After sensational trial, Johnny Depp releases an album

Fresh off his highly publicised, controversial defamation suit, actor Johnny Depp sought to show his creative career was back on track, releasing an album with English rocker Jeff Beck on Friday.

The 13-track album 18, on which Depp sings and plays guitar, features mainly covers, and so far it has been critically panned.

It’s a record unlikely to figure prominently in the repertoire of Beck, the 78-year-old former member of The Yardbirds.

The album includes renditions of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ and John Lennon’s ‘Isolation’, as well as the Velvet Underground classic, ‘Venus In Furs’.

The choice to include a song focused on sado-masochism might seem bizarre to some, given the ultra-mediatised trial centred on alleged domestic abuse between Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard, the actor best known for her role in Aquaman.

The album includes a song the 59-year-old Pirates of the Caribbean star penned himself, ‘This is a Song for Miss Hedy Lamarr’.

“Erased by the same world that made her a star / Spun out of beauty, trapped by its web,” Depp sings of Lamarr, who secluded herself in the final years of her life.

Originally published in Dawn, July 16th, 2022