Interpol play Oxegen on July 11. Drummer Sam Fogarino called the Revelatorium the other day to talk about his favourite writer, the late Hubert Selby Jr. Here’s what he had to say:

“Last Exit to Brooklyn was amazing. Parts of that book were my childhood, ’cos I grew up in West Philadelphia, which is very much like the bowels of Brooklyn. You can go five miles into Brooklyn, past hipsterville, and you may as well be in the centre of America, you may as well be nowhere, because that’s what it feels like, but the cultural mecca of this country is just five miles that way. The parts in Last Exit To Brooklyn where it’s all written in boldface, and the people are screaming out of windows and arguing, that was like West Philadelphia. It’s funny, the more they try to tidy up something, the more you know there was the dirtiest, seediest of underbellies. I love having the 1950s rear its real ugy head, and it takes writers like this guy to prove it.”

Here’s a clip from the documentary It’ll Be Better Tomorrow. And here’s our Requiem For A Dreamer, written on the occasion of Selby’s death in May 2004.

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