Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Marketing is the hangover.
'Master Harold' is about me as a little boy, and my father, who was an alcoholic. There's a thread running down the Fugard line of alcoholism. Thankfully I haven't passed it on to my child, a wonderful daughter who's stone-cold sober. But I had the tendency from my father, just as he had had it from his father.
I've written songs sober and I've written songs high.
As you get older, you kind of take a more sober view of life.
I think that after a year of Portishead I've become a little more sober.
In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.
I was afraid to admit feeling ill because even when I was 4 or 5, I knew that my father viewed sickness as a sign of weakness, of sin, of disobedience.
I was 14 years old when my dad went into rehab, and he stayed there for a long time - I don't know, 10 or 12 years maybe. He first was there as a resident, as someone trying to get sober, and it took a long time; and then he stayed on helping people get their GED.
I just finished an episode of a new show called 'Century City.' It's like 'Law & Order' set in the future, and I have a very dramatic role in that. I have to sob and weep and wail. It was very hard. When it was done, I was like, 'OK, time to watch 'SpongeBob!'
People would read all kinds of reaction into it, but Tracy told me himself that half the time he was just standing very still, trying to look sober and composed. That takes nothing away from him. The fact he got away with it was a tribute to his talent.
