Music blah blah blah

In the line of duty I’ve recently been forced to churn out several dozen 120-word bios on bands that no one’s ever heard much about. Usually for good reason. The majority are a bunch of spoddy charlatans whose lack of creativity is only equalled by their disgustingly disproportionate sense of self-importance. That half these weasel-faced, overstyled public school brats even have the audacity to pick up an instrument is beyond me, but they do.

The vast majority seem to subscribe to the ‘get the right hair cut and the rest will follow’ school of musical endeavour. A school that is notably short on successful alumni. Sadly, the music industry is so greedy, so fearful of ‘missing’ something, so hung up on invisible tailoring that no one ever has the guts to point out the little twerps aren’t wearing any clothes. And of course they’re all egged on by the vain, bitter, insecure, coke-addled cocksuckers who pass for the music press.

People like me. Who say things about bands like:

They have the Nazi-referencing band name (the White Rose Movement was an anti-Nazi student group), the angular haircuts, and slightly distressed facial expressions required of all devout Joy Division followers. However, their interpretation of Ian Curtis’s brooding vision is leavened by a healthy dose of 80s synth pop and noughties throw-away glamour. Which is pretty much what you’d expect of a band who picked up their keyboard player at hip student hangout Trash, and claim to have grown up on a Norfolk commune. Add the fact that they used to run a club night in an East End strip joint (hasn’t everyone?) and they’re almost too cool for school. Luckily they have enough snappy tunes to back up the arch posing.

When what I mean is:

Yet another bunch of utterly pointless, slavish 80s apologists. As if the optimistic Nazi referencing name (White Rose Movement were student insurrectionaries – they wish!) and shit Ian Curtis-alike severe fringes and jerky dancing weren’t bad enough the over-styled muppets don’t even have the decency to rip off the good bits of Joy Division. That would require emotion. The spew out vapid synth pop instead, with just enough overtones of Eurythmics, Human League, et al to give the slobbering journos in the crowd something to grab on to apart from their own stubby cocks. What else do you expect from a band comprised of Jasper, Finn, Ed, Owen and a keyboard player called Taxxi, who they picked up at Trash? Avoid.

See? There’s a fundamental, spirit-sapping ugliness about the whole thing. Trying to pitch these bands is like trying to sell the Tooth Fairy to a bunch of old folks with dentures. It is an audience that doesn’t need this shit, and is old enough to know better.

The only filament of hope holding me above the abyss is the fact that – thank Christ – at least I’m not in PR.

Mind The Gap

Good news ladies! According to the latest statistics British working women have achieved a historic level of wage parity. Don’t get too excited though – we still get paid, on average, 13.2% less than men.

But hey, we’re less unequal than ever before! Hurrah!

Or not.

Averages are ugly, and the deeper you dig beneath the shiny skin of this statistic the more it stinks. Women who work part-time earn 38% less than men in similar jobs. By retirement age women are nearly 50% poorer than men (all these statistics, incidentally, come from Metro – part of the viciously conservative Mail group of newspapers). Free financial paper City AM reports an even more depressing fact: while the average man working in Canary Wharf earns £100,000 the average woman only earns £43,000.


Whoa. Fuck. £57,000 per year, less. That’s a lot of fucking money. How did that happen? Simone Sasson (of the Women in Business Club) speculates that, since male and female graduates are offered similar salaries, the massive chasm in actual earnings opens gradually. “A lot of research suggests that once women are in their jobs, they do not negotiate pay packages according to their value. Men are probably more aggressive and women have a more modest approach,” she says.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how it works. Men – still the huge majority in the City – are conditioned to covet ‘boy’s toys’, many of them have been brought up through back-slapping public school networks that gave them a huge(ly inflated) sense of self-importance, and most importantly they compare. Their cocks, their cars, their salaries. The few women in their midst are shut out of this boys’ club. They don’t have an equivalent female group with whom to compare their achievements and compensations. And they’re too polite or too intimidated to ask the men how much they’re making.

So while the men are egging each other on, grasping for bigger bonuses and fatter paycheques the women are going about their work. ‘Modest’ and isolated. They probably console themselves with the fact they are earning well above the national average wage, but they don’t realise just how much they’re being short changed compared to their colleagues. If they decide to have kids their earning power takes another huge hit – while their partners’ earning power is totally unaffected.

This lack of financial equality makes social ‘equality’ another burden for women. Women in, say, the City, are expected to own expensive suits, get expensive haircuts, spend money on expensive personal maintenance. They are also expected to stand their round at the pub, and if they don’t have equally expensive holidays or equally nice flats they feel left out. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ costs women proportionately more than men – leaving them with less money to save or invest. No wonder by the time they hit retirement age they have only 57% as much wealth as men!

Apparently if the wage gap carries on decreasing at the same rate as the past few years it will take another thirty years before we reach parity. Fantastic.

Meantime, the only thing that’s going to save us is to stop being polite. Stop being modest. Start kicking up a fuss. I suggest this weird social taboo about wages be dispensed with (in Scandinavia people’s wages are a matter of public records, and they’re surviving just fine) – let’s start talking about how much money we’re making. Tell other people how much you make. Don’t be embarrassed if it’s a lot, or a little. Stop assuming that if you’re getting paid less it must be because you’re worth less. Look at the men around you. Do you think they do 15% - or 50% - more work than you? I doubt it.

A Grave robbery?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,2763,1637455,00.html

A man steals a dead baby’s identity. He gets a passport, a wife, a job. For over twenty-years he lives as aristocracy before a chance passport check blows his cover.

It’s pure tabloid heaven. But apart from bored journalists – who the fuck cares? How could a sensible person believe someone deserves to be banged up for 21 months for borrowing the identity of a dead kid? Is having the same name as someone a prosecutable offence these days?

Obviously not, or a whole lot of George Smiths or Gemma Wilson’s would be in deep shit. So the problem lies elsewhere. The problem, according to sentencing judge Adele Williams is that of ‘false identity.’

In this case the courts seem to have talked themselves around to believing that identity is a name you’re given. Something someone else slaps on you like a label, irrefutable, unchangeable and basically outside of your control. Which is bullshit.

The one thing we can be sure of is identity is malleable. Depending on who’s asking I’ll identify myself by my work, or my relationships, or my nationality, or the colour of my hair. All of them are fractals of identity. More importantly they are basically all constructs. Ok, I didn’t choose to be born in the USA, but how I define myself as an American is entirely my choice. I was also born brunette. But I decide on the shape and shade of my hair.

The accused in this case decided the ego prop he needed to get through life was a name and a title, so he started calling himself Christopher Edwards, Earl of Buckingham. Okay, he wasn’t (the real Christopher Edwards had died age 8 months). But what’s the harm in pretending? He was, officially, jailed for making a false passport application – but was it really? He may have invented a title, but the person who carried that passport was still him. There wasn’t some mysterious Other lurking beneath the title, just a person who – by all accounts – led a pretty average, respectable life.

Ripping off someone’s identity to empty their bank account is one thing; polishing up your life story with a few fibs to lend it a little glamour is another. And if the courts decide to make a habit of jailing people for doing so they’d better start building more prisons. Quick.

What has ‘Cocaine Kate’ really done wrong?

Famously private, Kate’s only real crime is to be a stunningly beautiful, successful career woman who has steadfastly refused to settle down, get married, and cosy up to the moronic celebrity press.

She is a model. The public seems to have forgotten that her job – her only job – is to look pretty on demand. And after 15 years in the notoriously brutal fashion industry, she still does it far better - and with infinitely more aplomb - than anyone else. Now, at the first chink in her impeccable armour the shrill, envious hyenas of the press are closing in for the kill.

They defend their rapaciousness. Wittering about how she’s a role model, a bad influence on children. A mother for god’s sake!

What cowardly, sexist nonsense. Kate is no more a role model by virtue of her profession than is the Mona Lisa by virtue of having sat for a painting. Both are merely outstandingly beautiful. If Kate had ever once put herself forward as a role model it would be different, but she never has. In fact, she never says anything in the press at all. Thereby clinging to a dignity which the majority of celebrities have long since abandoned.

Yes, she is a mother. By all accounts a devoted parent who enjoys playing dress-up and frolicking on the beach with her little daughter. Do the mewling hypocrites, with their trumped-up concerns, honestly believe a woman’s right to an adult private life disappears at conception? I certainly hope none of the women currently pillorying Kate have ever left their kids with a babysitter and gone out on the town for a night!

Kate is not being persecuted because she may have indulged in Class A’s, or enjoyed the odd Sapphic romp (notably, no one is queuing up to demand admitted drug-taker, self-harmer and lipstick lesbian Angelina Jolie’s children be taken away). She’s being vilified because of a much more basic, fundamental human flaw – the insecurity of her detractors.

Kate makes people uncomfortable. Women don’t understand how she can always look so flawless, so together. Men are baffled by her silence and haughty independence. Most of all, they don’t understand the notion of privacy, a value so old-fashioned that all the moralistic neo-Puritans no longer recognise it.

Take Kerry Katona, by way of contrast. She also had lurid drug allegations flung across the Sunday rags. Like Kate, she has young children and is separated from their father. And she is also regularly photographed falling out of nightclubs, bleary-eyed and clutching a fag.

The only difference – apart from Kate’s insouciant glamour – is that at the first whiff of trouble Kerry ran blubbing to the media. As a columnist for OK! She was guaranteed acres of fawning, apologist press, complete with flatteringly lit pictures of her cuddling her daughters. With the hounds of the press on her side the alleged week long coke binges became a terrible ‘betrayal.’ Her subsequent stint in a US rehab clinic was explained away as ‘exhaustion.’ Recently she sealed her redemption by posing with her boyfriend and publicly stating her desire to get married and have more children.

This is what 21st Century Britain demands of its women. The façade of independence – fags, booze, singledom – coupled with deep rooted conservatism (babies, husbands, no recreational drugs except alcohol). Only now, instead of being mediated by family, government or the church these social mores are deployed by the media like anti-aircraft fire: aimed at anyone who’s soared too high.

The victims of these new witch hunts are not the guilty – surely if that were the case Pete Doherty who is the father of a young son and whose drug antics are a matter of public record – would be on the dock alongside his on-off lover. They are, rather, the stubborn few women who hold on to two dangerous notions. First, that they are entitled to a life outside the pages of Heat magazine. Second, that ‘female equality’ means something in this day and age.

Sorry Kate. You have paid your own way, carved your own career, and made your own decisions, but that doesn’t give you the right to your own life.