When Does Good Art By Awful People Become Untouchable?
Taking in the view at Polanski Station on the train to Cosbyville
In 2003 I physically destroyed four perfectly good music recordings with a hammer. Lots of us have joked about torching albums by artists we love to hate (Nickelback, Justin Bieber, and Kenny G spring to mind) but in this instance my decision to take a hammer to these four CDs had nothing to do with the quality of the music on them.
The artist in question was the French indie rock band Noir Désir. Formed in Bordeaux in the early eighties, the band reached its apogee in the early nighties as a sort of Gallic Pearl Jam, combining twangy, grungy guitars with a distinctly French folk sound and left-leaning politically charged lyrics. There was nothing to dislike about Noir Désir, from my perspective. Their music was rock-solid, their words were super smart, and their frontman Bertrand Cantat, with his Jon Bon Jovi-esque good looks and Joe Strummer rasp, seemed like a perfectly likeable guy.
That is until one night in 2003 when I learned that Cantat had been arrested for beating his girlfriend (the actress Marie Trintignant) to death in a drunken rage in a hotel room in Lithuania. The news made me feel physically sick, and without even thinking it through I solemnly destroyed all the Noir Désir albums I owned. It wasn’t enough to simply…
