Julie Burchill

It’s a rule of life that adults shouldn’t understand young people’s music, ever since Little Richard made the old folk fume with his incessant and enigmatic cries of ‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!’ I bitterly recall when during my adolescence my father – a highly respectable Communist factory-hand who would rather have voted Tory than sworn in front of

It was Depp vs Heard and Best Of Breed at Crufts rolled into one: yes, the Wagatha Christie gravy-train came to a screeching halt yesterday having taken three years and £3 million in lawyers’ fees to reach the terminus. And with it, Rebekah Vardy’s reputation as a Cool Girl hit the buffers. I was vaguely

‘We don’t need another hero,’ sang Tina Turner back in the sexy-greedy 1980s. How times have changed. These days we have Superheroes Are Everywhere, a children’s book written by the Vice-President of the USA, Kamala Harris. Puffs tell us that ‘the book teaches that superheroes can be found everywhere in real life, from family members,

Growing up, I didn’t really think about the police until I got caught shoplifting at the age of 14. Separated from my comrades in the five-finger-discount crusade, I was stuck in a cell for half an hour but the earache only started when my furious parents came to collect me. I almost asked the kind

It seems incredible that, 45 years ago, a pop group – the Sex Pistols – could release a record on a respectable label (A&M, founded by Herb Alpert, home of the Carpenters) in which they claimed, probably somewhat rashly, that our glorious monarch was not a human being. These days such sentiments are confined to

For the first few weeks of watching Johnny Depp and Amber Heard attempt to turn each other into twelve cans of cat food, it felt like some silly if savage sideshow. But as the defamation trial dragged on, it became obvious there was something unusually grotesque about this case; as with a boxing match, turning the

There’s something ludicrous about old people trying to understand the pop music preferred by youth. Mind you, youth is relative and here I am at the age of 62, explaining Harry Styles. Styles isn’t just a pop star, he’s a phenomenon and therefore worthy of examination by ancient people like me. Last week, Radio 4’s

Few things are as much fun as a full-on court case between two rich show-offs. Watching Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney attempt to turn each other into 12 tins of cat food at the High Court of Justice this week, while trying to keep up with the ever more astonishingly antics of Depp vs Heard,

I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have been removed from it. A spokesman proclaimed: ‘In an effort to make the puzzle more accessible, we are reviewing the solutions and removing obscure or potentially insensitive words over time. HARRY is an example of

When I was a little girl, my mum told me that I shouldn’t use the word ‘woman’ – but rather ‘lady.’ ‘Woman’ was just too visceral to her, whereas a ‘lady’ might well be a doll. But by adolescence my shoplifted copy of The Female Eunuch and Helen Reddy bawling ‘I am strong, I am

I’ve never been keen on the idea of popularity. Courting disapproval has been a large part of my career and I find it bracing, like an early dip in a cold sea. I remember back in 2003 feeling put out because the Most Hated People In Britain list featured me at a mere 85, sandwiched