Every reader realises at once: These interviews are different from others – more intense, more funny, more intimate, more surprising, more open.
While other journalists arrive with pads full of notes, the editor-in-chief of the SZ WEEKEND learns the biographies of his interview partners by heart and then comes to the meeting with only an emergency sheet on which five questions are written at most – in case of embarrassing lulls in the conversation.
So either the outcome is a flamboyant flop (as with Lou Reed) or world stars such as Jeanne Moreau, Sylvester Stallone or Eric Clapton talk more openly than hardly ever before. Gorkow’s spontaneity often rubs off on his interview partners so that suddenly things which are normally subject to inner self-censorship are told.
This volume collects a selection of his best interviews. Gorkow talks with the gorgeous Amira Casar about Europe, with Lou Reed about hate, with the underground movie-icon Klaus Lemke about boys and with the concert agent Marek Lieberberg about events. With David Gilmour, the interview is about success, with Louis Begley about writing, with Sylvester Stallone about values and with Mick Jagger about class. With Helen Mirren, who talks about image, with Neil Diamond, whom Gorkow visited in his studio in L.A., and with former Monty-Python and »Londoner at heart« Michael Palin.
