As you will probably know if you read serious newspapers, the latest season of Big Brother the mini-celeb factory was launched last night on C4.  Davina showed us around the newly designed BB celembryo hatchery dressed in a dominatrix outfit that judging by her difficulty in walking or speaking or breathing or blinking also seemed to be doubling as her own personal bondage outfit. I suppose this was appropriate since BB’s sadism came out of the diary room some years back.

The re-design includes beds which sleep several celembryos at once, a bath in the living room and a sofa in the bathroom.  BB is becoming more like a nightmare swingers party every year.

Perhaps in an attempt to boost the chances of a woman winning this year (usually the mostly female audience chooses men), or maybe just to boost the chances of some hot lesbo action, all eleven housemates were women.  Some of them were hand-holding twins sucking lolita lollipops who will be snogging on the cover of FHM within a week of their leaving the house.  Some of them were dykes.  Men, as in the outsidde world, are optional extras that will be introduced later when the women need entertaining/shagging (they won’t need men to open the sauce bottle as the dykes can do that.) 

In fact, probably the real reason that all the starting housemates are female is because this simply reflects the kind of world we’re living in - and that BB has helped to bring about.

Monocaled old misogynist Sir Patrick Moore recently complained that TV had been ruined by the the women that now run it.  Perhaps he will be turning up in the BB house later.  (Mind, I’m probably just bitter because today a proposal for a documentary exposing an epidemic of drug abuse amongst young men and looking at how the media isn’t interested because it’s an almost exclusively male problem was turned down by C4 on the grounds that it was ‘male skewed’.)

It’s possible of course that not all the ladies in the BB house were born without penises.  After all, it’s been three years since BB was won by Nadia, possibly the world’s least convincing transsexual that, mysteriously, no one in the house twigged.  Only in Britain would all the housemates be too polite to ask: ‘Er, did you use to be an ugly geezer before you became an ugly bird?’  (Apparently this is what happened within just four hours of her going into the Australian BB house.)  After Nadia, a half-convincing tranny would be overlooked by just about everyone in and out of the BB house.

Even if all of the BB8 ladies were born ladies, I’m guessing that quite a few of the men they add bring in will be (unconvincing) male-to-male transsexuals - like Jason, BB5’s runner-up and Nadia’s arch-enemy/wank fantasy.

The Nadia-Jason trannyvision epic was unquestionably the definitive BB and none before or since can even come close. Or so I want to believe.  I don’t want to waste another summer watching BB8 - especially since it has so few men in it.  So instead I’m re-posting this piece I wrote about BB5:

  

BIG MOTHER

Mark Simpson on his summer romance with Channel 4’s big-breasted, ball-cutting reality TV show

This Summer I found myself doing something I never thought I would - unless at the point of a shotgun.  I got married.  To Big Brother. 

Now, I’m someone who has never watched two consecutive episodes of a soap because I was afraid of the commitment.  I’m not even sure when the news is on these days.  But for ten weeks I hardly missed a show and spent most evenings snugly-smugly cuddled up on the couch with my new affair oblivious to the outside world.  (Though I have to admit that I did cheat a little - I only watched the edited coverage and never the ‘live’ stuff of people snoring under their duvets in green nightvision).

Why this year?  Why did BB 5 finally snag me where all the others had failed?  Well, maybe it was because this time I happened by chance to see the very first night when the contestants made their excruciating entrance into the BB house and so felt implicated.  Maybe it was because the contestants themselves seemed so compellingly extreme - Marco, for example, was not a human being at all but rather a German expressionist animation.  Or maybe it was Jason’s pectorals.  But mostly it was, if I’m honest, because this year, as the all-conquering pre-publicity blitz announced, Big Brother was getting ‘evil’.  Gone was the sub-Warholian boredom of earlier series, watching idlers making porridge and loafing around, generally pretending to be Australians living in a shared house in Willesden.  This series was about real drama and conflict and real psychological abuse.  In fact, it was infinitely more gripping than any scripted TV soap or drama could ever hope to be.  Even though soaps are relentlessly sadistic these days, they’re still played by actors.  And as we all know, actors aren’t real people, particularly when they clock off.

‘Reality’ is different.  You see, having people imprisoned inside your telly just waiting for you to switch it on is a really heart-warming experience.  It gives you something to come home to.  Especially when your televisual hostages are being so badly treated.  The infamous Baghdad prison Abou Ghraib had nothing on Big Brother 5.  Okay, so the Salo-esque scenes of degradation in the BB house involved more-or-less consenting adults, but that only made them all the more shocking.

But however badly BB5 treated this year’s contestants, nothing can compare with the malice of the audience.  I mean, do any of the millions who voted for Nadia, the Portuguese post-op transsexual with the serious nicotine habit seriously think that winning Big Brother was what she needed or what the doctor would have ordered?  Her response to winning looked like the beginning (or perhaps the final stages) of a nervous breakdown.  Or how somebody would look if they smoked an entire packet of fags in one go.

But then, we know that the winners of Reality TV, being the most modern, most vacuous kind of celebrity, are treated with a smiling, casual contempt by their ‘fans’.  Almost everyone I know who watched BB felt obliged to tell me how much they ‘loved’ Nadia.  A patronising smile would cross their face at the mere mention of her name, head half cocked, as if discussing a favourite spaniel.  Hardly any of them bothered to disguise the nature of that ‘love’.  A female friend of mine told me how she ‘wept’ when Nadia won, but a few drinks later was talking about how funny ‘it’ was.  Others told me how they ‘loved’ her because of the way ‘she really made a complete fanny of herself in the Diary Room whenever she ran out of fags.’

Nadia won because she was the easiest contestant to pity, which is of course the most vicious human emotion.  Yes, she also won because she was the udders of BB5, the great, heavy-breasted usually horizontal She-Elephant that most of the female and both gay contestants loved to suckle from - and hide behind - and TV is nothing if it isn’t a matriarchal medium.  Because, like many trannies, she lives every waking moment as if in front of a camera and so was perfectly, glamorously equipped for reality television.  Because she proved to be the most hysterical contestant, both in terms of her behaviour (e.g. that armour-piercing laugh and that winning night impersonation of someone entered by the Holy Ghost) and her entertainment value. 

But mostly she won because the public decided that Nadia had chopped off his/her cock for them - the ultimate sacrifice that a man can make for TV, and in fact what TV sometimes appears to want to do to all men.  Even her famous obsession with cigarettes became for the audience an unconscious dramatisation of the sacrifice she had made (whenever she ran out of phallus-substitutes Nadia became comically less and less ladylike).

Her scheme to keep her transsexuality from the other housemates for as long as possible was no doubt encouraged and quite possibly dreamt up by BB.  It provided Davina with a shock-horror trump card whenever one of the other housemates was evicted: ‘Did you know that Nadia used to be a man?’ ‘No!  You’re kidding!!‘).  Which meant that BB had every interest in making sure she stayed to the end, turning the other housemates into (removable) extras in the Nadia Show.  When the housemates with birthday-shaped genitalia went into the Diary Room they were talking to a camera.  When Nadia went into the Diary Room she was communing with her-co-conspirators: Us.  It made her instantly, if spuriously, sympathetic with the viewers: we were in it together with Nadia.  The others stood less of a chance than Nadia’s penis after she took the pre-theatre sedative.

The drunken lads who one evening shouted over the BB wall ‘NADIA IS A MAN!’ were quite possibly motivated as much by a sense of fair play as bigotry, but their intervention only served to increase Nadia’s popularity with the viewing public, as they fell over themselves to vote for her, ‘protect’ her, and prove that they weren’t like those nasty oiks shouting over the wall.  In ‘reality’, winning BB is of course a much, much crueller thing than being called what you once were over a garden wall.

The explanation that she didn’t tell the other housemates because she ‘wanted to live as a woman’ never made any kind of sense, since the only people in the whole country who didn’t know that she was a tranny were the handful who were stuck in the BB house.  If you are a transsexual and you go on BB you know very well that however convincing you are as a woman you will never be a woman, you will always be ‘that transsexual who was on Big Brother’.  After winning the ‘Portugeezer’ as the tabloids ‘affectionately’ dubbed her told the world she ‘just wanted acceptance’.  Oh right, so you won’t be needing the prize money then, or the mooted record deals, or the magazine interviews, or sponsored appearances then. 

Jason the male-to-male transsexual

Whatever your feelings about Nadia, BB5 really was inarguably the year that BB went tranny.  Not only was the winner a transsexual, but also the runner-up.  Jason the vain working class Scottish bodybuilder was after all a male-to-male transsexual, who with his fake tan and big (probably steroid enhanced) tits and elaborate grooming and preening rituals was also a thing of glamour and artifice and hormones.  His pneumatic entrance into the BB house in leopard-skin thong was a triumph of exhibitionism and briefly made him favourite to win.  Nadia and Jason were clearly lined up to be the Jordan and Peter Andre of BB (the ‘tranny’ stars of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here).  No doubt Channel 4 were praying that that Jason would shag Nadia.

Alas, it wasn’t to be.  After a promising start, it rapidly became apparent that Jason wasn’t playing along and, despite appearances, wasn’t prepared to be tranny enough.  He wanted - how tiresome! - to hold onto what was left of his masculinity.  He initially flirted with gay Dan and then blonde Vanessa, provoking much disapproving discussion of his ‘sleazy’ ‘bisexuality’ in the popular press (male bisexuality is still as unappealing as female bisexuality is appealing, apparently).  Then he had a famous showdown with gay Marco, the Gollum-like creature of distilled campery and spitefulness who, like Nadia his Dungeon Mistress, was fascinated by Jason’s body - who wasn’t? - but resentful of its lack of interest in him, and also of Jason’s paternal role in the house. 

Marco taunted Jason with all the annoying shrieking effeminacy he could muster - and let’s face it taunting masculinity/dad is exactly what male effeminacy is designed to do.  Jason, who like everyone that night had had a few, threatened him in the language of a drunken Saturday night in Glasgow, but, disappointingly, didn’t actually hit him (Marco was, after all, literally asking for it).  Instead, Nadia slapped Jason.  This was the end of Jason’s chances of winning BB.

One gay man, when I asked him what it was that he loved about Nadia, replied: ‘Well, at least she wasn’t Jason!’  ‘And’, I asked, ‘just what was so awful about Jason?’  ‘He was a thug!’ came the reply.  ‘Erm, lantern-jawed slap-happy “WHATAREYOUGONNADOABOUTIT!!!!” Nadia was rather more of a thug than Jason,’ I huffed.  (Of course, I was somewhat biased as I have a weakness for beefy Glaswegian ex-submariners.)

Many, myself included, may have wanted Jason to be a thug, but sadly he wasn’t.  Actually, Victor was the closest thing to a thug in the house, which is precisely why no one in the house challenged his appalling behaviour, except batty, feisty Emma, who was attacked by him and then thrown out by BB for her pains, and, in the final days, a sorely taxed ‘Wedding Night’ Shell.  Jason got it in the neck because he didn’t have anything to hide behind except his ornamental biceps: he wasn’t a woman, he wasn’t gay, he wasn’t black, he wasn’t an asylum seeker.  He was just a working class male narcissist from Glasgow who should never have sent his application in to Channel 4.  Jason was, as Dan said, ‘a big pussycat really’.  (Probably this is why he never stood up to Victor either, and in fact allowed himself to be dominated by him.)

In the final weeks Jason stopped playing the game.  He stopped trying to seduce/manipulate people.  He stopped pretending to be anyone’s friend.  His auto-eroticism became really auto - one day he spent an astonishing 4 1/2 hours in the bathroom.  He spent much of the rest of the time sleeping, or pacing around the garden by himself.  Even his exercise routines, which once seemed for our benefit, a one-man Chippendale show, took on a very self-involved, almost religious, Mishima-like quality.  His body became a fortress rather than the bouncy castle it initially promised to be.  Jason shut us out.  This made the viewers very angry.  Why won’t he humiliate himself for us anymore?  Why won’t he emote?  Why won’t he talk shit like everyone else?  Why won’t he play?  What a boring bastard!  In fact, Jason, through his withdrawal, had turned himself into easily the most interesting BB contestant.

Jason’s final exit from the BB House to loud boos and his awkward interview with Davina afterwards was embarrassing to watch (Jason was the most hated runner up in the show’s history - probably most of his votes came from his fellow Scots who felt sorry for one of their own being picked on by the Sassenachs.)  He refused to look at the clips of himself inside the house that Davina was so keen to show him, covering his eyes and turning away, and seemed unable to answer her questions.  He appeared, shy, bashful, cowed.  Jason, like everyone else in the house wanted to be liked.  It’s a sign of our hardened times that nowadays this is literally the definition of ‘pathetic’.

His response was nevertheless perhaps the least pathological response that evening.  This was after all nothing less than a modern version of a public execution, with Davina as Madame Guillotine, efficient, polished and ever-so humane, grinning at him invitingly, egged on by the crowd waving placards and baying for blood.  Jason had every reason to refuse to put his head on the block and watch Davina’s ‘clips’. 

As for the whole ‘Was Jason bisexual?’ issue.  Clearly Jason was not bisexual.  He was metrosexual.  In fact, he was a textbook example of my definition of a metrosexual as a young man ‘who may be officially gay, straight or bisexual but this is utterly immaterial because he has taken himself as his own love-object.’  Jason was also an illustration of the way in which metrosexuality can stand in for homosexuality.  The intensity of Jason’s relationship with his own body looked very much like it stood in for all other male bodies; as far as the male sex was concerned, he was passionately monogamous and faithful to his own reflection (literally: he spent more time with it in the bathroom than with any of the housemates).

Jason wasn’t the only metrosexual in the house, however.  There was also pretty boy Stuart the costume-fetishist who loved dressing up and making up and generally pleasing people.  Unfortunately for Stuart, Michelle the shark-eyed Geordie man-eater decided that she was going to accessorise him.  He never stood a chance.  The ensuing ‘relationship’ between them was an on-screen high-speed deconstruction of heterosexuality in which Stuart was infantilised and emasculated in a matter of weeks rather than the more customary years.  (Though admittedly Stuart didn’t have much in the way of balls in the first place).  This was probably the chief reason why Michelle, once a favourite to win, became so hated and was soon evicted.  Her ruthless, almost vaudevillian manipulativeness (and violent, Miss Piggy-ish temper when this failed to get her what she wanted) threw the female role in heterosexual relations into terrifying only slightly exaggerated relief.

But, then, what do I know about heterosexuality?  Or women?  Or for that matter relationships? 

Now that the ruthlessly manipulative man-eating BB5 is over I’m terminally single again.

© Marksimpson.com 2007

Mr Humphries is no longer with us. He has been transferred to another department. One that even the cheery Grace Bros. lift - forever ‘going up!’ - cannot reach.

Comic actor John Inman best known for his portrayal of the flamboyant shop assistant in the 1970s British sitcom ‘Are You Being Served?’ finally got ‘promoted’ last week, aged 71. The Great Floorwalker in the Sky tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he was ‘free’. Let’s hope there are lots of divine inside legs for him to measure in the Heavenly Menswear Department. Even if he still doesn’t have a key to the Executive Washroom.

Set in Grace Bros., a fading London department store, and written by Britcom legends David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, ‘Are You Being Served’ ran for thirteen years from 1972 to 1985. It was lambasted at the time for its creaky scripts, smutty humour and abject reliance on crude double entendre (e.g. ‘Captain Pee-COCK’, ‘Mrs Slow-COME’, ‘Miss BRA-hms’, and of course, ‘Mr HUMP-free’.) Many critics wondered why Auntie was airing such off-colour trash.

I loved it. As a lad in the 1970s I never missed an episode, practically wetting my grey school shorts every time. It made me the man I am today. So perhaps it should have been banned after all.

What’s more, history, not to mention ratings, were on my side. This low-rent, gutter humour was, it is clear now, the golden highpoint of the Great British Sitcom: an astonishing 22 million people tuned in for a 1979 episode of AYBS - half the population of the country at the time - just to have a titter at Mrs Slocombe’s tired old pussy. As I observed in an article for the Indy on Sunday about the death of the British sitcom in 2000 (posted below for anyone interested in its obituary), ‘Are You Being Served’ managed to encapsulate an era:

Lloyd and Perry’s peerless BBC sitcom ‘Are You Being Served?’ WAS the British 1970s. Everyone is fed up, everyone is skiving, everyone is seething with resentment and nobody is ‘being served’, in either sense of the double entendre (except the ancient, filthy rich Mr Grace who is probably impotent and the camp poof Mr Humphries who lives with his mother). So palpable is the frustration that Mrs Slocombe’s pussy has a life of its own.

As I got older I did wonder about Mr Humphries. First as ‘one of them’ and then, slowly, as ‘one of us’. Though like many if not most homos growing up at that time Mr Humphries was one of the reasons why I thought I couldn’t possibly be ‘one of them’. Inman’s flamboyantly effeminate powder-puff Mr Humphries (along with ‘Generation Game’ host Larry Grayson) practically defined male homosexuality in Britain in the 1970s – and in fact to this day if you read the tabloids. The Sun has a house rule that you can’t refer to a male homosexual without putting the word ‘camp’ in front of their name or profession. Practically the only way you can avoid the giggily moniker preceding you and your achievements if you’re a famous homo in the UK is to become a rapist or serial killer. Which seems to me like a lot of trouble to go to just to be taken seriously.

Inman’s skittish, swishy portrayal was attacked at the time by gay rights activists, but with the comfortable wisdom of hindsight this seems like tilting at lisping windmills. After all, everyone at Grace Bros. were caricatures. What’s more, Mr Humphries was a likeable caricature and the only person, aside from Mr Grace, who was allowed to have any fun. The protestors’ point I suppose was that Inman was part of the general portrayal of male homosexuals in the culture as being emasculated irrevelant creatures. But then, after all these years of gay lib, gay rights and gay respectability we have…. Graham Norton. Someone loved by gays, apparently. Compared to Norton, three decades old Mr Humphries is no more ‘masculated’, somewhat less irrelevant and rather more like a recognisable human being. What’s more, he’s actually funny. Norton on the other hand seems to do most of the laughing himself, but then I would if I was paid that much. He is however ‘out’.

For his part Inman always denied his character was homosexual, as did the writers. Inman himself announced in 1999 that he had been straight all his life and that he had been involved in a ’serious relationship’ with a woman for 28 years. Reportedly, no one was more surprised than his friends - and none of them had any idea who this woman was.

I suppose though that was the whole point of double entendre. It was knowing at the same time as innocent – double entendre was deniable entendre. Smut without responsibility. Sniggering connotation without serious denotation. In other words: it wouldn’t upset your dear old Mum.

‘I’m free, Captain Peacock!’ Free for a spot of gratuitous symbolic humping, free for some good old fashioned single entendre tittering, and free also of any tedious political statements - or definite meanings. But probably not free, alas, of sexual guilt.

In other words, ‘double entendre’ may be French in origin, but it’s very, very British.

—————————————–

DEATH OF THE BRITISH SITCOM

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, October 2000)

Here is the news: ‘I don’t belieeve it!’

Everyone must know by now that to fill the gap left by the demise of that timeless national institution The Nine O’Clock News the Beeb is bringing back the nation’s favourite misanthrope Victor Meldrew for one last marvellous moan. This is, we are told, the very final series of ‘One Foot in the Grave’ and to make sure of this, Victor actually dies and is buried six feet under in the final episode. Which will probably come as something of a relief for him since it is, after all, what he has been waiting for impatiently ever since the series began in 1990.

However, when Victor finally draws his last, indignant, muttering breath it will be nothing less than a national catastrophe. It won’t just be Britain’s most loveable miserable old git that we lose but an institution once as important as, well, the Nine O’Clock News. For years now it’s been clear that the great British sitcom has also been in retirement, waiting for death. Victor is its last gasp.

You don’t have to be a UK Gold subscriber to know that the sitcom has been in decline ever since the 1970s – the Golden Age of the BBC and also of Victor and Anne (probably the last time they had sex – albeit with the lights off). Then they lived a cheaper street or two from ‘The Good Life’s’ Tom & Barbara, and a few doors up from ‘Terry and June’, holidaying every August at ‘Fawlty Towers’, where Victor and Basil got on famously. And it’s glaringly obvious they bought most of their current wardrobe at young Mr Grace’s department store.

The 1970s was such a rich era for sitcoms and the Beeb because sitcoms were indispensable back then. Everyone was bored, frustrated and repressed. Nowadays there are plenty of things to do – whether it’s Playstation, taking drugs, casual sex, remodelling your home, watching cable TV, surfing the Net or making money. (They may not be things worth doing, but they certainly occupy people’s time.)

Sitcoms reflected back that world to their captive audience, in grotesque and liberating parody. Croft and Perry’s peerless BBC sitcom ‘Are You Being Served?’ WAS the 1970s. Everyone is fed up, everyone is skiving, everyone is seething with resentment and nobody is ‘being served’, in either sense of the double entendre (except the ancient, filthy rich Mr Grace, who is probably impotent anyway, and the camp poof Mr Humphries who lives with his mother). So palpable is the frustration that Mrs Slocombe’s pussy has a life of its own.

As the rigid hierarchy of the doomed department store demonstrated, Seventies Britain was paralysed by class. Sitcoms made fun of hopeless aspirations: in ‘Rising Damp’, everyone is trying to climb the greasy pole and desperately position themselves above each other, but as the name suggest, the only thing that is rising is the moisture problem. In the 1980s the arrival of the grocer’s daughter Mrs Thatch and her loyal supporter Essex Man changed all that. However, before the loadsamoney culture got underway, high unemployment offered some sitcomic potential. ‘The Young Ones’ featured epic amounts of boredom and frustration (they were meant to be students, but in those days students were unemployable),

As the economy picked up, unemployment queues dwindled and social mobility went into overdrive, sitcoms had to resort to time-travel to find boredom and frustration. Croft and Perry retreated to the safety of a joyless, regimented 1950s holiday camp in ‘Hi De Hi’; Mr Blackadder in class-ridden, VCR-less Jacobean England, or the aspiration-less mud of the trenches of the First World War. The North-South divide offered sit com makers less costly time travel by simply motoring up the M1 (‘Bread’ and ‘Last of the Summer Wine’). But if you couldn’t escape Essex Man, you had to make him affectionately inept (‘Only Fools and Horses’).

By the Nineties most of the younger generation had been lost to the smart-Alec, exhausting wisecracking style of the American sitcom: for them Channel Four’s line-up of ‘Cheers’, ‘Roseanne’, ‘Frasier’ and ‘Friends’ ruled the airwaves. The reason for the success of these glossy American ‘lifestyle sitcom’ products was quite simple: post Eighties the British were no longer so repressed, no longer so class-bound, no longer so bored. No longer so… British.

To achieve a non-American sitcom success Channel Four had to take us to a priest’s tumbledown draughty house on Craggy Island. Only there could they be sure of boredom (it’s an island off Ireland), official frustration (priests are supposed to be celibate), and a rigid class system (Father Ted is forever trying to avoid kissing the Bishop’s ring).

Recent high-budget, high-profile attempts by the Beeb to jump on the American titterwagon with slick, wisecracking shows like the glossy sit-coms ‘Coupling’ (‘Friends’ in Soho) and ‘Rhona’ (‘Ellen’ with a Scottish accent) haven’t worked. They’re so grindingly unfunny because young British people who aren’t repressed and are shot in soft focus with high production values in nice bars aren’t funny. They’re just very annoying.

It’s no coincidence that the Beeb is also martialling ‘The Royale Family’ along with ‘One Foot’ to fill the Nine O’Clock gap. Almost uniquely for a recent BBC sitcom a great success and extremely funny. But then, Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash are hugely talented writer-performers, and the show is about a bored working class Northern family where there’s no hope and no serious aspiration – and no sex, except when someone’s ‘trying for a baby’ and Jim’s over-enthusiastic arse-scratching. Despite being nominally contemporaneous (they watch programmes like ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’), it’s real location is the 1970s of Caroline Aherne and Cash’s childhood. You can tell because everyone watches the same TV.

More to the point, ‘The Royale Family’ is not really a sitcom – it’s an observational comic drama of details which depends on a great deal of irony. It’s Bennetesque. The close-ups of the overflowing ashtrays, the endless bacon sandwiches, the sympathy for that strange illness called vegetarianism. It all depends upon a we-know-better-now attitude. It’s the affectionate and nostalgic mild snobbery of a generation that, like Aherne, has ‘done well for itself’.

‘One Foot’, the last true and the last great British sit-com isn’t ironic. It is nostalgic, however, and more than mildly snobbish – Victor is supposed to be an ex-security guard, but he’s clearly BBC Home Counties middle class and his wife Anne talks like someone out of ‘Brief Encounter’. And, like the BBC middle class today, he has the voice of entitlement but no money, and is tormented by the uncouth C2s who have moved onto his close, with their wads of cash, drunken wives and their disrespectful kids.

Unlike Victor, who is thankfully too uptight and too set in his ways, they have sex, take drugs, play video games – and watch SKY instead of the BBC

© Mark Simpson 2007

Interviewed by Mark Simpson in Pride magazine, 2005

The man who has been described as the ‘Joni Mitchell of his generation’, lionised for his genius by such as the Scissor Sisters, Elton John, Neil Tennant and Michael Stipe, is changing onstage from jeans and shirt into a blue glitter thong, red pumps - and a hairy chest. He’s singing a song from his new album WANT TWO called ‘Old Whore’s Diet’ - “Gets me goin’ in the mornin’” - as the finale to his show in Reading, England, the first of his UK dates. Rufus Wainwright, the rockstocracy son of folk legends Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, keeps turning round and showing us his thirty-one-year-old decidedly, commendably non-circuit-party ass. A little later he turns into the Wicked Witch of the West from THE WIZARD OF OZ, before ‘melting’.

Rufus may or may not be referencing British Music Hall, but he’s definitely channelling Monty Python and Judy Garland. He may or may not now be teetering on the edge of global domination after years of critical praise and modest sales, but he’s clearly teetering on some kind of edge. Bless ‘im.

M: WANT ONE had you dressed as a knight in armour, apparently dead. Your new album WANT TWO has you dragged up as a kooky, drowned Ophelia figure. This is horribly Freudian, but it occurs to me that you have now enacted the deaths of both your parents - your distant, armoured father, and your ethereal, spiritual mother.

R: [laughs I haven’t heard THAT before! But I’m willing to go there. I’m going to see Bella Freud tomorrow, so I’ll ask her! I’ve had a real yin and yang existence: my mother’s very bohemian and Irish Catholic; my father is quite rigid and a disciplinarian and logical. Both of those forces have been necessary for my survival. I’ve had to learn to accept my parents for who they are, taking what you need, and not blaming them for it.

M: And, besides, you have your own gay daddy now, don’t you?

R: Yeah, I’ve got several actually, Elton John, Neil Tennant, Michael Stipe..

M: It could be argued that you’ve found another kind of daddy now in the ‘higher power’ of AA, now that you’ve kicked alcohol and crystal meth.

R: I don’t like to talk about whether I’m in that or not. Once I went to rehab, that was where it ended. My drug using and alcohol became a very private issue. Just because if I say, ‘Oh, I don’t drink’, then people see you drinking. What I will say is that I was spiritually bankrupt. And I needed God, really, in some form.

M: Were you looking for discipline?

R: It was just like surrender really. The thing about show business is that you spend so much time being in such control you think you can really rule the world. And that’s maddening - because you can’t! I wish you could. At some point you have to admit that there is something greater than myself.

M: I understand that Quentin was your fairy godmother.

R: I was thirteen when I was introduced to Quentin. Was that specific Summer when I came out to myself about my sexuality. I had a lot of sex that Summer but I definitely do believe there’s something called statutory rape. I was just too young to be in that world, but I wanted to go there so I went there! And both of my parents, understandably, just really kinda freaked out and didn’t know what to do, so my father called up Penny Arcade. She was a friend of the family and had been involved with the Warhol Factory and all those drag queens and was now Quentin’s babysitter so she had a lot
of experience of handling gays! My mother and father aren’t particularly homophobic, but my mother was not happy and my father just didn’t do anything really. He didn’t want to talk about it at all.

M: Would you perhaps have preferred a passionately negative response to one of apparent indifference?

R: I got what I got - and that’s what I have to work with. [laughs. I think he handled it in the only way he knew how to. Sending me to hang out with Penny and Quentin was a pretty good option. I think I fared pretty well.

M: Did Quentin offer you any advice?

R: Gee, I don’t think he every really acknowledged me, to tell you the truth! I was in the same room with him many times. I noticed that the way he operated was that there was the audience and there were the servants. And I chose to be an audience member. But then, he deserved servants!

M: Your work seems to own that melancholy that contemporary gays have disowned. I have a theory that your music is what’s playing in the heads of circuit party boys when they’re coming down. But they don’t want anyone to know.

R: [laughs Right, right! I would say, that it’s definitely not the sound in their heads when they’re going out! I have had a difficult time with the gay press in the US. It seems to be coming around now. I don’t think that they have a choice but to acknowledge me. They’ve tried their damnedest not to in the past.

M: Well, you’re a movie star now, you did that rather wonderful cameo as the strung-out lounge singer in THE AVIATOR.

R: Yeah! They’ve got to notice me now! I think it’s due to this limited aspect of gay life that is worshipped and publicised - one of FUN!, y’know, style, SEX!, nice physiques, and all that, which you know I’m prone to as well, I’m prone to the same fucking disease, the obsession with the middle of the body, and so forth, but I have always tried to illustrate the other side of the rainbow and be the Sunday morning music, the alone time. It’s very difficult to get that across to certain gay people. I remember a long time ago doing my first show in London. It was a real cross section of fans, young women, middle aged women, my father’s fans, gay people - gay people were the first ones to leave. Most people stayed to the end, but the gay people had somewhere better to go, something way better to do.

M: Today’s gay culture seems to be in denial of the ‘alcoholic homosexuals’ you sing about in ‘Hometown Waltz’ on the new album - The Judy Garland factor. Someone who I understand was a friend of the family..

R: It’s true! She made my grandfather’s school sandwiches! Look, given the amount of kind of treachery tragedy that the gay male community has gone through for the last 2000 years, not to mention that the worst of it has been in the last 25yrs with AIDS, there is no kind of bouncing back fast from this. Homosexuality right now is really enemy No1 whether it’s Islam, or Catholicism, or even Judaism in my opinion, look at the Kabala. I don’t think you should live your life under constant awareness of oppression, but I think that you have to accept a certain amount of sorrow, and realise that
in a certain way it’s how we’ve survived.

M: You’ve suggested before that gay men take drugs because they’re oppressed. Is that really true? Don’t they just take them because they like them?

R: Let’s not underestimate the power of chemistry. It’s a very potent combination: gays and drugs! I strongly believe in that romantic idea that in primordial time gay people were shamans. I think we’re spiritually destined to have to dig a little deeper. And that is a role, a tougher role. Some people just don’t’ want to go there. Which is understandable.

M: You dedicated your performance of ‘Gay Messiah’ tonight to the Pope. I take it you didn’t go to see him lying in State?

R: Oh, no. I’m here, protesting in Reading.

M: Is there any religious background to your family? Your music is very Catholic.

R: My mother is kind of a latent catholic, she doesn’t really go to church, but she has Catholic ways. So, yeah, I was brought up in a very Catholic environment. But I’m actually not baptised. In an odd way she tried to send me to church, but I could never take the sacraments or do confession. That was an interesting road to take.

M: If you’d been born in an earlier age would you have been a priest?

R: I think I would have been a priest. For sure. I’ve often thought that. And I mean a priest who has sex.

M: There are quite a few of those.

R: [laughs Yeah, but with men. With other priests.

M: Not with the altar boys.

R: Well, maybe with the altar teenagers!

M: If you were made Pope what would your first Papal decree be?

R: I’d ban the folk mass and bring back everything in Latin so we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.

 

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006
 

 

‘Shamed TV entertainer’ – as he was re-Christened by the British press – Michael Barrymore’s new autobiography ‘Awight Now: Setting the Record Straight’ has just been published by Simon & Schuster.

I’ve yet to see a copy, but the title and the blurb, the publicity, the large publisher behind it and the reports of a C4 series later this year suggest that Barrymore’s remarkable fight-back from being depicted as the most reviled figure in British light-entertainment history, if not British public life, and exiled to the penal colony of New Zealand, continues. It was dramatically kick-started earlier this year by his surprise appearance on Celebrity Big Brother and, even more surprisingly, not only somehow surviving right to the end but being voted the most popular actual celeb in the house. This in the teeth of a vicious hate campaign against him in the press.

It was a rather reckless move - it could easily have ended very differently, especially given his erratic behaviour - but perhaps it was entirely of a piece with our times that the victim of a (press) media show-trial should have volunteered to appear in another (TV) media show-trial as a way of rehabilitating himself. Particularly a man who had once been the nation’s favourite TV entertainer.

Almost everyone loves a winner, it seems. Especially The Sun, which didn’t spare him anything when he was in the House, making endless ‘jokes’ about ’swimming pools’ and stirring up ‘outrage’, but then performed an impressively shameless volte face after his victory. The week after the series ended they finally printed the facts of the case instead of the fantasies, and presented Barrymore as a man wrongly blamed by the press for Lubbock’s death and injuries – cleverly stealing a march on its rivals, who were still peddling the tired old story of Barrymore the anal-rapist-murderer, or, sorry, ‘morally responsible’ anal-rapist-murderer.

All this was of course presented as a ‘scoop’ and the result of The Sun’s own ‘special investigation’ but, as was pointed out by at least one media commentator, much of what they ‘revealed’ as ‘new evidence’ was to be found in a three-year-old Independent On Sunday article by yours truly (posted below) – which I had based on the fiendishly clever strategem of simply reading the transcripts of the public inquest into Lubbock’s death. The same inquest at which all the major newspapers - including The Sun - had staff reporters.

I predicted at the end of the piece that this scandal could turn out to be Barrymore’s last and biggest hit show and that the British public would never be able to forgive him or themselves for the crimes he committed in their minds, rather than real life. CBB seems to have proved me wrong about the first part and Barrymore seems to be doing his best to prove me wrong about the second.

Tears of a Clown

A young man drowns in the pool of television’s highest-paid entertainer. The star is branded a killer. But, says Mark Simpson, the case against the ‘OJ of Essex’ doesn’t add up. Now, as fresh evidence emerges, Michael Barrymore talks about that tragic night, his demons and why the facts weren’t allowed to get in the way of a good story
(Independent on Sunday, uncut version, 02/03/2003)

“Follow the brown signs,” Michael Barrymore’s PA tells me when giving directions over the phone for the Essex leg of my car journey to the infamous “House of Horror” of the former Mr Saturday Night. “The ones pointing to Paradise Wildlife Park,” he adds, without a hint of irony in his voice.

The 50-year-old comedian’s Roydon home may not be an official tourist attraction, but since the body of 31-year-old Stuart Lubbock was discovered in his swimming pool in the early hours of 31 March 2001, it has become, like its owner, the ‘butt’ of countless off-colour locker-room jokes. Many of these focus on the serious sexual injuries the young man was said to have suffered.

But most of the Barrymore “jokes” didn’t come from the changing-room. They were supplied by the Fourth Estate. Most memorably, Private Eye ran a front-page picture of Barrymore being asked: “What killed Stuart Lubbock?” His balloon reply: “Buggered if I know!” And also the front page of the Sunday Mirror (15 September 2002), two days after the inquest into Lubbock’s death delivered an open verdict and the press declared open season on Barrymore, featured a picture of Barrymore and the huge, hilariously serious headline: “YOU ARE A KILLER!”

Jokes are irresistible ideas, as seductive as they are preposterous. Laughter, after all, is a very physical response to something we are rejecting and accepting at the same time; a reflex located somewhere between orgasming and vomiting. Over the past few months, this preposterous idea of Barrymore, the television funnyman, as a kind of murdering anal rapist has proved irresistible to the British media. It’s been having hysterics. Retching, raving, shuddering hysterics.

Barrymore, however, isn’t laughing. “I’m not letting that one go. At all,” he says of the Sunday Mirror’s “Killer” verdict. “It’s being dealt with. Action is being taken,” he insists. Written off only a few months ago, Barrymore seems to be regaining the initiative. In recent weeks the perjury investigation against him, prompted by his ex-wife Cheryl’s allegations, has been dropped and Essex police have reopened their inquiry into Lubbock’s injuries because of fresh claims that they occurred after he was declared dead.

According to Barrymore, the Sunday Mirror headline was a form of revenge. “It only came out because they didn’t get their way,” he says. Apparently, the paper rang the day the inquest finished asking if Claire Wicks [Lubbock’s ex-girlfriend could visit Barrymore’s house with her two children by Lubbock as they “wanted to see where their Daddy died”.

“Not a problem, we said. Would be very happy to have Claire and the kids here for the day. But, of course, they wanted photographers and journalists to come with her so we asked, is this Claire’s idea? And they had to admit it wasn’t. So we said no. Two days later: ‘You Are a Killer!’” says Barrymore.

Possibly only Iraq or OJ Simpson’s house have been photographed from the air more than Barrymore’s home. He is, after all, by decree of the popular press, the Sodom Hussein of Roydon, the OJ of Essex. The bungalow is not as large as it looks from above through a telephoto lens, but it’s certainly large enough, as are the vast, shiny leather sofas we are sitting on. The “death pool”, as the News of the World dubbed it, clearly visible through the French windows, also looks smaller at ground level but it is also, alas, big enough to drown in.

“I’m actually quite quiet,” says Barrymore, talking about how people expect him to be the hooting extrovert they see on telly. There does appear to be a low-energy shyness to him. He’s sitting diagonally across from me, initially with his arms and legs crossed and his body quarter-turned away. But then, I am, after all, a journalist.

“This is not a trial,” the coroner had declared at the start of the Lubbock inquest. The inquest, however, was turned into a media show trial of epic proportions, and set the climate for others that were to follow, such as that of John Leslie and Matthew Kelly. As with all show trials, Barrymore was guilty until proven innocent and then still guilty anyway - or “morally responsible”, if you’re a broadsheet reader.

I suggest that there has been an almost playground spitefulness in some of the press coverage. “Yeah,” he says, now looking at me directly, “but what have I actually ever done to them? In the playground, or anywhere? What have I done to them?” His gaze doesn’t waver. “Say they succeed in finishing me off, what good does that do them? They haven’t got you any more to exploit, have they? What do they gain from that? Tell me?”

IF YOU’RE GOING to drown in a celebrity swimming pool, choose carefully. Not all celebrity swimming pools are equal. In March last year Daniel Williams a 23-year-old fireman drowned in another male celebrity’s pool. But while Lubbock, a butcher by trade, became a household name, Williams became yesterday’s news.

As with the events surrounding Lubbock’s death, there was a party, Williams amused himself in the pool at the London house, while the other guests drifted indoors. No one saw him drown. He was found submerged dead, or dying, in the early hours of the morning. The toxicologist’s report showed that Williams had consumed the same quantities of alcohol (nine pints), ecstasy (four or five tablets) and cocaine (a line or two) as Lubbock. Likewise, there was no forensic or witness evidence of any struggle.

Unlike the Lubbock case, the press didn’t find Williams’s death mysterious or even particularly interesting. They accepted the results of the police inquiry (which, as with Lubbock, ultimately produced no charges) and the Home Office pathologist’s conclusion was that he had died by drowning. They didn’t splash each day’s (carefully selected) inquest “highlights” across their front pages, printing speculation as scientific fact, or constantly interview Williams’s family and friends. Nor did they lynch his host’s career from the lamppost of public indignation. Instead they treated the death for what it was, a terrible accident.

Why? What was the difference? Was it in part that Williams drowned, accidentally, in a swimming pool belonging to a married film celebrity - the actor Art Malik - instead of a very famously gay and off-the-rails television celebrity called Michael Barrymore?

There was however another ‘fundamental’ difference: the injuries to Lubbock’s anus, described as serious and significant by the pathologists, “fearful”, “nightmarish” and “horrific” by the press. These injuries, combined with his hosts very public homosexuality, presented an irresistible idea – arousing all those column inches and making the inquest one of the most heavily and excitedly reported - and distorted - of recent times.

For example, the papers, tabloid and broadsheet, told us repeatedly how Lubbock was found floating face down in Barrymore’s pool. Untrue. All the witness statements agree that Lubbock was found at the bottom of the pool face up. Apparently, the image of a “handsome”, “heterosexual father-of-two” floating dead, face down, and arse up - literally drowning in passivity – in the pool of Britain’s most famous ‘arse-bandit’ was just too seductive for the press to resist.

But this relatively minor kind of kinky distortion was just the beginning. For example, in the space of his first few sentences, (13 September 2002) the Sun’s resident sodomy expert Richard Littlejohn, forced all the important facts to surrender themselves to the impatient heat of his passion: “The inquest is finally underway into the death of the man found floating face down [false in Michael Barrymore’s swimming pool. Stuart Lubbock was pumped full of drink and drugs [false: in fact, he helped himself to Barrymore’s drinks and toxicologist reports showed he was a long-term user of cocaine and/or ecstasy, and had been rogered senseless [fantasy. Pathologists agree he suffered a serious sexual assault [false.”

In fact, the pathologists were divided as to how the injuries were caused. It was not even established that the injuries were caused by sexual activity. Indeed, DNA testing showed that Lubbock had not had sexual contact in the hours before he died.

Since it seems to have been such an important part of the coverage, I ask Barrymore if he fancied Lubbock when he met him in the Millennium, the nightclub in Harlow that the star attended with his then-boyfriend Jonathan Kenney before returning home in a taxi with Lubbock and two other party guests, Kylie and Jonathan Merritt, who he had met that evening (Kenney following later). “I spoke to that many people at the Millennium that night. I wouldn’t have picked Stuart out. It was reported that I couldn’t even remember his name. Well, I didn’t know his name. He jumped in the taxi with Kylie and Jonathan and I thought he was with them. When he was here he did whatever he was doing, like most of the other guests; I just said here’s the drink and here’s the music. Most of the night I was with James Futers and Simon Shaw, who I knew from the village. If I was trying to chat Stuart up, I think I would’ve spent a bit more time with him. Besides, my boyfriend at the time, Jonathan, was here.” Barrymore adds, “It just doesn’t tally up.”

Barrymore is convinced that the papers built the story the way they wanted to build it. ‘That’s why most of them didn’t mention that there were three girls at the party, because it got in the way of the “Gay Sex Orgy” headlines.’

How many of the guests were actually gay? “None. Just me and my boyfriend,” says Barrymore.

So not much of a gay orgy then. “Nope. Not much of an orgy of any kind. No sexual activity took place whatsoever,” insists Barrymore.

I ask him about the only indisputably culpable thing he did that evening: his departure from his house after Lubbock’s body was retrieved from the pool - and catch a glimpse of the evasiveness that irritates many. “Yeah, well, it was wrong,” he says quickly, “but I’ve answered that. I didn’t run away… immediately - I ran into the house and got Jonathan who knows about resuscitation, while the lads {James Futers and Simon Shaw} were getting Stuart out of the pool. I wouldn’t have know what to do… there were four people working on him… it wasn’t my idea to leave the house. James and Simon said, ‘Come away, there’s nothing you can do here….’

“I’ve admitted it was a stupid thing to do,�? he continues, sounding irritated, perhaps with himself as much as the question, “but no one knows how they’re gonna react… it was just a nightmare. I rang my PA to tell him where I was going so that I could be contacted. Why would I do that if I was running away?” Barrymore’s call to his PA, which was reported in some papers as a call to his PR (“something I’ve never had�?) was taken as further evidence either of his guilt or his celebrity arrogance: “I’m a celebrity, get me out of this!” Of course, it was precisely his celebrity status which meant that his fears about what the press would do were well founded.

Likewise his reported silence at the inquest was seen as callous and suspicious. In fact, he answered all the questions put to him - save those relating to illegal drug taking in his house. Barrymore’s exercise of his legal right to refuse to incriminate himself was seen as doubly incriminating. Much was made in the press of the allegation that, during the party, Barrymore tried to rub cocaine on Lubbock’s gums; however, leaving aside the fact that Lubbock was a long-term user of drugs, the small amount of cocaine - a stimulant - in his system was not identified at the inquest as a likely factor in his death.

It’s worth mentioning that perhaps that the most unbelievable thing about that night for some was the fact that television’s highest-paid celebrity would attend a nightclub in Harlow, and invite working-class strangers back to his house for a ‘chill-out’ party simply because he might enjoy their company, and that he might not want to treat a butcher like a piece of meat. “It wasn’t unusual for me to have people back for drinks. Wasn’t a regular thing. Just not unusual. It’s partly my Irish background and it’s partly that I don’t like being alone,” explains Barrymore. Much of the broadsheets’ hostility to Barrymore, their almost universal failure to criticise the tabloid gang-bang of his reputation, and indeed their complicity in it, was down to class: Barrymore was a vulgar man who entertained vulgar people in a vulgar way. Worst of all, he was paid vulgar amounts of money for doing so. (A senior editor on a liberal broadsheet, explaining shortly after the inquest why no, he definitely would not be running an article anatomising the press’ distortions, told me in no uncertain terms that Barrymore was ‘low life’.)

Born Kiernan Michael Parker into a working class family in Bermondsey in 1952, this Norman Wisdom fan and former Redcoat’s adopted stage moniker (‘there were too many Parker’s on Equity’s books’) became a household name with his madcap comedy performances on the TV game show Strike it Lucky in 1986. Barrymore brought the physical, audience involvement comedy that he had perfected on the workingmen’s club circuit to the relatively up-tight and staid world of prime-time commercial TV with great success. By 1992 Barrymore was one of TV’s highest paid entertainers, and a prime target for tabloid gossip. After many run-ins with the press over his drinking, drug abuse and sex life, this married working class hero finally came out as gay in 1995 – the first family entertainer to do so. ‘I thought I was finished,’ he says. In fact, more awards and hit TV shows followed, and he remained ‘Mr Saturday Night’ - even after Lubbock’s death in his swimming pool in 2001. It wasn’t until the universally damning coverage of last September’s inquest that his career finally ran aground.

However, the real inquest into Lubbock’s death, rather than the virtual one reported in the media, largely went well for Barrymore. It emerged there was no evidence that he, or his guests, were responsible - even indirectly - for Lubbock’s death or injuries. However, the summing up of the coroner, Caroline Beasley-Murray, seemed to assume, despite evidence to the contrary, that Lubbock’s injuries must have occurred at Barrymore’s house, and appeared to criticise the partygoers and the host for not being able to explain them. This and the open verdict – itself not uncommon in inquests – provided the press with enough rope with which to hang Barrymore again and again.

“If his injuries occurred here,” asks Barrymore, “why was there no blood on his boxer shorts? Why is there no blood in the house? Or in the pool?”

It’s a vital question. Lubbock’s anal injuries, lacerations as well as bruising and dilation, would have involved a substantial amount of bleeding and even small bloodstains are notoriously difficult to eradicate. Moreover, since the inquest, Stuart Nairn, one of the A&E nurses who worked without success to resuscitate Lubbock for over two-hours, has provided a detailed sworn statement to Barrymore’s solicitor which has sparked the new investigation by Essex police and thrown the coroner’s presumption about where the injuries took place into even more doubt.

Nairn’s assigned task for the entire two-hours was repeatedly taking Lubbock’s temperature rectally with a small, thin, thermal probe. Nairn performed this operation 16 times, pulling apart Lubbock’s buttocks and opening his sphincter each time. His statement makes clear that he saw no evidence of the injuries described at the coroner’s inquiry. Indeed he noticed no dilation or significant bruising (according to the pathologists’ report, even if Nairn’s small temperature probe were actually quite large, he would not have needed to open Lubbock’s sphincter muscle at all). “I am sure that I would have noticed this,” says Nairn. “Moreover, I would have reported this to the doctor.” He also mentions that aside from a small smear of blood on the probe towards the latter stages, which was not unusual given the number of insertions, there was no evidence of bleeding. (Perhaps this level of information is distasteful to you – perhaps, like Yasmin Alibai-Brown of the Independent, you are keen to assert it makes you ‘want to throw up’; but Lubbock’s anus has been made an object of such fascination and symbolic importance not by Barrymore but by the Great British Press and its readership.)

Nairn was due to appear as a witness at the inquest but the police say they lost contact with him. A similar statement by Nairn was read out at the inquest, but it was dismissed by Professor Crane, one of the pathologists, who claimed that someone in A&E would not have had time to notice such injuries, and would have been preoccupied with other things anyway. Nairn’s second statement makes it clear that he would have noticed. In fact, he probably spent more time observing Lubbock’s anus than any pathologist.

If, as now seems likely, the injuries to Lubbock occurred after he was finally pronounced dead at Harlow General Hospital and Nairn’s treatment ended, then they must have occurred in the seven hours between this time and the body’s examination by the Home Office pathologist, who was the first person to record them. Essex police are unable to confirm that the body was guarded during this time. Instead they can only say that this matter, and the issue of who had access to the body during this time, is “part of the current investigation�?.

Does Barrymore have any idea how the injuries occurred? “Well, I have my ideas about it, but it would be wrong for me to speculate,” he declares. “That’s for the police to investigate. I’m not about to point fingers at anyone.”

If those injuries did occur after Lubbock was pronounced dead, it seems possible it was Barrymore’s special kind of fame, which was to blame. At the inquest, Emma Bowen, another former girlfriend of Lubbock’s, who was at the Millennium in Harlow that night, stated that when clubbers spotted Barrymore with his partner Jonathan, they “were shouting out: ‘That’s Barrymore’s boyfriend!’ ‘Up your bum!’ and other such comments.” Perhaps “for a laugh”, someone couldn’t resist sticking something up the bum of the dead man who had been found in “that Michael Barrymore’s” swimming pool?

The tabloids were given more ammunition by the scorn of Barrymore’s ex-wife and former manager, Cheryl, and her book Catch a Falling Star about her marriage. It was published immediately after the Lubbock inquest and was luridly serialised in the Daily Mail with front-page headlines including “The Night Michael Tried To Kill Me”. Her claim that Barrymore lied to the inquest when he said he couldn’t swim, sparked a perjury investigation, which has now been dropped.

Barrymore’s views on his ex-wife’s interventions are clear. “She jumped in on the drowning affair, demanding, ‘I wanna know what happened!’ when it was nothing to do with her whatsoever, but she started to get involved as if she cared about Stuart and the Lubbocks and that, and yet has never been to see them once, yet made all these statements. What for? To sell a book. And then in the middle of it turns round and tries to get me done - possibly seven years - for perjury, saying that I lied in court about not being able to swim! The police went to speak to the list of friends of hers that she said would corroborate her statement and not one of them did. They just said, ‘I’ve only seen him stand in the shallow end.’ That’s why they dropped it. They didn’t even get as far as questioning me.”

What about her allegations that he was violent towards her in their final years together? “It got heated sometimes,” he admits, “but I’ve never ever punched her. I pushed her away. If she comes flying at me then I’m not going to stand there and get scratched to bits. I’d push her away. The way she dramatises it, well, it just makes you sick,” he says.

Barrymore complains now that she wanted to control him, but I put it to him that perhaps the things that drove him away from Cheryl were the things which attracted him in the first place. “Yeah, well I was quite happy to hand over the control, and most of our 18 years together were very happy. But the control got completely out of control. I couldn’t make a move without her say so, even if I went out fishing it would have to be with somebody who worked for us. Somebody who could then give her a run down of everything that happened. That’s one of my weaknesses, I allowed it to happen. It suited me.”

How easy has it been to live without it? “Well, I’ve got freedom from that. It was the thing that was killing me. Or one of the things that was. I just couldn’t live with it any longer.”

But freedom doesn’t appear to have cured Barrymore of his addictions. “Being in a relationship or being free, drinking and drug addiction is entirely different - it’s the disease which takes control.�? Barrymore says he attends AA meetings almost every night. “It’s all or nothing. One drink’s too much, 1,000 isn’t enough. You have to keep it in check on a daily basis. I’ve had 21 months of sobriety now, have got involved more [with AA and become secretary.”

One of his dogs, a Jack Russell, jumps on my lap. “JD! Get down!�? says Barrymore. His dogs are called JD and Sprite, his former favourite drink. Since the police inquiry was reopened, Barrymore has had a few offers of work. It was only in November of last year that Granada finally released him from his exclusive contract, having put him on ice for over a year. “‘We’re not using you,’�? they said. “‘We’re not paying you. And you can’t work for anyone else.’”

Given the headlines, can you blame them? “I’m not responsible for what the press has done - but the network made me responsible. So that means that they base their business on, on…”

What’s popular?

“Even if it’s incorrect?”

If Barrymore is feigning innocence of the ways of the world, he’s convincing. “That’s a bit sad isn’t it? They were the ones who suggested in caring tones that I go to rehab. I haven’t had one phone call from them since. Haven’t phoned me to ask if I’m well, or have kept off the drink. They haven’t phoned once to ask my office or me, ‘Is this or that true?’”

Maybe they’re not interested. Maybe they’re only interested in what sells.

“If I don’t sell, then why is Strike It Lucky on twice a day on Challenge TV? If I can’t be on family time, as they said in one of their letters, why was I on GMTV the other day at eight in the morning? I was on The Salon the other day on C4.”

It’s slightly pathetic that Barrymore, once the unchallenged king of prime-time, should be invoking re-runs on cable television, or an appearance on an exploitative reality television show, as proof of his popularity. But then, this is a man who, after the inquest, was publicly branded by TV executives as “finished”. Questions were asked about him in Parliament. His autobiography, commissioned long before Lubbock’s death (though portrayed in the press as a ‘cash in’ on it) was dropped by BBC Books. Daily Mail columnist Lynda Lee Potter declared that she would “rather stick pins in her eyes than watch Barrymore on TV again”.

Barrymore thinks the television bosses should go with him on his trips to Tesco. They can take him four hours because so many people greet him with smiles and laughs and handshakes, asking when he’s going to be on the telly again, and then call up their mums, dads and kids on their mobiles and ask him to bark “Awoight!” down the phone. “They feel that they can approach me,” he says. “With someone else famous they might say, ‘Oh look there’s so and so over there,’ with me they come up and shake my hand. It’s what my act is based on. If you tried to fake or contrive that you’d be sussed out straight away.”

I suggest though that these are the very people that buy the papers which have attacked him so viciously. He doesn’t disagree. ‘It’s gossip, isn’t it? The tabloids save you chatting over the garden wall.’ I press the point further: couldn’t their casualness towards him be because, like the press, they consider him their property? “They consider me part of the family,” he corrects. “Because of the way I work on telly, which is about approachability and vulnerability. And because,” he adds, resignedly, “yeah, because much of my private life has been acted out in the tabloids.”

How much of Barrymore, or for that matter of Michael Parker (his real name perhaps offering an anonymity which he might be forgiven for missing now), is left after all of this? Has his latest and darkest experience of the celebrity cycle taken the edge off his appetite for ‘success’?

He comes up with a paradoxical and possibly self-deluding reply. “You ask yourself, do I need all this? But thing is, what they’ve done this time in being relentless is they’ve allowed me to get well. Because what used to happen before was I’d go straight into rehab then come back out, go straight into a studio and be ill again. But this time that hasn’t happened, so I’ve had a chance to get well properly this time.”

Oddly, for all the accusations of self-pity, Barrymore hasn’t played his main victim card. He has not cried “homophobia”. Several times in the course of this interview I’ve given him the opportunity to mention it, but he hasn’t taken the bait. Perhaps it’s down to his wish to reclaim his stake as a mainstream entertainer; perhaps it’s down to pride. Whatever, it’s clear that the way the press played the Lubbock story was in large part, a delayed but apparently highly satisfying backlash for his coming out several years ago (a move which, if nothing else, deprived the gentlemen of the press of one of their favourite sports: bullying the closetted gay celeb).

Barrymore, whose act and popularity depended on crossing boundaries of taste, class and genre (and sexuality), grabbing and manhandling members of the audience, male and female, was cast as the predatory gay rapist of the public’s nightmares, and his deceased guest as an awful example of what happens when a homosexual manages to get between a straight-man’s back and the wall. This, against the evidence of the case and also, ironically, despite the fact that penetrative sex, according to Barrymore, ‘is not my bag’. As Dr Freud pointed out, we like to laugh at what we fear, and by the same token we also fear what we laugh at. One irresistible idea can lead to another. In the same way that laughter provides a socially acceptable way for people to vent their anxieties, the Barrymore-Lubbock affair provided an acceptable route for the media and the public to ‘out’ pent-up fears about male homosexuality, that ‘gay-tolerant’ contemporary Britain otherwise might feel slightly embarrassed about.

He may not quite realise it, he may not want to realise it, but Barrymore, the nation’s most popular, most ‘loved’ funny man, has just been starring in his latest, biggest, if possibly final, hit show. The currently ongoing police investigation at Harlow General Hospital may or may not show conclusively that the injuries to Lubbock’s anus occurred after he arrived there. But whatever the outcome, it will most likely prove difficult for Barrymore to rehabilitate himself – after all, his ‘crimes’ were committed in the minds of the great British public, and they will be unlikely to fully forgive themselves such thoughts, or him for provoking them.

The writing was on the toilet wall as long ago as 1995. After he had outed himself, the front page of the new, ‘gay-tolerant’ Sun joked, “WE’RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU MICHAEL – BUT NOT TOO CLOSE!’ In fact, they were there all along – and much too close. Just waiting for Barrymore to drop the ball.

Independent on Sunday, 02/03/2003

Postscript 3/10/2006

• A month after this piece appeared Essex Police concluded their (reluctant) investigation into whether the injuries to Stuart Lubbock occurred at Harlow General Hospital or not by saying: “ We are as satisfied as we can be that the injuries did not occur at Princess Alexandra Hospital.’
• The Home Office Pathologist, Michael Heath, the man who first discovered the anal injuries resigned this year after it was established that he found foul play in at least two other cases when there was none, leading to innocent people being charged for crimes which had not occurred.
• It seems possible now, according to The Sun report, that, contrary to what was stated at the time of the inquest the injuries to Lubbock’s anus may not have been quite so ’serious’ after all and might have been caused by the rectal temperature probe used repeatedly by Stuart Nairn.
• Whilst Barrymore was in the BB house Stuart Lubbock’s father, Terry, Barrymore’s nemesis appeared almost daily in the papers denouncing him and tried to obtain permission to bring a Private Prosecution against Barrymore relating to the death of his son (it was eventually thrown out of court for lack of evidence). Shortly after Barrymore left the house in triumph Terry finally agreed to meet him and told him ‘I don’t blame you, Michael’ (according to The Sun’s front page headline). Though he later retracted this. And then un-retracted it. Now he has reportedly penned a book with well-known homophobe Anthony Bennett called ‘Not Awight: Getting Away With Murder’ due for publication later this month and is picketing Barrymore’s book-signings calling him a ‘liar’ and condemning him for ‘making money off the back of Stuart’s death, how low can you go?’.
• Shortly after Barrymore’s CBB victory and The Sun’s volte face, Essex Police announced they were ‘routinely’ re-opening the investigation into Lubbock’s death. Both Barrymore and Terry Lubbock have welcomed this, though for apparently different reasons.
• Essex Police investigated but declined to charge one of the witnesses from the fateful party for perjury, following her retraction of her sworn statement that Barrymore had rubbed cocaine on Stuart Lubbock’s gums that night. She made this retraction when faced with a lie-detector test organised by Barrymore’s new ally – and long-term abusive co-dependent in this celebrity marriage from Hell – The Sun.

© Mark Simpson 2006

In honour of Robbie Williams’ current World Tour - and also of the recent ‘Wank Week’ - here’s my 2003 Salon.com loving tribute to him:

Why doesn’t America love Robbie Williams? Especially when he love-hates himself so much?

by Mark Simpson

(Originally appeared on Salon.com, April 2003)

It’s tough growing up British. Not just for all the obvious Austin Powers-esque reasons, such as our medieval dentistry, endemic mold problems and epidemic dandruff, but for something much more existential. The British are great and enthusiastic believers in Original Sin. In Britain, would you Adam and Eve it, we devoutly accept that we are all Fallen, all doomed before we are born, that no child however lovely and chuckly and pink-skinned is born innocent.

Of course, since we liberated the monasteries, Coalition-style, back in Henry VIII’s time, and became nominally Protestant for tax reasons, we don’t call it Original Sin anymore. We call it the class system (though in New Labor Britain you will be reported to the police if you mention it). And we don’t talk about sinners any more, just wankers. You see, whichever class you happen to be born into in Britain, it will be the wrong one. Granted, some are wronger than others, but even the most privileged classes are the wrong ones — to everyone else. Moreover, whatever class you are born into, your destiny, your happiness, your salvation, is not your property and certainly not your right. If you try to escape your British birthright by becoming something you’re not, then you will be Found Out, and everyone will point and laugh and call you a wanker.

Probably the biggest wanker in Britain today is cheeky chappie popster Robbie Williams, or simply “Robbie,” as we like to call him here in that affectionate, familiar way we handle tossers (another word for wanker; we have as many as the Inuits have for snow — and “Robbie” is fast becoming another). Robbie is the biggest onanist in Britain, mostly because he’s one of the biggest success stories. Since going solo in 1996 after leaving Brit boy-band Take That, Robbie, who was expected at best to become a kids’ TV presenter, has had 15 solo U.K. top-10 singles, 13 Brit Awards — more than anyone else in the award’s history — and has sold 15 million albums worldwide. Robbie is British pop today. He is also the bragging, self-publicizing, self-flagellating, self-loathing symbol of the lifestyle every young person in Britain is supposed to aspire to and despise at the same time. As he puts it with characteristic modesty on his new album, he’s “the one who put the Brit in celebrity.”

Unfortunately for the British pop industry as a whole, Robbie is also a symbol of its pathetic failure, in the post-Spice Girls era, to export much more than Kylie’s bottom and Coldplay’s runny noses across the Atlantic. EMI, the ailing British record giant famously swindled by the Sex Pistols (and probably looking back fondly now to those halcyon days), recently paid a sweaty-palmed sum reported to be as high as $120 million for Williams’ next six albums — at approximately the same time as the company was laying off 1,200 employees. A sum that could only be earned out by Yank-side success. Oh dear. Best string out those final installments on that advance: Robbie’s new album, “Escapology,” debuted in mid-April at number 43 on the Billboard charts, selling an anemic 21,000 copies in its first week. (By the end of the month, Amazon was already selling the album at a “Super Saver” price of $9.98.). For a record industry wallowing in deep water after its worst year in memory, this was nothing short of a Titanic disaster. Robbie could be the cheeky iceberg that finally sinks the British record business. Now that’s quite a wanker.

One reason why Robbie is such a popular wanker over here is that he was born chuckly and lovely and pink-skinned in Stoke-on-Trent, an ugly post-industrial nowhere place in the Midlands, a part of the country that everyone in the north and south of Britain can safely look down on, a place that might be described as the arse-end of the U.K. except that this would suggest (a) that there was a point or at least some kind of function to Stoke and (b) that you might if you were that way inclined, or just very drunk and confused, have some fun there.

Then there’s the fact that in Take That Robbie used to wear leather chaps and slap his arse end while singing covers of disco hits such as “Relight My Fire” for the amusement of early teenage girls, 40-year-old gay men and Lulu. There are no more humble origins than that.

As for his performance style today, I could say that he thinks he’s David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust but just ends up being Norman Wisdom (a 1950s British equivalent of Jerry Lewis, though more pathetic). Or, if I wanted to be crueler, I could say that his stage performance and chatter are like Tourette’s syndrome with pantomime movements. Or simply that he’s a selfish, self-pitying, self-seeking fool who has no opinions on anything other than himself — and they’re all terrible. But if I did, I’d merely be repeating what Robbie has already said about himself on national TV, beating me, the British tabloids, and Man in Pub to the punch. Robbie has told us many times that he’s “bored” with Robbie Williams and wants to “kill him off.” But Robbie’s eagerness to beat himself up for his public, although it is appreciated, is just another reason why he’s a — you guessed it — wanker.

You can probably understand, then, why our Robbie is so keen to make it in America. Why, in fact, he already spends most of his time and his European royalties in America, relaxing American-style in his big American house in L.A., sunbathing by his big American pool pulling fuck-off/come-to-bed faces at the British tabloid helicopters ceaselessly hovering over him. Why the U.S. and L.A. are mentioned — nay, incanted — often in a charming faux-American drawl, on several tracks on his new, American-targeted album, and several times in one song in the case of “Hot Fudge”: “I’m moving to L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.! L.A.!” — a place where success really can save you and where no one is ever Found Out, just found overdosed and badly decomposed at the bottom of their pool.

All this might also help you understand why his album is called “Escapology,” why the artwork for the album features disturbing-absurd pictures of our Robbie trapped at the bottom of giant tubes of water or suspended upside down hundreds of feet in the air, and why the lyrics talk rather a lot about self-loathing, especially when they’re bragging and crowing about his fame.

While Robbie clearly needs the U.S., it’s by no means clear why the U.S. needs Robbie. In the U.K. Robbie is a the king of karaoke pop, when the charts full of karaoke pop acts, but in his adopted home of L.A. every schmuck waiting their turn in a karaoke bar on a Tuesday evening is a better singer. In Britain his lack of great talent is seen as democratic and reassuring; in America it’s probably just uninspiring. It’s a shame, because as Robbie tells us on the AOR power-ballad “Feel,” probably the best track on this album, “There’s a hole in my soul/ You can see it in my face/ It’s a real big place.” Well, we know America’s a real big place, and since Britain is apparently no longer touching the sides, maybe the Big Country will oblige and fill Robbie’s aching hole?

The problem for us Brits is that as Anglican lapsed Catholics we still believe we’re all Fallen, but we no longer believe that we can be redeemed. Oh yes, now we have to pay lip service to the American religion of success — thanks very much for that, by the way — but we don’t really believe in it. We may, like much of the rest of the world, be crap-Americans now, but we’re agnostic crap-Americans; we still have hundreds of years of feudalism to negotiate. It’s why our tabloids, which exist solely to torment our celebrities, frequently with flattery, sell millions every day. It’s why our boy Robbie is so “ironic,” why he goes on and on and on about His Fame Hell.

For all his transatlantic suckface on this album, I suspect that tabloid-fodder Robbie, who is very crap-American (and also Catholic: “I’ve slept with girls on the game/ I’ve got my Catholic shame”), doesn’t really believe America can redeem him, either. He’s paying lip service, too, though it’s not the kind of lip service you might enjoy. (Note: “On the game” is British slang for being a prostitute.)

One of the reasons “Feel” is the best track here is that Robbie doesn’t deliberately sabotage the professional songwriting of his (now former) musical collaborator Guy Chambers as he does in practically all the other tracks, penning glib, flip lyrics which would be inoffensive and meaningless in a pop-Muzak kind of way except that they are also teeth-gnashingly, eye-gougingly crass. Robbie’s lyrics are hyperactive doggerel that won’t lie down, doing anything and everything to draw attention to themselves, including licking their balls and chewing off their own head. “Come Undone,” a big James-ish anthemic number, is utterly undone by the vain, self-obsessing lyrics full of mirrors and razor blades: “Such a saint but such a whore/ So self aware, so full of shit …/ Do another interview/ Sing a bunch of lies/ Tell about celebrities that I despise …/ I am scum.”

This perverted narcissism would be almost admirable in such a crowd-pleasing entertainer if it weren’t for the fact that Robbie is apparently singing to his drugs and rape counselor mom (yes, really) again: “Pray that when I’m coming down you’ll be asleep …/ I am scum/ Love, your son.” Robbie gives matriarchy a bad name. Another track, “Nan’s Song,” is dedicated to his deceased grandmother. This is the first song he’s penned entirely himself and he has said, “It’s only appropriate that my first song should be about someone I love.” In fact, the song is all about how much his Nan loved him.

Once again, the problem with selling this shtick in the U.S. is that few people apart from some aging gay men in San Francisco have heard of Robbie Williams. So how are Americans expected to relate to his problems with his “massive” fame, which is all his songs are about these days? Robbie is Eminem without the hip-hop, without the wit, and without, finally, the (global) success. Robbie tried and failed to crack the American market a few years ago with a compilation album called “The Ego Has Landed” — which once again appears to be putting the apologetic cart before the career horse, “wittily” referencing a mediocre 1960s British film, “The Eagle Has Landed,” that his target teen audience has never heard of. As one American critic’s daughter said when Robbie Williams’ face popped up on MTV: “Daddy, why is that guy being so goofy?”

In truth, “Escapology” is a kind of 21st century Brit Band Aid album, a “Do They Know It’s Christmas in Stoke-on-Trent?” where the needy continent is Robbie’s self-esteem (and EMI’s bank balance), but where Robbie is impersonating almost every Brit artist who has made it to drive-time radio in the U.S. In “Something Beautiful” he’s Marty Pellow of Wet, Wet, Wet, pre-heroin; in “Monsoon” he’s post-mustache, pre-AIDS Freddie Mercury (even the tune owes more than a little to “Radio Ga Ga”); “Love Somebody” is pre-wig Elton; “Revolution” is post-Wham, pre-men’s-room George Michael (Robbie’s first solo single was a cover version of “Freedom”). “Sexed Up” could be Oasis, post-talent. There’s some Rod Stewart in here as well, but I can’t be bothered to find out where. For good measure, and to show how versatile and deserving of a green card he is, Robbie also throws in some Steve Tyler, some retro-soul and some college radio rawk.

No, I lied. “Escapology” isn’t Band Aid. It’s an entire season of “American Idol,” where Robbie is the only contestant and also plays the part of Simon Cowell. Somehow, though, he manages not to win.

Robbie may be a wanker, and he may be doomed, but he’s not an original sinner. Not only is he a karaoke pop performer (his last album, “Swing When You’re Winning,” was a bunch of covers of Frank Sinatra songs), he’s a karaoke human being. After leaving Take That he thought he was Oliver Reed for a while. Then he thought he was Liam Gallagher. Dressed as Frank Sinatra on the cover of “Swing When You’re Winning” (which includes a duet with Nicole Kidman on “Somethin’ Stupid”), or as James Bond in the video for “Millennium,” he looks like an unconvincing if alarmingly hirsute drag king. By the same token, persistent rumors that secretly he’s “really gay” miss the point that Robbie isn’t really anything.

Where Sinatra was radio, Robbie is a radio. Robbie’s voice, although versatile, is strangely constricted, nasal and distant — as if he has a cheap transistor radio stuck somewhere up his nose. Frankie had a voice that, if radio didn’t exist, would have willed it into existence. Robbie has a voice that is merely an echo of broadcasts that dissipated into the ether long before he was born.

On “Escapology,” Robbie desperately wants us to believe that he has problems. Perhaps because he thinks this will make him likable. Or interesting. Or human. And perhaps because it will make people forgive or forget the fact that he’s a wanker. Actually, Robbie’s problem is much more serious than his wankerdom, more serious even than being British. Robbie’s problem is that he’s a ghost. A ghost that has no story of his own, no life to commemorate or haunt, and no point — other than drawing attention to himself and the pantomime of life that he has become. We’re supposed to listen to the clanking chains because they’re “really professionally put together” and harken to the moaning because it’s “so ironic.”

Mind you, Robbie’s insubstantiality may be the most modern, most sympathetic thing about him. As he sings on “Feel”:

Come hold my hand
I wanna contact the living
Not sure I understand
The role I’ve been given

Is there an exorcist in the house?

Copyright Mark Simpson 2006

Mark Simpson interviews Mark E Smith for Arena Hommes Plus, Summer 2006

‘’avin’ been around the world I reckon we’re very lucky,’ says Mark E Smith, pop genius and (usually) loveable curmudgeon in a moment of uncharacteristic optimism.  ‘They don’t realise what they’ve got, English people.’  And what have we got?  ‘Well,’ he says, eyeing me and sensing a trap, ‘you don’t know until it’s gone do you, Mark!’

Mark E Smith, is 49 years old this year.  It’s part of the mythology of the man who put ‘front’ in ‘frontman’, the lead-ranter for the longest-serving pre-post-punk band The Fall, that he looks much older than his years.  Maybe it’s because those heady days when pop and art and literature and, well, everything worth caring about, seemed to intersect, and everything seemed possible, especially after a line of dodgy speed and a can of Special Brew, now seem much further away than they actually are.  Due to an odd trick of the 21st Century light, the late Seventies, when The Fall was founded after Mark E Smith and most of the English working class was laid off at Salford Docks, is now much, much further away than, say, the early Sixties. 

Or maybe it’s just because he’s generally reckoned to have consumed enough sulphate and Special Brew to give ICI indigestion.  ‘A tooth fell out this morning, at 2am,’ he tells me with a grin, ‘I thought that’s fookin’ typical!  Just before I’m due to meet the press!’, he orders a pint of lager and a whiskey and lights up, eyes narrowing in the smoke. 

It’s clear that Mr Smith has had, ahem, a few late nights, and isn’t going to make the cover of Mens Health anytime soon but to me he looks younger than his years.  No, honestly.  Maybe it’s a trick of the iconic light on this Sunday afternoon in this postmodern Manchester hotel, or maybe it’s because he doesn’t care about his looks in the way you’re required by EC edict these days, but the man behind 25 studio albums and 24 live albums looks as scampish and defiant as ever.  A slightly shop-worn Kes with a merciless Mancunian motor-mouth. 

How does he feel being an icon?  ‘It don’t bother me,’ he says with a shrug.  ‘Though, being a Smith I prefer not to be noticed and to just get on with it.’

Smith’s style is anything but anonymous.  Lyrically, he’s a cross between William Burroughs, Philip Larkin and Ena Sharples.  Above all else, he is distinctively, eccentrically English.  In the true sense of the word.  That’s to say Northern. 

‘London’s sealing itself off with its prices and its attitudes,’ he moans.  ‘London is fookin’ surreal.  It’s like: you can’t come in here. And what is London, that collection of villages, for? Fook all.  Compare it to cities like Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester, great cities which changed the world.  I don’t wanna get too northern here…’

Please do….

‘After 11 o’clock you still can’t get a pint!’  He grins.  ‘But we can’t say this Mark coz this is going in a London-based magazine!’ 

Albert Camus, who penned the novel Smith named his band after, described a rebel as  ‘A man who says ‘no’.  Smith has turned ‘no’ literally into an art-form – always placing himself apart from the latest trend, the latest bleating herd-instinct; it’s made him a lot poorer and a lot less celebrated; but it has made him a hero. One of the last.

He isn’t impressed by the current renaissance of Northern English pop, even those bands which owe rather a lot to The Fall.  ‘I think that the Kaiser Chiefs and Artic Monkeys should open a chain of chip shops in North Yorkshire’, he says, only half joking.  ‘I think the East Germans had it right, actually.  Every group used to have to have a permit.  Until they came up with anything culturally relevant, like a classical composition.  I think they should bring them in here.  I should start a musical Stasi.  If you can’t play in fookin time, then fook off back to the factory.’

What have the English got?  Mark E Smith, that’s what. 

Let’s hope this is one thing they appreciate before it’s gone. 

 

© Mark Simpson 2006