Category Archives: Hedonism

Its nearly a quarter of a century since Fela Kuti passed away. Yet, the influence of his music and pan-Africanist thoughts hasnt stopped. Fela was notorious for the deployment of his Afrobeat as a critical tool against human rights violations, social injustice and insensitive cum inept leadership in Africa. And the conversation as to who best fits the profile of a successor has continued unabated.

Many Nigerian artists have gone as far as naming themselves as the reincarnation of Fela. From Dede Mabiakus endless references to his closeness to the Abami Eda the name Fela gave himself a Yoruba phrase that roughly translates to the strange one and Chief Priest, to Charles Charly Boy Oputas antics, a few have pretended to be made of the sort of defiant stuff at Felas core.

Musically, Eedris Abdulkareems success with the 2004 hit Jaga Jaga appeared to have instigated a Fela complex in him to the point that he got Felas eldest son Femi Kutis saxophone support to legitimise his tribute in the single titled Fela (2013).

There have been several other musical tributes to the memory of Fela. These have included Seyi Sodimus remarkable Fela the King (2002) and W4s rather cheesy Like fada, Like son (2012). Beyond these, pop-inclined artistes have sought to appropriate different features of the great musicians legacy. This has included drawing from the rich repertoire of Felas ensemble in embellishing their works, particularly over the last decade.

Yet, undoubtedly the most powerful of the tributes to Fela is 97 (2001) which was recorded and performed by Femi Kuti, himself an accomplished Afrobeat star.

A great deal of work has been done on protest music in Nigeria. But, in my view, studies have been reticent in appreciating the works of Femi.

I set about to fill this gap. In my study, I look at Femis music through the framework of a re-democratised Nigeria and I invariably draw equivalents with Felas works which constituted a major alternative voice through military-ruled Nigeria.

I conclude that, to source for a Fela successor outside the direct lineage of his family is to court the ridiculous that is if there is any need to source for a Fela successor to begin with.

Previous research showed that Femis consciousness through art had begun during military dictatorship in Nigeria. Songs like Wonder Wonder (1995), Plenty Nonsense (1995), Nawa (1995), Stubborn Problem (1995), Sorry Sorry (1998), What Will Tomorrow Bring (1998), and Victim of Life (1998) are standouts from Femis catalogue during that particularly dark era.

The same study posited that Fela was not the only popular musician who confronted the military and tyrannous leaders of Nigeria between independence in 1960 and Felas passing in 1997.

The study discussed the protest contributions by reggae, highlife and other Afrobeat stars during the same period. These included Sonny Okosuns, Tunji Oyelana, Wole Soyinka, Victor Essiet and The Mandators, Majek Fashek, Ras Kimono, Lagbaja and Osayomore Joseph.

Femi Kutis protest credentials spans across both military-ruled and democratic Nigeria. My research further found that hip hop has constituted an accomplice to Femi Kutis work having served as a veritable vehicle in speaking truth to power in Nigeria since re-democratisation in 1999. Contrary to its critics claims, hip hop culture in Nigeria isnt always about hedonism and the objectification of women.

Kuti himself featured American hip hop acts Mos Def and Common on Do Your Best and Missing Link off 2001s Fight to Win album.

A review of Femi Kutis discography from 1989s No Cause for Alarm to 2018s One People One World shows that through all ten albums spanning about 30 years, Femi is undoubtedly the most prolific creator of protest music in Nigeria. Add to this the maturation of his first son Omorinmade Kuti. Now 23 years old, he released his debut single Free Your Mind in 2020 to respectable acclaim in the Afrobeat genre.

Omorinmade who has grown to become an Afrobeat artist in his own right under his fathers watch, makes it even clearer that Femis proximity to the title of a Fela successor is rivalled by none.

Yet, there are no signs that the family plans to rest on past laurels. A new release, Legacy+, is out. A double record comprising Femis Stop the Hate (his 11th album) and Omorinmades debut, For(e)ward, it links three generations of the Kuti dynasty.

Through Legacy+, we find a deliberate merging of Felas legend, Femis unrelenting struggle and Omorinmades forging on through youthful and possibly futuristic Afrobeat.

The sole caveat to this chain is that Felas last son Seun Kuti, also an Afrobeat artist, presents the public space in Nigeria with the most cerebral viewpoints of any artist at the present time. Following the #EndSARS protests, Seun has flown kites on the possibility of relaunching his fathers Movement of the People, a political party through which Fela attempted to run for Nigerias presidency during the Second Republic.

The truth is that no artist through Nigerias postcolonial years has contributed close to what Fela did and continues to do - for human rights and social justice. Appreciation must of course follow the efforts of Charly Boy, Eedris Abdulkareem, Dede Mabiaku, Lagbaja and Wole Soyinka. But, musically and otherwise, only Gani Fawehinmi, the late human rights lawyer, holds the semblance of a record anywhere in the neighbourhood of the organic consistency for the betterment of Nigerian lives close to Felas.

To put it simply, I re-assert the words of singer and song-writer Seyi Sodinmu:

There will never be another Fela

Fela was the King

The King of our music

Oh what a King

The King of Kalakuta

Oh what a King

From a shrine in Lagos, he gave us his music

The music of our lives

The music of our time

The awesome musician

A master composer

Songs of redemption

The fighter of oppression

The pride of Nigeria

The African superstar

Fela!

There will never be another Fela.

Read the original here:

The quest to identify Fela's successor: why it's time to end it - The Conversation CA

From the very beginning, whenever there was a crush, there was also a drink in my hand. In his novel High Fidelity, Nick Hornbys narrator Rob, an unhappy vinyl obsessive, asks himself: Which came first, the music or the misery? Did he learn to be unhappy from the sad songs he loved, or did the songs comfort him after the unhappiness was already a fact?

In my case, the question is something like this: which came first, the booze or the boys? Did I just happen to begin my romantic life at the same time as my drinking life? Or were my infatuations and love stories authored or at least fuelled by the alcohol that accompanied them?

This is not the story of a tragic, ruined woman who destroys all her relationships through drinking. In some, I drank very moderately; in most others, only to good-spirited excess, which caused no harm. There is no redemption arc here, no coming to the light. I still drink now. It is one of my personal bugbears that we seem as a culture flatly incapable of discussing many of lifes most complex issues without urgently needing to name and solve them, preferably with formal medical interventions.

And so I cant speak about a plodding, hopeless soul sickness that afflicts me at times without being cornered into describing it as depression or an anxiety disorder. This is not to say that these things dont exist; of course they do, and over the years Ive taken medication for both. But the terms and the drugs are too blunt as tools to address the infinite realm of human suffering and struggle that they sit within.

For the same reason I cant discuss drinking, how I have loved it and been frightened by it, how it has joined me in my love affairs and adventures, and silently judged me from the other side of empty flats; I cannot say any of this without using the word alcoholic. But I will.

AGED 15, I BETRAYED the first boyfriend I ever had under the influence of the little alcohol it took to get me drunk. I had recently shed a lot of puppy fat, not through the whims of nature but through smug, grim deprivation routines. I played a cruel trick on myself.

The loss of weight happened to occur at the same time as I was leaving childhood and becoming a young adult, the time that boys were beginning to look at me, and I at them. But because my debut into horny society was taking place at the same time I had become a thin person, I conflated the two experiences. I wonder now if something similar didnt happen with drinking, that it came to stand in for all manner of agreeable things it wasnt actually responsible for.

The first boyfriend smelled like sandalwood and was a passionate and brilliant musician, and I adored him. We became a foursome with another couple; the guy was my boyfriends closest friend, the girl a newly acquired pal of mine. They were the kind of people I could only have dreamed about befriending before my transformation. They appeared adult and sexy to me and exchanged witty banter with no agony or indecision.

I was served my first drink in a bar while in this glowing new formation, blissed out with the feeling of having finally stepped inside a TV show. I asked for a double Jack Daniels and Diet Coke, the sort of thing a happy and wild and pretty girl like me would order in the kind of show I was casting myself in.

A few months into our relationship, we were all four at a party in someones parentssuburban home. The tips of my ears were burning from the tepid white wine I was drinking, and I stepped outside. In the darkness of the garden I could make out a body stretched on a trampoline. It was the boy in the other couple, my boyfriends friend. He was uncharacteristically sad, which made me feel tender and dramatic. I lay down beside him and he talked about what was troubling him, some issue with his girlfriend. He was also drunk, and I felt completely alive and open to his emotions.

Before I could think about it, we were holding hands. Then a light came on in the doorway and it was my boyfriend, seeing us. I pulled down my dress from where it had ridden up, although we hadnt done anything more explicit than touch hands, and shaded my eyes and stared over at him with my heart thudding, the wine beating in my pulse.

None of us would ever mention it, this meaningless and minor betrayal, but as it took place something changed in me. I wouldnt have touched the boys hand if I hadnt been drinking; the drinking allowed me to pretend it never had happened. Alcohol made me behave a certain way and it gave me the ability to disappear the same behaviour it had induced. It had created movement. This was what I wanted above all things: propulsion.

AT 17, I WAS in a relationship with my first love. On weekend nights, we sat in the outhouse he slept in and kissed and watched films and put on disco lights and danced. We drew pictures together and made mix CDs and took photographs of each other, engorged on the gratuitous beauty of this new way to know another person. I skimmed from the bottles of spirits in my mothers cupboard and brought it there, one night swallowing a ghastly blistering few inches of Cointreau that I can still taste now, then pressing my numb mouth to his.

On Fridays, I would occasionally go for a drink by myself. I got changed in the school toilets and stuffed the uniform into my backpack, headed to a party later that night, but first I would go to a bar. Not one of the pubs where all the staff knew my parents and that I was underage, but one of the anonymous modern ones where nobody showed up until later in the evening.

I would slip in and have a whiskey and Diet Coke, and read my book or write in my diary and be so content, so cosy, nobody knowing where I was in that moment. I told my first love, whose father was a recovering alcoholic, how much I enjoyed the stolen, contained hour. Be careful, he said, Thats what my dad liked to do.

But I wasnt worried. There were two things I wanted from my life. I wanted to be with others, to have as much attention and affection and company as I was able to drain out of them and I also wanted to be left completely alone whenever I wanted. Nobody could predict which of these two opposing and equally urgent needs might want satisfying at a given time, least of all me. Drinking was magical because it enabled you to be with others fully, free of self-examination. And then when you wanted it to, it enabled you to be by yourself with pleasure, too.

Then I lost it all. Away from home, dropped out of university, I was in an ugly spiral of denial and mania. I buckled beneath my self-disgust, the disappointment and panic about what I would do with my future. Thinking beyond the immediate seemed likely to lead to the abandonment of any will to go on living. Concerning myself with boys, men, sex, romance, whatever this was one way to focus on individual hours and evenings. Drinking was the other, and for these lost years the two strategies bled into each other.

Because I had lost all the trappings of my identity the idea that I was smart, had a good future, was an interesting person the alcohol operated differently. It didnt just ornament the person I was, allowing me to enjoy people I did sincerely like and love. It compelled me to be someone I was not, a person I was not even very good at imitating.

I exhausted my few reserves of energy angling towards men I had nothing to say to, nothing in common with whom I did not so much as even like! simply because they looked a certain way and stayed out as late as I did. Perhaps, I thought, if going out and drinking could be the purpose of life for these people, then I could give up worrying about what mine might be.

And so I forgot about daytime and concentrated only on the pathetically shabby facsimile of hedonism I was aping, and the boys who propped it up. Mostly I shelved anyone who wanted to speak to me properly or treat me with kindness, because I couldnt afford to slow down. The point was to always keep moving. Until one day a few years have passed and you notice, finally, the only direction you have moved in is further down.

IN MY EARLY TO MID-20s, I lived with a man who didnt drink the way that I and most of my friends did. By now I was steadily, if meagrely, employed and partied with much less vehemence, but still we would be out and drunk at least once a week. He was a little older than me and I felt implicitly shamed by his comparative sedateness and curbed my habits. I was afraid he would come to his senses otherwise, go and find someone very different from who I was. I have never been able to fully shake the suspicion that when people tell me they love me, they are, in some sense, joking.

Drinking with the next one, the one who came after my cohabitation, was the most fun. So theatrical, such a performance. Fitting for a love that felt so dazzling and innovative and promising and, when examined, turned out not really to be there at all.

With him, there were 14 cocktails I was only pretending to be able to afford, in a dimly lit Dublin smoking garden. There was murky rich beer with an astonishingly high alcohol percentage, sitting on a pavement in Denmark eating smoked-fish sandwiches. Two-for-one nasty little old-fashioneds in a Peckham happy hour, tossed back with lustful abandon and one hand up my dress. Like the happiness that drinking creates, it was conjured, ephemeral. All of it was based on a false premise I was willing myself not to see through. It wasnt real, it had to end but, ah, what doesnt. Its hard to regret.

Unrequited love is a funny complaint, an embarrassing one when there are so many exciting and attractive and decent people in the world. Its surprising how much it still hurts to think about it, this failure of mine. How amazing it was to realise that this person with whom I felt intuitively and perfectly in tune, who understood things about me nobody else ever had, and was an inexhaustible reserve of fascinating thoughts did not experience me in the same way.

I wish he had received me with complete indifference, which would be easier to accept. Instead, he just liked me well enough until he met someone to really be with. A few times after we had been drinking a lot, as he was falling asleep, the words did leave his mouth: I love you. And although I knew they werent true, I leaned over him in the bed, my face close to his, mouth open, as though I could eat them.

This is another thing that drinking does, this thinning of veils, spirits and souls, consciousness and unconsciousness: I dont love you, I love you. Some references to the pagan festival of Samhain, when the barrier between worlds is breachable, mention the role of excessive alcohol. In our world this happens, too, the scraping back to things hidden, the descent below normal surface. The problem is that what is revealed isnt necessarily the truth. Being drunk sometimes leads to long-buried secrets emerging, catharsis, certainly. But it can also incite emotions and ideas that simply dont exist in waking life.

There was a guy friend of mine who, during my late teens, I was close to but had no romantic desire for. One night when we were both pissed at a house party, I saw him kissing a girl and was inconsolable, crying for hours. The next day I could not understand my reaction. I didnt want him; I felt nothing about him kissing this person. It was alarming to know that a feeling could be created like that. The alcohol had attached some arbitrary emotion that had risen to the top of my subconscious soup to my friend and his kiss.

I drink less now than I used to. I lack the concentrated fury of my youth. I dont feel as bad, I dont feel as good. These are the truces we make, and then at times wonder why we bothered, missing all the vivacity that made up life back then. Somehow this past year did the thing that years of self-recrimination failed to, and made me moderate. I have a single drink and find myself frustrated and bored by its inability to get me anywhere, to do anything.

The main attraction of drinking is gone for now: the illusion of movement, the way it set off a course of events you couldnt always predict. Now, whether I have one drink or 10, I know Ill still be where I started, in the nook of my sofa with the TV on at half volume, anxiously biting hangnails.

Maybe when this is over, Ill descend into Bacchanalian retribution and drink to excess every night. But I think that my body has learned the lesson, whether I wanted it to or not, that there is no magic inherent in the bottle. That what I felt to be its magic was only ever other people. Guardian

Acts of Desperation is published on March 4th by Jonathan Cape

Excerpt from:

Megan Nolan: At 15, I betrayed my boyfriend under the influence of the little alcohol it took - The Irish Times

Published 02-01-21

Submitted by Bacardi Limited

HAMILTON, Bermuda, February 1, 2021 /CSRwire/Bacardi Limited, the world's largest privately-held spirits company, has its eye on the future. It just released theBacardi Cocktail Trends Report, the company's second annual edition, revealing how recent cultural shifts have re-shaped the beverage industry. Created in collaboration with The Future Laboratory (TFL), a London-based consultancy, the report predicts the changes that will happen in cocktail consumption in 2021. It also relates insights collected from the global network of Bacardi ambassadors, as well as bartenders and other industry experts.

"The pandemic has shifted mindsets and accelerated emerging trends, and the Bacardi Cocktail Trends Report is a window to these changes," says Brenda Fiala, Global Vice President, Strategic Insights and Analytics for Bacardi.

"These insights help us navigate the consumer landscape and set the course for future growth, as we enter a new year in which adults of legal drinking age are looking forward to reestablishing connection, creating new rituals, and toasting to simple moments of celebration with loved ones."

Prior to lockdowns, only 1% of spirits sales were online as people werent really aware of shopping of bottles or cocktails via their browsers. Within weeks of lockdowns, consumers discovered they can buy spirits online and have them delivered right to their door, leading to exponential growth of online spirits sales. A new culture of convenience, enabled by the meteoric rise of e-comm, is on the rise.

Drizly, an alcohol e-commerce platform, grew by 350% in 2020, according to IWSR. An appetite for convenience, and a new abundance of caution, have together sparked a 131% rise in ready-to-drink (RTD) canned cocktails in the U.S. (Nielsen CGA).

As this category flourishes further this year, expect to see some new players in the game.

The Italianaperitivois being embraced across the globe, spiking interest in bitters in particular. As consumers thirst for a familiar reprieve from lockdown life, classic cocktails are also growing in popularity, as are pursuits of fun twists on these time-honored staples.

More people are pushing the boundaries of experimentation with cocktails like the chili whisky sour and turmeric-infused gin and ginger cocktails, suggesting the emergence of gustatory thrill-seeking.

The classics are back but with a futuristic twist, says Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory. He further predicts that, At home, weve learned to make these drinks. But once bars are up and running again, well be expecting our favorite bartenders and places to match, confound and challenge us with the future faced fusions and variation builds and tastes theyve been perfecting during lockdown super-charged bitters, volatile sweets when we expect gentle sours, even hyper-local elixirs that distil the best weeds, mosses, and lichens with the exactness of a chemist. If yesterdays bartender was about skill and mixology, tomorrows one is a about alchemy and disruption.

According to Bacardi, 20% of customers are now keen to explore drinks that weren't on their radar pre-lockdown, including premium versions of their favorite spirits or of others they haven't sampled before. As a result, we'll see more elevated, to-go options, as well as premium batched cocktails.

In North America, the best premiumization opportunities are in tequila (60%), dark rum (32%), and mezcal (29%). In Europe, gin is booming, and it is the top trending spirit globally (51%), based on insights gleaned from the Bacardi Global Brand Ambassador Survey.

This desire for more environmentally conscious consumption has also entered into bars and restaurants. 58% of Bacardi brand ambassadors in North America say they have noticed an increase in bartenders interest in zero-waste ingredients.

Bars and restaurants are starting to take note of this shift. Many have adopted hybrid menus that offer drinks in both alcoholic and non-alcoholic versions, and many more likely will this year.

Download the completeBacardi Cocktail Trends Report 2021andInfographic.

About Bacardi Limited

Bacardi Limited, the largest privately held spirits company in the world, produces and markets internationally recognized spirits and wines. The Bacardi Limited brand portfolio comprises more than 200 brands and labels, including BACARD rum, GREY GOOSE vodka, PATRN tequila, DEWARS Blended Scotch whisky, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE gin, MARTINI vermouth and sparkling wines, CAZADORES 100% blue agave tequila, and other leading and emerging brands including WILLIAM LAWSONS Scotch whisky, ST-GERMAIN elderflower liqueur, and ERISTOFF vodka. Founded more than 158 years ago in Santiago de Cuba, family-owned Bacardi Limited currently employs more than 7,000, operates production facilities in 11 countries, and sells its brands in more than 170 countries. Bacardi Limited refers to the Bacardi group of companies, including Bacardi International Limited. Visithttp://www.bacardilimited.comor follow us onTwitter,LinkedInorInstagram.

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From Domestic Hedonism To Mindful Moderation, the Bacardi Survey Reveals Spirits Trends Sparked by Cultural Shifts Last Year - CSRwire.com

In a feat of rarely-realised and prescient self-awareness, the new-fangled MTV launched on 1 August 1981 with a premiere of The Buggles Video Killed The Radio Star. The one-hit wonder for the British band was - and remains to this day - a sharp and addictive hit: the new-wave nous, the cacophony of instruments, the swooning bridge all make for a truly timeless listen. Lest we forget the music video - filmed in one day - that the song hit with, a maximalist budget-breaker that became the first ever music video to air on MTV forty years ago this August.

It was, for all intents and purposes, the worlds first music video smash: a full-formed narrative visual that sat with the songs themes and put the artists on a new kind of pedestal. Here, we start our investigation into some of the music videos weve gotten ever since: the ones that have burned our retinas; the ones that have made sex symbols of unknowns; the ones that changed the way the medium works completely.

On Video Killed The Radio Star, we join Trevor Horn in a high contrast effect as he leans in to sing those opening lines: I heard you on the wireless back in 52. A young girl (who would now be about fifty years old) interacts with a comically-large radio while wearing a fetching pair of green socks paired with sandals. Soon, she evolves into a lurex-clad woman, who represents the scene-stealing television and its futuristic connotations.

Theres a hell of a lot going on in this shoot: surely part of the reason why the video was chosen as MTVs first. While most songs of the era and before featured unfussy lip syncing on stage, this Russell Mulcahy-directed film goes well-in with nauseous hand-held zooming, glitzy costumes, early SFX and ramshackle set design. Consider, if you will, the scene at 2 minutes nine seconds, in which televisions fell a bunch of radios, revealing a paper-thin flooring covered in a hasty icing of rubble, which takes us out of the narrative with its flagrant slap-dash finish. Still, on the whole its a high-budget affair for the time, and one that reflects the new-fangled hedonism of the tune nicely.

Horn called The Buggles "a robot Beatles" in an interview with The Guardian in 2018, and those influences can certainly be seen here in modish cyberman suits, alongside an apparently unconscious fetishism of everything Bowie. Some might dismiss the roughly tugged foil paper background, the less-than-smooth employent of fly harnessing and the goofy costumes worn by Horn and his bandmates. For all of these things and more, critciism would be fair. And yet very few moments of this landmark video can be said to be uncharming; only a true fun-sponge could level serious criticism with a straight face.

Maximalism and hedonism are the keys here: precedents that seem to have informed the following forty years, in which we have had progressively more batshit, expensive and inventive music videos.

Stick around for Video Stars: our new column reviewing some of the music videos that we have been gifted since MTV launched forty years ago.

Go here to see the original:

Video Stars: Video Killed The Radio Star - The Buggles (1981) | Gigwise - Gigwise

In the 1920s and 1930s of buttoned-up Britain, homosexuality was an illicit act, and would remain that way until 1967 when the law changed in England and Wales. Even though gay culture was vibrant, it existed mostly underground, its community forced to socialise with a certain degree of covertness in order to avoid exposure and the risk of prison.

Berlin, meanwhile, had emerged from the dark years following the first world war as a cultural hub of creativity and intellectualism, attracting pioneers in the fields of science, psychology, art and literature. The German capital was also a hotbed of hedonism where sexual freedoms and gay culture flourished, and where exciting new forms of music and dance contributed to the febrile atmosphere.

On visits to this liberal metropolis during that period, a small group of young British Conservative Party MPs which included figures such as Ronald Cartland, Anthony Muirhead and Robert Bernays began to witness the growing persecution of certain groups in Germany, including homosexuals and Jews.

This group of Conservative MPs was scathingly dubbed the Glamour Boys in 1938 by their own leader Neville Chamberlain, the then prime minister. Chamberlain, who would become the eventual architect of appeasement in the autumn of 1938, even threatened the group with deselection. The story of the Glamour Boys provides a striking example of how the political establishment was prepared to publicly disparage members of their own party.

Yet, despite the risk of exposing their own homosexuality at a time when it was illegal, the Glamour Boys brought their concerns to parliament throughout the 1930s. The rise of the Nazi party to power in 1933 marked the end of the Weimar Republic that had witnessed the cultural explosion of Berlin. A crackdown on gay culture in Germany saw the detainment of homosexuals, alongside police raids on popular bars and nightclubs.

But opposition to the rise of Hitler was certainly not the prevailing attitude in Britain at the time, either at Westminster or in public. There was plenty of enthusiasm for the Fhrer among certain sections of British society including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who met Hitler in Germany in 1937. Yet, even though the concerns of the Glamour Boys were vindicated as the 1930s and 1940s progressed, British history has failed to appreciate their prescience in the same manner as it has figures such as Winston Churchill.

The activity of the Glamour Boys peaked between 1938 and 1940, as Europe accelerated towards war. The Whitehall Newsletter provided a mouthpiece through which the group voiced their concerns at the growing threat of Nazism. The group was also prominent in parliamentary debates during the period, including those in 1938 surrounding the Munich Agreement which allowed German annexation of the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia.

This group of young MPs provided essential critical mass to the dissenting anti-appeasement movements within the House of Commons, which came to be spearheaded by the likes of Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill. Without such backing, the two would have remained voices in the wind until the outbreak of war in 1939 became imminent.

The opposition to the rise of Nazism offered by Winston Churchill throughout his wilderness years of the 1930s has been well-documented. In a famous speech of November 1934, he expressed concern at rapid German rearmament. In British historical memory, Churchill has come to be viewed as a prophet of the horrors that were yet to unravel.

But the foresight and instincts of the Glamour Boys have faded from public memory. The story has only recently garnered attention, in large part thanks to the research of current Labour MP Chris Bryant whose book, The Glamour Boys:The Secret Story of the Rebels Who Fought for Britain to Defeat Hitler, sheds light on the story.

We should question why the Glamour Boys have not occupied a more prominent position in narratives of the second world war era. Churchills political renaissance and redemptive rise to prime minister naturally magnified his own actions in the 1930s. This has likely come at the historical expense of other groups such as the Glamour Boys, who had also been vocal in their opposition to Nazism at the time.

It seems plausible that the sexuality of the Glamour Boys has prevented them from receiving their historical place. LGBT+ histories have not been well-accommodated in British narratives of the past. Only legalised in England and Wales in 1967, homosexuality remained taboo in the decades that followed. The fact that that the contemptuous moniker Glamour Boys endures perhaps speaks for itself.

Similarly, gay wartime codebreaker Alan Turing was only granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013 for his conviction for gross indecency in 1952, which resulted in his brutal chemical castration.

Every February, LGBT+ History Month offers a chance to reflect on society past and present, and consider how certain stories have been airbrushed from national history. The political views and sexual orientation of the Glamour Boys have been marginalised, both at the time and retrospectively, despite their important contribution to British society. We need to reflect on how enduring social prejudices have shaped the way in which the nation remembers its past.

The Glamour Boys offer just one opportunity among many to diversify entrenched national narratives. There is danger in ignoring the voices of marginalised groups, and continual effort is required to eradicate unconscious bias in whichever context it might appear. It also provides a reminder of why history must feature narratives that contain multiple voices and perspectives, besides those of the status quo.

Above all, the story of the Glamour Boys is one of bravery. The courage displayed by this group of MPs extended well into the second world war, when several were killed in military action. In a time when homosexuality was prohibited, this group of young gay MPs risked their liberty and later their lives in the pursuit of social and political justice.

Read more:

LGBT+ history month: remembering the Glamour Boys' the gay MPs who warned 1930s Britain about Nazism - The Conversation UK

Almost 10 years after the release of Friday, the auto-tune-heavy song that laboured over weekdays and memorably rhymed seat with seat, its time to set the record straight once and for all. Despite being treated like a punchline throughout her entire teens, Rebecca Black is cool. Case in point: her actually-pretty-good latest single Girlfriend. Its a pointed move from the queer artist, who seems less interested in pinning down her fluid sexuality to any one specific label and more interested in smashing out undeniable bops. And bloody good on her!

10 years ago, Rebecca Black, then a 13-year-old from Anaheim, California, had vague aspirations of going to study performing arts and when a classmate made a music video with LAs Ark Music Factory, Black decided to do the same. Founded in 2010 by Patrice Wilson (who raps on Friday and also appears in the video), the business put out tracks with aspiring artists in exchange for money: mostly they shot low-budget music videos for teenagers like Rebecca Black, who signed up wanting to boost her chances of getting into college. I really didnt think that much about it because nobodys going to see it, Black told Slate last year.

Despite being mercilessly ripped to shreds at the time, Friday is a high-camp masterpiece. From the very beginning, its completely nonsensical. When Rebeccas mates surely not old enough to hold driving licences, but besides the point pull up alongside her in a convertible, she spends an entire pre-chorus deliberating over whether to call shotgun on the front passenger seat. Despite the suggestion that theyre all setting off for school, the group of truants drive instead to what resembles an under-18s proto-frat party for a healthy dollop of partyin partyin, fun, fun fun sung by Black from beneath about 700 layers of auto-tune and robotic vocal treatment.

Though Black may not have set out intending to parody tropes of pop music, Friday certainly succeeds in this respect anyway. Years before ultra-cool production house PC Music were satirising the most auto-tuned elements of 00s pop, Friday was inadvertently skewering them, and like majority of genuinely camp moments, it got there by accident. Though Black copped a lot of backlash at the time, the track has become a mainstay of certain gay bars, a lip-synch favourite for drag queens everywhere and Tyler, The Creators dance break of choice while performing with Odd Future. Rebecca Black herself even ended up performing it at RuPauls Los Angeles DragCon while decked out in a leopard-print suit nicked straight out of Kat Slaters wardrobe. Next stop, guest judge on RuPauls Drag Race?

When the song went viral, Ark offered to take the video down, and she refused. God knows why, but I said no, she told Slate. I think something told me, Ugh, if you do that, then everybody else wins, and youve just immediately given up any sort of little bit of power you had. An amateur music video intended for YouTube obscurity, Friday spread like wildfire instead and was quickly hailed the worst music video ever made, according to one viral tweet. Though some of the mocking was in relatively good humour, Black also received abusive messages and even death threats.

Unlike most viral moments, Friday didnt just fizzle out a couple of days later she kept the flame alight by, essentially, being a massive laugh. A few months after her accidental breakthrough, Rebecca Black popped up in Katy Perrys video for Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.), corrupting Perrys nerdy lead character and leading her down a path of partying and hedonism. Two years later, Black released its sequel, Saturday and gently poked fun at Friday in the process munching Cheerios from a container labelled with the lyric gotta have my bowl and mimicking aspects of Fridays bizarre delivery. Whatever your feelings towards either song, theres no denying that she entered into the spirit of things.

A synth-poppy EP titled RE/BL followed in 2017; though broadly underwhelming, it marked a clear and deliberate step away from Friday with intriguing production choices and a few signs of early promise. Two years later, Anyway channelling vague hints of The 1975 and MUNA was far better. Last year Closer and Self Sabotage surpassed them. And in the ultimate cool move, Rebecca Black ended up teaming up with experimental pop figurehead Dorian Electra for Edgelord chucking in a couple more referential piss-takes aimed at Friday along the way.

Her latest, Girlfriend is a sapphic pop banger cast in a similar mould to Katy Perrys Teenage Dream, but made super-gay. To mark the 10th anniversary of Friday meanwhile, theres talk of a commemorative remix. And ultimately, this is why Rebecca Black is way, way cooler than most of your faves who made dubious decisions early in their careers. A decade later, shes still completely in on the joke and with 149 million views for Friday, its safe to say that she also had the last laugh.

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Why Rebecca Black has been cool all along (and 'Friday' is a masterpiece) - NME

Vogue Williams' husband Spencer Matthews has admitted that he wishes he had done less reality television.

pencer, who shares two children - Theodore (2) and six-month-old Gigi - with Vogue, says his life now is very different from when he appeared on E4's Made In Chelsea.

While trying not to regret things from my past he has found it hard to shake off the image of the boozy guy from that show.

"I wish Id done less reality television, to be honest," he said, "I probably would have left TV to pursue a career in business earlier.

Im finding it really hard as a young entrepreneur to break that mould of being that guy from that show. It isnt the end of the world, because it was a popular show, but my life is so different now.

"I kind of feel like saying to people, Well what were you doing when you were 19? Do you want to be remembered for that for the rest of your life? Its kind of an unfair label to carry, especially when youre sober, because the two people are miles apart from each other.

Spencer says his life couldnt be more different from his boozy days on the show.

Now sober, he says sobriety seemed a natural lifestyle choice ahead of the birth of his son.

I remember Theodore was going to be born in a few months, and I was at the stage where I was drinking really rather very heavily, and it was going to be a big shock to the system. When you have kids, you realise its not really about you any more suddenly you have to be ready and available for them at all times.

"I try not to regret those things from my past though," he added, "as had I not lived those years of hedonism, the importance of what were doing now wouldnt have been quite as potent for me."

The TV star stressed that his decision curb his drinking habits was not because of a "alochol dependency issue", but instead for his health.

"I choose not to drink alcohol but I dont see it as an enemy.

"Im not in recovery and I dont have an alcohol dependency issue; I just prefer living my life in a sober manner, having been drunk for a lot of my 20s and late teens.

"In the past, Id drink to be social and Id formed poor habits over time. I didnt even realise I drank to excess in the way that I did, as it wasnt this big looming problem. I wasnt being sat down by my friends and being told they think theres some kind of issue."

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Spencer Matthews reveals why he wishes he had done 'less reality tv' - Sunday World

Watching a programme on the famous London Hotel The Ritz has Murray Chalmers thinking about the nicer things in life.

One of my favourite quotes ever came from Andy Warhol who, when asked what he would most wish for, answered money for everyone.

This struck me as one of the most profound comments ever uttered by my hero still lazily dismissed as a glib controversialist by those who label him the banal king of 57 varieties of Campbells soup cans but, for me, the true artistic genius of our times.

Ive been thinking a lot about luxury recently, mainly because I watched a programme about the Ritz hotel, but also because there is such a lack of glamour and excitement in life right now.

I have to say I loved the programme, which was only made in 2019, although it already makes the hotel seem amazingly anachronistic and even more out of touch than normal given that it was made in a year when no one could have imagined the horror the world would find itself in a year later.

The Ritz, a beacon for wealth, ostentation and gilded privilege, sums up part of my life lived in the fast lane of the media world in London, when expense accounts were large and we children of the 50s and 60s could sit in the Groucho private members club and feel that the capital was our playground.

This was an age when there was always time for another drink, another party and even more fun. Life seemed eternally optimistic and I feel very grateful to have lived in and beyond those hedonistic times.

I distinctly remember my annual visits for a check-up to my doctor always ended with him saying your liver is fine and me asking how can that be?, knowing that hed been at the same party as me the night before.

Even then, going to posh hotels like the Ritz, the Connaught or Claridges felt like a rare treat and a stay at the Ritz in Paris (far nicer and even more chic than the London hotel) made everywhere else pale in comparison.

My stays at the Ritz in Paris were normally when I was accompanying Yoko Ono, so her gang were treated with even more reverence than normal. I must admit that the quiet hum of efficiency hanging in the hotel air above a decorous layer of deference was both captivating and guiltily intoxicating, especially after a Champagne cocktail or two.

While swimming in the beautiful ornate pool of this loveliest hotel in my favourite city of Paris I did sometimes think back to my life growing up in a Lochee tenement and thanked God for health, good luck and a career even on the unfortunate visit when I swam in the Ritz pool with shingles, thinking it was a heat rash, and checked out under a scratchy cloak of itchiness, calamine lotion and shame.

Of course the Ritz was never real life, which seemed to pause as you went through those famous Parisian revolving doors, the same doors captured in the footage of Princess Dianas arrival at the hotel on the night she died.

In truth, I always felt like a tourist in the Ritz and could never really escape the feeling that I was somehow punching above my weight but then thats one of the points of grand hotels, really, behaving like you were born to the life while secretly smuggling in wine from the supermarket down the road because its a tenth of the cost of the mini bar.

Real life in the Ritz, for me, meant taking the postcards from the stationery drawer in my room, keeping each days new soaps and bath oils and wondering if they really would notice if the bathrobe were to disappear all to prove that, for a short time, I was part of a lifestyle that was both impossibly glamorous and ultimately unattainable.

The food in the Ritz was amazing both in Paris and in London and it was while remembering the beauty of the London dining room that I also recalled the brilliance of executive chef John Williams MBE, a legend at the hotel since 2004.

As the TV programme continued and I was reminiscing with my friend David about lunch with Kylie and drinks with Siouxsie Sioux in the Ritz bar, we both got a bit giddy with the feeling that one day we would all have a world outside our window again, even if mine is now very different to the starry episodes of the past.

I was also a bit giddy with the effects of the very good Justerini and Brooks burgundy stocked by Balgove Larder, a bottle of which didnt really even touch the sides that night (to be fair, there were two of us drinking and we were both a bit down about lockdown).

As is now the norm after a few glasses of wine and thoughts of escapism, I was soon online looking for the Ritz Cookbook and when I saw it was available for 20 (the same figure that Douglas Ross abstained-voted against paying to those on Universal Credit, people who need it to buy food and heat their homes), I was sold. A day later, 240 pages of vicarious, sublime glamour were in my hands.

This is a beautiful book, not just for the recipes within but for the depiction of perfection and attention to detail that only the best dining rooms and bars achieve.

As such its one that is ideal for those interminable days of winter when a gale is blowing outside and respite from the drudgery of life can be provided by just thinking about the very idea of making a slow-cooked duck egg, pomme pure and truffle or saddle of lamb belle poque for your tea.

Its probably true to say that my current inertia means that I will cook very few dishes from this book during this hellish year but its an excellent reminder of the power of imagination and how remembering happier, safer times not necessarily in posh hotels can be a way to get through the toughest days.

Theres only one blight with this cookbook. One of the final recipes is for a coffee mousse with marsala jelly which comes as a reminder that some things, however poshly presented, will never bring happy memories.

As with bluebottles, snakes, rats, flavoured waters and buying pre-cut onion, I have to ask myself what is the point in jelly, Rowntrees, marsala or wine gums?

Even the word gelatine makes me wince. Apart from that, the book is highly recommended.

Closer to home, joy was brought by a lunch delivery from Tayble Deli in Dundee, part of the Dundee Cooking Academy and the new Howff Secret Supper Club family. The deli produces affordable takeaway food with dishes prepared by chefs with high end-Michelin star experience and it shows.

I was already a fan of the deli on Bank Street before we went into the first lockdown and it was great to discover I could order their great food online.

One of the issues I have locally is that I dont always want a home delivery of very cheffy food, although of course many times I do want that and would wholeheartedly recommend somewhere like the Tayberry.

But yesterday I had a fairly busy and stressful morning and it came to lunchtime and I couldnt be bothered cooking, and I certainly didnt want anything fussy.

Thats not to say I dont want innovation and top quality for want of a better descriptive phrase what I really wanted was the equivalent of food from a street food stall, with punchy flavours cooked assertively.

Thats exactly what I found in the new additions to Taybles home delivery offerings from which we ordered the following: bao buns with crispy pork, honey mustard dressing and Asian slaw; teriyaki glazed chicken wings with spring onion and sesame; smoked haddock and dauphinoise bon bons with crispy leek and smoked cheese sauce; bao buns with sticky cauliflower and Asian slaw; feta salad (those two simple words hide the joy to be found in this dish) and a dessert including white chocolate Oreo fudge and a ginger snap and tonka biscuit.

The savoury dishes were all 6.50 except for the deliciously fresh feta salad, a bargain at 3.50. Lunch came to a total of 29.50 but two of us got three meals out of it, with me finishing the delicious bao bun for breakfast. For food of this quality, delivered to your door, I call that a bargain.

Lewis Donegan, executive head chef of the venture, is on to a real winner here. Everything we had was delicious and I will definitely be ordering from Tayble again and again.

I will also be ordering from the more complex dishes offered by the Howff Secret Supper club, a newish venture that was set to launch as a physical space before lockdown but is now online for the time being.

With the Ritz cookbook, a delivery of such great street food from Tayble, a bottle of Burgundy and the first episode of the glorious First Dates on TV (I dont believe in guilty pleasure, only pleasure) then January can do one in the grandest way possible.

Bring on the spring!

The Ritz London cookbook by John Williams, MBE, 20

Tayble Deli: Facebook Tayble Deli

dundeecookingacademy.com

howffsecretsupperclub.co.uk

Murray Chalmers on the tasty dishes that mean the New Year diet may not be so tough after all

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Murray Chalmers puts on the Ritz: Hedonism and Yoko Ono in the fast lane of the media world - The Courier

Rob Lowe signs autographs after unveiling his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015.(Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)Take it from someone who took the Eighties for everything it had: Hedonism is overrated.

As a boy in Dayton, Ohio, and continuing after his unstable, divorced mother moved the family to Malibu so she could (only after arriving) announce that she was marrying a doctor she had met in a clinic that offered Seventies quackery to people with unexplained allergies, Rob Lowe thought of himself as an awkward theater nerd. When it came to flirting with girls, I had no game whatsoever, he recalls in his sagacious autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends. Evidence accumulated to the contrary; for his 14th birthday, for instance, a girl he didnt know particularly well offered him a birthday cake and sex. (On the beach. It was lovely, he says.) He was barely 19 when Nastassia Kinski, one of his co-stars on The Hotel New Hampshire (1984) and generally acknowledged to be one of the worlds great beauties, openly propositioned him, and he didnt quite grasp what was happening. She shot him a look that said, Helloooo? Do I need to spell it out? he writes.

But something changed in him when he played the freewheeling, sax-playing, shades-wearing, drinks-drinking cad, Billy, in one of the signature teen films of its era, St. Elmos Fire (1985). The director Joel Schumacher wasnt sold on Lowe for the role, which the actor won only after showing up for an audition with a six-pack of Corona and swigging liberally as he pitched himself. Lowe enjoyed playing the roguish charmer so much that he started to play him in real life. In the famous June 1985 New York magazine profile of him and his co-stars Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson whose headline introduced the sobriquet the Brat Pack, Lowe (who was then 21) and Co. were holding court at the Hard Rock Cafe in Los Angeles. Passing beauties circled the movie stars hungrily, desperate for a nod of attention and an invitation to sit down. Being Rob Lowe in his prime was unlike living at the candy store; lollipops dont simply jump into your shopping basket.

Lowe began to use MTV as his personal Home Shopping Network, selecting girls from videos and calling up the network to obtain their digits. But he too was an object that was being shopped for; what seemed to be a fortuitous meeting with Princess Stephanie of Monaco turned out to have been elaborately planned by her, a detail he didnt discover until he found a magazine with him on its cover in her home. It turned out that she had kept it on her nightstand for six months. At their first dinner date, she wound up sitting on his lap. He later learned that while they were flirting, she had taken a break to order servants to evict her then-boyfriend and all traces of him from her quarters so she could invite Lowe back to them. Throughout their affair, her father, Prince Rainier ,refused to acknowledge Lowes existence, but at a charity event Lowe said hello to Rainier and the three men he was standing with (Cary Grant, Robert Wagner, and Gregory Peck). As the young man was walking away, he heard Wagner say, Ya know, guys, I think that kids banged every one of our daughters. Lowe had indeed gotten to know Grant by dating his daughter, Jennifer, and the three of them had even watched one of Lowes earliest screen efforts together, with Cary Grant complimenting him on his performance and comparing him to the young Warren Beatty.

But by Lowes mid 20s, the bacchanalia was getting old. He bottomed out on an infamous trip to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988, where he made a sex tape with a 16-year-old girl. He says he did not know she was underage; they had met at a club that had a very strict carding policy. In the book he has very little to say about the whole incident, assuming we all remember the delirious coverage at the time.

In short, Lowe lived the life that young men think they want, and it nearly destroyed him. He realizes that the way he spent his youth doesnt inspire much sympathy: Nobodys going to do a pity party or have a telethon for all those suffering 18-year-old movie stars, you know? he said recently on the Today show as he celebrated 30 years of sobriety. Yet nonstop cosseting creates its own dangers.

The night his mother phoned to tell him his grandfather had had a massive heart attack, his girlfriend had just dumped him after catching him with another woman. His instinct was to chug some tequila and go to bed, but catching a glimpse of his wasted self in the mirror, he thought, Im so hammered I can barely stand. The girl I love has just left me, because I cant keep my word and I have no integrity. My grandfather is dying, my mother is in crisis . . . and I am cowering and hiding. He begged his girlfriend to take him back, then married her. Today he and Sheryl Berkoff, a makeup artist, have been married for nearly 30 years and raised two young men together. (The sons live to troll Dad on Instagram.)

Lowe managed to find stability and satisfaction for the first time in his life when he got off the hedonic treadmill, and he reached his highest level of fulfillment as an artist when he co-starred with Martin Sheen, the father of his childhood friend Emilio Estevez, on The West Wing, although (this is the one discordant note in the entire book) he quit the show after four years in a huff about his salary. Variety reported at the time that he was getting $75,000 a week, not including residuals, which seems like not-bad pay for doing work you find satisfying and meaningful. Today Lowe stars on Foxs 9-1-1: Lone Star.

The example of Beatty, to whom Cary Grant once compared him, made Lowe uneasy rather than proud. He says he was long haunted by the final moments of Shampoo, the 1975 film in which Beatty plays a swaggering Beverly Hills hairdresser who has his pick of the ladies. The emptiness and alienation Beattys character feels at the end of that film was a distant warning to Lowe that he failed to heed for too long, although he was fortunate to have been only 26 when he finally got sober. Lowe discovered through experience what cognitive scientists have found in recent decades: that we are extraordinarily bad at predicting what will make us happy. He thought he loved what he calls the scene, but actually he was wildly uncomfortable among strangers and drank heavily to cover for it. The parade of girls that marched through his bedroom left him equally hollow. Whats the point of sharing your bed with someone you wouldnt want to share a sandwich with if you were sober? As he tells other guys: If you find yourself dating your best friend, marry her.

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Heed the Wisdom of Rob Lowe - National Review

As the number of fashion retailers closing down continues to rise, emptying at the highest rate since 1999 according to Bloomberg, optimistic analysts have forecast a post-Covid recovery.

The Economist predicted a new period of economic dynamism was on its way, while Prof Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times that things will get better and the business mogul Tilman Fertitta told CNBC : The consumer is coming back ... this is going to be the roaring 20s you can just see it.

If the last global recession in 2008 led to the internet shopping boom, will fashion be experiencing a revival of fortune?

Post-pandemic, we will certainly be looking for ways to reconnect socially - clothes, hair, make-up will be part of the therapy, says Andrew Ibi of Face, a former trend forecaster. We use clothes to communicate and to perform, they make us feel good one way or the other.

There was evidence of glamour at the recent mens and couture shows, such as the dropped shoulder tops at GMBH and the West Egg-ish style of the Casablanca collection. Azzaro and Area meanwhile featured showgirl looks with a focus on silver shading and night-time magic. For me the idea of going out or dressing up is not so much about colours, but more about textures and fabrics: satins, silk and anything shiny, says Fioruccis Daniel Fletcher, whose recent show featured dressing up clothes ready for next summer.

There are also indications that people are already buying for the period post Covid. Investment bags have seen a huge surge in demand since December and are continuing through January including Brunello Cucinelli, Berluti, Bottega Veneta and Mtier, says Damien Paul, head of menswear at Matchesfashion. We are also seeing a strong reaction to mens fine jewellery.

Fashion has already begun to reclaim fantasy as a design asset, says Ib. [Its] always optimistic and follows instinct and speculation towards the future. As designers we respond to the world around us.

Many have drawn parallels between the Covid pandemicand a century ago, during the 1918 Spanish flu. Following first world war and one of historys deadliest epidemics we had a decade of social freedom, creative boom and economic upturn.

Fashion stood nearly still from the fall of 1918 to the fall of 1920 with almost no changes in silhouette or novelty, says Jonathan Walford, curatorial director at the Fashion History Museum. He says that in the era that followed the roaring 20s fashion reflected a society driven by hedonism and a desire to look youthful.

Instead of suits men began wearing sports clothes [with] caps, plus fours [trousers] and argyle sweaters. While women wore oversized hats that slipped down over their bobbed hair and the beaded, waistless, sleeveless dresses [which] made them look like they were playing dress up in their mothers gowns.

In our own roaring 20s Ibi thinks that the way we dress will be informed by a new sense of freedom. I think we will see a broader acceptance on how to dress for any occasion, he says, whether thats wearing leggings and trainers to the opera, or full drag into the office.

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Roaring 20s: fashion world predicts post-Covid boom - The Guardian