About dead pop stars

The director Kevin MacDonald on Hollywood’s penchant for glossing over the murkier corners of dead celebrities’ lives, and punters’ happy acquiescence to the phenomenon:

Audiences don’t seem to care... Many of these films are pure fan service. Which is fine as far as it goes. Maybe we were all naive for believing that popular artists were worth looking at seriously, critically?

Not only are we entreated not to yuck another’s yum, we are not even allowed to yuck the yum’s creator. In the words of another genius whose private life would probably prompt cancellation or worse today (for a slightly different reason from what got him cancelled in 1895), the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But today’s celebs, or those running their estates, don’t even want them to be talked about, beyond the blandest of platitudes. As long as the cash keeps coming.

About April 2016: And then Prince died

After the initial shock (for those of my cohort) of Bowie falling off his perch, 2016 settled down to be just another year. There was going to be a referendum on Brexit (but the only question was how big Remain’s majority would be) and in November the Americans would catch up with the rest of the world and elect their first female president.

In retrospect, it wasn’t until April that 2016 really started to happen, that it became The Year When Famous People Died. Not that other famous people (Antonin Scalia, Umberto Eco, Tony Warren, Asa Briggs, Sylvia Anderson, et al) hadn’t died since Bowie, but it was as if we suddenly noticed the strange intensity, the feeling of “wait, not another one” when the news came in. And the thing that woke us up, that prompted the same sort of generational, communal grief that Bowie brought, was the death of Prince. As I said at the time (on Facebook, because 10 years ago Facebook was still a useful way to share pain and condolence, rather than a weaponised cesspit):

The thing is, a lot of us (by us, I mean nerds, obviously) have been imagining that the God Who Only Exists For Us When Famous People Die has been creating a heavenly supergroup, with Lemmy [who’d actually died in the last days of 2015, but retrospectively felt like part of the continuum] on bass, Maurice White on drums, Bowie on vocals, sax and oblique strategies, Victoria Wood on piano and wry Lancastrian one-liners, plus George Martin to produce and keep them all in order. But now Prince, who can do all of that, is up there, will God be sending the others back? 

And as we shared tearful memes relating to the purple imp of sexy fun, we also thought, hey, I guess this is as bad as this year can get. Oh well. 

One more thing. In January there had been a moment of dark levity in the Celebrity Big Brother house, when Angie Bowie was informed that her ex-husband had died but Tiffany Pollard (no, me neither) thought the news referred to fellow-inmate David Gest (who was asleep). Piquantly, the whole farrago got more coverage than Gest’s actual death would attract a few months later, in April. Needless to say. I didn’t find a place for him in my celestial band. 

About Brigitte Bardot and Nigel Farage

Brigitte Bardot exits and the splendid Justin Lewis ponders aloud on the vexed question of whether we can/should celebrate the art while castigating the artist.

For the record, I don’t think Bardot was a terribly good actor or singer, nor did she make very many good movies, but that’s not the point. Her arrival in the 1950s signalled a new perspective on female sexuality that resonated well after she ceased to be a major draw in the cinema. She was John Lennon’s first celebrity crush and her look influenced any number of 60s dollybirds (Christie, Faithfull, Rice-Davies, et al) as well as cementing in the mainstream media the association of Frenchness with sensual misbehaviour. She was important, and that’s what qualifies her for obituaries. Her later descent into far-right wingnuttery is neither here nor there. Incidentally, I’d disagree with Justin and also stake a claim for Norman Tebbit. He wasn’t the first senior Tory politician from a humble background – Heath, Powell and Thatcher came before him – but he was the first to eschew elocution lessons and as such must be a role model for the current crop of right-wing populists.

Talking of which, the question of how colossal a shitbag the teenage Nigel Farage might have been rumbles on. I don’t know, as I wasn’t there. But I do come from a roughly similar vintage, being four years younger than him, and am an alumnus of a similar school (selective, single-sex, sporty, cadet corps, faded grandeur, a strange blend of academic rigour and macho philistinism). And racism was bloody everywhere and as the only Jew among the student body, I was on the receiving end and I’m pretty sure that the handful of non-white kids got it even worse. The low point came in 1983 when we staged a mock election and the National Front came a strong second and I wouldn’t be surprised if even that result was massaged downwards to avoid some unpleasant headlines. I remember the names and I remember the faces. I’ll be charitable and assume it was all youthful bravado and they’re now respectable, productive members of society. I’m sure I said some pretty toe-curling things myself at that age. But if I see any of those names and faces appear over the parapets, perhaps by getting involved in politics, perhaps as cheerleaders for a certain former student of Dulwich College, maybe I won’t be so discreet.

PS: More about the good art/bad artist conundrum here.

About Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry has died. You may not be able to place the name, let alone fit a face to it, but you know the buildings, the ones that look like a stack of imploding loo rolls, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Dancing House in Prague, the residential add-ons at our very own Battersea Power Station, beggin’ yer pardon, guvnor.

Not in the mind of a Daily Mail sub, though. In that strange, empty space, Gehry’s not an architect. He’s “Brad Pitt’s architect friend”.  And, look, a rock star employed him, and another actor wrote something. So he must be important. And moreover, the two actors and the musician require no clarification, but we need to have it explained to us that Gehry was an architect. Although if you need that level of explanation, why would you even care that he died?

About Gregg and Timmy

I mentioned a few years ago that the two best ever instalments of the Sunday Times magazine’s venerable A Life in the Day feature were both by actors called Tom. What I hadn’t realised, because like so many others, I’ve lost the habit of burrowing into the weekend papers, is that the Telegraph has for some time been running its own pallid simulacrum of ALitD and, unsurprisingly, it’s not as good.

Well, until the gurning greengrocer Gregg Wallace took his turn and, well, it still wasn’t good but at least it was funny.

The problem was that, unlike the Toms’ takes on their respective days, Wallace wasn’t trying to be funny, and the fact that his pride in being able to get into the gym half an hour before mere civilians, his staunch defence of Harvester, his wargaming, his lack of body fat, all speak of someone with such a total lack of self-awareness that Alan Partridge comparisons were inevitable. “Is this a parody?” we chorused.

No, it wasn’t. But this is:

This, Brian Blessed gong, Frazzles, the ghost of Patrick Macnee and all, is the work of Mark Bowsher but inevitably the whole thing developed a life of its own within hours and several people thought it was genuine. Well, genuine in the sense that Timmy Mallett himself had written it, not that it was in any way an accurate representation of his life.

Because ultimately all of the other articles are artifices, constructions hovering in a liminal space between objective reality and how the subject wishes to be presented. The difference is that the two Toms (and Jeffrey Bernard, who collaborated on Baker’s piece) were fully aware of what they were doing and Gregg Wallace wasn’t. And I’d like to think that if Timmy Mallett (with whom I once shared a lift, sandwiched between him and Tony Blackburn, which does demonstrate how easy it is to drift into Partridge territory) were to do a real article on these lines, it would be closer to the Toms than to what Gregg did. But a tiny bit like the parody version as well. Just to keep us guessing.

About the Noughties

In 2009, I wrote a book about the decade that was then stumbling towards its demise. Inevitably it was going to be imperfect; not only did I have little more than 200 pages to tell the story, but I needed to deliver the manuscript about six months before the story ended. And, just as importantly, I was a white, educated-ish, straight male (also cis but I‘m not sure that concept would have even resonated then) in his early 40s, who’d never been south of the equator. The narrative was necessarily partial, in both senses of the word.

That said, I don’t think the story I told about the period was too far off. I argued that we’d been so fixated on the symbolic turning-point of the millennium that we’d never bothered to decide what the decade was going to be called. (“Noughties” was a best guess and plenty of people didn’t get the memo.) And, despite the historian’s desire to package stretches of time into next units that corresponded with the calendar (what Ferdinand Mount called “decaditis”), real life rarely obliges. I suggested that the 1990s, the decade of Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism when history supposedly ended, spilled over until September 2001; and the truncated decade came to an end when Lehman Brothers did, two collapses, just seven years and a few New York blocks apart. Fear and technology were the two themes that permeated the period and the meeting of the two created a characteristic sense of twitchy unease: should I be more worried about a terrorist attack, or about the CCTV camera that’s meant to prevent it? What was really lacking was a single image that encapsulated our (received) memory of what the decade was like, to compare with the dedicated followers going through the racks in Carnaby Street, punks striding across the King’s Road, a besuited yuppy on a slab-like mobile phone.

I knew my utter wrongness would become clear eventually. What I wasn’t expecting was that it would take so long to happen; and certainly not that the catalyst would be a nest-haired narcissist called Russell Brand. Because of the laws of libel (and possibly a worry about prejudicing any subsequent legal proceedings) all we can say openly about the man himself is that he wasn’t very nice and we never found him funny or, if you’re a devotee of his second career as a hawker of conspiracy theories and associated quackeries, that it’s the New World Order/Rothschilds/Mainstream Media/Giant Lizards trying to gag the gallant speaker of truths blah blah blah.

Instead, the finger pointed at... the Noughties themselves. Endeavouring to contextualise Brand, Sarah Ditum characterises the decade as: 

...a period of viciousness and excess, where cruelty was the norm and misogyny was celebrated... Lad culture, which had once seemed like a corrective to smothering Nineties niceness, flourished into a full backlash. Second-wave feminism had spent decades explaining why porn, objectification and rape jokes should be unacceptable. Now they came surging back, this time with a protective sheen of irony.

Others seem retrospectively baffled, even when they were right at the heart of the shenanigans, and presumably in a position to stamp out misbehavior; here’s Lorraine Heggessey, who was controller of BBC One at the time:

It's not actually that long ago. This was the 2000s, so let's not think it was the dim and distant past. It wasn't. I don't think it would be acceptable to say anything like that. I'm amazed that it was acceptable at that time frankly. 

Obviously I’d completely missed all this in the book but I can console myself that pretty much everyone else did at the time. It’s taken nearly 14 years for that decade-defining image to make itself known; it‘ll be a clip of Russell Brand getting away with it (“it” being, if nothing else, a sort of non-specific nastiness, enabled by his gender and celebrity status), and the rest of us letting him.

PS: And while we’re talking about partial memories of a decade, this morning the Absolute 80s radio station heralded a day celebrating one-hit wonders with a tweet (or whatever we call them this week – Xpectoration?) depicting ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners, a band that enjoyed seven more Top 20 singles in the decade. The usual suspects jumped in to point and laugh at the cock-up, but one brave soul asserted that his own limited awareness of the Dexys oeuvre trumped any silly ideas about empirical reality:

Yeah they were. Might of had one other song no one can really name

— not_me (@stop_changing_7) September 25, 2023

About TikTok

Every generation is told that its own crazes and foibles are the equivalent of vogueing while the Titanic goes down, and then 40 years later, they see the apocalypse happening live in the actions of their children and grandchildren. So it’s probably just a sign that I’m very, very old that the end of this article by Barrett Swanson resonates so much: 

TikTok is a sign of the future, which already feels like a thing of the past. It is the clock counting down our fifteen seconds of fame, the sound the world makes as time is running out.

About Martin Amis

I was never a diehard Amis fanboy (and it was almost always boys) at the level of some of my contemporaries. But when I first moved to London in the early 90s I embarked on a major catch-up session, reading everything from The Rachel Papers to London Fields in the course of a few weeks. 

What dampened my ardour a little was not just the declining quality of the books themselves through the coming decades (although that is evident) but the fact that Amis had become a bit of a punchline, with the strange story of the new agent and the sweary letter from his ex-friend Julian Barnes (also wife of his old agent) and, yes, his dental bill. These days I’m scrupulous about distinguishing the Art from the Artist and as such I really can’t be doing with numpties chopping bits of Eric Gill statues, his crimes notwithstanding. Back then there was an element of self-branding going on, ostentatiously retrieving my copy of Dead Babies from my ICA carrier bag as I strap-hung from Brixton to Victoria. And then the name on the front became just a tad embarrassing, and I transferred my affections to McEwan and Ishiguro and Winterson and more...

So, even though I sneered when the BBC kept the Phil/Holly saga at the top of the bulletin, even on Radio 4, even as the news of Amis’s demise was trickling in, I’d have to admit that we’re all susceptible to a bit of celebrity gossip once in a while.

About poetry

It is late and I am tired so regard this as a place holder; simply to note the news that Amanda Gorman, who became world famous a week ago for the poem she declaimed at Joe Biden’s inauguration has been signed not by a publishing house or record company or a university but by a modelling agency.

About Miller and James

News came in yesterday of the deaths of two polymaths, Jonathan Miller and Clive James. I found this chat between the two, astonished that such freewheeling, unscripted, funny cleverness once popped up in a primetime slot on a mainstream channel; note that Miller isn’t plugging his latest product – he’s just there because he can talk well. When people talk about how wonderful podcasts are, I tell them they’re just what TV used to be.



It was a little depressing though that the deaths of two people blessed with such intelligence and knowledge should be accompanied by such outright wrongness. No, Evan Davis on Broadcasting House (Radio 4), Michael Grade did not give Clive James his television break on LWT in the late 70s; he’d had a regular berth on So It Goes for Granada in 1976 and was doing telly for several years before that. On the same frequency, a Front Row presenter claimed that Miller was a Cambridge contemporary of Eric Idle, when there was a decade or so between them. And, most glorious of all was Sarah-Jane Mee on Sky News, happily remembering a contretemps with the Bee Gees, oblivious of the fact she was thinking of the wrong Clive...

And the most poignant thing is the fun they would have had with such gaffes.

PS: Good article in the FT about the way each of them straddled the high/low divide:

Miller and his colleagues said: we refuse to take some things seriously just because respectable opinion says we should. James, you could say by contrast, said: I am determined to take some things seriously even though respectable opinion says I shouldn’t. The two positions are complementary.

About Thatcher Wine

I was directed by Clair, who used to be The Urban Woo in the days when people spoke of a blogosphere without sniggering, to an article about one Thatcher Wine, who is responsible for Gwyneth Paltrow’s books. No, he doesn’t write them; he curates them. A brief snippet to give a flavour of what he does:

My invention for the book jacket means that someone can have the complete works of Jane Austen, but in a certain Pantone chip color that matches the rest of the room or with a custom image. People have invested in how their home looks: They chose the cabinets, the carpets, the paint, and the window coverings. Why settle for books that a publisher designed? Books can have as much style as anything else in the room.

Which does make me yearn just a tiny bit for the glory days of actresses who actually read stuff.

PS: And in a similar vein, this is doing the rounds...

About Camp

From this week’s Met Gala.

When something is bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. —Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp, 1964

PS: The reliably tiresome Piers Morgan characteristically misses the whole big thing point by calling one of the red carpet sillies “preposterous”. 

About the Earl of Rocksavage

There may or may not be a rumour that the Duchess of Cambridge (the one who’s married to the bald one, not the one who’s married to the ginger one, who people hate because they’re racist, I think) has had a falling-out with someone I’d never heard of until a couple of days ago.

She’s called Sarah Hanbury in real life, apparently, but in the weird neverwhere where this sort of thing matters, she’s known as the Marchioness of Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”, obviously), which is less a title, more a disreputable pub in Soho that puts on bad drag acts on Thursdays.

Of rather more interest is her husband, who’s called David (so far, so dull), an Old Etonian (fancy!) and the Marquess of Cholmondeley (see pronunciation note above), but also the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, which I assume means that one of his ancestors was tasked with wiping George II’s bottom or suchlike. Even better, before his accession to that title, he was called the Earl of Rocksavage, which just has to be one of David Bowie’s more fleeting alter egos, probably less cool than the Thin White Duke but far, far better than Screaming Lord Byron. Just imagine swaggering around with that title in your teens and twenties, only to be informed, not only that your dad’s dead, but you’ve got a new, very silly name that you’ll have to spell out for people for the rest of your life. And that your 15 minutes of fame come when your wife has, or hasn’t had a row with someone that racist royalists prefer to the other one.

Never mind, at least they’re happy.

About high/low

I was startled today to see a copy of the Modern Review Mark 2 – the glossy, vapid Burchill/Raven relaunch from 1997, rather than the scrappy, wonderful collaboration between Burchill and Landesman and Young and York – selling for over £100 on Amazon, and the psychic shock propelled me back to the days when seeing Roland Barthes and Bart Simpson on the same bill was still something subversive and beautiful.

Now everyone’s doing it, the latest example being modern celebrity culture with moody 19th-century proto-existentialism. But under the egalitarian veneer, there’s a hint at what we’re expected to know or not know. In the Twitter profile, Kim Kardashian is just Kim Kardashian, while we need to have it explained to us that Søren Kierkegaard is a philosopher.

About John Hamilton

John Hamilton, the art director at the publishing company Penguin Random House, has died. Someone whose work is known to more people than his name, one would think, and whose demise wouldn’t cause a major stir beyond his friends and family and the worlds of publishing and design. But, wait, what’s this in the Mirror?

Now Jamie [Oliver] has had more bad news with the loss of his friend John Hamilton...

And in Hello!

...the celebrity chef paid a heartfelt tribute to John Hamilton, who was his art director at Penguin books...

And what’s this in Woman & Home?

...Jamie was struck by tragedy again, when he learned that John Hamilton...

We’re supposedly a less hierarchical, less deferential society these days but it seems that we’ve just built a whole new hierarchy, where a death can only be acknowledged if it makes a celebrity sad, and he says so on Instagram.

About Harry Leslie Smith

Harry Leslie Smith has died. Well, the real, meat-and-mucus Harry Leslie Smith, the war veteran and political campaigner, has died in a Canadian hospital at the age of 95, but the Harry Leslie Smith known from the @Harryslaststand Twitter account transcends such banal considerations.

Most of us are aware that lots of celebrities’ social media accounts are in fact run by PR acolytes who churn out the sort of things we expect said celebrities to say, just as “their” autobiographies and other books are ghosted by people who can actually write. We only point and laugh when it becomes obvious that the celeb in question hasn't even bothered to read the bloody thing.

The problem comes when a celebrity’s USP is his or her “authenticity”. @Harryslaststand rather blurred the distinction, as most people were aware that Harry’s son John was doing the heavy lifting on the account, although it generally represented Harry’s views. There were rumours that certain political entities – dear old Momentum was the main suspect – had more influence than might have been clear from “Harry”’s impassioned jeremiads against austerity and the like. But we bumbled along, not willing to interrogate any apparent anomalies, because the guy was 95 and still quite feisty, a sort of lefty David Attenborough, and it would have seemed mean.

Of course, in his last few days, when the whole point of him was that he was dying in hospital and really not up to explaining why Trump was such a bastard, the pretence was unsustainable. Smith Jr came into his own, taking advantage of the sad circumstances to cue up some jibes against the effect of austerity policies on health services in the UK and Ontario. It was a bit like the reveal in a late Ian McEwan novel, when the real author lifts off the mask and mutters that s/he would have got away with it if it weren’t for you pesky Booker judges. 

Unfortunately, the other thing that came to mind as Harry slid to his inevitable end in full view of us all, was the protracted demise of another figure whose relationship to reality was fuzzy at best (and whose socio-political views were similarly forthright), the lamented Jade Goody.

What a pity Harry never launched his own perfume range.

About my non-existent book

I’ve long been fascinated by the saga of Jim Crace’s Useless America, a book that never existed but, thanks to a typing error or a misheard phone call or something, came to life within the Amazon hive mind. In fact, such occurrences aren’t that unusual. A few years ago, I was supposed to be writing a book about Lady Gaga, but after a few thousand words, the publisher decided the market was glutted with such products and elected not to go ahead with it. (This sort of thing is also fairly normal practice.) However, the title, cover and provisional release date had been released to the online and high-street retailers, so the book now had a virtual existence that would never be realised. And it’s still there, hovering amidst the ones and zeroes; as I type this, it’s the 10,363,298th best-selling book on Amazon.

Over at GoodReads, though, things have progressed to the next level. Not only does my non-book exist, but you can find out how good or bad it is; three people have bestowed upon it an impressive five stars. Which makes me wonder how well it would have done if I’d actually written the bloody thing.

(One of the people who was so nice about my masterwork is called Miley Cyrus, although I assume she isn’t really. Which adds another level of postmodern wonder to the whole thing.)

About Lewis and Diana

Lewis Hamilton, a man who drives cars very fast, has written a poem dedicated to the memory of Princess Diana, a woman who died in a car that was was being driven very fast (but not, it must be said, by Mr Hamilton).

Englands Rose

The day we lost our Nations Rose
Tears we cried like rivers flowed,
The earth stood still
As we laid her to rest,
A day you & I
Will never forget
The people's princess
Who came to see,
The love from a Country
We'd hope she'd lead,
Englands beauty
Captured in one sweet soul,
Carried the torch
God rest her soul,
With the gift she had 
She'd light up the way,
With a smile to show us a brighter day,
Hearts still full 
of the love she gave,
20 years since she laid in her grave
There will never be another like you,
Now a shinning star in the midnight sky
I will always remember you,
Princess Diana
As our sweet nations Rose🌹

It’s not terribly good, is it? I mean, even if he’d taken the trouble to sort out the punctuation and spelling, and find some better rhymes, and learn a bit about scansion, it would still be fairly mundane.  But, hey, what do I know? Many people appear to have liked it. “Beautiful” is a very common response. “Heartfelt” as well. And, in one case, “I can’t wait to call me nan later. Read her this poem. God is great.” Some are even prompted to respond in kind:

A rose, you never used your thorns, the ones you loved abandoned you, your angel face made hearts so warm, you helped the sick... but who helped you?

offers olivercsmith90, perhaps channelling the spirit of Rik the People’s Poet.

A few, though, are less charitable:

wow your just too easy to please, now go read a John Keats poem , and see if Lewis 's poem still ranks with you!!! Yeah it probably would!

suggests simonnoble389. But sofiashinas shoots back:

You can't compare Lewis to Keats, apples and oranges. One is a champion race car driver, another is a brilliant poet. Either way Lewis's homage to Diana goes straight through my heart ❤️ and bring tears to my eyes .. he obviously loves her spirit as most of us did and still do.

Of course, Sofia is setting up a false dichotomy here; one can be “a brilliant poet” and something else as well. TS Eliot worked in a bank; Wallace Stevens sold insurance. Keats himself was a doctor. There’s nothing to say Lewis Hamilton can’t be a champion driver *and* a brilliant poet as well. I mean, his homage goes straight through Sofia’s heart and that’s what matters.

My own response to Mr Hamilton’s efforts was simple and, I hope, sincere.

You are the poet the British people deserve.

Let’s just leave it there.

About Warhol

Alice Cooper has discovered a version of Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair print in a locker alongside some of his stage props. I was initially amused by the comment from his manager, Shep Gordon, about a discussion the then-drunk rock star may or may not have had with the artist: 

“Alice says he remembers having a conversation with Warhol about the picture... he thinks the conversation was real, but he couldn't put his hand on a Bible and say that it was.”

Which is something that would doubtless have tickled Andy. But I’m not sure how he would have taken another of Gordon’s reflections:

“Andy Warhol was not really ‘Andy Warhol’ back then.”

I suspect what Gordon means is that Warhol didn’t command the vast sums on the art market that he can attract now he’s safely dead – which goes for any number of big names. But it seems oddly appropriate in that ‘Andy Warhol’ (as distinct from Andy Warhol) was his greatest work, the spectral, silver-wigged entity, umm-ing and gee-ing and generally being, blurring the lines between art, business, performance and celebrity. In fact, by the mid-70s, it’s possible that Andy Warhol had ceased to exist and only ‘Andy Warhol’ was left.

Seven thoughts about #PepsiLivesMatter

So Pepsi made a commercial in which Kendall Jenner, who is apparently a Kardashian, sort of, shows up at a political demonstration and calmed everyone down with a can of fizzy drink and some people didn’t like it so Pepsi said, yeah, fair enough, we’ll pull it.

• It’s just a classic example of recuperation, the tactic of reclaiming radical, transgressive  images/tropes in the cause of capitalism. The flipside of the Situationist tactic of détournement. Every time your favourite old punk anthem shows up in a commercial. That.
• Until this thing happened, I honestly thought Kendall Jenner was a boy.
• Everyone’s so clean and groomed and pretty. Is that what demos are like now? Blimey.
• An Iranian friend has pointed out that the placard with supposedly Arabic text on it just contains random characters that don’t mean anything.
• We’re all talking about Pepsi now.
• And Kendall Jenner.
• Right now, Coca-Cola is working on something bigger and better/worse.

PS: Also, this: