Ken Scrudato
Ken Scrudato has been for more than a decade covering music, travel, hotels, nightlife, art, fashion and penguin breeding for many of the top independent US style and culture publications, including BlackBook, Filter, Flaunt, SOMA, Nylon, and Surface.
Having discovered at an early age a perilous but all-consuming affinity for dark-hearted, Baudelaire-quoting mademoiselles, as well as having somehow bought lock, stock into all that Malcolm McLaren Situationism nonsense, his editors are now usually to be found begging him to write a few lines about the actual music, amidst all the bombastic blather about political and cultural context. He nevertheless has managed to talk them into letting him interview and profile the considerable likes of Bjork, Depeche Mode, Carla Bruni, Charlotte Gainsbourg, David Byrne, John Lydon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Siouxsie Sioux, MIA, Juliette Lewis, and David Bowie, who actually apologized to him for having a bad hair day.
He also does travel, event and hotel consulting.
A steadfast supporter of new talent, he would like to help young bands by telling them to stop being influenced by Paul Simon and Brian Wilson.
28 articles
List of articles in the library
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Surface, April 2001
WHEN, IN 1987, David Sylvian sang the words, "I wrestle with an outlook on life, that shifts between darkness and shadowy light," he spoke of ...
Interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, September 2002
PETER MURPHY. Once the man who forced glamour and dread into its permanent cage match, he's now become the dark bard of Istanbul. ...
Interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, March 2003
IT'S NOT EASY being an "it" girl, especially when most of those proclaiming it have little clue as to what "it" is. Most often, "it" ...
Interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, July 2003
"You know how I know it's the end of the world, Lenny? Because everything's been done. Every kinda music, every government, every hairstyle. How we ...
Profile and Interview by Ken Scrudato, Flaunt, September 2004
WHILST SERVING time in a French prison for pathological thieving, Jean Genet wrote that "a man must dream a long time in order to act ...
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, October 2004
SOME VELVET MORNING (or evening, perhaps) back in 1940, a child was born of a very, very famous father. SHE was doubtless a vision of ...
Profile and Interview by Ken Scrudato, Flaunt, February 2005
NEARLY TWENTY years before 9/11/01 – before New Yorkers and other Americans decided to believe that great tragedy had begun and ended with them – ...
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Reclaim The Magic
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, May 2006
AND THEN there were three. The three were called Brian, Nick and Karen (O), and together, they were also called the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Like ...
Primal Scream: Making Trouble In Riot City
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, August 2006
THE DOOMSAYERS, the rapture-mongers, the manic street-corner preachers, the postmodern theorists...they all completely missed it. With laser-beam paranoia but eyes wide shut, they all claimed ...
Brian Eno: Containing Spontaneity
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, October 2006
NOT JUST a few otherwise sophisticated human beings would likely feel less uneasy naked and unarmed in Northern Afghanistan than present in a room when ...
Carla Bruni: The Literary Ambitions Of A Model
Interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, February 2007
THERE WAS a t-shirt going around a few years ago which snottily declared of its wearers, I Hate Models. Of course, it said way less ...
Bob Dylan, Bryan Ferry: Knockin' on Dylan's Door: Bryan Ferry
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Flaunt, March 2007
HIPPIES. PERHAPS no other collective of modern countercultural revolutionaries has left a more ambiguous imprint. Dada, Situationism, Punk—all boast fairly intact legacies, the original philosophical ...
Charlotte Gainsbourg: Initials C.G.
Interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, April 2007
NEW YORK'S hideously hypocritical smoking policy (in a city choking on exhaust fumes) was a particular nuisance that morning at the impossibly fabulous Carlyle Hotel, ...
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, August 2007
COMES A TIME in every girl's life where she's got to reach for the trigger and take aim at the motherfuckers (usually mostly guys) who ...
Joy Division: Closer Still: An Interview with Control director Anton Corbijn
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, September 2007
THE ESSENCE OF DEATH, much like that of war, rests in how it has irreparably changed those left to grapple with its aftermath. Its effects ...
Siouxsie Sioux: Sans Banshees, Siouxsie Returns
Interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, October 2007
IT'S HARD TO recall a time when the scent of Armageddon has hung so heavy in the international air as it has during this, the ...
David Byrne: The Importance Of Being David Byrne
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, November 2007
I WAS IN ZURICH recently and found myself at the rather legendary Cabaret Voltaire. It was in that very same place, all the way back ...
The Raveonettes: Good Things Come To Those Who Wait
Interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, February 2008
THEY WERE a glorious sight, appearing gorgeously on the horizon. Modern day Vikings, they came from the land of Hamlet, pastry and strikingly progressive politics ...
Depeche Mode, The Killers: Dave Gahan meets Brandon Flowers
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Working Class, 2009
RECENTLY, while immersed in the eerie drug-sex double entendre of 'Never Let Me Down Again', a friend commented to me, "What's with Depeche Mode? They ...
Damon Albarn And The Honest Jon's Revue: Uptown Rankin'
Report and Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, June 2009
OH DEAR. Damon Albarn is at it again. ...
Patrick Wolf: A Wolf In Wolf's Clothing
Interview by Ken Scrudato, SOMA, June 2009
IN AN AGE of insufferably style-less, beardy bores like Fleet Foxes and Band of Horses, when the gloriously outlandish and confrontational likes of Dresden Dolls ...
The xx: Doom On The Dancefloor
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, March 2010
IF YOU’RE NOT completely averse to new age poppycock, it’s interesting to note that according to numerologists, the letter "x" indicates sensual, artistic, and temperamental–which ...
Public Image Ltd: Dear John: Public Image Ltd
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, May 2010
WAY BACK in 20th Century England, a gang of four insurrectionist-minded punk motherfuckers were to be found causing such an anarchic, subversive uproar as to ...
Karen Elson: The Ghost Who Rocks
Interview by Ken Scrudato, BlackBook, May 2010
IT'S HARDLY likely you've ever had occasion to look it up, but there are, to be sure, no direct flights from Manchester to Nashville. But ...
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark: You Should Already Know: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
Report and Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, November 2010
DESPITE BEING BORN into the choking, mechanized wasteland that was early '80s urban England (Dear Old Blighty had, sadly, become Dear Old Blighted.), ...
Björk: Thrall of Sound: An Elemental Conversation With Björk
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, 7 January 2013
"They only live who dare." ...
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: This Moral Coil: A Conversation With Nick Cave
Interview by Ken Scrudato, Filter, 12 April 2013
"ASK ABOUT our Seven Deadly Sins packages," tempted the intentionally sexed-up outgoing recorded message of the hotel in Perth where Nick Cave was holed up ...
Retrospective and Interview by Ken Scrudato, BlackBook, 18 February 2020
THE CULTURAL landscape is littered with the faded memories of those who came and went without the honours corresponding to the levels of their actual ...
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