There is much about the modern Labour Party to make the stately politicians from its past turn in their graves.Think of Labour leader Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, embarrassing themselves at the Pride Parade in London in 2022. Gay anthems played as Rayner indulged in a self-conscious shoulder roll, before Keir Starmer followed suit. This was before his current incarnation as ‘Starmer the Statesman’. This was ‘Queer Keir’, a heterosexual sexagenarian with glitter on his cheeks. He even sported his customary Barney Rubble look of confusion as though struggling with two thoughts simultaneously. Perhaps he was trying to remember who the Weather Girls were, and what made them biological women. But it is London mayor Sadiq Khan who is surely most responsible for sending those regal figures from Labour’s past spinning in their graves. His identitarian posturing is ceaseless, his support for voguish causes tireless. He embodies perhaps all that is wrong with the modern Labour Party.

11 mins 51 secs read

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Someone once wrote that they were not born a redhead but born to be a redhead. Some of us were fortunate enough to be both. We remained that way until mother nature and our father's genes (or so I believed) colluded to force our hairline to retreat in early adulthood and disappear completely by the time we left our twenties. There is something semi-Masonic about being a redhead. The actress Julianne Moore has mentioned how we tend to notice each other and 'notice our identity'. It's a club, a tribe, a minority. A ginger group, of sorts. Baldness never bothered me, but I was crushed by no longer being a redhead. Ginger. Of course there are greater losses, but these came later, and others will come later still. Long after the loss of youth, hair, looks and loved ones comes the loss of faculties, mobility and independence. And when it comes to pain and illness there is an argument that redheads feel it more than your average mousey blonde, strawberry blonde, chestnut brunette or black head. Says who? Well, this century, neuroscientists examined the mysterious ginger gene and revealed that redheads are more susceptible to pain.

11 mins 9 secs read

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It would be unthinkable to write about the film director Terence Davies without acknowledging the cinema that introduced me to his films, decades after it was demolished in the 1990s. Davies died last month, aged 77. London’s Lumiere cinema on St Martin’s Lane lasted a paltry 16 years. I watched it metamorphose into the Ian Schrager hotel (as I say, it was the 1990s) and the Gymbox fitness club it is today.  It was previously an Odeon cinema that solely screened Walt Disney cartoons, reminiscent of those Terence Davies remembered from the Liverpool of his youth. These venues were his initiation into film, with an elder sister as his escort, when he was 7 years of age.  He cried during the iconic dance sequence in ‘Singing In the Rain’ because Gene Kelly was so happy: ‘I remember every single thing about that day. It will be with me for the rest of my life.’ In later years he expressed two main regrets. Firstly, like Siegfried Sassoon, the subject of his last film, he sought redemption, but acknowledged that ultimately it wasn’t in him. He’d turned away from Catholicism and towards atheism at the age of 22.

16 mins 35 secs read

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Pablo Picasso once said that Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel had more sense than any woman in Europe. Among the many astute, sometimes absurd, quotes attributed to the designer during her 87 years was the line that the legend has a harder life than the subject itself.  'May my legend gain ground,' she mused. 'I wish it a long and happy life.'  Since her death in 1971, both the legend and the legacy have become a testament to longevity. Each is currently in reasonable shape despite the character of the age. Presently, the history that relates to the many is re-written to accommodate the fantasies of the few, with the past defined entirely by the crimes it committed.  The triumphs that have brought about progress are overlooked,  while the modish beneficiaries of these developments rail against the privileges they've inherited. Frequently they call out consumption and consumerism while being slaves to each. They pick their version of the past as easily as they choose a designer brand, a gender, a pronoun, or a condition that sets them up for victimhood. Yet despite this climate the revered House of Chanel survives and thrives.

11 mins 30 secs read

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The future has often been a focus for David Byrne, even in his formative years when he was fronting Talking Heads. In one particular lyric from ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ (1988) he envisages it as an idyllic Eden. He laments the passing of 7-Elevens, as flowers and cornfields have replaced shopping malls and parking lots (‘If this is paradise / I wish I had a lawnmower’). Byrne’s futurology, shared by his frequent collaborator, Brian Eno, always pushed him ahead of his contemporaries when it came to creating tomorrow’s music today. This pursuit of innovation persists now, even though Byrne is an elderly man in his seventies. Since quitting Talking Heads in 1991, Byrne has successfully, and sometimes brilliantly, put his name to dance scores, film soundtracks, musicals and books. Byrne’s most recent solo album, American Utopia, was released in 2018 and turned into a Broadway musical in 2019. It is now five decades on from Talking Heads playing ‘Psycho Killer’ at the CBGB club in New York. And it’s nearly four decades on from Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed 1984 film of Talking Heads in concert.

10 mins 23 secs read

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In 2005, broadcaster Melvyn Bragg fronted a series that documented the story of ITV. The title was perhaps a comment on what the independent broadcaster was and what the BBC wasn’t – The People’s Channel. Last week, in a similar vein, Bragg criticised the BBC for its crass portrayal of the working class. The BBC has long had a class problem – both on screen and behind the scenes. Tellingly, when ITV launched in the 1950s, the BBC’s first director-general, Lord Reith, compared the arrival of popular television to the bubonic plague. He feared that independent television would not advance the mission of the nation’s public-service broadcaster, established during his tenure, to ‘inform, educate, entertain’. He compared the BBC to a ‘drawn sword parting the darkness of ignorance’. His paternalistic approach to the masses would go on to set the tone for the institution we now know as ‘Auntie’. Indeed, the BBC today is as synonymous with that paternalism as it is with the Oxbridge pedigree of its staff, which has forever been a priority when it comes to employing programme makers and board members. While Lord Reith made sure that women never read the news, and divorcees and homosexuals never played in the BBC orchestra,

5 mins 59 secs read

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By the time he’d made it on to record and into the charts, Neil Tennant had lived many lives. As had many of those listeners who came on board with the debut album, Please, in 1986 and stayed interested in, if not always loyal to, the Pet Shop Boys canon. Much of this canon features in the forthcoming Pet Shop Boys collection, Smash, which covers the duo’s career by way of 55 singles recorded between 1985 and 2020. Beginning with ‘West End Girls’, released the month PC Keith Blakelock was savagely murdered during the Broadwater Farm riots, Smash concludes with a song about a boy who won’t leave home, during the peak of the Covid pandemic. If a Pet Shop Boys line wasn’t on our lips or on our minds, it was out there somewhere as the world changed – as our world changed when love, loss and death punctuated the odd party, club night or wake.

12 mins 28 secs read

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Words spoken almost half a century ago by a man who meant very little to me at the time, and of whom I had little knowledge and little interest, came to mind when John Lydon failed to become the Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest - staged this month in Le Royaume-Uni - as front man of PIL, with the song 'Hawaii'.  These words were spoken in the high season of punk  during which  I collected my weekly copy of Sounds on the way to school, and perused it en route to the bus stop for the short ride to Camberwell, via the ramp of the brutalist estate completed three years earlier. Work begun in the high season of glam rock ('In every dream home a heartache'), with the final flagstone laid the summer the Philadelphia sound was wafting through walkways and stairwells, as it emanated from the Phillip's cassette pet belonging to one of our gang.

11 mins 50 secs read

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Today is Stephen Lawrence Day. It commemorates the 30th anniversary of the lethal stabbing of 18-year-old Lawrence in Eltham, south-east London, at the hands of a gang of young men. Initially, six suspects were arrested but not charged, before the Lawrence family launched an unsuccessful private prosecution against five of them in 1994. It was not until 2012, after a change in the law allowing individuals to be tried twice for the same offence, that two of the gang were eventually convicted of Lawrence’s murder. Do I need to add more details? Isn’t this one instance where the name of the victim – Stephen Lawrence – is enough to conjure up a tragedy and summon a sequence of events?Many will be able to immediately recall that photograph of the teenager in a blue and white striped top. It is sometimes cropped to remove Lawrence’s slightly raised fist, as if some fear this gesture would take away from the severity of the crime in some way. But arguably, the canonisation of Lawrence has already done this.

11 mins 34 secs read

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A minor controversy over a major event arose at the start of Morrissey's career, and a similar experience may soon plague him in the present. Common to both are children, murder and Manchester. What has changed throughout the intervening years is the nature of controversy. What has changed is the nature of those taking offence. It was once the reactionary and the conservative, now it's the radical and the progressive. It was once the old, now it's the young. 'Manchester, so much to answer for,' he sang in 1984, recalling the bodies on Saddleworth Moor from the 1960s of his childhood. The tragedy continued to resonate. That's how the nation grieved back then. It allowed itself to mourn; it allowed itself to be angry. While some events were too sacred to be sung about. 'Suffer Little Children' became a tabloid story, hyped up into a minor controversy; the lyric provided a list of the lost. We will be right by your side, until the day you die.

13 mins 35 secs read

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Even before Harriet Harman married the trade unionist and Labour MP Jack Dromey, she felt the need to tone down her accent. Born on Harley Street to a barrister mother and doctor father, she was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School. Her family tree extends from illustrious politicians to the descendants of high-profile peers: Neville Chamberlain is in there, along with numerous countesses and earls; David Cameron is a relative; Boris Johnson’s godmother, Lady Rachel Billington, is her cousin. Johnson is central to what is likely to be Harman’s last major role as a parliamentarian (our longest-serving female MP is retiring after 40 years) as chair of the House of Commons Privileges Committee investigating “Partygate”. The forthcoming hearing could bury what remains of Johnson’s reputation. Politically, he is the antithesis of everything Harman stands for. Personally, he epitomises all that she abhors about the men in the class she was born into.

10 mins 15 secs read

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A television production company once offered me the opportunity to black up for money, by repeating the experiment that brought John Howard Griffin to prominence with the book, Black Like Me, published in 1961. In 1959, Griffin started documenting his sojourn throughout the segregated southern states of America, while Jim Crow laws were still enforced, and with evidential prejudice a common occurrence for black Americans. Griffin was a white man who darkened his skin – with the aid of the drug methoxsalen – to temporarily experience life as a black man. His account became a magazine article, and later Black Like Me, which took its title from a line in a poem by Langston Hughes. Had I taken up the offer, I would have been filmed in the north of England living with a black family, recording the ‘low level’ racism I was expected to encounter before returning, along with my natural pigmentation, to compare experiences.

6 mins 51 secs read

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When it comes to race and the left – certainly the wealthy white left, definitely the middle-class left – it is as if left-wingers have not progressed since being unceremoniously exposed as a type by Tom Wolfe, in his mammoth essay, ‘Radical Chic’, over half a century ago. Other writers also had their number, including black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. The event Wolfe documents may not be familiar to a rising generation charting similar territory as chic revolutionaries on social media. It’s therefore worth providing a summary here. In the season of radical chic, as Wolfe refers to it, super-rich celebrities and socialites were indulging in a political cocktail of nostalgie de la boue and noblesse oblige, by staging fundraising parties – where sumptuous hors d’oeuvre were served – at New York duplexes on Park Avenue. Their pet causes were those raised by ethnic groups who were politicised – often rightfully so – by grievances that needed airing, axes that needed grinding.

12 mins 33 secs read

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Drag has come a long way since television presenter Robert Robinson, speaking on the BBC arts series The Look At The Week in 1967, implied it was a shady phenomenon creeping through respectable society. Robinson, more wary than wry, referred to this burgeoning trend as something previously confined to the illicit world of homosexuality, which was legalised that year. Homosexuality had spread to vicars and scout masters according to the press — now drag was muscling in on dockers and stevedores in cockney hinterlands. The programme featured the drag act Phil Starr at the City Tavern, Millwall. Starr, a wallpaper salesman by day, and someone akin to a brickie in a wig at night, explained how his best audience were women. They were even more appreciative than the male prisoners at his Wormwood Scrubs performances. In Britain, drag was finding its way out of gay clubs and into east end pubs, as well as onto the stage of the Royal Variety Performance, where Danny La Rue was a regular sight into the 1970s.

6 mins 52 secs read

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By the time the veteran journalist Christopher Booker died in 2019, he had witnessed enough of the twenty-first century to notice how much his book on the 1960s (The Neophiliacs, published in 1969) resonated with it. Two years into this decade, it’s become apparent to others, too, that there are striking parallels between the themes highlighted in his critique of the 1960s and social trends that test us in the present. “In order to become mature, in short, we must not only reject the authority of our parents — but, at the same time, in order to replace them, we must also learn to kill off our own fantasy selves”, Booker, in Jungian mode, wrote. “Only by killing this fantasy self can a man become fully mature. Unless he does so, he is still in a state of rebellion, a perpetual state of immaturity.” He was referring to the reputed revolution that occurred in the 1960s (which he dated to beginning in 1954). It was a conflict between the young and the old; the past and the present. It was attributable to developments that contributed to major upheaval and a constant pursuit of the new: technology, consumerism and something akin to affluence, compared with the austerity and rationing that had gone before.

10 mins 55 secs read

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Even before Brexit, the attitude of many in the Labour party towards traditional working class voters had been closer to contempt than camaraderie. Last week was not only the sixth anniversary of the result, but the point when the left momentarily ditched minority issues. Trade unionism replaced transgenderism as a priority, in support of the RMT union — an organisation left-wing Remainers previously condemned for urging its members to vote Leave. These workers were once again comrades-in-arms, because the industrial action was an opportunity to create chaos and, possibly, bring down a Tory government. Labour has failed to do as much via the ballot box for over a decade. Last week the party also clawed back a seat in the red wall which it lost in the 2019 general election, and failed to reclaim in the recent council elections. Yet the Wakefield by-election may be a false dawn, as many former Labour voters disenchanted with the Tories stayed home. The working class remains Labour’s lost cause.

8 mins 9 secs read

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‘‘It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation,” suggested Kenneth Clark at the conclusion of his 13-part television series, Civilisation, in 1969, “We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.” Events at the time led him to suggest that, as unlikely as it seemed, European civilisation could fall to the barbarians as it had after the fall of Rome when “we got through by the skin of our teeth”. He quoted W.B. Yeats for back-up. It wasn’t that the centre could not hold, it was that there was no longer a centre. Being a self-proclaimed “stick-in-the-mud”, Clark was an odd choice to front the BBC’s ambitious (shot in 130 locations across 11 countries) and expensive (£130,000) project in a season of radicalism and youthful insurrection. Filming proceeded in 1967, the year the Vietnam War was at its deadliest, and global student protest at its peak. The civil rights movement was making headway; the women’s movement was making headlines. In Britain, homosexuality and abortion were legalised.

14 mins 51 secs read

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A wealthy, middle-aged bachelor once told me, apropos of nothing, he was saving homosexuality for his dotage. 'I'm saving The Beatles for mine,' I quipped. It was a steamy season in London and the two of us were seated in the rotunda at BBC TV centre, smoking cigarettes and staring skyward towards the golden sculpture of Helios. It was halfway through the 1990s, two decades beyond the moment in which the BBC and The Beatles came together to make history. In the seismic year of 1966 satellite technology made it possible for television stations across the world - with the exception of the USSR, naturally - to transmit as one. The world's first global broadcast occurred the following year: each country participating offered up something local and cultural. For Germany it was Lohengrin from the opera house that Wagner built in Bayreuth. There was a concerto from the Met in New York, and Franco Zeffirelli filming Romeo & Juliet in Rome (Paul McCartney was considered for the lead.)

13 mins 25 secs read

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It’s hard to believe it, but the inspiration for the fictional Euphoria — the drug-crazed, fashion-conscious, sex-obsessed drama set in a high school in Los Angeles — was a tragic death that occurred in Israel. An 18-year old was confronted by the boyfriend of a girl he was talking to in a club; he was later found murdered. This sequence of events led to the Israeli series of the same name in 2012. American actor and filmmaker Sam Levinson created the US version, which made its debut in 2019. The delayed second series (Covid being the culprit, naturally) is now with us, with HBO teasing diehard fans with a new episode ahead of each school week. The opening episode of the new series was a taster for the excessive violence and nudity heading our way. Euphoria travels to extremes that no other TV teen saga has ever chartered. The territory is unique to Generation Z, the Tik Tok age and the 21st century. The current series begins by going back a decade, taking us through the infancy of young drug dealer Fezco — before he built his empire in a local garage, assisted by his pre-adolescent, gun-totting accomplice, Ashtray.

4 mins 51 secs read

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I was sick. Poorly. Queer. Under the weather and out of sorts. I was ill. I prefer this to the previous words and expressions. It conjures up damp English afternoons. In fact all the illnesses that accompanied overcast days throughout the decades. Mumps. Measles. Hypergonadism. Kidney stones. As Prufrock’s life was measured out in coffee spoons, and the passage of Eno’s life in shirts, my adulthood has been punctuated by kidney stones. The last was surgically removed days before the nation went into self-isolation. The weekend before was spent with a catheter. It was retrieved by a nubile nurse who said that after her shift she planned to settle down with Love Island on catch-up and a kebab. Her look was one of alarm. Maybe she was shocked that my penis had shrunk to the size of a skin tag. Or perhaps she didn’t realise this bald, bespectacled middle age man was once a redhead. The next day the nation was under the weather; life in the time of Covid. In the silence myself and a neighbour, Mr P, made a noise. We were in an altered state.

13 mins 21 secs read

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