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Ginger Baker is renowned for being a difficult man, but his recent Q&A with The Guardian is one of the most excruiating interviews in recent memory. Perhaps worse than classic moments of awkwardness involving Madonna, Justin Bieber, Sigur Ros and more...
Catch them on the right day and musicians can be some of the loveliest, friendliest, most easy-going people you're likely to meet. A genuine pleasure to talk to. But catch them on a bad day and getting blood out of a stone sounds like it could be quite cathartic.
Sometimes a musician is just having an off day, forced to do promo work they really don't want to do. At other times it's a question of interviewer and interviewee simply being on different pages, misunderstanding each other or the tone of the interview. Some people just enjoy being difficult.
Whatever the cause, there's nothing quite as painful as watching an interview sink, seeing an interviewer flounder as they try to get the star back on side while the world looks on grimacing. Prepare to curl your toes...
Ginger Baker - Michael Hann
Given that there's just been a documentary made called 'Beware Of Mr Baker', it's no surprise that the drummer's not the easiest interview partner. When the Guardian's Michael Hann tried to host a Q&A with him after a screening though, you can see he just wants the ground to swallow him up. Baker makes no secret of his dislike for the other man on the stage, calling the questions stupid and insinuating that Hann has no idea what music is.
Madonna - Letterman 1994
This one is really the fault of the interviewer, who introduces the pop star saying she's 'slept with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry', something Letterman clearly thinks was very funny. He then tries to get Madge to kiss a guy in the audience. She then goes him a 'sick f**k', having given him a pair of underwear as he greeted her. All kind of weird, all very uncomfortable.
Justin Bieber - Peter Andre
Andre really buggers this one up, first introducing Bieber as a presenter of an award, before being corrected that he's a nominee and having to start again. He then hopes to find common ground in their love of MJ, but falls flat on his face yet again when Bieber explains he can't moonwalk on carpet, which Andre profoundly agrees with, and then asks him to do another MJ move. Bieber declines for the same reason.
The Bee Gees - Clive Anderson
You have to ask yourself what Clive Anderson was thinking with this interview, jokingly insulting the band for the duration, seemingly misreading the tone with catastrophic effect. When two of the brothers decide enough's enough and leave his face is one of the funniest things on TV, ever. He genuinely doesn't seem to have realised he was p*ssing them off.
Vanilla Ice goes crazy
Vanilla Ice was invited on an MTV show where they wreck videos that have been over-played, one of those being 'Ice Ice Baby'. Vanilla goes a little further though, trashing the set with a baseball bat and at several points looking like he might start laying into the presenters. This is a man who's been pushed to the edge. Clearly. But then he's heard 'Ice Ice Baby' more than anyone so you can't really blame him.
John Lydon - Tom Snyder
From Lydon's Sex Pistol's days right up to recent months the punk frontman has always presented a challenge to interviewers. His determination not to cooperate with Tom Synder in 1980, though, is perhaps the epitome of his difficult nature. Insisting PiL is a business not a band, that the Sex Pistols were suppose to be the end of rock'n'roll and that people who idolise bands are idiots - all while appearing genuinely threatening - seems too much for Synder.
Sigur Ros Bryant Park Project
No one, in the history of the world, has ever wanted to do something less than Sigur Ros wanted to do this interview with the now defunct Bryant Park Project. There's an uncomfortable silence between most questions and answers, with most of the band simply fiddling with their coffee cups or staring at the desk. Perhaps you could blame the language barrier a little, but in all truth this was just something the band didn't want to do and they weren't going to try and hide it.
Billy Bob Thornton & The Boxmasters QTV
Billy Bob Thornton, known to most as a kind of weird actor, also has a band - The Boxmasters. When he went on QTV in Quebec the production team were apparently instructed not to talk about his acting career. Sadly, the host did just that in his introduction. Billy Bob made him pay by pretending to be confused by the most simple of questions, meandering off on irrelevances instead of answering and eventually scorning the interviewer for his awful crime, leaving him to struggle to piece the segment back together, with limited success, while Thornton insults Canadian audiences.
