But, in all that time, I have often reflected on how that first brush with a celebrity, back in 1982, so perfectly encapsulated all my reactions to meeting celebrities since. For although I have cycled through many different coping techniques, every single one of them has been persistently, unwaveringly, and astonishingly stupid. Thus:
1991–3: Gonna make you love me
I am sixteen years old. I am writing for Melody Maker. I am able to do a thing which is both amazing yet wholly inadvisable for a teenage girl—essentially ring up my heroes and request that they be delivered to a pub, for me, so they can fall madly in love with me and propose marriage.
Other people call this activity “doing an interview”—but I know the truth.
Unfortunately, having had no training in either (a) conducting interviews or (b) getting people to fall madly in love with me, my technique is: to get very, very drunk, and then talk about myself for the entirety of the interview.
I don’t know if you’ve ever really viscerally wanted to stab yourself in the eyes, hair, and chest before then throwing yourself off a cliff—but I can assure you that, if you have, then listening back to an hour-long tape of you slurringly telling the Beastie Boys “the thing about me, right, is that I’m a lover—not a fighter” will absolutely motivate you to do that.
1993–7: Blowing their minds
Doing a palm reading for Björk? Showing Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera the pictures you drew of him when you were thirteen? Crying hysterically in Radiohead’s front room “because I feel the ghosts in your music”? Telling Teenage Fanclub, “Let’s not do an interview—let’s just play Scrabble, instead, while I ‘feel your vibe’”? I’ve done all of these. I just wanted to . . . liven the place up a bit. You know. Keep things fresh for promo-jaded celebrities. Out of love. Bad love.
This demented tactic reached its unfortunate climax in 1997 when I was in a limo with Robbie Williams, who had a toothache. Instead of painkillers, I insisted he use my herbal remedy, instead.
Thirty seconds later we went over an unexpected road bump, and Mr. “Angels” was screaming in agony as I tried to rinse a whole spilled bottle of clove oil out of his eye, using half a can of flat Lilt.
1997–2005: Hard-core shunning
Having nearly blinded the most famous man in Britain, I had a rethink about a world where celebrities regularly had to come in contact with me—and came out solidly against it.
“I need to protect famous people from me,” I thought. “They shouldn’t have to put up with this shit. From now on, whenever I’m trapped with a famous person, I will nobly ignore them. I will erect an invisible Protective Booth of Respect around them, in my mind.”
This noble eschewing of famouses reached its apogee when I did a radio show with one of my greatest heroes, Radio One DJ John Peel. Three times Peel attempted to make pleasant conversation with me. Three times I physically turned away from him—thinking, “John Peel, the best way I can show you my respect is by not bothering you with my replies. Besides, we’ve got plenty of time to become friends—later.”
Peel died six months later.
2005–present day
“It’s because you’re overwhelmed by their fame,” my husband counseled me. “They’re just normal! Just do that old trick—imagine them on the toilet.”
And, indeed, this advice really did work like a dream—until the night when, due to a sequence of events too long to explain, I ended up seeing Lady Gaga on the toilet for real.
I KNOW. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?
Since then—your guess is as good as mine. I’m all out of ideas.
TV Review: Shakespeare and David Bowie—England’s Beautiful Boys
I know someone who knew David Bowie, and he told me, once, “One day, I’ll introduce him to you. You can’t interview him, or write about it—but you will meet him.”
I spent a lot of time, in the intervening years, thinking about that. Thinking about the day when I would finally meet David Bowie. What should I say? What would I wear? What do you wear to meet the man who’s worn everything—purple-and-red jumpsuit, sharp lemon zoot suit, Jareth the Goblin King’s knacker-immortalizing leggings? I looked through my entire wardrobe and realized the only thing I could wear to meet David Bowie that wouldn’t look like I was copying something he’d already worn—and better—was my shirt that is covered in hundreds of tiny cartoon pictures of David Bowies. What’s the etiquette on that? Would it have been wrong to make Bowie look at little Bowies all over my tits? Or was it—as I was dangerously close to convincing myself—so wrong it’s right?
Then, of course, he fucked up half the world’s heart by just dying—dying like he was a mortal man, made of frangible bone, and metastasis-able tissue—and making it so we would, finally, know what it was like to live in a Bowie-less twenty-first century. Worse, it turned out, unsurprisingly. Just . . . sad, to not have him there in New York, with his mis-matched eyes, and heroically gigantic genitalia, and his delighted laugh, which was the laugh of a man who had become the handsomest man in the world through sheer force of will. It was just good having him there, you know? Having a David Bowie, in case we needed him. In case he wanted to see what I’d finally chosen to meet him in.
No one should be surprised there’s Bowie all over this book, and the first spoonful is here, discussing a documentary about him, which ran the same week as an amazing documentary on Shakespeare—England’s other beautiful, world-changing bisexual boy.
There is a fairly persuasive argument that the answer to the question “What is Englishness?” may be “A nation of people who constantly ask themselves ‘What is Englishness?’”
Very few things can have been as exhaustively examined by the English as “Englishness.” It’s practically all we do. Drink tea, love dogs, queue patiently, plant herbaceous borders, get off our margins on Friday night, live in a constant state of astonished tetchiness about the weather, knock out superlative homosexuals—and constantly ask ourselves what it means to come from this country. And that’s the lot. It’s only when you go abroad that you notice other countries do not do this.
The French would think you were insane if you were to ask them, “What is it to be French?” They would sit there, eating Frenchly, dressed in a French manner, and thinking à la Française, and stare at you until you stopped. Likewise the Americans, or the Greeks, or the Indians. They all just . . . get on with it.
We, meanwhile, get on with earnestly fretting about whether earnestly fretting is inimitably English or not. Since we stopped tending beehives in the grounds of our abbeys, or stoically resisting Hitler, it’s become our national hobby.
In this respect, summer 2012 has been an absolute doozy—the twin-header of the Jubilee and the London Olympics allowing us a double pop at a slew of broadsheet think pieces that would best be headlined, “GB—WTF?”
And television has, of course, followed suit. This week—in among Punk Britannia, Grayson Perry’s series on British taste, and The Secret History of Our Streets—there were documentaries on two of the brightest things this country has ever produced: Shakespeare and Ziggy Stardust.
Simon Schama’s take on Shakespeare came first. When it comes to history documentaries, there are very few pleasures as great as watching Schama: slithering around drafty castles in his black leather jacket, spreading whispery allegations about Charles I in such a manner as to suggest that the king might just be around the corner, irascibly hidden behind a heavy curtain and likely to behead the titillating Schama—rather than dead these 370 years.
Indeed, Schama’s confiding tone is so all-pervading that, on occasion—when his nostrils get particularly flared, perhaps over some perfidious long-gone deed by Cromwell—he morphs into Kenneth Williams narrating Willo the Wisp. In a bit where Evil Edna’s behaved particularly outrageously towards Mavis Cruet, the fairy.
A two-part series, Simon Schama’s Shakespeare kicked off with Schama at his best. With so little known about Shakespeare, you would think establishing
his patent gossipy tone would be difficult—yet Schama managed it with ease. He made the gossip about the work.
“You can take away cricket, skip the last night of the Proms, even lose the Empire—but if you lose Shakespeare, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no England anymore,” Schama opened, before opining that this was because “he gives us England unedited—the cream and the scum. The fleabag hostelries, the chilly cathedrals where sour bishops crack their knuckles and plot. The clapped-out actors and greedy squires . . . and that’s what we want. The dirt and the devilry. He gives us the voices of England.”
Schama’s thesis was that Shakespeare had, to all intents and purposes, invented England: “Shakespeare put Britain onstage before it even really existed,” he claimed. Quoting Jack Cade in Henry VI, Part II, with his sweeping cry of “My mouth shall be the Parliament of England,” Schama explained just why it is that “the rhythm, and the way that we speak” are down to Shakespeare: “He is the river of our language.”
Shakespeare’s great luck was to be born on a fault line—a point in history where sociopolitical tectonic plates were opening a new space.
In 2012, the burgeoning technology of the Internet defines us. Shakespeare, by way of contrast, started writing at the point where the technology of words themselves was in the ascendant: between 1500 and 1659, thirty thousand new words were added to the English language. This was when the rules of grammar were being fixed—and this was, in great part, down to Shakespeare himself: his use of grammar, then propagated by the success of his plays.
As Elizabeth I began to lay the foundations of the British Empire, Shakespeare’s fresh, plastic, plosive English became as exportable and valuable as woolen cloth, or coal. Back in this country, meanwhile, Shakespeare’s big stories—the most exciting games in town—filled the entertainment vacuum that had once been filled by the touring Catholic plays. The Reformation made brilliant business for Shakespeare.
And Shakespeare made brilliant business for Schama. He was in his wide-eyed element doing semihysterical potted listings for Shakespeare’s works.
“He put the onion breath into his Dicks and Georges, and let the middling sort smell it,” Schama said, in the kind of glorious “WTF?” piece to camera that makes you blink several times. Reveling in the Schama drama, he went on to describe the monarch in Henry VI as “insomniac, guilt-ridden, doomed never to enjoy the fruits of his usurped throne—trapped in a Death Star where everyone moans and plots within the steel casing of their dark armor.” Henry VI was, therefore, “Kill Bill, in tights.”
For viewers, Simon Schama’s Shakespeare scored the double whammy of making you go, “Well, I never—do next-door know about all this?” and “This summer, I really must start reading Shakespeare. This stuff sounds excellent.”
On to England’s other dazzling boy—David Bowie—who, on Friday, had a whole night to himself, when BBC4 knocked out another one of those Mojo-friendly rock-archive evenings a person of a certain persuasion finds so very satisfying.
The thing about Bowie is that, whatever the Beatles did (i.e., everything), he did it all better, really. Well, harder, certainly. For although working class, the Beatles were essentially a really good-looking gang. They had the power of a brotherhood. They were straight. And they weren’t ginger—albeit dyed—either. They were a pretty easy sell, all things told—what with their girlfriends, and their yeah yeah yeah.
Bowie, on the other hand, was alone. A man in a dress, who’d outed himself to Melody Maker (“I’m gay, and I always will be.” Obviously he was wrong about that, given that he married Iman, but we all make mistakes. Unless, of course, he misheard when he was introduced to her, and thought she was “a man.” Then he’d still be quite gay), and who wanted to bring the then-uninvited guest of theater—dance, choreography, mime, makeup, costume, lies, dazzle, inference, narrative—to rock.
And he wanted to do all this without a band of brothers. Without the shelter of the familial name “Fromthebeatles.” All on his own. No wonder he invented Ziggy Stardust. “Oh no, love—you’re not alone!” He needed him, for company.
David Bowie and the Story of Ziggy Stardust covered Bowie’s astonishing eighteen-month raid on pop, from 1971 to 1973, when Bowie broke into the world and—rather than stealing something—heaped up the charts, and the imagination, with treasure, instead: leaving Hunky Dory and The Man Who Sold The World and Ziggy Stardust under the Christmas tree, plus tossing off “All the Young Dudes” for Mott the Hoople, and producing Lou Reed’s Transformer and Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power. A CV which genuinely entitles the bearer to refer to themselves as—per the lyrics to “Ziggy Stardust”—“The nazz / With God-given ass.”
Ziggy Stardust was a conflation of Little Richard, British rock ’n’ roll singer Vince Taylor, the world’s post-Sputnik obsession with aliens, and a tailor’s called Ziggy’s.
Like Shakespeare before him—who took the history, stories of kings and queens, and reworked them to make the future—Bowie took rock’s past and used it to kick off the next four decades of pop.
“The eighties would never have happened without him,” Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet explained. “The makeup was where we started. The outfits were where we started. [Lady] Gaga’s whole act is Bowie.”
“He wanted to be everything,” Mick Ronson said of the boy who’d already, at twenty-three, changed his name, written “Space Oddity,” and given Peter Noone “Oh! You Pretty Things,” lyrics inspired by Nietzsche (“You gotta make way for the Homo Superior”).
And Bowie was, at that point, the Homo Superior. Here’s Ziggy Stardust’s first, legendary appearance on Top of the Pops—the one every gay man of a certain age remembers as being the gay equivalent of the moon landings. In some dandy half-harlequin outfit, his mouth is outrageous. He’s all hip bone and cock. The blasted pupil in his brown eye makes it look like he was winking during an explosion. At one point, he casually drapes his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson—in an era of absolute homophobia, he might just as well have been violently taking Ronson over the drum riser. Men did not touch each other like this in 1972.
“I had never seen anything like this in my life,” Elton John—one of the talking heads—said. “It was so exciting. He commanded the stage. He was so . . . sexual.”
And then, almost a year to the day after the Top of the Pops appearance—with Ziggy having released three albums, and done two huge world tours—Bowie took the Spiders from Mars to the Hammersmith Odeon, with the intention of announcing the retirement of Ziggy Stardust. He had not told the rest of the band.
When he takes to the stage, a girl at the front of the audience, in a red coat, repeatedly rests the side of her face on the stage, gently, instantly and ecstatically, like a cat in love. She clearly believes she is living in the era of Ziggy Stardust, and it will last forever.
But before an encore of “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” Ziggy Stardust shouts out, “This is the last show we’ll ever do!,” and dies. David Bowie puts out Diamond Dogs the next year—then on to “Fame,” and Station to Station and “Heroes,” and Low—still astonishing right up until Let’s Dance, and capable of something as beautiful as “Absolute Beginners” (“I absolutely love you”) even in 1986.
And even with your head still buzzing from Mick Ronson’s unlubricated, staccato buzzing on “Rebel Rebel,” you think: “Moonage Daydream.” That’s the kind of title Shakespeare would have come up with.
Why We Cheered in the Street When Margaret Thatcher Died
In April 2013, the woman who utterly defined the social climate of my childhood in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, died. Many people I knew celebrated. Many others were furious that they did. I tried to explain why, for some people, her death was something they’d waited to mark for a long, long time.
It’s an odd thing—being told to mourn. Being told to feel sad. Being chided into reverence.
When the news of Margaret Thatcher’s death broke, Twitter became—as it always is—the village well: the
place of announcement and discussion.
At first, everyone stuck to a very simple “Margaret Thatcher has died,” or “Baroness Thatcher, RIP,” or “It has finally happened.” The first communications were the simple reporting of news.
After half an hour or so, people started to talk about their emotional reactions to the news that she was gone. And whenever someone from the left said anything nonreverent—or even joyous—about her passing, several thousand people from the right would be on hand to scold, “Show some respect!,” or “An 87-year-old woman has died!,” or “Can you not feel some compassion? Can you not act with kindness? Can you not bow your head, just for today?”
And this was interesting, because those who supported Margaret Thatcher appeared not to believe that otherwise reasonable, considerate people could legitimately feel like this. The right could not understand why, even for a day, some on the left could not bow their heads and make a civilized attempt at deference.
But as someone who comes from a council estate, in a town that rioted in the 1980s (Wolverhampton: the McDonald’s was left intact—even as we rioted, we protected the chips), but who now mingles with the elite (I’ve been snubbed by David Cameron at a garden party: my echelons are “upper”), I know why those feelings exist. How it is perfectly possible for kind people to not be capable of mourning the death of an old lady. Why your bones can boil against someone who should, ostensibly, be assessed as a hardworking public servant.
As a class jumper, I would say, as a sweeping generalization, that politics can never mean as much to the professional classes as it does to the working class, or the underclass.
Moranifesto Page 5