Jil Sander once noted that those who wear her clothes are not fashionable but modern. It’s a word too many have too little time for, but a word that we were once keen to be defined by. If we needed to be defined at all.

For, as we are aware, and as Virginia Woolf knew, so much so that she made it the theme of an essay - words fail us. ‘Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words,’ Woolf wrote, ‘they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old.’ Modern was not the ideal description for the Jil Sander ethos that remains with the company long after she loosened her grip and left in 2013, any more than the word ‘minimalist’. (‘My eyes respond to a smart, modern style in dressing. I am alert to anything out of tune: the wrong colour, shape or proportion.’) Here is another word frequently applied to Sander as much as that trio of designers (…

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The author Patricia Highsmith was often scathing about adaptations of her work because of the liberties directors took with storylines, while some actors were praised for staying faithful to her characters.

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

Ripley was responsible for nine deaths throughout five novels - ‘Ripley Underground’, ‘The Boy Who Followed Ripley’ among them. His notoriety shifted from the page and screen to the real world, and an official mental disorder diagnosed as Ripley Syndrome. 'The psychopath is an average man living more clearly than the world permits him,' Highsmith wrote. In Ripley she invented a cunning, sociopathic anti-hero new to literature and cinema. The American film critic Roger Ebert noted: 'It's insidious, the way Highsmith seduces us into identifying with him and sharing his selfishness; Ripley believes that getting his own way is worth whatever price anyone else might have to pay. We all have a little of that in us.’

‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ was reputedly the easiest book Patricia Highsmith ever wrote. It was as though he were writing it for her, and she returned the compliment by signing her letters with his name. Critics, friends and enemies even, concluded that Ripley was compelling because he was based on someone the crime writer had intimate knowledge of: herself. ‘I learned to love with a grievous and murderous hatred early on’, Highsmith bragged. A hatred born of what? The knowledge that her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine? Society’s attitude to her homosexuality? Did she, like Ripley, simply harbour a desire for the social stature of his first victim Dickie Greenleaf, the rich socialite?

Her initial impression of Ripley conjures up Nick Carraway’s first glimpse of Gatsby. From a balcony in Positano on the Amalfi Coast - the fictional Mongibello of the novel - Highsmith spotted an awkward, pensive young man heading to the beach. Why was he alone? What was on his mind? Years later he’d evolved into the character who murders Greenleaf and takes on his identity and wealth, while travelling through Europe; dining on marrons and giblet gravy; carrying an alligator skin Gucci wallet; wearing the kind of grain-leather shoes that were ‘advertised in Punch’.

The decline of the friendship between Ripley and Greenleaf begins when the latter finds his friend dressed in his clothes, and informs him Dickie’s girlfriend Marge Sherwood suspects Tom is ‘queer’. She later confides by letter: ‘All right, he may not be queer. He’s just nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life.’ Accustomed to such accusations, Ripley had concocted a response that became tiresome to old acquaintances: ‘I can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I’m thinking of giving them both up.’ When the two men are alone at sea in San Remo, Tom looks at Dickie and thinks he could kiss him or kill him. He opts for the latter.

Since the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ there have been successive attempts to bring the books to the screen. Now, finally, there is Andrew Scott cast in the forthcoming series produced by Showtime in the States. Last year, the actor led the cast in an Old Vic production of Noel Coward’s ‘Present Laughter’. The performance was shown in cinemas throughout the country, introduced on screen by a slight, American man none of us in the auditorium knew. Why was he alone? What was on his mind? He was the husband of the diver Tom Daley and he was explaining how several female love interests were played by men because this is what dear Noel would have wanted, had homosexuality been legal in 1939. Cinema audiences have become accustomed to seeing history re-written to accommodate a cosmetic diversity that is largely, if not purely fiction, the most crushingly ludicrous example being Ryan Murphy’s ‘Hollywood’. There are other instances too numerous to mention, but as a taster, here’s two: the Bollywood dance sequence in 1950s Pinner from ‘Rocketman’. Churchill practically high-fiving a black fella on the Bakerloo Line in ’The Darkest Hour’.

To second-guess the intention of an author by switching the race, sex or sexuality of characters is likely to make adaptations and revivals even more farcical. There’s the possibility we’ll now see Ripley portrayed along the lines of the gay serial killer in Ryan Murphy’s ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’. This, however, is not in keeping with the intention of a writer as protective of her characters as Patricia Highsmith. 'I don't think Ripley is gay,’ she told an interviewer in 1988. 'He appreciates good looks in other men, that's true...I'm not saying he's very strong in the sex department. But he makes it in bed with his wife.’ Ripley remained the solitary, pensive man she spotted on the beach, a ’queer’ outsider too abnormal to have a sex life and experience intimacy. A fact that becomes evident in an existential panic following the confrontation between Tom and Dick back there in Mongibello. Ripley accepts that he will never truly know people, beyond brief moments of harmony and friendship that are ultimately illusory: 'For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.'

This is central to what makes him both sympathetic and familiar. Reluctantly, we root for him, even though his world is one in which evil triumphs over good. A prospect that Highsmith rejoiced in: 'I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too.’ In that first Ripley book, the narrator suggests the killer’s stories and alibis are plausible because he imagines them so intensely that he believes them. This was as true for Highsmith and her success as a storyteller as her fictional alter-ego, the talented Tom Ripley.

Alain Delon (8 November 1935 – 18 August 2024)

Originally published in The Critic in 2021.

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The future has often been a focus for David Byrne, even in his formative years when he was fronting Talking Heads.

In one particular lyric from ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ (1988) he envisages it as an idyllic Eden. He laments the passing of 7-Elevens, as flowers and cornfields have replaced shopping malls and parking lots (‘If this is paradise / I wish I had a lawnmower’). Byrne’s futurology, shared by his frequent collaborator, Brian Eno, always pushed him ahead of his contemporaries when it came to creating tomorrow’s music today. This pursuit of innovation persists now, even though Byrne is an elderly man in his seventies. Since quitting Talking Heads in 1991, Byrne has successfully, and sometimes brilliantly, put his name to dance scores, film soundtracks, musicals and books. Byrne’s most recent solo album, American Utopia, was released in 2018 and turned into a Broadway musical in 2019.

It is now five decades on from Talking Heads playing ‘Psycho Killer’ at the CBGB club in New York. And it’s nearly four decades on from Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed 1984 film of Talking Heads in concert. This month, the album of the same title inspired by Demme’s film is re-issued; and the film returns to cinemas later this autumn.

Much has changed since Stop Making Sense’s debut. The future Byrne speculated about has arrived. The world has changed – and so has David Byrne. Sadly, contemporary cultural trends have dimmed what made his work so weird and wonderful. And they’ve exacerbated his worst political tendencies.

Byrne has always made politically correct noises in relation to several US presidents over the years. He made perfunctory jibes at Reagan, Bush and Trump. And he expressed the obligatory reverence for Obama. But his political correctness is much more pronounced today. In the concert film version of American Utopia (2020), directed by Spike Lee, he nods to all the post-millennial pastimes that occupy orthodox celebrity radicals, from tackling climate change to dismantling systemic racism. He has always shared the prejudices of, and reached out to, the urban liberal upper-class and art-house crowd that have been part of his fanbase from the off.

Byrne arrived in New York in the early 1970s. He was born in Scotland, raised in Baltimore, and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute College of Art, before dropping out. He then moved to New York and formed Talking Heads with Chris Frantz on drums and Tina Weymouth on bass in 1975 (Jerry Harrison arrived later).

Byrne was the Nostradamus of the new wave, in a band that anticipated post-punk before punk. Even though Talking Heads were dressed like preppie Republicans and sang about the Protestant work ethic, Byrne moved and sounded like no other front man. He had a nervy yelp of a voice that was pitch perfect for the arch, disconnected lyrics that bounced off his lips. He seemed as uncomfortable in the modern world as he was on stage.

In recent years, as band members’ memoirs settled scores and opened old wounds, Byrne has been revealed as an egotistical figure, with an incapacity to make eye contact or acknowledge that colleagues deserved a songwriting credit. The implication was that he was on the ‘spectrum’, before we even talked about the ‘spectrum’. During an interview in 2020, Frantz said of his erstwhile bandmate: ‘His brain is wired in such a way that he doesn’t know where he ends and other people begin. He can’t imagine that anyone else would be important.’ Perhaps that is what has made him so interesting.

Talking Heads were the quintessential New York band, with Byrne an honorary New Yorker. But his relationship with Americans beyond New York has always been more ambiguous. Their homespun lives crop up often in his sometimes obtuse lyrics, full of apple pie, peanut butter, small hopes, big dreams. Coming from relatively humble origins himself, and being an immigrant, Byrne seemingly shared an affinity with and an affection for these figures. But at other times, he could seem sneering and mocking. Whatever their shortcomings, it seems their greatest crime was that they were not native New Yorkers. In ‘The Big Country’ (1978) Byrne observes these tribes and their reservations from the window of a passing plane – the farmlands, the factories, the baseball diamonds. ‘I wouldn’t live there if you paid me’, he sings.

But by and large, Byrne was busy writing like an alien, making a miracle of the mundane, as though he was the man who fell to Earth. In the film, True Stories(1986), he travels through the fictional Virgil, Texas coming upon madcap characters that might belong in a David Lynch script. The kookiness continued into the 2000s when he wrote a popular blog. Discovering IKEA in his middle years, he even described the experience with the forensic detail of an early Nicholson Baker novel. Some wondered if celebrity had taken him so far into the wealthy cocoon of the New York art-house intelligentsia that he’d lost sight of the reality of those outside it. Had this simply become his schtick, some asked?

But this kookiness had always been central to Byrne’s art. By the time Stop Making Sense appeared in the mid-1980s, the twitching limbs and jerky non-dance moves had been exaggerated and honed to become his persona. This, too, was his schtick.

Band members have said the more successful he got, the more distant he appeared. This is clear in the shift in some of the lyrical content, when he writes of sensations and feelings, like a Beckett voice without a home, a name, a future or a past. He was solitary, solipsistic even. ‘There’s a party In my mind / And I hope it never stops’, Byrne sang on ‘Fear Of Music’ in 1979. By 2004, on the solo album, Grown Backwards, he was singing, ‘I’m glad I can’t see beyond myself’. He once even sang that compassion was too time consuming.

His natural oddness went hand in hand with his obsession with the future. ‘It’ll be as easy to hook your computer up to a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries’, he predicted in a 1979 interview. In the same interview, he also said that, ‘[people will] be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches’. In 1985, on ‘In The Future’, the predictions were more hit and miss. But he was on the money with this one: ‘In the future, half of us will be “mentally ill”.’ He could have added that many of us would be on the spectrum, and some of us would simply be grifters angling for victim status.

The future trend he didn’t foresee was the desire to deny that any progress has been made on social issues. Particularly on the issue of race. How could he have known? At a time when races were divided musically, Byrne was one of those figures instrumental in creating a common ground. Talking Heads introduced African rhythms into their later records; Byrne introduced rhythms from everywhere else to his solo albums. He did write an essay in 1999 for the New York Times entitled ‘Why I hate World Music’. But in a 2006 interview, he justified the use of musical styles from around the world in the following terms: ‘I would like to think that once something moves you and you have an emotional involvement with it, and you see some relevance in it to your own life, then it’s a little bit harder, maybe, to look at the people that produced it as being just exotic others that don’t have any connection to you or relevance to you.’

It’s hard to see Byrne saying something as genuinely progressive today.

Time has passed, trends have changed, and both Byrne and Talking Heads have since been accused of cultural appropriation by hardline race hustlers. They have also nearly been subject to another trend Byrne failed to anticipate: cancellation. This was a genuine prospect when, in 2020, a promotional film made for Demme’s Stop Making Sense came to public attention and remained there. It was a skit with Byrne interviewing himself by disguising himself as various journalists, one of whom was an African American. Cue a ‘blackface’ scandal. It showed how today, past mistakes and bad choices can return to overshadow the present and bury careers. The party going on in David Byrne’s head was suddenly halted.

He apologised, atoning for his sin in the modern public square that was Twitter (and is now X): ‘It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing someone else – you’re not, or were not, the person you thought you were.’ And there’s more: ‘I’d like to think I am beyond making mistakes like this, but clearly at the time I was not. Like I say at the end of our Broadway show, American Utopia, “I need to change too”… and I believe I have changed since then.’ Former Talking Heads bandmate Frantz was not convinced: ‘It’s true that his public image has changed. But friends of mine assure me that he hasn’t. I think he probably just decided that he could catch more bees with honey.’

But there’s an argument to say that Byrne’s mea culpa wasn’t fake or a schtick, but that it was authentic. It brought out of him that figure that has reared its head throughout his career, and more regularly in recent years. This unique, innovative, talented, stylish, exceptional oddball was becoming The Weedy, Woke, White Bloke. The politically correct one.

After all, this side of him was visible during his blogging years, in the nascent days of the new century. In one post, he recounts venturing beyond his familiar furrow – between his home in Midtown Manhattan and his office in SoHo – and visiting a carnival in Brooklyn. Here Byrne, marvelling at the mundane, was joyful at finding soul-food menus chalked-up on broken wooden pallets. He recalled that he and Brian Eno were mugged at the same festival decades earlier, but argued that the strong police presence at the present festival was now down solely to racism.

Excruciating as this was, it pales beside the moment The Weedy, Woke, White Bloke pops up in Byrne’s musical, American Utopia. Here Byrne delivers his interpretation of Janelle Monáe’s ‘Hell You Talmbout’, in which the suited, barefoot cast list names of black men and women killed by police officers. Stats and facts are overlooked to accommodate a stunt that conveniently confirms the narrative of systemic white racism. ‘Say Their Name!’ he and the cast chorus, as though at a revivalist meeting, in anticipation of a response from the Broadway congregation.

If the motive was authentic, the method felt fake, schmaltzy. It belittled the experience of the families slotted into the film holding images of their dead children. It reduced a serious and complex issue to the level of a show tune with audience participation, raised black fists and white man’s overbite.

Some nights, the routine was met with silence from the stalls. On occasions, a few fans made for the exit. In one interview, Byrne dismissed these dissenters as being at odds with his usual demographic. They were out-of-towners; they weren’t native New Yorkers. They were people like those from the big country beyond the Big Apple. They have a different take on the events that followed the death of George Floyd, and the big moment of the discredited Black Lives Matter movement. They think of the burning buildings, destroyed businesses and ruined livelihoods. Not that those who enjoy the rarefied existence of wealthy New York residents like David Byrne were unaffected by the carnage and chaos. It affected New York, too. It’s just that they chose to ignore it.

Byrne now lives in Chelsea and cycles to his office in SoHo, where he works on his online magazine, Reasons To Be Cheerful. It attempts to find hopeful ways of promoting a happy, cohesive future, free from the division and alienation of the present that’s partly attributable to the technological developments Byrne highlighted all those years ago.

New York City is currently encountering its own major difficulties, similar to the days when David Byrne settled there and Talking Heads played those sets at CBGB. The crime and the homelessness are rumoured to have brought about an exodus of wealthy New Yorkers, art-house intelligentsia and orthodox celebrity radicals. Those out-of-towners, with their apple pie, peanut butter, and the hopes and concerns they share with a majority of similar Americans, must be thinking: ‘I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.’

Originally published in Spiked, September 2023.

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Pablo Picasso once said that Gabrielle 'Coco' Chanel had more sense than any woman in Europe.

Among the many astute, sometimes absurd, quotes attributed to the designer during her 87 years was the line that the legend has a harder life than the subject itself. 'May my legend gain ground,' she mused. 'I wish it a long and happy life.' Since her death in 1971, both the legend and the legacy have become a testament to longevity. Each is currently in reasonable shape despite the character of the age. Presently, the history that relates to the many is re-written to accommodate the fantasies of the few, with the past defined entirely by the crimes it committed. The triumphs that have brought about progress are overlooked, while the modish beneficiaries of these developments rail against the privileges they've inherited. Frequently they call out consumption and consumerism while being slaves to each. They pick their version of the past as easily as they choose …

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It’s hard to believe it, but the inspiration for the fictional Euphoria — the drug-crazed, fashion-conscious, sex-obsessed drama set in a high school in Los Angeles — was a tragic death that occurred in Israel.

An 18-year old was confronted by the boyfriend of a girl he was talking to in a club; he was later found murdered. This sequence of events led to the Israeli series of the same name in 2012. American actor and filmmaker Sam Levinson created the US version, which made its debut in 2019.

The delayed second series (Covid being the culprit, naturally) is now with us, with HBO teasing diehard fans with a new episode ahead of each school week. The opening episode of the new series was a taster for the excessive violence and nudity heading our way. Euphoria travels to extremes that no other TV teen saga has ever chartered. The territory is unique to Generation Z, the Tik Tok age and the 21st century.

The current series begins by going back a decade, tak…

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By the time he’d made it on to record and into the charts, Neil Tennant had lived many lives. As had many of those listeners who came on board with the debut album, Please, in 1986 and stayed interested in, if not always loyal to, the Pet Shop Boys canon.

Much of this canon features in the forthcoming Pet Shop Boys collection, Smash, which covers the duo’s career by way of 55 singles recorded between 1985 and 2020. Beginning with ‘West End Girls’, released the month PC Keith Blakelock was savagely murdered during the Broadwater Farm riots, Smash concludes with a song about a boy who won’t leave home, during the peak of the Covid pandemic. If a Pet Shop Boys line wasn’t on our lips or on our minds, it was out there somewhere as the world changed – as our world changed when love, loss and death punctuated the odd party, club night or wake. After friends have gone the way of family members and all flesh, our faculties will desert us, but th…

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Something changed the day Virgil Abloh’s former mentor Kanye West was dismissed as an unhinged, uppity black man by the rap aristocracy, race hustlers and rich white liberals.

Those that control the narrative when it reaches blacks, whites, 'racism', the slavery motif, and the MSM's nemesis and muse President Trump. It started with a West tweet: I like the way Candace Owens thinks. Hours earlier the 28-year-old conservative and You Tube provocateur challenged Black Lives Matter standard-bearers protesting her presence on a campus panel. She told them they were not slaves but overly privileged Americans. She wants to smash stereotypes; create a ‘blaxit’ within the black community; an exodus; a movement of the people from the Democratic Party ‘plantation’. (Word is, it’s happening). Her viewpoint chimes with that of the black American economist Walter Williams: ‘For 50 years, the well-meaning leftist agenda has been able to do to blacks what Jim Crow an…

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Just as Prufrock’s life was measured out in coffee spoons, and Eno’s life in shirts, some of us can say the same of Sparks songs. As Edgar Wright maintains, for those of a certain sensibility, these songs “invaded” their lives. Morrissey championed Sparks in a letter to the music press as an adolescent teen.

A decade ago I interviewed Boy George, and he made the point that Sparks have even influenced those who are unaware of the original source of the influence. Born in the same era, the two of us found ourselves citing examples, listing the songs that had invaded our lives. For me, a key lyric is in the 1974 single “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” from Propaganda. Here’s why: I first met the brothers in London in the early-1990s, between their lengthy and unsuccessful attempts to bring their musical version of the Manga Mai The Psychic Girl to the screen, under the aegis of Tim Burton, and their beginning work on the underrated album Gratuit…

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There’s a difference at McDonald’s these days. The fast food chain has gone through a metamorphosis, an overhaul of the brand that has made it less like McDonald’s by making it “Just like McDonald’s”.

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

I was staying at the Grand Ferdinand on the Ringstrasse, a secret service building that morphed into a hotel a few years ago. It was lit by Lobmeyr chandeliers. Dining tables were laid with Wiener Silber Manufactur cutlery. The menu offered “Emperor’s soup” and “fritters à la Metternich”. I slept in a bunk in a dorm equally as lavish, despite costing a paltry £28 per night. The catch being you had to sleep with strangers.

My fellow travellers were young, Japanese. Two men. One woman. I assumed their indifference to me was generational rather than cultural: a bald, middle-aged man wearing Wäscheflott pyjamas and watching “Giri/Haji” on his iPhone, as they headed out at midnight. We rose early and were reluctant to pay 32 Euros for the hotel breakfast. Someone mentioned McDonald’s. Finally, a common bond that broke through generational and cultural barriers. We were speaking a universal language in a city that famously housed an Esperanto museum. McDonald’s.

I’d not been inside McDonald’s for years. I harboured fond memories of my first time. The cheeseburger with the gherkin, something the British tucked into at Christmas; a milkshake as dense as quicksand, and rumoured to consist of lard, which made it oddly comforting and homely.

The young trio became animated on arrival, enthusing about the rice burger bun, glazed with soy sauce, launched at McDonald’s back home in Japan weeks before. Individually they listed the varieties of this burger: rice teriyaki, rice bacon lettuce, rice fried chicken. “These are on the ‘‘Night Menu’”, they chorused. This summoned the Tokyo of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. That twilight world of 24-hour cafes, love hotels, and McDonald’s outlets that according to Warhol introduced beauty to that city. Home to these midnight children.

The fast food chain is an oasis, to a stranger alone in a foreign city

Some years ago I read David Byrne’s account of his first trip to IKEA. He compared it to entering the world of video games. I had a similar experience returning to McDonald’s. The rebrand has seen the famed gold and red theme heightened to become as vivid as anything in Disney or American pop art (“We are a Golden brand accented with Red accents”). The photography focuses on those enjoying the food rather than the food itself. It could have been any one of those cities that Warhol mentioned, but for the familiar McDonald’s phrase in an unfamiliar tongue on the packaging and merchandise: Ich liebe es. I’m lovin’ it.

There are approaching 40,000 McDonald’s restaurants throughout the world, with about 1,300 in the UK. The last county in England without the fast food franchise succumbed last year when, despite some opposition, Oakham in Rutland gave the green light. The fast food chain is an oasis still, to a stranger alone in a foreign city, where they become part of a communal ritual among tastes, scents and imagery that’s immediately familiar.

There were young office workers collecting their breakfasts. Night workers now relieved of their shift. Students. Pensioners. The restaurant remained the great leveller I remembered, from the days when Princess Diana accompanied her sons to McDonalds on Kensington High Street — although when it first came to Britain in 1974, the company chose Woolwich as the ideal locale for its first franchise.

The origins of McDonalds have been documented at length. Perhaps most comprehensively in the 2016 film The Founder, with Michael Keaton as the figure synonymous with its success, Ray Kroc. The title is a misnomer, and knowingly so. The founders were two California-based brothers, who ran the business at the start of the 1950s. Kroc supplied them with milkshake machines and spotted the potential for a franchise and, ultimately, a global empire.

Stories of McDonald’s superfluity spread like folk tales, reaching those of us landlocked in an austere age where the magical phrase “all you can eat” was an anomaly. As I say, McDonald’s was exotic. Mind you, to those of us growing up off the Old Kent Road, so was Woolwich.

Throughout the years I exhausted the changing menu. As actor James Franco has pointed out, “when I needed McDonald’s, it was there for me.” I was not one of the many millions that worked at the franchises, or for the brand’s suppliers, but I witnessed and participated in its evolution from the early arrival of the Big Mac, through the debut of McNuggets and Happy Meals in the middle of the 1980s. When my taste for the meat on the menu waned, I moved on to the singular fish dish that began as the “McMariner”, and matured into the cheese-covered Alaskan pollock that is “Filet-O-Fish”.

When my interest in McDonald’s waned, I can’t say it was due to charges levelled by alternative comedians, celebrity chefs, environmentalists, anti-capitalists, animal rights activists or anarchists. I simply discovered restaurant experiences in which waiters took your order, and other people often paid.

The class-based snobbery that persists around McDonald’s was evident from the beginning. I recall in the 1990s an editor comparing its customer base to a Pulp lyric of the time: “We can’t help it, we’re so thick we can’t think / Can’t think of anything but shit, sleep and drink.” A resident of Hampstead, he supported the liberal agitators opposed to McDonald’s moving into the high street. The franchise had finally arrived in Beijing and Moscow but not NW3. Not-In-My-Name. The well-heeled locals won the battle, but lost the war. A subtle McDonald’s emerged; the junk-food loving masses were herded behind a black door and kept below stairs.

McDonald’s is becoming something it has never been — fashionable

Yet still the snobbery persists. It’s at its most vehement on Twitter of course, where a battle commences whenever McDonalds’s news is trending. Piers Morgan retweeted to his seven million followers a photograph of himself seated at a McDonald’s tucking into a Big Mac at breakfast time. It had been taken by a member of the public, to shame—to “out”—the TV presenter, as this was a crime as great as voting Leave or Tory. “Mate, you can’t shame me,” wrote Morgan. “I’m proud to be here!”

Whatever the preconceptions about those that patronise McDonald’s, there’s been a shift in the demographic. One that continues to evolve. For me, this became apparent in Austria, where I found myself returning to the McCafe and its established elder for breakfast, dinner and afternoon tea.

A younger, student-led demographic has returned. Clearly the meatless burgers first promoted in Germany and Israel were directed at this market, as is the vegan P.L.T. (plant, lettuce tomato) given its dry run in Canada (perhaps Animal Rebellion’s demand for the company to be fully plant-based by 2025 is not as fantastic as it sounds). Moreover, McDonald’s is becoming something it has never truly been—fashionable.

By which I don’t mean current, or popular, but actually courted by couture and elevated to the catwalk. I believe it was Moschino that started the trend, re-designing the brand’s logos for handbags. Vetements launched its Spring/Summer 2020 collection by way of a fashion show staged at the McDonalds branch on the Champs-Élysées. Alexander Wang collaborated with McDonalds on luxury items designed to hold Happy Meals.

Although the fast food chain will never court the animal rights activist, like many a major corporate entity it’s become part of an unholy alliance with those championing other causes. These two tribes have something in common: contemporary capitalism will overlook many crimes and misdemeanours in pursuit of profit; the seasoned protestor will overlook similar to prove a point. Chances are McDonald’s will never win over the Labour party; it was banned from the conference in 2016. But you get the impression that McDonald’s and Black Lives Matter have each other’s back.

In the wake of the death of George Floyd, the colour black replaced the company’s signature red on its social media sites. Floyd along with other black men and women that died at the hands of the US police were namechecked by the company in its stance against “systemic oppression and violence”. It informed us that each of these characters is among McDonald’s customers. They Were One Of Us. Somewhere, a red-haired, white-faced clown was taking the knee. Like I say there’s a difference at McDonald’s, but it remains the great leveller.

I’m seated at a franchise somewhere in the UK writing this. It could be anywhere in the world. Woolwich. Wuhan. New York. London. Paris. Munich. The diversity of the staff and the customers is far greater than on the marches or at the dinner parties of the middle and media classes that rail against it.

All human life is here: a British princess, a TV anchorman, Japanese tourists and a martyred felon said to have threatened a woman with a gun while burgling her home. Ich liebe es.

This article first appeared in The Critic.

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There's a line in Harold Brodkey's short story 'The State of Grace' that sums up the outlook of his marginalised protagonist, and all adolescent outsiders that have ambitions to rise above their tormentors and triumph: 'If dreams came true, then I would have my childhood in one form or another, one day.' It's a line that seems applicable to Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

These two were cast as queer outsiders in infancy; each of them recalling they didn't want to be girls, while suggesting it might have been the better option as they failed to measure up to the standard masculinity of their fathers and their peers. This is just one experience that these southern-born writers shared, as relayed in the new documentary Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation.

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'Everyone has the potential to become an artist,’ Duggie Fields once said. He was by no means the first contemporary artist to make the claim, and with the coming of a new century it felt like old news anyway.

By the end of the 1990s anyone with sufficient funds and a steady hand had the potential to be a post-pop artist, following the launch of the Apple iMac. Those of us who never picked up a paintbrush could use the mouse and the minimal palette of shapes and colours supplied by the software to copy objects or artworks. (Battenberg, Colonel Sanders, and Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ in my case.) These were the fledgling days of the internet when websites created by design agencies were virtual works of art. They were impossible to navigate — but it didn’t matter. What was evident was this platform didn’t merely have the potential to make everyone an artist but a film maker and a musician too, such was the scope of the brave new worl…

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In October Alan Yentob and Camila Batmanghelidjh appeared in court at the beginning of a nine-week hearing following the collapse of her charity Kids Company, of which he was chairman.

Six years earlier the pair were seated together in a setting suited to the excesses that led the charity to insolvency. It was a black-tie dinner at a Mayfair hotel where select guests paid tribute to a figure as synonymous with the BBC as Eric Gill’s Ariel and Carole the Test Card girl: Yentob.

The event was organised by the Media Society and overseen by its president, Peter York. One speaker joked of the millions Nigella Lawson had made since Yentob put her on screen. Another claimed the Daily Mail harangued Yentob because he continued to produce radical films (he’d recently interviewed Bette Midler). Some referred wryly to Judaism; many namechecked Oxbridge. Yentob, they said, the ultimate BBC insider, was once an outsider, being the one intern that…

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When the largest, most expensive home in Los Angeles is finally completed at the end of this year, after five years in the making, one of its distinctive features will be an absence of books.

There's a beauty salon, a cinema, a bowling alley, a nightclub, a casino, a lounge with walls constructed from tanks of jellyfish, a glass-walled library - yet, no books. Nobody really reads books, according to Nile Niami, the film producer and real estate developer behind the project (he anticipates a sale price of $500 million dollars). And so the copious rows of bookshelves will be filled with blank books: white covers, white spines, empty white sheets of paper. As though content, literature, history, have been erased from the pages. And, stylistically, this works. It’s in keeping with the monochromatic theme favoured by the architect commissioned by Niami. A Paul McClean home is composed of marble, concrete, steel and glass; retrac…

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When Lana Del Rey first hinted at a foray into poetry via cryptic Instagram posts my mind went to a line from her last album Norman Fucking Rockwell: ‘Your poetry’s bad and you blame the news’.

One year on she’s about to release an audio book of 14 poems set to music with the printed volume to follow in September: Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. The title conjures up Fitzgerald’s short story Bernice Bobs Her Hair and more obscurely the ethereal Eighties pop of Virginia Astley, love songs to the English countryside. California is Del Rey’s playground; Los Angeles is her town. The setting has been the backdrop throughout five successful albums and is central to the opening poem ‘LA Who Am I To Love You?’

The actor James Franco has said her music reminds him of everything he loves about that city: ‘I am sucked into a long gallery of Los Angeles cult figurines, and cult people, up all night like vampires and biker…

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Yohji Yamamoto crossed my mind for the first time in some time at the elegant dorm of the Grand Ferdinand hotel in Vienna.

There were four of us in neighbouring beds encased in glossy teak, with starched white sheets, and a room lit by a starry Lobmeyr chandelier. Breakfast was 32 euros. A bed for the night was £28. We decamped each morning to the nearby McCafe, where my paltry McMuseli paled beside their hearty breakfast meal. My fellow travellers were as silent and unsocial here as back at the dorm. These three room mates were young. In their twenties. Japanese. Two men and one woman. What they had in common apart from their nationality was a particular wardrobe. Not the Westwood kit evident on the young Japanese scurrying through the high end shops on the Herrengasse, nor the heritage brands on Japanese elders, their raised iPhones capturing everything and nothing: McDonalds golden arches, the Ferris wheel from The Third Man, Goethe immortalised in stone on the Ring…

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Paris, 2019. Despite embracing the spectacle when displaying his wares, Karl Lagerfeld decided on the opposite when it came to his finale, his last goodbye.

Not for him a send off at the Église de la Madeleine, where the ceremonies of the glamorous dead are staged. Coco Chanel for one, in 1971. Madame Pompidou planned something spectacular until the designer’s iffy war time allegiances came to light. Nevertheless here was Coco Chanel sealed in a casket shrouded by camellias, gardenias - her signature flower - orchids and azaleas. The pews filled with those that modelled her clothes. 'And you and your funeral,’ Lagerfeld was asked months before his death this year, aged 85, 'do you see it more in Sidi Bou Said like Azzedine Alaia, or at the Madeleine?’ Like David Bowie he opted for pure cremation, or what has been catchily termed in Britain 'direct disposal'. No ceremony. No rituals. Ashes to ashes.

Lagerfeld requested that his ashes be dispersed with tho…

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‘In time people will tell one another, “You really should know about these two guys, who lived in the 20th century in Paris”.’

This was Pierre Bergé in his later years, reflecting on his prolonged partnership with Yves Saint Laurent. Was he referring to their story as erstwhile lovers?

Was he alluding to the global fashion brand the couple created, driven by Bergé’s crusading zeal and business acumen? Arguably, it was also a reference to how Paris, Europe, and society changed during their lives, and the active role figures like themselves played in bringing about that change. The couple’s presence was felt beyond the confines of their fashion empire. Bergé was notable as a political campaigner and a patron of the arts. The couple’s art collection was famously auctioned for almost €400 million in 2009. The most expensive private collection ever to go under the hammer, according to Christie’s. The money was donated to AIDS research, and the charitable foundation now responsible for the two museums dedicated to the work of Yves Saint Laurent that opened this month. A move the couple had planned for over half a century. Almost as long as they were together.

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Writing about the trade of his Italian father in the 1989 essay ‘The Brave Tailors of Maida’, Gay Talese notes: ‘A tailor’s eye must follow a seam precisely, but his pattern of thought is free to veer off in different directions, to delve into his life, to ponder his past, to lament lost opportunities, to create dramas, imagine slights, brood, exaggerate - in simple terms, the man, when sewing, has too much time to think’.

Talese attributes his sartorial elegance and meticulous approach to writing to his father. 'I essentially write like a tailor,’ he once said. 'My idea as a writer is to make the stitching last. The writing, the shape of the story, the seriousness with which it is approached, the sense of craftsmanship.’ I first heard of Gay Talese in 1981 when I was a shallow manchild grudgingly serving an apprentice as a London tailor. He featured in a magazine story following the publication of 'Thy Neighbour’s Wife’. Talese spent the…

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Barcelona, 2015. When Jonathan Anderson won both male and female designer of the year at the British Fashion Awards last Autumn I was in Barcelona writing about Margot House, a hotel inspired by the Wes Anderson creation Margot Tanenbaum.

The building looks onto the Spanish heritage brand Loewe where Jonathan Anderson has been creative director since 2013. The day after the announcement a buoyant Loewe employee steered me through its hushed and hallowed rooms, past the iconic luggage from its archive - the Amazona, the Flamenco - to the Anderson accessory that propelled the luxury store into the 21st century: the Puzzle bag. Anderson has hinted that when it comes to modernising an established brand you begin by erasing the familiar. At Loewe he did this by changing the HQ, the logo and the coat hangers. The Barcelona outlet is part of the city’s famed ‘block of discord’, where Gaudi’s Casa Batlló is as stately as a gallion alongside the equally iconic Casa Lleó-Morera on the Passeig de Gràcia. The thoroughfare is the equivalent of a Madison Avenue or Avenue Montaigne and exactly where you’d expect to find a flagship store dedicated to the eponymous J.W. Anderson label that garnered these awards. Instead the designer has opted for a 250 sq ft shop leased by the neighbouring Ace hotel on Shoreditch High Street in London’s east end.

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Long before the Chateau Marmont became Lana Del Rey’s muse and Sofia Coppola immortalised its faux gothic grandeur in Somewhere, there was Eve Babitz.

The hotel on Sunset Boulevard is as central to the writings on her beloved Los Angeles as fires, earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds. I stumbled on her book Eve’s Hollywood the day before the 1994 earthquake. An Englishman abroad I looked beyond Hollywood to Heaven and begged to be buried in England as the city shook. A Babitz essay had a different take: ‘If God wants me to believe in him, I’ll do it, but only for the Pacific Ocean and sunsets. Earthquakes are only earthquakes. If God wants me to believe in him he’ll have to do better than that. I’ll wait under a door frame’. I waited under a door frame because ‘there is nothing to do but wait’. Outside, apartment blocks buckled and sidewalks crumbled. In the distance fortress Chateau Marmont, the first building in LA to be earthquake-proof, remained aloof. It’s foundations and secrets in tact. When the author A.M. Homes opted to write a book on the hotel in 2001, she made a beeline for Eve Babitz. ‘It was built for you know, peccadilloes’, Babitz informed her. 'If you want to commit suicide, if you want to commit adultery, go to the Chateau. It doesn’t mind brilliant talent, or romance, or lunacy’. It was from here that she witnessed Los Angeles ablaze during the Watts riots of the 1960s. It was here her former lover Jim Morrison jumped from a fourth floor window into the pool below. It was here a line-up of former lovers - Harrison Ford, Steve Martin among them - gathered for an auction to raise money for hospital bills weeks after Babitz herself was set ablaze.

Neither violent riots nor violent weather caused the fire that Eve Babitz survived in 1997 - but cigar ash falling on her skirt while driving her car. She sustained third-degree burns from her waist to her calves. 'Death, to me, has always been the last word in people having fun without you’, she writes in Eve's Hollywood. First published in 1974, it’s finally been re-issued with the original Annie Leibowitz cover of the young Eve Babitz: a still life of party girl in bra and feather boa.Whereas the novels - Sex and Rage, LA Woman, Black Swan - are thinly-disguised fictional outtakes from her life, this is a catalogue of perfectly-formed autobiographical vignettes and anecdotes from the 1950s onwards. She has described it as a confessional novel but it’s closer to memoir, and her journalism at its very best. Growing up in Los Angeles the child of well-heeled, well-connected parents - Igor Stravinsky was her godfather - she believed that besides death and moving elsewhere, there was one further danger of being a teenager in Hollywood: having your schoolmate get discovered. One of her peers gained notoriety within the Manson family. Meanwhile Babitz achieved something close to it in 1963, aged 20, when she was photographed naked playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. She had chutzpah as well as connections. She wrote to Joseph Heller: ‘I am a stacked eighteen-year old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer’. But it was Joan Didion that kick-started her writing career, when she passed up a freelance job at Rolling Stone and recommended Babitz instead.

In Eve's Hollywood among the pages of dedications to people, places and stimulants - Desbutol, Ritilin, Obertrol - she acknowledges Joan Didion ‘For having to be who I’m not’. Both writers became chroniclers of Los Angeles. In 2004 Didion documented her frontier family’s history in Where I Was From (‘if we could still see California as it was, how many of us could now afford to see it?’) having been one of it’s most fervent, yet eloquent, detractors since settling in New York. For her it had become a cultural wasteland, a burning city where the winds revealed how close it was to the edge. For Eve Babitz - a ‘daughter of the wasteland’ and the antithesis of Didion’s pioneer girl - it remained home, and a place she celebrated despite its faults (the San Andreas among them). A view at odds with notorious critics of Hollywood such as Nathanael West - the subject of an essay in Eve’s Hollywood - who reputedly wrote The Day of The Locust (1939) at the Chateau Marmont. The LA-based journalist, Steffie Nelson, who has written at length on Babitz says: 'No matter what cruel realities she might face, a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy, feels its magnetic pull as much as that Midwestern hopeful who heads to the coast’.

Lana Del Ray was one such hopeful. She was recently described as the spiritual successor of Joan Didion - a stretch, I know. ‘Come to California be a freak like me’, she sings on the recent album Honeymoon. But if you take out the pout and the suicidal tendencies she’s actually closer to Eve Babitz. Particularly when you read actor James Franco fawning over her in V Magazine : ‘When I listen to her stuff, I am reminded of everything I love about Los Angeles. I am sucked into a long gallery of Los Angeles cult figurines, and cult people, up all night like vampires and bikers’.

Babitz herself regards the writer Colette, who she discovered at the age of 9 in the Hollywood public library, as a major inspiration: 'When she describes a luncheon alone where all she has is a view of the Bois, a plum and a chicken wing washed down with a glass of cold white wine and capped with a Caporal - you get to sit in the Bois eating a plum and a chicken wing, sipping cold white wine and lighting a black tobacco cigarette’. This is perhaps something Babitz comes close to achieving when describing the Hollywood of her youth. And a skill highlighted by New York Times contributor Holly Brubach, who provides the new introduction to Eve’s Hollywood. 'I like to imagine Babitz recounting all this at the Boutique, a restaurant that no longer exists’, she says, 'where she’d drink dry Champagne and order a Leon Salad: Swiss cheese, ham, salami and lettuce chopped to “the cheerful consistency of linguine.” Or maybe at the also-extinct Luau, a garish Polynesian restaurant that was, she tells us, Stravinsky’s favourite'.

Whereas Joan Didion’s output has been absorbed into the New Journalism canon that emerged in the 1960s, with its east coast leanings, and ambitions to succeed with non-fiction where the novel was failing, Babitz remained outside of it, often cast as a lightweight because of her subject matter. She was on the other coast, and her short essays are gossipy, witty and conversational. In which she is frequently centre stage, cast as the smart party girl at the heart of the action, documenting her own experience as much as that of others. The drugs that came close to destroying her, long before burning cigars. The lovers - in the absence of husbands and kids - that later achieved fame in the their respective fields, some of whom donated art work to the auction at the Chateau Marmont (Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper) and others that bid $50,000 for it.

Since the fire she has become something of a LA recluse in a town where others pursued fame in their youth and settled for anonymity in their dotage. Sightings of her, interviews with her, calls returned by her are as rare as earthquakes. There is nothing to do but wait. New published writing has been unforthcoming - apart from 49 tweets on an old Twitter account. Perhaps the re-issue of Eve’s Hollywood might prompt something from her on the ever-changing Los Angeles of the present. Long after the Boutique and Luau have gone, factories from the 1920s become the flagship stores for designers, like the recently-launched Rick Owens homage to Cecil B. DeMille on La Brea. The Chateau Marmont, built in 1929, remains despite seismic shifts and shifting times - both a hangout and a hangover from another era. 'Hollywood doesn’t exist’, writes Babitz. 'I firmly believe, however, that it did exist. And like Rome, we are living amidst the fallen columns and clothes-lined courtyards, in the ruins of an empire of the self-enchanted which was once, briefly, more devastating than Caesar’s...'

Originally published in the Sunday Times.

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