Music From Every Night at 8 > Rob Dickinson
Artist: Rob Dickinson
MOVIE QUESTIONS
- MY FAVORITE MOVIE:
- Withnail and I or Get Carter
- A MOVIE SHOULD:
- Move and inspire and make you laugh and cry (duh).
- FAVORITE MOVIE SCENE:
- The opening credits to The Italian Job (1969) as an aging Italian lothario speeds to his violent death in a tunnel in the alps whilst driving an orange Lamborghini Miura to the strains of "On Days Like These" sung by Matt Monro.
- MY FAVORITE ACTRESS:
- Julie Christie
- BEST USE OF MUSIC:
- Roy Budd's score in Get Carter
- MOVIE CHARACTER I'D LOVE TO BE:
- Charlie Croker in The Italian Job (1969).
- FIRST SCREEN CRUSH:
- Olivia Hussey in Romeo and Juliet (1968).
- MY FAVORITE ACTOR:
- Michael Caine
- FAVORITE MOVIE SOUNDTRACK:
- Once Upon A Time In the West by Ennio Morricone
- FAVORITE MOVIE LINE:
- "I think you should strangle it quickly before it starts trying to make friends with us." --Marwood (Paul McGann) to Withnail (Richard E. Grant) as they try to prepare a rather charming chicken for dinner in Withnail and I.
BIOGRAPHY
ROB DICKINSON
Fresh Wine For The Horses
Patient. This guy must be patient. How long has Rob Dickinson been sitting on songs of such enormity and magnificence as "My Name Is Love", "Oceans" and "The Night"? Where has he been for the five years since his groundbreaking band The Catherine Wheel stopped making records? What on earth has he been doing and why has he chosen this moment to re-emerge?
Raised in Norfolk, England, the son of two school teachers, Dickinson was a slow learning child who grew up happily enough in a sleepy town next to the sea. He went to school, he went to University, he designed cars, and then he formed one of the most range roaming, viscerally intense rock bands of the nineties, the Catherine Wheel.
The Catherine Wheel was a cool band. In Rob Dickinson they possessed a songwriter and lyricist of rare and sometimes audacious talent. "Eat my dust you insenstive..." purred Dickinson on 1994's "Happy Days," his scalpel-sharp understatement having grown from the flickering of the bands 1992 breakthrough, the feedback-soaked "Black Metallic" ("it's "Like A Hurricane" for the nineties" drooled NME). This song in particular heralded Dickinson's talent as a tunesmith of unusual passion and intensity. Through constant evolution and a steadfast refusal to repeat themselves, Catherine Wheel grew into a swaggeringly assured, devastatingly effective scene setter of a band.
Criminally overlooked, (Rolling Stone magazine famously sub-editing the review of the band's 1997 masterwork, "Adam and Eve," down from 4-1/2 stars to 3-1/2), never was a band so influential and yet so invisible. They quietly unleashed six brilliant albums, all an artistic development of the last and all reflecting a musical force that could crush any band that dared share a stage - ask Radiohead or The Smashing Pumpkins about that.
And then? Nothing. The band vanished. No word, no explanation, no fanfare, no farewell, no best wishes, no "Best Of". Nothing. A band stopped. "People were no longer paying attention. Going out with a bang seemed a little inappropriate," says Dickinson dryly. "I'm not bitter about the band's modest success. I view that time as an apprenticeship. Huge success would have killed me anyway at that time in my life. It was a time when I was free to experiment and was encouraged to be 'an artist'. I consider myself lucky to have been blessed with such an opportunity."
So, what's been going on for five years? Tales of another life in New York or LA, supermodels, vintage Porsches, rumors of depression, a hush-hush business designing one-off cars for the well heeled, even shepherding in the French Pyrenees, all remain unconfirmed yet undenied. Dickinson it seems is a complicated man. What he has very definitely been doing is writing songs. Whatever merit his past with the band may confer on him, Dickinson's inevitable stardom would appear to be as a solo artist with a breathtaking new collection of music celebrating the extremes of the human spirit. If ever a slice of modern rock music deserved the adjective "deep", "Fresh Wine For The Horses" is it.
From a conversation with Venus on "My Name Is Love" to the whimsical heartbreak of "Oceans" ("As far as I can tell, you already bare the scars of love") to the confessional despair of "Bad Beauty" ("Upon my shirt, the dirty work, of tunnels through my dreams") to the emotional highs of "Towering and Flowering" and dark magnificence of "'The Night," Dickinson's "Fresh Wine For The Horses" bristles with beauty, wit, power and romance but still keeps its manly charm. And all of it held together with sincerity in both delivery and thought that is rare in these post modern times.
