Regardless of whether white Britons cared how black immigrants from British colonies referred to them in 1956, Colin MacInnes was keen to tell them.

Eight years after the Empire Windrush brought that first wave of Caribbean migrants to Tilbury Docks, his essay, “A Short Guide For Jumbles (to the Life of their Coloured Brethren in England)”, revealed that the “Jumble” of the title was a corruption of “John Bull”, used by West Africans to describe Englishmen “in a spirit of tolerant disdain”.

In his eagerness to enlighten the Jumble, the author seemed to be inadvertently confirming certain fallacies, as well as stereotyping both blacks and whites to a risible degree. He wrote: “What most differentiates the African from the Englishman is that our chief ambition is to put our lives into a savings bank, whilst he firmly believes that every day is there to be enjoyed.”

When MacInnes died, aged 61, in 1976, the obituary in the New York Times — a newspaper he contributed to along with British magazines — described him as “one of the first novelists to deal with Britain’s community of blacks”. His contemporaries covered similar territory. The Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon arrived in Britain in 1950 and published his novel The Lonely Londoners six years later. In To Sir With Love (1959), Guyanese-born E.R. Braithwaite fictionalised his experience as a teacher in an East End school.

Whilst these black authors were writing as interlopers in their adopted country, Colin MacInnes was a white, well-bred Englishman describing the experience of the black outsider in the trilogy of novels that assured him his legacy: City Of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959), Mr Love and Justice (1960). The themes common to these books are race, crime, youth and a changing London (a decade before it officially began to “swing”) — topics that still resonate there almost half a century after Colin MacInnes’ death from lung cancer, and 75 years on from the publication of his debut novel, To The Victors The Spoils (1950).

As well as being one of the first authors to write about the black experience in Britain, MacInnes, who was openly bisexual, was one of the first to write rationally on the taboo subject of homosexuality — describing it as “English Queerdom” — before legalisation in 1967. Above all else, he is remembered as the first writer to celebrate the new phenomenon of the “teenager” in the 1950s (even though he was in his forties at the time).

If age made him an odd chronicler of the young, his pedigree made him an unusual candidate to tackle race. He was related to Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. His great-grandfather was the artist Edward Burne-Jones. His mother was the novelist Angela Thirkell. Born in England, he spent his childhood in Australia, with a spell in Europe as a teenager before serving in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War, which provided the inspiration for that first novel.

His social pedigree may have been his entrée to a broadcasting role at the BBC, where he was initially commissioned to write radio scripts whilst embarking on the career as a freelance journalist that kept him afloat in later years, when his novels failed to match the success of the earlier trilogy. The film critic Philip French, a former BBC colleague, described MacInnes as “one of the rudest people I’ve ever met, always needling away to try and expose some bourgeois trait he might, as a good bourgeois, disapprove of”.

The London of MacInnes was notably that of Notting Hill, Fitzrovia and Soho, where he drank to excess with fellow writers and artists at the Colony Room Club. Photographs taken in the 1950s capture him casually attired in grubby bedsits, where he wrote most mornings, before a daily constitutional through Hyde Park.

Notting Hill was infamous for the slum housing that made landlord Peter Rachman notorious and which the narrator in Absolute Beginners (in which the neighbourhood is re-named “Little Napoli”) reflects on, highlighting the “diarrhoea-coloured street lighting”, the “mulligatawny fog” and “broken milk bottles everywhere scattering the cracked asphalt roads like snow”.

The locale was a novelty for “good bourgeois” bohemians like Colin MacInnes but a necessity for the black immigrants that gravitated to the area. By reporting on their experiences, he wasn’t merely documenting the spirit of the times but attempting to expose its injustices. The race riots in Notting Hill in 1958 had a major impact on him and to the close of Absolute Beginners.

MacInnes wrote numerous essays on race, beyond his guide for white natives on black immigrants. In “Britain’s Mixed Half-Million” (1961), he sought to further enlighten the Jumble. According to MacInnes, West Indians arrived to escape overpopulated islands in pursuit of prosperity, whilst West African men were seamen, traders or students propelled by wanderlust. He writes: “It is only exceptionally that one may find Africans in England who decided to emigrate because of extreme economic hardship in their homeland.”

Whilst northern working-class writers were producing accounts of their native experience in novels, films and the cinéma-vérité drama that was dominant at the BBC by the 1960s, the London working-class experience was cornered by upper-class interlopers. In 1965, Nell Dunn’s novel Up The Junction became the BBC “Wednesday Play”. Her husband, Jeremy Sandford, wrote the infamous BBC screenplay Cathy Come Home the following year.

MacInnes had been attempting something similar the previous decade, but, despite the gritty subject matter and social issues central to his output, the novels were in the realm of fantasy. In these stories the characters, with names such as “Johnny Fortune”, “Frankie Love” and “Crepe Suzette”, are shorthand for the youth gangs or ethnic and social group they are part of, complete with exaggerated slang dialogue, rather than realised naturalistic figures.

MacInnes writes about black figures in a manner that would be impossible for a white author in the current climate of territorial identity politics, even though his approach is positive and his intention honourable, whilst the topicality of the issues he addressed — immigration, sexuality, racism, post-colonialism, vice — blinds those readers persuaded by his leftish viewpoint to the fancifulness of the style.

Even MacInnes was quick to dismiss any suggestion that his novels were the result of forensic and exhaustive research, referring to them as “poetic evocations of a human situation”.

The white adults he wrote about sometimes fitted the petit bourgeois stereotype he abhorred. This is evident in his essay “The Express Families” about the characters that appeared in the Giles cartoons in the Daily Express. Like George Orwell’s take on “Boys’ Weeklies” from 1940, this suited the cultural studies territory MacInnes was treading, along with academics Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, whilst contributing to high end literary magazines such as Encounter.

His biographer Tony Gould, who commissioned him when he was literary editor at the New Statesman, has suggested that, like Orwell, MacInnes is a better essayist than novelist. His journalism took him beyond the West End postcodes with which he was familiar, in essays entitled “Hamlet and the Ghetto” or “The Pied Piper of Bermondsey”, a profile of the local boy made good, Tommy Steele.

But as with the readers of the Daily Express, the teenagers embracing the new consumerism were also subjected to his criticism because of their indifference to politics: “in their kind of happy mindfulness — the raw material for crypto-fascism of the worst kind”.

Although MacInnes occasionally concedes that the good, the bad and the ugly are to be found in all races, his tendency is to deify the black foreigner and demonise the white native. In this, he’s emblematic of white writers from his class and with his politics and pedigree that have continued to mine the same territory and re-enact battles already won, in a world that has moved on since those days of the diminishing British Empire.

In part, his portrayal of black characters was based on his objectification of them, and particularly African men, to whom he was especially sexually attracted. He pursued them, often conquered them, usually by offering cash, before discarding them.

In his 55-page pamphlet “Loving Them Both” (1973), a study on bisexuality, he outlines how same-sex attraction plays out amongst black men in foreign climes, highlighting where it is most prevalent: “the virtue of anyone who, in Barbados, bends to retrieve a coin, is in dire danger”.

Here again in attempting to expose the assumptions of others, he reveals his own. The black man is cast as carefree and exotic, a sexual radical with a natural sense of rhythm (“blacks regard a bed as a place of joy and not a confessional”). He is invariably a musician, a pimp, a hustler who, of course, avoids putting his life in savings banks because every day is there to be enjoyed.

Just as MacInnes had little interest in a white working class that might aspire to the status of those Express families, let alone the class of which he was a beneficiary, the educated black man did not hold his interest — unless, of course, he was a revolutionary.

Colin MacInnes became the token white figure to the fore of short-lived black liberation groups that limped into the London of the 1970s and landed on the agitprop pages of listings magazines. He was a propagandist for black “revolutionary” and convicted murderer Michael X, who was executed in his native Trinidad in 1975. In his final years, MacInnes’ focus on race was surpassed by sexuality, which he wrote about under a pseudonym in a column for Gay News: “Captain Jockstrap’s Diary”.

He died on the Kent coast and was buried at sea, far from his beloved London. Half a century on, the capital is a city he would barely recognise — not because of the regeneration and gentrification but the mass immigration that has followed in his wake.

For certain Londoners that remain, London is a foreign city; for those that have left, it’s an alien one. The diarrhoea-coloured street lighting and mulligatawny fogs that were the backdrop to the lives of MacInnes and his characters, that once made it a dark and dismal city, have gone. But so have many of the attributes that made it a safe, sane and dignified one.

Originally published in The Critic.

Subscribe now

In the 2017 documentary, Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold, Didion, the subject of the film, gives a telling response to a question from director Griffin Dunne, her nephew.

She recounts scenes she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, witnessed after they returned to her native California in 1964 from New York, where Didion had spent eight years writing for Vogue. The couple settled in a California vastly different from the Sacramento of Didion’s childhood. They were at the epicentre of a mutinous counterculture and, according to Didion, ‘participated in the paranoia of the time’. Housed in a ropey corner of Hollywood, they hosted parties that attracted the beautiful people, but remained too disciplined themselves to indulge in the excesses that took out many of the celebrities they entertained. Each morning Didion slipped on her sunglasses, sipped an ice cold Coke for breakfast, and started writing.

In Dunne’s documentary, she recalls a visit to the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco, where she watched a five-year-old child, daubed in white lipstick, read a comic book while on acid. In response to the director asking her reaction, Didion replied: ‘It was gold.’ It’s a cold, dispassionate answer, but one in keeping with how Didion regarded her craft. Everything was there to be used, and as she once acknowledged, ‘writers are always selling somebody out’.

Does that also mean that writing should ultimately sell the writer out, when everything they committed to paper, that remained unpublished in their lifetime, is available posthumously? In 1998, Didion wrote of Ernest Hemingway that his wish was to be survived by only the words that he determined fit for publication. If this was also Didion’s wish, it’s not being adhered to.

In March this year, 336 boxes of her private papers, including menus and guest lists for those celebrated 1960s dinners she and her husband hosted, were made available at the New York Public Library. The release of these papers follows the publication in April of Notes to John, the unedited writings she committed to a notebook following her sessions with a psychiatrist from 1999. These were intended for her husband, who died four years later from a heart attack.

Back in Los Angeles, in the early days of their writing careers, Didion and Dunne were mining for gold while writing a column together along with Hollywood screenplays (including the 1976 adaptation of A Star Is Born). Mostly, Didion was writing alone, producing fiction and non-fiction essays in the elegant, chiselled style she honed at Vogue. The work was absorbed into the ‘new journalism’ canon, which included the dispatches of Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. But Joan Didion was writing more personally, even when reporting on newsworthy events that were redefining American culture.

In the introduction to her 1968 essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion recalls: ‘Whatever I do write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.’ A decade later, taking her cue from the George Orwell essay ‘Why I Write’, for a lecture she delivered, she said: ‘In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, “Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind”.’ Whether she was writing about John Wayne, the Black Panthers or the Manson family, Didion always returned to ‘the act of saying I’. This was evident from an early essay for Vogue entitled ‘On Self Respect’, in which she alludes to keeping a notebook, a habit that began in infancy and continued until her death.

Didion begins another book (The White Album from 1979) by informing us that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. She wrote to understand and articulate her own thoughts, and believed that, as a reporter, she was able to be an invisible witness. ‘I am so physically small’, she wrote, ‘so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests’. This is certainly true when you compare her with Tom Wolfe, dressed like a southern American dandy from another era, and Gay Talese in immaculately tailored suits and pristine hats and spats. Yet the look that began to define her, the bobbed hair and oversized sunglasses, became her signature style. This is why fashion house Céline included her as a model in its ad campaign for spring 2015, six years before she died, aged 87.

Although many have been quick to canonise her, the odd dissident has emerged in the four years since her death, suggesting the Joan Didion persona was a conceit. This was reinforced last year, when a joint biography of Didion and fellow author Eve Babitz was published. The former was responsible for getting the latter a writing assignment at Rolling Stone. They were California girls. Didion was a descendant of prairie folk; Babitz a well-connected, wild-child party girl (infamous for being photographed naked while playing chess with Marcel Duchamp). Whereas Didion interviewed The Doors, Eve Babitz slept with them. According to the biography, the diminutive Didion used her evident brittleness to good effect, as it disguised the shrewd predator beneath: ‘It’s the tininess, it’s the sunglasses, it’s the shyness. But she’s a killer.’ Perhaps this was part of her appeal. Didion once wrote that our favourite people, like our favourite stories, become so because they illustrate ‘something deep in the grain, something unadmitted’.

Didion’s status as a national treasure was confirmed when Barack Obama presented her with the prestigious National Humanities Medal in 2012. Now, she had the venerable stature of those veteran writers revered as wise, sage-like elders of a tribe, with white New York liberals at their feet hanging on every syllable, as though each sentence is worthy of an award. Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison only needed to inform us that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush to be in the running for the Pulitzer Prize. Didion belonged to this community of saints.

Despite her Californian origins, which she wrote about often, and was perhaps at her best and most brilliant when doing so, hers was very much a New York state of mind. In 1988, she returned to NYC and remained there until the end of her life. One of her most celebrated essays on her return was written for the New York Review of Books in 1991, in which Didion deftly addresses in detail the case of a 28-year-old female who was gang raped while jogging through Central Park in 1989. It was an unusual subject for the magazine’s readership and the demographic Didion was addressing. A gang rape in which the victim was white and the five perpetrators black and Hispanic was of little concern to the New York literati. But an essay that put history and the media on the stand over the case was gold. It was vindicated, too, when in 2002, the so-called Central Park Five were exonerated.

Here again, as with that child on LSD decades before, hers could be the dispassionate voice of the reporter. But that shifted when Didion made the subject herself, particularly when writing about loss. This was the underlying ache expressed in her 2003 memoir, Where I Was From:

‘I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked door. The fear is for what is still to be lost. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.’

She deepened her reflections on grief with two further books that reached out to a wider readership. Firstly, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), where she writes of her reaction to her husband’s death, while her daughter was in an induced coma. Secondly, Blue Nights published in 2011, six years after the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, at 39. To Didion, as a wife and mother, these losses were devastating and tragic. To a writer like Didion, they too were gold.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, she notes:

‘We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all. ’

As raw as these experiences were, in writing about them Didion remained in command of her subject, and the manner in which she approached it. But this was not so with the entries in her notebooks, which ‘could only mean something to the maker’, or indeed the husband to whom Notes to John is dedicated. This is apparent from the opening entry: ‘Re not taking (the antidepressant) Zoloft, I said it made me feel for about an hour after taking it that I’d lost my organising principle, rather like having a Planter’s Punch before lunch in the tropics.’

This, the last new book to carry Joan Didion’s name, is without the precision and style that defined the writing she put her name to. But it is perhaps more gratuitously about herself than all that went before.

Originally published in Spiked.

Subscribe now

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 …

Read more

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…

Read more

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

'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…

Read more

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

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

The event was organised by the Media Society and overseen by its president, Peter York. One speaker joked of the millions Nigella Lawson had made since Yentob put her on screen. Another claimed the Daily Mail harangued Yentob because he continued to produce radical films (he’d recently interviewed Bette Midler). Some referred wryly to Judaism; many namechecked Oxbridge. Yentob, they said, the ultimate BBC insider, was once an outsider, being the one intern that wasn’t an Oxbridge graduate when beginning his BBC career in 1968. This, they proclaimed, said much about the man: the Great Panjandrum. But what did it say about the BBC?

When Greg Dyke described the BBC as “hideously white” during his brief stint as director-general in the early 2000s, it started a trend for similar generalisations about the corporation that were just as disingenuous. If the staff were defined by race they were also defined by class. The percentage of ethnic minorities working within the BBC surely surpasses that of the share of the national demographic, yet this is not the case when it comes to social class. What defined a majority of creatives at the BBC, whatever their hue, was a degree awarded by one of two universities.

Those of us in the minority that managed to bunk in without this qualification discovered that, decades after the radical Sixties tenure of Hugh Carleton Greene, little had changed. Despite a respectable TV résumé I failed the BBC boards. Being chippy and common I attributed this to the absence of a degree, when interviewed by someone who appeared to be a descendant of the Sackville-Wests. I appealed directly, and desperately, to the presenter and producer on Peter York’s Eighties at BBC Arts in the mid-1990s, landing a short-term contract in a dream job. At lunchtime I circled the “doughnut” at BBC TV Centre, staring skyward to T. B. Huxley-Jones’s sculpture of Helios, not quite believing my luck. I was in the beautiful, minimalist belly of the broadcasting beast despite being, like Alan Yentob, an outsider. (He’d attended the Sorbonne. His parents had a home on Park Lane. The family owned Dents, the luxury glove company. But he never went to Oxbridge.)

This obsession with class, Oxbridge and pedigree is as Reithian as the founding father’s famous credo: “inform, educate and entertain”. John Reith attended Glasgow University, which he considered one of his failures. Initially, he ignored John Logie Baird for attending a university in the same city and fiddling around with televisions. (He had numerous idiosyncrasies, like barring homosexuals and divorcées from playing in the BBC orchestras.) During his reign as first director-general a mission statement in Latin was inscribed on a corridor wall in Broadcasting House: a dedication to the God the governors affiliated themselves with by spreading the word. And the word was: that good seed sown may bring forth good harvest, and that all things foul or hostile to peace may be banished thence, and that the people inclining their ear to whatsoever things are lovely and honest, whatsoever things are of good report, may tread the path of virtue and wisdom.

If Reith’s faith in broadcasting was shaken with the birth of television, it disappeared entirely with the prospect of commercial channels. When ITV was launched he compared it to the plague, warning of its impact on moral values and ethical and intellectual standards. “He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants,” he said, “is often creating a fictitious demand for low standards which he will then satisfy.”

This perhaps sums up the legacy of recent director-general Lord Hall, when pushing a fictitious demand for a laboured “diversity” agenda. The equality of opportunity many of us would have liked to have seen emerge at institutions such as the BBC is being replaced by an equality of outcome. Will social pedigree be entirely overtaken by that of a tokenistic ethnicity when it comes to recruitment? (Yesterday’s Dimbleby is today’s Chakrabarti.) In both instances merit isn’t always paramount.

Odd this should be a focus as the broadcaster is in the throes of an existential crisis without precedent in its history, two years away from its centenary. According to a recent report on what makes Britons proud to be British the BBC scored a paltry 7 per cent.

The “Defund the BBC” campaign continues to clock up support, alongside mounting criticisms of the bloated salaries of in-house celebrities. The role of a public service broadcaster remains valid but less so its purpose since the internet and streaming services have made so much about conventional television redundant.

The age of Hugh Carleton Greene, single-figure channels and an “appointment to view” from the BBC’s high season are past. The corporation seems uncertain as to who the viewers are and the feeling is mutual. The young believe the BBC is right-wing, their elders see it as being on the left. The latter are more likely to fork out for a TV licence fee, a bone of contention now more than ever, particularly when Hall’s parting shot was to plough millions into a diversity programme as Black Lives Matter made headlines. He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants …

When it comes to the BBC’s original brief these days it’s diversity we need to be educated and informed about, while being entertained by contemporary programmes that hammer home ethnic quotas to a patronising degree, and dramas that rewrite history to the same end. “They call it ‘cultural Marxism’,” writes Peter York, addressing the BBC’s critics in GQ. “The rest of us call it ‘modern Britain’.”

Most of the general public have lived with multiculturalism for years, while a well-bred clique in the upper echelons of the media have only attended the course. This “modern Britain” is absent from homes of top TV executives and those that inhabit their social circle, where the brown faces present are on the covers of old vinyl, on book jackets, or on at least £300,000 per annum. These positive discrimination initiatives never reach the top table, although with the crisis deepening, class is beginning to be addressed in a cursory attempt to reach the demographic many in the media regard with contempt.

To justify her £75,000 salary for a three-day week June Sarpong, the BBC’s first Director of Creative Diversity, and author of The Power of Privilege: How White People Can Challenge Racism (2020), informs us the BBC doesn’t represent the white working class. New director-general Tim Davie wants to address the Oxbridge culture at the BBC. Not so much the revolution being televised, as television being revolutionised.

Coming out in the corporation’s corner at an opportune moment is the well-intentioned book The War Against The BBC, recently published by Penguin. It takes on the institution’s detractors. One of the two co-authors is Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing at London Business School. In assembling a suitable case in the present the text relies heavily on the past. The glorious triumphs from the broadcaster’s golden years are as evident as the contemporary equivalents are absent. Both Strictly and Bake-Off recur as proof of its commercial and creative success but, arguably, these could have been produced by other broadcasters. Fleabag, Killing Eve and Normal People would not necessarily have been made elsewhere, or at least not as well. The corporation’s news outlet is flagged as being without equal:

The BBC has almost never been accused of inaccurate reporting. The same is obviously not true of online media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which are exploited by a range of state and non-state players for large-scale disinformation. But, to a lesser extent, it is almost not true of the right-wing tabloid newspapers that are among the BBC’s most persistent enemies.

The mounting number of disenchanted viewers are more savvy than their social betters on the left give them credit for. They see shortcomings to rival that of inaccuracy; a selective approach to reporting; political bias; prioritising stories that chime with a “woke” agenda; censoring and silencing views in keeping with the increasing influence of cancel culture. One instance is the way in which the BBC kowtowed to the Black Lives Matter movement. When 36 police officers were injured during last summer’s carnage, it reported on “largely peaceful protests”.

If John Reith’s original credo is central to the defence of the corporation in The War Against The BBC, so is his brand of paternalism. We are led to believe the Brexit-voting barbarians are at the gates of provincial postcodes, beyond the townhouses and regency squares of central London where the wealthy, liberal arbiters of taste and culture reside or socialise.

In Reith’s day it was commercial television that threatened the moral, ethical and intellectual standards; now it’s think-tanks scattered around the Westminster village, along with a dominant right-wing press that entertains the blinkered masses, while leaving them ill-educated and ill-informed. In correcting the tabloids on salient points relating to BBC funding and accusations of “waste” — did I mention June Sarpong getting 75 grand for a three-day-week non-job? — the book itself takes a tabloid approach to exposing the figures that challenge the BBC, citing “dark money” and vested interests.

Questions over impartiality have been evident throughout the history of the broadcaster. The diversity issue it needs to straddle is more recent, but no less problematic. The BBC has to be seen to tackle diminishing occurrences that might be classified as discrimination, while acknowledging a rising number of grievances that are false. Too many ludicrous examples to cite, but how about the black staff that compared having a white manager to being slaves on a plantation?

We are currently living through a period of widespread nationalism, including in Britain, with words like “traitor”, “treason” and “anti-British” regularly rumbling out of the mouths of the hard right. These are the same people who would love to see the BBC crumble.

This is as mythical as the claim that there is no “silent majority” and that the political agenda is decided by the right-wing press. The more prevalent mindset is that which dominates on social media, in the corporate world, in education, the civil service, the wider public sector and the BBC itself, where words like “racist”, “bigot” and “fascist” rumble from the mouths of those without justifiable cause or evidence, destroying careers and lives in the process.

Stylistically, the voice that’s absent from The War Against The BBC is that of its other author. Peter York is well placed to inform the viewer who the BBC is as an occasional on-screen style pundit. In his day job as Peter Wallis, management consultant, he is well placed to inform the BBC who its viewers are. In his GQ essay he pursues a similar line on the corporation, pitching “well-informed people” against a crude cabal of an “illiberal metropolitan elite” and council-home dwellers with regional accents. Class bookends the essay.

York recalls the impact of David Bowie, androgynous and playing gay, on Top Of The Pops in 1972; how this made adolescent working-class outsiders believe they could be contenders. He offers the example of a teenage Gary Kemp, back there in a King’s Cross council flat before Spandau Ballet took him onto Top Of The Pops. York claims the modern equivalent would be similarly affected and inspired by a BBC event. Which of course is not the case in the age of the internet. Broadcasting has changed. The working class has changed. The paternalism and provincialism that pervades a London-based media class has not.

David Bowie and the BBC were catalysts for my own Kempian experience, in a home where books were of as little interest as the BBC beyond Top Of The Pops. ITV was the channel of choice. In 1975, I watched the Bowie documentary Cracked Actor. It was produced and directed by one Alan Yentob, the outsider who would come to epitomise the self-entitlement and profligacy of the BBC in the view of the press. This overshadows achievements that made him an example of the kind of BBC creative who, in the words of Huw Weldon, makes “the good popular and the popular good”. When I finally moved beyond Top Of The Pops as a viewer, it was Yentob’s arts output that I was informed, educated and entertained by, particularly the Arena films. Here was a seed that brought in a good harvest.

In this last decade I myself got to present two films for BBC 4 on the theme of social class — a subject that I continue to exhaust in print — one of which was The Great Estate: The Rise and Fall of the Council House. There was talk of a series on the National Trust; my name was mentioned to front it. I recall Peter York telling me that in the past they would have wanted someone with his accent for the job, and now it was someone with mine, as though the age of egalitarianism trailed under the tenure of Carleton Greene was upon us.

It wasn’t. I remained the exception not the rule. These days neither of us is wanted. At the Edinburgh Television Festival a couple of years ago it was decreed the BBC no longer needed documentaries in which the presenter was “white, middle-aged and male, standing on a hill”. During my brief spell in front of the camera I was often standing in a sink estate, but I got the message: hideously white.

Although too stale, pale and male to be on screen or behind the scenes, and fully understanding the arguments behind the “Defund The BBC” hashtag, I can’t commit to a call for the end of the BBC, or its licence fee. For now, at least. Just as there is an ever-increasing number of viewers sick of the diversity agenda, there is an ever-diminishing number of BBC producers that feel the same. Collectively, we are a portion of that 7 per cent of Britons still oddly fond of the BBC, naively hoping that under the aegis of a new director-general it may tread that path of virtue and wisdom. Particularly the wisdom part.

This essay first appeared in The Critic.

Subscribe now

With the opening of Conran’s Skylon restaurant at the Royal Festival Hall in 2007, a taster for this year’s sixtieth anniversary of the Festival of Britain, Terence Conran’s career came full circle.

Skylon, the iconic metal sculpture designed by Powell and Moya symbolised the futuristic, sky-high thinking behind the festival, while the event itself gave Conran his first job as a designer. Writing in the recently published celebration of the Festival of Britain, Beacon For Change, Barry Turner notes: ‘Habitat and Heal’s were pure Festival, so too were Ercol and G-Plan’. It’s been said that 1951 was the year that the British home began to leave behind brown paint and porridge wallpaper. Terence Conran would take a leading role within the modernist vanguard that brought about this change. It was a slow train coming. Conran himself has said that Britain has taken more than half a century to embrace modernity. In that time he has amassed the kind of fortune that would enable him to buy the South Bank, maybe London itself.

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

‘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.

Read more

London, 2017. At Phillips auction rooms in London’s Berkeley Square an image by Bruce Weber has just been bought for £87,000.

It’s the most expensive auctioned work the photographer has ever sold: a sensuous black and white, full length shot of a toned, tanned man and woman up close and naked on a swing ( ‘Ric and Natalie, Villa Tejas, Montecito, California’). The iconic photograph was used in an ad for Calvin Klein’s scent Obsession, in 1989. As fresh and provocative as the perfume campaign was it marked the culmination of a chapter in the evolution of Calvin Klein. The game-changer came six years earlier with the launch of his men’s underwear range. Weber’s image of Olympic pole-vaulter Tom Hintnaus in a pair of briefs - the luminous white that Persil promised - against a spotless white-washed wall, beneath a cloudless Grecian sky. Emblazoned across a billboard in Times Square it halted traffic and attracted crowds. Not as newsworthy as images of the moon landings or the assassination of a president….but a contender, nevertheless. The following year, American Photographer magazine cited it as one of the ten pictures that changed America.

Read more

Michael C Hall and I are comparing notes on all that has been done in the name of David Bowie since his death in January.

“Did you see the Lady Gaga tribute at the Grammys?” he asks, that familiar eyebrow raised. “The BBC Bowie Prom was far, far worse,” I reply. “I swear you could hear him turning in his grave when Amanda Palmer brought her baby on stage.”

Luckily, Hall missed it all — he was at home in New York. Now he’s in London for the Mercury prize, for which Bowie’s Blackstar was a contender, but not the winner. He performed the track Lazarus, the title of the off-Broadway musical in which he played the lead. It opens in London this month, which means the capital is his home until the new year.

For the moment, Hall, 45, is Bowie’s representative on earth. The part of Thomas Jerome Newton in Lazarus was his from the start. He was cast on the back of his roles in the award-winning series Six Feet Under a…

Read more

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 1970s writing this experiential take on the so-called sexual revolution; attending orgies and nudist colonies, managing a massage parlour in the name of research. It was his look that struckme; the writing hit me much later. Along with Tom Wolfe - the best-dressed pioneers of the new journalism of the 1960s - he sports hats, bespoke suits and hand-cobbled shoes. Dressed as though heading for Wall Street, he leaves his five-storey town house on New York’s upper east side to descend into a former wine cellar below. The windowless-room where he works is surrounded by floor to ceiling shelves containing…….everything: ‘I want to report on what I have seen and heard and people I’ve known, and what I’ve done, because I think it’s connected to history. I keep records to testify to the fact that I’m alive’.

At 84 he’s still stitching those stories together. The subject of his new book ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’ has been with him since ‘Thy Neighbour’s Wife’, when the owner of a Colorado motel first made contact. Gerald Foos confided that he’d been conducting his own scientific research on the sexual lives of Americans, by spying on his paying guests and documenting his findings. Talese signed a confidentiality agreement and visited him, essentially becoming an accomplice to the voyeurism, and later, privy to the details of a murder that Foos witnessed. In April, an extract from the book was published in The New Yorker. (Foos finally gave Talese the go ahead to tell the story). In a reprise of the response to the publication of his book on the sexual revolution, certain critics are questioning the author’s ethics. Those that aren’t include Stephen Spielberg and Sam Mendes, who will be taking on producer and director roles for the film adaptation, since Dreamworks bought the rights for a reputed £1 million dollars.

Foos is the latest in a line of figures that Talese has written about - the mafia among them - that appear at odds with polite society and whom he attempts to redeem in some way. Like so many others I came across his celebrated masterwork ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’ (1966), several years after the event - 15,000 words on the author’s thwarted attempt to interview a fellow Italian-American. Vanity Fair has described it as the greatest non-fiction short story of the twentieth century. ‘Many Italian-American boys of his generation’, he writes of Sinatra, 'were then shooting for the same star - they were strong with song, weak with words, not a big novelist among them'. Gay Talese became the exception to the rule. He was strong with words, and elevated non-fiction to the standard of the novel. Tom Wolfe has credited him with inventing the new journalism in which the devices of fiction were brought into play: scene-setting, point-of-view, interior monologue. Talese has always been emphatic about using real names and real dialogue. Something that began with the stories he wrote as a copy boy at the New York Times (its staff became the subject of his 1969 best-seller ‘The Kingdom And The Power’). He has written of his family history, and the major work in progress is the story of his 57-year marriage.

In his essay ‘Origins Of A Non-Fiction Writer’ from 1997 he writes: ‘Each of my books draws inspiration in some way from elements of my island and its inhabitants’. He was referring to his formative years in New Jersey, watching his father at work and eavesdropping on the conversations at his mother’s dress shop. Here he learned the ‘store manners’ and charm that served him so well as an interviewer. It is the story of those customers, and similar figures he has come upon since that are central to his best pieces of writing: 'the overlooked non-newsworthy population that is everywhere, but rarely taken into account by journalists and other chroniclers of reality’.

These were the words that stayed with me when I set about telling a similar island story that I’d been a witness to, in the book ‘The Likes Of Us’, a decade ago. The overlooked population here was the British white working class who became newsworthy when cast as a caricature or called on to play the patsy. To me these figures were as ‘dateless’ as the characters Talese has described in his brand of journalism, which he believes, rightly, is redundant in an age when celebrity soundbites and Twitterhave become the authorial voice.

Originally published in the Sunday Times.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

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.

Subscribe now

It was the historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay who coined the term ‘extravagant austerity’ when describing the asceticism of the puritans.

Similar could be said of the minimalism being championed nowadays as an antidote to hoarding and consumption. Certainly when you look at the minimalists themselves. Some of whom - I’m sampling Macaulay again - have a tone of mind 'often injured by striving after things too high for mortal reach’. For minimalists tend to be tech and web entrepreneurs. They’ve made their billions and cash has left a few of them feeling uncomfortable, even though their wealth is a perk of the goal they pursued rather than the goal itself. Firstly, there are those whose lifestyles reflect the simplicity of their product. The late Steve Jobs cornered this one. The co-founder of Apple lived a sofa-free adult life and spent every day of it in the same Issey Miyake polo neck. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, forever in the same style of t-shirt, embraces sartorial minimalism to liberate himself from unnecessary decisions. He and Jack Dorsey - co-founder of Twitter - are striving after things too high for mortal etc. Zuckerberg has said: 'I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything, except how to best serve this community’. ( The Facebook followers that document the minutiae of their lives online.) It’s been said of Dorsey - a ‘minimalist' even as a child, when he opted for the smallest bedroom of his siblings - he wants to make the world a fairer, kinder and nicer place. Dorsey’s masterwork is a paean to minimalism. How perfect that a child with a speech impediment, who became a man of few words - according to those that meet with him - should create Twitter: 140 characters in which to signal virtues, flag status, and then add a hashtag to bring in back-up. With one click #blacklivesmatter and refugees are welcome. In seconds you’re a contender - and the world knows it. If Jack Dorsey hopes to make that world a fairer place, there are others that hope minimalism will make it a happier one.

They are spearheading a movement intent on liberating us from the shackles of maximalism. A move that is proving more lucrative than the schemes that brought them troublesome filthy lucre in the first place. Theirs is a credo that fills books, blogs and TED Talks - where every manifesto is guaranteed a captive audience. Graham Hill, 45, CEO of the website Life Edited leads the field. He practices the minimalism he preaches: 'I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did’. But it’s 'The Minimalists’ themselves - Joshua Fields Milburn, Ryan Nicodemus - the men behind the eponymous website that has 4 million followers, and the authors of best-seller ‘Everything That Remains’, that have become the Wesleyans of the movement taking the message on the road.

Late last year they pitched their minimalist spiel to a young British audience. The venue was the perfect backdrop: Testbed 1 in Battersea, the ‘distressed’ warehouse and former dairy ripped and stripped by architect Will Alsop. The peeling walls, the abundance of light and absence of windows, the fractured concrete floor gave the impression that something underground - a resistance? - or illicit was happening. The kind of subteranean set-up where you might watch dog-fighting or witness waterboarding, after arrivingin the boot of a car. The only signs of modernity and consumerism the iPads and iPhones documenting the proceedings - by way of Twitter, Vine, Instagram - in the palms of the people present. Each of them open to the possibility of being cast as a Henry David Thoreau of the digital age. (Am I alone in thinking Walden Pond with wi-fi?). They were embracing a new form of acquisitiveness. They wanted everything The Minimalists have. In short - nothing.

They wanted it because the34-year old authors have found happiness and liberation. Here’s how it came about: They were friends back there in Ohio with high-powered jobs and six-figure incomes. 'I found minimalism after two great losses,' says Joshua Fields Milburn. ‘My mother died and my marriage ended both in the same month. Minimalism allowed me to get the excess out of the way and re-prioritize my life so I could focus on what was truly important: health, relationships, passions, growth, contribution’. Milburn jettisoned 90 per cent of everything he owned over a period of eight months. He tells me: 'Some of us embrace minimalism to reclaim control of our finances (I was six-figures in debt), our health (I weighed 80 pounds more than I weigh now), our mission, our community, our families, etc. The best way to convince someone to become a minimalist is to show them the benefits that apply to them, and then let them decide whether they want to simplify their life'. Seeing a change for the better in his friend’s new found freedom, Nicodemus divested himself of almost everything too. Like Thoreau, the pair took themselves off to a cabin. (The wired cabin is taking over the compact city studio as the home of choice for the 21st century tech-savvy minimalist. The co-founder of video-sharing website Vimeo, Zach Klein, this month publishes a book that pays tribute to this entitled Cabin Porn. ) They documented their story and their philosophy in a blog, books, and now the documentary Minimalism released next spring. With a programme that brings to mind the 12 steps of AA, The Minimalists offer a 21 day journey to free you from your possessions; to get you clean. So what did the British make of it? 'Ultimately, what we learned from the folks in the UK is that, whether we're American or British, young or old, rich or poor, we're all fundamentally searching for the same thing: we want to live a more deliberate, meaningful life’. It’s a line that echoes the modernist architect Adolf Loos who believed that freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.

But it’s an approach that isn’t entirely new. Back in the 1930s one Richard Clegg advanced his philosophy of ‘voluntary simplicity’ as an antidote to the burgeoning consumerism that threatened to brainwash the masses. A far cry from the turbo-charged consumption of the present, in which hoarding is cast as the new obesity. Oddly, it was the depression era in America, with similar occurring on these shores before the gear shifted to austerity and rationingin the post-war years. The generation borne of that experience became our parents and we became akin to the avaricious 1970s adolescent in the Jim Shepard short story ‘The Mortality of Parents’: ‘Money dictates our children-of-the-Depression parents’ mantra, the bottom-line creed by which they live: If it’s good enough for me’. At the close of the story, now a middle-aged man in the 21st century he asks: ‘When exactly did their It’s good enough for me become our I need more? How did we let this happen?' These are the questions that occupy Graham Hill.

Here’s someone that had the midas touch when it came to money-making. He made his millions selling sites like Treehugger - his attempt at striving for things beyond mortal reach by saving the planet. Life Edited was his attempt to save himself. After travelling the globe with his girlfriend he woke up, looked around his beautiful house, and like a character in a Talking Heads song asked - How did I get here? The charge levelled at Hill is a familiar one: kicking out the stuff is an easy stance to take when you’re rich. It’s difficult to get rid of everything when you have nothing. And some people just might want the opportunity, the experience of having possessions before giving them up. When Hill laid out his story in the New York Times there was a backlash: 'In a majestic display of guileless narcissism, Hill, an Internet multimillionaire, congratulates himself for downsizing his life and getting rid of all the stuff—the homes and cars and gadgets and sectional sofas and $300 sunglasses—he accumulated over the past decade’. I’d argue that there is a paradox here - and not entirely a new one - whereby the modern ‘progressive' wants to return us to some idyllic, pre-industrial utopian past that never was. What distinguishes the likes of Hill, Klein and Milburn from the Richard Cleggs of the past is the reliance on 21st century technology. 'The modern version of minimalism, tries to objectify our objects’, says David Friedlander, 39, Director of Communications a Life Edited. 'Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s a tool. So the big question becomes “Am I using this technology - this smartphone, this app, this whatever - to enable me to connect with my life or am I using it to take me away from it?" Take Facebook. I can use it to connect with people or I can spend four hours watching cat videos. Facebook isn’t the problem. How I use it is'.

This approach further echoes the European modernists that had specific ideas of how the common herd should live - but now it’s more about sustainability than aesthetics. All those foreign theories about the house as a machine, ornament as a crime, and less is more . As Tom Wolfe writes in The Me Generation: ‘They had things figured out for the woking man down to truly minute details, such as lamp switches. The new liberated working man would live as the Cultivated Ascetic’. But of course the aspirant prole took off to the suburbs or customised his abode when he got the opportunity. Not only did he not embrace asceticism, but his idea of aesthetics was an affront to those that believed themselves to be the arbiters of good taste. Which is how minimalists often see themselves. ‘The members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge themselves with products’, according to Graham Hill. By which he means the ‘wrong’ products. People spend less on more by buying cheap and in bulk, discarding it, and forking out for the next lot of stuff. 'If anything, people with fewer resources, especially those with less money, can benefit most from minimalism’, Milburn believes, 'because a minimalist lifestyle helps people determine what truly adds value to their lives — what things actually serve a purpose and bring joy’. Yes, but again, maybe people need to be shallow and rich before settling for the virtues of extravagant austerity.

Although some of us simply missed out the middle man. We didn’t become billionaires and our minimalism was instinctive from the word go. It remained with us partly from necessity, partly as a way of finding a clearing in the chaos of life and taking control. Or is having less simply a better way of dealing with loss? If we can live without a kettle and a sofa, maybe we can cope better when losing the big stuff - hair, family, home, faculties. The less we have the less we fear losing. Like Jack Dorsey, I was a child minimalist. My parents never had to tell me to clean my room because I was always throwing things out. This morphed into an asceticism in adult years that is dramatically monastic: one-pot stove-top cooking, one white plate, one white bowl, one white cup, one knife, one fork, a single bed, two chairs. The absence of cutlery and crockery leaves no reason to entertain at home. While Jack Dorsey’s credo that ‘constraint inspires creativity’ applies to cooking with a single pot. It’s possible to take on ghoulash, kedgeree, cassoulet, and an adaptation of Julia Childs boeuf bourguignon. Time was when I allowed an ironing board to double as a dinner table - and later, a writing desk. Perhaps the Pet Shop Boys put it best in the track ‘Minimal': ‘a cell without a criminal’. In hindsight I was anticipating the future. Because the future back then - when our depression-era parents were in their it’s-good-enough-for-me mode - was simple and minimal. Where everything we needed would be contained in a device on our wrists or in the palm of our hands; where we’d live in clinical all-white cabins where everything was operated by remote control. Now that future has arrived and it’s all we expected to be - and more.

But inevitably there’s a downside. Some argue that possessions have become a symbol of poverty and minimalism the preserve of a wealthy elite. ‘A modernist monastery where the religion is Apple itself’, was the charge levelled by one critic. I don’t entirely agree. The consumption ofthe minimalist is simply less conspicuous - even though suitably aesthetic. As technology becomes smaller and smaller it contains more and more apps that are less and less essential. While this ambition to continually modify our tiny technologies is the anthesis of the oh-so English minimalism championed by the architect John Pawson way back in the 1990s, before the internet and Apple became the giants they are today. In his book ‘Minimum’ he writes: ‘The minimum is the perfection that an artefact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve on it by subtraction’.

Originally published in the Sunday Times

Subscribe now