Dear Readers,
Good afternoon – good lord, this heat – and welcome to a very, very special edition of Off The Fence. At long last, after two years of waiting, we are able to share some special and exciting news with you today, just in time for the heat death of the universe we are currently experiencing.
Before we do, however: last call for Fence subscribers who have changed their address in the last few months. Issue 24 is, in an ironic twist, arriving quicker than we anticipated this time around, so time is of the essence to save you retrieving your beautiful copy from the new tenants at number 56. Drop us a line at info@the-fence.com if you need an update, we’d be glad to get you on the mailing list for the first batch of #24s.
Aaaaaand, if your name isn’t down on that mailing list, but you’d really like to get an Issue 24 along with everybody else, then subscribe today. Print subs start at £29.99 a year for four gleaming issues of The UK’s Only Magazine – a staggeringly cheap deal for what we would humbly suggest is the best reading material currently on sale in the English language. Tap that orange button below and subscribe today.
Breadcrumbing over and done with, let’s move on to the good stuff. In today’s newsletter, we have recipes for forged art, safaris through the book clubs of suburbia and footage from sixties Mayfair, with the opening of London’s first tiki bar. But first, that huge announcement we’ve been talking so much about.
To The Pub!
Not sure if we’ve mentioned this, but we have written a modest yet nonetheless incredibly culturally important (necessary, some critics might say; urgent, even) book about The Pub. Going to the pub, being at the pub, the general concept and vibe of a pub. It is called The Pub, it is for the pub, and if you love the pub, you’ll want to bring The Pub to your pub.
The book is governed by the same principles as the print magazine: we pulled together a collection of ale-sodden stories from the length and breadth of the UK, leveraging the talents and the insights of our wonderful contributors, and welcoming in a few new stars for good measure. Our publishers blessedly allowed us to run riot with the vision for it, with all of our illustrations and peccadilloes preserved. The end result is the single Fenciest object we have ever produced; everything we stand for, everything we adore, lovingly compiled across 288 pages. Let us tell you a little more about what’s inside.
From the Fence team, editor and Grand Vizier, Charlie Baker, writes with grim affection for the humble north London boozer and the New Labour head honchos who spoil them. Kieran Morris takes the piss out of the famous Philharmonic urinals in his beloved Liverpool city centre. Fergus Butler-Gallie sinks a few in the Wetherspoons next to Beaconsfield Services, the only pub in the country to sit immediately beside a motorway. Séamas O’Reilly travels to the corners of the map to bring you the most northerly, southerly, easterly and westerly pubs in the country, and Róisín Lanigan takes a trip back in time to the Troubles-scarred pubs of Belfast.
There’s plenty here by Fence favourites old and new, too. Bron Maher’s chapter is a colourful history of London’s iconic gay pubs; Francisco Garcia celebrates The Laurieston, the best pub in Scotland; Ana Kinsella snuggles into the historic boozers of Dublin city, while Charlotte Ivers takes a trip back in time to retrace the unsteady steps of one of Soho’s greatest pintsmen. There’s appearances from countless other luminaries, from Katy Hessel to Tom Parker Bowles, John Banville to Simon Thorp and the guys at Viz, and a guide to pub behaviour from etiquette expert, William Hanson.
And as is our wont, along the way there are games and gags. Unsure whether you’re in a good pub or a bad one? Fear not for the rest of your days, for we have created The Fence’s pub bingo. Discover how on earth to get a pint at The Devonshire in under 45 minutes; read with avid interest a special pub-themed edition of our classic format, 146 Questions, this time with the alpha papa of British satire, Craig Brown. Although we’re never ones for exaggeration, we can safely say there is quite literally something for everyone here. Mark out 14 August in your calendar, and remember to behave orderly in the queues outside Waterstones Piccadilly. It’s the best book about pubs ever published. Pre-order today, without delay.
Riff-Raffle
To that end, we’ve teamed up with The Fence’s official bookshop partner, Backstory, for an excellent giveaway.
There are few cast-iron guarantees in British life; Wagon Wheels will shrink every decade, a new Pride & Prejudice adaptation must be made every five years, and a new call for ID cards will come from Uncle Tony Blair every six months. Another, however, is that pre-orders are the lifeblood of any literary endeavour.
We’re not exactly sure how it works, but the facts are these: the more of you pre-order our incredible Pub Book, the more the cigar-chomping fat cats at Big Book will lavish us with praise and attention upon release, which means more people will see said Pub Book, and make it easier in the long run for The Fence to continue producing our signature skits and routines, admired alike by the crowned heads of Europe, and the lowly common man.
So we're encouraging people to pre-order our incredible Pub Book directly from Backstory (who offer free delivery with promo code: UKSONLYBOOKSHOP). For this you are guaranteed to get the book before anyone else on the planet AND all pre-orders through this method will be entered into a raffle where the following prizes abound.
1st prize - A pub crawl with The Fence’s seminal sot, pints correspondent James ‘Jimmy Mac’ McIntosh (1 winner)
2nd prize – A year’s subscription to The Fence (5 winners)
3rd Prize – The latest issue of The Fence, and a copy of Issue 24, in one of our dazzlingly chic tote bags (10 winners)
Avail of this deal now and experience the broiling envy of your peers. And don’t forget to use promo code UKSONLYBOOKSHOP as you do so. Avant!
Reading Too Much, Into It
Despite being publishers of the UK’s Only Magazine, Newsletter and Podcast, we are not so hubristic as to deny the existence of other books – sadly, they’re out there, and as Tim Abrahams discovers, all sorts of people are reading them.
Over three years, the longest lead time that a Fence piece has ever had, Abrahams passed through every kind of book club he could find, from ‘Happy Hour for Introverts!’ to think-yourself-rich seminars, in search of his El Dorado: a book club where book people talk about books. The end result is a hilarious picaresque through modern literary life, and one of the most charming essays we’ve published in a long while. Turn up for the books, right here.
Like Your Idols: Nothing
A short recipe for guerrilla art forgery from our resident Wolfgang Beltracchi, the redoubtable Dr Mark Blacklock.
Having burnt a million pounds, Jimmy Cauty, formerly of the KLF, possibly has a greater need to make money than many of his generation.
Now trading as ‘toWerBlocK1’ for his guerrilla art doings, Jimmy retools pre-loved police riot shields to make art, repainting them with classic acid smileys. They retail for a cool £695, possibly putting them beyond the reach of the majority of readers here, but they're – to affect a voice here – quite a cool idea, sort of in the Banksy space, like, yeah, fuck the man, ACAB. They were even featured in Banksy's ‘Dismaland’ thing in Margate.
Announcing a new edition of 100, Jimmy wrote valiantly on Instagram: ‘We spent the winter searching the North of England for battle-scarred ex-police issue riot shields, we found 100, we took them to our South London HQ and spent 6 weeks dismantling, cleaning, sanding and painting them.’
Clearly, Jimmy's pith-helmeted minions have been almost implausibly bold and effective in their missions to the northern wastelands, bartering with the right-wing agitators and feral youths in Rotherham and Middlesbrough, converting last summer's trophies, carelessly discarded by legions of plod, into a frankly astonishing stock of designer shields. What a journey they must have made.
Those of us less courageous than these brave ‘art terrorists’, however, can buy them on eBay from Circular Surplus for £50 a pop, which would give us a very tasty 1350% mark up – were we able to command Jimmy's generous margin. Swirl some acrylic paint around, et voilà: your very own Jimmy Cauty, indistinguishable from a real one. And those of us who can't be arsed to do even that, eBay user ‘smileyriotshield’ does them for an artisanal £167.
For more tips on how to make your own DIY art forgeries, revisit Mark Blacklock’s fantastic guide from Issue 11.
A Loft Space and 21 Bitcoin
Staying on the theme of ‘art and bullshit’, our sparkling new podcast series, Money’s No Object, featured a fantastic interview with culture critic, Dean Kissick of Harper’s and The Atlantic, last week. Chatting with host Joe Bishop about the degradation of luxury, the insanity of hyperwealth and – crucially – how he’d blow a EuroMillions jackpot, this episode was the most thoughtful and insightful yet, and we commend you to listen to it.
You can do just that, right here on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else you find your podcasts. Stay tuned for the next episode, landing tomorrow with Guardian wine critic and long-time friend of The Fence, Hannah Crosbie.
Mappa Mersey
A familiar experience for millions: you’re staring into the milky-white Dulux abyss of your bare living room wall, asking yourself the same question over and over. ‘Why don’t I have a map of Merseyside’s most famous hanging here?’ For years, people toiled over this conundrum. Hasty efforts were made to splice images of Jimmy Tarbuck onto Ordnance Surveys of North Wales, but consumers were rightly unsatisfied, and the question loomed over Britain for decades. That’s when we stepped in.
The Pride of Merseyside is the only map that places Ian Botham, Elvis Costello, Paul O’Grady, Johnny Vegas and Andy Burnham in the same rogues’ gallery, like the green room of The Graham Norton Show in the dying days of the Brown government. It is gorgeous and stupid and £40 and there’s only a few left. Click it below, or go to our shop, so you can finally answer that existential question and live your life in peace.
Something Rotten
This is an advert from our friends at the Screen Rot Podcast. If you’d like to advertise in this newsletter, email Charlie Baker (cb) or Kieran Morris (km) at __@the-fence.com.
The venn diagram of Fence listeners and Screen Rot heads might well be a perfect circle, but for the still-uninitiated, let’s introduce ourselves. If you've ever wanted to hear forensic dissections of Eating with Tod, the TopJaw cartel or Schooner Scorer's satanic cabal, we are the podcast for you.
Rolling Stone called us ‘highly enjoyable and wonderfully irreverent’ and Miranda Sawyer (Fence contributor, Issue 22) told the Observer that listening makes her ‘snort out loud’ – but don't hold that against us. If you don't know where to start, here's some episodes that we think you might love:
Eating with Tod: what's better than an hour-long examination of Britain's favourite project manager-turned-taco tastemaker? As we found out, doing two hour-long examinations, which sent us up the wall a bit. The second one, this one, reimagines Tod as a deranged billionaire, and us as his court jesters, swathed in tallow for his edification..
The Schooner Scorer: Pitching the Schooner as this generation's James Bond, and a True Detective-style investigation of the shadowy ‘Chelsea Life Jacket’ brand. Squint, and it almost looks like journalism – but it’s not.
Emotions in Life with Ava Santina: where else can you get one of the country's foremost political journalists talking about a Bristolian TikTokker who does emotive rants about breaking up with your partner? Off Menu could never.
In Case You Missed It
The Guardian’s North of England editor Josh Halliday, with a searing survey on the ‘untreated illness crisis’ making Britain the sick man of Europe.
Constance Kampfner and Tom Duffy on the wild story of Peter McInnes, the flamboyant scouse businessman at the centre of a £330 million crypto Ponzi scheme.
The AI CEOs huckstering their way into all our lives are a disease, and Ed Zitron has a prescription: Make Fun Of Them.
With music consumers getting ever more squeezed, the Quietus’ Eamonn Forde warns that no amount of superfans can save the day.
A while back, TF managing editor, Kieran Morris, spent several months shadowing unwalleted football icon Jamie Carragher for the Guardian Long Read, in a bid to discover what makes him tick. You can now enjoy that piece with beautiful scouse audio.
And Finally
As London sweats, our thoughts invariably turn to sweeter climes, or specifically one of the western world’s weirdest inventions: the tiki bar. These weird, culture clash features of Edward Said’s nightmares were invented, inevitably, in America. Inevitably too, they were founded not by a Hawaiian but by a Texan born of German immigrants, who was known for being a serial liar and eventually changed his name from Ernst Gantt to ‘Don Beach’.
As the Atomic age dawned, so the tiki bar spread. The first one in the UK opened in London, in the basement of the Mayfair Hotel in 1963. British Pathé visited in this absolutely stonking film where, in trying to get teenagers to attend, the narrator describes the bar as ‘a geography lesson without tears or transport.’ Beat that, Saatchi & Saatchi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSoLllFyWqg
Enjoy, in particular, the Evelyn Waugh lookalike in black tie, who is resolutely refusing to drink the themed drinks, but instead raises a glass of brandy to his intensely pink face as he commits fully to perving on the hula dancer. At the end, he is eventually compelled to join in the dance as the announcer informs us, in a cut glass accent, that ‘you’ve just got to shake ya Hawaiian-style hips’.
Other highlights include the fact that the suckling pig – exactly what you want to eat in a nightclub – comes with ‘your own personal unused chopsticks to take home’, and the parrots which seem to randomly hop around the bar.
Nowadays the tiki fad is almost dead; feel free to peruse the 2.9 star rated reviews of Lola Lo, Reading to get a sense of why. Surely, if any country needs coconut cocktails, nightclub pork and cultural appropriation right now, it’s us. Go grab the Blue Curaçao, we’ll go check if Herb Alpert is still alive (he is!) – we’re bringing tiki back.
As they say, bosh – Off The Fence done, and book launched. Thank you for reading on this hottest of days, we’ve all earned a pat on the back for just making it through the day. We’ll be back with you tomorrow with the next episode of Money’s No Object, and after that, we will see you next Tuesday with another Off The Fence. For five weeks in 1013, the Lincolnshire town of Gainsborough was the capital of Denmark. Subscribers who have moved, send us your new addresses at info@the-fence.com. Pitches to editorial@the-fence.com.
I prefer buttons to hyperlinks
Until next time.
All the best,
TF