Lunny is promising lots more special guests during the festival; bearing in mind his place at the centre of the current fusion of Irish traditional music with contemporary, global styles, you can take him at his word.VAN THE MANIrish music is featured in the Green on the Screen season, which features Van Morrison in Ireland, the 1980 music-doc of the legend by Il Postino director Michael Radford. The ex-Planxty member and his new Wheels of the World band – joined by Hothouse Flower, Liam O’ Maonlai – will open the festival with Lunny’s beloved “Irish music with a big motor”
(4 Apr, 7.30pm). One of Ireland’s most innovative musicians and respected producers (he has been dubbed “the Quincy Jones of Irish music”, but wonders whether Quincy Jones would ever have heard of him) – his influence is evident from last year’s Common Ground album. One of the best of the recent “Celtic” compilations, Lunny bagged his wish-list – stars such as Bono, Elvis Costello and Kate Bush – to rework traditional songs. The only thing that stops you swearing undying fealty to this resilient heroine is the certain knowledge that she’ll be back in business before the year is out.
“That and the Spice Girls…” After that she’ll go back to her modest house in Willesden Green, to write her interview and worry about where the next cheque is coming from. Storey is handling the fallen-idol stuff very well, considering the losses she has sustained – of love, money, career, success, profit, reputation, stuff like that. I really admire Katharine Hamnett, who’s grown her whole company off the back of her income, without any bank loans It’s the same with Paul Smith. What advice will she give aspirant designers? Don’t go into fashion? Don’t trust banks “The only real answer is: leave Go abroad Certainly get the clothes made abroad And if you can, get financed from there too The other thing is not to rely on third parties.
It was for thousands of dozens of items – we had to add extra columns on the order forms”) and she discovers that the banks won’t underwrite her against losses. Behind the dress with the bare arse, there’s 10 versions of it, complete with arse, and they’re the ones that end up selling in Paris.”The story of her success and where it all went is documented in Fighting Fashion, plainly told and full of nightmares, as huge orders come in from America (“One order was a quarter of a million quid, which for a little girl was a lot of money. But the part of my work that’s most publicised only accounts for about three per cent of what I do. Rather selfishly, I often think of the body as just part of my design process I don’t design to protect the body. Then I realised you could make money from doing what you enjoyed Then I worried that it wasn’t really a profession And my answer was to make something out of rubbish. I thought you were supposed to hate your job, you were there to make money. She dealt in festishistic materials like rubber and latex, and threw in some Moschino-like subversions of the whole opulent fashion circus, making dresses out of council bin-liners, a boa out of scraps, a ballgown out of men’s shirts sewn together.
“I did it out of guilt, I think, guilt at being a fashion designer. Wherever you looked, there were draughty cutaway garments that sometimes looked like terrible accidents (the evening dress with cut-away bottom caused a lot of fuss). Her first catwalk show, in 1990, was titled “Rage” and featured some coolly extravagantly sights – abbreviated sequinned shorts, lycra leotards in pop-art abstracts, a battle-field brassiere covered in bullets and a rose Later, her tastes got wilder. The head of the school came round and took my dabblings and mistakes for originality.”Such modesty. But none of it counted anyway, since she got a job at the Valentino salon in Rome and learned about the weirdly unreal, court-of- Versailles collective of neurotic enthusiasts and sycophantic popinjays that flap and fluster around a major-league designer; how a design on a sheet of paper is transformed (her words) “by a form of glorious madness” into a hundred frocks and jackets and blouses and unstructured frou-frou in the Paris shops.She started her own label and opened her own shop in Newburgh Street, London, in 1984.
