of nothing less than the dancey tracks from Moby's Everything is Wrong, which I'm quite sure Harris wouldn't take as a compliment.

But when you're self-consciously producing a retro album, I suppose that effective emulation is an accomplishment. There are four tracks here that would not drive me from the dancefloor and two more--"I'm Not Alone" and "Dance Wiv Me"--that I would scramble across a crowded room to turn up. It's a far cry from I Created Disco but it's still a better batting average than most pop-dance albums (though I suppose that one could say that Lady GaGa had raised the bar in this regard).

It's the future I fear for. The best track, "Dance Wiv Me" an electro-hip-hop collaboration with Dizee Rascal, predates the rest of the album. Harris' more methodical direction seems to be taking hi further and further away from what made him such a lovable sod.

No shame in Shameless

Like so many foreign cultural phenomenon, I stumbled across the British comedy/drama Shameless purely by accident. A DVD of the first season (the sixth is currently in progress in the U.K.) was very cheap at a used book shop on Yonge Street because it was region two—having a multiregion DVD player finally paid off. I've made it to the end of season two.

I instantly fell in love with the show, based on the council-estate upbringing of creator Paul Abbott. It’s a laugh riot and a celebration of life. And that’s saying something since the show presents you immediately with a major learning curve—you have to learn to find the humour in a drunken Keith Richards-without-charisma father who absconds with any money that comes near the family’s townhouse in a Manchester council housing estate. Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) is a totally useless leech who exploits the sweetness of his conscientious eldest daughter Fiona (played by Anne-Marie Duff), turning her into a surrogate mother while he runs around town. He’s not even particularly goodhearted, looking down on most people as his moral inferiors. Our entry point into this world of welfare scams, substance abuse, casual teenaged sex and pregnancy is Steve McBride (played by James McAvoy, who left the show in season two to head off to Hollywood—Atonement and Wanted with Angelina Jolie), a seemingly posh fellow who courts Fiona. He owns his own house and drives a nice car. The two meet cute in the first episode when her purse is stolen in a nightclub and he makes a valiant effort to rescue it. His infatuation with Fiona quickly expands to include the whole family and their cavalier attitude toward adversity and it through him that we see how loveable they are.

But midway through the second season, Steve develops his own serious problems (and by serious, I mean more serious than the everyday perils of his profession as car thief) and his own descent into reprobateness meant he was no longer the outsider—he was deeper in the muck than anyone else on the show. That’s when I realized, like father’s hand quietly removed from the seat of a child on a bike, I didn’t need him anymore as my fascinated proxy in Chatsworth Estate. I had myself accepted all the bad behaviour—kidnapping a child, accidentally shooting an acquaintance or poisoning the neighbourhood—as normal and funny, heartwarming and life affirming. And that’s what makes Shameless so special. It uses a magic realist style to juggle the awful and the rib-tickling. But it also avoids using purely black humour that would set us to laugh at the bad things in life—there’s no “He’s dead, ha-ha.” We don’t actually laugh at the crime and the misery per se. Each episode keeps the focus sharply on the family’s skewed reaction to their problems—and that’s where the humour lies. We don’t laugh at Frank Gallagher blacking out behind the sofa as much as we laugh at his youngest daughter Debbie bringing him tea—she’s a trooper who will never give up on a lost cause and we laugh at the futility of what she’s doing even as we admire her.

At a certain point in season two, I thought, “Aren’t there too many pregnancies driving the storyline? Are they jumping the shark?” But then I realized that unwanted/unexpected pregnancy is not a plot device on Shameless, it’s ambiance, it’s what happens in the down moments between crises, a well-worn worry that doesn’t require the extreme reaction everything does.

All the characters except Fiona—the show’s Bob Newhart—are offbeat and delightful. But they’re not quite circus freaks. On any other show, a tantrum like horny neighbour Violet (Maxine Peake) threw during her mother’s birthday—plunging it into dark silence by yanking out and tossing the fuses—would make us dislike the perpetrator. How can she treat people so badly? But we develop such a sharp sense of Violet as a real character, we can still like her without sweeping her horridness aside. She’s of a piece, the good and the bad. We come to expect that her mother will bring out the worse in her and realize it’s up to the other characters to help her negotiate it. We are all programmed defectively and must turn to the collective to help us overcome it.

Several formulas help contextualize the show’s situations so we are able to laugh as things fall apart. Firstly, friends will always help you out in the end. Secondly, the characters never come out ahead—no matter how much money is waved in their face. And thirdly, all problems are eventually solvable. Fourthly, there’s always a party to take the edge off.

In this, Shameless is closer to the work of P.J. Wodehouse than its makers would care to admit. You can only laugh at problems when they happen in a world where they are time and time again solved or contained, a world that has proved itself totally and absolutely safe even if—and this is where Shameless diverges from Jeeves—justice is totally and absolutely absent.

Yes, period

While most of their peers—Depeche Mode, Madonna, New Order—have relied on periodic reinvention for their longevity, the Pet Shop Boys have always operated by other strategies, constant repositioning in a well-defined and carefully guarded terrain. The songs on all 10 of their official studio albums can be placed on a quadrant graph with "exuberant" at the top, "regal at the bottom," "melancholy" at the left and "wry" at the right. I've always liked them best when they've kept close to the melancholy/exuberant corner (The dance tracks of Behaviour, most of Very)and have had a growing impatience with wry/regal--most of the Fundamental album.

This precise emotional landscape is what makes the Pet Shop Boys sound distinctly like themselves (okay--occasionally like New Order) even while a new generation of electro-pop groups adopt their trademark disco-bass surge, tingly synths and laser-beam sound effects. The ironic persona transcends the quotation marks that make their 00s descendants, for all their homaging, sound very much 00s, not 80s. Neither a retro band nor of the electro-pop moment, PSB own their longevity to their creation of their own little world. That holds true even on their newest release, Yes, despite the participation of Xenomania as producer and co-writer on three tracks—if the collaboration has added something new to the formula, it's a sprinkle of cinnamon in a barrel of cookie dough.

Yes's core through-line follows the exuberance that made Very a best seller, a through-line that drives through the lyrics and even the packaging as well as the bounce of lead single "Love etc.,” Tchaikovsky-sampling "All Over the World," laser-beam bubbling "Did You See Me Coming?" and writhing “Pandemonium.”

The inevitable regal side turns up on tracks like “Vulnerable," "King of Rome" and “Legacy"--I accept them but don't love their theatricality. There are two experimental one-offs (yes, I’ve just added another dimension to the PSB quadrant graph): “Beautiful People” gets a hand from Final Fantasy’s Owen Pallett but it’s glaring Echo and the Bunnymen-ness that makes it jump out at you; and the album’s only car wreck, “Building A Wall,” another of their unsuccessful attempts at being overtly political.

For all the Very 2 ambitions built into its DNA, Yes’s melodies and themes come across as overly cautious and restrained—perhaps even rout—as if the meticulous programming necessary for the album’s shiny surfaces contaminated everything. The exuberant beats only periodically pry open the tunes. But when it happens—like the chorus of “All Over the World” where Neil Tennant plays a the role of Cher-like diva presiding over a dance floor with the line “This is a song for all the boys and girls/You hear it/Playing all over the world”—it’s beautiful release.