Pop star, soap star gone bad in Strippers Vs Werewolves — but who?
❚ THOSE JAUNDICED EYES are usually piercingly blue. And if the ears are few sizes larger than in real life, those fierce fangs won’t please his hordes of female fans either. This poster for a new spoof horror movie features one of Britain’s favourite pop musicians and ex-TV soap stars, but we’ll leave you to put a name to the wolverine face he is given in Strippers Vs Werewolves.
Due for release in October, SvW is one of the most hotly anticipated British films of 2011, and promises to be a rip-roaring gorefest, according to Hollywood News. It is is directed by Jonathan Glendening (of last year’s werewolf film 13 Hrs) and the ultimate horror movie star Robert (Freddy) Englund was persuaded to make his British feature film debut as a sinister werewolf pack leader. Producer Jonathan Sothcott of Black & Blue Films said: “Robert has a dignity as an actor that lifts any film he’s in.”
Superman actress Sarah Douglas plays the owner of Vixens, a London strip-club where a werewolf chief played by Billy Murray is accidentally killed, prompting his bloodthirsty wolfpack to seek retribution. Which is when our jaundiced pop star falls foul of the next full moon. Guessed who he is yet? Click here for a clue.
Farewell to Hils: the spoof front page every good hack deserves to cap their career
❚ YOU MIGHT EXPECT a diamond-encrusted Rolex watch from the chief exec when you retire as fashion director of a national newspaper running a 20-strong team chasing trends on five continents. Plus a rope of Chanel pearls from a secret admirer. You’ve already been feted at a starry slap-up reception hosted by your employer and the British Fashion Council for your 26 years’ worth of being an international icon of the fashion press. But the one present you’re really never quite braced for comes when you invite all your fellow hacks down to the local tavern to see you off the premises. It is the best present in every hack’s career: an unholy spoof front page starring you, in which all your “friends” rib you mercilessly over your really annoying habits, and your little foibles — such as the menagerie of animal furs you’ve worn on your head from racoons to foxes to ferrets. Or for the sake of argument, your taste for Marlboro Lights, Maasai jewellery, a straight bob cut by Warren at Nicky Clark, and large glasses of wine beside your laptop while you tweet hourly to your 183,000 followers.
The highly sarcastic page will make you cringe when it’s presented in the pub, because they obviously choose the worst possible picture of you they can find. But you preen secretly as you bask in the indirect admiration of your workmates — which will never before have been expressed to your face by anybody in the highly competitive newspaper business — and you’ll frame your impudent page and hang it in the bathroom with pride. It is better than any Oscar recognising a lifetime’s achievement.
Last night near The Daily Telegraph’s office in Victoria, it was the turn of the doyenne of British fashionistas, Hilary Alexander. If she’d worked on a glossy magazine the page would have contained a handful of satirical coverlines. But a broadsheet newspaper page can hold about 2,000 well-crafted words. Having dealt with Hils’ trademark hats in row of pictures across the page top, a selection of stories dug for dirt. We read of a recent fashion emergency which brought chaos to Heathrow airport when the star writer’s dongle would not work and World Travellers piled in to help. “This is nothing,” the doyenne commented. “I once sent copy on a Hussein Chalayan show from a nightclub in Brixton at 1am.”
“Me and Hils?” Marc Jacobs wants to be photographed with Hilary in the tribute video
Another story deals with her passion for cats which rank up there with Karl, Stella and Donatella. Then there’s a report from Karl Lagerfeld’s allotment where he is pictured sporting green wellies, while another attributes a craze for sparkly hairspray to the “Hilary effect” following a TV appearance. But the splash, as we pros call the lead story on the front page, reveals Hils’ secret yen since her schooldays — she always wanted to be an archeologist in the footsteps of Jacquetta Hawkes, who also favoured a neat line in floppy brimmed hats while digging for relics. Funnily enough, the one present Hils could have done with last night was a trowel.
Hils and Karl: this report is entirely a spoof report from her Telegraph tribute, Monsieur Lagerfeld, in case you were wondering
The breathless splash tells us: “Telegraph editors are braced for a run of front-page stories about developments in ancient Babylon. With Hilary Alexander shifting her sights from fashion to archeology, midnight calls to the news desk are expected reporting events in Mesopotamia. “The writing is on the wall for Nebuchadnezzar,” she may be shouting down the line. Another day she could bring news of a rehang in the gardens of Babylon.” And so on.
The truth is of course that Hils will continue to write about fashion as a freelance, just try to stop her. A close second-best present was a fabulous series of personal tributes in the specially commissioned video first screened at the Fashion Council bash earlier in June, where everyone danced to Hilary’s playlist of Abba, Queen and dance anthems long after midnight (she is an inveterate nightclubber). Friends had a chance to view the video last night at the St George’s Tavern. In it BFC chairman Harold Tillman says unreservedly: “She deserves the highest honour you could possibly give somebody in her profession — she is brilliant.”
➢ View a Telegraph Online video of the lavish party celebrating Hilary Alexander’s career, plus a slideshow of the evening:
British doyennes among fashion commentators: Suzy Menkes (International Herald Tribune), Hilary Alexander (Daily Telegraph), Anna Wintour (US Vogue) caught on video celebrating Hils’ retirement
+++ ❚ FABER AND FABER EXCITEDLY ANNOUNCE they are to publish Jarvis Cocker’s Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics, in October 2011. Only days earlier the prestigious publisher of T S Eliot, the leading poet of modernism, unveiled their monumental digital milestone The Waste Land for iPad, itself probably the mightiest poem of the 20th-century. Now they have signed Pulp’s singer and songwriter, as a spry chronicler of Britain’s common people fast achieving the status of a national treasure. In the video [above] Jarvis talks to Faber publishing director Lee Brackstone about writing lyrics, his inspiration, habits and thoughts on putting together his first published collection.
It was shot on the day he’d signed the contract, three weeks before today’s announcement and right after the reunited Pulp’s triumphal UK comeback at the Isle of Wight festival after a nine-year absence. Jarvis is visibly thrilled to bits and he gives a hugely entertaining interview. “I fell into the thing of writing lyrics when I was 15 because nobody else would. It was like homework, it was as appealing as that. The first lyric I ever wrote started, Shakespeare rock, Shakespeare roll.”
He tackles the risk of writing cosmic bilge, his breakthrough precipitated by an accident when his gaze shifted to the everyday, and the influence of Scott Walker who married realism to cinematic orchestration: “I liked his song The Amorous Humphrey Plugg [deft and witty lyrics by Walker from his 1968 album Scott 2] which is about slipping on a newly waxed floor… a humdrum everyday thing with a massive orchestral backing. I’d been looking for the epic in the everyday. I don’t think everyday life is mundane. I’m curious about what keeps people functioning.”
◼ THIS WEEK BASSIST ROMAN KEMP told Hemel FM: “We’ve only been around for eight months so we’re amazed by how it’s been going. The other day we were confirmed for the Wireless Festival on Sunday. We were amazed. Playing before Pulp!”
OK, a bit of artistic licence there. The club scene’s dynamic pure-pop teen band Paradise Point are scheduled to strike up at exactly 15:20 in Hyde Park, which is about four hours before Grace Jones goes on, to be followed by Jarvis Cocker’s band Pulp who top the bill at the three-day fest. All the same, Kemp wasn’t exactly overdoing the crowing rights. This gig is a huge coup for a bunch of live 18-year-old popsters without a recording deal.
In the audience for Paradise Point at Islington’s O2Academy: Spandau manager Steve Dagger and Martin Kemp vote Roman Kemp’s band a hit. So no surprises there, then.
Call of the Wyld is a blogger who “tracks young, new and exciting bands as they emerge” and last month he wrote: “This lot are sex on legs and even if they weren’t actually any good they would still find it hard to walk on stage without being shrieked at. Fortunately their music is excellent too. These are real pop gems — certainly 80s inflected, but delivered with a whomp and panache that would put a lot of other acts to shame. The Only One is a track that is going to get them a lot of attention.” As a taster or three, view PP’s live debut last November (below), videoed by Shapersofthe80s, scan our first PP concert review and give the Hemel FM interview a spin:/%20
Two of the BBC monkeys: Robin Ince and co-host Brian Cox
❚ WHETHER OR NOT YOU BELIEVE in miracles, there was something pretty phenomenal about a BBC science show coming from the cabaret marquee over a ley-line at the Glastonbury rock festival, which some people believe is where the make-believe King Arthur’s sword was forged. Inevitably the show had to be fronted by that rock-star among physics professors, Brian Cox, he of Dare/D:Ream fame and today just about the biggest boffin in the telly cosmos. Yet today’s Radio 4 show, The Infinite Monkey Cage, billed as a comedy series, scored a spectacular first in the eternal struggle to explain science to people who think crystals run the world. Confronted with the potty view that scientists are no different from priests for “believing in” their theories, Cox & Co drew a very clear line between mysticism and the rational scientific method in, oh, two minutes flat.
A couple of hippy-dippy guests played the village idiots. Yes, Billy Bragg, we mean you. He’d heard that scientists believe the universe is 95% made of a “hidden mass” called dark matter which we can’t see or touch: “So you believe that, do you?”
Billy Bragg signing off at Glastonbury: “The space race is over” but how can he be sure?
Step up Professor Brian: “This was an observational statement. It was observed to be true. You have to believe the evidence because that’s what we measured.”
Mystic Bragg: “But you have to have faith in the fact that the dark stuff is there?”
Prof Brian, offering himself up to the Wicker Man: “Science is a system of thought that has no underlying prejudice. Science as a process is the absence of a belief system.”
Bragg: “There are areas of science where you don’t know exactly what’s happening so you have a series of beliefs to explain it … ”
Brian: “Theories.” [Exactly, silly Billy. Not beliefs.]
Bragg: “… That’s what religious people do. They explain the world by the existence of a supreme being. Isn’t there a similarity there?”
Prof Tony Ryan of Sheffield: “No! Scientists either search for a better theory (which is happening) or we search for the hidden mass (which is also happening). It’s not a belief system. It’s a belief in looking for evidence.”
[Cheers from the overwhelmingly rational Glastonbury audience. QED.]
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MORE INTERESTING THAN MOST PEOPLE’S FANTASIES — THE SWINGING EIGHTIES 1978-1984
They didn’t call themselves New Romantics, or the Blitz Kids – but other people did.
“I’d find people at the Blitz who were possible only in my imagination. But they were real” — Stephen Jones, hatmaker, 1983. (Illustration courtesy Iain R Webb, 1983)
“The truth about those Blitz club people was more interesting than most people’s fantasies” — Steve Dagger, pop group manager, 1983
PRAISE INDEED!
“See David Johnson’s fabulously detailed website Shapers of the 80s to which I am hugely indebted” – Political historian Dominic Sandbrook, in his book Who Dares Wins, 2019
“The (velvet) goldmine that is Shapers of the 80s” – Verdict of Chris O’Leary, respected author and blogger who analyses Bowie song by song at Pushing Ahead of the Dame
“The rather brilliant Shapers of the 80s website” – Dylan Jones in his Sweet Dreams paperback, 2021
A UNIQUE HISTORY
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❏ Header artwork by Kat Starchild shows Blitz Kids Darla Jane Gilroy, Elise Brazier, Judi Frankland and Steve Strange, with David Bowie at centre in his 1980 video for Ashes to Ashes
VINCENT ON AIR 2024
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
TOLD FOR THE FIRST TIME
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
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UNTOLD BLITZ STORIES
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
CHEWING THE FAT
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
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