Why Disney looks set for a rock and roll makeover
Jarvis Cocker, Baaba Maal and Shane MacGowan aim to give Disney songs a new edge this weekend
Independent
By Tim Cumming
Published: 15 June 2007
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The music of Disney is a world Willner has explored before, though not on stage. His 1988 tribute album Stay Awake combined Sun Ra and his Arkestra with Tom Waits, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr and Sinéad O'Connor, each injecting a wild strain of adult content into Disney's presumed innocence. It was Disney all right, but seen through a glass darkly. "I wound up taking my childhood out on the whole world, since cartoons affect me very personally," Willner says, "but now I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old child, I don't need to spread my unhappy childhood out to people so much."
Twenty years on, Forest of No Return draws on that same illicit thrill of artists breathing a very different kind of life into Disney classics. Think of Pete Doherty doing "Chim Chim Cher-ee", Shane MacGowan ripping through "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah", or Cocker himself taking on a song from The Jungle Book. There's Baaba Maal paired with "When You Wish Upon a Star" and Grace Jones, Bryan Ferry and Beth Orton have also been booked.
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"There's something very direct and blatant about it that you wouldn't be able to do now, people just wouldn't accept it. That naivety and blatancy got me interested in exploring that area, especially the really old cartoons, the ones that Disney himself was involved in. It's manipulative and sentimental but somehow it is potent and it is powerful.
"It's a potency that stems, perhaps, from how our perception of childhood changes as we grow older. Because there's a distance to it now, I think there can be a certain kind of darkness to it. I thought it would be something worth exploring at the Meltdown."
And with the likes of Cave, Doherty and MacGowan on board – each with vivid back stories of their own – Forest of No Return promises some deliciously dark combinations. "They're songs from a much more innocent era, or at least a more innocent era in show business," says Robyn Hitchcock, "but done by this bunch of rock roués... the generation that killed it off, in a way."
We're not talking I-killed-Bambi shock tactics, although Willner does confess to the troublemaker's urge. "I always want to paint the moustache on the Mona Lisa," he says, "and there'll be a bit of that." The main challenge is making a show out of songs of such brevity. "It'll probably all change at the last minute. As Tom Waits says, everything I do is unspeakable and dark."
That, and the kind of wild surrealism of vintage Disney moments, such as Dumbo getting drunk and hallucinating pink elephants on parade – scenes of adult experience mixed with childhood fantasy that would never pass the censors these days. "You just wouldn't be allowed to put that in a kids' film now," Cocker says. "The idea of getting pissed and it being quite hallucinogenic and also quite pleasurable would be a complete no-no. You'd be accused of corrupting the youth.
"That kind of sums up where children's entertainment has gone. But it was doing the same thing that folk tales and fairy tales used to do before they were sanitised. They would present aspects of the adult world in an entertaining way to prepare kids for what was going to happen. That's why folk tales were powerful – by introducing kids to the concept of danger. It takes away one of the big ingredients by bowdlerising them."
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With the Forest of No Return only a few days away, no one knows quite how the show is going to turn out, which is the way Willner likes to work... He flew into town armed with just a set-list and a wish-list of collaborators, and it's how the two combine that makes or breaks a project like this. "Some jump on top of it straight away, others have to be convinced. Artists are still coming aboard; some are still disappearing." 
) Stranger still was the number Shane did earlier, with Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, and Pete Doherty, a "song" called "Home Sweet Home," which consisted entirely of the quartet howling and wailing like dogs. Priceless.
