Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that doesn’t get ideas above its station.
Issue 22 is nearing completion. The daubs and designs are being finalised – it’s all very exciting. We have a beautiful new website launching next week, and there will be some special ‘merch’ landing soon. Lots to look forward to.
In the meantime, we have only a few copies of the legendary Issue 19 left in our shop, and you can fill up on some archive jewels here, or better still subscribe to the magazine from just £24.99.
Issue 21 continues to light the beacons across the world, as well it might. In the last week, it has appeared ‘neath the Temple of Aphaia on the Greek island of Aegina; in the chi-chi upstairs club of Quo Vadis; by the foothills of Mount Kenya; breakfasting in the former (and in many ways, current) headquarters of the Hitler-Jugend; crawling down the scorched remains of Notre Dame cathedral; and, of course, visiting Oily Rocks, the world’s first offshore oil platform, just off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan. We’re also in shops, too: the WH Smith in Victoria Station, and Rococo News in Notting Hill, to name but two of our myriad stockists.
Remember, all you need to do is take a photo of the magazine and you can win a bottle of Bollinger champagne, which is very decent of us. You can tag us on social media or you can send an email to editorial@the-fence.com if you’re feeling shy.
To business. This week, we’ve got a pasting for TopJaw, an Off The Fence debut for Katie Price, and a clip of a rapping Vincent Price (Katie’s grandfather) looking closer to death than Max von Sydow could ever muster. But first, we ride our hobbyhorse through the rickshaw-strewn streets of Soho.
‘Ey! We Ain’t Walkin’ Ova Here!
Sadiq Khan has overruled the Labour Council in Westminster to pedestrianise Oxford Street. But this is not good enough. There is now a clamour among local business owners for the whole area of Soho to be pedestrianised. Somewhat predictably, this has enthralled various policy wonks of the ‘expect graphs!’ variety.
A worthwhile journalistic endeavour would be to take a closer look at the Soho Business Alliance, and what proportion of the 150 businesses that comprise the SBA have Soho Estates or Shaftesbury PLC as their landlords.
The list is overwhelmingly made up of restaurants, bars and clubs that would reap the rewards of pedestrianisation. Residents, it goes without saying, are understandably opposed to the neighbourhood being turned into La Rambla.
And, to be honest, so are we. We will be covering this parish tussle in the weeks to come. Stay tuned.
Gentleman’s Relish
As some of you will know, our office is above The Windmill Nightclub on Archer Street, on the very floor where Paul Raymond ran his empire in the pomp days of Soho sex trade. A few weeks back, a heavy-set man appeared on the landing, poking his head around. When asked what he was up to, he told our staffer that ‘he was representing the new landlord’, which was certainly news to us. He didn’t answer any further questions as to his identity or plans for the building.
A curious episode, yes, but made all the clearer when we read Michael Gillard’s latest exposé of the Soho vice trade, where it is revealed that the new leaseholder of The Windmill is… Spearmint Rhino. Soho, we can tell you, still glistens with sleaze.
England’s 1001 Best Opinion Pieces
Sir Simon Jenkins posits the theory that the year 1974 marked a revolution, of sorts, in which the people rose against the town planners and architects who were razing historic city centres and replacing them with concrete council estates. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s great to see Jenko still doing his thing in his ninth decade, and we were particularly fascinated to hear of his encounter with Graeme Shankland, the architect-planner whose grand vision for his home city earned him the sobriquet the ‘butcher of Liverpool.’
Fascinatingly enough, Shankland, a lifelong Marxist, chose to live on perhaps the most Elysian street in Hampstead in a nice early Victorian stucco house that would sell for £8 million in today’s market.
We may well have shown this before, but you really should watch this short film by B.S Johnson, which comprises a series of interviews with Paul and Alison Smithson, a husband and wife duo who theorise, in all their humourless grandiloquence, about their designs at the Robin Hood Gardens (they lived in a Victorian house just off The Boltons). Sometimes people really just embrace the form of the cliché.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH5thwHTYNk
When I Tread the Verge of Jordan
Sussex-based novelist and equestrienne, Katie Price, appeared on Louis Theroux’s podcast recently. They had a good old natter on a variety of subjects, including her sojourn at Evgeny Lebedev’s Umbrian villa. At the supper table, and in front of her fellow guests – including Boris Johnson, who was then Foreign Secretary – a pissed Price lifted up her top and exposed her breasts to the party, before roaring the immortal line, ‘Champagne and Pricey don’t mix.’
According to her, the story is cobblers, completely made-up. A tabloid absurdity. But according to two – count ‘em, two – of her fellow guests that evening, we can assure you that the incident definitely happened as described.
Our Issue 21 cover story is a profile of Lord Lebedev, one of the most colourful and controversial figures the capital has ever seen, and proudly reveals this ludicrous exchange alongside dozens more details about the former host of Big Brother’s Bit on the Side. Do read it here.
Smoke ‘Em While You Got ‘Em
In some corners of the UK, they’re mourning the impending death of disposable vapes. Not here in Fence towers, where we work under a constant cloud of Vogue smoke and consider Lost Marys to be a crime against good taste that should be punishable by death. If you haven’t already, you can pick up a limited edition print of our Soho Map Of Vogues, signed by the artist and available now on our shop. But you’ll have to be quick because there are only fifty of them and we can’t guarantee they won’t incur office smoke damage if you dilly dally. But at least they’ll be fantastically yellowed and you can claim they are antique. Tout de suite!
Reel Content
Secret Chef has returned to turn the tables on the critics after a brief three-year interlude. They first put down the pans and picked up the pen to skillet Jay Rayner, then it was Giles Coren’s turn to take a filleting – before Marina O’Loughlin took the big five stars from ‘SC’.
TopJaw are a comely duo of short video content mavens who have somehow become embedded in London’s fine dining scene. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Our knife-wielding correspondent has a very firm idea about who the culprit is. Sliced and diced right here for your delectation.
In Case You Missed It
Dear Limey Assholes: 20 years on, here’s the best correspondence of the Guardian’s Clark County project, in which the papers’ readers tried to convince American voters to cast their ballots for John Kerry.
The New Yorker’s Lydia Davis asks: do you remember school?
Simon Bradley writes about becoming a trainspotter, for the i (God, such an awful title to italicise).
Screed supremo Tom Lamont with a boffo longread on John Burton, the British young gun at the screaming peak of roller coaster design.
And it’s an unmistakable highlight of the year as Jimi Halloween — in which Japanese people compete to create the most mundane costumes possible — returns.
And Finally
We are already in our costumes ready for Soho’s Halloween festivities. As soon as this newsletter lands with you all in fact, we’ll be in the area’s finest All Bar One, doing the Time Warp in perfect synchronicity.
We are also enjoying the musical stylings of the godfather of Halloween, Vincent Price. Back in 1987 Pricey appeared on the Joan Rivers show to deliver a chilling spoken word rendition of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpEfX1IKEak
Price recorded his rap for the song in just three takes, which he described as ‘fabulous’. We are inclined to agree. Sadly, as his payment for the performance, Price was offered either a $20,000 flat fee or a percentage of the album proceeds. He opted for the latter, which in fairness is not bad for a morning’s work.
He also received a lifesize framed photo of Michael Jackson from the man himself.
That is it for this week. A pretty good outing today, we reckon, and do remember that this little digital jaunt is much inferior to the 64 pages of raw menace that comprise the print magazine, so do subscribe today. If you would like to speak to us about an order or a technical issue then please do email support@the-fence.com and we’ll attend to you there. Until the next time.
All the best,
TF