Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence: it’s the final newsletter of the year. We hope you are having a proper Christmas still – six more days to go if we’re playing things by the rulebook – but we imagine some of you are back in the office, grimacing over a lunch al desko. To close the year out, we’ve got a proper bumper edition to see 2024 out.
Issue 22 continues to be snapped in all places fashionable. On Chris Coates’ Christmas tree; at the Valetta public house where Oliver Reed met his end; resplendent at W H Smith King’s Cross; on the beach in Colombia; in transit somewhere in the English countryside and here is a very cool photo of a TF tote bag in the Spanish desert, which is not really in keeping with the rules re: ‘photos of the magazine’ but is too good not to include.
Remember: you can win a very silly and eminently drinkable prize of Bollinger Champagne by sending in a snap of the magazine via our social media or to editorial@the-fence.com.
If you haven’t yet picked up a copy, you can do so by clicking on the photo below or get at it via the orange-red button.
We are on the brink of summitting 2,000 new subscribers for the year, which if we achieve it, will just make us very happy indeed. There have been 1,967 fresh sign-ups in 2024, and there are almost 25,000 of you reading this newsletter – double what it was at the start of the year. Let’s do this.
Last week, we celebrated our 12 most popular pieces of the year, and so we thought we’d shine a light on a few truly outstanding pieces that offered an insufficient sacrifice to the SEO shamans.
Flanks & Shanks
Lauren Bensted wrote a beautiful piece about the John Martyn festival in County Durham, in which 100 or so devotees of the late singer gather for a weekend of songs & laughter. If that sounds a bit generic, then we can assure you that this article is anything but – there are also a number of astute observations about elderly hippies. (Though are all ‘real’ hippies elderly now? Discuss.)
It is astonishing, almost surreal that John Banville writes regularly in these pages. He’s one of the greatest to still be doing it, and in Issue 21, he remembered his most memorable meal, a lunch of truffles and polenta cake in an Umbrian taverna. Finished with a coffee, ‘a smear of thick, rich mud’.
It has been a busy year for our pints correspondent, Jimmy McIntosh. While starring in Instagram Reels for the world’s largest brewing company has taken up much of his schedule, he also found the time to retread the steps of an infamous binge in the shadow of Heathrow Airport. Few writers under 40 – even 50 – write about London with the intimacy and brio that Jimmy summons. We’re delighted that he’ll be back for the next issue.
Since Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Belgrade has welcomed an influx of Russian emigrés, some 300,000 in number, a remarkable influx for a country of six million people. In the capital, Belgrade, the newcomers have rubbed up the locals the wrong way, as Camilla Bell-Davies reports. Did you know that Russians love Irn Bru? Now you do.
Orlando Whitfield is, in his own words, a ‘failed art dealer’. He is also a retired motorcyclist and a voluble natural wine enthusiast. His first book, All That Glitters, was hyped and excerpted in this very newsletter at the start of the year, and has since been deservedly garlanded with praise by the New Yorker and the NYT. In Issue 20, Orlando tells us of his encounter with ‘The White Whale’, a would-be collector of staggering vulgarity.
On Boxing Day two years ago, the writer Hanif Kureishi fell over in Rome. When he woke up, he was paralysed from the neck down. His son, Sachin, reflects on a year of caring for his once-carer with stark honesty, of the manifold indignities and unexpected joys that have sprung from the accident.
There is a restaurant on Beauchamp Place called Ciro’s Pomodoro that has been open for 46 years. The owner, Ciro Orsini, claims to have been been best friends with Patrick Swayze. ‘I have his ashes in my house,’ he tells Margaret Mitchell. He also contends, in all seriousness, to have discovered the secret of eternal life.
Too Monstrous for Words
One other highlight of the year? We revived the Carbuncle Cup, crowning the Lime Street redevelopment in Liverpool as the worst new building in Britain, and it proved something of a boon to locals, which was the point of it all, really. We aren’t going to run the competition next year, but it will be back in 2026 – something to look forward to.
Backstreet’s Back Alright
As much as we love raiding the BBC archives for vintage jewels we must salute their contemporary broadcasting, and the three-part series Boybands Forever is very much worth your attention (commissioned at three episodes because there are so many celebs involved? Who are we to say).
The first outing starts in 1991, and charts the respective breakthroughs of Walthamstow’s E17, and Manchester’s Take That, two groups of boys steered and preened by two much older men, Tom Watkins and Nigel Martin-Smith respectively.
Martin-Smith is at great pains to place the band’s successes through the prism of female sexual liberation, which is a bold claim to make.
Simon Napier-Bell – like Watkins and Martin-Smith, a gay man – managed Wham in their heyday, and also wrote a gloriously unpretentious history of British popular music, titled Black Vinyl, White Powder. The book kicks off way before The Beatles and The Stones, in the mid 1950s, when the industry was essentially run by three gay men: Lionel Bart, Joseph Lockwood and Larry Parnes.
As Napier-Bell writes, ‘Parnes’ technique of titillating his own sexual tastes by cleaning up working-class boys and sending them out to sing… became the template for all gay pop managers.’
And, really, it’s through that prism that Boybands Forever should be enjoyed – look to Take That’s first video under Martin-Smith’s aegis for vivid confirmation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpqAXZI0s0s
(Simon Napier-Bell – still with us at the age of 86 – strikes an agreeably soigné profile over on Instagram.)
That Man of Kent
Will Nigel Farage be our next Prime Minister? Probably not, but we’re not in the business of political divination. Yes, it would help if Elon Musk wasn’t able to give $100 million to Reform UK, but it would help more, we reckon, if people stop giving money to a certain pressure group for their grandiose and twee stunts that only serve to bolster his legend.
Prior to his entry to the House of Commons in July, one of Farage’s principal income streams was on Cameo, the video greeting app where celebrities charge a sum of money for a personalised video. This is one of many compilations of Farage’s greetings, prompted by Gen-Z streamers, and is much subtler and funnier than, say, LED lights screaming vitriol by Clacton pier. And, of course, the youngsters paid for the messages themselves. Much more dignified, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sii85r68RRs
A Pedida e Samba
For the next week, you could go for contemplative walks in the foggy afternoon gloom, read bracing works of literature, get on top of life ‘admin’, or you could sleep in till lunchtime, piss around on your laptop and go on the razz with your cronies. Either way, this Floating Points five-hour Boiler Room set is the ideal sonic accompaniment for the amber glow of the end – and the rebirth – of the year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiy05zewUpg
Bruvshead Revisited
Some small portion of you will have suffered the company of fake rudeboys in the past, watching, as they commandeer dining rooms of seven-bedroom houses in Notting Hill to ostentatiously roll spliffs; blazing trap music off tinny speakers and just generally disappointing everyone, not least their parents. As Clive Martin observes, most of them grow out of it by the age of 28, before becoming sommeliers, tree surgeons, sober coders, yoga impresarios, reality TV producers and in the odd case, bona fide criminals.
But not Tom Hardy, the A-list Hollywood star and private school alumnus with ten of millions in his bank account and a burning point to prove at the ripe old age of 47. In this video interview with Complex, Hardy unleashes the exact mien and vibe of a bandana’d Boomtown-er anticipating a particularly rotten set of GCSEs results (despite the efforts of a fleet of patient tutors). It really does have to be seen to be believed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC5mgE_wxsc
Would You Like to Write for Us?
We are still open for pitches for Issue 23 and beyond, and have space for a five-star feature and a top-shelf short story. Vitally, we will need texts by the end of January, so do get in touch with us at editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll attend to you there. Please do read the pitch guide before sending your submissions through, and do have a good old look through the website to see what has proved successful in the past.
In Case You Missed It
A lot of great artists died this year – Maggie Smith, Donald Sutherland, Quincy Jones, Kris Kristofferson, Paul Auster, Edna O’Brien. But none of them were as singularly dedicated to their craft as Frank Auerbach, who is remembered here by his son, Jake.
In a banner year for new music, Gary Grimes tots up the ten best tracks by queer women – though allow us to direct you immediately to Tinashe’sNo Broke Boys. Something for everyone there.
Why are professional rugby players behaving worse than ever?
The case for having lots of children.
At the cinema, was this the year of ‘elevated trash’? (This phenomenon is not exactly new, in our view.)
And Finally
At the age of 85, when most people are dead, if not dribbling in a care home, Nicky Haslam is still putting away a pack of cigarettes a day (and a bit more besides). In this interview with Bella Freud – she of the squiggly jumpers – he also provides one of the great interviews of the year, offering toasts to departed friends, glorious put-downs and a detailed guide to dyeing one’s pubes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU_0hxxx5Ks
That’s it for this year, not week, year. It’s been a fantastic 12 months for TF, and thank you to everyone who has written or illustrated for us, and to everyone who made our new website be birthed like Aphrodite.
We’ll be back in our usual Tuesday slot from 7 January onwards, and there will be a shining new mail-out joining you all very soon. It’ll be a bit different in topic to this one, that much when we can tell you. In the meantime, we wish you a very happy New Year.
All the best,
TF