Spectator Life

In January 2022, the New York Times ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, quoting Martin Amis’s daughter saying it seemed like it was. In the summer of 2023, the Guardian ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Lily-Rose Depp looks great when smoking. Last month, the Guardian again ran a piece that declared that smoking was back, because Dua Lipa smokes and Charli XCX pretends to.  Smoking between 35 and 60, however, is really very dangerous But it isn’t back, and there’s stats to prove it. However, what those pieces do say is that smoking retains its ‘cool’ image. We know that. Kate Moss and James Dean knew that.

It could be said that the last thing we need now is an Oasis reunion. I read somewhere that there are 56 conflicts in the world at the moment, and that doesn’t count what would surely happen if you put the Gallagher brothers in the same room. Siblings have a poor history in rock ’n’ roll – one immediately thinks of John and Tom Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who didn’t talk for the last 20 years of Tom’s life, or Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. In 1971, Ray and Dave were dining in Manhattan. Dave tried to steal one of Ray’s French fries. Ray stabbed his brother in the chest with a fork. At Dave’s 50th birthday, Ray stamped on his cake.

On the evening of 10 August 1996, I found myself lost in the grounds of a stately home in Hertfordshire, and very, very drunk. Everywhere I turned, there were men, mostly young men in bucket hats. They were all raucously singing, and they too were very drunk. Everyone was drunk. It always felt like the Gallagher brothers were performatively baiting each other for show, like two camp old wrestlers trying to hype a crowd Almost 30 years on, the Oasis concert at Knebworth is, what those working in marketing like to call, legendary. There has already been a commemorative album and documentary film – and now an Oasis reunion will see millions of people attempt to spend tens of millions of pounds to be able to attend re-creations of Knebworth next summer.

In the early 1860s, the teetotal vicar Revd Henry Solly founded the very first working men’s clubs. Like so many middle-class radicals, he failed to understand the true appetites of the working classes. Where Solly had visions of ‘education’ and ‘wholesome recreation’, real working men had different ideas: they wanted booze. Real clubland is not in St James’s. Instead, it can be found some 100 miles north By the 1970s, there were over four million drinkers visiting 4,000 clubs across Britain. There was live entertainment, big pot parimutuel betting, and copious amounts of subsidised drink. Some had Sunday afternoon strippers. Then British industry came crashing down, the miners of Orgreave had their heads smashed in, and their jobs went abroad.

We’re approaching the home straight at the Proms. There are three weeks to go at the world’s greatest festival of music, and Prommers are counting down the days until the famous orchestras of Berlin, Munich and Prague reach the Royal Albert Hall. The friendly foreign invasion has become the traditional climax to eight weeks of music-making. It’s been a better season in the hall than the one which appeared on paper, though the opening night was vin ordinaire. Clara Schumann’s pretty piano concerto turned out to be pretty dull. It’s not a piece that should open a festival of this pedigree. The pianist was a poor choice, too, but we shall come to Isata Kanneh-Mason anon.

What’s a guy got to do these days to take a pee in peace? Standing at the urinal in London King’s Cross train station, I was trying to embrace the present, not dwell on the failures of the past or the great trials to come; and for a brief moment, I felt that Zen-like tranquillity that, as all guys know, is key to avoid a freeze moment at a public urinal. But then, ‘MALE SUICIDE IS AN INCREASING PROBLEM. IF YOU OR ANYONE YOU KNOW ARE HAVING THOUGHTS...’ blared the Tannoy system. My inner Buddha fled. I left the public toilets thinking, ‘hmm, I don’t think I’ve been feeling particularly suicidal of late... But maybe?’ I was soon gazing at the latest poster campaign for prostate cancer (anti, not pro). One in eight!

As an arts journalist, you know you’re getting old when you scan the Edinburgh Festival programme, and instead of thinking ‘Wow, look at all this,’ your reaction is ‘Oh Christ, look at all that’. You tell friends that you’re off to cover Edinburgh in August, and instead of lighting up with envy, they suck their teeth in sympathy. Ouch – nasty! And yet there it is, nonetheless: that great immovable cultural blow-out on the shores of the Forth; infinite, monstrous, plastered all over press and media, and defying you to ignore it. Could you design a less suitable host city for a major international arts festival? No, it’s got to be done, and you know what that means. The hell of a Cross Country train.

I’ve never been seduced by the circus. As a motif in children’s literature, particularly taken up by Enid Blyton and Disney. In fact, as an animal-loving child, I think I found it cruel; I wanted Nellie the Elephant to pack her bags and say goodbye to the circus, I longed for her to slip her iron chain. In childless adulthood, I forgot all about it. Until I moved back to Oxfordshire and Giffords Circus appeared on the horizon every summer, its posters slapped on every lamppost from Charlbury to Cheltenham. The posters might have pulled in some punters, but for a certain type of middle-class patron, Giffords needed no advertisement. Everyone knew about it. It was the day out du jour. The young, the old, the child-laden, the childless: all came in their droves.

I’ve lived in Brighton and Hove since 1981. I’ve been surrounded by seagulls for most of my life, but somehow I’ve never really got used to them. There’s something unsettlingly prehistoric about those gnarled beaks and oversized, reptilian feet. While the feet can occasionally lend them a pleasingly comic aspect, the sheer size of the seagull makes its feelings impossible to take lightly. Their cries, so evocative from a safe distance, sound incredibly ugly at close quarters; I once lived near a nest, and it was like being trapped in an early Yoko Ono album. Granted, the place wouldn’t be the same without them – Brighton’s seagulls are its oldest and most recognisable natives.

Family holidays always carry a risk of dismaying revelations. Suddenly you are thrust together, 24/7, over many days, in a way only matched by Christmas (which is equally perilous). And so it was that, after ten days of driving around Provence and Occitanie, from Arles to the Camargue to the mighty Gorges of the Tarn, my older daughter this week suddenly said: ‘Why is Britain so hideous?’   The outburst was clearly prompted by the comparative beauty of France. My daughter is 18 and her only prior experience of France was grey wintry Paris in a boring school trip, so she was probably expecting more of the same dreariness.

Of all the places to witness the circus parade of modern French history, you can do a lot worse than the tiny town of Espalion, in the beautiful department of L’Aveyron, in the south of France. Because there are few destinations more unchanged than L’Aveyron, and this extremely French place is where I saw the opening of the French Olympic Games, in an al fresco brasserie. And this is where I sensed a weird unease. No one booed, no one catcalled, no one mocked. They sat there, sipping cold bière, and at times they vehemently cheered and laughed. Yet they also appeared a touch confused, and, I suspect, this is because they thought – like the rest of the world – ‘this is quite often a load of bollocks’.

I was in S&M relationships from my teenage years to somewhere in my naughty forties. Why did I go in for such strange antics? Damned if I know. Is it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn’t want a calm, cosy, devoted relationship, like my parents had? Because when I thought of romantic and sexual love, I thought of volatility, and that seemed hard to reconcile with vanilla sex? Or did I just conform to the type that also marks out many male masochists – I was ‘powerful’ in my realm, excellent at my job, and was curious to find out what being powerless felt like? (This last one, in the face of what I know now about how many girls and women experience powerlessness throughout the world, makes me feel shame in a way that very few things do.

Few bluesmen have matched the success of John Mayall, ‘the godfather of British blues’, who died on Monday aged 90 at his home in California. In a career spanning more than six decades, he made 50-odd albums with an ever-changing incarnation of his band, the Bluesbreakers. His proselytisation of black American artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Otis Rush, gave these legends a new audience this side of the Atlantic. BB King is said to have remarked that, were it not for Mayall, ‘a lot of us black musicians in America would still be catchin’ the hell that we caught long before.’ Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, founded in the early Sixties, was a carousel for some of the world’s most notable blues and rock musicians, many of whom went on to greatness.