Wilko Johnson Interview

Two years ago, rock legend Wilko Johnson had just been told he had 10 months to live. Doctors had diagnosed the Dr Feelgood guitarist with terminal pancreatic cancer. Refusing treatment, which would have scarcely extended his life, he announced a 'farewell tour' and embarked on one of the wildest years of his career, playing to enormous festival crowds and recording an album with The Who front man Roger Daltrey. Comprised of his own material, it was Wilko's biggest hit since his number one album Stupidity with Dr Feelgood in 1976. He never expected to live long enough to see it released.

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Wilko on stage in 2013. 

Picture by Charles Thomson.

But last week I enjoyed a frank and funny hour-long interview with Wilko, who is still very much alive. More than a year after receiving his bleak diagnosis, when experts started to wonder why he wasn't dead yet, he underwent further tests. On closer inspection, doctors told him his cancer had not been terminal after all - only now, after having left it untreated for over a year, it had grown into a three kilogram, football-sized tumour, which had spread to his spleen and part of his stomach. Last summer he underwent a pioneering, experimental operation. Amazingly, doctors removed every trace of cancer - albeit along with his pancreas, leaving him diabetic - and now Wilko is taking his first tentative steps back into the music industry.

Ahead of a comeback tour and a raft of summer festival dates, Wilko was friendly, candid and extremely funny - as he always is. It was not the first time I have interviewed him. In September 2013 I was the first journalist in the world to reveal he was working on a project with Roger Daltrey. At the time, he was expected to die within weeks.

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Wilko on stage in 2013.

Picture by Charles Thomson

During our conversation, we covered everything from how he writes songs to his nerves about returning to the stage after the longest absence of his adult life. We discussed his time in hospital, including how the mind-altering after-effects of the massive dose of anaesthetic needed for his 12-hour operation led him to stage a dangerous, if amusing, escape attempt when he woke up. Along the way we also discussed his charitable efforts for the hospital which saved his life, and why he isn't angry at the doctors who wrongly told him he was terminally ill.

Wilko also revealed that he is the subject of a new documentary, directed by Julien Temple, who has made music videos for Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston and Davie Bowie. Temple also directed Oil City Confidential, the hugely popular documentary about the origins of Dr Feelgood.

Oil City Confidential Trailer.

It was wonderful to find Wilko on such good form. The last time I spoke to him, 'knowing' - so we all thought - that he'd be dead by Christmas, was extremely sad, not least because he's such a friendly, funny and vibrant man. I look forward to catching one of his comeback concerts.

To listen to the extended interview, including all the bits that simply did not fit in the newspaper, click here. 

To read my interview feature with Wilko, click here. 

To read about the new documentary, click here. 

Life on the Road with Mr Dynamite

Tonight, HBO will premiere its new James Brown documentary 'Mr Dynamite', directed by Oscar-winner Alex Gibney. The movie charts the rise of the Godfather of Soul as he revolutionised the music industry and became a prominent philanthropist and civil rights campaigner.

James Brown at the Harlem Apollo.
Photo: Emilio Grossi. Permission: HBO.

About 10 days ago I was contacted by HBO and asked if I would like to interview Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks, the drummers who played on many of Mr Brown's most important songs. Of course, I leapt at the chance. The pair told me many hilarious stories about life on the road with the famously tempestuous star.

In a new Huffington Post article I have published, alongside extracts of my existing unpublished interviews with saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis and trombonist Levi Rasbury, some of what they had to say.

Click here to read the article.

London Film Festival: Ed Snowden documentary is more gripping than any thriller.

The London Film Festival was book-ended by thrillers. It opened with The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing's race against time to crack the Enigma code. It closed with Fury, following a WWII tank crew through a series of bloody skirmishes in Germany. But more gripping than either was CITIZENFOUR, which told the story of US whistleblower Ed Snowden as he revealed the US Government's industrial scale spying on its own innocent citizens...

Click here to read my review. 

London Film Festival - Bjork fails to impress... or even show up.

I attended the premiere of Bjork's new documentary a few days ago. Bjork didn't bother. She was supposed to, but she suddenly pulled out, citing a rather flimsy excuse about working on an album. She would have known she was doing that when she committed to the premiere. All a bit odd. All a bit Bjork.

Directors Peter Strickland and Nick Fenton, and producer Jacqui Edenbrow, apologised at the premiere for Bjork's absence. 

I'm not a particular Bjork fan, but was interested to give the film a go and see whether she could win me around. Sadly, she didn't.

Click here to read my review. 

London Film Festival 2014 - The Pamela Smart Trial

The London Film Festival typically includes at least one documentary shedding light on some sort of terrible injustice. Previous years' highlights have included The Central Park Five, West of Memphis and The Kill Team. One of my favourites was actually the much-maligned Conviction - not a documentary, but a real life story, which I reviewed here.

This year the trial of Pamela Smart is put under the microscope. In Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart, director Jeremiah Zagar posits that the trial - the first in America to ever be fully televised - was corrupted by months of media speculation before it began. It is worth noting that in the UK, Contempt of Court laws would have rendered almost all of that coverage illegal for the precise reason that it could compromise the trial process.

Click here to read my review of the film. 

London Film Festival: Ralph Steadman Update

I promised to notify you as soon as my interview with Ralph Steadman was published. Here it is as it appeared in this week's editions of the Yellow Advertiser - Britain's biggest regional newspaper series. Unless you have a massive screen, you won't be able to read that, though, so click here to read it on the YA website.

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Fear and Loathing at the London Film Festival

On Friday, the morning after my advance tour of the Michael Jackson exhibition, I set about trying to arrange another interview. The London Film Festival begins this week and I knew that a documentary was screening about Ralph Steadman.

Mr Steadman is probably best known for his collaborations with Hunter S Thompson and I am a huge fan of their work together. I even wrote my university dissertation on Hunter's gonzo journalism and to what extent its influence could still be felt in contemporary journalism.

While the pair's most famous collaboration is probably Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I have two favourites; one from the early years and one from the latter. The first was their debut, 'The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved', written for short-lived magazine Scanlan's. The second is a giant coffee table book, 'The Curse of Lono', in which Hunter drags Ralph to Hawaii to observe a marathon, setting in motion a chain of catastrophic events.

Knowing the Steadman documentary - 'For No Good Reason' - was screening at the film festival a week later, I called the press office on Friday morning to see whether Mr Steadman might be in town giving interviews at any point.

To my surprise, I was told Mr Steadman was at the BFI National Film Theatre at that very moment. At midday I received an email telling me I had been allocated a slot at 2pm. I had nothing with me - no dictaphone, no camera - so had to leg it home, gather my equipment and dash to the train station.

I made it to the BFI with just ten minutes to spare but that didn't matter in the end. The gentleman before me was still waiting and we were told there was a backlog. As time wore on - and 2pm became 3pm - we were approached, variously, by PR workers, the film's executive producer and its director, all of whom explained that Ralph had a tendency to veer off on wild tangents and his interviews were all overrunning as a consequence.

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Photo property of Charles Thomson

Eventually, Mr Steadman loomed over me, grinning maniacally and claiming I shouldn't ask him any questions because he was a 'moron'. It was a strange beginning to a strange interview, which should be published later this week.

Before we parted ways, I asked Mr Steadman if he'd do me the honour of signing my copy of 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' ('The Curse of Lono' wouldn't fit in my bag). He went a step further, drawing Hunter's face - complete with cigarette holder - then raising his fountain pen above his head and flicking it downwards, splurting ink all over the book (and my dictaphone and the BFI's table). We had a few pictures taken and then I headed home.

It was certainly not an encounter I'll forget in a hurry. As soon as the article is published, I will post it here.

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Photo property of Charles Thomson

My Upcoming French TV Appearance: A Preview

On June 20th, French TV station France Ô will screen Conrad Murray's controversial documentary about the death of Michael Jackson - and a lot of Jackson's fans are less than happy about it. Largely shot during Murray's trial and shown around the world in the weeks after he was found guilty of Jackson's manslaughter, the documentary tells his version of what happened on June 25th 2009, the day Michael Jackson died in his care.

The documentary sparked outrage when it first aired in November last year. Jackson's fans organised a campaign and vowed to boycott, while his Estate publicly demanded that it be banned from the airwaves. In an open letter to Comcast, NBC and MSNBC, the Estate complained that Murray had 'refused to tell his story under penalty of perjury in a court of law' but had now, post-conviction, released a documentary in which he blamed Michael Jackson for his own death.

Ultimately, the documentary did Murray no favours. It actually became an aggravating factor in his sentencing hearing. In a witness impact statement, Jackson's mother Katherine wrote that Murray's comments in the documentary had added 'insult to injury' and showed that he was 'clearly not remorseful'. Judge Pastor, who presided over Murray's trial, agreed and sentenced him to the maximum possible jail term for Michael Jackson's manslaughter.

Fans have set up petitions and launched a huge campaign to have the documentary pulled from France Ô's schedule. Of course, the petitions will almost certainly be futile affairs. There's probably more chance of Conrad Murray releasing an album called Michael Jackson's Killer and outselling Michael Jackson's Thriller than there is of the show being pulled from the airwaves at this stage. If anything, the fans are most likely generating more buzz around the show, which will ultimately lead more people to switch on and see what all the fuss is about.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of these fans have never seen the documentary. I remember mentioning on Twitter that I'd watched it back in November and being sent a number of rude tweets, informing me that I should be ashamed of myself for tuning in. It was awful, the fans said, and they were boycotting it. But how did they know it was awful if they refused to watch it? How can one intelligently comment upon a documentary without having seen it?

If those fans had tuned in, they would know that for the vast majority of the show - currently on YouTube, for anyone interested in checking it out - Murray comes across as a deeply deluded individual, to whom telling lies comes as naturally as breathing. He constantly makes claims which were refuted by the evidence in his trial and the camera crew also films his defence team as they scheme to concoct outlandish theories around the prosecution's evidence.

In one scene, Murray's defence lawyers are seen wracking their brains for ways in which to counter the evidence of anesthetic expert Dr Steven Schafer, who quite literally wrote the instruction manual that comes inside every propofol box.  Lawyer Michael Flanagan is actually filmed suggesting that the defence needs to convince jurors that the coroner's verdict on Jackson's cause of death is incorrect. "We gotta get it to be a cardiac arrest," he says. The scene epitomises Murray's defence: 'Ok, our last harebrained theory hasn't panned out, what's our next one?'

In another scene, Murray - looking like a pay-per-view faith healer - closes his eyes and waves his arms in the air as he describes how the Holy Spirit came to him in a dream and promised to 'keep me safely in the secret chambers of his tabernacle'.

Any right-minded viewer watching the deranged doctor's ramblings will be left with the impression that this is a man they wouldn't leave in charge of their shopping cart, let alone their life. Far from painting Murray as a sympathetic figure, it only reinforces the perception of him as a charlatan. In the UK, it was screened under the title, The Man Who Killed Michael Jackson.

Amid all the controversy surrounding Murray's documentary, I was contacted a few weeks ago by a production company working for another French TV station called M6. The company was putting together a documentary to mark the third anniversary of Michael Jackson's death. The show would focus on the circumstances surrounding Jackson's death and, specifically, whether Conrad Murray was the only doctor to blame.

I am firmly of the opinion that Murray is the only doctor to blame for Jackson's death and thought taking part would be a good opportunity to make that point. The M6 documentary, titled Access Privé, is scheduled to air on June 25th, five days after the Murray documentary, and M6 scores far higher ratings than France Ô.

Picture: Angela Kande

I was interviewed for the show on Thursday, June 7th, at the Millennium Hotel in Knightsbridge, London - about a two-minute walk from Jackson's favourite London shopping centre, Harrods. I was interviewed for roughly an hour by Amal El Hachimi from Spica Production TV, the company making the report.

It wasn't the easiest of interviews. The documentary's aim is to explore whether any other doctors were at all culpable in Jackson's death. I was repeatedly asked about the actions of other doctors who treated Jackson over the years. Questions like that are a legal minefield. To even hint that a doctor may have behaved unethically when they have never been charged, let alone convicted, is extremely legally precarious.

I wasn't too put off by the line of questioning. Amal kept returning to the subject, but I remained resolute: Michael Jackson's cause of death was acute propofol intoxication. Ergo, the doctor who administered that propofol - Conrad Murray - is the only doctor legally culpable for Jackson's death. If other doctors gave him medication over the years which they shouldn't have done, they should certainly be prosecuted for that - but the fact is, Jackson died on Murray's watch and as a direct consequence of Murray's actions.

I was asked a lot of questions about demerol, but stated repeatedly that there had been no findings in Jackson's autopsy to indicate any demerol addiction. There was certainly never any implication that it played a role in his death.

Other topics covered included theories that Jackson was worth more dead than alive, speculation that his publishing catalogue was a motive for murder and the hotly debated subject of Jackson's well-being during This Is It rehearsals. Discussing the latter, I recounted evidence given throughout Murray's trial from both sides of the fence, including both Ortega's email about 'pulling the plug' and the coroner's assessment that Jackson was 'above average health for a man his age'.

Almost every topic discussed during the interview was legally questionable but I took extra care not to say anything dangerous. My interview lasted an hour but the entire show - which will feature other interviewees including Frank Cascio - will only last 15 minutes. My primary concern is that during the editing process my considered, legally sound responses will have vital sentences lopped off of their beginnings or ends.

J Randy Taraborrelli once told me about the dangers of giving TV interviews. He said that he always took care to be fair and balanced but often found that in the editing process, vital material was cut away and what was left in didn't accurately represent the totality of his answers. I hope I'm not left feeling that way on June 25th, although it may take a while for me to find out what's actually been included, as my voice will be over-dubbed in French!

I took extra care to be fair, balanced and honest. I hope that's reflected in the edit and that I don't piss off too many fans. I don't want to be the subject of their next petition.

Dieter Wiesner: 'I caught Martin Bashir sneaking through Michael Jackson's luggage.'

Back in October I interviewed Dieter Wiesner, who served as Michael Jackson's manager between 1997 and 2003. At the time, I was writing an article about the making of Michael Jackson's last ever music video 'One More Chance' and had arranged an interview with Dieter because he was not only on the video set during filming but also integral to the planning of Jackson's wider comeback - which was scuppered mid-way through the video shoot by Tom Sneddon's raid on Neverland Ranch.

During my interview with Dieter he discussed topics that I'd never heard him discuss before, such as the moving story of how he had to break the news of Sneddon's raid to Jackson in his Las Vegas hotel room. But the most shocking claim was one about British TV journalist Martin Bashir, whose famous show 'Living With Michael Jackson' is considered by many to have renewed Tom Sneddon's interest in the popstar and instigated the allegations which would result in the 2005 trial that almost killed Jackson.

While discussing Martin Bashir, Dieter Wiesner claimed that during a 2002 visit to Berlin he observed Martin Bashir sneaking into Jackson's hotel suite and rummaging through his luggage. He also claimed that Bashir was running around, chasing Jackson's children with a camera while the popstar was elsewhere, despite agreeing not to film the children for the documentary.

Here is an audio excerpt from my interview with Dieter Wiesner in which he makes the shocking allegations:



I first revealed Dieter's claims in a live three-hour interview on Blog Talk Radio. I am now in the process of uploading edited highlights of that interview to my YouTube channel, to which fans can subscribe if they want to receive updates when further clips go online.

The first three segments of this interview are now online. In these clips I discuss little known information about Martin Bashir's documentary which came to light during Jackson's 2005 trial.

Click here to listen to Part One.

Click here to listen to Part Two.

Click here to listen to Part Three.

Preview: True Crime with Aphrodite Jones - The Michael Jackson Trial

Aphrodite Jones's Michael Jackson documentary hasn't even aired yet and already the media is gunning for it. The documentary, which aims to highlight slanted media reporting about the allegations against Jackson, has already been dismissed by New York Daily News as a 'love letter' to the star. Meanwhile, South Coast Daily News says it is unobjective because the interviewees are 'a parade of former Jackson managers and retainers'.

The latter comment in particular is both untrue and unfair. Firstly, the show's interviewees include two of the jurors from Jackson's trial, a criminal defense expert and Jones herself. None of these people knew Jackson and they certainly weren't on his payroll.

Secondly, the idea that a documentary about Michael Jackson should be dismissed as unreliable because the talking heads actually knew him is beyond ludicrous. The clear inference is that the documentary would somehow be more reliable if half of the screen time was dedicated to people who never met Jackson speculating wildly about his private life. This is patently absurd.

Having arrived home today and found an advance screening DVD of the show on my doormat, I thought I would post a preview/review ahead of tonight's airing.

Preview

The show begins with Jackson's death on June 25th last year, with Jones positing that while the star was technically killed by acute propofol intoxication, his death had been a sad inevitability. His spirit was crushed, she argues, by bogus allegations about his relationships with children and the way in which the media had misrepresented them. "Jackson never came back from his trial," Jones says in publicity materials. "He died trying."

The audience is transported back to 1993 and taken through the first set of allegations levelled against Jackson. Much time is dedicated to the controversial settlement of the civil suit brought by Jordan Chandler's parents. That settlement, Jones suggests, is the primary cause of many people's reservations about Jackson.

Former Jackson manager Frank Dileo says that Jackson was tricked into the settlement by business advisors more interested in the star's earning power than his public image. Thomas Mesereau, who represented Jackson in his 2005 trial, adds that the settlement also set a precedent for anybody wishing to extort money from Michael Jackson, sending the message that he was an easy target. It created an attitude, he says: 'Why work when you can just sue Michael
Jackson?'

It was Jackson's concern over the impact of the settlement on his public image, Jones claims, that inspired him to let Martin Bashir into his inner sanctum. Seduced by Bashir's promise that his documentary would centre on Jackson's quest to achieve an International Children's Holiday, the star gave Bashir unprecedented access to his life in the hope that it would vindicate him of the 1993 child abuse allegations. But Bashir manipulated the footage in order to advance his own career, Jones says. Bashir ended up crossing the pond to work as a news anchor for ABC, while the documentary Jackson hoped would vindicate him actually wound up serving as the catalyst to a second set of allegations.

Thomas Mesereau describes former DA Tom Sneddon - who tried to prosecute Jackson in 1993 and brought charges against him in 2003 - as being "obsessed to the point of absurdity". Paul Rodriguez, jury foreman in Jackson's trial, agrees. "He came across like he was just doing anything he could to pursuade us to look at things his way, regardless of the evidence," he says. "It was almost like he had a vendetta against him."

Criminal defence lawyer and celebrity trial expert Mickey Sherman adds:

"I think [the prosecution] got too emotionally invested in the case. I think Tom Sneddon seemed gleeful. Gleeful. He took a little too much pleasure in dishing out misery to Michael Jackson... There was such an eagerness to dish out some bad stuff to Michael Jackson that the credibility was, if not lost, certainly diminished."

Jones asserts that the media ignored the not guilty verdicts in Jackson's trial and continued to portray him as a predator because it made 'great headlines on the covers of rag papers'. Mesereau adds that the media was 'humiliated' by the verdicts because reporters had been predicting a conviction and 'almost salivating about him being hauled off to jail'. Jones concludes that the trial traumatised Jackson to such an extent that he was unable to sleep, and this is why he died of a propofol overdose last summer.

Review

While early reviews have been unfair and inaccurate, this documentary is not without fault. For the uninitiated, it offers a tantalising glimpse of what was wrong with the prosecution's case against Jackson and the extent to which the media skewed its reporting on the trial. However, this documentary is not a definitive guide to the allegations against Jackson. The 2005 trial alone lasted four months and could warrant a six part TV series of its own. By condensing both rounds of allegations against Jackson - plus his death - into an hour-long show, programme makers have omitted a wealth of key information.

The 1993 case is all but skipped over. Claims made by Evan Chandler are stated as fact rather than conjecture and the ample evidence undermining the Chandler family's case is not mentioned at all.

The show also fails to mention the enormous legal reason behind the settlement of the civil suit in 1994. Tom Sneddon had so little evidence to support his case in 1993 that two separate grand juries refused to allow him to bring charges against Jackson. The upshot of this was that the civil trial wound up scheduled ahead of any potential criminal trial. This was a violation of Jackson's fifth amendment as it would severely undermine his right to a fair trial.

Holding the civil trial in advance of a criminal trial would give the prosecution unqualified access to Jackson's defense strategy. If Jackson cited an alibi in his civil trial, Sneddon could go back to the office and change the dates on the criminal charges. If Jackson called witnesses to corroborate his version of events, Sneddon could go back to his office and mould his case around their testimony. He could tailor his case exactly to the defense strategy, making it impossible for Jackson to win a criminal trial. The only way Jackson could guarantee himself a fair criminal trial was to make the civil trial go away.

The settlement agreement did not prevent the Chandler family from testifying in a criminal case. Jackson was prepared to fight the allegations in court but he was not prepared to forfeit his right to a fair criminal trial by wasting his defense on a civil suit. The Chandlers' decision not to testify in the criminal case was entirely their own and is perhaps the best indication of what they were really about.

None of this was mentioned in the show's discussion of the 1993 case.

When the second set of allegations rolled around in 2003, Sneddon repeatedly broke the law in his pursuit of Jackson. He breached the conditions of his own search warrant, illegally raided the office of a PI hired by Jackson's lawyer, breached a court-imposed gag order and stole defense documents from the home of a Jackson employee.

When Jackson's lawyer appeared on NBC and stated that the star had a 'concrete, iron-clad alibi' for the dates on the charge sheet, Sneddon shifted them by almost two weeks in time for the arraignment.

None of this is mentioned in tonight's show. Nor is there much discussion at all about the testimony presented in Jackson's trial. Each of the Arvizo family was caught in countless lies. They contradicted their own and each other's versions of events. They claimed to have been held captive at Neverland when records clearly showed that they'd entered and exited the ranch at will and had ample access to telephones while they were there. It was also revealed that the family had lied about sexual abuse in the past for monetary gain.

Elsewhere, former employees took the stand and claimed to have witnessed Jackson molesting Brett Barnes, Wade Robson and Macauley Culkin - only for all three of them to take the stand and tell the prosecution, in no uncertain terms, that they'd never been touched and they resented the implication. The prosecution was also unable to produce a single piece of evidence linking Jackson to their ill-conceived conspiracy charge. All of this - and much more - is omitted from tonight's documentary.

In brief, tonight's show suffers due to time constraints. Whilst it does include interesting commentary from experts like Thomas Mesereau and jurors Paul Rodriguez and Paulina Coccoz, and it will give non-fans an insight into Sneddon's questionable motives and tactics, it is simply impossible to condense the story behind the allegations against Jackson into a one-hour TV show. Aphrodite Jones herself wrote a 296 page book about the 2005 trial alone.

Although this documentary does not include all of the exculpatory evidence relating to the allegations against the King of Pop, it may inspire Jackson skeptics to re-evaluate their stance and perhaps intrigue them enough to seek out Jones's book, Michael Jackson Conspiracy, which contains far more information.

True Crime with Aphrodite Jones airs tonight at 10pm (ET) on Investigation Discovery.