Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a relentless Tuesletter. Issue 19 has continued its miasmic swarm across the planet this week, popping up in Katowice, Tangiers and as far as Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building, over 10,000 miles away.
All three of these jet-set entries have been tossed into our Bolly tombola, and you could be in with a shot at the champers if you send us a picture of your Issue 19 somewhere strange and wild. The weirder you go with it, the more likely you are to be quaffing fizz with your next copy, so shoot for the stars.
If you’re missing the very thing that can get you into the mix, then please do not fear. You can buy a single copy here, or in WH Smiths all over the country. Alternatively, you can subscribe for the year by clicking the button below.
In today’s buffet trays, we have brimming dishes of gangland bacchanalia, thumping literary beeves, and a nod to comedy mags passim. Let’s get the ladle out.
COURTNEY LOVE
You wait for one thrilling dive into the world of Dave Courtney and then two come along at once. Last week we were thrilled to publish Clive Martin’s bittersweet elegy to the dodgy don himself, in which he surveyed the late celeb gangster’s life and legacy via a trip to his Whitechapel wake. It’s a sterling piece of reportage that got a fair few tongues wagging – just ask ruler of all media, Richard Osman – and, as such, we commend it to you emphatically.
But it also stirred something within friend of TF, Hussein Kesvani, who was moved to recall that he, too, had a late period run-in with the big man. We’re delighted to share his story below.
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Of all the memories I have of being inside Dave Courtney’s house, the most lasting was being fed a breaded chicken strip by a bald, middle-aged man sitting in an inflatable jacuzzi while 80s synth pop played in the background.
Out of boredom and intrigue, I had arrived at ‘Camelot Castle’: Courtney’s walled-off, slightly crumbling abode, immediately recognisable by its faded array of England flags, imitation regalia and a large mural of Courtney and his mates depicted as mediaeval knights one evening in the early summer of 2020. It was the night of Courtney’s annual summer carnival.
Having seen him advertise the party to the public, and realising it was the around the corner from my flat in south-east London, I put on the only dress shirt I owned, and headed to the first house party I’d attended in well over a decade.
For most of my life, I tried to avoid house parties – a fairly difficult task when you live in the Kent suburbs without any means to get out. I could pontificate over my hostility toward them, intellectualising the suburban house party as a reflection of one’s position within an inconsequential social hierarchy. But really, I think it was just that I didn’t drink alcohol, which, arguably, is the whole point of house parties to begin with. Which meant that my memories of the house parties I did attend, all ended in the same way: my mates drunkenly getting off with whatever girl they’d met and got drunk with that night, while I sat in a corner, playing Snake on my phone.
Now, at the beginning of my thirties, I hoped Courtney’s Carnival would help me get over my hostility toward them. For years, I’d heard about Courtney’s open-invite parties, where members of the British public would be able to mingle with self-professed retired gangsters and lesser known actors from TV soaps. If they got lucky, they could even get a picture with the big man himself, posing with replica guns, swords and knuckle-dusters that line the greying white walls of his house.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsFJWsGi4QU
While I had expected the party to be as bizarre and raucous – after all, I had only known of Courtney as a notorious gangster – I had been surprised by how subdued the whole event was. Guests were reminded of the good relationships Courtney had with the police, and as a result, there would be no tolerance over the use of ‘illegal shit’ in the premises. There was an abundance of party snacks available, and as far as I could see, no fights breaking out in Courtney’s home bar. The guests themselves were a mix of Courtney’s personal friends – some who were depicted as knights in the aforementioned mural – local fans of Charlton Football Club, and fans who’d travelled to the edge of south London for the purpose of taking a picture with Courtney before rushing to get the train home.
Throughout the evening, Courtney had been surrounded by fans taking selfies , making him pose with his fist against their chin, which meant that I sadly never got to meet the man personally. Nevertheless, I was touched watching the elation of his die-hard followers, many of whom will have attended his funeral earlier this year, who had clearly waited for this moment their entire lives.
The carnival hadn’t changed my opinions on house parties, but they did show why they are often beloved memories. It’s rare to find someone who can truly make you feel at home.
You can follow Hussein here, and listen to his excellent show Trashfuture anywhere that pods are cast.
People Used to Laugh
We’re not a comedy magazine. We try to be a funny one, while very much understanding that it’s not our place to say whether we are or not – even saying so tilts us dangerously close to sincerity, which is a feeling we have long since grown allergic to. Anyway, good thing we were two decades from existing back in the mid-nineties, where not one or two but threelaugh mags hit the British market, and Prof. G. N Martin was in the thick of it all.
Read the good Prof’s excellent feature, which casts an eye over a distant golden age for British comedy fans, right here. (Sidenote, but how many Cook’d and Bomb’d members do we have subscribing? Email editorial@the-fence.com if you are or were, purely out of curiosity).
Got Beef?
The internet has been abuzz with the greatest rap beef of this, or possibly any, generation, with Drake and Kendrick Lamar trading bars and barbs for the past few weeks. At time of writing, there have been nine tracks exchanged back and forth, although this number could also be listed as eight or ten, depending on your strictest definitions, and may have grown by the time of publication (there were three exchanged in one 24 hour period this weekend). One of those, Lamar’s Not Like Us, has just broken the all-time record for most one-day streams in Spotify history.
This is, by any definition, a very big story. Trying to put the entire thing into a coherent form has been difficult - on which more presently - but the best attempt we’ve thus far read has come from Ryan Broderick, and his ever-excellent mailout, Garbage Day. There, he makes the salient point that coverage of said beef appears to have been hurdled by the total atomisation of the online media ecosystem, and pored over mostly in the wild west of reddit, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.
Frazier Tharpe penned the first detailed explainer some weeks ago, and it has been updated to include some further volleys, (but not, annoyingly. the most recent tracks exchanged). As things accelerated in the past week, others got in on the act and now everyone from the BBC to Yahoo Singapore have added their own. Each of these cleaves, shall we say, closely to the beats of Tharpe’s original, which is expectable even if it does rather conjure imagery of journos hurriedly looking over the class swot’s shoulder in the last few minutes of their final exams.
Gone, it seems, are the days of immediate, forever-updateable explainers from the millennial-crowded desks of digital media behemoths, all of whom had numerous expert staff on hand to demystify the ebbs and flows of any story to us mere normies. In its place, we find an oddly hesitant media establishment, either trying to cobble together pieces from their rivals, or - we might surmise - dropping a line to any of the 10,000 culture writers who’ve been sacked since 2020 to see if they’ll do something for them at a moment’s notice.
Among this beef’s other notable features – allegations of paedophilia, Ozempic use and leaking fake scandals to your opponents and then rapping about doing so – the fact that it might be the canary in the coalmine of culture writing’s inability to keep up with itself, may yet be the strangest.
In Case You Missed It
Simon Hattenstone on the Kafkaesque nightmare of Britain’s indeterminate IPP sentencing.
Francisco Garcia explores the tales and tunnels of the infamous Hackney Moleman.
Guy Kelly has a piece bursting with salacious details of the secrecy, spycraft and skullduggery of MI6/KGB double agent Oleg Gordievsky.
Tom Whipple on the incredibly moving story of Carol Jennings, who forever changed the course of Alzheimer’s research with a single letter in 1986, and has since succumbed to the disease herself.
And, a modern classic from a few years ago by Burkhard Bilger, on Paris’ premier plumassier, Eric Charles-Donatien: nest-featherer to the stars.
And Finally
With Drake and Kendrick wafting the sweet scent of beef toward our nostrils, TF has been scrying the archives for our favourite intra-pseud feuds of yesteryear.
A good place to start might be this rat-a-tat compilation of the best spats from BBC 2’s The Late Show, featuring a plethora of artsy types getting into the beginning strokes of a conversational death match, among them Toby Young (with hair), Sarah Maitland, Christopher Hitchens and Tom Paulin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWkxT7Zm6C4
A highly commended must go to the Susan Sontag v Camille Paglia spat which proffers one entertainingly droll diss from Sontag (included below), and a seemingly endless parade of gerbil-velocity responses from Paglia (which you can find on your own).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mmi03G5oV0
But, while Vidal and Mailer – and to a lesser extent Vidal and Buckley - are for many the bellwethers of belles-lettres belligerence, our own favourite might well be this stunning tête-à-tête between Dame Barbara Cartland and Jackie Collins.
Taken from an episode of Wogan in 1987, it starts at fever pitch around the ‘evil’ Cartland feels Collins writes for ‘perverts’ and only becomes more unhinged from there, as Ed Asner looks on with very little to say about matters at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtXmlZH7Ldw
We offer thanks to aylwin.bsky.social and Panti Bliss for reminding us of the above, and humbly ask that you send us your own bygone beefs in response.
Drink up, last orders, that’s us done and what a pleasure it was. We hope you’ll join us again next week for more of the same. Waiting on your copy? Message support@the-fence.com and we’ll hunt it down for you. Got a story? Reach out to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll take it from there. Until next time.
All the best,
TF