The Arts: `I'm not miserable all day'

Chris Isaak, famous for his sad songs, shows a lighter side on his new album, says Simon Briggs.

The Daily Telegraph, pp 12
October 03, 1998 By Simon Briggs

CHRIS Isaak has a confession to make. "Yeah, I played with Metallica last year. We had a lot of fun." Can this be the same Chris Isaak who idolises Roy Orbison; who had his biggest hit with the exquisite melancholy of Wicked Game? The Chris Isaak who was cast by Tom Hanks in his period pop piece That Thing You Do because his public persona is such a perfectly observed throwback, greasy quiff and all, to the days of Elvis and Buddy Holly?

"A lot of people think, `Metallica - that's loud and angry, devil music.' But, acutally, they have beautiful melodies. I'm moving in the same direction myself - this last album is probably the loudest, most rocking record I've ever made."

Well, it's all relative. Speak of the Devil, Isaak's sixth album, does feature a couple of up-tempo rockabilly numbers, but it'll hardly have the neighbours banging on the walls. There are also songs like 7 Lonely Nights, a trademark slow, spacious lament, decorated by a crooning falsetto. Isaak is aware that his songwriting tends towards the miserable, so he lightens the mood at his live shows with quips and jokey cover-versions.

"I think it would be strange if I was on stage, wearing a black turtleneck, smoking a cigarette and reading Sylvia Plath, though some people might like to see that. This girl once came up to me and said, `You' re such a phoney. I see you with your friends and you're eating an ice-cream and riding a bicycle. These songs are supposed to be sad and you're not sad.' Well, at the time my life was a total wreck and the only good thing I had was playing these shows. I didn't bother telling her that, though. I was like, `Sorry that I'm not miserable 24 hours a day.' "

That particular low happened about six years ago after he and a long- term girlfriend broke up. Those who appreciate his matinee-idol looks and broad shoulders (he was an amateur boxer before turning to music) might like to know that he hasn't struck up any lasting bonds since then.

"I don't go to bars and I don't drink. I'm more likely to do my show and go back to my hotel and work out, play my guitar, stay in my room and go to bed. Once in a while I get lucky and I have wild times, like a pirate, and do things that are totally sinful and evil, but that's only once in a great while. I'm very ashamed of it when it happens and very proud of it in the long run."

In person, Isaak is certainly more pirate than party-pooper. He may be laid back, both literally and metaphorically, stretched across a black leather sofa in black leather cowboy boots, black trousers and a black shirt, but he is talkative and engaging.

Isaak grew up in a musical family in Stockton, California, but he doesn't think of himself as a natural. "I listen to John Lennon and Elvis and Roy Orbison, whoever it is, and just try to compete on that level. You might not have so much talent, but you never know, you might get lucky. Sometimes you get something bigger than you intended, so I keep in there."

If Isaak doesn't get lucky with his music - and he has yet to repeat the success of 1990's Wicked Game, which turned up on the soundtrack to David Lynch's film Wild at Heart - he can fall back on his film work. His meatiest roles have come in Bertolucci's Little Buddha, where he starred opposite Keanu Reeves, and in Fire Walk with Me, Lynch's Twin Peaks spin-off, where he was Kyle MacLachlan's alter ego.

Recently he had a part in Tom Hanks's glossy mini-series From the Earth to the Moon, which tells the story of the manned space programme. "Man, if you'd told me when I was 12 that I'd be pretending to be a cop or an astronaut for a living, I would have said, `So what am I doing at school? I already pretend to be a cop or an astronaut, all day long.' "

So would he have made a good astronaut? "I don't like to do heroic things; I like to avoid them. But I do have an ability to focus on a situation that would have helped.

"At one stage they jammed three of us into these really tight mock- up spacesuits, and put us in an exact copy of the actual capsule. One of the other actors was acting like a real bad-ass, smoking cigars, hanging tough. And they were doing a scene where the craft catches fire, only it really did catch fire on the inside, and there were flames up and down the whole wall. We were in this really tiny space, and no one outside saw that the fire was still going, and I thought, `We could die in here from all the flames and smoke.'

"They came and dragged us out, and this guy next to me, the bad-ass, is crying - he really freaked out. So I went to him: `Wow, I didn' t know if they were gonna come and get us or what.' And he turned to me, and said, `You mean you were scared too?'"

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