Dear Readers,
Once again, we join you on the Day of Rest, but this time out, we have a scandal-packed issue for you to slow roast this Sunday, and we can promise that you won’t want to miss an iteration of this newsletter until the New Year, as it will be loaded with reportage, scandal, featurettes, tips and links.
One small note of business: Issue 9 is currently printed by our friends over at Kopa in Lithuania, and it will be with subscribers at the start of November. The last two iterations sold out in three weeks, so do sign up today if you’d like to bless your palms with The Fence. This time out, we’ve got some Frieze intel, a bit of Cambridge Spies conversazioni and a little featurette on Zadie Smith’s brother.
Ask Lucian
Ghislaine Maxwell has been charged with the trafficking of underage girls, and is set for a court case on 29 November. We are sure that the Daily Mail, the country’s most powerful newspaper, will be following proceedings carefully, but we imagine they won’t find time to publish these photos of the editor, Geordie Grieg, cavorting with the gruesome Ghislaine. Obviously, one snap can be written off as an accident, but here we have three separate pal-ups: one tender moment here, then this candid camera moment at a book launch and finally a summit with Piers Morgan: we look forward to what we trust to be an unbiased reportage of events from Manhattan Federal Court.
General Surgeons Warning
If you’re generally in the favour of ‘funny content’ then you should track us on Twitter, as we will be pumping the launch of Issue 9 with some free-to-air articles there, and also, if you’d like, check us out on Instagram at this address here, where we’ll be playing the odd rogue shot on the stories. The grid has been laid out with lavish beauty by Alex Christian, who has given so much to TF, from copy-editing to web design and, of course, a whole series of superb illustrations, and you should follow him here, and if you’re in the position to do so, send a commission his way.
Straight Gossip
Recently spotted at the BFI: chain-smoking belletrist Karl Ove Knausgård taking in a film of an evening. The film in question? The Worst Person In The World.
Garlands of Praise
It’s been a fist-clenching thrill to see two contributors who have written landmark pieces for us get their justly deserved flowers over these past few weeks.
Rebecca Watson is perhaps the most exciting young writer in Britain today, and we were quietly shocked when she wrote an original work of short fiction for us in Issue 7. Her first book, little scratch, is a masterpiece of brittle, beautiful interiority, the ideal gift for anyone who loves formal playfulness (and the ideal gift for anyone, really, it’s very easy to read it one sitting). So we were delighted to learn that Rebecca’s novel is going to be adapted for the stage by the great Katie Mitchell at the Hampstead Theatre.
This time last year, Richard Smyth wrote a wonderfully funny essay on the state of British nature writing, which caused some mild controversy online, but was a vital signpost in The Fence being taken seriously as we tried to move the project away from sophomoric hi-jinks. Richard was just nominated for the BBC National Short Story Awards, and is an absolute mensch, and we’re very proud to have worked with both him and Rebecca.
Brioche Bandit
Last week, we spotted Boris Becker, famed bankrupt, taking in the scene at Frieze London, before we retreated to take a break at Gail’s, where the cheapest lunch we could find was an egg and cress sandwich at £6.50 only. We’re not the only ones to have been shocked by these cliff-face mark-ups. In previous years, we heard of one famous broadcaster who was seen to pocket the pastries rather than hammer the BBC company card at the checkout queue. We’ll be taking answers on a postcard as to the identity of this Takewell Tart (sorry in advance for that pun, it’s been a long weekend, and this newsletter remains, at the time of writing, entirely free).
Salon des Refusés
We do always want people to subscribe to the magazine, which is available at the laughably cheap price of £25 per year, so we can pay our writers, editors and illustrators fairly and keep expanding the project carefully. Do sign up if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter; we want to keep it free for everyone to read.
There’s not much money in advertising for upstart publications, and there are not that many upstart publications full stop, so we were really rather happy when Kyle Chayka and Daisy Alioto of Dirt-fame asked if we would like to collaborate. They run a daily newsletter by selling NFTs, and their designer, Mark Costello, made a special little guy called Filthy especially for us.
If you’d like to read more about this sea-change in how media companies can fund themselves, then do read this profile by Brian Ng, in which we briefly feature. And if you’d like to buy a version of Filthy, then do hit up this link here. We wrote a little something on the Anglo-American discourse surrounding Succession to christen this minting, which we hope you find to be a nifty piece of TV critique.
Lastly, we’re aware that some of you are a bit perturbed by our NFT experiment. (Please don’t be: we haven’t announced a branded partnership deal with Chevron). Subscriptions are our chief revenue source, and will always remain so. If you’re passionate about what we do, support us by subscribing today.
Kersal Massive
When did the UK become a joke country? We’re not into self-important op-eds at The Fence, and we’ve been doing our best to zone out of the news, but when an American journalist asked ‘what is your favorite character from the UK extended universe’, it suddenly became grimly apparent that we’re overdosing the rest of the world with levity.
At the same time, some of the replies are pure-spun silver, but if you are looking for the goldmark of this particular genre, then do treat yourself to Ginger Joe and his freestyling Lancastrian posse.
Hang Tough
Our features editor, Séamas O’ Reilly, released his first book this year, a memoir of his childhood growing up on the Irish border with his ten siblings after his mother passed away when he was five years old. It stayed at number one in the Irish book charts for seven weeks, and has now, thanks to a photogenic rugby player, become a very funny meme about childhood bereavement.
Let us let you in on a secret: most writers are pretty strange people, given to monologue, deceit, and self-pity. Séamas, however, is not only extremely funny online, but even funnier in real life, and the most generous, thoughtful and collegiate of colleagues.
He’s the beating heart of so much that you love about this magazine, and it would make our day if you were to hit up this link, scroll halfway down, and vote for Did Ye Hear Mammy Died as the Dubray Biography of the Year: an act of corruption we can all get behind.
Stay Blunted
For reasons that will be revealed very shortly, we have spent a lot of time reading about the Cambridge Spies: very possibly the most mind-blowing slice of 20th century British history. Just imagine: a group of upper-class men in their twenties, high on their brilliance, vow to their Soviet handler to infiltrate the heights of the British secret service, and then achieve that very goal; only to flee their country, betray their friends, and finish drunk and lonely, quietly unable to discard their caste in their Moscow dachas.
It’s the inspiration for one of the best books never to win the Booker (The Untouchable by John Banville, if you’re keen for a book to read, re-read and re-read again), and some of the most interesting long reads before long reads became a thing (check out this quietly furious and drily funny essay by Noel Annan here).
Among them all, Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess is the inscrutable clown king, his outrage, cleverness and ribaldry leap from the page. How amazing, then, that we have the only recording of his voice, to hear those rich Edwardian tones, to listen, as it suddenly sways into the most perfect parody of Winston Churchill, and to get a hint of the oceanic levels of charm that allowed him to get away with it all.
Citizen Smith
Here is a pure moment of accidental Partridge, it seems, as a man in his mid-thirties raps about Palestine to a static audience of aging politics nerds.But behind the saucy quote-tweets, it captures the spent, tragic energy of one of London’s criminally underreported subcultures.
The performer is Kareem Dennis, better known as Lowkey, and in the early noughties, he was by and large regarded as the best underground rapper in the capital. Back then, there was no Dave, or Stormzy, or Krept or Konan. Black British music was never near the charts or the broadsheet review pages, but there was an extraordinary blip of creativity around about 2004 which still flies low under the radar, and should be celebrated more.
Klashnekoff, Rodney P and Skinnyman are the three artists from that era who are name-checked today, and you can read this profile to find out more about their trio of game-changing albums. (And Alex ‘Skinnyman’ Holland is one of the wisest, warmest voices around, how he is not on national radio is a scandal in itself).
As a young rapper, Lowkey was signed to the Poisonous Poets, whose first and only album is regarded as a touchstone for British hip-hop. The guiding force behind the group was Doc Brown, better known as Ben Bailey Smith, the younger brother of the novelist Zadie Smith. Doc Brown has since reimagined himself as a comedy artist, but back in the mid-noughties, he and Lowkey teamed up to make this stone-cold classic.
Were they to have made the album ten years later, they would have been featured on the cover of the Guardian weekend magazine, and toasted their success from the top of the charts. But as it is, Doc Brown is known as Ricky Gervais’ sidekick, and Lowkey is Chris Williamson’s warm-up act.
In Case You Missed It
New research confirms that Vikings were in North America a pleasingly specific 1,000 years ago exactly.
Adrienne Jeffries and Leon Yin explore what happens when you click Buy on an Amazon purchase. Spoiler: almost exactly what you'd think.
VICE drop some premium eaves at Inferno, London's best worst nightclub
In a cheery read for fans of the fourth estate, McKay Coppins - a favourite in the genre of American journalist names that sound like consultancy firms - investigates the secretive hedge fund shuttering American news rooms.
Nicky Haslam launders another delightfully arbitrary list of nouns AKA things he deems common, this time in tea towel form.
40 years after taking his shot, a new singer songwriter has entered the game
And Finally
Even as noted and devoted cineastes, we were new to the following impossible crane shot from 1964 movie Soy Cuba, which starts impressive, becomes astounding and quickly becomes so miraculous that it still has us scratching our heads, and really puts the cámara in camarada. Although, being a 1964 film imported into YouTube, you might want to turn the definition up a smidge.
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That’s the lot for this week. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, please screenshot, share or subscribe, and we’ll join you again very soon.
If you’d like to chat to a member of the editorial team, then reply to this email. It's always a pleasure to talk with our readers, and we really relish ‘connecting’ with you all, and we really do mean that.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday, and speak soon.
All the best,
TF
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