LOS ANGELES — Bill Nighy handed me a cassette mixtape many years ago titled "Ooh Baby Ooh," a nod to the chorus of a Lou Reed rocker that was not among the 20 songs on the cassette, though there was plenty of Lou and Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield and Maxwell, the last included because Nighy had just asked a record shop clerk, "Where do you go after Marvin?" and the young man walked him down an aisle and handed him "Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite."
"That's where you go after Marvin," he told Nighy. "And he was absolutely correct. Also, I love the expression 'Hang Suite.' It's just a great idea."
It's a rainy day in L.A. — "I can't quite put the two things together," Nighy says — and we're catching up, sharing our latest passions, mostly musical, as Nighy grew up in an English household where his dad loved Bing Crosby and his older brother, Martin, a singer, revered Sinatra. Martin used to give Nighy a schilling ("shows you how old I am," he says) to write down the lyrics to songs, which involved dropping and lifting the record arm repeatedly until he got it right.
