In a bid to restore its reputation, widen its remit and replenish its diminishing funds, Stonewall has begun to focus on less familiar groups within the infinite alphabet of LGBTQIA rights. This follows the withdrawal of financial support for the charity’s Diversity Champions programme promoting inclusivity in the workplace when Channel 4, Ofsted, the Cabinet Office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission jettisoned the initiative. Driving Stonewall’s fall from grace has been its belligerent attitude to those with a different take on trans rights. Like society more broadly, Stonewall, which was established in 1989, has come a long way from the riot at New York’s Stonewall Inn twenty years earlier (an event Barack Obama compared with Selma and Seneca Falls, moments that transformed civil rights and the women’s suffrage movement). In the intervening years, its goalposts have shifted in the pursuit of an elusive “equality” until it has taken a form the founders wouldn’t recognise. The LGBTQIA lobby is grappling with the problems of entry into the mainstream.

7 mins 29 secs read

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Just as Prufrock’s life was measured out in coffee spoons, and Eno’s life in shirts, some of us can say the same of Sparks songs. As Edgar Wright maintains, for those of a certain sensibility, these songs “invaded” their lives. Morrissey championed Sparks in a letter to the music press as an adolescent teen. A decade ago I interviewed Boy George, and he made the point that Sparks have even influenced those who are unaware of the original source of the influence. Born in the same era, the two of us found ourselves citing examples, listing the songs that had invaded our lives. For me, a key lyric is in the 1974 single “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” from Propaganda. Here’s why: I first met the brothers in London in the early-1990s, between their lengthy and unsuccessful attempts to bring their musical version of the Manga Mai The Psychic Girl to the screen, under the aegis of Tim Burton, and their beginning work on the underrated album Gratuitous Sax, Senseless Violins.

5 mins 0 secs read

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There’s a difference at McDonald’s these days. The fast food chain has gone through a metamorphosis, an overhaul of the brand that has made it less like McDonald’s by making it “Just like McDonald’s”. Big changes have taken place in the decades since I was a regular customer. Developments that have briefly transformed me into a regular again. When I returned, I was reminded of my first time, in that blistering 1976 summer of punk and droughts, when McDonald’s was an oasis on London’s Haymarket. It was exotic to those of us raised on the wrong side of the river and reared on Wimpy. More importantly, it was American. “The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s,” Andy Warhol once said. “The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet.” My fortuitous return occurred in Vienna.

7 mins 59 secs read

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The inspiration for the object of Aschenbach’s infatuation in Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice was acknowledged by the author some years after publication, and the subject of a biography a century later (‘The Real Tadzio’ by Gilbert Adair). He was a Polish boy the writer ogled from a distance in 1911 while holidaying with his wife at the Grand Hotel des Bains in Venice. Less is known of the teenager who played the role in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film of Mann’s novel. For years the director trawled the Continent in pursuit of the right actor for the part. It was a search that had eluded the other major directors who had attempted to bring the book to the screen: John Huston, Joseph Losey, Franco Zeffirelli. Visconti finally found 15-year-old Björn Andrésen in Stockholm. Alain Delon said that if Visconti recruited you for a role, it was because he knew what he would be getting, even if you didn’t. Andrésen, with virtually no acting experience and little ambition to develop any, clearly had something.

4 mins 33 secs read

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Michel Houellebecq brought me to Bertrand Burgalat. The enfant terrible of French literature, who’s been described as a racist, a pornographer, a misogynist, an Islamophobe – his novel Submission envisages a Muslim government ruling France by Islamic law in 2022 – is also a chanteur let’s not forget. The lyrics for his album Présence Humaine (2000) are culled from his poetry, and rendered in that half-speaking, half-singing style that’s at its best in the French language and – ideally Parisian – accent, of which Serge Gainsbourg was the master. Beyond the guitars and the guttural Gallic monotone of the title track, what lingered were motifs reminiscent of theme tunes in TV detective series from the 1960s or breezy art house films. This is the work of the composer and producer Bertrand Burgalat; he has numerous French film soundtracks to his credit, alongside collaborations with Nick Cave, Pulp and the writer Jonathan Coe. Not only is he himself a recording artiste, as they were once called, but according to the British author “a very brilliant one”. He’s right. One critic described his early works as “ear candy created with so much care that it starts to resemble high art.”

5 mins 47 secs read

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The penis has come a long way since it was concealed behind the knee of a naked Yves Saint Laurent in the advertising campaign for his scent Pour Homme, in 1971. The designer wears nothing but his signature spectacles. He has silky, shoulder length hair and is remarkably androgynous, but perhaps more significantly - vulnerable. His lean frame is closer to that of progressive rock fans or British porn actors of the era - figures formed by copious cigarettes, tinned food, strong tea and instant mash. In hindsight the portrait by the photographer Jeanloup Sieff is distinct because it’s free of the machismo implicit in the male centrefolds that started a trend the following year. The American edition of Cosmopolitan was the forerunner with that infamous Burt Reynolds pin-up. Shortly before the release of Deliverance the actor was photographed by Francesco Scavullo, who’d previously captured Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro - the pert chest gracing the cover of The Smiths debut album - naked.

12 mins 33 secs read

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William F. Buckley once said that Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams should never be on the same flight because if the plane went down it would mean the death of America’s only black conservatives. Somehow the right summing up these two brilliant, maverick intellectuals as conservative seemed to sell them short, while their rational stance on race pitted them against a left that expected like-minded views from black Americans on this topic. Even in his dotage Sowell is subjected to this, as when one of his books was reviewed by an academic from the London School of Economics who assumed the author was “a rich white man”. Sowell has referred to the predominantly white intellectual elite of the left — those quick to classify the minds of minorities — as “the anointed”. He, Williams and the fellow travellers inspired and influenced by these men’s output over the years, have been called other names along the way. In the eyes of say, President Biden, these figures aren’t officially black because they don’t vote Democrat, while others had names for them that should have been consigned to history — Uncle Tom, “coon”, “house negro” — like those ancient racial slurs once favoured by Klansmen.

10 mins 6 secs read

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There's a line in Harold Brodkey's short story 'The State of Grace' that sums up the outlook of his marginalised protagonist, and all adolescent outsiders that have ambitions to rise above their tormentors and triumph: 'If dreams came true, then I would have my childhood in one form or another, one day.' It's a line that seems applicable to Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. These two were cast as queer outsiders in infancy; each of them recalling they didn't want to be girls, while suggesting it might have been the better option as they failed to measure up to the standard masculinity of their fathers and their peers. This is just one experience that these southern-born writers shared, as relayed in the new documentary Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. The film's director, Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel, 2012. Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, 2015) planned a project solely about Capote before hearing that a film of The Capote Tapes, based on the George Plimpton recordings, was in the offing.

4 mins 39 secs read

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'Everyone has the potential to become an artist,’ Duggie Fields once said. He was by no means the first contemporary artist to make the claim, and with the coming of a new century it felt like old news anyway. By the end of the 1990s anyone with sufficient funds and a steady hand had the potential to be a post-pop artist, following the launch of the Apple iMac. Those of us who never picked up a paintbrush could use the mouse and the minimal palette of shapes and colours supplied by the software to copy objects or artworks. (Battenberg, Colonel Sanders, and Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ in my case.) These were the fledgling days of the internet when websites created by design agencies were virtual works of art. They were impossible to navigate — but it didn’t matter. What was evident was this platform didn’t merely have the potential to make everyone an artist but a film maker and a musician too, such was the scope of the brave new world wide web.

11 mins 13 secs read

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In October Alan Yentob and Camila Batmanghelidjh appeared in court at the beginning of a nine-week hearing following the collapse of her charity Kids Company, of which he was chairman. Six years earlier the pair were seated together in a setting suited to the excesses that led the charity to insolvency. It was a black-tie dinner at a Mayfair hotel where select guests paid tribute to a figure as synonymous with the BBC as Eric Gill’s Ariel and Carole the Test Card girl: Yentob. The event was organised by the Media Society and overseen by its president, Peter York. One speaker joked of the millions Nigella Lawson had made since Yentob put her on screen. Another claimed the Daily Mail harangued Yentob because he continued to produce radical films (he’d recently interviewed Bette Midler). Some referred wryly to Judaism; many namechecked Oxbridge. Yentob, they said, the ultimate BBC insider, was once an outsider, being the one intern that wasn’t an Oxbridge graduate when beginning his BBC career in 1968.

12 mins 47 secs read

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I realised the contempt certain royalists harbour for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had surpassed that for Camilla Parker Bowles during the previous marriage of the Prince of Wales, when an ailing monarchist said: “These are two lives that don’t matter”. This was a royalist who’d attended street parties for jubilees and celebrated the weddings of the princes Charles, Andrew, William and Harry. When these ancient British royalists die the reverence will go with them, as the rising generation has little interest in the Royal Family. The surviving adulation for the Queen doesn’t extend to other members of the House of Windsor, including the heir apparent. This poses the question that will gain momentum when the Queen retires or dies: Should the British monarchy be abolished? Or, at least, should it go when the Queen goes? Rumours are she will hand over the reins to number one son in 2022, the year of her Platinum Jubilee.

5 mins 17 secs read

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Despite the slogan on the child-like cardboard placards held above the heads of Black Lives Matter protesters, the silence of us lower-case whites is not violence. For a while it was something considered as objectionable as racism — indifference. We neither canonised nor fetishised black men and women as our experience of them was too diverse to classify them as a placid victim or an exotic rara avis. They were ultimately as dull and workaday as the rest of us, harbouring similar hopes and grudges. That’s how it is when you move from society’s margins to the mainstream. (This is the price of equality, at least the equality — it’s an amorphous creature — Britain was trudging towards before identity politics became the pub bore that emptied the bar.)The upside is you’re not solely knife-wielding, drug-dealing absent fathers (the classical view of the far right); the downside: you’re not simply the carnival-loving soul man in fear of the policeman’s knee and the neighbour’s noose (the current view of the left).The black people I’m not talking to about race are not those from the past, those I’ve liked or loved, laughed, cried and climaxed with, or those I’ve yet to meet that share a similar outlook on evidential prejudice in whatever race, faith or shape it comes.

12 mins 55 secs read

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David Byrne recently became the latest in a list of celebrities to apologise for “blacking up” in the past. His racial sin occurred in a promotional video for the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense in 1984. Byrne wrote on Twitter: “I’d like to think I am beyond making mistakes like this, but clearly at the time I was not.” As he concedes in his 2019 Broadway show American Utopia – a 2018 album, and now an HBO film – he needed to change. Change is central to the gist of these projects as well as the David Byrne persona that’s surfaced in his later years. It’s aeons since he first sang of losing his shape trying to act casual. That awkward, nervy figure unable to keep eye contact made for a mesmerising frontman, but a difficult fellow musician. At least according to this summer’s Remain in Love, the autobiography of erstwhile bandmate Chris Frantz, who formed Talking Heads with Tina Weymouth – his wife – and Byrne when they were students at Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s.

4 mins 53 secs read

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Three years before David Bowie’s death in New York in 2016, the curators of London’s V&A exhibition David Bowie Is published a list of his favourite books. Among the inevitable philosophers, artists and beats there were a few surprises (Stephen King, for one), but none more so than The American Way of Death by the US-based English writer Jessica Mitford, published in 1963. The book, a bestseller at the time, was an exposé of the American funeral business revealing how the “dismal trade” of undertaking turned death into a booming industry. Mitford died in 1996, while updating the text: she had opted for a cheap funeral with no ceremony. Bowie went further by bowing out with a direct cremation within hours of his demise. It was a worthy antidote to the vigils that followed, as middle-aged fans with Aladdin Sane make-up prostrated themselves before a badly drawn Bowie mural in Brixton. Last year Karl Lagerfeld settled on the same option despite being, like Bowie, a showman throughout his career.

8 mins 6 secs read

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Even before the adaptation of Donald Ray Pollock’s novel The Devil All The Time has been streamed on Netflix, the plaudits for Robert Pattinson’s performance as preacher Preston Teagardin are mounting. Not least of all because the English actor has mastered a convincing southern American accent. Although the setting for the novel - and the film - is the midwestern state of Ohio, it was swiftly added to the canon of Southern Gothic literature. According to one review it read as if 'the love child of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner was captured by Cormac McCarthy, kept in a cage out back and forced to consume nothing but onion rings, Oxycontin and Terrence Malick’s Badlands’. Like Faulkner, Pollock sticks to a familiar setting. For the former it was the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, for Pollock his native Knockemstiff in Ohio. The film arrives as themes synonymous with the Southern Gothic tradition are played out in the wider country as reality rather than fiction.

4 mins 46 secs read

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Some stories stay with you and never leave you until they’re told, even if it takes years to get the opportunity to tell them. One such story is the murder of Richard Everitt in 1994. Not solely because of the tragedy itself, which attracted little press coverage at the time, but because the response to the crime exposes a double standard in the unremitting debate on race that’s become ever more apparent in the intervening years. Here was the murder of a teenager that drew parallels with that of Stephen Lawrence a year earlier in 1993, except in this instance the victim of the crime was white and his killers were not.mThe details of the Lawrence story have been justly documented at length and will be aired again in a three-part sequel to the 1999 ITV drama The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. A recent BBC film dramatised the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker on Merseyside in 2005, for which the brother of footballer Joey Barton was charged, but films relating to Richard Everitt have been conspicuous by their absence. This is therefore an apposite moment to tell a story I’ve attempted to tell previously.

14 mins 29 secs read

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The noteworthy moments in the films of Luca Guadagnino tend to involve dancing, food or sex. Tilda Swinton’s ecstatic reaction to a plate of prawns in I Am Love (2009) was surpassed by Timothée Chalamet masturbating with a peach in Call Me By Your Name (2017), but neither came close to Ralph Fiennes’ dad dancing to ‘Emotional Rescue’ in the otherwise senseless A Bigger Splash (2015). Balding beneath a scorching sun, a burgeoning middle-age spread exposed, his performance was so wildly exuberant it was as though his character – the bothersome bon vivant Harry Hawkes – was a boy again. Youth is a recurring motif in Guadagnino’s films. “Remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once,” the father tells his son Elio (Chalamet) in his adaptation of André Aciman’s gay rites-of-passage novel Call Me By Your Name. “And before you know it, your heart is worn out, and as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it.”

5 mins 37 secs read

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When Lana Del Rey first hinted at a foray into poetry via cryptic Instagram posts my mind went to a line from her last album Norman Fucking Rockwell: 'Your poetry's bad and you blame the news’. One year on she’s about to release an audio book of 14 poems set to music with the printed volume to follow in September: Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. The title conjures up Fitzgerald’s short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair and more obscurely the ethereal Eighties pop of Virginia Astley, love songs to the English countryside. California is Del Rey’s playground; Los Angeles is her town. The setting has been the backdrop throughout five successful albums and is central to the opening poem ‘LA Who Am I To Love You?'The actor James Franco has said her music reminds him of everything he loves about that city: 'I am sucked into a long gallery of Los Angeles cult figurines, and cult people, up all night like vampires and bikers.’

5 mins 16 seconds read

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The author Patricia Highsmith was often scathing about adaptations of her work because of the liberties directors took with storylines, while a some actors were praised for staying faithful to her characters. 'He was excellent. He had elegance and humour, and the proper fondness for his mother,’ she said of Robert Walker as the slick psychopath in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of her debut thriller 'Strangers on A Train’, from 1951. We’ve yet to meet the definitive Tom Ripley, her most enduring creation, who emerged in ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’(1955) and reappeared throughout her career. (There were plans for further books for 'The Ripliad’ when she died at 74 in 1995.) The erudite and epicurean serial killer has been portrayed by Dennis Hooper, John Malkovich, Matt Damon, and soon Andrew Scott from the BBC series ‘Fleabag’. It was Alain Delon’s Ripley in ‘Plein Soleil’ (1960) who came close to the perfection Highsmith expected, as he was 'very beautiful to the eye and interesting for the intellect’.

5 mins 30 secs read

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In the opening years of this century I wrote a book, The Likes Of Us, on the white working class. Several newspapers bid to run an excerpt. I opted for the Guardian as it was those on the left from the middle class upwards that were the most disparaging about this particular tribe. They mocked them and demonised them. Currently they order them to check their “privilege”; to kowtow to the false narratives of the Black Lives Matter cult. Yet this class remains the cornerstone of a silent majority whose angry silence makes itself known via the polling booth, rather than toxic riots. The Likes Of Us won the Orwell Book Prize. The runner-up, Andrew Marr, wrote in his Telegraph column the next day the win was a testament to Blair’s meritocratic Britain. (In short, I was an interloper, a jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place.) I’d used my experience growing up in south-east London as the springboard for the story of an urban class over centuries.

15 mins 21 secs read

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