US – Sunday, March 14
The Grid
The week's releases
Metro staff reviews the latest CDs, DVDs and books for your reading pleasure.
 
Music
Run this town
No living man but Jay-Z could get a sold out Boston arena so excited about New York City. But for two hours last night, the sold out crowd at the Garden was in an Empire State of Mind, as “The Blueprint 3” tour rolled into town.
 
My Television
Back in the trenches
Steven Spielberg makes strikingly vivid, breathtakingly poetic movies about some of the most terrifying conflicts in the history of man. The filmmaking aesthetic he pioneered with “Saving Private Ryan” — and continues to perfect in HBO’s new WWII miniseries, “The Pacific” — was born out of a desire to translate as honestly as possible his conversations with veterans on their combat experience.
 
The Word
Is nothing in her life real anymore?
When we first read that Heidi Pratt was firing husband Spencer Pratt as her manager, we thought, “Yay! Heidi’s new face is finally doing something right!” But then we found out that although she did fire Spencer, it seems like she’s replacing him with psychic Aiden Chase to take the reigns on her “career” — and then we got scared.
 
Movies
Pattinson: A vampire in Brooklyn
Robert Pattinson has been playing Americans so often that he has forgotten how to talk like a Brit. In his latest, “Remember Me,” the “Twilight” heartthrob stars as a soulful young New Yorker attending NYU, but he insists he didn’t need any help sounding like a native. “I’ve never had a dialect coach or anything,” Pattinson says. “Ironically, I’ve only had a dialect coach for this film I’m doing now, which I’m doing in an English accent. I guess I’ve forgotten how to do an English accent.”
 
Published 22:46, May the 12th, 2009
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Look for Captain Sensible, second from left, and Dave Vanian, center, to smash it up tomorrow.Look for Captain Sensible, second from left, and Dave Vanian, center, to smash it up tomorrow.
 

Still so Damned good

 Don’t try to put the Damned in a corner.

While labeled an early punk rock band, the Damned’s music actually runs the gamut from pub rock to goth to new wave.

Then there’s guitarist Captain Sensible’s unlikely 1982 hip-hop hit “Wot.” The tune — famous for the singsong chorus of “He said Captain, I said wot!” — still gets spins in clubs. The song came from what could have been a bad experience.

“I had been up drinking with the rest of the band and we went to bed at 6 in the morning,” says Captain, who also answers to the name Ray Burns. “We were going to sleep until 7 and get back in the van and drive. I was woken up by the sound of a pile driver after five minutes.”

Once awake, Captain taped the sound of the construction, took it into a studio and created an early ver-sion of a tape loop for the single’s pounding rhythm.

“We had to literally string a ring of tape around the studio to do it,” he says.

The Damned are touring in support of their latest album, “So, Who’s Paranoid?” Of the current lineup, Captain and singer Dave Vanian are still in.

Not bad for a band credited with releasing the first British punk single (“New Rose” in 1976), a genre nobody thought would last very long. And they still continue to test musical boundaries. On “Paranoid,” there’s an unlikely 14-minute tribute to Pink Floyd founder Syd Barret called “Dark Asteroid.”

“We go through a really wild jam. We were going to chop it down but nobody had the heart,” Captain admits.

The Damned
Tonight, 8 p.m., The TLA, 334 South St., $25, 215-922-1011
www.livenation.com