Mark Hamill’s single favourite band of all time: “I had never heard anything so primal”
It’s always fun to discover facts about very famous people liking surprising things that seem somewhat unusual. For instance, Mike D of the Beastie Boys is an Arsenal fan. Christopher Walken is into lion taming. And Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, is an obsessive watcher of Bottom, the anarchic 1990s sitcom with Rik Mayall.
That last one sounds like a lie, even more so than the lion taming, but it is indeed the case, and Hamill enjoys the show so much that he actually once injured himself while filming 2017’s The Last Jedi, because he was watching Bottom while on a treadmill, laughed so much at a part that he wanted to rewind the DVD, fell off and twisted his ankle.
Fantastically, it meant that the escapades of Ritchie and Eddie in a flat in Hammersmith caused a day’s delay of filming for one of the most successful movie franchises in history.
But it isn’t the only fact about Hamill that raises an eyebrow; another is that he is a dyed in the wool fan of 1960s legends The Kinks, citing the band with the warring brothers as a major influence on his life, even once stating that his overarching mission (on this planet at least) was to convert other people to appreciating the works of messyrs Ray and Dave Davies.
Much to his excitement, Hamill got the chance to sit and interview Dave, the older brother, a few years back, and he couldn’t contain the chance to tell the rocker about his lifelong passion for the band.
Hamill said, “You are only a few years older than me, and when I first heard ‘You Really Got Me’ on the radio, it ripped my guts out. I was 12. I had never heard anything so primal. All I could think was that I had to get that single. I mowed lawns, collected deposit bottles, I’d take my wagon door-to-door to save up the money.”
It’s acknowledged among musical circles that Davies and The Kinks had a huge influence on other bands across the globe, thanks to their pioneering use of amplifiers to create a more distorted, electric guitar sound. Davies would take a razor blade to his amp in order to achieve the ‘fuzz’ made famous on 1964’s ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night’.
Meanwhile, Hamill continued to lavish praise on the Londoner, adding, “I can’t relate to you at that age because you were having hit records, whereas I could barely get my shoelaces tied correctly. I was clueless.
“You grew up so incredibly fast – just the fact you got kicked out of school for having sex with your girlfriend made you a hero in my mind!”
Of course, Hamill would go on to have astonishing success himself a decade later as the lead in Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, the George Lucas film that revolutionised not just cinema, but special effects and the wider world of movie merchandise too. While Hamill received a fee of around £500,000 for appearing in the film, he sensibly negotiated a ¼ per cent share in the eventual back-end profits for the movie, netting him in the region of £15m across the series.
It was something also negotiated by Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Alec Guinness, who received 2.25 per cent, but notably not Harrison Ford, who opted for a straight fee. He wasn’t out of pocket for long, though, and by the time 2015’s The Force Awakens came around, he banked £15m plus a share of the profits.
