Vampire

Duvetyne, or in this case the alternative spelling Duvateen, is a twill fabric with a matt finish that makes it ideal for blocking out light.

In its black fire-retardant form, it has widespread use in the film industry to ensure the right controlling effect.

In the first season of the ­original Star Trek for instance, exterior shots of space, “the final frontier”, were created by gluing glitter to it.

As you’ll discover, it was also used by The Afghan Whigs’ frontman Greg Dulli — and now it’s the name of a pivotal song on the band’s tenth studio album, Soft Control.

It is 40 years since he formed the Whigs in Cincinnati, Ohio, later moving to Seattle to become Sub Pop label mates with grunge pioneers Nirvana, Mudhoney and Soundgarden.

But Soft Control, their first LP in four years, has to be one of their most urgent, textured and captivating efforts yet.

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When he calls from America’s West Coast, it’s the first time I’ve spoken to Dulli since 2008.

He was in London then during an extended Whigs’ hiatus, promoting The Gutter Twins’ album Saturnalia, made with the late Mark Lanegan, one of the grunge movement’s defining singers both with the Screaming Trees and as a solo artist.

Lanegan died aged 57 in 2022, a year after battling a severe case of Covid at his adopted home of Killarney, Ireland. “Mark is someone I miss . . . every day,” Dulli tells me.

He returns to the subject in hand and provides a fulsome explanation of his song Duvateen.

“There was a time in my life when I put it on all my windows,” he admits. “I kept my house in permanent night, living the vampire life.

“I had a friend in the movie business so I went with her to get some. I saw what it could do for me.”

So, what DID it do for you? I venture with a degree of trepidation.

“It was decades ago and I just didn’t have any use for sunlight or for being outside,” replies Dulli, before adding with a knowing sigh, “It was clearly not a healthy time for me.”

By calling the piano-led song Duvateen, Dulli, who delivers the lyrics with white-knuckle intensity, is using it as a metaphor for the infinite void — or, if you like, ­mortality.

He admits: “The symbolic nature of it is not lost on me.”

With lyrics that span his childhood, “teacher gonna chase us down the hall”, to the grave, “dig somebody’s hole”, it encapsulates the circle of life and serves as the album’s heartbeat.

Its sound is in stark contrast to the more rock-heavy numbers, drawing this response from Dulli: “When I get a piano song like that, it’s an exciting moment in my life.

“It’s the sort of thing I could play to my mom.” As for the idea that Duvateen is the album’s centrepiece, he says: “You write songs and, as some emerge, they state their alpha-ness.

“Duvateen got my attention very quickly. It started out differently — a bit like Honky Tonk Women for a minute — but I completely changed it.

“It was one of those songs when you feel as if your hand is being guided from beyond.”

I suggest to Dulli that listening to Soft Control’s ten tracks “feels like an emotional rollercoaster”.

“Well, life in general is an emotional rollercoaster for me,” he replies. “It would stand to reason that any art I put forth would be a similar thing.”

Next the single-minded singer describes his path to the album: “We did a Covid record that came out in ’22, then we toured it for a year.

“Then I took some time off and travelled. I didn’t start working on a new record until ’25.

“But once I began writing songs again, they were happening fast and furious. I did 20, 22. Cut them down to ten. And here’s the ten.”

The result is a concise, dynamic punch of an album. “I like 40 minutes or less and I like ten as a round number,” says Dulli. “I’ve been landing on it for the past four or five records.

“They’re like a little family and sometimes they waiting for a little brother or sister to show up. I wrote the final song, Loose Talk, earlier this year.”

The album comes bursting out of the blocks with taut Jungle Roux and riff-heavy House Of I.

Elsewhere, My Lover leans into the band’s R&B credentials while stately The Deepest Part Of The Darkest Shadow serves as a companion piece to Duvateen.

There’s a song called Memphis, Texas, not as strange as you think because there is such place, along with the famous Memphis in ­Tennessee where Elvis made his name.

The album ends with A Simulation, 70 seconds of ambient beauty segueing into one of Dulli’s most tender vocals and a gorgeous string arrangement.

He calls it one of his “most existential songs”. “I get overwhelmed by injustice, sadness, and people and animals being hurt. I know I’m not the only one wondering, ‘What the f*** are we doing here?’”

But now, before we go any further, it’s time to tell Dulli’s story beginning with his teenage dream of fronting a band, inspired by a legendary psychedelic soul band.

He recalls: “I went to see The 5th Dimension. When (singer) Billy Davis Jr. took off at the end of Let the Sunshine In, it was the most electrifying thing I’d ever seen. I knew I wanted to be a lead singer.”

Having dropped out of studying film at the University Of Cincinnati and flirted with the idea of becoming an actor, Dulli formed his first band, The Black Republicans, in the mid-Eighties.

Did they find it hard to get noticed at first? I ask. “When you’re 20 years old, nothing’s hard, man,” he answers. “You’re literally immortal.

“We all had regular jobs. I drove a taxi. I cooked in a restaurant. I painted houses, put roofs on houses. I was a roadie-type guy at the big theatre in town.”

Crucial to Dulli’s trajectory was the recruitment to The Black Republicans of bassist John Curley, the only Whigs founder member still by his side today.

He says: “We would see this bearded dude at our shows. We all thought he was about 40.

“Then one night after the show, he walked up and introduced himself to me, saying, ‘I’m better than your bass player.’ John came by our rehearsal place and played his way into the band.”

Dulli describes what happened next: “I moved to Arizona for six months and wrote a bunch of songs.

“Then I came back to Cincinnati and started the Whigs with John, Rick McCollum (guitar) and Steve Earle (drums).”

He remembers the Midwestern city on the Ohio River being a “great jumping-off point” because so many towns “weren’t that far away from us”.

Dulli rattles off the places in the manner of Johnny Cash singing I’ve Been Everywhere — “Louisville, Lexington, Kentucky, Columbus, Athens, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Pittsburgh.”

But most inspirational to Dulli was a venue in Newport, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, The Jockey Club.

“Back in the day, the jazz dudes Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. played there,” he says.

“Then it fell into disrepair before opening again as a punk rock club. When I got to college, my roommates were deep in that scene and that’s how I got into The Jockey Club.

“I saw The Damned, Ramones, Johnny Thunders, Violent Femmes, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Killing Joke, so many great people.

“And everybody in the area cut their teeth there. If you were in a band, you played The Jockey Club and you played it multiple times a month.”

In 1989, the Whigs self-released debut album Big Top Halloween caught the attention of Seattle-based Sub Pop’s boss, Jonathan Poneman, who offered them a contract.

Suddenly, they were label mates with grunge pioneers Nirvana and Mudhoney — but they were a very different beast.

Dulli says: “We were outsiders in more ways than one. We were from Cincinnati and we weren’t from the Northwest.

“Our covers were R&B covers instead of Stooges’. I love The Stooges but we had bonded over The Temptations. At our first rehearsal, we played Psychedelic Shack.

“We formed in October, 1986, and played our first gig in January the following year — and I guarantee you we played Psychedelic Shack at that show.”

Dulli was also infatuated with a Midwestern powerhouse in the shape of genre-defying Minneapolis-based Prince.

“We weren’t trying to sound like Prince,” he says. “But you could grab elements of him and stick them in your quiver.”

So what was it like heading to Seattle and mixing with Kurt Cobain and Co?

“It was like seeing people our age doing cool things,” says Dulli. “When Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson off No.1 on Billboard, I thought, ‘Wow! One of our own is at the top’.

“It was an exciting time, certainly in Seattle, where we had a front-row seat to it all.

“We loved all those guys and we loved those bands, played with everybody, and got to know everybody.”

When it came to meeting his biggest buddy from the scene, Mark Lanegan, it was via a different route.

“I met Mark in Boston when the Screaming Trees, Primus and the Whigs were on the same bill but we didn’t start hanging out until around 2000.”

The Whigs enjoyed a stellar Nineties, navigating their way through the music industry “machine” on various labels but coming up with at least three first-rate albums, Congregation (1992), Gentlemen (1993) and 1965 (1998).

In 2001, frazzled Dulli decided to take a step back and the Whigs disbanded. Aside from a brief recording reunion in 2006, the ­hiatus lasted ten years.

He says: “I had absolutely no intention of being in the Whigs ever again. In my creative life, I’m so proud of the things I did during that time — The Twilight Singers and The Gutter Twins.

“But when the door opened to the Whigs again, I was a different person and ready to step through it.”

Dulli remembers the times he would pass through his home town of Cincinnati where bassist Curley and his wife were raising their two daughters. “We were all pretty cooked from the Whigs experience but John would come to the shows and would get up on stage and play with either one of my bands — and everybody loved it.”

In 2010, when Dulli was on a solo tour, Curley did his usual thing but was then persuaded to do the next night in Chicago, a five-hour drive away.

He says: “It was the first time in 11 years that anyone had seen John Curley and I on stage together outside of Cincinnati.

“When I introduced him, the ovation was so unexpectedly loud and long. That, effectively, was the catalyst for the Whigs reforming.”

Since getting back together, they have made four studio albums, Do To The Beast (2014), In Spades (2017), How Do You Burn? and the imminent Soft Control.

The current line-up is Dulli, Curley, multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, Christopher Thorn (guitars) and Bryan Lee Brown (drummer who recently replaced Patrick Keeler who tours with Jack White).

Forty years on since the Whigs formed, Dulli says: “I’m still smiling at my good fortune. Still putting out music, playing live, the whole works. I’m a lucky fella.”

He accepts that he used to be “an angry young man” but, at 61, he has found a degree of peace.

“I had an imaginary chip on my shoulder that I needed to get rid of,” he says.

“You can tame yourself but you can always go back to the wild side — just in case you need to explore.”

It’s fair to say that The Afghan Whigs’ latest album is one of his walks on the wild side.

THE AFGHAN WHIGS

Soft Control

★★★★☆

Some people are still processing “Euphoria’s” evolution away from its roots as a gritty drama that explored highly mature and dark teenage experiences to, in its final season, a fever dream-esque look at adulthood that played like a full-blown neo-noir crime thriller. But another show’s creative transformation has taken the stage now.

The third season of AMC’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire” brings a reset to the captivating world of bloodsuckers. While the first two seasons adapt the original 1976 novel, relying heavily on the recollection of Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) as he recounts his centuries-long life and romance with Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) to a journalist, the new season shifts narrative focus and perspective over to Lestat, who transforms into a charismatic frontman of a glam-rock band to publicly set the record straight. As such, the series has been retitled “The Vampire Lestat,” which is the name of Rice’s second novel. For this week’s Guest Spot, I spoke with showrunner Rolin Jones about the show’s rebranding and Reid’s commitment to the musical challenge.

Also in this week’s Screen Gab, TV critic Robert Lloyd steers us away from the usual streaming options to recommend a man’s video journal that documents his quest to travel the world by foot, while culture critic Mary McNamara suggests a new British comedy about codependent BFFs navigating the sort of tricky development that would end most friendships.

Speaking of endings to relationships, it was announced this week that “Doctor Who” showrunner Russell T Davies is exiting the series (again) seven months after Disney+ decided not to continue its partnership with the BBC to distribute the long-running sci-fi series. BBC also announced it will not air the show’s previously announced Christmas special this year. Lloyd, a longtime Whoverse follower, is a voice of calm through it all. He shares his thoughts on why the new questions swirling around the franchise don’t necessarily have to be cause for alarm — evolution is part of the show’s essence, he reminds us. Elsewhere in current events, if you’ve been curious (… sure, that’s the right word!) about the UFC Freedom 250 live event that will unfold in an oversize cage on the White House South Lawn in celebration of Trump’s 80th birthday and the country’s 250th anniversary — and will be streamed live on Paramount+ — check out our explainer about the controversy — and lawsuit — it has sparked.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have another Matthew Rhys story to read so I can maintain my executive membership in the fan club. See you next week!

— Yvonne Villarreal

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@AlexanderCampbellOfficial (YouTube)

In February 2023, Alexander Campbell, then 27, set out from Sydney to walk west around the world. Currently he is somewhere around Albania, having traversed, among other places, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Bulgaria. He’s been documenting his progress on camera all along the way, but it wasn’t until Day 938, in Georgia, that he began posting the longer, “uneventful” videos that make his channel such a singular, meditative, even hypnotic, form of vicarious travel. Walking alone to the sound of his own footsteps, through sun, rain, sleet, snow and dark of night, over mountains and deserts, through forests and fields, he becomes a character in a peripatetic, nearly one-man show. The occasionally encountered friendly local will warn him about wolves or bears or the hunters who might mistake him for one, though he meets more dogs than people. (He calls them all “Buddy,” warily.) Titles include “I Slept in a Barn Full of Stray Dogs,” “I Got Caught in a Snowstorm With Nowhere to Sleep” and “Something Was Out There in the Forest.”) — Robert Lloyd

Jemaine Clement, left, and Nicola Walker in “Alice and Steve.”

(Lara Cornell / Hulu)

“Alice and Steve” (Hulu, Disney+)

What would you do if your ex-turned-longtime bestie slept with your 26-year-old daughter? Well, Alice (“The Split’s” Nicola Walker) 100% loses her mind. Sure, during a drunken convo at a bar, she did tell Steve (“Flight of the Conchords’” Jemaine Clement) that he could have any woman he wanted, but she most certainly wasn’t talking about Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith). Having just returned home after breaking up with her boyfriend, Izzy decides that Steve, now bunking down on the sofa, is “strangely hot” enough for a little rebound sex and then a romantic relationship. And Steve, though initially regretful and more than a little shell-shocked, decides this is what he wants too. “I really like her,” he says by way of sheepish explanation. It leaves Alice no choice but to hilariously alternate between screaming and scheming as she tries to put a stop to the proceedings even at the expense of her marriage, her career, her friendship with Steve and her self-respect.

Clement’s sad-sack charm successfully boosts the leap of faith required to keep Steve from becoming an oblivious creep, but the show belongs to Walker. Her Alice becomes a blazing embodiment of the emotional maelstrom inside every woman who is expected to somehow put on a supportive, understanding face no matter how outrageous or impossible the situation. The laughs she elicits are exhalations of shock, recognition and relief. We can’t all ditch the high road for pure, luxurious fury, but it’s mighty fun to watch someone who does. — Mary McNamara

Guest spot

A weekly chat with actors, writers, directors and more about what they’re working on — and what they’re watching

Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt in “The Vampire Lestat.”

(Sophie Giraud / AMC)

If you thought posting cryptic digs about an ex on your social media accounts as a way to cope with unresolved emotions was petty, this TV vampire may have you beat. The wild new, music-infused season of “The Vampire Lestat” (formerly “Interview With the Vampire”) revolves around Lestat de Lioncourt (Reid) on an elaborate mission to tell his side of the story after his ex-lover, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Anderson) published a scandalous memoir — with the help of journalist — that detailed their turbulent romance. In his bid to control the narrative, Lestat becomes an immortal glam rocker who launches a music tour and enlists the same journalist — newly turned into a vampire — to direct and film a music documentary about his life. The result is a flamboyant seven-episode season that blends rock-opera style performances (the season will feature 20 original songs) with personal reflections from its flashy frontman. As it enters its second week of release on AMC and AMC+, creator and showrunner Rolin Jones spoke over video call recently to discuss the show’s creative pivot and more. — Y.V.

To kick off the new season, there was an immersive premiere concert event at the historic Beacon Theatre in New York City earlier this month. Was that a surreal experience? Did you feel like a music manager?

I have a hard time talking about the work — the selling of the work, all that kind of stuff. I want to finish my edit, and then I want to like disappear at the Arctic. I knew we were doing this and I knew that there were like fans from all over the world flying in for it — some who didn’t have tickets. I knew there were people who had worked on the show from Seasons 1, 2, and 3 who got on a plane, asked for a ticket, and made a pilgrimage there. I was really moved by it. It was about as good as these things can ever be. It felt really beautiful. It felt like Vampire Church. It was pretty cool. And Sam — “surprising” is not the word because I’ve worked with him for a long time — was way better than he should have been. It’s incredible.

In this TV landscape, taking a show and giving it a new title as it enters its third season is a daring move. The series moves focus to the second book in Rice’s oeuvre. And while it continues the story of these characters, at the same time, it feels like a new show. What made you nervous about carrying out that kind of creative transformation? And what was thrilling about it?

We could start with a thrilling part because the idea to be able to go to the people who worked really hard and say, “Hey, let’s rebuild it” — that’s exciting. That part’s cool. The executing part about it is where the terror begins because most worthwhile art — you can call TV art — invariably has to have risk and danger involved in it, otherwise you’re probably performing a magic trick. No offense to magicians. But you want something that when you turn off the TV, you’re not immediately forgetting. The more risk you do, in terms of form, in terms of all that, you want to be able to feel like you can pull it off because, otherwise, they [the audience] have nothing to grasp onto. [And they say,] “You just destroyed this thing we love, how dare you!” But generally speaking, everybody — from the top of the network down to the actors who are doing it — was down for it. Mostly because, if you listen to our fandom, I think they demand it. They’re out there on a limb telling everybody “it’s the greatest TV show, and blah blah blah” and you have to deliver that for them so that they can continually confidently bombard all their friends and neighbors and say, “Watch the show.” There’s nobody who didn’t give everything [to this season]. It was a real collective leap together.

Sam undergoes quite the transformation to make this rock star vampire persona believable. What struck you about how he approached embodying Lestat this season?

I gained 20 pounds in Toronto, and that’s because I kept stuffing my face with bread, and about every three or four times I would have this big sloth of butter on bread, I’d go, “Poor Sam” because I know Sam had not touched a piece of bread. Let’s start there — 0% body fat, the dimensions on the waist. The level of dedication. He was living and breathing every second about the role and about the demands of it — sing songs, and not only sing songs, but go learn to be a musician, and go train with people who have been doing it their whole life so you can fake it. I feel very confident saying this: Anybody who watches this season and Sam’s performance will feel like, at the end, they saw one of the 10 greatest performances in the history of our medium. I think he absolutely disappeared. James Gandolfini did not sing songs, Swearengen [the “Deadwood” character played by Ian McShane] did not sing songs. Mr. White [the “Breaking Bad character played by Bryan Cranston] did not sing songs. I’ll put him [Sam] up against all of them. He’s incredible.

What if he wants to go off and be a rock star now?

He could do it.

Jacob Anderson as Louis De Pointe Du Lac in Season 3 of “The Vampire Lestat.”

(Sophie Giraud / AMC)

You have a rock band posing as vampires fronted by an actual vampire who is the focus of a documentary being directed by a vampire passing as a human. And for all this to work, the band has to be good. What was the challenge of making this fictional band’s stardom believable — the charisma, the presence on stage, the discography? It’s a tall order, in addition to making a compelling TV show.

Anytime you have seen these things, following a band, there’s so many ways it can fall flat. You can do three or four of the things you need to do, and if one of them falls apart, you’re still stuck there, going, “Eh.” We all, who are working on it, love music. We’ve all been in clubs. The first thing we did was remove the stardom for budget reasons, but also for singular storytelling — he decided to do rock ’n’ roll in the year 2025. Some basic building blocks, we need songs. So with [composer and songwriter] Daniel Hart, we bring him into the [writers’] room because it’s not only writing songs, but writing the context about when and where he’s [Reid] singing them. He has to be aware of what we’re doing in the room. We also have to be able to pivot when he has pure inspiration; he can come in with something we’ve never talked about, and go “Boom!” And it’s OK, now what do we do with this song? And quite often this year we restructured episodes because the song was beating our episode. [We had to] hire actors who can play or musicians that can act — and that’s not everybody, so that shrinks that down. Make sure when you’re in the club, or whether you’re singing the song in rehearsal, let us uglify it, embrace the mistake, make it a little dirty. We have a song this year that has some of the most beautiful orchestrations, but because of where it landed in the season and what it talked about, we ended up going with the most stripped down, bare version of it. Don’t worry, you’ll get to hear these beautiful orchestrations [at some point]. [It’s also thinking about] how do you carve out the time you need to shoot it and the playback elements of it, and what sacrifices you have to make on other set pieces that you would normally put in is a lot. But everything from the beginning was with one thing in mind: Do not suck. How can we suck less? Let’s not suck. And we just kept going over and over again with that.

At the end of the first episode we see Lestat reunited with his undead mom, Gabriella, who he has, I think it’s fair to say, an oddly intimate relationship with —

Multifaceted.

And obviously the Louis-Lestat romance is far from being over. What are you interested in exploring within those two dynamics, in particular, moving forward since they’re so central to Lestat?

It becomes immediately about him going, “Let me try to explain this … I might have just repelled 80% of you.” I’m really interested in the viewers who are really off-put by it. I want to see where they’re at by the end of Episode 7, if they trust us. And see what they’re feeling. I guess [some people feel], “Oh, you’re not allowed to do this in the TV world unless you got f— dragons and s—, but all the things that you would have thought [that the network might say], “Don’t do this,” we didn’t really have a lot of those obstacles. There was a lot of trust. The thing with the Lestat character is like it’s probably harder to cuddle up to him like you could Louis. Louis is a Faustian tale; here it’s like a Faustian tale but Elton John’s at the center of it. There’s a series of questions like “Why do you keep doing this to yourself? Why do you keep get trapped into these things?” It’s like going on odyssey, or as Jacob called it, an idiocy, with a character that is exotic and eccentric and contradictory. For us going forward, as we wrote it, every time we fell into the something that felt well-made or cool on a twist or turn level, we found we were very suspicious of it, and we were trying to make alien TV as best we could. So, what do I want? It’s less about exploring those two dynamics, although they’re richly part of this fabric. It was, how can you take them on a magic carpet ride, a very difficult one? The idea is to actually have, by the end, every single person recognize that part of themselves in him. And how can you normalize him over seven episodes? How can you deliver that to an audience?

I know you’ve been super–busy, but what’s the last thing you watched that you found yourself recommending to everyone or something that you were obsessed with right now?

A TV show I’m watching, one that I’m enjoying right now, is “Widow’s Bay” [Apple TV]— that has been very enjoyable. It’s so much fun.

Matthew Rhys’ facial expressions are so good.

Oh, he’s great, and that show just really knows what it is, and is joyfully silly, and has a great atmosphere. It’s one of the most beautifully shot things I’ve seen in a while. I’m not finished yet.

OK, before I let you go, I hope we get a concert out in L.A. at some point.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Where would you put it up? Echoplex?

Maybe the Troubadour.

What about the Greek? That would be nice.

ICYMI

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Ali Louis Bourzgui scored an upset win for performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical for originating the role of David in the musical adaptation of the cult vampire horror film, “The Lost Boys.”

As viewers scrambled to keep their score cards straight — André De Shields was favored to take the trophy for his work in “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” — the 26-year-old Bourzgui went on to deliver the night’s most impassioned, and pointedly political speech.

He began by noting that, “Vampires represent those who have shunned their own humanity in order to achieve a non-existent sense of superiority. The billionaires will never find happiness from their money. The colonizers will never find fulfillment from the land and lives they steal. The fascists will never find meaning from their conformity, not in this lifetime or eternity.”

Through the cheers of an invigorated audience, Bourzgui went on to talk about how “theater is one of the last places people can come to worship the power of true collective human presence.”

At its best, he said, theater helps us see ourselves in a stranger’s story.

“This is dedicated to the beautiful tapestry of immigrant families who make this country really special. May you one day not have to audition for the empathy that should be freely given by this country that benefits from your beauty, for the queer and trans communities who will exist, no matter what people in power try to take away from them.”

Bourzgui, whose father immigrated to America from Morocco, went on to pay tribute to Palestine and his own Arab heritage.

“For the people of Palestine, who deserve a free life, a full life without occupation, for Arabs and their makers and artists, may we continue to tell our stories and show our faces. Our humanity becomes undeniable, and our families can no longer be written off as merely collateral damage, may they know the beauty of our kisses upon his cheek and the romance of a language rooted in passion for love and life itself.”

He wrapped up this speech with a plea for love and empathy.

“If there’s one thing we can learn from vampires, it’s that life is short, but that’s it’s a gift. Find beauty in the ephemeral and gratitude in what is not promised, and always invest in the people that want to see you blossom into your truest self, and hold that space for them in return.”