Cash rich

The best pop video ever made was the one Mark Romanek directed in 2003 for Johnny Cash’s swansong — ‘Hurt’. It’s also definitely the bleakest. The Man in Black was on his last legs when he made it, a doddery, rheumy-eyed 72, and here you see him very consciously bidding farewell to his adoring wife June (who appears alongside him, choked with emotion, and who predeceased him, of cancer), his life and the trappings of wordly success.

My favourite bit — actually, I’ve lots, like the perfect moment at the end where his huge hands slowly, pointedly, close the piano lid for the last time — is where you see him enthroned in his Nashville home, looking like some ravaged former god rendered cruelly mortal. With a shaky hand, he raises a goblet of wine and spills it contemptuously towards the viewer, singing, ‘And you could have it all — my empire of dirt.’