Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, coming at you live from what is – what must be – the final glorious week of summer, and god it’s good. Almost as good as the issue we’re currently polishing up, our seventeenth edition, which is positively jumping off the pages as we bring it to the finish line. Once again, it is better than anything you can find anywhere else. More details to follow in the weeks ahead.
If you’d like to get your hands on a copy of our next edition, and the following three, then saunter over and subscribe for the too-good-to-miss price of £24.99 a year. Pound-for-pound, in every sense of the term, it’s the best thing going today, and your support and adoration will keep us roaring for 2024 and beyond.
Should you be feeling like a bit of a shopping spree, too, take a look at our shop, where you can rifle through our vanishingly rare back catalogue, and buy yourself a beautiful map of Merseyside and its cult heroes – we can confirm that not just one but two of the names on the map have now requested their own copy, so move fast and cadge one for only £40 a go.
Right then, on we go into this week’s newsletter. We’ve got a haunting inquiry into the activities of one Mr Wayne Lineker, but first, a ten-bell salute for the dearly departed Mohamed Al-Fayed.
Pharaoh…’Nuff?
A deliciously juicy skewering of the late Mohamed Al-Fayed by Tom Bower in the Sunday Times this week, a piece that we commend to you all. For those of us coming of the ages in the 00s and 90s, the Egyptian tycoon was a comedy figure, a funny old man who was friends with Michael Jackson and was stitched up like a kipper on the Ali G Show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bYjGHRX9dE
For the oldsters among you, Al-Fayed was a tragicomic character, a priapic parvenu desperate to join an establishment who despised him, a ludicrously horny old goat given to insane conspiracies. As the Bower piece lays out in detail, Al-Fayed was considerably more powerful – and dangerous – than that.
As this Channel 4 investigation suggests, Al Fayed was lucky not to end his life in a prison cell. But what if Al-Fayed was born in 1949, and not 1929, and had risen to prominence in the 2000s and 2010s? Would people have found him so funny then? Would TV producers be happy to have a man of his reputation dance around with a bevy of scantily clad women for casual entertainment? The past is a different country, they do things differently there, etc. etc. etc.
Fountains Of Wayne
If you’ve haven’t been able to get away this summer, or your one week away passed by in a blur of screaming children and/or neon-smudged nights, and you want to make yourself feel better about not getting away properly, then we strongly encourage you to book yourself into a retreat on Wayne Lineker’s Instagram account.
As some of you will know, and many of you may have sussed out, Wayne has a slightly more famous brother. Resident in Spain for many years, Wayne lives the life of a 22-year-old man at the age of 61. A plastic surgery enthusiast and a successful nightlife impresario, whose holdings include a Chinese restaurant in Ibiza called ‘Chi Kee Wun’, Wayne’s face is now just a suggestion – a mere, passing suggestion – of the face he once wore in 1992, when the BBC came to visit his bar in this fascinating little short:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeaUqTNksoY
Dancing with Diego
Football is back all over the continent, and with it, the hopes and dreams of every fan who has not seen their team denuded by Saudi money over the course of the summer transfer window. One such team, who saw their greatest glory in thirty years realised in dramatic fashion last May, is SSC Napoli; when they finally clinched the Serie A title for the first time since the age of Maradona, the city of Naples exploded with joy.
Here in London, however, a tightly-knit group of exiled Neapolitans were gathered in a tiny Italian restaurant in Notting Hill to capture the moment of excelsis, and the brilliant Francisco Garcia – our man on the inside – was there to share it with them. The story of that night, one of the jewels of the last issue, is now live for you to read online.
For Fence Sake! Just Subscribe
Thank you to Dan Sandison, supremo of Mundial magazine, who gave us a very warm shout-out on Twitter, which was well-received by all of us here.
We are putting together something that is pretty challenging – a non-partisan current affairs print magazine in a brutally tough marketplace – and we are largely succeeding. The year’s growth forecast is up by nearly 50 percent on 2022, which is pretty mega.
The Fence is going places fast, but we need you to subscribe to keep the aspidistra flying, so to speak. We want to be not merely the best but the biggest, broadest and most brilliant magazine this country has to offer, for many many years to come. Subscribe today and support us in that endeavour.
In Case You Missed It
James Greig meets TikTok’s bizarro trauma actor Lewis Saunderson for Dazed.
Isobel Cockerell investigates the Albanian town emptied by TikTok scammers.
Dean Nelson writes about Peter Wilby, the former Independent editor recently convicted on child pornography charges, who stymied Nelson’s reporting on child abuse for decades.
Megan K Stack reports on the ongoing search for answers in the 1989 murder of Pat Finucane.
Amanda Gefter gets to grips with the science of sleep and asks: what are dreams actually for?
And Finally
Several people have recently lamented the dearth of bite in contemporary culture writing. From music to art to literature, op-eds have been warning us for a while now that there is an epidemic of toothlessness when it comes to coverage of the media we consume.
Nowhere does this seem more pronounced than in the music business, where the once-unassailable position of music critics appears to have been all but eroded entirely. Those organs which remain viable – even when not literally in-hoc to the gambling industry – still appear reluctant to upset their major label cash cows by giving them anything but the most rabid and rousing rave review.
Which is all the more reason it would be nice to mention some of the reviews of Aphex Twin’s triumphant return to Field Day, captured below and uploaded by NTS in 360 rotation and 2K HD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkmo-LseN0c
The pans, it seems, were in. Angus Colwell’s review for the Spectator began with a throat-clearing declaration of his love for Aphex Twin, albeit citing four or five of his ambient works – from a catalogue of over 1,000 tracks across a dozen or more genres – as proof. This might explain his disappointment at the slightly louder, and more representative, showcasing of Aphex’s rave-heavy tastes on display in Victoria Park.
Colwell laments, in fact, that the show featured ‘[n]ot a hint of a hit all night long’, a curious complaint since it was a DJ set, and one which nevertheless featured dozens of objective bangers by Aphex himself, as well as Squarepusher, Ceephax Acid Crew, 4Hero and CEP2Plet. Perhaps mistaking these curated selections for live noodling, Colwell reports that che ditched the muzak. It was an attack, not a gig: stop-start blares, schizophrenic synths, artillery-fire drums with not a hint of structure, all set to contracting and expanding wild bright lights… A 50-quid, hour-and-a-bit troll.’
His sentiments echoed those of the Financial Times’ Miles Ellingham who, in an earlier takedown, declared ‘[t]he last 10 minutes veered dangerously into what you might describe as taking the mickey. His music became anti-music, with the beats per minute rising to absurd levels. It felt like being punched in the face over and over by a vindictive ancient god.’
All of which leaves us rather torn here at Fence Towers; on the one hand, we disagree with their sentiments quite strongly, but on the other, we can’t help reading their descriptions as inadvertently, and massively, appealing.
Perhaps, when you’re sent to review a rave, you end up giving a rave review whether you like it or not.
Bang! Done. Newsletter boxed off, sorted. Don’t forget, if you need something from us, or want to ask us something, or tell us something, or instruct us to do something, or just want to offer us money for whatever reason, email editorial@the-fence.com and one of our crack team of email-repliers (staff) will get back to you. Catch you next week.
All the best,
TF