Dear Readers,
Welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that’s twice-fried and then coated in sugar. We’ve spent the week finalising copy and perusing the flatplans and initial designs for the oncoming storm that is Issue 27. We’re really excited about this and as a fun, entirely pointless and indecipherable teaser, here are all of the writers initialled and slammed together: RMIWSHJBEQBLBAJNWKSHLBLCFMPJAELLHTM. You’re welcome.
The issue has been spotted as ever all over the shop. It was seen in sunny ‘Nuneaton’, and protecting Albion’s shores and also in WH Smith in Wimbledon, would you believe it.
We are entering last chance saloon for the photo contest, any picture with the mag out and about and sent into editorial@the-fence.com could put you in the running to win a lovely bottle of something sparkling.
The impending issue reminds us to remind you to subscribe, not least because the magazines are set to go from strength to strength. Our two new columnists – John Banville and Sophie Heawood – are getting stuck in from 27 on, and Cormac Kehoe’s investigative work – who’s just become a Tenacious Journalism award winner – is soon to give us scoops on scoops on scoops.
We have printed another ten tickets, giving you 20 per cent off for a year’s subscription. All you need to do is enter the code MARCH20 at checkout. It applies to print, digital and both, and to gift subscriptions too. Only ten available.
This week we brighten the spotlight on a nasty classical music gossiper and celebrate the return of a northern hero.
Out of Joint
Classical music is a world that does seem willing to ‘hold space’ for elders with incredibly sharp tongues. We heard tale recently from some hardened concerteers about the brutal words that came with their early training days.
One cellist remembered his Russian teacher fondly for asking him – at the tender age of eight – the following question: ‘Tell me what’s best. Should I fall asleep when you play, or should I kill myself? At least with the latter I wouldn’t have to hear you play again.’ A pianist recalled his teacher (also Russian) asking him the deeply un-PC question ‘David, why are you playing like a spastic?’ before turning to the child’s mother, sat next to her on the sofa, and saying, ‘Don’t you agree?’
And yet this world was recently at the heart of an overlooked Beeb scandal involving the comically named Norman Lebrecht. He’s long been an arch-nemesis for many musos who detest his gossip-font Slippedisc which boasts a supposed two million visitors a month. Needless to say the fire behind the sophisticate’s Daily Mail is much the same as the fire behind the regular Daily Mail: scandal, polemic and sleaze. Headlines include ‘Name an Italian symphonist – go on, just one’; ‘An orchestra chairman parades his prejudices’; ‘Colorado pianist kills three’; and ‘How Andris Nelsons told musicians he’d been sacked’, which was appears to be just a screenshot of the email Nelsons had sent to his colleagues.
It is a truly bizarre WordPress cesspit including amongst itself an agony aunt column (occasionally misspelled agony aun’t) which Lebrecht places in a ‘Daily Comfort Zone’ section. It contains strange advice and stranger quips. One such column, correctly advising someone not to try and prevent their ex coming to their school, ended with the strange note that ‘life is full of strange things’ and that the complainer should be glad that ‘at least you aren’t cousins’. Thanks Norman!
The recent fallout came with the BBC’s decision to hire Norman to do a series of high-profile interviews for Radio 3, a station he’s been broadcasting on and off with for 25 years. One of the stars he was set to talk to was Yuja Wang, a brilliant pianist who frequently draws ire from classical music’s near non-existent coterie of reactionaries for her audacious outfits. Lebrecht, predictably, is one and these, and has written some truly vile copy about Wang over the years including this piece for The Critic.
When Wang decided she’d rather not speak to the author of such a piece, he emailed her personally to say he was ‘surprised and disappointed’ and that he thought she was ‘a serious person’ but would now ‘revise that opinion’. Wang then promptly posted the email to her Instagram and Lebrecht no longer had a gig at the Beeb. It is a long-overdue decision, and will hopefully give Lebrecht time to focus on his busy schedule at Slippedisc where he frequently publishes up to eight articles a day, all written by himself.
Chillin’ on a Villain
Who here remembers James Stunt? A ludicrously colourful figure, who gave bombastic interviews, the former Mr Petra Ecclestone claimed to be crime lord Terry Adams’ godson. But was there any truth to this particular morsel? Michael Gillard has the whole story, and it brings together a cast of characters very much like a Guy Ritchie caper – press barons, mobsters, heiresses, etc. After you’ve read it, do dive into the feature he wrote for us in Issue 12, concerning a civil service mandarin with a taste for BDSM.
Bring out the Banns
As some of you recall, we measured up the heights of male journalists back in Christmas 2023, for no particular reason other than we thought it was quite funny, not least to cut down some of the heights. Well, the tabulator herself, Róisín Lanigan, married one of the entrants, Jacob Furedi, this past weekend. As Róisín writes, ‘negging works’ – one of the happiest moments in The Fence’s seven-year history.
Our Beau at the Ball
Sex clubs are not quite what they used to be, that is they are increasingly popular, just a little more mainstream, and, according to Karl, founder of Klub Verboten, the sex isn’t as complex as it used to be. Dan Beaumont – DJ and the founder of Dalston Superstore – spoke to Karl and a fellow sex club promoter Eden Topall-Rabanes in Issue 26 to uncover what is attracting people to club spaces where fucking on the dancefloor is the purpose of your visit, not simply a tawdry example of the prank generation. He uncovered a fascinating world of human connection, rules (‘Don’t Have A Solo Wank’) and of course ‘undulating arses on either side of me [that] made my exit feel like a Marina Abramović installation.’
Don’t be shy now, read it here.
She Walks in Beauty
A shout-out to a friend of TF, Katy Hessel, whose new book, The Story of Art Without Men: An Illustrated Guide to Amazing Women Artists, is out now, and you can get your copy here.
Overflowing with gorgeous illustrations by Ping Zhu, it’s sure to get kids – and parents – off their iPads.
Plus, don’t miss her monthly newsletter for the best art-centred content around… Sign up here.
Lubbly Jubbly
You know when a trend gets taken up by a politician, that it automatically dies. Step forward ‘Londonmaxxing’, which died this weekend when Sadiq Khan – not an unambiguously successful mayor of the city, as we and others have pointed out – changed his Twitter Bio (itself a deeply embarrassing thing to do in The Year of Our Lord 2026) to say ‘Londonmaxxing since 2016’. What is, or perhaps was, Londonmaxxing? Examples of it from social media apparently include posting photos of Canary Wharf that make it look like Dubai (minus the drone strikes), using the tube and going to Gordon’s Wine Bar. So far, so depressing. But of course, that isn’t to say there aren’t interesting or cool or inspiring things going on in London. We have been pointing them out for several years now.
The problem is that anyone using the phrase Londonmaxxing is most likely not going to be the person who can point you in their direction. If you want the real version of the trend, and the actual places to go, then you could do a lot worse than subscribe to our zoom in on London, the Capital Letter. It’s free, it’s sexy and – barring legal action – it will almost certainly never appear in a politician’s social media bio. Subscribe here.
In Case You Missed It
A very enjoyable piece by Sarah Simpkin, regarding film set trailer decor.
Veronica Horwell celebrates the life of the legendary journalist, Drusilla Beyfus, who has died at the age of 98.
Helen Mirren and Vin Diesel smoulder.
A great piece of recent London history on one of the best Instagram accounts around.
A group of young kestrels reacting to a butterfly is about as wonderful as it sounds.
Another tribute to Palmerston (cat). What a great cat he was.
Henry Mance meets Lord Mancroft for lunch at Bellamy’s.
The Times’ piece on Paul Bremer’s time running Iraq for the Bush administration is really quite something.
A happy, if belated, World Seagrass Day to all.
And Finally
We won’t pretend to be original with this one. It’s Gordon Ramsay. He has, of course, been parading around our screens for some time, shouting at people, pretending to be nice to people, cooking things, eating things, etc. He is so media perennial that the man has even prompted someone to create this visceral animation of his rage.
But if there is one chip off the Gordo mountain that we keep returning to, it’s this seemingly banal burger tutorial he once made for Good Morning America. It’s fascinating because it is a total car-wreck of incomprehensible Gordonspeak (odd stresses, syntax, vocab) and bad editing in the attempt to make it look like one, on-the-fly take.
It starts strong with Gordon intro-ing us with the phrase ‘welcome home’ (???), which is quickly followed by a slew of misspeech, mostly centred around a Joycean refusal to give the word ‘burger’ a definite article: ‘the secret of burger’, ‘once you put burger on the grill, the secret is to move it as less possible’; ‘ preparing everything beforehand stops the burger going cold and you want to eat it when it’s piping hot!’ He also confidently tells us that you cannot season a burger after it is cooked before throwing handfuls of salt at his flaming grill as if the devil had finally moved from behind your shoulder to under your coals.
Then there’s the sudden apparition of three new burgers around four and a half minutes in, and an entirely overwrought ‘assembly’ section where Rambo loses all sense of what the words ‘in’, ‘down’, or ‘on’ mean and attempts to cover this with the phrase ‘hold that baby’. A living hell from start to finish that ends with a double-clang name drop of Kardashians and Stevie Wonder. We’re glad Marco made him cry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM_KMYulI_s
And so another week’s missive finds its end. Do remember that we have beautiful ten tickets with 20 per cent off a year’s subscription at the shop here. All emails to be directed to editorial@the-fence.com or if you’re being technical, support@the-fence.com. Peter Mandelson is an anagram of ‘repent, sad lemon’ and ‘lean modern pest’. Until the next time.
All the best,
TF