Jimmy Saville – Blood and Porridge

July 12, 2022July 14, 2022

Make it stop

I firmly believe that if the Covid-19 virus, aeons from now, evolves into a multi-cellular organism, and further aeons from that, evolves into a humanoid being with homo sapiens’ abilities of thought and speech, it will look and sound a lot like Britain’s current, though hopefully soon to be ex, Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

The big, blonde, blobby and bloviating Johnson and the humble 50 to 140-nanometre-wide Covid-19 virus already share many characteristics. Both of them made life miserable for large numbers of people in the early 2020s. And both have similar effects on the human physique. They both induce headaches, exhaustion and severe respiratory problems. Though with Covid-19, the respiratory problems are the result of it filling the lungs’ air sacs with fluid, which seriously reduces their capacity to take in oxygen. Whereas with Johnson, the problems come from exposure to his non-stop idiocies, venality, lying and gaslighting, which destroys your will to continue breathing.

Meanwhile, just as Covid-19 keeps mutating and keeps coming back at us in a dismayingly endless series of variants, such as the alpha, beta, delta, gamma and omicron ones, so too has a variety of Johnson variants appeared over the years.

The 1980s saw the Bullingdon Johnson variant – he was an enthusiastic member of the Bullingdon Club, the Oxford University dining club for posh yobs, who liked to strut around in tailcoats, waistcoats and bowties, wreck restaurants and burn money in front of homeless people. This was followed by the Sacked Trainee Journalist Johnson – the Times dismissed him when they discovered he’d made up a quote for a front-page story – and the Criminal Accessory Johnson – he agreed to supply his old Bullingdon mate, the businessman and future jailbird Darius Guppy, with the address of a journalist to whom Guppy wanted to administer a severe beating.

In the 1990s there emerged the Lying-about-Europe Johnson, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, who’d offered him refuge after his fall from grace with the Times – as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Johnson wrote wildly exaggerated pieces on how the evil EU was imposing nasty and stupid regulations on plucky little Britain, helping generate the Euro-scepticism that eventually won the 2016 referendum in favour of Brexit.

From unsplash.com / © Annie Spratt

Around this time, certain Johnson variants appeared that have persisted to the present day. For example, the Racist, Homophobic Johnson – he’s described black African people as ‘piccaninnies’, described gay men as ‘tank-topped bumboys’, called Chinese workers ‘puffing coolies’, likened gay marriage to bestiality and compared Muslim women to ‘letterboxes’. That last remark, made in a notorious column in the Telegraph in 2018, was followed by a 375% rise in incidents of Islamophobia reported in the UK.

So too emerged the Shagger Johnson – he’s had extra-marital affairs with Marina Wheeler, whom he married in 1993 a dozen days after his marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen was annulled, with Petronella Wyatt, allegedly with Anna Fazackerley, with Helen Macintyre, with Jennifer Arcuri, and with Carrie Symonds, whom he married in 2021 following the end of his marriage to the long-suffering Wheeler. He also tried to punt Symonds into a six-figure-salary job in the Foreign Office in 2018, while he was Britain’s Foreign secretary and she was still his mistress.

As Johnson has shimmied up the slimy pole of politics, from Member of Parliament to Mayor of London to leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, further variants have materialised. There’s been the Partying with Oligarchs Johnson – in 2018, while Foreign Secretary, he was seen stumbling about an Italian airport suffering from a severe hangover, and lacking his security detail, after attending a shindig thrown by Russian media magnate Evgeny Lebedev at his castle near Perugia. Oddly enough, Lebedev subsequently received a peerage and now, technically, is ‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’. The Talking Gibberish Johnson has also been observed – blabbering about Peppa Pig during an address to the Confederation of British Industry or filling the 2021 Tory Party Conference with excruciating riffs on his ‘Build Back Better’ slogan, such as ‘Build Back Butter!’ and ‘Build Back Beaver!’

Of course, we can never forget the Corrupt Johnson – detected, for instance, during the Wallpapergate saga wherein he and his missus tried to get Tory Party donors to foot the bill for more than 200,000 pounds’ worth of refurbishments to their flat, or during Johnson’s abortive attempts to get dodgy MP Owen Paterson off the hook after the Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended that he be suspended for breaking paid advocacy rules. Nor can we overlook the Breaking Lockdown Johnson – he seemingly presided over non-stop partying at No 10 Downing Street while the nation was under strict lockdown rules to slow the spread of Covid-19, which resulted in the police issuing 126 fines to Johnson, his wife, his Chancellor and their staff, making No 10 the most lawbreaking address in Britain during the pandemic.

From the BBC / © Daily Record

Obviously, the most virulent variant is the Big Fat Liar Johnson, which basically manifests itself every time he opens his mouth. To Conrad Black, media magnate and owner of the Spectator, in 1999 – make me Spectator editor and I won’t become an MP! (He did.) To the people of the constituency of Henley in 2001 – make me your MP and I’ll step down as editor of the Spectator! (He didn’t.) In response to claims that a mistress had to have an abortion in 2004 – it’s an inverted pyramid of piffle! (It wasn’t.) During campaigning for the 2016 Brexit referendum – if we leave the EU, we’ll be able to give an extra 350 million pounds to the National Health Service every week! (We weren’t.) To Londoners – I’ll build a garden bridge across the Thames! (He didn’t.) To Northern Irish Unionists – I won’t stick a trade border in the Irish Sea between you and the rest of the UK! (He most certainly did.)

To Keir Starmer – as Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, it was your fault Jimmy Saville escaped prosecution for his crimes! (It wasn’t.) In response to Partygate – I didn’t know about the parties! / The parties weren’t my fault! / I didn’t realise they were parties! / They didn’t actually break any rules! / I was only at them for a minute! (He did / They were / He did / They did / He wasn’t.) On the scandal involving the promotion of MP and serial groper Chris Pincher to the position of the Tory Party’s Deputy Chief Whip – I didn’t know he was a sex pest before I appointed him! (Oh yes you did.)

The Pincher scandal proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for those Tory politicians who’d supported Johnson or at least tolerated him. Last week, his ministers and MPs turned against him, first with the resignations of Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Education Minister Sajid Javid, and then with a deluge of resignations by MPs serving as ministers of state, private parliamentary secretaries and trade envoys. Even David Mundell, the embarrassingly cringy and spineless MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, the constituency I’m from in Scotland, quit his position as Trade Envoy to New Zealand. On July 7^th, Johnson at last accepted that the game was up and announced his resignation as Prime Minister. Here was a scrape that even he couldn’t squirm, worm and wriggle his way out of. The greased piglet, as David Cameron once called him, had finally been degreased, and spitted, and roasted.

Or had he? People have noted that his supposed resignation speech suspiciously lacked mention of the word ‘resignation’. Indeed, it lacked anything hinting at the vaguest feeling of remorse or apology. And Johnson only agreed to resign on the condition that he remain in post as ‘caretaker’ Prime Minister until the autumn, after a new Tory leader and Prime Minister has been chosen. Ominously, Johnson’s old advisor, now bitter enemy, Dominic Cummings tweeted on the matter: “I know that guy & I’m telling you – he doesn’t think it’s over, he’s thinking, ‘there’s a war, weird shit happens in a war, play for time, play for time, I can still get out of this, I got a mandate, members love me, get to September…’ If MPs leave him in situ there’ll be CARNAGE.”

Yes, just as we dread that Covid-19 will never be defeated, and will become a permanent, malignant feature of our increasingly fraught world, so Boris Johnson might never depart either. God help us.

From unsplash.com / © CDC

July 31, 2020August 10, 2020

Exit Q

© Bauer Media Group / Q Magazine

This week saw the publication of the final issue of Q, the British monthly music magazine that’d been on the go since 1986. You could argue that it’d been as much a victim of Covid-19 as, say, Terence McNally, John Prine or Tim Brooke-Taylor. In recent years Q had struggled financially and the lockdown in Britain caused by the virus and consequent lack of sales dealt the killer blow. Its editor since 2017, Ted Kessler, reflected in its last issue, “We’d been a lean operation for all of my tenure, employing a variety of ways to keep our head above water in an extremely challenging print market. Covid-19 wiped all that out.”

That’s a shame because for a decade-and-a-half, from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Q was a fixture in my life. Buying it every month was both an ingrained habit and something I looked forward to.

It was launched in the mid-1980s by David Hepworth and Mark Ellen – the latter’s claims to fame include playing bass for a short time in the 1970s Oxford University band the Ugly Rumours, which had one Tony Blair as its singer. You mightn’t have expected Hepworth and Ellen to start up something like Q, aimed at older music fans, because previously they’d edited the shiny, teen-pop weekly Smash Hits. However, they’d also spent the 1980s hosting the BBC’s long-running highbrow rock-music show The Old Grey Whistle Test (1971-88) and on July 13^th, 1985, helped to present the BBC’s coverage of the Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium. Indeed, it was in response to something Hepworth said during the broadcast that Bob Geldof made his famous “F*ck the address!” outburst on live TV.

Hepworth and Ellen angled Q towards an older readership because they realised that pop and rock music were no longer just a young person’s game. By the mid-1980s, folk who’d spent their teen years listening to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and the like were well into their forties and those who’d been old enough to enjoy the soundtrack of the Summer of Love were pushing middle-age. Furthermore, a new innovation, the compact disc, was causing many older records to be reissued in a new format and older people were spending money on older music again – buying on CD what they already owned on vinyl, a technology that suddenly seemed obsolete. Unsurprisingly, the ‘reissues’ review section in Q was almost as long as its ‘new releases’ review one.

At the same time, the existing British music press seemingly offered nothing to anyone who was older than their mid-twenties. The teenybop magazines, pursuing an audience interested only in New Romantic bands like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham – a movement I have to say I found unspeakable, as well as unlistenable – certainly didn’t, and the ‘serious’ music weeklies like the New Musical Express and the Melody Maker treated anything recorded before the advent of punk rock in the mid-1970s as the music of boring old farts.

No doubt reading Q in the late 1980s marked me out as a boring old fart too (I recall the NME once describing Q as a ‘living death of a magazine’), but I preferred its more measured, less partisan and less pretentious style and its willingness to cover with an open mind a range of musical genres from a range of eras to the attitude of the highbrow weeklies. The NME particularly got up my nose, its scribes broadcasting their musical preferences (and personal politics) in such an annoying, self-conscious, stuck-up and patronising way that I sometimes wondered if they were all clones that’d been grown from the cells of Rik Mayall’s character in the TV sitcom The Young Ones (1982-84). I actually enjoyed much of the music that the NME championed, like punk, new wave and indie, but my two favourite musical genres at the time were heavy metal and goth music, both of which the NME loathed and ridiculed, dismissing their fans as gormless morons. So yes, by 1986, I was ready for Q.

That’s not to say Q was toothless. Some of the most scathing pieces of musical journalism I’ve read appeared in its pages, though they were effective because the writer simply recorded was seen and heard and allowed the ‘stars’ in question to talk and string themselves up with their own words. I’m thinking of an article about an American tour attempted by late 1980s teen heartthrobs Bros, in which the brothers comprising the band, Matt and Luke Goss, came across as delusional and out-of-their-depth plonkers. Or a piece about Simply Red doing a concert in Cuba, in which the Q journalist had to deal with the mood-swings of a megalomaniacal, self-pitying and generally bloody awful Mick Hucknall. Or an encounter with the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, in which Corgan’s behaviour was such that the interview’s strapline was Marvel at the horribleness of Billy Corgan!

This ‘give-them-enough-rope’ approach, along with a strong dose of sarcasm, was evident in what for me was Q’s best regular feature, Who the hell does… think he / she is?, which ran until the late 1990s and was often but not always written by the late Tom Hibbert. This involved a unflattering interview with one of the ‘characters’ who were fixtures of British popular culture at the time – prominent in British TV, radio, comedy, sport, music, publishing, journalism or politics, but not showing much evidence of the talent that, in a rational world, would have secured them that prominence. The rogue’s gallery getting the Who the hell… treatment included Jeffrey Archer, Bananarama, Simon Bates, Jeremy Beadle, Gary Bushell, Barbara Cartland, Jeremy Clarkson, Edwina Currie, Jim Davidson, Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, Samantha Fox, Hale and Pace, Neil and Christine Hamilton, Benny Hill, David Icke, Bernard Manning, David Mellor, Michael Winner and not one, but two Starrs, Freddie and Ringo.

The interviews with those last two people were particularly memorable. An unhinged Freddie Starr ended up raving, “Jesus Christ tried to please everyone. And look what happened to him. Am I right? Am I right?” Whereas Ringo Starr, taking umbrage that in 1992 Hibbert still wanted to talk about the Beatles, raged: “That was 30 years ago, man. I’m still making records and you can hear that I’m a great musician on the new record, Time Takes Time, if you can ever be bothered to mention it. This is an actual bloody legend in front of you.”.

And it’s fascinating, if extremely disturbing, to note how many of the Who the hell… interviewees were later revealed as paedophiles and sexual abusers: Max Clifford, Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris and, worst of all, Jimmy Savile. Of Savile, Hibbert wrote: “People are loath to speak ill of Sir James. The man is a saint, millions raised for charity; he is the kiddies’ friend, ever on the telly placing a Jim’ll Fix It gong around the neck of some abashed youngster who’s just been a hovercraft pilot for a day. It is churlish, cynical beyond belief, to suggest there might be something untoward about the benevolent one. But isn’t there, perhaps, some oddness afoot. You hear tales, entirely uncorroborated, of course, whispered in sniggers at dinner parties…” To which Savile retorted that there were no skeletons in his closet because “I got knighted and that proves it, doesn’t it?” The wizened old monster then started bragging about his promiscuity with the ladies: “You can’t be in a disco with 600 birds in Aberdeen and stopping overnight and faithful to one f*ck in Leeds…”

Incidentally, an interview Hibbert did with Savile’s good friend Margaret Thatcher also appeared in Who the hell… Asking her what her favourite sort of pop music was, she professed to liking How Much is that Doggie in the Window?

© Paul Rider

Q was lucky in its timing, for the anodyne, superficial music that dominated the charts during the early and mid-1980s was later, partly at least, dislodged by Madchester and grunge. And then the Britpop phenomenon hit the country in the mid-1990s. In other words, music got rockier again, and with bands around like the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Oasis and Blur, Q had proper rock stars, displaying proper rock star attitudes, as material for entertaining articles and interviews. During the 1990s, the magazine also established the yearly Q Awards Ceremony, which became famous for the raucousness and rudeness of certain invitees. For example, John Lydon heckled Phil Jupitus and Johnny Vegas as ‘Teletubbies’, and Liam Gallagher called Chris Martin of Coldplay a ‘plant-pot’ – quite right too.

I spent a good part of the 1990s living in the Japanese city of Sapporo, and between 1993 and 1998 I bought every issue of Q from my local branch of Tower Records. Just before I left Sapporo, I donated my collection of back issues to my mate, Steve Burrow. I hope he’s still got them, as they would be worth a fortune today. A little later, I went to Ethiopia and worked there for the Voluntary Service Overseas organisation, and my brother in Scotland was kind enough every month to post me the latest copy of Q after he’d finished reading it. I think those Q back issues, from 1999 to 2001, ended up sitting on the shelves of the volunteers’ library in the central VSO Office in Addis Ababa. Who knows? Maybe they’re still there now.

But I lost interest in Q in the early noughties, partly because every issue seemed to indulge in that most pointlessly bloke-ish of things, compiling lists: ‘The 100 best albums of all time’, ‘the 100 best gigs of all time’, ‘the 100 best drummers of all time’, and so on and so forth. I know I’m guilty of putting the occasional list on this blog, but at least I don’t charge people money to read them.

In truth, Q was running out of interesting things to write about. By now the popular music scene had become a lot duller, thanks in part to the rise of identikit pop stars spawned by TV reality shows like Pop Idol (2001-2003), The X-Factor (2004-present) and The Voice (2010-present). These non-entities were products of what I like to think of as ‘the Simon Cowell conveyor belt of karaoke’.

That’s not to say that there wasn’t good music still around, but people were accessing it on the Internet and making the discovery and enjoyment of that music a much more disparate and individual experience. The days when large numbers of people suddenly hooked onto the same musical craze, which the old-style music magazines would then cover and capitalise on by selling loads of copies, were dead and gone. The Internet too was where people were increasingly turning to for information about music. Indeed, it was ironic that Q, a magazine partly created by new technology, the CD, was scuppered by new technology too.

That’s said, I’ve heard good things about Q under the editorship of Ted Kessler during the past three years, and I wish I’d dipped into it again while it was still there. But it’s too late now.

That’s not to say, of course, that good writing about music doesn’t exist anymore. It does, but you’re more likely to find it online than on the (ever-thinning) magazine racks of your local newsagent. That’s why I recommend you click onto – and if you like it, donate to – the Quietus.