Dear Readers,
Welcome to the latest iteration of Off The Fence, our fortnightly newsletter-slash-propaganda arm. We love drill music here, and we hope you do, too. Plus, we have some Julie Burchill archive content for the normies and a letter from COVID-free New Zealand. And, of course, we also have our speciality: jokes at the expense of the LRB cakeshop. But first, a necessary amendment.
Correction
In our last newsletter, we reported that Ferdinand Mount had refused to write for the TLS under the editorship of Stephen Abell due to a perceived decline in standards. We were wrong. In fact, Mount refused to write for the paper in protest at a wave of redundancies under the current editorship of Martin Ivens, though he has subsequently contributed to the TLS’s Books of the Year roundup.
We apologise wholeheartedly for any offence caused, and we’re happy to have had an opportunity to set the record straight.
A Whole in the Net
There is a six-foot six rapper by the name of Dutchavelli. He’s had three singles in the top 40 this year, and has been longlisted on the BBC Sound of 2021 And he’s also just been accused of sending inappropriate messages to a 14-year old girl on Instagram.
The artist, whose real name is Stephen Fabulous Allen, denies any wrongdoing on his part. The mother of the girl has defended him. But what of the girl’s father? His name is Robert Powell, and he was shot dead this summer, outside a pool party, which was held, allegedly, by none other than Dutchavelli.
From 1999-2001, eight men were murdered on Lower Clapton Street. The bloodbath led to the road being christened ‘murder mile’ by the tabloids. The massacre was fuelled by gang warfare, at the centre of which lay Robert Powell.
Known as the ‘Fox’, Powell’s Instagram account is still live, and contains a fascinating snapshot into this story. The man on the left is Mark Lambie, ‘the Prince of Darkness’, and leader of the Tottenham Man Dem (TMD). The man on the right is Powell, who was an ‘elder’ in the Hackney crew who operated under ‘LOM’ or ‘Love of Money’. The photo is subtitled ‘Once upon a time’, and was taken, most likely, in the early nineties, before the postcode war between the two men, and their rival gangs, left bodies all over the streets.
These aren’t low-level criminals with occasional access to firearms. Lambie is one of the most infamous gangsters in London’s history. At the age of 14, he was acquitted of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock during the Broadwater Riots. He is alleged to have been behind multiple homicides. As the leader of the TMD, he was ‘prom. nom. one’ (prominent nominal one) for the Metropolitan Police’s special unit: Operation Trident, a collaboration between police and local leaders to address crime in London’s black community.
In 2002, Lambie was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He had been torturing a rival with a hammer, a hot iron and boiling water. But his victim escaped, desperately alerting a police car who had been tailing the mob boss. Chimes nightclub, the site of three murders associated with the gang war, is now a hipster pub where they serve halloumi fries with yoghurt and pomegranate.
And what of the police operation that paved the way for this real-life satire of gentrification? Well, that’s dead in the ground, too. Operation Trident looked to rebuild trust between the police and the black community, led by respected leaders. You can see that relationship in action here.
But the whole thing was binned back in 2012, and by none other than Boris Johnson, who was then Mayor of London. Why does this all matter?
It matters because so few people know about this part of London’s recent history. As a journalist told Graeme McLagen: ‘My news desk is just not interested. To stand a chance of getting in the paper, unless it’s a murder or a very quiet day, these court cases have to involve either two people being shot, a child, or an innocent passer-by, who’s preferably white.’
Riding out on the Chelsea Opps
Lekan ‘CB’ Akinjosi is well known in the UK drill scene, not least because he’s currently spending 23 years at HMP Belmarsh for pointing a shotgun at police officers during a car-chase. Safe to say, he’s living alright there. He’s finagled a flatscreen TV and a phone, so he can broadcast his views on Jamie Laing and the rest of his toffish crew.
We can only sympathise. Who among us hasn’t got frustrated by the cast of the country’s most exclusive and irritating reality TV show?
Watching Sausages Get Made
Digga D is one of the most exciting artists on the UK scene. His videos and lyrics have to be approved by the police as part of the conditions of his release from prison. It’s a state of affairs that’s reminiscent of the 1950s, when the Lord Chamberlain exercised powers of censorship over the British stage.
Or is that exactly right? This programme from the BBC certainly makes for unique viewing, in which we follow Digga try and get on the straight and narrow after his release from HMP Feltham. Here’s a guy selling a lifestyle about the London hoods, a life he knows all too well, but making music from a hostel in Norwich, interspersed with visits to Harley Street to see an eye specialist.
You see, Digga got blinded in jail. And he tries to act tough, but by the end of the program, you just want to give him a hug. He has all these vultures circling, desperate to keep the golden goose laying those eggs. And he wants to keep his credibility while keeping himself safe.
‘Happy Christmas!’ – A Letter from New Zealand
A typical Kiwi Christmas is quite weird. It’s summer here, with temperatures in the high twenties, maybe even thirty degrees by Christmas. What’s odd is people do sing Christmas carols in New Zealand, especially In The Bleak Midwinter. They make dense, heavy Christmas cakes and full roast dinners, even though all you really want is a cold beer, some fresh fish and maybe a salad with some dried cranberries thrown into it.
And this year’s Christmas looks, for me at least, to be pretty normal. Last weekend I went to the beach, got my first sunburn of the season and went to a friend’s Christmas party. This weekend, I will gather for a long, boozy lunch with about 15 members of one side of my family. The party will not be over until my cousin bowls out my Dad at cricket. I will go to my local bookstore, making my way across a shop floor that resembles a mosh pit, to pick up beach reads for my family.
Admittedly I will scan a QR code when I enter the shop – I also might wear a mask, but I also might not, and that won’t be a big deal.
On 25 December, I will wake up, slather SPF 150 all over body, put on a red dress, have strawberries for breakfast, put on red hat with a fake-fur trim to open presents with my grandfather, move the outdoor furniture into the optimal ‘half-sun, half-shade’ position, and have lunch. By all measures of the meaning of Christmas – family meal, consumerism and strange traditions imported from Scandinavia – I will be having a very standard Christmas. Hopefully, this year, I will not fall asleep in the sun.
But not everyone will be having such a nice time. Commentators overseas paint NZ as an island paradise, and for a locked down audience, it would be easy hold up Jacinda Ardern as a red-clad Santa delivering the Christmas that our country deserves. But many here will spend Christmas Day unemployed, worrying about how to put food on the table, never mind presents under the tree. Unlike in Australia, which simply raised benefits for all as a result of COVID-19, Ardern’s government created a two-tier benefit system. If you lost your job on 1 March, you received nearly twice as much you did if you lost it on 28 February.
NZ is the only country in the OECD without a capital gains tax – and house prices simply will not stop rising. This means that if I buy a house, rent it out for five years, make no improvements to it at all, and sell it in five years at a huge profit, none of that income is taxed.
Meanwhile, some people will spend it in Auckland Women’s Prison, where, it was recently revealed, guards are spraying pepper spray into cells, and 60% of the population are Maori. All those classic Kiwi Christmases across the land, including my own, will be taking place on what is stolen land. New Zealand has a very high rate of youth suicide – twice that of the US and five times that of the UK – and it’s even higher among Maori.
As for New Year’s Eve? While Christmas traditions make more sense in the northern hemisphere, New Year’s Eve is simply better in New Zealand. Our Glastonbury equivalents take place around 28-31 December and schedule their headline acts for 11pm on New Year’s Eve – albeit this year with a line-up of all NZ bands. Although the nation did just vote to keep cannabis illegal, (in a nail-biter referendum which could have gone the other way if Ardern had supported legalisation), pill-testing at these festivals has now been made legal.
This New Year I will do what I always do: go to the beach and make salads while my sister cooks a fish caught by a male relative, drink my parents’ wine and, at midnight, tipsily text my UK friends, 13 hours behind, at 11am: ‘Happy New Year! I am in 2021 and I am telling you it’s great!’ I really hope that it is.
For Those in Need
Over Christmas, we are continuing to collect money for St Matthew’s, Burnley. They are keeping their flock from the edge of starvation, with a long winter ahead. If everyone who reads this newsletter gives just £5, we would hit our target easily.
My Teacher is a Monk!
You may have read that a school near Windsor has sacked a teacher, and you might be surprised that this is national news. In the world of private education, there has been a bigger story still. Ampleforth, the establishment of choice for the country’s Catholic elite, has been advised by the government that they can no longer accept new pupils, as they are not taking safeguarding with the appropriate degree of seriousness. Which means that it will probably shut down, unless they can overturn the decision on appeal.
Ampleforth is lodged in a valley at the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors. There’s a fantastic documentary from a few years back on this isolated, curious place. Most programmes of this sort are glorified PR for the ‘fabulously British’ institutions, but this one plays out differently. For whatever reason, Ampleforth granted too much access to the filming crew, and they couldn’t help but capture the quiddity of the boarding school experience: the Olympian eccentricity, the obsession with chuffing cigarettes, the low-level evil of certain members of the teaching staff. Plus, 16-year-olds going to the pub and being served pints legally. Filmed in 2003, it feels a long time in the distance right about now.
Booze and Gaffes
The publishing house of Little, Brown have decided that, after all, they won’t be publishing Julie Burchill’s screed on the war on the woke. And fair enough, too. Burchill has courted controversy in a manner that rings rank to contemporary ears, not that’s news. Camille Paglia hooked her right way back in 1993:
‘Apparently you are someone who once made a claim for yourself on the basis of her working-class roots. This may have been useful once, but obviously several decades have passed and the hypocrisy of your present position is becoming all too clear. Blow your old, dusty proletarian tuba with all your might, but the unhappy truth is that for many years your life has been one of coterie privilege and dining clubs, a cozy, smug, chic literary insiders' set that would turn the stomach of any authentic member of the working class. You have become a sheltered, pampered sultan of slick, snide wordplay, without direct experience of life of any kind. As a writer approaching midlife, you lack vision and deep insight.’
Monet, Monet, Monet!
When does someone’s money become unacceptable? It seems that might be the case for one particular family. The Sacklers have accumulated a $13 billion Oxycontin-tinged fortune, and now London’s museums are starting to refuse their hand-outs. But what about the other benefactors?
At the National Gallery, our leading cultural institution, the Ahmanson Curator in Art and Religion is sponsored by Howard Ahmanson Junior, an evangelical Californian tycoon, who was one of the chief sponsors of the infamous slice of anti-gay legislation known as ‘Proposition 8’. In 1985, he gave an interview in which he claimed ‘my goal is the total integration of biblical law into our lives’.
And he’s splashed the cash over at the British Museum, too, where he has helped with the acquisition of the Lacock cup and the conservation of many other paintings. Given his political views, it might not be wise to tell him about the sexual preferences of some little-known artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The issue between public art and private patronage is a thorny, eternal issue, and it doesn’t even resist the most ridiculous ironies.
(This is an excerpt from a larger investigation in Issue 6, which you can select to buy here).
Radical Chic
We were delighted to see our little riff on the London Review of Books play well online (and even with some contributors themselves). And for the avoidance of doubt, we are long-standing fans and subscribers to ‘the paper’. When we were formulating our own magazine’s identity, this portentous essay by Jonathan Coe on our current Prime Minister was firm in our minds. What is the point of satirising an establishment when they can co-opt that satire themselves? And by endlessly mocking politicians what do we say about ourselves? Needless to say, it still reads brilliantly today.
Four to the Floor Beats
The ludic musical genius Dean Blunt described contemporary Berlin as ‘the biggest coffee shop in the world; nothing happens, it's purgatory for people who failed in their own countries.’ Well, there’s been quite the turn of events down Kreuzberg way of late. Veteran DJ Daniel Wang has unleashed a Facebook rant about fellow DJ and erstwhile neighbour, Peggy Gou, in which he alleges that she is a tyrannical kleptomaniac who treats her employees with sheer contempt.
Now, some people are of the belief that Wang is misogynistic for relaying this particular opinion. What we would say is this: the world of ‘underground’ dance music is a curate’s egg. At its worst, the repetitive soundtrack to the grim jet-set elite; at its best the repository of some of the most interesting cultural movements around. Our album of the year is Beatrice Dillon’s Workaround, which makes big, bold steps in rhythmic invention, but it didn’t even make the Mercury Prize shortlist. What’s certainly true in all of this is that there are double standards at play.
The Great Trango Tower
Every time we put out an issue, we sit back and wait for the plaudits to roll in. ‘Hey guys’, we want you to say, ‘I love the print magazine: it’s a perfect meld of continental chic with a distinctly British sensibility’, or ‘the way you give a platform to young writers is so cool’. But no. What they say is: ‘the newsletter is great, especially the extreme sports videos’.
Well we won’t disappoint you, then. Here’s probably the best extreme sports video of all time. In 1995, before Go-Pro was just a twinkle in Red Bull’s eye, two Australians summited, for the first time, the world’s highest vertical drop. And then base-jumped off it.
***
After the year that’s been, flinging ourselves off a Himalayan precipice sounds like an enticing prospect. But we will be back between Christmas and New Year for the final Off The Fence of 2020. In the meantime, you can get in touch with us by replying to this email. And do subscribe to the magazine, please, if you think people should be paid for their work. There’s a link just below.
All the best,
TF
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