Dear Readers,
Good evening and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter with a spring in its step. Summer may be winding down but we are ramping up for our new issue and dare we say our best yet – start counting down the days. While we may be working away on issue 29, our summer offering has been characteristically gallivanting far and wide, seen entwined in a subscriber’s garden, taking a dip in east London, admiring Edinburgh Castle and paying a visit to Hawker’s Hut, the smallest National Trust property, perched on a clifftop in Cornwall. From one end of Britain to the other, it has also been papped at Iona Abbey in Mull, contemplated the distant silhouette of Mount Olympus in Greece, as well as enjoyed a platter of pinchos in northern Spain. As we finish our next issue, the window starts to close for this iteration’s competition, so do get your photos in while you can – there’s a bottle of very decent fizz on the line. The photos don’t need to be taken in exotic locales, either. We welcome everything through to editorial@the-fence.com or tag us on social media.
We are continuing our special eight-for-four magazine deal, but only for the first ten people who subscribe to the print magazine, wherever they are in the world. So do move with indecorous haste to bag yourselves four mags for free.
And so we soldier onto the business of the day - this week we consider multiple Ricks, results day, the seedy underworld of noughties nightlife and a fantastically bad film with a fantastically lucrative reception.
Great Expectations
We have heard some pretty solid intelligence as to where Harry and Meghan will be resting their heads for their reverse-Megxit. And it makes their unexpected departure from their Montecito manse make more sense…
Murder on the Dancefloor
Howard Spooner has had a life like no other, a real-life Guy Ritchie biopic. The Chelsea club king has partied with royals and shaken off Verender ‘Indian Dave’ Sharma. If you ever went to Embargo, Public or Crazy Larry’s, then you’ll want to read this profile from Clive Martin. Plus it’s got some truly unbelievable Prince Harry anecdotage. It’s free to read here.
Singin’ Em
Usually, we try to keep this newsletter smart and inventive, not just throwing random stories and content at you, but finding ways they connect to things in the news, or a great piece we’ve just done. But sometimes, the content asserts itself, sometimes the need to share our discoveries is so urgent that all we can say is here is the thing, gaze upon it.
So it is with celebplaylist, an Instagram account dedicated to finding music performed by anyone famous for anything but music. There is Patrick Stewart’s greenscreen Rawhide, Rodney Dangerfield’s rap single that made the Billboard Hot 100 and, our favourite, Rick Moranis doing a lounge version of The Vapour’s Turning Japanese. A true piece of media madness.
Rubin It In
One of the more depressing signs of the state of the music industry these days has to be the recent appearances of Rick Rubin in Polymarket ads. For those who are good at smelling a rat, Rubin’s untrained, produce-by-vibes, woo-woo-infused music career has always been somewhat of an eyebrow-raiser.
But for a long time, it was just hard to argue with some of his achievements. Yes, he produced Kid Rock’s album Born Free but he is also the man who reinvented Johnny Cash’s career with Hurt, quite possibly even saving Cash’s life in the process. He also had a near-legendary ability to jump from genre to genre – rap, metal, country – Rubin could do it all.
So we could put up with him occasionally sounding off QAnon talking points on Twitter, asking Anderson Cooper to meditate with him on Sixty Minutes to ‘just like, get… here’ and listening to music on objectively awful-sounding air-tube-based headphones to avoid Bluetooth-related brain damage.
Now he’s appearing in dystopian ads for Polymarket – the now notorious ‘prediction market’ – which appeared at the UFC America 250 event on the White House lawn and promoting AI tools as the ‘new punk rock’. His book called The Creative Practice is a mash of contradictory faux-Buddhist nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUEpQ8VyR1k
What Rubin’s career perhaps demonstrates most clearly is something we’ve written about closely over the last few issues. The modern music industry is all about business, the music is secondary. Was Rubin’s reinvention of Cash’s career a piece of genius musical reinvention or more of a smart rebranding, making a once famous name attractive to a new round of investors?
It all feels much closer to the processes of selling and marketing that Sarah Haque described in her piece Burning Cash at the Wah Wah Hut… and we’ve got even more insider intel on in the upcoming issue.
Risky Business
Tom Broughton, founder of Cubitts, once thought his company made spectacles and sold them to people. How quaint! Writing in Issue 28, Broughton reveals how as the popular spectacle brand grew it transformed altogether, revealing the real implications behind scaling up.
A New Obsession
Fans of this newsletter will know we love a truly bad film – not Odyssey bad (whose badness is even banal) – but something that goes so strange and awry as to push the limits of art; we love the outsiders. And it is hard to think of a more enjoyable example of late than Niu Lai, a Chinese film made by a mother and son duo over five years.
It’s an animated film about a prolonged dream of a newborn calf, and boy is it animated. It was made in a free software called SketchUp, an architectural modelling programme that they bought second hand, not designed to animated feature length films. It gives the film a mad look, like if David Lynch’s special effects guy on Dune was asked to do an animated re-make of Marley and Me in a weekend.
Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang wrote, directed, animated and voice-acted the whole thing with a total production cost of a few hundred dollars. The resulting quality was a concern, and the film was nearly canned, but Xin had a friend in the studio, so out it went to the people. The film’s promotional campaign consists of one poster, total. Cinema staff were forced to draw their own to place around their theatres.
But after grossing just under 1,000 quid and being seen by just 236 in its first week and a half, virality took hold. People have flocked to see a film whose animation would get anyone flunked from any film school anywhere. It has now grossed over seven million dollars. Given its budget was 200 dollars, it has just dethroned Obsession as the best ROI on a film of all time, generating a 3,499,900% increase on its production cost.
You can watch an appropriately badly ripped version below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDOqyb5VSdA
The Centre of Excellence
It’s that time of year again, when teenagers wake up at the same time as the rest of us and open (now presumably prop?) envelopes nervously on BBC Breakfast to find out if they’ve secured their first choice. A cohort that might have been armed with a decent level of confidence are the sixth formers at Brampton Manor, an institution that goes viral year on year for its increasing ratio of students securing Oxbridge places and, in case this may happen to slip under the radar, gallery of beaming graduates posted with their results to their X feed. However, the stories behind these results are not quite so heart-warming, as a report from Francis Martin reveals back from Issue 10 – detailing how an obsession with grade stats and Oxbridge count has come at the detriment to the wellbeing of both staff and students, from accounts of brutal quality control to intimidation and bullying.
In Case You Missed It
K-pop fans side with Ian Paisley.
RFK Jr.’s phone calls him a quack.
Becca Rothfeld eviscerates Rachel Cusk.
The hip-hop stylings of Siggy Retts take our feeds by storm.
Therapists speak out against therapy speak.
We’re on the brink of a vaccine for skin cancer.
Little Snoring and Greater Snoring have been roused by a police-raided rave.
Amazon’s drones are delivering packages into pools.
And Finally
The children’s baking book, filled with glassy photos of how to bake and construct cakes in the shape of all manner of objects – including a swimming pool, sandcastle or hedgehog – is basically a holy object for British adults under 40. There have been different iterations of the same sort of book over the years. Perhaps the most famous is The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, which featured what the authors have now admitted were several essentially impossible-to-construct bakes, including a duck with crisps for its bill and a pick-up truck mid-material dump of crushed biscuits. Googling the cakes is like stepping back into a warm bath of birthday imagination and disappointment. Parents, who are now grandparents, still shake their fist into the sky at the thought of these recipes. It was undeniably wonderful, though. The swimming pool made of jelly? Fabulous. Perhaps every child who requested that one received a puddle of sludge instead.
There are other cake-based memory lanes available on YouTube, including a series of adverts by Betty Crocker – remember those? We can’t find the UK versions of the adverts, but American equivalents are alive and kicking, and there are some especially great ones in the archive. One is a sort of educational video on the making of cakes through history, featuring a quasi and rather fierce Henry VIII chowing down a wedding-sized bake followed by a sort of austere, Edwardian gent stationed between two turquoise candles. He’s nibbling on a more sober cakelet. The final character in the trio is a woman, presumably Betty Crocker, who has no distinguishing qualities except being a baking fiend in a yellow dress touched by the fire of baking passion. These three characters are trotted out to represent the three great eras of cakemaking, and they take their charge very well indeed! It’s a charming doc-advert. The video also does much to continue Big Children’s Baking overrepresentation of the importance of cakes in daily life. Were all of us convinced that knowing how to make a rosette out of fondant would be a vital skill? Maybe it is, and we’ve all missed a trick. Viva campy cakes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6wKaLQ66r8
That’s that for this week. We’ll be uploading lots of articles for the rest of the year, which is exciting for us all. If you have any technical issues, drop a line to support@the-fence.com. Sharks existed 50 million years before the first trees appeared on land.
All the best,
TF