The night before we met he and his band had supported Hole at the Patriot Centre in

The night before we met, he and his band had supported Hole at the Patriot Centre in Washington. A load of their equipment had gone missing in transit and they’d had to borrow amplifiers and instruments. The Everlast of old would have made sure that whoever was responsible got a rollicking, and he might well have called off the gig “These days, I try to be a bit more understanding”, he says. “I’m more merciful towards the world because the world has been merciful towards me.”This laid-back outlook has its limits, though, and Schrody still holds forthright opinions about the politics of the music business. He describes record company employees as “weasels” whose only skill is being able to recognise a talent in others that they can exploit.He’s also critical of the current trend in hip hop to go out and hire “whoever’s hot”, regardless of how much it might cost.

He sees Sean “Puffy” Combs as someone out to exploit this phenomenon; an extremely shrewd businessman rather than an artist, as such. The real innovators, he argues, are people like DJ Premier, “a true genius with drum machines and sampling”, and also Wyclef, who first got him thinking that people might be ready to deal with a rapper holding a guitar.Despite the Whitey Ford album’s success in the States, Everlast is bracing himself for a rather more testing round of promotions over here. The record’s sleeve has a shot of Schrody stripped to the waist, and to the left of his operation scar the words “Sein Fein” are tattooed on his chest.He sighs deeply when I question him about it, and concedes that there’s talk of air-brushing the tattoo from the British CD sleeve. “But then it’ll just become a different question, and I’ll have to answer for that, too,” he says.He goes on to explain that he’s third-generation Irish on his mother’s side, and that although he’s not pretending to be “bona-fide County Cork”, his Irish roots give him a sense of being someone other than “some white guy from America”.He repeatedly states that he doesn’t condone violence of any kind, and stresses that when he got the tattoo, he was naive about its political implications.”For me, it was just the literal meaning; that thing of you come in alone, you die alone”, he says “If people can’t understand that, that’s fine. Just don’t kill me over it.”`Whitey Ford Sings the Blues’ is released by Tommy Boy records on 1 March. WHAT MAKES a good sound-track? Transplantability, say the music promoters, pointing to the Titanic concerts that pack their halls. Saleability, say the record companies, pointing to the swelling sound-track sections in the stores.

With such rich pickings, it’s no wonder that the composers play along, but the artistic price is a deadly sameness. That is why the scores for films such as Wilde, The Woodlanders, Wings of the Dove and Mrs Brown – the list could go on ad infinitum – are virtually interchangeable. Next week sees the opening of Jon Sanders’ Painted Angels, whose sound- track is a wonderful portent, despite running to a mere 18 minutes of music. Why so? Because the score and its film both represent an extraordinary triumph of artistic will. Sanders’ angels are five prostitutes in a 19th- century Saskatchewan brothel: Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, set in a Tokyo brothel in the Fifties, was both its inspiration and its template. Dwelling on faces, voices, and the harshness of the landscape, Sanders presents humanity scraped bare; his film’s fatalistic beauty is perfectly echoed in the delicate flute music of its score.
But since it sees men through women’s eyes – and in this house of “pleasure” they’re a stomach-turning sight – the film has made enemies, including the directors of the London Film Festival and the Canadian-based company which co-financed it. Sanders was ordered to shorten and soften the film, and when he refused, it was recut behind his back and the sound-track was replaced by Riverdance-style pap.