Saturday, Aug 27th, 2005
Sheikh Hassan al-Khalifa
His group is called Brothermandude. Amazingly he's seduced me back to management. The fact is, his music is outstandingly good.
People often ask if I would help them to become superstars. My answer is always the same. I can introduce them to anyone they like, but if the music doesn't grab people it will come to nothing.
With Sheikh Hassan it's just the opposite. I flew to Bahrain , heard his demos, and immediately said, ‘Let's do it'. Last week in London we confirmed that Mark Wallis and David Ruffy will produce an album with him. No point listing these guys' credits, it would fill a page. Perhaps U2's ‘Joshua Tree' would be enough to give you the idea.
Some people's reaction is that Hassan must be a spoilt rich kid, but that just isn't the case. He's 29 and has worked for the last four years building the GCC's biggest retail business (GCC is Kuwait , Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Doha). Eventually he decided the time had come to do what he'd always wanted to do – make music. Even at 29 he had to argue with his parents (a person from the al-Khalifa family, the ruling family of Bahrain, doesn't simply go off and become a rock star). But in the end it was his money and his choice and no-one could stop him.
From there, Hassan recruited legendary American rock drummer and bassist Billy Carr and added a guitarist to make demos. Then he asked me to help and when I heard the music I couldn't resist.
There's no arrogance in Hassan, like all good artists he's full of self-doubt. But like all good artists his self-doubt is balanced with mad confidence.
The reaction we got in London last week justifies it all. Everyone loved his demos and soon they'll be turned into an album. Recording starts October 1st. By the end of the year we'll be setting up dates for a US tour, probably starting next April, with the album released simultaneously. (If you want to know more, you can read the piece I wrote about him six weeks ago on this web site under ‘whatsgoingon_dude'.)
I'm well aware a rave like this puts me in the same potentially face-losing position as Hassan himself, but I'm not the slightest concerned. My prediction... Hasssan is going to make a stunning album (the music is sort of updated Hendrix) and a year from now he'll be the person all America is looking for - someone who can pull the two cultures together. Sheikh Hassan al-Khalifa - the rock'n'roll Ara. And his group, Brothermandude.
Watch out. They're coming.
RELATED LINKS
David Ruffy - drumbeats and info
Saturday, Aug 20th, 2005
Last week I showed a picture of two teenagers being executed in Iran for nothing more than having had a sexual relationship. While the punishment was horrendous, that really wasn't the worst thing about it. The worst thing was that what they'd done should be a considered a crime at all. Why any sane person should think that what two people do together privately, and with mutual agreement, and with no harm to anyone else, should be subject to the law, is beyond me. For private and personal behaviour to be subject to legal scrutiny is an outrage.
It stems, of course, from the church's insistence that homosexuality is a sin. Personally, I don't see Islam and Christianity as much different from each other and when I looked again at that horrific photograph it reminded of witches being burnt at the stake and the church's pogroms in the middle-ages.
Religious figures of all sorts carry the blame for this, but the most powerful religious figure must shoulder the most blame. Which means the pope. If the pope goes around saying homosexuality is a sin, he's underwriting the behaviour of every homophobic lout in the world .
At about the same time as I first saw that picture of those two boys being hung, I belatedly read the piece about Pope Benedict objecting to Harry Potter because it might fill children's head with ideas that make it difficult for them to find religion. Well if anything is insidious propaganda pumped into innocent young brains, it is the rubbish of religion preached to children at an age even younger than the Harry Potter reading-age.
This new pope himself seems to have suffered from being pumped full of religious dogma by his family at an early age. He came from a devout Catholic family and was already showing signs of being interested in the priesthood before he was ten. He was only interested in received information, not philosophy. He continually copied other people rather than acting and thinking for himself. When it came time to join the Hitler Youth, he joined.
‘Like everyone else', he explained later.
Later he joined the German army (‘like everyone else', he explained again.)
As the war drew to an end, he deserted.
‘Everyone was doing it,' he explained.
Seems to me, in all things he's a bit of an ‘everyone was doing it' person – which of course is where his stance on homosexuality comes from - nothing new, nothing thought out, just received dogma.
When Christians, and other religionists, disagree with each other's dogma they fight and go to war. It's despairing, isn't it? To think of all the conflict and civil strife that has been born out the dumb nursery stories that so much of humanity believes in. People killing each other, not for some proud principal, or even for money or family honour, but more often than not simply because ‘I believe in Jack and Jill while you believe in Goldilocks'.
For two thousand years Christianity has been the world's most consistent source of fuckwittedness. Unfortunately, one of the many off-shoots of this has been institutionalised homophobia.
RELATED LINKS
Intellectual Conservatives on Andrew Sullivan and the Pope
Website for gay Republicans (Log-cabin Republicans)
Andrew Sullivan rants on gay abusrdities
The Times on the Pope and Hitler Youth
Saturday, Aug 13th, 2005
It started with a kiss. No it didn't - that's rubbish - that came much later - it started with a look, a mere glance - on the beach at Pattaya.
He was with a couple of friends, wandering along the sand by the edge of the surf - two girls and a boy - dressed in shorts with unbuttoned shirts tied round their waists.
The three of them were walking down into the receeding waves then running back up the sand as the next wave rose and broke. On one occasion as they ran laughingly away from an oncoming wave, the boy looked up and caught me watching him. As our eyes met my groin, or my stomach, or my heart, I'm not sure which, leapt slightly. That's how it started.
And what did I do? I walked on by. That's how absurd desire can be. I walked on along the beach, never turning back until I thought I'd managed to display sufficient lack of interest. Only then did I coolly turn round and start to walk back in the direction I'd come from, and there they were, not ten yards in front of me, coming straight towards me.
This time as we passed, the boy looked up again and smiled straight at me. And I smiled back. The picture above is us. Still together fifteen years later.
The picture below is how it might have ended if we'd been living in Iran .
These two boys, one sixteen and one eighteen, were legally executed under Iranian law for having a sexual relationship.
RELATED LINKS
Gay News - About the number of children executed in Iran
Website for gay Republicans (Log-cabin Republicans)
Gay News - About the two executed teenagers
Saturday, Aug 6th, 2005
At school I was hopeless at games. But games were compulsory, which meant each term, depending on the season, we had to make a choice. Would it be rugby or rowing or hockey or cricket?
In the summer I chose cricket. The good part was lounging around in the long grass on a sunny afternoon while the other members of the team batted. When it came to my turn I always made sure I was out first ball. There was no way I was going to stay at the crease with someone hurling a cricket ball at me.
With batting over, I would be sent to stand on the boundary where I watched passing birds and day-dreamed a great deal, which I liked. Sometimes there would be an agonising moment when I would be woken from my dream by loud shouts, indicating that there was a ball somewhere in the air heading towards me which I was meant to catch. Once I actually woke up in time to catch one and I remember enjoying the congratulations of my team-mates so much that I wondered for a moment whether being good at sport might be fun. But it was only a cursory thought and quickly passed.
One spring term, when I'd just turned 15, I opted for hockey. This was the coldest term of the year with the temperature during the afternoons often below freezing and the grass still white with frost from the morning. In hockey, I'd noticed that the goalie didn't have to run round the concrete-hard pitch bashing balls up and down wearing nothing but a t-shirt. He could stand still and warm, thickly-covered by five or six sweaters, with heavy hand-warming gloves and padded legs, and ponder on the state of the world and passing birds.
It was effectively the same position as fielding on the boundary in cricket. I waited around and day-dreamed until some warning shouts told me someone was approaching. Bringing my brain back to earth and looking out from my goal posts, I would see someone running towards me, pushing the ball in front of him with his stick. But this was happening at the lowest level the sport could reach. I was in Grade D, the category for the school's ultimate sporting duds. The people running at me with stick and ball were as inept at the game as I was and like me had no desire to be playing it in the first place. As a result, cosseted with warm sweaters and padding, I spent a term suffering this thrice weekly absurdity without once getting hurt.
Then something arose I hadn't reckoned with - housematches. In housematches there was a rule that everyone chosen for a house team had to play in the position in which they normally played. Ours was the top house at hockey. Most of the team were in the school first eleven, including the goalkeeper. They went easily through the opening rounds of the competition and arrived at the final. But then disaster struck. The goalie got measles. The only other person in the house who was categorised as playing in goal was me.
I would no longer be standing between the posts facing other feckless, non-sporting fifteen-year olds whose only real interest was to get back to the warmth of the junior common room and eat buttered toast. I would now be confronted by some of the school's top players, including Addy, a gigantic member of the first eleven.
The house final was a big event, attended by most of the school, and I was terrified. Nevertheless, we got through the first half without a single occasion on which I had to do anything. And we even scored a goal.
By midway through the second half I was feeling confident enough to relax into my usual daydream and admire some passing clouds. And it was at that moment that I heard the awful shout.
My brain fell to earth with a jolt and I saw him there in front of me – Addy, twice my size, maybe even three times - just twenty-five yards away, completely on his own, unchallenged, away from the pack and charging towards me with the speed of a racehorse and the weight of an elephant, the ball brilliantly skewered to the bottom of his hockey-stick, just waiting for the moment when he would cross into the circle and fire it, surely like a rocket, straight into my face.
I have to admit I was transfixed with fear. I knew I should start running forwards to challenge him before he could hit the ball at goal, but I was petrified. Only when he was within fifteen feet did my adrenalin suddenly activate. In the split second left before he hit the ball at me, I saw with absolute clarity that if I didn't run away at once I would be killed.
As he arrived at the edge of the circle and swung back his club I did the only thing I could do to avoid being slaughtered. I dived frantically to the left to get out of the way of a shot that was clearly going to the right.
I crashed into the ground, head over heals, my legs shooting into the air. And as they did so my foot hit something. The ball.
In a flash I was surrounded, the entire team. “Finest save I've ever seen,” “Sheer brilliance”. “Absolutely amazing!”
A few minutes later we'd won the game. I was hero of the afternoon and for a while I basked in it. For doing so I got my comeuppance. The next morning, when teams were posted for the next weekend of inter-school hockey, I'd been put into the school's second eleven.
I went straightaway to see the master in charge of hockey.
“It was a fluke,” I told him bluntly. “I didn't know what I was doing. I don't want to play hockey. I don't want to be in the second eleven.”
“Nonsense,” he insisted. “You're just what we want. Fantastic eye – tremendous footwork.”
But I refused. And refusing to play for a school team was like refusing to fight for your country. I'd always been disliked by the school authorities; now I was hated. Only the school chaplain stood up for me.
“Very brave”, he said, “to stand up for your right to choose.”
But he had his own reasons. He had wandering hands and was keen to give me private divinity lessons.
RELATED LINKS
Towards a computational theory of human daydreaming
Website for the American field hockey association
Website for the American field hockey association
Wikipedia - about field hockey
Saturday, July 30th, 2005
In the late Seventies I spent three years living in Paris. Allan, my Singaporean boy-friend of five years, was studying French at the Alliance Francaise, which was the only method we'd found of letting him stay legally in Europe, and therefore of being able to live together. I went to London every Tuesday morning and came back on Friday evening. It was very much the best of both worlds for in both places I had particularly beautiful apartments. In London , for four days a week I stayed in a flat in South Audley Street which I rented from Simon Blow, member of a famous theatrical family, and drama critic for the Guardian. The flat was as chic and theatrical as the Paris flat was grand and historical, with Scott's restaurant and the Connaught Hotel just a few yards along the road.
In Paris , things were even better. Allan and I were living in the Eight Arrondissement in Rue du General Foy - a beautiful fourth and fifth floor apartment with a spiral staircase between the two floors.
The flat was magnificent, and also quite a bargain. It was furnished with superb antique furniture in Louis Quatorze style, and had a sitting-room of sheer pomp. We rented it from Mademoiselle Pelletier, a hugely flamboyant young lady who resembled a youthful Elizabeth Taylor, but with more bounce. She'd been left it in her uncle's will but couldn't afford to live in it. Well actually, it wasn't as straightforward as that. Mademoiselle Pelletier wasn't really what she seemed – she was a Monsieur.
At the age of 25, Mademoiselle Pelletier had reached a very difficult point in her life. She had to decide whether to continue to live the good life on the rent obtained from the apartment, or whether to sell it and use the proceeds to pay for the surgical snip that would legitimise the extravagant make-up, wigs and dresses she so much liked to wear. On rent days Allan and I sat listening sympathetically to stories of her confusion. We became rather good friends, but always recommended against the operation since that would also be the end of our tenancy. Eventually, though, the decision was taken. The snip would be made. To pay for the operation the flat was put on the market; Allan and I were given notice and moved to a new place near Les Halles.
Anyway the point of this quite irrelevant sounding story is…
Two weeks ago I was having lunch at the Normandie Grill in the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok when I realised there was a very elegant French couple a few tables away from me. The man, handsome and suave in the best French manner, was in his mid-fifties, the woman, somewhat younger, was wonderfully beautiful in that way only middle-aged French women can be. With them was their daughter, a stunning twenty-year-old who could have been a film-star and looked like Charlize Theron. They talked together with delicious Parisian intonations, the daughter addressing her parents endlessly as ‘Mama' and ‘Papa', the father oozing adoration for her and clearly bursting with pride at the beautiful young person he'd created.
Having puzzled for a while about what it was that made him so familiar, I suddenly realised he was Mademoiselle Pelletier.
It was quite a shock. But once I was certain, I simply had to say hello. Choosing a moment when his wife and daughter went together to the toilet, I walked across to him, nodded my head slightly and said, “Excuse me. Nearly thirty years ago, you rented me an apartment in Rue Du General Foy.”
He stood up at once, the epitome of politeness, and shook my hand. “That's right,” he said, “I remember you well. You had a Chinese friend.”
“What happened…” I asked, confused for a second to find myself talking to someone so completely different from the person I'd once known "to your...er...plans?”
He shrugged broadly and waved a Gallic hand. “I changed my mind.”
I looked him up and down; his suit was superb, his shirt, his tie, his moustache, his hair, his whole demeanour. There wasn't a hint of effeminance about him.
I felt rather lost for words. “Changed your mind, did you?” I repeated rather foolishly.
"Well why not?" he asked. Then suddenly pursed his lips like Mademoiselle Pelletier. “It's a woman's prerogative, isn't it?”
His wife and daughter came back from the toilet and I went back to my table.
Amazing, really, that I should still be surprised by things like this.
RELATED LINKS
Wikitravel about Paris, 8th Arrondissement
Website for the Connaught Hotel
About Louis Quatorze furniture
Website for Alliance Francaise
Website for the Oriental Hotel
Saturday, July 23rd, 2005
The other day while searching through a drawer, my old passports came to light and I couldn't resist looking at the photos. It was a sobering experience.
The first was issued when I was 11. The school had arranged one of those overseas exchanges. For three weeks I would stay with a family in Paris, then the French boy would come and stay with us in London. I signed up for it but ended up being the only boy from my school to go. At the other end I would be met by the family I was to stay with, but it meant traveling alone on the boat and train, watched over by an unknown traveler chosen by the teacher who took me to Victoria station. By today's standards it was an extraordinarily casual way to send an eleven-year boy abroad. But I loved it.
Neither the family I stayed with, nor the son they had of my age, showed any interest in entertaining me. They simply gave me a key to the apartment and told me what time meals were served. Sheer luck! I was already addicted to wandering round London alone, now I could do the same in Paris. They were filming American in Paris and I used to go and watch, and talk to the film crew. But now,when I look at that passport photo of me at 11, it's difficult to believe that the clever, worldly, grown-up, person I clearly remember thinking I was, resided behind such an innocent young face.
The next passport shows me at 18, smooth-faced and adolescent; in a high-necked sweater with inquiring eyes and pretty lips. I was off to Canada to earn my living as a musician. I didn't yet know I was gay, nor did I have any sexual adventures when I arrived in Canada. Which seems like quite a loss for all the people I therefore didn't do it with.
The next picture was in 1967. I was 26, a young pop manager in Swinging London. By now I knew all about sex and was going at it full swing. A young but sultry face with a touch of decadence creeping in. It was during this period that I managed the Yardbirds and Marc Bolan and started traveling regularly to Australia and the Far East.
By the time the next passport was issued I was 36. Good-looking, horny, sophisticated, the world at my feet, yet looking strangely hurried, lips apart, eyes almost glazed. The picture suggests my wild life might have been getting the better of me, and I have to admit, it was a bit of a decadent whirl. It was during this period I reached my smallest waistline ever.
I'd just come back from Australia where I'd caught a stomach bug and hadn't eaten for a week. Recovered, and proud of my reduced slimline look, I headed off to Carnaby Street to buy some new trousers.
An obsequious shop-assistant with a Kenneth Williams voice suggested I try a size 28. With a great struggle I got them over my thighs and around my arse and the assistant leant across, attempting to force up the zip. As it closed at the top, my personal belongings (frantically seeking space to house themselves), plopped firmly to the right and lay there breathless - a straining hump under the unspeakably tight fabric.
“Oh, very snug, sir” said the fawning assistant.
The passport issued when I was 46 heralded the decade in which I was to do the most traveling. It shows me looking ‘world aware' rather than ‘world weary' - my face filled with confidence – dependable and unworried. Another photographic lie! Read my book I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch and you'll see. I was lurching round the world gulping up the good life as usual. Ostensibly fixing for Wham! to play in China , in reality I was doing the playing myself, most of it on the beaches of Thailand .
The next passport got lost, which rather pleases me for it was issued when I was 56. I remember being horrified at the realisation that I was now in my late fifties. It was 1995, four years to go to my sixtieth birthday. I consoled myself by looking at pictures of great looking film-stars of the same age – Cary Grant at 58, Paul Newman at 59, Marlon Brando..… no No NO – not him. At that age he was everything I was determined NOT to look like.
Then we come to the present, and here I've cheated. The photo in my current passport is so horrifically awful (taken in a machine in Bangkok in a frantic rush to get a duplicate passport in time to catch a flight to New York) that I included instead a recent picture, one I would be happy to have in my passport if only they'd agree to change it for me.
Looking at it, I can see I might be taken as a benign and wise old bugger with an enigmatic smile. But once again the picture belies the truth. Below that smiling face is a gigantic belly and much sloth. Last week, contemplating these pictures while doing my annual accounts, I was tempted to try and turn my life's experiences into the same sort of column of figures that my accountant turns each year's business into.
At sixty-six years old, with some fanciful estimating and the help of a calculator (and allowing for my idiosyncratic behaviour), I set down my life as a set of numbers. It made for very dreary reading.
2,000 shirts, 1,200 pairs of shoes, 7,000 pairs of underpants, 4,000 flights, 3,000 hotel rooms, 15,000 showers, 10,000 baths, 150,000 press-ups (with nothing whatsoever to show for them), a million burps, three million farts, 48,000 shits, 72,000 meals, 9,000 shags, 30,000 wanks.
Amazing, isn't it, the truth that lies behind a photo.
RELATED LINKS
About the movie 'An American in Paris'
Saturday, July 16th, 2005
Yesterday's emails brought an urgent request for me to write about food. I thought at first of writing about 'the best meals I've ever eaten' but that seemed too difficult - too many to choose from - so I've settled for memorable meals instead. Often, food is not the principal component in making a meal memorable, it's more likely to be something that happened or was said.
In the Sixties, I once had dinner with Ike and Tina Turner when they were still an item (though a fast deteriorating one, I seem to remember). My friend Vicki Wickham was in charge of booking acts for Ready Steady Go and had just had them on the show singing River Deep Mountain High. There was a lot of sexual tension round the table. Ike seemed to have plans for him and Vicki. Vicki, I think, had similar plans for Tina, who kept staring meaningfully at me (who had the hots for one of the waiters).
All this high tension snapped in a flash when Tina found a caterpillar in her cauliflower au gratin. Screaming ad libs far more thrilling than any she'd recorded up to that moment, she leapt up and stood on her chair, as if the poor dead caterpillar were a live rat. Years later, when her fortunes declined, armed as I was with this insight into her true dramatic potential, I didn't doubt for a second that she would eventually re-emerge as one the world's greatest stage performers.
Also in the sixties I had an extraordinary dinner at the Edinburgh Festival with Marlene Dietrich and her musical director, Burt Bacharach. Marlene was 64 but on stage looked thirty years younger. Unfortunately the face-lifts which kept her that way, had taken their toll in the laughter department. Before dinner we were informed by her secretary that conversation could extend only to serious subjects and we shouldn't get over humourous. When Marlene arrived at the table, all was explained. Her beautiful parchment-like skin was stretched so thin it was translucent. It was barely flexible enough for her to eat, let alone laugh. But at the last minute we were joined for dinner by a wonderful black blues singer from New York who reduced us to hysterics with non-stop tales in jive vernacular. Poor Marlene had to sit their rigid, allowing only her eyes to show amusement, though mostly they showed just age and frustration.
Frustration is what I felt a few years ago when I got home from a recording session at 3 a.m., not having eaten all day, to find nothing in the house but baked beans and stale bread. I was also in need of some wine to wind me down from the tension of fifteen hours recording. But in the wine rack there was just one bottle - a present from a friend, something I'd been keeping for a special occasion - '61 Cheval Blanc valued at around £600. There was no alternative. I uncorked the wine, opened the beans, toasted the bread and ate one of the best meals of my life.
Touring with rock groups is guaranteed to produce memorable meals, though the food is likely to be little to do with it. Amongst many I've eaten, there was a star-studded meal in Tokyo after a TV special which had included several of the world's top rock groups. A carpaccio of fugu fish had numbed our lips and left us worried we might be dead before the main course arrived. To drown our fears we sloshed back sake. It worked. We survived to be fed with shabu-shabu made from Kobe beef (£100 a kilo, beer & milk-fed cattle, tethered to prevent exercise and massaged daily so that their fat is spread evenly through the meat making it pink rather than red). This was washed down by more sake and plenty of wine too.
By the time we'd finished our dessert, my meek-mannered lawyer, who was travelling with me, had lost his usual mild demeanour and had become the life-and-soul of the party (a party which was getting more racous by the minute, much noisier than was expected of people dining in this particularly posh restaurant). Finally, allowing the sake to get the better of him, or it might have been the fugu fish, my lawyer provided an impromptu finale to the dinner by jumping onto the table and unzipping himself. He flashed what God had given him to all and sundry, and as I remember it, God hadn't been too generous. But worse than that, within minutes, certain members of two well-known rock groups were running a copycat competition. Between then and when the police arrived, some very famous knobs were flashed around the table.
One year in Cannes, during the annual Midem music festival, I bumped into Chris Gilbey, an old friend from Australia who had just been appointed to run BMG in Sydney. We decided to celebrate but foresook the grander restaurants for a wander through the back streets where we chanced on a small bistro. I don't remember what starter we chose but as so often happens the real starter was chilled white wine and good conversation. The main course, however, was outstandingly memorable - confit of duck as it's really meant to be - naughty, fatty, crispy and flavourful. We ate it with a bottle of Domaine de Ott, then had cheese and tarte aux pommes. When we'd finished we decided to repeat the whole experience and ordered two more plates of duck confit with another bottle of wine. Gluttony of this sort usually proves disappointing. This time it didn't. If anything, the second serving was even more delicious than the first.
Cannes provided me with another great meal, and on this occasion it was the food I remember, not the meagre dimensions of my lawyer's willie. It was at the Majestic Hotel in the late 1980s and I was dining with James Fisher, then the head of ASCAP in London . We ordered sautéed calve's liver and wondered how they dared charge so much for it. We soon found out. The liver came in a sauce containing a dozen or so small muscatel grapes. When we bit into them our mouths were flooded with calvados. Each grape had been individually injected with a hypodermic.
Offered a repeat of any of these meals, I'd choose the confit of duck with Chris Gilbey. But to make it even better, I'd take along another bottle of that '61 Cheval Blanc.
(I wouldn't invite my lawyer).
RELATED LINKS
Tasting notes for Cheval Blanc 1961
Saturday, July 9th, 2005
I've never understood why so many of the world's top religions require their followers to wear daft headgear. Jews perch silly skull caps on their bald spots, except for those who are doubly serious about their religion in which case they wear quite obscenely broad-brimmed hats, as to do the devout followers of the Dutch reform church. Then there are the wool caps that Moslems wear in hot climates which seem exactly like the hats Russians wear to keep their heads warm in cold climates. And if you're a Sikh, despite living in fairly hot temperatures, you're required to wrap your head up in something which looks like the lagging for a water tank. Worse than that, for pointing such things out, I'm likely to be abused for being politically incorrect and made the subject of hate mail.
I only say all this to give you some idea of the indifference with which I regard religion in general. So it was with some amusement that I read a few months ago that scientists had discovered a gene that compels people to need a God to worship. In other words - for all these religious people - their religion is not a choice but a genetically installed need. There they are thinking how pious and clever and self-righteous they are to have chosen god, when really it's nothing like that at all. It's just a silly gene.
Just as the scientists tell me there's a gay gene which points my willie towards the male sex, so Christians are now being told there's a religious gene that points their minds towards God. Frankly, I don't believe it. If there's a religious gene, why is its distribution so unequal? Why, in America, do ninety per cent of the people have it while in Europe only ten per cent do? The gay gene is much more believable, the percentage being spread around evenly in all societies at approximately ten per cent.
Personally, though, I prefer to claim it as a choice. From the first time I read about gay society, I loved the concept. In my teens I read books by Isherwood and Auden and Robin Maugham. I discovered there was a wonderful, civilized, literary group of people who didn't live like normal people - paying mortgages, having children, hunting for school fees - but spent their lives chatting about art and intellectual concepts, traveling around the world in the company of charming young men, unconcerned by domestic matters.
Most gays support the scientists' point of view, saying it's all beyond our control. But now scientists are going even further. They're telling us that women's ability to have orgasms is also genetic. And what next? The 'eating with your mouth open' gene? The 'being a hoodlum' gene. The 'being a complete wanker' gene? Is everyone going to escape responsibility for their actions, or inactions, by resorting to genetic excuses?
But there's more to it than that. If I have to accept that gay behaviour isn't a choice but a genetic fact of life, does that mean (since there is now considered to be a religious gene), that I can no longer sneer at devoutly religious people? Because that would be such a bore.
I prefer to stick to my previous position - that devout religionists - Christians, Moslems, Jews, you name it – have lazily allowed an important part of their brain - a part which should be used for personal choices in morality – to become stuffed with some sort of fast-food takeaway prepackaged religious dogma. Worse still are those silly hats. If I was going to wear a silly hat, I would like to think it would be my own choice to do so, not the result of having allowed my brain to be clogged with religionist garbage. Though now, of course, they can blame their daft headgear on that recalcitrant religionist gene.
For gays, though, even if we accept that real sexual choice is beyond us and that genes reign supreme, we're still only talking about the rise and fall of our willies. There's still a choice to be made, and I believe I made it - which was to take advantage of that uncontrollable rise and fall to head for a lifestyle free of normal domestic concerns.
Believers in the gay gene would say I was only able to make that choice because the gene was present, but I disagree. I maintain that even if latent heterosexuality had been flooding through me I would have somehow overcome it and opted instead for a gay lifestyle, something I saw as infinitely preferable.
And gosh - how I've enjoyed it!
RELATED LINKS
Website of Richard Dawkins, Britain's most articulate atheist
Website devoted to Christopher Isherwood
The American atheist organisation
Saturday, July 2nd, 2005
Brothermandude!
A German breakfast cereal? A druid settlelement in North Cornwall ? A black American TV sitcom?
Wrong! It's the name of a rather amazing rock group.
"No way!" was my initial response when Iain Cooper emailed me out of the blue and suggested I might like to come to Bahrain and listen to a band. But bit by bit he seduced me with emails, persuasive and entertaining, laced with the names of the city's best restaurants. So I weakened and went.
Iain was someone I knew from the Eighties. A journalist, he once interviewed me, then moved on to five years of conspicuous failure in his attempt to become a popstar. Now, in Dubai, he has his own advertising agency and has turned out rather brilliant.
"What's this all about?" I asked him as soon as we met at the airport. "Why does this group have such a clumsy, laborious name. Are you sure you've booked all the best restaurants?"
"Come and meet the singer," he told me. "Sheik Hassan Al Khalifa."
And therein lies the story.
Sheikh Hassan is 29. He's charming, calm and thoughtful. He admits he wasn't always like that. At 18, he was often aggresive and abrasive. He could have become one of Bahrain's finest horsemen; he could have ridden in the Olympics and wanted to devote his life to breeding and training horses. But his family said no.
He was sent to university in America where he discovered music - rock, pop, electronic, hip hop - and fell in love with all of it. He decided to be a singer, but of course the family said no! No! NO!
He came back to Bahrain and went the way of all correctly behaved eldest sons - into the family business. It's a retail business and stretches across all the Gulf States. When his father died a few years ago, Hassan took it over and modernised it. He put in new systems, new management and new thinking. He doubled the profits in just eighteen months. It now brings in more containers of retail goods per year than any other company trading in the GCC ( Dubai , Qatar , Oman , Bahrain , Saudi and Kuwait ). And this makes Hassan pretty damned successful.
A while back he decided to expand into the USA, but in the States he didn't want to go into the retail business, he wanted to go into the music business. He would form a record company, fund it well, take things slowly and watch out for artists with long-term talent which the company could nurture and develop. He was giving himself a present for all the hard work he'd done, but as the icing on the cake he wanted to launch the record company with a record he would make himself. Too late, maybe, to be the rock star he once dreamed of being, but he could at least have fun making a rock album. So he went to the States and chose some musicians.
Because he needed to be in Bahrain to run the business, he brought them back home with him, built a small studio and hired a British producer, Andy Ward. For the next two months Hassan and Andy and the musicians spent their evenings and nights writing songs and recording. It was these recordings that Iain Cooper had asked me to come to Bahrain to listen to.
Iain is a long-time friend of Hassan and had no compunction telling him what he was doing was just the silly dream of a young man with money to waste. But when Iain heard what came out of the studio he realised he was wrong. It was something extraordinary.
Firstly - these were some of America 's best musicians. For instance, the drummer, Billy Carr, is a rhythm-section legend. He plays bass as well as drums and sometimes at gigs plays both at the same time, playing the drums with two feet and one hand, using the other hand to play the bass, balanced on his knee. An almost impossible trick, yet, once perfected, giving the bass guitar and bass drum an interlinked groove almost impossible to acheive any other way.
The music on Hassan's album has roots in the Seventies - Hendrix, Led Zepelin, Crosby Stills & Nash, the Average White Band - yet there's no feeling of pastiche or conflicting styles, it holds together and turns into one homogenous feel. What does it is Hassan's singing - the thick throatiness of Seal, the stoned slur of Hendrix, a dash of wry hip-hop humour – and the quite amazing drumming and bass-playing of Billy Carr. Somehow the overall style makes the name work too. Once you've heard the music, 'Brothermandude' seems an entirely appropriate name.
"What d'you think?" they all asked me as soon as the album had finished playing. And it was an incredibly difficult question to answer.
Four of the tracks were as good, as orginal, as well played and hooky as any rock music I've ever heard. There were small deficiencies in the recorded sound due to the makeshift studio, and a few songs needed extra backing vocals, but all in all it was breathtaking.
I've no idea why it should have come about. It's just one of those miraculous combinations, Hassan and Billy Carr have a magic synergy – like the three members of Cream, Bonham & John Paul Jones, or Jagger & Richards - something has emerged way in excess of the individual parts.
So what advice should I give a highly successful 29 year old business man from a top Bahraini family who has an urge to try his hand at rock, yet worries (quite rightly) that he might be doing something completely daft? It would have been easy had the recordings been rubbish - I could have just shaken my head and said, 'Give up.' But what Hassan has done is amazingly good.
Even so, I've seen it all before. Many times young musicians come together, record some intitial music that could lead to them becoming major artists, then blow it. They fall out, or simply don't have the energy to push their way through the mire of the music business, or don't realise how good their music is and allow people to point them in a different (and wrong) direction. In Hassan's case, even though the songs he and his band have recorded are tremendous, they still need to be finished off in Britain or the States. Thereafter, as an album, they'll need to be publicised, promoted and distributed. It's tiring, often depressing, and expensive. There's no reason why Hassan's record company shouldn't be successful, but he might find pushing himself forward as an artist just too irksome to put up with.
Which would be a pity. For with recordings as good as these, if everyone were to stick the course, Brothermandude might just end up as a major act, with many more albums to follow.
If not, let's at least hope that this first album gets finished and released. 'The Bahraini Sessions 2005' deserve to be heard. It could even be a Grammy winner.
(By the way - Iain was right about the restaurants. Unlike Dubai, Bahrain has great restaurants, world class in both food and decor. I was royally entertained.)
RELATED LINKS
Equestrian activities in Bahrain
Saturday, June 25th, 2005
If I asked you what Boy George and Hugh Spring have in common, you would probably ask, ‘Who's Hugh Spring ?'
Hugh is a retired banker, though actually he prefers to call himself a clerk. “Some people own banks and some people run them,” he says. “I ran them, which made me a clerk.” That's as maybe, but he did so under the title ‘general manager' and in such places as Bahrain, Houston and Seoul.
Hugh is one of Pattaya's sharpest and most knowledgeable residents. He has the fastest mind, the quickest tongue, the largest fund of information.
“ Here's the photo you wanted”, he told me in an email he sent with his picture. “It was taken at brunch in New York. My smug look comes from having just expressed ample credulity that a Jewish establishment – ‘Isabella's' - would name itself after the bitch that drove the Jews out of Spain. The waiter, though impressed by my fund of knowledge, was still slow with my eggs.”
If you want to wine and dine accompanied by a non-stop flow of edifying talk and crisp wit, you'll love eating with Hugh. None of which, you might think, has anything in to with Boy George. But you're wrong.
The above photo shows several things that Hugh and Boy George share - the same shaped chin, the same teasing eyes, the same size ears and nose, the same high cheek ones and the same broad sweeping forehead - but the common trait I'm referring to is none of those. It's their inability to control a funny remark once it's jumped into their brain; to hold onto it for a second, to perhaps modify it for public consumption. No way! Out it pops, just the way it was thought of. Hilarity first; consequences later.
As a result, over the years both Hugh and Boy George have found themselves with a few unwarranted enemies. I say ‘unwarranted' because the sharpness of these remarks is not usually intended to hurt - they just sort of tumble out.
When he walked into Charlie's bar in Pattaya a few years ago, Hugh bumped into his old friend Douglas, a man of Indian extraction and one of Pattaya's most charming and much-liked residents. Having just been to some sort of social event, Douglas was dressed in a dinner jacket and bow tie. Before he could control his tongue, Hugh heard himself say, “ Douglas, you only need a turban and you could get a job as doorman at the Dorchester.'
No malice was intended - no racism, no bigotry, no prejudice - it just fell off his lips. But the result was - Douglas didn't talk to Hugh again for two years.
In Boy George's case, many hundreds of similar remarks over the last two decades have left him rather misunderstood. He's often seen as cantankerous and bitchy, when in fact, like Hugh, he's simply irresistibly sharp. In the last few weeks alone, Boy George is reported to have called George Michael ‘a twat', Elton John ‘an asshole', Madonna ‘a hypocritical homophobe' and the woman who financed his Broadway show and then closed it down after three months, ‘a pottery farm lesbian'. On the other hand (amazingly), he's managed to find something nice to say about me.
Last week, while Hugh and I were having dinner at the Grill Room of the Royal Cliff Hotel, I was approached by someone who shook my hand. "You must be very special", he said. "I've just finished reading Boy George's new book and you seem to be the only person he can find a good word for."
Well that's sweet of George, because from time to time we've had our run-ins; particularly on a chat show in the 80s. The interviewer asked me what I thought about Boy George's famous remark that, when it came to sex he preferred a cup of tea. At the time I was managing George Michael with whom Boy George was having a feud and I saw no reason not to be catty.
“I know several people who've had sex with Boy George,” I said. “They all agree that a cup of tea would have been preferable.”
For Boy George to now pick me out for a few kind words shows how good natured he really is. It also shows how well he understands the philosophy of never letting a good quip go to waste. Anyway, he got his own back. Shortly afterwards, still struggling to prove he wasn't gay, George Michael announced to the press that he'd been living with a girl and “she'd broken his heart”.
Boy George knew the girl well. She was a bit of a fag hag and had shared a flat with him too. “Broke your heart, did she?” he sneered at George Michael. “She lived with me for three years and all she managed to break was my Hoover .”
Hugh Spring has the last word.
Once, in Houston, he was in a meeting with the directors of his bank, the most important of whom happened to be a woman – a rather substantial woman, strongly built, not overly pretty, with a large face and broad nostrils. She told them over the weekend she'd taken part in a horse-race.
“In what capacity?” Hugh heard himself ask.
Not long afterwards he was re-located to Korea.
RELATED LINKS
Saturday, June 18th, 2005
Last Sunday I found myself having lunch with a microbiologist (whose speciality was the study of sleeping sickness), and with a psychologist, (whose speciality was the psychoanalysis of corporations rather than people). We were at the home of Francis Connor, Pattaya's most outstanding lunchtime host.
Amongst other extravagances Francis had provided us with a kilo of caviar. Heaping an obscene amount onto my plate, I asked the microbiologist something I'd often wondered about. “Are the big discoveries in microbiology made mainly by intuitive guesses for which evidence is then sought? Or are they hit upon by endless research which sometimes turns up surprise results.”
The microbiologist told us about Francis Crick who was perhaps the greatest microbiologist of all, having discovered the source and structure of DNA. Crick, he explained, started out as physicist. He learnt his biology at a late age, and then applied to it the intuitive thinking process he'd perfected in physics.
Then the psychologist took over, explaining his techniques for analyzing corporate bodies. He puts the corporation itself on the couch, making it tell him what happened when it was two years old that is now causing it problems with getting a financial erection.
Then it was my turn with some talk about the music business. Soon it was clear that the psychologist was not only a music buff but quite a fan of dance culture too. He freely admitted to enjoying the occasional recreational drug and this pricked up the ears of the microbiologist who was on the look out for the right chemical concoction to get his brain moving when confronted with a word processor and a touch of writer's block. (He's currently writing a novel).
Half a Zanac with a glass of champagne was the recommendation. Very genteel, I thought.
All in all, this was pretty typical of what Pattaya has to offer round lunchtime on Sundays, especially when you happen to be at Francis Connor's place. Pattaya mixes people together in a way that would never happen if we'd all stayed in our respective countries.
Francis himself worked for years in banks, and still does. But he's not a money man - he's a PR person, whose principal activity is taking care of the chairman's wife. He's a delightful chap with a penchant for fine kaftans (in which he entertains his guests) and vino blanco (which he freely admits getting stuck into first thing every morning). He's very savvy about his need for white wine and adjusts his life accordingly. Aware that he can usually stay conscious to mid-afternoon, but not much longer, he opts for giving lunches rather than dinners.
He has an opulent apartment, rather out of town, packed with ornaments and antiques and with the services of a very fine lady cook. I once asked her how it was she could make such delicious mousaka.
“I used to work in Japan ,” she replied.
It was a bizarre reply to a question involving Greek cuisne, but for a place as strange as Pattaya it seemed appropriately dotty.
Sunday lunch was not what I really intended to write about this week; I'd planned to talk about Beijing Duck, for which Francis Connor and I have developed rather a passion. It's a dish I've eaten many times in my life but rarely better than in Pattaya - not even when I was treated to it in Beijing by Madame Li Peng, the Prime Minister's wife.
Beijing Duck dates back to the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century. A duck with its head still attached is inflated with air to separate the skin from the body. The skin is scalded with boiling water to make it taut and brushed with molasses so that during cooking it will acquire a dark color with an aroma of caramel. It's then dried for twelve hours before being hung by its neck in the oven where it's roasted for an hour at a high temperature. This causes the fat to melt off and the skin to become super-crispy.
The carver dons white cotton gloves before carving the skin away from the carcass in 120 pre-ordained cuts. When all traces of meat or soft fat have been scraped away from the inside surface, the crispy skin is rolled up in plain flour pancakes with spring onions, sliced cucumbers and plum sauce.
In Pattaya it's the Chinese restaurant at the Montien hotel that serves it, and every three or four weeks Francis and I go there to indulge ourselves. All of which gives you a fair idea of how an ex-pop manager living in Thailand dribbles away his time.
RELATED LINKS
Communications resource for microbiologists
About corporate psychoanalysis
Saturday, June 11th, 2005
For many years now I've thought that, given the right trigger Bangkok could become another Munich . I'm talking about the period when, for almost a decade, ‘the Munich sound' dominated the world of dance music.
Bangkok is sunnier, sexier, more reasonably priced, and nowadays not too third-worldy. It has great night-life and a hip club scene with a cosmopolitan clientele – Thai, Japanese, European, American, Australasian. It's the perfect place for a world class studio to pump out dance records. So why has it never happened?
In the past, when Thai record companies have looked at foreign markets they've thought too mainstream. Several times I've been asked to become involved with Thai artists with a view to them breaking outside of Thailand . First by Grammy with Mai Prajenjura, then Sony with May Patrawadi, and later by Tim Young, Tata Young's father, when he realized the need to break loose from Grammy if Tata was to have success internationally.
Due to Tim's persistence, Tata pulled it off, but her current music has no Thai character in it, neither traditional nor modern. What I always longed to see was something as young, outrageous, and in-your-face as Bangkok nightlife itself, but with some hint of Thai roots. And suddenly, last year, there it was. FUTON.
At first it was just the photo. Futon shrieked out of that photograph like instant on-the-floor sex. Then I heard the music, sort of electro-techno-raunchy-rock. More contemporary than Scissor Sisters, more punk too, but with pop overtones. It has social intensity. It has the ring of the early seventies when all those over-amphetamised groups were coming out of London – the Stinky Toys, the Banshees, the Slits, the Sex Pistols. It's like dirty punk underwear under shiny electro trousers.
Futon are Anglo-Thai-Japanese. They were put together by two British guys who'd come to live in Thailand . David Coker, who worked in London programming artists like All Saints and Brian Ferry; and Bee, who's been a DJ in Thailand for seven years and runs Re-hab, Bangkok's best dance club. Lately, they've been joined by a third Brit – Simon, who drummed with Suede for fourteen years.
In the 80s in Britain , Bee was part of Phsycic TV. Then, he looked like fragile piece of porcelain. Now, twenty years later, he seems to look exactly the same. Not a day older, not a wrinkle worse, not a jot less fashionable. The clue, he says, is in the title of the group's first album, Never Mind The Botox. But I think it's more than that - Bee has eternal youth in his soul.
Don't, however, mistake youth for purity. Futon are grungy and perverse – sick as well as slick, and all the guys are gay. Onstage they love to be dangerous; stripping off; flaunting feathers and chains and tatoos. Their gay sensibility gives them a wonderful sense of flippancy. Take them too seriously and you'll find you've been had. On the other hand, dismiss them as trivia and you'll have overlooked the seriousness of their artistic comittment.
The smack in the act comes from the two up-front singers - Momo and Gene. Momo is Japanese and claims to be the love child of Yoko Ono and Ryuichi Sakomoto. (Unsurprisingly, Yoko and Ryuichi deny it. But there's no denying Momo's resemblance to the Yoko Ono who turned up in London in 1965 planning to film the naked backsides of Britain 's three-hundred-and-sixty-five best-buttocked people.) Momo half sings, half howls, and usually strips off to her underwear.
Gene is the raunchy blond Thai boy with a dynamite torso. He used to sing in temples in the north of Thailand and won prizes for singing Luuk Tung. Now he prefers provocation. “I don't wanna be straight – football makes me masturbate”.
That's from Gay Boy, which has just been remixed by Jonty Skrufff. Skrufff's involvement will not only carry the group into the European dance market, it will also trigger something else. It will establish Bangkok as a credible source of dance production.
My prediction! Soon there'll a regular flow of records from Bangkok hitting the dance charts all over the world.
RELATED LINKS
Wikipedia about Ryuichi Sakamoto
About Yoko Ono's film 'Bottoms'
Saturday, June 4th, 2005
In London, for twenty years I had the same accountant. Barry was his name - a neat man, softly spoken, nice mannered and exceptionally polite. His room was on the first floor of the offices of Wilson Wright, a large firm of chartered accountants in Holborn where it was not unusual to find yourself waiting in reception with the likes of Richard Branson or Peter Gabriel.
Although I thought of Barry as a friend, I probably only met him once a year in each of all the years we knew each other. For some reason, these annual visits to his offices always took place at the beginning of June. The receptionist would tell me Barry was ready and I would proceed to the top of a short flight of stairs. There, he would be waiting to escort me to his room, tidy and un-show-offish but in no way bleak - a large desk, a picture of his wife and children, a sububstantial sofa and two comfortable chairs for his clients. It had been that way for as long as I could remember.
In the sixties, when personal income tax could be as much as 83%, I'd been persuaded to start a company as a way of reducing it. Ever since then, this company had funded my extravagant lifestyle - kept me flying round the world, staying in 5-star hotels and eating out every night.
During a typical year, besides working in London, I might fly round the globe a dozen times - record a pop singer in Manila,work on songs in LA, sell the rights to some music in Mexico and tour all over the world with whatever group I was currently managing. To turn these twelve months of eclectic money-making and profligate spending into neat columns of figures was Barry's annual conjuring trick.
In all the years I knew him, I never spoke to Barry about my private life, nor did he ever talk of his. But I often wondered if, like some sort of fortune teller, he could tell from the figures I presented him with at the end of each year what I'd really been up to. When he looked through this package of year-end accounts did he get any inkling as to the real truth? Could he, for instance, have possibly got a feel for what I was up to in, say, January 1984?
(I seem to remember, at that particular time, I was trapped in Rio by a magnetic young person of indeterminate gender - money flowing in all directions.)
“This twenty thousand pounds you spent in Rio de Janeiro?” Barry asked at our next year-end meeting.“What was that for exactly?”
“A Brazilian singer,” I told him, white-lying through my teeth. “But it didn't work out.”
Appearing to understand everything (though hopefully, nothing at all) Barry put it down as a ‘miscellaneous investment'. Then, in the annual summing-up, he wrote, “An investment in South America at the beginning of the year proved unsuccessful but was adequately balanced by the company's continuing management activities in Britain.”
And so it went on, year after year. Barry's ability to turn a year of business adventuring into figures so unexciting the Inland Revenue hardly bothered to look at them, kept us locked in a most civilized annual friendship. And now that these annual meetings are in the past, sometimes, when June rolls around, I quite miss him.
RELATED LINKS
How to keep your company books
Saturday, May 28th, 2005
John Dang
I've never worked in an office (doing business, negotiating deals, developing ideas, dealing with people's affairs, running companies, discussing projects, managing artists or making money) without feeling I was rather wasting my time.
On the other hand I've never passed time aimlessly (travelling, day-dreaming, eating lunches, contemplating the universe, lounging in first class aeroplane seats, talking with friends, laughing, joking, walking on the beach, getting drunk or having sex) without feeling life was being thoroughly well spent.
Despite this, I sometimes feel a touch guilty about the luxurious way I live in Thailand . I mean - I've learnt the language, I've been to nearly every province and town, I've read its history and know its traditions and quirks, but - ask me what I like best about this country and I'll talk about good restaurants, beautiful people, charming service, five star hotels, glittering shopping centers and fine food. And last week two old friends of mine, Ben and Julia Bedford, helped rubbed this in.
When I heard they were coming to Thailand for a week I sent them an email offering to meet them in Bangkok and take them to dine them at the Oriental. But they turned me down.
Nor were they interested in flying down to Phuket so we could have dinner at the Boathouse (included in Fortune Magazines' “The Best Hundred Wine Cellars In The World”)
No! They'd decided on a walking holiday.
They called me from Auckland and we had a conference call. They'd bought sturdy shoes and were planning to use them to tramp up and down hills in the far north of the country, sleeping in tents and living off squashed mosquitos and twigs.
“How can you say you've seen all of Thailand ,” they asked me indignantly, “if you've never visited the hill tribes?”
“And how can you say you've seen it,” I replied, “if you've never had dinner on the riverside terrace of the Oriental?”
I tend to feel disdain for people who don't realise that the whole point of mankind being mankind is that life should become ever more comfortable and pleasant. But I also feel slightly guilty about having visited this country for more than thirty years without ever having suffered any of the hardships that the vast majority of Thais suffer every day. Perhaps because of this I suddenly heard myself telling my two friends I would buy some walking shoes and come with them up those stupid muddy hills.
“We'll be traveling up to Chiang Rai by minibus,” Ben told me. “It will pick us up direct from our flight. You can meet us at Bangkok airport.”
“By bus?” I moaned. “If we're going to spend five days walking up and down hills in the mud and eating things the wild animals have left behind couldn't we at least get there in comfort? There are two flights a day and it only takes an hour.”
“Going by bus is part of the fun,” Julia said firmly.
And thank goodness she did, for it was the thought of fourteen hours in a minibus that broke my resolve.
So while Ben and Julia Bedford spent last week walking up and down muddy mountains in the Golden Triangle, I, as usual, was enjoying my nice house by the sea at Jomtien beach, to which John Dang and his girl-friend Emma came with a bunch of new songs for his album. (And very good they were too.)
The point of this story is; there are many ways of seeing Thailand. But my way is the most comfortable.
RELATED LINKS
Website of the Boathouse restaurant, Phuket
Trekking & climbing, Northern Thailand
Hill-climbing in Northern Thailand
Saturday, May 21st, 2005
“Don't you just hate it when your dick falls out the front of your boxer shorts. It's so irritating. It just sort of hangs there. Normally I wear briefs – they're SO much more comfortable.”
Rupert Everett was trying to explain why I'd opened my front door to find him poking around in his crotch.
No, this wasn't last week in Pattaya, it was eighteen years ago in London . But earlier this week I bought a dozen or so of those ridiculously cheap CDVs that are available here in Thailand and amongst them was ‘My Best Friend's Wedding', which reminded me of him. And in this morning's paper I saw he'd sold the British rights to his memoirs for a million pounds.
Rupert had come to see me because he wanted to become a singer. He was just back from Hollywood where he'd been making a film with Bob Dylan in which he'd played the part of a British rock star.
After he'd finished filming it, Rupert decided he wanted to play the part for real. “I want to sing,” he told me. “And I want you to be my manager. I'm a bit of a renaissance man, you see, able to turn my hand to anything I choose.”
I asked him if he wanted to be a singer instead of an actor, or as well . The problem being, the two simply don't go together. It's sometimes possible for rock stars to act, but when actors try to become rock stars they usually look false, and fail, a recent example being Keanu Reeves.
I tried hard to put Rupert off. “There'll be no problem getting you a record deal, but I'm not convinced you'll grab the market. I'm not sure your name is right. I mean, ‘Rupert' isn't a great name for a rock star.”
"I sometimes call myself Roopie-Poopie," he said, completely straight-faced. “Is that any better?”
I laughed and asked him to give me a day to think about it.
He pouted. “Can't you make your mind up straight away? I mean, we seem to be getting on very well, don't you think?”
Indeed we were. Rupert was a real charmer. Meeting and chatting with him was the sort of pleasure life should you give you more often. But even though he was so charming, so bright, so entertaining, turning Rupert Everett into a rock star would be near impossible. In fact, I was convinced I couldn't do it. The answer had to be ‘No'.
But when I opened my mouth to tell him, my voice had a mind of its own. “OK,” I heard it say. “I'll do it.”
It wasn't a success. He made a great single. He got all the TV shows. He was fantastic on chat shows. But he was still an actor playing the part of a rock star and it didn't ring true. After six months we called it a day and he went back to films.
Last night, laughing again at ‘My Best Friend's Wedding', I could only feel glad that he did so. And his memoirs will be so much the hotter for it. All those gay insights into the Hollywood closet.
RELATED LINKS
About 'My Best Friend's Wedding'
Saturday, May 14th, 2005
Boys night out, Pattaya style
A few weeks ago I did a piece for Attitude Magazine, UK 's best gay mag. By chance, it was published in the issue in which Tony Blair did the first ever interview by a Prime Minister for a gay paper. My piece appeared on the page before his interview – not a bad place to be.
Of course, I wrote it long before I knew it would be put into this ‘special' edition. If I'd known, I would probably have written something much more serious – some sort of message to politicians, or some earnest views on matters relating to gay culture. But I didn't. I wrote a lightweight piece about camp gossip in the Sixties. It included a story about Andrew Oldham (the Rolling Stones' manager) and the time he first heard Jonathan King's record of ‘Everyone's Gone To The Moon'.
Andrew imagined Jonathan to be a blond Adonis. With seduction in mind he engineered a meeting only to discover that Jonathan resembled a bespectacled toucan. Later, over dinner, he told songwriter Lionel Bart the meeting had been a waste of time.
"What's wrong with him?" Lionel asked
"He's not fuckable," Andrew said bluntly.
"Not fuckable!" Lionel exploded. “Well we can't waste our time with people like that, dear, can we!"
So there went my opportunity of being taken seriously by the political crowd. With every politician in the UK thumbing through Attitude magazine all I'd come up with was some trashy gay chat.
Talking of which, last week one of Yo's friends had a birthday party, to which I was invited. The prime mover in this was Pooki, who owns a hair and beauty salon in Pattaya's Soy 6.
Soy 6 is famous for its brothels, and I doubt that a happier, better-natured, more entertaining streetful of hookers exists anywhere else in the world. Each morning all these girls need their hair done, and throughout the day, every time one of them enters into a little bit of business with a customer, the resulting damage to hair and make-up has to be rectified.
Pooki charges each girl a set amount for hair and make-up each morning – cheapish, around 200 baht - and then a flat fee of 20 baht per time for whatever refurbishments are needed throughout the day.
In a street of a thousand hookers, it goes without saying Pooki's doing good business. But what makes her salon even more exceptional is that she and her staff are all transvestites, and a sharp-tongued bunch into the bargain. Imagine a bitch marathon between Paul O'Grady, Dame Edna, Boy George and Eddie Izzard and you just about have it. And with a couple of hundred bar girls passing through the salon each day, the banter is beyond belief. (All in Thai, of course, so if you want to pop down there and catch a bit of the flavour you'd first better brush up on your Linguaphone course ).
Anyway, the point of the story is that one of these hairdressers had a birthday dinner. As you can imagine, the principal entertainment was much like the piece I wrote for Attitude Magazine - trashy gay chat.
Which couldn't have been more enjoyable.
RELATED LINKS
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