Dear Readers,
Good morning, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that aims to meet and often surpass expectations. We’re delighted to announce that we now have 15,000 of you reading this mail-out, which really is a lot. In further good news, Lotte Brundle has joined the team as editorial assistant. Lotte is charming, talented and funny, and you should follow her on Twitter.
We’re expanding the team slowly but surely, and there are lots of super exciting things in the pipeline. If you’d like you to score one of the back issues, you can do so here – there are a declining number of Issue 14s still for sale. Subscriptions remain our primary source of revenue: if you’d like to see us grow more, please sign up today from just £19.99 for the year.
Let’s get it going. Today we’ve got some top-tier bits about the Ambani wedding and Paul Mescal’s pub trips, but we kick off with a few words about a very exclusive club that absolutely anyone can join.
Who Do You Know Here?
Once upon a time, Soho House claimed to be an exclusive private members club that would eliminate the inherent stuffiness of exclusive private members clubs. This was a place for young, hot creatives to hang out, lounge by the pool, drink picantes, network with 19-year-old TikTok influencers and 48-year-old cokeheads who make B-movies about London gangsters. So went the dream!
But the dream could now be coming to an end; a new report, published today in The Guardian, claims the era of Soho House is over, thanks to its rapid expansion and lack of exclusivity, and the fact that it's haemorrhaging money in the process. The chain of private members clubs (a misnomer in its own right) published full-year results this week, with the bombshell revelation that in its 29-year history, it has never turned a profit, and that its pre-tax losses this year are expected to come in at about $73 million. ‘You can never get a table, it takes ages to get served, and you’re paying a lot for the privilege of being a member", one poor beleaguered member told the publication. ‘I don’t really know what the point is any more. It doesn’t feel special, I don’t feel special.’
Since its inception on Greek Street, Soho House now boasts 200,000 members and locations in exotic locales such as Shoreditch! Jaffa! Balham! And (soon to come) Manchester! Disregarding how obviously and deeply unchic it is to derive specialness from your admission to the Ivy-ified chain club, it’s perhaps it's fitting that the company is losing its touch on its 29th birthday; once you turn 30 membership of the east London edition of the world's least exclusive club jumps from around £83 per month to £150. And they don't even do free pick'n'mix anymore. We should also mention that no member of The Fence has ever been a member of Soho House.
Mescal Slammers
If you go down to the pub tonight, you won’t believe your eyes. Throngs (yes, throngs!) of glamorous women are showing up at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington every weekend for a pop at the champ, one Mr Paul Mescal. Their prize: an A-list rendezvous, a Gail’s Bakery breakfast and an NDA to sign. To get the skinny on this incipient Mescalmania, we sent our new editorial assistant, Lotte Brundle, down to Islington for her very first dispatch – and like a 16-year-old Wayne Rooney against Arsenal, she put it top corner from distance.
Kyle Chayka called it a ‘perfect piece of journalism’; the story then made it into the New Statesman Morning Call newsletter, alongside reads from Philip Pullman and Patrick Maguire. Best of all, Lotte’s piece formed the basis of a wonderful segment on Paper Cuts with Miranda Sawyer, Marcus Brigstocke and Rob Hutton. It’s every bit as good as they all say it is, and it’s still free to read right here.
The Chapel Of Love
Even if you spend more time than you care to admit on the ‘Sidebar of Shame’, rubbernecking away at the lives of the rich and famous, you’re still going to be pretty shocked at the level of excess at the wedding of Anant Ambani, the son of the richest man in India. Featuring performances from Rihanna, celebrity appearances from Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg, the cumulative bill for the extravaganza is estimated to be more than $100 million dollars.
The celebrations have been ongoing for some time. Some of you might admire this video of the Ambani’s golden retriever performing the role of ringbearer at the engagement party:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIwOOeitJXU
From the same bash, there’s a rather special vid of the whole family getting up and dancing for their guests:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m47U971xPAw
And if you’d like to read something that hints at the real enormous power of the Ambani clan, then you might want to check out this dispatch from 2014.
All At Sea
It’s always a joy when a contributor has a book out, and this week we’d like to direct you toward Maurice and Maralyn, an extraordinary debut from one of the very best feature writers in the whole damn biz, Sophie Elmhirst. If you’re au fait with Sophie’s work – which, if you’re reading this, you really should be already – you can expect more of the same: intricate, empathetic storytelling from a master of the craft, on a story so wild and unpredictable that it could only have come from real life.
Glowing reviews are already washing ashore: the Guardian, Observer, Times, Spectatorand Literary Reviewall say ‘buy buy buy’ like an NSYNC tribute act, and we do too. We urge you to grab your copy here for £16.99, before its inevitable inclusion on every non-fiction roundup between now and the end of the year. While you wait for it to land, read Sophie’s first piece for us from Issue 16, on a life spent agonising over the Highway Code. There’s more to come, too, in the next issue… but that’s something for another newsletter.
The Adolescents
Every issue, we have a fiction slot, and we’ve just published Issue 18’s story on the website for you all to read. Madeleine Brettingham is best known as a TV writer for the likes of Have I Got News for You and That Mitchell and Webb Look, and has crafted a moving short story charting a couple drifting apart in the midst of a cancer recovery.
That may not sound very funny, but there’s some great jokes in there, and we commend the piece to you entirely.
Yes Please, Yes Please
With prices going up everywhere else, we’re keeping our Saudi Pro League journalism at Vanarama Conference prices. If you like what we do, and you’d like to watch us flourish further, then do buy a subscription for the year. It really is both very good and very cheap.
In Case You Missed It
Sweden’s favourite upper, snus, is set to take the crown as the next nicotine craze. Anna North’s latest peers into the world of Zyn by nicotine multinational Philip Morris, the new gateway drug for tee-total Zoomers.
Axe a silly question: Mary Harron on Adapting American Psycho, for The Paper.
It might be time to give up email. Except this one, obviously. But all the other ones.
Miles Ellingham’s cover for FT Weekend magazine is a strangely moving tale of how profoundly moving it can be to discover a beached whale (a common experience).
Why can’t women be foot freaks too, dammit! Asks Hallie Lieberman, very reasonably, for Slate.
And Finally
The world seethed with glee at the Scottish Willy Wonka experience, and justifiably so. It is very much our belief that the internet deserves a Fyre Festival-style palaver every once in a while, just as a treat. Amid the mounting insanity, it surprised no one when the spectre of AI rose from the barren concrete wasteland of Box Hub Glasgow, and showed that the immersive event’s website, flyers, and even its script had been created by AI.
Giant-membered rats are popping up in science textbooks. Hong Kong banks are being defrauded of millions via complex heists involving deepfaked board meetings. It’s not yet been a year since we all laughed at ourselves for being fooled into thinking the Pope wore that big jacket that one time, and now Teslas are blowing through stop signs, US Airmen are divulging state secrets to Russian chatbots, and every third person on Twitter is a robot pretending to be an OnlyFans model with a pneumatic arse and fourteen fingers.
It seems as if this weird new future is everywhere, and Italian filmmaker Silva Dal Dosso clearly agrees, as her new short film attests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpNRfzwnXJc
The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF catalogues a lot of the uncanny madness of the present moment, from AI generated imagery and heavy robotics to the dehumanisation of the labour force and the janky landscape of digitally created culture.
If that description of the film reminds you of a certain golden-eyed, silver-haired documentarian, then the film’s deft cuts, music drops and blocky text even more deliberately invoke the style of Adam Curtis’ work.
As if to underline this obvious touchstone, Dal Dosso’s script is read by an AI rendering of Curtis’s voice, which – like everything these days – veers between eerie accuracy and baffling dissonance.
The future, it seems, is a foreign country. They do things differently here.
Bada-bing, bada-boom – there’s your Tuesletter for this week. We hope you enjoyed this edition, and as always, if you need us for any reason whatsoever, reach out to support@the-fence.com and we will try and solve your problems, whatever they may be. Until next week, we must bid you adieu.
All the best,
TF