Now We Are 40

Jamie East, founder of gossip website Holy Moly and now a radio presenter, started out as a singer in the indie band the Beekeepers. ‘We got a record deal in the mid Nineties, because we had been able to support our rehearsing on the dole. The dole was the lifeblood of the music industry, as it actively nurtured creative talent,’ he says. ‘You could sign on and be creative – artist, musician, designer – it gave you the luxury of time to do that. When they introduced Job Seeker’s Allowance, all of a sudden you couldn’t claim housing benefit and get your £37 dole. I remember we were front page of the Derby Evening Telegraph on the same day I was having to go and lie about having to sign on. The headline was “Derby band heroes go off on 4-week tour”, and I was down the dole office having to say I was actively looking for a job. It stifled everything.’ In the end East left the band and went off to work at Sky TV.

Media went from three TV stations to the national launch of another two terrestrials (Channel 4, Channel 5), then came satellite and cable, the launch of commercial radio stations (Kiss, Virgin), and the expansion of magazine publishing houses (Arena, Frank, Esquire, Q, Red and Elle Deco) and more national newspapers (the Correspondent, Today, the Independent).

TV was exciting – there was The Big Breakfast and The Word, anarchic, youth-oriented shows where the kids were in charge, and there were no rules. Paula Yates could seduce Michael Hutchence in bed live, bands could swear at Terry Christian, Amanda de Cadenet got a speaking part. Of course it wasn’t all creative, and someone had to pay for it. Canny types saw the opportunity to marry up brands with this new sexy media. Brands had the money, Britain was brimming with creativity. One of the most canny was Matthew Freud, whose PR agency brought the two together. His agency could place a packet of crisps on a TV show, or a toothpaste tube on a magazine cover; celebrities could be bought and sold; a soft drink could sponsor a film premiere. It gave PRs and brands the illusion they were in control, and gradually, they were.

Kris Thykier, Freud’s right-hand man, remembers Planet 24’s Christmas parties as ‘legendary’. The year Planet 24 launched The Big Breakfast, its other show The Word was in full flight. Two of the most anarchic TV programmes that had ever been made – produced and presented by young people, for young people. This wasn’t any longer middle-aged men in expensive suits in Madison Avenue and Soho telling young people what was cool. The kids were doing it for themselves.

‘We took over the Ark in Hammersmith, which had just been opened and was the building of the moment. We threw a party on the top floor and it was the first moment where you sensed there were young people in charge. It was the year the Groucho was up and running. I was 20 years old and already representing the programmes, the presenters and the production company, talking to all the newspapers. It was mad. But the media were encouraging it and we were storming it,’ he says. ‘That party that year was the meeting of the teams that made The Word and The Big Breakfast. Two shows, one first thing in the morning and one last thing at night, talking to a generation that hadn’t really been talked to by television before.’

The same thing was happening in the print world. Newspapers began to expand to accommodate all the new advertising streams, with features and lifestyle and fashion sections starting to appear. These sections naturally invited in more staff, many of them young and female. This was where my career took off: I went from being an unpaid work experience on the listings section of the Observer (a job I had blagged through a friend of a friend of a friend), to a paid researcher on their Life magazine supplement. From there I went to the Telegraph as a commissioning editor in charge of food (where my patrician, silver-haired boss called me ‘The Infant Tiffanie’ as I was, as far as he was concerned, outrageously young to be in the job).

Courted by PRs, riding the London cocktail circuit of launch parties and openings, it was the ideal spot to watch the Nineties unfold. Like Thykier, I went to some legendary parties and witnessed some great moments. I remember attending one party in Cannes at the film festival, hosted by MTV in Pierre Cardin’s space-age villa, a collection of pink Teletubby pods built into the edge of a cliff on the Cote d’Azur. Ostensibly the week-long festival in Cannes was a showcase of the film world’s upcoming releases – and they were so exciting, as directors like Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie were bringing a rock ’n’ roll edge to Hollywood.

In 1998 Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was released, giving London an international film voice – and making it very attractive to brands looking to cash in. There were probably about a thousand people at the MTV party that year, every named DJ in the land playing, and endless test tubes of Absolut Vodka going round. Everyone was cool, young and fashionable. At three in the morning they closed the party down and emptied out the villa – and at four they started it up again, for those that remained. We danced on the terrace as the sun came up over the Mediterranean and there was nowhere cooler or more at the centre of things on earth than that terrace right then – we were all exactly where we wanted to be.

As such a source of economic prosperity, the thriving creative industries, which had previously been dismissed as a bit ridiculous and inconsequential, were now being embraced by the establishment. They were part of Brand Britain – something we could sell on to the world to drive our economy and elevate our national pride. Taking his cue from America, which was so good at marketing itself, the newly elected Tony Blair held an event in 1997 that was to become the pivotal moment of the Nineties. He celebrated his election with a series of parties at 10 Downing Street, and all these artists who had set themselves up as anti-establishment, disruptive voices, were invited to Number 10, the heart of the government.

Blair was Cool Britannia – he had rebranded politics and reinvented it for our generation. For a generation so expert on and obsessed by cool, Blair’s relative youth and embracing of the creative industries was intoxicating. He must be a good thing. One of the first things he did in government was celebrate British design and creativity with a party – a party! Suddenly the emblems of what had previously been considered fringe culture were invited in to be celebrated by the establishment itself. Thatcher had had little time for culture. After 18 years of Tory rule, there were clear changes afoot.

‘It was an exciting time, to have so many people from all these different industries included,’ says June Sarpong. ‘Architecture, design, he had them all. It wasn’t just the obvious musicians and fashion and art.’ Geri Halliwell had just brought the Union Jack in from the cold, Blur and Oasis were fighting it out for cool points, the cast of The Full Monty were on set, the ‘Sensation’ exhibition was about to open at the Royal Academy, Loaded was in full swing. Tony Robinson, Vivienne Westwood, Ben Elton, Chris Evans and Kevin Spacey all trooped up the street to that famous front door. Blair hit cool paydirt when he got the photograph of the decade – chortling over a glass of champagne with Noel.

‘The fact that a guy who’d been in a band, owned an electric guitar and has probably had a spliff was prime minister really meant something,’ said Gallagher later. ‘He might be one of us.’ And Blair knew how to handle himself. When Gallagher asked him how he had managed to stay up all night on the night of the election, he quipped, ‘Probably not the same way you did.’

‘That government, because they were all so young themselves, understood how important shaping British culture was, not just for Britain but as a message to the rest of the world,’ says June. ‘They understood the importance of selling that image so that the world wanted to be part of the UK. It was quite American thinking.’ Politics, then, began to use marketing too: the age of spin was born. Blair’s PR man was Peter Mandelson, a silver-tongued figure hated by the media for his slippery talking, whose responsibility was to cast the New Labour project as the bright dawn of liberal thinking. The danger was that the shiny sheen Mandelson applied to the policies and personalities left them open to suspicion.

Momentarily, Blair brought that disengaged group in from the outside. Ultimately, though, politics did not benefit from its embrace of marketing – in the end its reliance on spin just earned it distrust. By the time Cameron came along with his lookey-likey ‘Cool Britannia’ party (Eliza Doolittle and Ronnie Corbett: the guest list didn’t have quite the same cachet), the cultural zeitgeist had moved on. He would have done better to invite Millennial vloggers and the Silicon roundabout digipreneurs, but of course that just isn’t as sexy or cool. Cameron was a posh boy who went to Eton (nobody likes privilege) whereas Blair presented himself as classless. He may have come from a relatively affluent background and even gone to public school, but Blair was socially much harder to place – the level playing field we all wanted so much.

It was to be some time before the scales were to fall from our eyes. As Private Eye had it so perfectly, Tony Blair was our saviour. Working on a national newspaper, I was not only party to all the cultural changes happening around me, but was on the inside track of the political ones too. I felt like I was living right in the middle of it – and physically I was. I had moved in with a boyfriend (TV producer for one of the myriad new satellite channels) who lived in Primrose Hill, not far from Islington and the street where Blair lived up till the election. I used to visit one of my writers who lived near the Blairs’ old home, and pass the door Cherie Blair famously answered in her nightie on the morning of the election.

Creation Records opened their HQ in Primrose Hill village, and for a while the genteel street that was then lined with greengrocers, tearooms and bookshops also housed pop stars, paparazzi and music industry types. The ancient bohemian ladies of Primrose Hill, who dined at Odette’s in their hatpins, beehives and endless necklaces, were rather a pleasing backdrop to the northern swagger of the Britpop scene. Everything, it seemed, was being overrun by the noisy clash of modernity.

Round the corner was The Steele’s, a pub where Kate Moss and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream would drink; The Queen’s played host to Chris Evans and Oasis; David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Sadie Frost and David Walliams all lived nearby and would pass in the street. It felt as if I had landed in the heart of everything, that I was part of this new world. By now I had moved on from the Telegraph to the Express features desk, where we could be reactive to the news unfolding around us. Racism in the police, the care of the elderly, the shenanigans at Westminster were all fair cop, although my finest hour was probably ‘Too posh to push’ – the truth behind Victoria Beckham’s caesarean.

I definitely gravitated towards the more fluffy side of news: my boyfriend at the time was producing a TV series with the comedian Leigh Francis (who now portrays the comedian Keith Lemon), and a pilot on video gaming with Dexter Fletcher. I was literally living next door to Liam ’n’ Patsy and I think I was rather blinded by the glitz and the excitement. While tabloid culture is a clever mix of both hard and soft news, it wasn’t clear to me at the time how we were shaping the future. How Saviour Blair was, or was not, paying it forward. How distracting and eventually corrosive celebrity culture would become. How Blair’s ‘New Deal’ – a cornerstone of his welfare reform in his first term, which withdrew benefits from those ‘who refused reasonable employment’ in exchange for training and subsidised employment, and the introduction of tuition fees that withdrew free arts education, stifling social mobility – was to have such far-reaching consequences for talent and creative culture.

The recent death of the actor Alan Rickman brought this into sharp focus: could a comprehensive boy who had grown up in a council house make it to the summit of the acting profession now? Twenty-five years ago, if you had no money you could live in a squat and draw dole to fund your rehearsal time, and you could beg, borrow or steal cheap studio space.

‘We rented a whole floor of an old disused mill for band practice back in Derby,’ says Jamie East. ‘It cost us £40 a month that we made back by sub-letting it out to other bands.’ These days ‘disused studio space’ has been turned into loft-style apartments. Bands can afford no such luxury, but it was a luxury afforded to Generation X talent: the YBAs, Kaiser Chiefs, Oasis, Jarvis Cocker et al. Where are the Alan Rickmans of today? Is it any wonder Eddie Redmayne, Dominic West, Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis all went to Eton?

Or that the best pop can offer is a new hierarchy of talent decided by shows like The X Factor?

5

Clinton’s Cigar

With greater transparency comes greater accountability. As the media exploded, and the traditional respect for privacy and restrictions around reporting on authority began to melt, power fell victim to the truth. Celebrities, once revered beasts of glamour, found themselves exposed as the humans they actually were. Tom Cruise was a cult Scientologist, David Beckham was a suspected adulterer, Jude Law was a wife-swapper, Jennifer Aniston’s marriage was on the rocks. But it wasn’t just the A-listers who were morphing into tragic soap stars in front of our eyes – it was the highest levels of government and those who had once been utterly untouchable, the Royals.

The Monica Lewinsky affair in the States seems incredible even now in the excruciating level of its detail. It was perhaps the last deliberately careless act of an American presidency that relied on secrecy. Back in 1998 Bill Clinton underestimated the growing power of the internet, the scrutiny of an ever more powerful press, the advance of technology in collecting DNA evidence. It was also the moment popular culture took on politics. Clinton’s affair struck at just the moment when technology, science, the press and popular culture came together.

Rumours of the Lewinsky affair first surfaced on the Drudge Report, at that time a fairly insignificant politics blog. Picked up by the Washington Post, it was enough for Clinton to utter the eleven words that were later to bring him down: ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.’ An investigation was set up on the popular satirical sketch show Saturday Night Live. The internet hummed with rumour and speculation. The presidency of the United States was now reduced to a conversation around blowjobs and cigar dildos. And then investigators found DNA evidence on a blue dress. There was to be no cover-up this time. An independent investigator was appointed to ascertain whether the president had lied. Eleven months and acres of media coverage later, both parties were left shamed and broken.

Over here in the UK, we had already witnessed the unravelling of Charles and Diana’s marriage in similarly glorious detail. Charles found himself the victim of a leak of phone tapes, caught red-handed talking to his mistress and expressing a naïve (aristocratic? who knows!) desire to be her tampon. Pretty hard to command future kingly respect following that one. Diana played her hand as the wronged siren, finding lovers in surgical operating theatres and on yachts with the sons of Middle Eastern billionaires, turning up at openings in drop-dead gorgeous designer gear. Charles sought to rescue his credibility with TV confessionals but he was no match for his wife, who was much more in tune with the times.

It was the endgame, as we now know, and as the final acts of both events played out to a watching world, they ended in spectacular tragedy: impeachment for the president and the self-proclaimed prophecy of death for Diana. Diana’s ride around the Med on Dodi Fayed’s gin palaces ended in horror as the paparazzi chased her to her death on a midnight flit from the Ritz in Paris. The gradual erosion of authority that had kicked off the decade had ended it with shame for the British Royal Family and the American political establishment. Nobody believed anything any more about our inherited structures. The old ways were broken. But what did that leave us?

‘We are the first generation for whom the level of media scrutiny has made it impossible for anyone to make a move into political life,’ says Kris Thykier. ‘Until the election of Donald Trump last year, we have only had people in government who have been in politics all their lives – because unless you’re in politics all your life, you haven’t run a life that will allow you to be in politics. It may have been possible in the Sixties and Seventies, even the Eighties. But it stopped being possible in the Nineties.’ The life of JFK was no less colourful than Clinton’s – but that was no impediment, far from it. ‘When Clinton came to power in 1993, the “I didn’t inhale” line was a fudge, an indication of what was to come.’

What followed was two decades of scrutiny on our politicians that has possibly manacled some of the free-wheeling entrepreneurialism and colour that kept the political populous and discourse lively and diverse. While Generation X was busy ushering in a period of intense cultural change, the establishment failed to find an alternative route. The year 2016, however, saw all that turned on its head. Fed up with the status quo, fed up with a government that effects incremental change that seems only to be in the best interest of the elitist few, the British electorate voted themselves out of the European Union, and the American electorate voted in a man who was the antithesis of what we thought was acceptable in a politician. Dismissing liberalisation and globalisation in a great sweep, America now waits to see what kind of change a Trump presidency will bring. And Britain faces years of legal wrangling and paper-pushing as it attempts to disentangle itself from membership of the EU. Where change should and could happen is through politics – perhaps as we head into the latter years of this decade this is where we will begin to see it again. Because for a long time our attention was diverted from the political to the personal – it was, after all, much more fun. After the Clintons came the Osbournes. MTV’s reality series of life at home with a bonkers rock star began the era of ‘Reality’. Svengali of the series was Ozzy’s wife Sharon; portrayed as the long-suffering partner of a drug-addled, unfaithful star, it soon turned out that truth was stranger than fiction when tales of her defecating into a box and leaving it on people’s desks turned out to be leaked by none other than Sharon herself. She was manipulating a willing audience into believing her pantomime family was as off the scale as it appeared.

Hardly anyone who watched The Osbournes could name a single Ozzy song, but it didn’t matter. This lunatic rock musician, famous mostly for biting the head off a bat, now turned out to have a domestic life that was fascinating in its gross absurdity and yet also its mundanity. Celebrity rockers have marriage problems just like the rest of us, and they also have untidy houses and stroppy teenage children. It was a revelation.

‘The Kardashians have got nothing on the Osbournes,’ says Jamie East, founder of gossip site Holy Moly. ‘The Osbournes made us realise we didn’t like the gloss of the celebrity world. What we liked instead was watching Sharon call her husband a bastard and crying about his drugs or the time he threatened to shoot her. People could watch The Osbournes and think, “I had a similar argument with my husband. Okay, he didn’t earn a million quid and he’s not on cocaine but he spent our last 50 quid in the bookies and the kids didn’t have sandwiches in school for a week!” All of a sudden we realised celebrities left skid marks in the bowl just like the rest of us.’

East at this time was a lowly mole working at Sky TV. Celebrities and tasty morsels of gossip used to pass by his desk, and he needed somewhere to pass them on. That place was Popbitch. Starting out as an email newsletter of crude and rudimentary – yet dehabilitatingly hilarious – stories, it rode the wave of media from print to digital.

East saw the opportunity to set up a rival website, Holy Moly. ‘We were riding this wave of snark. Nick Denton was doing it overseas with Gawker, but our remit at Holy Moly was that we would always go where no one else would go – we were blunt.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.