Simon Napier-Bell

WEDNESDAY AUG 27, 2008

From: Dean Shorter, Toronto, Canada
Hi Simon, Been watching the pictures on TV of a Thai mob in yellow shirts occupying government buildings. Thailand is looking a pretty unstable place and I've just booked a holiday there. Now I'm not sure if it's the right thing to do.

It's happening in a tightly focussed area. Just a couple of hundred yards away you'll find everything as usual. And the country is as worth visiting as ever. The current government is made up mainly of nouveau riche crooks - half the cabinet have suffered criminal prosecutions or have cases pending, even the Prime Minister. And many are totally inept and unable to deal with the ministries they've been appointed to run. But at least they were elected fair and square by a population which knew exactly what they were getting. The opposing mob is spurred on by the old families of influence, old money and the so-called inelligentsia. Both sides have little to do with ordinary people or ordinary lives. The mob in yellow shirts are part of the old corrupt power block, fed up with democracy because it's deposed them. The government are the new corrupt power block, delighted with democracy because it's put them into power. But both sides are almost identical in that neither has any concept of real democracy or the administration of government without corruption and kickbacks. Eventually a compromise will be worked out because that's what happens in Thailand. But it won't last long because that's also what happens in Thailand. None of it will have the slightest effect on blue sky, beautiful beaches, wonderful food, smiling people, pretty boys and girls in the go-go bars, or lunch at the Normandie with a bottle of Monrachet and some good armagnac to finish.

TUESDAY AUG 26, 2008

From: Lee Ashton, London, UK
Hi Simon, reading about your dental problems of the last two weeks made me wonder about healthcare in general in Thailand. On my part, it's the thing which made me decide not to retire there. Aren't you nervous of something big cropping up and not being able to get back to the UK?

Totally the opposite. The quality of treatment in Thai hospitals and dental clinics, once experienced, makes me frightened of getting ill anywhere else in the world. At my local hospital (the Bangkok Pattaya hospital), the dental work of Mr Tapasit is superb. Actually, he's American. But Thai too. Born there; works here. His father was a heart surgeon in the USA but now also lives here. They're both as Thai can be but American too. Anyway, I just want to make it clear - Mr Narut, the tooth-pulling economy-anaesthetist may have pissed me off a bit but - in a couple more days and the removal of all the stitches from my guns, this nightmare will be over. And the man who comes out of it best is the wonderful Mr Tapasit, who is basically a cosmetic dental surgeon but has given me daily attention for the last three weeks beyond the call of duty. If you want crowns or implants of bridges, Mr Tapasit is the man. A third of the price of Europe or the USA, and a degree of charm and care totally unfindable elsewhere. And if you like movies, he's a must. There's not a movie ever been made he hasn't seen, and he has an opinion on ever one of them. There now - I don't usually do commercials (except perhaps for myself) but this time I have.

MONDAY AUG 25, 2008

From: Lee Saunders, London, UK
Hi Si - does two days with no mention of your tooth problems mean they're over? I'm just asking because we're all awfully bored with it.

I'm bored with it too, so last night I took a night off. The picture at the top of the page shows the huge benefits of combining painkillers with alcohol, something all these foolish doctor-and-dentist people say we shouldn't do. Danny Rampling was in Pattaya to have dinner with me, a date we'd made months ago. I'd spent the day moaning on the couch with toothache (another 'dry socket'). I was waiting for Danny to call so I could tell him I couldn't make it. But amazingly, as soon as he called I heard my voice tell him, "I'll meet you at eight."

As wayward as my voice had been in refusing to deliver the right message, I hardly felt able to scold it because I knew it had done the right thing. So I took two each of three different pain killers, arrived at our meeting place ten minutes early and consumed a couple of quick double scotches. By the time Danny turned up I was as right as rain. (Well, almost! But right enough anyway to have a good evening with him.)

You see how unfair it is? These doctors and dentists keep us locked away with our pain when we could be out having fun like everyone else. The fact that I'm suffering scorching toothache again this morning is of no consequence - I would have been anyway.

SUNDAY AUG 24, 2008

From: Timothy Gee, London, UK
Hello Simon! You have received a package from Greenmetropolis.com. It is the Quentin Crisp book 'How to Become a Virgin'. There is no index and the chapters are called 'One' 'Two' 'Three' etc. So I shall now have to read the book until I find the right place....

Before I retired to bed last night I found the attached. It seems to fit the bill.

Thanks Timothy, I've been trying to get hold of this for months. In my memory, it was a whole chapter that he'd written about the experience of recording with me, now it turns out to be just four pages - the ego of youth (well, I was only thirty-something). As for Quentin saying I looked like Robert Redford, I'm not sure if it's flattering or depressing. To think that perhaps I once did, and then to look at the fat old sod in the mirror each day, is depressing. On the other hand, to look at the fat old sod in the mirror (quite a charming old bugger really!) and then to see knarled and wizened Robert Redford as he is today makes me feel rather good. Anyway... now that you've emailed me the part of the book I wanted, I bequeath the rest of it to you.

SATURDAY AUG 23, 2008

From: Harvey Peck, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK
Simon, there I was driving into Cheltenham yesterday on my way to lunch with Jeffrey Sands, and driving like a dervish I might say because I was late, and then suddenly there you were on the radio on the phone from Thailand talking about Marc Bolan. Bit of an old subject, isn't it - rambling on about him after all these years. Still, it was good to hear your voice and reminded me you owe us a visit next time you're in England. Come and stay at the cottage for the weekend and we'll treat you to dinner at the place I went yesterday with Jeff - Le Champignon Sauvage - bloody marvellous. Gloucetershire's best.

Hi Harvey - sorry to spoil your morning with my ramble about Marc Bolan. I was contacted by Plexus publishing and asked if I would do some publicity for a book that's coming out. It's a book about Marc that I commissioned from a journalist - Chris Welch - 25 years ago. I wrote the foreword for it and then licensed it to Plexus who put it out as jointly written by me and Chris. Two things about it - firstly in the foreword they printed a page out of order so it went from page 3 to page 5 then back to page 4 then to page 6, about which I was pretty pissed off - and then for 25 years I've been trying without luck to get an accounting from them. Now they're re-publishing it. And although I've never had a statement they have the cheek to phone and ask me to do publicity. I was going to tell them to piss off but the girl who called was charming and called Alisande, which I thought was rather a nice name, so I said OK. I decided instead I'd blow the whistle on them live on radio when I did the interview - but the interviewer was pleasant too, so in the end I just chatted away and helped them sell the book, which they probably won't pay me on for another 25 years. Never mind, if it did enough to get an invite from you for Le Champignon Sauvage, it was worth it. I've been hearing how good it is for years and still haven't eaten there. Next time we're around in the UK, Yo and I will descend on you and demand to be fed.

FRIDAY AUG 22, 2008

From: Paul Rymer, Middlesborough, UK
Hi Simon, OK, even worse than those guys who tried to fake a Bigfoot with a shop-bought fancy-dress costume, you busted me. No, sad as it is to admit it, I'm not even slightly like Madonna in appearance, though with the amount of painkillers I'd taken anything seemed possible (in my mind). But then you challenged me - oh dear - I can't back down from a challenge. So I found myself this lunch break posing in front of the webcam in the spirit of Madonna. The results were, frankly, disturbing. I look older than I thought I did - so to add to the toothache I'm now aware that I'm ancient, and what I thought was the sexy unshaven look just makes me look like a tramp (in the English sense, not the American sense which was what I was aiming for). Here's the best one (ha ha ha). Just imagine I am chanelling Madonna.

Paul - I take it back, you look exactly like her, except a little younger. What's more, I've been told that early mornings her facial hair is comparable. You can have ten out of ten, if not for beauty, at least for giving me something easy to put on the website.

THURSDAY AUG 21, 2008

From: Paul Rymer, Middlesborough, UK
Hi Simon, Hope the toothache is getting better. I can sympathise - am suffering myself too - and worse broke a front tooth so resemble Madonna (very very slightly).

Hi Paul - nice to have sympathy emails flooding in regarding my toothache. It makes me feel like an invalid, which I'm not. I'm just a very grumpy SNB, grouching round the house full of painkillers, unable to eat anything proper 'cos my mouth is full of stitches, and groaning with pain every six hours when the painkillers wear off, which I have to let them do so I can see if it's getting any better. It isn't! But the dentist's theory is that the massive dose of antibiotics he's given me will finally get rid of it. My theory is that I need a mouth transplant.

And regarding looking like Madonna... even with two 'verys' it rather stretches the meaning of 'slightly'. I challenge you to send a picture I can post (and don't go putting on that 'Material Girl' outfit you keep for special occasions).

WEDNESDAY AUG 20, 2008

TOO MUCH TOOTHACHE!!

TUESDAY AUG 19, 2008

From: Martin Lloyd Elliott, London, UK
Darling Simon, You poor bastard. You should have warned the nasty little sadist that your body has consumed so many drugs over the last half century that he would have had to give you an elephant's dose to even touch the sides of your brain's pain sensors. Of course I've had patient's from time to time who are rather keen on a spot of pain, and willing to pay good money for the perfect torture, but I know you're not much interested in ropes or gags. Hope your suffering stops very soon. Double the whiskey dose. Love to Yo.

Not a half century of drugs, just alcohol, but I'm sure it has the same immune-producing effect on anaesthetising drugs. By the way, the torture continues. Today things felt worse than ever. I went back to the dentist yet again to be told I had 'dry socket' - that is, the blood clot produced when a tooth is extracted gets lost and there is exposed bone. The saliva happily eats this away and is said to produce the most exquisite pain known to man (this bit I can attest to). Solution..!! A lady surgeon was produced who delved into the socket, scraped the bits of half digested bone away, stuck sharp things into the surrounding gum to produce more blood, made another clot, dragged bits of the gum over it and stitched the whole thing up. And remember, this was still the 'wrong' tooth. The 'right' tooth, which has also been extracted, is meanwhile still managing to produce exactly the same excruciating pain that took me to the dentist in the first place - and it's not even there anymore. Tomorrow I expect that socket too will be opened up and dug into. The delight is endless!!

MONDAY AUG 18, 2008

From: Susie Suthar, Birmingham, UK
Dear Simon, my boss, Mrs Talati, has asked me to write to you. Apparently she met you in the 1st class lounge in Bahrain airport some weeks ago and exchanged cards. Mrs Talati tells me she gave you a photo and a CD of some songs by her youngest son to listen to. She has requested me to contact you and ask your professional opinion on the material and whether you feel he has the potential for a career in music.

Listen Susie – I’m currently suffering from a continuous throbbing pain in the gum that refuses to be diagnosed. It’s the most disruptive life-stealing thing you can imagine and is only kept at bay with large doses of pain killer washed down with whiskey four times a day. As a result I’m not in a thrillingly good mood. BUT even were I in the pink of health I would still have the same answer for your boss. Firstly - having met me she should have the politeness to write her own letter. Secondly - nothing in the world would be more impossible than to turn her fat little spoilt brat of a son into a popstar.

SUNDAY AUG 17, 2008

From: Cessie Smith, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Hey Simon. I just logged on and saw this week's top of page picture. Very funny! What's the story?

The dentist got the dose wrong. I knew he had 'cos I could still feel the throb of my toothache as he lifted the pliers. It was the same throb I've had for the last seven days. During that time I've visited the dentist a dozen times, had a crown removed, the tooth inspected, the crown replaced, removed again, root canal treatment probed into and finally a tooth removed - relatively painlessly at the moment of extraction but with much bruising afterwards 'cos it was a big wisdom tooth and had to be positively wrenched from its happy resting place in the back of my jaw. But it was the wrong tooth.

As soon as the injection wore off the toothache continued. A further visit to the dentist and we made a joint decision that next time it would be better to pull the right tooth. So at 9am this morning I was back in the chair.

I knew at once the dentist hadn't given me enough anaesthetic, he'd just prodded the syringe around on the surface of the gum and there wasn't enough numbness. But before I could tell him his hands appeared with the pliers. "I can steel feel the throb," I protested."

For a brief second he jabbed the syringe towards my gums again, then grabbed the pliers and lunged. The pain shot through my gum and down to my chin like being skewered. I couldn't shout 'cos I had two hands and a pair of pliers in my mouth so I kicked my legs in the air instead. "It's half out already," the dentist trilled gleefully, and with my legs still waving he lunged again. Given the choice of that or being kicked in the crotch by a wild buffalo, I'd go buffalo anytime. "Got it," he sang triumphantly and let out a delighted soprano giggle which coupled with my tuneless baritone moans sounded rather Benjamin Britten.

Anyway I'm home now and still throbbing; the pain of having the tooth out simply replacing the pain of having it in. Hopefully it will eventually abate and I shall have a clear mind again. Not much of a week really.

SATURDAY AUG 16, 2008

From: Alain Turok, Montreal, Canada
Simon... after reading Black Vinyl i broke my engagement, gave up my job... i will now become an artist, a singer of truth... your book inspired me, YOU inspired me, you DO inspire me... im reading all three of your books over and over... i must come and see you... i will star of the univers... you will be my inspiration and manager.... Simon im serious... when can we meet???? i will fly to you... just let me know where...

I'm in Emiliano Zapata - I'm in Tamanrasset - I'm in Erdenenmandal. I'm anywhere you can't get to and I'm in an unreachable time-zone. Stop reading my books, de-inspire yourself, re-instate your engagement, get a new job, take a bath in sulphuric acid, try reading Barbara Cartland.

FRIDAY AUG 15, 2008

From: Jackie Browning, London, UK
Hi Simon, since you still haven’t updated Eating Out for last year I presume it just wasn’t a good year for eating. Now I’m wondering about this year. What’s your best meal so far?

Sorry about last year's Dining Out, I wrote it months ago but never got it sorted out for the website. I will. Soon! As for this year good meals, they've not always been where you'd expect. Superb Beijing duck at the Fortune Hotel in Bangkok, an unglamorous 4-star hotel. It gets a lot of Chinese tourists so it keeps a good Chinese restaurant. Its Beijing duck is way better than any you'll get in Beijing and mine was made all the better by eating it with Simon Henderson who provides cabaret with every sentence. Then there were the good old favourites - Poissonerie in Sloane Avenue, London, with super-delicious Alexis Parr, and Daphne's, next door, with more subtle-flavoured Tom Foley. The teppanyaki restaurant in the Tokyo Westin is amongst the best and I actually got Colleen Zulian to eat a prawn's head - a bloody miracle 'cos normally she refuses to eat anything that hasn't been born and bred in Australia or Italy, and this was a distinctly Asian looking prawn. A strange quirk of all this international travelling is the way some of the best Asian food turns up in Europe and some of the best European food in Asia. The rack of lamb at the Seoul Westin was as good as anywhere in the world and the bartender made black bombers like an Aussie. But in the end the best meal was quite predictable - Breeze in Bangkok, where I ate with film-producer Orian Williams. Every mouthful perfect, as was sitting outside 60 floors up with Bangkok stretched out on all sides below, but not at all cheap - the set meal costs more than Sketch in London or Daniel in New York. And now I've remembered something even better. It was just me, alone, day-dreaming (evening-dreaming actually) at the Waldorf Astoria, slurping my way through a wonderful bottle of Calistoga Cabernet. I can't remember what I ate, just that I was very content.

THURSDAY AUG 14, 2008

From: Kate Shaw, Canberra, Australia
Thank you again for the fun meals, it was a great ending to our Thai holiday andThomas loves his picture on your web page. And now here we are in Canberra. It seems we have travelled through time and space to the 1970's and it is really cold, this is my least favourite time of year and now I am going to get it twice in one year. Whose idea was this??? Mmmm mine!! Good to see my friend of course, but brrrrrr it sure ain't Thailand! Thomas is not impressed either - no monkeys, no coconuts.

Well I warned you! My own memories of Canberra are clear - the only possible reason to go there is to say you've been, although admitting it to anyone will only get you laughed at. To see if it's changed since I was last there I just checked a couple of websites for good restuarants. Canberra's top four were listed as Raja's Fiji-Indian, the Hog's Breath Cafe, Ali Baba, and Central Cafe. And this is Australia's capital city! Even worse, Pizza Hut made the top ten at number seven. So get your girl-friend and her family into a car and head for Sydney. There'll still be no monkeys but at least you'll eat well.

WEDNESDAY AUG 13, 2008

From: Joss Acock, London, UK
Dear Simon, I’ve just begun my dive in to the music industry and have only just stumbled across Black Vinyl White Powder! The book is absolutely brilliant and has fuelled my passion for the career and I’d like to thank you for the insight you’ve passed on to me! Ironically, you have also worked with my father, John Acock, whilst recording one of Junior’s albums. He was engineering on the album and vividly remembers having drinks at your flat after a session!

Hi Joss, glad you liked the book. Re that session with your dad, I remember one moment from it concerning my lovely friend Larry Ashmore, the arranger. I was producing and your dad was the engineer and he'd been mixing a track for hours without getting it right - in those days there were no automatic faders, no recall, everything had to be done by hand each time - if a mistake was made you had to start again. Round midnight the tape op said he had to leave and it was decided the next mix would be the last attempt. It was a long piece and in the middle of it there was a dramatic string entry. All the faders were left up so that when the orchestra wasn't playing the studio ambience would sound the same. This time the mix went perfectly but as it approached the place where the strings came in Larry jumped from the settee where he was sitting and rushed to the front of the mixing desk to face your dad. As the string entry arrived he flung down his arms as if he was bringing in the London Philharmonic and bellowed 'Strings!' at the top of his voice. Since the fader was up, the strings came in on cue, as they would. Larry mopped his brow and the mix continued to the end and was perfect. Your dad - the perfect gentleman - without a hint of sarcasm, said, "Thanks for that Larry."

TUESDAY AUG 12, 2008

From: Freeki Leaky, Syracuse, NY, USA
Darling - whatever got into you? What a tirade, and about sport of all things! I never knew you were interested in such things. Still it's always good to see you have a good rant - bad temper brings out the best in you. Now then, what happened to the Quentin Crisp song. You promised I'd be able to download it this week.

You can! It's on the home page of Cherry Red records. Or listen to an excerpt here. As for my sports rant I've no idea what caused it - boredom with endless Olympics on the tele and a hankering for the druggy days of rock management. Plus yesterday I had throbbing toothache. Put them all together and there you have it. The tooth is dealt with now so I shall bury myself in good eating for a few days - that'll soon put me back in good humour.

MONDAY AUG 11, 2008

From: Pete McGuire, Glasgow, UK
Your postings yesterday and the day before were about China, yet the article you commented on, and just about every other article in the British dailies for the last three days, has not really been about China but about China's use of the Olympics for political ends. What do you think about that? Do you think, as I do that China might be in the forefront of countries who are using undetectable drugs to enhance the performances of their athletes?

Wonderful if they are! Because the drug-free Olympics is a miserable parade of boring mediocrity.

When astronauts are sent into space, d'you think they're not given drugs? To keep themselves awake, to avoid eating excessively, to extend their endurance. Should space exploration be drugs free?

And the armed forces... do you think soldiers go to war without drugs? To keep them alert, to engender hatred, to calm them afterwards, to cover their pychological trauma. Should the army be kept drugs free?

Then there are artists - people who paint and write and perform - when were they ever drugs free? Where would rock music be without drugs to dream and compose to? Would we have had rock'n'roll, flower power, punk rock, acid jazz, Ibiza or Pete Doherty without drugs?

Jazz too? What a miserable concert of nothingness we would have suffered if the likes of Billy Holliday, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker and Stan Getz hadn't shot themselves high as kites to give us all that wonderful music.

So why not athletics? I want to see the Drug Olympics - science and physical endeavour combined - not this pathetic array of supressed athletes cavorting round the track barely a millionth of a second better than last time. These athletes should be seen for what they are - the amateurs - the second leaguers. The pros should be the athletes who want to break real barriers - scientific as well as physical. I want to see a great leap forward. I want to see the pills that makes us jump and run and charge at twice the speed of ever before - the 100 metres in 5 seconds - pole vaulters soaring one hundred feet - long jumpers leaping the Grand Canyon. What's the difference between putting an athlete on a special diet or a special pill? What's the point of science if we can't invent drugs that improve our performance? I hereby salute all those athletes who take performance-enhancing drugs, risking their bodies and careers in the name of science and better performance, maligned and outcast and banned from competition by the mean-spirited tiny-minded elite. And I spit on the miserable, conservative, self-interested organisers of world sport who through their lack of vision keep us from seeing faster, finer, more thrilling chemically-induced performances.

SUNDAY AUG 10, 2008

From: Paul Britten, London, UK
There you go again Simon, being totally perverse. You've often told me I should read Charles Moore's pieces because he's one of our best and insightful writers, now you slag him off.

Like Simon Jenkins, Charles Moore is someone I normally read first on any subject I'm too lazy to find out about any other way. Actually, he's better than Simon Jenkins because mostly he's not only right, he's funny too. But yesterday he was twittering.

Like me, Moore went to a public school, a minaturised version of a totalitarian state. Because of that he knows full well that with a little resourcefulness it's possible to find your own space within the rules and regulations in which to live, think and enjoy yourself. Most of the rules are unnecessary, some are totally barmy, but the pupils have to obey them or get slung in the school Gulag (or whatever the equivalent of that might be in each respective school). If, by imposing the rules of a public school on an entire nation, 99% of the people in that nation become better off, why should the people who run it worry too much about the other 1%? That may not be everyone's point of view but it's certainly what public schools imbue in their pupils - not democracy, nor freedom. Strange that an ex-Etonian who approves of public schools objects to a nation being turned into one.

SATURDAY AUG 9, 2008

From: Pat Downes, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Hi Si - In today's Telegraph there's a piece by Charles Moore that takes a far more cynical and doubtful view of China's policies than you seem to, especially in relation to its one child families. Did you read it?

Charles Moore is a twittering old fart. Especially when he calls the China one child policy "one of the great evils of Chinese communism".

Deng came to power following the idiot Mao's cultural revolution to find the intelligentsia eliminated and a billion impoverished people who believed the only way to protect themselves in old age was to have half a dozen children, which in turn impoverished the country further. He declared war on poverty, OK'd a market economy, put in hand a method of keeping the population from growing further and booked Wham! to play at the Workers Stadium. This was far more sensible than anything Charles Moore has done in his life. The country has prospered and the population (and pollution) are down 23% from where they might otherwise have been. Moore goes on to complain that one of the results of the one child policy has been 117 boys to every 100 girls instead of 105 to 100 as in most other countries. Only a rampant old heterosexual would complain about such a thing. Personally I think it's marvellous.

FRIDAY AUG 8, 2008

From: Paul Rymer, Middlesborough, UK
Richard Barbieri's success as a member of Porcupine Tree is partly responsible for Japan starting to gain the kind of cult/legendary status of the Velvet Underground or New York Dolls. Some Japan collectors have been comparing records and noticed a mistake. When "All Tomorrow's Parties" was released an error stated that Giorgio Moroder produced it, when I know you did. Hansa tried to fix the mistake but managed to cock it up again, crediting John Punter. Various sites on Giorgio Moroder are starting to state he produced the single. (All the tragic detail is here.) On top of that, what would have happened to any money you might have earned?

Money? Unlikely to see any of that from Hansa, I've never been paid a penny for any production I did with Japan. But the effort involved in getting mimimal back payments like these is too much to bother with. Of course, if you add up all the little payments that people can't be bothered to fight for it makes millions a year extra for BMG Sony, but I don't really resent it - it's the way the music business works. As is making pots of the stuff when things are going well. So no worries!!

THURSDAY AUG 7, 2008

From: Paul Granville, Shanghai, China
Hi Simon, I take it you were so busy in Beijing that you didn't have time for us "Joe Public" down here in hot-as-hell Shag-hai. Seeing the picture on the top of your site today having a little kiss'n'cuddle with the buxom and voluptuous Passionata begs me to ask you this question, Did you not feel the slightest little "twinge of joy" in the old purple headed ferret? Come on Simon, Man-Up, Honest answer? Anyway, nonsense aside, hope the trip is going well; more importantly hope you're getting over the nasty old gall bladder removal ok and that your back on the red meats, foie gras, fruity reds by the bottle and the occasional creme brulée. Judging by the pic it looks like a button is about to self implode at any second. Hurry up and bring Yo to Shanghai! Soon, OK? We want more stories and a meal at M On The Bund awaits (plus a trip to your favourite dumpling shop around the corner).

Ah yes, that dumpling shop - probably the finest meal I ever had in China. But rather than try and find it again another feast at M On The Bund would do.

As to whether the ferret twinged? Not really - these days its twinges come less often and are usually reserved for members of the same sex, as befits an elderly poofter like me. However it certainly did twinge a few days earlier when 20 or so shots of tequila were downed in the presence of a particularly fine specimen of Beijing waiter (just as it did, I seem to remember, for the waiter who served us the last time we ate at M On The Bund). Anyway, from the pictures below you can see that a good time was had by all.

WEDNESDAY AUG 6, 2008

From: Brian Sanderton, Cowes, Isle of Wight, UK
Simon, I wrote to you last year about your lamentable views on global warming. Several times since then you have again been flippant about the subject. I noticed last week that you were in China, a country you have defended several times despite all the information pointing to it being one of the world's worst polluters. Did being there and seeing the terrible smog in Beijing not change your mind at all?

Sanderton, you pompous windbag, you know nothing. The Beijing smog was pathetic - absolutely not world standard. Anyone who remembers the superb pea-soupers of 1950s London would be totally unimpressed. But although China seems unable to produce world-class smog, it can certainly produce a world-class city. Beijing has become an incredible modern capital - clean, orderly, full of stunning buildings yet with space for gardens and greenery all around. More than that, China is still the only country to have made any sort of serious attempt to cut back on the thing that most causes global warming - people! On Monday evening a few of us had dinner with the Deputy Minister for Health. I asked him about China's 'one family one child' policy. He told me the current population is 1.3 billion. Without the 'one family one child' policy it's estimated the population would have been 1.7 billion. So in 25 years China has effectively reduced its population from what it would have been by 23.5%. None of the solutions proposed by anyone else for reducing global warming in a 25-year period come anywhere near that.

TUESDAY AUG 5, 2008

From: Edward Holland, Bangkok, Thailand
Dear Simon, Not wishing to drag out this debate until the heat-death of the universe: but, if Mr Andrew Datchley actually did some basic research, he would soon discover at least one observed and documented event of Stephen Hawking enjoying a night out in a strip club. Furthermore, if talking affectionately about eminent physicists with terminal illnesses who also like to go to strip clubs is disrespectful, then Richard Feynman must be the most disrespected character of the 20th century. QED.

I'm sure no-one really cares that Stephen Hawking occasionally goes to a strip club, what upsets them is having to think of him in a sexual way. Not only is his mouth profoundly unkissable but to hear sweet nothings whispered in dalek-speak would be most unnerving. Moreover, I presume he can't easily dance from his wheelchair to the proposed site of sexual activity and has to be lifted and placed by two pairs of strong arms, which suggests, other than receiving a blow-job in situ, a group of four people would be required each time he wished to perform. It's probably because neither of these scenarios presents a pretty picture that people prefer not to think of them, which the sight of the the good professor heading into a Soho strip joint might make them do.

MONDAY AUG 4, 2008

From: Andrew Datchley, London, UK
Dear Mr Napier-Bell, I have had pointed out to me that earlier this week your website ran an email in which a correspondent wrote spurious and fanciful obscenities about the eminent phycisist Stephen Hawking. I do not expect Professor Hawking to have seen this and I am hoping he will not. You should be ashamed of yourself showing such disrespect for someone who has overcome enormous physical disabilty to obtain such stature.

My correspondent, the eminent gossipologist Gregory Gray, simply pointed out that young Stephen's push cart was occasionally seen being trundled through Soho with Stephen atop of it, and that rumour has it the cart is sometimes turned at right angles and pushed through the doors of a strip club or two. While it's possible that this may not in fact be true, it's equally possible that it is. Either way, the point my correspondent was making was, 'Why shouldn't he?' Just because he's good with galaxies and even better with big bang theories, there's no reason why Professor Hawking shouldn't also enjoy a little sexual entertainment now and again. In my opinion, someone as up your own arse as you are might benefit greatly by joining him.

SUNDAY AUG 3, 2008

From: Eric Short, New York, NY, US
Hi Simon. I just finished reading "I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch". Then I went to your website and found you were in Beijing again right now. The thing that interested me most in the book was the bit about the CIA trying to put their nose into it all. Do you think that used to happen with everyone who set things up in China? Does it still?

Then, I'm sure it did. Now, I think less so. As soon as the CIA saw the Wham! concert was definitely going to happen they started pressuring me to let them have access to it for political reasons. They wanted to put one of their operatives into my road crew, that sort of thing. Basically, I told them to bugger off - I'm not American so I didn't see why I should talk to them. But many of my American friends abroad have succumbed to similar approaches. Anyone American in a solid position in a foreign country is likely to be approached - regional heads of Coca Cola or MacDonalds, that sort of thing. The CIA play on their nationalistic feelings and if that doesn't work they just plain sit on them. The interesting thing is how, in contrast, the Chinese secret service goes about it; they never use amateurs, they use their own trainees - decide on the position they should have in a 'cover' industry and then train them. I have friends in Shanghai who since the early 90s have run a radio station specialising in punk rock. They felt they might have a spy in their midst but couldn't figure out who. Eventually they realised it had to be the guy who was most knowledgeable about punk, had the biggest record collection, spent the most time in punk clubs and did the most drugs. Only someone trained by the secret service could have been so perfect. But they couldn't fire him because they needed his record collection to keep the station running.

SATURDAY AUG 2, 2008

From: Steve Holmes, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Hey Simon, a week or so ago you told us you were going to China for some sort of posh concert. I gather you’re there now.Can you tell us what it’s about.?

Two concerts were organised for the earthquake appeal. The first was in Xi’an, the old capital in the north, and the second is tomorrow in Beijing in the Chinese parliament. It’ll be the first concert ever played there so it’s quite an event to have pulled off and the people did it are five fun-loving, super bright Dutch men. A great deal of eating has taken place and even more drinking but tomorrow is a day for putting on suits and meeting deputy Prime Ministers. The concert will be watched live by 6,000 VIPs and is a bizarre mix of many things – an Argentinian concertina, a semi-classical pop singer, a John Lennon lookalike, a jazz singer, and five sexy girls singing opera. Beijing has never looked cleaner; half the cars are off the road (odd numbers one day even the next) and there are no traffic jams. Today the smog cleared away and the sun came out but the piano player had four thumbs. Worse still, the orchestra wasn't up to scratch because Princess Asoupa stole the Beijing Symphony and took it to Tonga for a coronation. Tomorrow I'm taking over as lead roadsign player.

FRIDAY AUG 1, 2008

From: Georgia Bart, London, UK
hi simon... i've got a food question for you... best wine with donkey's knob?

Chateauneuf du Pape Cuvee da Capo, 2000, one the best Chaeauneuf du Papes ever. It has a deep ruby colour (almost the same as the penis itself) and enormous aromas of kirsch, leather, herbs, spice and licorice. Sniffing it continuously will mask the smell of the meat and when you sip it you'll find its flavour enormous - thick, full and tanniny. Take a good full mouthful, pop a little meat in and you'll hardly know it's there. Swallow the whole lot down et voilà, lunching on donkey's knob becomes painless. What's more, the wine has a 16% alcohol content so after a couple of glasses you couldn't care less what you're eating anyway.

THURSDAY JULY 31, 2008

From: Danny Wong, London, UK
Hi Simon… I noticed your Dining Out reviews for last year are still not on the website and I wondered when they were coming, especially as you told me our lunch together at Bibendum was going to be one of them. I went back there a couple of weeks ago and had a starter I'd never eaten before - pig's snout! Have you ever tried it?

Yes, just once - and only once - because pig’s snout is no more worth eating than penis, which I remember you forced me to eat when we were in Beijing last year. I'm there again right now, and since last night's dinner included jelly fish and chicken's feet, this evening I might go in search of foie gras and oysters. But definitely no more donkey's knob.

WEDNESDAY JULY 30, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
hi simon... i actually met stephen hawking once... on old compton street... flankedby two wheelchair bitches... he was cool... a real glint in his eye... word on the street is he likes to go and watch the pole dancers in soho rub their shaven girly meat curtains up and down the old shiny chrome... and i'm all for it!

as for this jonathan fella... what a cunt?!.. fancy him wanting privacy agreements signed before you get to hear his trinkets?!.. i fancy the extreme irony of his lofty ways being matched with deeply crap recordings... anyway... surely if he sees the 'universe as music' he'd be happy to just open his legs and send his song out into the cosmos unconditionally.

TUESDAY JULY 29, 2008

From: Jonathan Sedley, Southampton, UK
Dear Mr Napier-Bell, I am a singer-composer of the old-fashioned type. I do not have a Myspace and prefer not to use computers in the process of composition. My creations are a mystique of poetry and richly harmonic melody; my recordings are made in full-spectrum audio and copied to CD without compression. I am not looking for a record deal or a publishing contract but simply to share with people of discernment my vision of 'the universe as music’. If you are interested in listening to four exquisite compostions I will send you a CD, though I would first ask you to sign and return the attached privacy agreement confirming that this will be for your ears only.

Sorrry Jonno, my discernment level isn't too high at the moment - I'm busy in China getting drunk every night with a bunch of Dutch crazies. As for privacy - never trust a man with a website. But your theory on the universe sounds good. Maybe Stephen Hawking would give your tunes a listen.

MONDAY JULY 28, 2008

From: Danny Levy, Singapore
Hi Simon, I saw you yesterday at Beijing airport, getting into a car as I was getting out of one. I shouted hello but you didn't hear. What were you up to? I'll be back in LA next week. Give me a call sometime?

Hi Danny. We'd just been greeted by two strangely-dressed Dutchmen and werebeing whisked off to have dinner with the Chairman of the Society for Chinese Alternative Medicine - don't ask me why! - then to a weird bar with pictures on the ceiling, more Dutch people, a LOT of alcohol, exceptional jollility, manic chatter and a waiter who became prettier with each of the twenty tequilas I drank. This is going to be a hard-working week for my liver.

SUNDAY JULY 27, 2008

From: Maggie Jarrold, London, UK
Hi Simon - from reading your books I can't really make out what you think of artists. They seem to entertain you but you're often scornful of them, though not as scornful as you are these days of record companies. What do you really think about the artists you managed? Were there any you actually liked?

At an early age - about 15 - I found I didn't really know what I wanted to do with myself, I had no ambition, no specific thing I wanted to do, but was perfectly happy waking up every morning and watching the world go by. The adults around me - parents, schoolteachers, etc - said this was wrong - I was meant to have an ambition which I should work hard to acheive. Since I played the trumpet and enjoyed jazz I kept them quiet by saying I'd become the world's greatest trumpet player. I knew I wouldn't, I just wasn't good enough. But anyway, I went off to North America and started earning my living that way. When I got bored of being a musician I decided I'd one day earn my living as a writer but meanwhile needed more experience of life. The best way to get it, I thought, would be to follow my dick, which I proceeded to do. It led me all round the world, jumping up and pointing the way, sometimes most unexpectedly. Then I discovered pop management. The artist had the desire, the ambition, the talent and pointed the way - just as my dick had done previously. All I had to do was to enable him to get what he wanted - again, not much different. So you see, that's how I've always thought of my artists - big surrogate dicks - leading me round the world and introducing me to pleasurable situations. As for liking them... Well who doesn't like their own dick?

SATURDAY JULY 26, 2008

From: Mary Clemente, New York, NY, USA
My Dearest Simon: As I mentioned to you in my recent emails we had a serious salmonella outbreak that was focused on tomatos, hence I planted a container in my beach house in New York. Lo and behold the very first tomato was a boy with a penis. My first reaction was it looks like Simon Napier-Bell's New Year's picture of him doing his baby Beluga Whale underwater synchronized ballet! Needless to say... I have officially named my new source of food "Simon Napier-Bell Tomato"! I have taken these pictures and sent them to the Associated Press and UK tabloids. I'm Coming to Eat You For Lunch! I will await its ripeness and sprinkle with olive oil and garnish with fresh basil and enjoy with a Shot of Jurado Tequila! Love Ya!

My dear Mary, from the first sentence of the first email you ever sent me it was clear you were as delightfully mad as a March mongoose (which was the attraction and continues to be). While I'm not particularly flattered by having a deformed tomato named after me, nor hugely thrilled at having the news spread round the world's media, I'm not the slightest bit upset either. C'est la vie! If I mix with potty people I must expect sometimes to have the potty thrown over me. Take another look at the strange object you grew at at your beach house. There's no 'boy with a penis' that I can see. Nor any sign of me swimming in my pool. But could there be something of you about it?

FRIDAY JULY 25, 2008

From: Bruce Emond, Weekender Magazine, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta, Indonesia
Hey Simon, I saw your note on your website - bit taken aback, as I didn't realize you were yelling at me, which must have been a bit clueless of me. And I do apologize for sending you so many questions. At any rate, good luck,

There you are then, you see how gently I can scream - nothing to be afraid of, not if you're a newspaper editor anyway, though I did once let loose with at Caspar Llewelyn-Smith at the Observer, but nothing like Giles Coren's tirade yesterday directed at the Times' sub-editors about which I totally agree with him.

In your case, the trouble was your questions all seemed to be things that were fully answered in my books. Even so, after grumpily telling you I wouldn't do them I still left them on my 'to do' list meaning to answer them later. But eventually my computer crashed and I bought a new laptop, so they were forgotten. If you send me a new lot I'll answer them. Promise!

THURSDAY JULY 24, 2008

From: John Dang, Manchester, UK
I loved yesterday's email. It made me smile... I can't believe he called them partyheads. I assume he meant the organisers of the party. What party is this then? An Olympic thing?

I believe it's called the Communist Party. But Bas has a great way with words, doesn't he! 'Partyheads' makes them sound so skunk-smokingly cool.

Actually, Bas and I haven't yet met although we've been corresponding for some weeks now. He works with the Europe China Foundation, a non-govermental organisation based in Holland that aids business and research by connecting top Europeans with top Chinese, both people and companies. They've arranged a concert in the Great Hall of the People - China's vast parliament building - in aid of earthquake vicitms, mainly classical music but with a pop tinge and some jazz. Anyway - in response to my asking how I'd recognise him at the airport, Bas sent me a picture of what he intends to wear.

WEDNESDAY JULY 23, 2008

From: Bas van Gent, Beijing, China
There will be a ceremony in Xi'an with the governor and partyheads and dancers who are opening the palace doors. The artists get the key of the City. President Clinton got this honour in 1998 and Chirac in 2005 and now you guys. By the way I asked for a bigger place in Xi'an than the small theatre for 1100 people, so this will now be a stadium with 8,000 people. More income for the charity. After the concert in Beijing you get a glass of champagne with the Vice Prime Ministers and probably higher. I will pick you up. The new train is perfect by the way but there will be less traffic now because of State regulations.

OK Bas! Always great to be picked up. Thanks! With all these Prime Ministers around it sounds like I'll need to bring a suit - in 40 degree heat too - ugh!!! By the way, how will I recognise you at the airport? Should we meet somewhere special? Or shall I wear a yellow hat and pink shoes?

TUESDAY JULY 22, 2008

From: Dave Lubbock, London, UK
Hi Simon - are you really not prepared to answer questions anymore - you’ve answered mine a few times - some other people I know too - I ’d be disappointed if you stopped - what did the lady from Chicago ask that made you so sour?

As you know, I’m normally charm itself when it comes to answering student’s questions. Please note I said nothing in my answer to Ms Danziger about not answering sensible questions for sensible people, it’s just that I haven’t got time to work out the answers to questions like this (1 of 7 she sent me).

“You once said on your website that you consider the aspirational functionality of an artist’s predisposition to success as being the most essential aspect to be considered in assessing his or her potential. On the supposition that this is not the sole quality on which you base a decision to enter into a professional relationship with an artist but is normally balanced with a certain degree of singing or performing ability, could you tell me what percentage of importance you apportion to each of these two qualities in arriving at your decision.”

How can someone do Media Studies and write a question like that? It's meant to be the study of communicating clearly. And the daft thing is, the first part of her email looked like an illiterate SMS message.

MONDAY JULY 21, 2008

From: Julie Danziger, Chicago, Illinois, USA
hi simon... i'm writing a piece for my media studies course... do you mind me asking...

Yes, yes, yes, I mind very much. I'm busy. And I'm bored of answering damned silly questions from half-witted students about stupid subjects that aren't worth studying in the first place.

SUNDAY JULY 20, 2008

From: Shane Shelley, London, UK
Hi Simon - I was thinking the other day about the fantastic rehearsal studios you used to have in Hammersmith, just behind Olympia - Nomis Studios. I was in two different groups which used them at different times and everyone thought they were the best rehearsal facilities they'd ever seen. Why did you ever sell them?

It was a grandiose idea turned into grandiose reality. The idea had been to build a huge rehearsal complex for the world’s top groups and artists. The reality was a vast disused building in west London, built as a dairy in the nineteenth century and therefore with two foot thick concrete walls to keep it cool inside. Two foot thick concrete was perfect soundproofing, so this building that no-one else could see a use for suddenly turned out to be just perfect for what I wanted. In 1976 I raised the money and got the architect to work. But it took three years to build and between the time it was started and the time it was finished interest rates had risen from 5% to 18%. When it was finished it was indeed magnificent – thirty rehearsal rooms running from small to breathtaking (well - rather good, anyway). It had extensive facilitites for storing and hiring equipment, a custom made loading bay for groups to fetch and carry their equipment and a canteen that daily housed the greats of rock and roll, there to rehearse for their next tour or record – Queen mixing with the Rolling Stones mixing with Aerosmith mixing with Led Zeppelin - and pop stars too – Blondie, Adam Ant, Tom Robinson, even Shirley Bassey. It was like owning the trendiest night club in town without ever having to stay up past bedtime. But because the loans had been taken at 5% and were having to be repaid at 18% it was losing money like a cullender leaks water. It was too big, had cost too much to build and cost too much to run. Eveyone who went there was impressed to the gills. "Gosh, that Simon Napier-Bell’s a clever bugger investing in these studios. He must be making a packet."

But a packet was what I was losing; not making. So it had to be sold. And was.

SATURDAY JULY 19, 2008

From: Ed Lawson, Seattle, Washington, USA
Hi Simon, I was reading back on your old emails and I found something you wrote about Live Nation. They announce themselves as the future of the music business but you seem a bit demeaning of them. I'd been thinking of investing in a few shares. Do you really not think they're a good bet?

They have the smell of a company that expands too big and too fast and spends too much in doing so. Look at their company accounts for last year - a total of 4 billion dollars income yet there was a net loss of 11 million (but the company's corporate expenditure was 45 million, so the executives are living well). In my time in the music business I've seen so many of these companies come and go - too much start-up money, not enough time spent building a solid base. The first time I saw it was back in the 60s with a company called Tetragrammafon. Some poor sucker coughed up a stack of cash - a hundred million, perhaps, or maybe in those days all it took was twenty - and off they went. They found premises in New York – three floors of something prime round 52nd street - then in LA, then in London. They hired staff to fill the offices - put lawyers in the business affairs department and press agents in the publicity department; poached the best A&R and marketing men from other companies; hired sales people and promotion people and specialists in bribing radio-stations. Then they gave them all secretaries. Now they had three large buildings in three cities filled with highly-paid staff but with absolutely nothing for anyone to do because so far they hadn’t signed a single artist. So what was the obvious next step… you’ve guessed it. Yes! An executive jet. Now the chief executives of each branch could fly off to meet the chief executives of each of the other branches to discuss matters of importance. They finally hired some talent scouts but by then the talent scouts were under huge pressure, not so much to find talent, more to find something for everyone else to do. So in it rolled, the most second-rate stuff imaginable - all those artists who’d been auditioned and turned down by every other company and all those music-biz con-men with their tapes and songs and production deals - and very soon the money was down to not very much. In the end they got lucky and signed Deep Purple and for a while things looked good - they had nice buildings, lots of staff, the executive jet was comfortable and Deep Purple gave them a hit or two. But too much money had gone out at the beginning and two years after they started they went bust.

Are Live Nation really like that? Well to be honest, I haven't a clue - but something tells me 'yes'. Just an instinct!

FRIDAY JULY 18, 2008

From: Susie Lemmons, New York, NY, USA
Dear Simon, the company I work for is looking for a United Kingdom distributor for an exclusive brand of vodka it produces. Do you know anybody that can help us?

Sorry love - I'm just a consumer. Though perhaps if you left it with me I could consume the lot and you wouldn't have to waste time finding someone to distribute it.

THURSDAY JULY 17, 2008

From: Blake Joliffe, Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Hey Simon, I just read "I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch" and loved it. Seems from reading it that the 80s was the best British music-business decade ever - even better than the 60s. From your CV page I you see you were in your 40s then. Was that YOUR best decade too? (I'm 38 so I want to know before I get there.)

Me and decades don’t quite coincide. My first decade started in April 1939, whereas the rest of the world's new decade started eight months later in January 1940. I've now realised what a benefit it is having an eight-month gap between the start of my decades and the start of the world-at-large's decades. It gives me time to snug-in and get used to it, like getting to like a new pair of shoes. At the end of the year, when everyone else gets to their new decade, I’m already eight months into mine and going strong. When 1980 hit I was 40 plus nine months. Perfect! Everyone says life begins at forty and by the time January 1st 1980 rolled up I’d discovered what they meant. It was a breeze. Still had a few good looks but also a bit of experience and wisdom. After thirty-nine years of not always being perfectly aligned in all things, suddenly everything clicked into place and I was running like a Swiss clock. Still am!!!

WEDNESDAY JULY 16, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York, NY, USA

One day in the near future, I will come to visit and bring the proper ingredients and make you the best fucking guaca and home made tortillas... we will grill some filet and and onions and chop fresh cilantro and I will refry some frijoles and have a feast! But not right now, I'm on a diet for the Casa de Campo party in two weeks and will be wearing a bikini and do not want to get sand kicked in my face for not having a body! Or even better, the next time your in Gotham, I will take you to the Esquina in the east village for the best maritas and taquitos al pastor!

So Bibi, threats and promises! The promise of a visit to Thailand to teach me to cook decent Mexican food is good. Not so good is the threat of Esquina. Isn't it that scruffy cafe where they serve tacos and tortas on baguettes? Not much authenticity there. As for al pastor - in the UK we call it doner kebab, to be grabbed late at night after the pub - and never let them give you the meat from the bottom which has been there a month and gives you the... well, I suppose... the Mexican runs. Ah, so there's the connection! Nevertheless next time I'm in New York we WILL eat together. But cafes are out! Decent wine and comfortable chairs please.

TUESDAY JULY 15, 2008

From: John Aspen, New York, NY, USA

Re your reference to the word 'naco', recently it's started to be used to define a certain style of art - Naco Art - and here's an example.....

Thanks John. I had quite a few emails about the word, everyone saying I'd got the meaning wrong. So what do I know about Mexican slang? A little bit, maybe - chichifo, I've always thought, is one of the nicest words for rent-boy. But as far as 'naco' is concerned, until I saw the word in that email yesterday I thought of Naco as a drummer - the best there ever was in Italian popular music (until he died a few years ago). His full name was Giuseppe Bonaccorso - brilliant at pop but also a great jazz musician. And he played with several Italian rock groups too.

MONDAY JULY 14, 2008

From: Ellie Deutz, Mexico City, Mexico

You know Simon, you just don't seem like a 'flaming fajitas' person. Living in Thailand too! What would prompt you to come up with that idea for Sunday lunch? A visiting naco?

A visiting naco? I had to check it out - I thought it was a rude word for a Mexican but it seems these days it's less so - more of a vulgar fashionista. Anyway Ellie, you're wrong! I've spent a lot of time in Mexico - one of my favourite places - and eaten a lot of flaming fajitas. In 1983/84 when I was buzzing off to China every month to get Wham! permission to play there, I always flew on round-the-world tickets which meant I spent a few days in Thailand before Beijing, and a few days in Mexico afterwards (PanAm used to fly down there as a side-trip on its rtw ticket.) So it was Acapulco once a month for a couple of years. But back to my Sunday fajitas - they were very compromised ones - the tortillas were actually Indian chapati from the local supermarket, the steak was Thai, and instead of real guacamole I mashed the avocados up with Thai chilis, a touch of creamed coconut and a squeeze of local lime. Mexicans, read and learn - these were way better than traditional fajitas.

SUNDAY JULY 13, 2008

From: Dominic Sio, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Hi Simon, how are you? I read your story from your website and really interested to do an interview with you if you're up for it. It's for the little magazine I started, Stimuli . Just read your interview in Butt...really like it. Perhaps we can do an email questionnaire thing? The magazine is bi-annual so we have a month to do it. By the way, I'm also a friend of Alec Ewe but have not heard from him
since !?!?.

Hi Dominic - your magazine looks pretty stylish, I like it, so let's say yes (particularly as you're a friend of Alec). But be warned, there's nothing as annoying as getting a stack of questions by email every one of which is already answered in one of my books. The last person who landed that on me was the editor of the Jakarta Post's Weekender Magazine. I yelled at him (via email). He seemed to think I was being unreasonable; said, living in Jakarta how's he going to get hold of them? I figured he might just have heard of Amazon. But apparently not. Still, with that proviso in place, I'm all yours.

SATURDAY JULY 12, 2008

From: Princess Asupa Motuapuaka, Beijing, China

Hi Simon, great to hear from you!! Its a terrible pity that you're coming to Beij and I am not there to see you. I am leaving to Tonga on the 21st for the coronation of our king and will be back in Beij August 5th... If it was not a coronation, I would postpone my trip but we are also taking the Chinese symphony (90 people) from Beijing so I am stuck... sometimes life is not fair! hugs

Asupa, darling, so cruel of you..... I arrive on the 28th and leave on the 4th. Any chance you could use your influence within the royal family and get the coronation delayed a week? Well no, I suppose not! But Beijing without Asupa? Like cappuccino without the chocolate sprinkles. I can't imagine clubbing without you there to provide the sparkle. But I understand - for one of the family a coronation is pretty unmissable. Bit much though stealing the Chinese symphony too. Never mind - I'll be arriving complete with musical group, so no problem - the beautiful Passionata.

FRIDAY JULY 11, 2008

From: Andrew Shorter, London, UK

Hi Simon - I'm holidaying in Thailand in December, will you be around? And how is TV news coverage in English? Is it possible to stay relatively in touch with what's going on in the world?

CNN and BBC deluge us each day with the world's goings-on, and Fox with American politics. And there's also ABC from Australia. So you won't have to worry about being uninformed. For instance, yesterday morning the Australian channel had told us what Jesse Jackson said about Obama's nuts while CNN was still saying it was an unmentionable word. But the best moment yesterday was when I had a sudden insight while watching President Sarkozy talk at the G8 summit. He began getting animated in that mouth-pursing, eye-popping, over-animated way that French politicians use when talking to the plebs. And it suddenly occured to me that's exactly why the British call the French frogs. It's not, as I'd always thought, because they eat the little buggers, but because of the way their politicians talk (President Chirac in full harangue used to look exactly the same, as did President Pompidou). When Sarkozy got heated his eyes suddenly popped foward a centimetre. Then his lips self-collagenised and his head started jerking from side to side. He looked for all the world like a fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina) with something large and uncomfortable making its way up his bottom.

THURSDAY JULY 10, 2008

From: Stevie D, New York, NY, USA

Simon, sorry to bother you about this again but about a month ago you said you were working on some remixes of a Quentin Crisp song and you'd let me know when they were avaiblable. Are they finished yet?

Sort of! The person doing them was Simon Henderson, a British producer based in Bangkok. But he encountered a few problems. What he had to work from was a tape I threw in a drawer thirty years ago. The BBC had just shown The Naked Civil Servant and I'd had the idea of asking Quentin Crisp to make a record. The song that seemed right for him was the Peggy Lee hit, Where Did They Go. ("Where did they go all the good times, the flowers and the wine, the young men who held me, all the lovers who were mine.)

Having warned me first that he couldn't sing a note, Quentin then threw himself into it wholeheartedly, speaking the lyrics in a superbly fruity camp voice. The end result sounded pretty good, if a little old-fashioned (and why not - he was already in his early seventies), but every record company I took it to said no - too camp by half. So I slung it in a drawer.

I mentioned this to Simon Henderson who suggested I fish it out and give it to him to work on. The problem was, I didn't have the multi-track, just a stereo master. The voice was virtually inseparable from the track so the best he could do was make a new version of the original song much as it was originally recorded. But he did manage to extract a dozen or so words from the verses that were relatively clean of the original backing track and he used these to make three different dance remixes. I played the whole lot to a few people in the dance side of the business and they all agreed it was best thrown back in the drawer.

Simon H and I aren't sure we agree with them. These dance people are too trendy by half - afraid of being laughed at by their contemporaries for using a sound that's three weeks out of date. But we haven't progressed any further apart from Simon H editing a few pictures to one of the dance versions and putting it on Youtube. Judge for yourself.

WEDNESDAY JULY 9, 2008

From: Francis Connor, Sataheep, Thailand

My Dear Simone, firstly, the idea of luncheon together this week is hugely appealing and I would be available on Friday. How about The Bay at 1pm? Secondly, my wonderful chef Aek recently served me a fish he buys from the local market called Tuptim. I've never had it before and it is truly delicious. You must try it, perhaps here, cooked by Aek next time you visit.

Hi Francis, Friday's fine, see you there. And re Tuptim, I'm surprised you've lived in Thailand so long and never had it before (your life is too sheltered - all those chefs and servants). Tuptim is easily the most common fish in rural Thailand. It's actually a Tilapia, originally from Egypt and for 2000 years the principal fish of the Nile. Now it's being bred anywhere vaguely tropical, from Jamaica to Japan, particularly in Southern China. In Thailand the King proposed a further development of the fish to make it more fleshy and raise its nutritional value. Ten years of cross-breeding produced the Tuptim. In the countryside they usually lay it in bright sunlight for 12 hours to 'bind' the meat before frying it in a shallow pan and serving it with Thai salad. I had it this way at Bangkok airport just last week for a mere 110 baht (£1.80). Delicious! The fish's name is said to mean 'pink ruby' though the dictionary offers other translations too - 'permangranate', for instance, which is a salty bleaching agent, and pomegranate (the fruit). At a pinch it could also be translated as 'shagging Tim' since the word 'tup' by itself can mean copulate.

TUESDAY JULY 8, 2008

From: Simon White, London, UK

Had a very good day at Henley and Ian Morton was charming, though a little worried about Allan rushing in and out of the changing rooms with his camera and handing personal cards to all pretty oarsmen. I've booked the knife for 16th August. This is a fortnight later than I'd hoped because I'm due to driving down to Figeac, near Cahors, by the 5th September and then on to Carcassone and Cannes. (This whilst the decorators are here). Then in November to Thailand.

Great! So we're finally going to see you here. I'm sure you'll have no problem leaving for France on the 5th - keyhole surgery is amazing, I was on the plane to London just three weeks after my op. Figeac and Cahors are great wine places. Pre-phylloxera, Cahors made wine by boiling the grapes before pressing to make the juice stronger. They made a wine so dark it was known as 'black' rather than red and it could take up to a hundred years in the bottle to reach its best. Nowadays they make it softer and quicker maturing but back in the 70s I managed to get hold of a couple of bottles of the pre-pylloxera stuff - not particularly soft even after a hundred years but remarkable tasting, and as black as night. In the 15th Century the Russian Orthodox Church adopted Cahors 'black' as their communion wine. Very canny! Even I would have mumbled an occasional amen in return for a good slug of it.

MONDAY JULY 7, 2008

From: Andy Sharpe, Trenton, New Jersey, USA

Hey Simon - a month or so ago when you had your gall bladder out you told us you wouldn't be able to eat anything fatty ever again. How are you finding it? I'm interested because I had my gall bladder out a year ago and they told me the same thing but I've not changed my diet at all and I feel just fine.

Thank-you Andy for enquiring about my health. I'm now totally recovered, though there was a bad period just after the operation. When he let me go home the surgeon warned me not to drink any alcohol for a couple of weeks. So I didn't. And I didn't feel good. I went for a check-up from my regular doctor who took some blood and sent it for testing. The long and the short of it was that my blood alcohol level was dangerously low. He wanted to keep me in hospital for a day or two and put me on a whiskey drip but when I promised to up my intake of wine and calvados he agreed to let me go home. Since then things have been fine. Like you I haven't found the need to change my diet at all, though to be honest I haven't yet dived into a kilo of foie gras. Maybe I'll do that tonight.

SUNDAY JULY 6, 2008

From: Muir Vidler, London, UK
It was very nice to see you... good to bat a couple of ideas around for 'the book'... we could be a good partnership... as you pointed out, because we are not such an obvious pairing... part travel, part reportage, part diary sounds like a good cocktail to me...

Hi Muir - after we spoke I talked with my literary agent who was absolutely, utterly, supremely negative in that extraordinary English way I've spent forty years having to put up with in the music business: "Won't work - can't be done - won't sell - totally not worth doing". He had an explanation of course - it's because there are already so many travel books that bookstores HAVE to put on their shelves that there's no room for more. Every bookstore MUST stock the "Lonely Planet" books, MUST stock the "Rough Guides", MUST stock the "Eyewitness Travel Guides" etc. And when they've put all these books about all the different countries onto the shelves there's no room to squeeze any more books between them. "So forget it", was his message and I left feeling a touch depressed. But really, what he'd told me (though he didn't realise it) was that travel books have become the pop records of the book industry. It was always like that in the music business. Every shop had to stock the Top 40 so how could they find room for new artists? And of course we - the managers - solved that problem week after week and got new artists into the charts despite the dreary pessisim of all those miserable people at record companies. From what my agent told me it seems travel books have never before been so popular - nor more boringly formularised. There's obviously a need for something fresh and different and what we're planning could be perfect. A bit more focussing perhaps, then we should get on with it. And with photos like yours how can it fail.

Sharon Osbourne by Muir Vidler

SATURDAY JULY 5, 2008

From: Danny Jamieson, Vancouver, BC, Canada
A long time back I remember you talking about what books you'd been reading - a strange bunch if I recall correctly - and I thought it was time for another update. Myself I've just finished Barrack Obama's book about his father which I found dull rather than inspiring. I thought back to that wonderful play John Mortimer wrote - "A Voyage Round Father" - more insightful, more amusing, more revelatory. If only America could import its presidents from Britain. Anyway Simon... read any good books lately?

Not many! I don't much like fiction, just factual stuff, memoirs, autobiography. Though that's not altogether true because I enjoy reading fiction in Thai. Not sure why. Perhaps because I read slower in Thai and the story helps pull me through the book whereas if I want facts I prefer to gobble them up fast in English. Currently I have two books by my bed. In Thai, The Remains of The Day by that strange Japanese man who writes in English, Kazuo Ishi Wotsit. Since what he produces is already the fruit of two cultures it seems reasonable enough to read it in a third, and in Thai it works rather well - I can't imagine it would be as good in English. Next to that is "Quicksands", a book by my favourite writer of English, Sybille Bedford. Second time of reading and still stunning. Written when she was almost blind at 93 and as witty and youthful and sharp (though not hopeful) as something written by a thirty-year-old.

FRIDAY JULY 4, 2008

From: Anthony Anderman, Singapore
Thanks for coming down to see us last night. If the meal was a bit casual I trust at least the wine made up for it. Sorry about the karaoke. Hope you made your flight.

Anthony - the meal was ridiculous, probably the biggest collection of seafood I've ever had put in front of me, but the karaoke, as always, was the worst possible way to end an evening. Since other people had to be considered, you're forgiven. I shouldn't really be so snooty about it, the last time I was in Singapore I was in a karaoke bar too, though not on purpose - I was looking for somewhere else and wandered into the karaoke bar by mistake and there singing his balls off was Jerome Walton who used to be the Pink Floyd's tour accountant. The end result was an all night bar crawl during which we somehow got emeshed with an exceedingly posh Thai girl (the daughter of a Thai general) who ran all the Thai hookers in Singapore. They're given official licences by the Singapore government to come and 'hook' within the law for a three year period on the condition they'll never enter Singapore again afterwards. Odd place isn't it - Puritan yet pragmatic - which is one more reason why I think your project will do well.

THURSDAY JULY 3, 2008

From: Gordon Torrance, Jakarta, Indonesia
Yesterday, reading your website and pondering on the delights of a kiss with Mr Soonsiri, I realised it's been a long time since we've been in touch. So how are you? Last time we met you looked very different. A lifetime of eating and drinking, I suppose. Anyway, just to remind you of what was, here's a picture I took of you in my flat in 1976.

Hi Gordon, I remember your flat well - in Manchester Square - grand but ragged round the edges, untidy, with lots of things lying around, most of them applicants for that pop group you endlessly planned to launch but never quite did. (I always presumed it wasn't really meant for launching, just for auditioning.) Anyway, good to hear from you. Actually I was in Jakarta recently but had no idea you were there. Never mind! We've done quite well not seeing each other for thirty years - should manage another thirty OK, don't you think?

WEDNESDAY JULY 2, 2008

From: Charles Arnold, London, UK
Dear Simon Napier-Bell, my wife and I have enjoyed two wonderful holidays in Phuket. We considered buying a small holiday home there but my wife began reading about Thai politics and is now worried that our investment might not be secure. A few days ago I chanced on your website and read a piece by you in which you were extraordinarily sanguine about the political situation in Thailand, saying the country was a secure place in which to invest and that there was nothing to worry about. Excuse me asking this but is what you wrote really your considered opinion or were you writing that way simply to be amusing?

What a tedious question! Of course I meant what I wrote. I reckon you and your boring wife should stick to package holidays in Phuket. And if you really want to know about Thai politics take a look at the picture below. Mr Prasong Soonsiri has been a leading political figure and a deft operator for the last twenty-five years; when he speaks other politicians listen, yet his mouth perfectly sums up Thai politics - a dirty place to be. To form a government, many a Prime Minister has had to get into bed with him. Would you like to? Or your wife, maybe?

I'm told he gives a mean kiss.

TUESDAY JULY 1, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York, NY, USA
Morning Simon: read the story and give me your thoughts? (MTV are about to do digital downloads.) Biggest Kiss.

Hi Bibi, it's a natural thing to happen. I've thought for a long time - the future of popular music is for every radio and TV station to offer downloads of their currently playing song. The real potential being with car radio. When you tune your car radio, you set up a credit card account with with each station. When you're driving and they play a song you like you tap a button on the radio and the song goes straight on to your in-car recordable hard-disk, charged to your credit card. The result? Billions of downloads - though cheap-cheap prices need to be a part of it too. Radios and TVs at home will have the same facility. But it's cars that offer the big future for downloading.

MONDAY JUNE 30, 2008

From: Philip Adey, London, UK
Hi Simon, How are you? I hope this finds you and Yo well and enjoying life. I pass on the message below as I notice that you are a 'lost' Old Boy. How careless of them. No doubt if you have any desire at all for them to be able to contact you, you are quite capable of letting them know.

Hi Philip, thanks for passing on the letter from Bryanston. I have no objection to putting myself in touch with the place but I'm surprised they don't tell a secretary to key their 'missing' old boys into a search engine. I'm sure a quick Google would find half of them at least. In my case the first page would bring up at least twenty sites with links to my email address. But maybe they don't use emails. When we were there it was considered one of the more progressive public schools. Now I'm wondering if they even have a computer?

SUNDAY JUNE 29, 2008

From: Archie Hart, Brighton, UK
Hi Simon I was surprised yesterday to see you singing the praises of one of those miserable ‘neither one thing nor another’ musical groups. All that pappy middle-of-the-road ‘pop meets classics’ stuff has been done to death - it couldn’t be more old-hat. What's happened to the man who used to boast he'd given us The Yardbirds, Marc Bolan, Japan, and Wham! (who at least were uncompromisingly good pop)? Nowadays, it seems, you’ve sunk to doing anything for a good dinner.

Archie, you miserable codger, I wish you’d hurry up and die. Since a good dinner involves good conversation I’d be surprised if you’ve ever had one. I can’t think of anyone who’s ever enjoyed talking to you.

Re the groups I mentioned, there’s no way could any of them be called middle-of-the-road – they’re the very opposite. Passionata, for example, are the extreme outsides of two different roads – uncompromising opera with uncompromising rock. I can’t think of anything more powerful in sound and attack than a great rock group pounding along in full heat other than a great operatic chrous. Replace the orchestra with the rock group and you have a musical powerhouse that carries both genres to new heights.

I’ll make a deal with you. Do everyone a favour and pop off during the next twelve months. In return I’ll book Passionata for your funeral and we’ll all celebrate with a cheerful rock-driven Hallelujah Chorus.

SATURDAY JUNE 28, 2008

From: Casey Dale, Santa Monica, California, USA
Hi Simon, you said you'd be in London this week but I've seen nothing on your website about it. What you up to?

What I'm up to is 'being in London', which this week has been a full-time occupation. I came here to meet Dominic and Al Lyon who run the music-biz's most interesting new company, Young Guns UK.

Al and Dom were both violinists but decided to form a company to package music for corporate events. The results have been spectacular. One of their groups, Escala, just came 2nd on 'Britain Has Talent' - four girls, two violins, a viola, a cello, short skirts, long legs, flashy hair and lots of strutting. Even more eye-catching are Passionata, five striking blondes who sing opera to a heavy rock backing. And Eclipse, four guys who play classical strings with a rock presentation. Dom and Al are looking towards the Far East and thought I might give them some advice. I'm not sure I've done so - mostly what I remember is a dinner at which we consumed eight bottles of wine before moving on to even more serious drinking elsewhere. Last night I was excused a repeat because Dom went with Passionata to entertain the Prime Minister and his dinner guests at Chequers. This afternoon Escala are playing at the O2 arena in Grenwich. Tonight there'll be more food and wine. Tomorrow I'll cure my hangover with champagne on the flight home to Thailand. Next week I'll do this all over again with some folks in Singapore. Strange business, consultancy!

FRIDAY JUNE 27, 2008

From: Simon Shukat, London, UK
Simon Napier-Bell - why on earth are there so many of us these days? I mean - so many Simons - especially in the music business. There's you, and there's Simon Cowell, and his producer Simon Fuller, and I looked up Simon Cowell's company and his partner is called Simon Jones, and then there's the record producer who sends silly pictures to your website, Simon Henderson, there's a journalist with the Guardian, Simon Heffer. When I was at school (thirty years ago) I can't remember there being a single other Simon in the school. Nowadays I feel I've lost my exclusivity.

Me too - I was the only Simon in a school of 400, but today I bet there'd be a dozen. But the name still isn't in the top twenty, which is surprising when you realise that Joshua is number 4 and Ethan is number fifteen. (Who's ever met someone called Ethan, for God's sake?)

As to why it's become such a popular name, it started with a UK TV series in the early 60s called 'The Saint' in which the lead character (played by Roger Moore) was called Simon Templar. By the 70s this had caused the Simon population to increase tenfold, and with ten times the number around a few more famous ones emerged, which caused it to increase again. Now the blighters are all over the place. But being Simon is still a lot better than being Bruce or Jack or Mick. Don't you think?

THURSDAY JUNE 26, 2008

From: Colonel Jim, Ipswich, Suffolk, UK
Dear Simon, I see that you claim never to have had anonymous sex in a dark place! During National Service in the fifties I read Compton Mackenxie's then new novel "Thin Ice" which led me on an adventure to Jack Straw's Castle in Hampstead, and then to the Heath. I didn't wear uniform but it didn't take long to "click" and it was an amazing anodyne for the frustrations of the times in which we then lived.

Sorry Colonel, what I said wasn't clear. One of the great things about being gay is the way easy sexual encounters turn up from nowhere. I've had hundreds of them, often with people I'd never met till that moment and never saw again afterwards. But - by 'anonymous sex in dark places' - I meant sex in blacked-out rooms in gay clubs, or at 2am in the bushes on Hampstead Heath. For me the most sexually arousing thing about a person is the way they look. It puzzles me that someone should want to have sex with a stranger they can't see. Though with an ugly old bugger like you it might have its advantages.

WEDNESDAY JUNE 25, 2008

From: Gerald Dance, Bristol, UK
Simon, you've often described yourself as a bit of an outsider, a loner even, not wanting to join in, not good with teams, yet yesterday you described yourself travelling across London as a teenager to do exactly that, to play with a jazz orchestra, which I would have thought was quite a 'teamy' thing to do. Isn't that something of an anomaly?

Yes, it probably is. But even so, playing trumpet in the brass section of a big band is probably the most exhilarating thing I ever did in my life - the rhythm section belting away underneath and the brass section roaring along on top, ten or so instruments playing as one. Despite this astonishing precision and unity not one of those people need ever to have met before yet they can still sit together in a brass section sight-reading the music and swinging orgasmically without even having a rehearsal. (Though sometimes it absolutely does NOT work that way.) Only one other thing in my life has given me the same experience - rowing in an eight. At the moment the eight oarsmen hit a perfectly synchronised stroke and surge forward at maximum pace, it's exactly the same feeling. Yet I never liked anyone else I rowed with and spent absolutley no time with them whatsoever other than when we were rowing. The same, perhaps, as having wonderful anonymous sex with a stranger in a dark place - something I've never done, nor ever wanted to - but which an awful lot of people speak highly of.

TUESDAY JUNE 24, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
hi simon... here's an mp3 of shorty rogers and stan kenton doing one of billy strayhorns most popular songs - 'Take the A Train' [i hope the trumpet isn't too shrill for your morning as you open this.] maybe save it for later in the day.

This 'Take the A-train' the arrangement is exactly the one I used to play with pick up swing bands in the school holidays (circa the mid 50s), amateur musicians who got together through ads in the Melody Maker. My own 'A-train' was the disgustingly dirty Southern Railway one I took from Clapham Junction to somewhere south of Lewsiham. (In those days London was filthy. Most buildings hadn't been cleaned since before the war, and industrial smoke belched everywhere. I grew up thinking all those white buildings along the embankment at Westminster, like the Shell building, were made of black stone.)

Anyway, 15-years old-ish, I'd set off with my trumpet to end up at a depressing Victorian school building in south London, used during the holidays for amateur band rehearsals. Then the dreariness of 50s London disappeared. I'd find myself in a twenty-five piece band playing arrangements by Duke Ellington, or Basie, or Kenton - learning to play the choruses tight, swinging on all those brass riffs I'd been listening to on the gramophone in my bedroom since I was 10.

The people in those rehearsal bands were amazing - kids like me, men of 70 who were retired musicians from the army, taxi drivers, doormen - there was even a hooker who played a mean alto sax. And there was no point giving up our free day and going all the way there if we didn't do it brilliantly, so everyone gave their best. It was great training for later becoming a professional musician where you turned up at gigs and had parts shoved in front of you you'd never seen before, sight-reading them straight off with all those 'be-bop, da-wop-dop, da-ditty-bop' phrases to be played spot-on first time.

MONDAY JUNE 23, 2008

From: June Shorter, London, UK
hi simon... i'm a media student writing a piece on business achievers... i want to ask you... of all the things you've done in the music biz what are you most proud of?

Pride and working in he music industry don’t really go together. I’ve learnt the art of management - of getting the best out of people - that sort of thing. But to have used that to turn reasonably pleasant teenagers into ego-maniacs doesn’t seem particularly pride-worthy. Anyway, 'pride' is a such a grand word. And 'being proud' sounds so pompous. In my teens and early twenties I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. The fact that I've got through it without creating a major disaster for myself or anyone else is enough to give me some quiet satisfaction.

SUNDAY JUNE 22, 2008

From: Daniel Anstee, Richmond, Virginia, USA
Hey Simon. I just finished reading "I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch". A wonderful read, and so like a novel it made me think that that's what you should be writing - fiction.

I’ve never been interested in writing fiction. It seems a cheat. You sit down to write from your experience, then when it doesn’t flow quite right you say, 'Oh never mind, I’ll make something up'. Much more fun to take fact and re-balance it; to filter it; to adjust the balance of the charcters in the story until it becomes interesting. With ‘I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch’ I tried to make it read like a novel. To do this everything had to be put into a new balance. The character Rolf was made much more present in the book than he had been in real life – every last one of my experiences with him was included - whereas Wham! were made much less present. The end result was that in reading the book Rolf felt like half the story. Which in my mind, thinking back on it, was the truth.

Wham! were just two annoying teenagers I had to deal with on a business level, but Rolf was a fascinating and intriguing man whose company I enjoyed enormously. Most of the time I spent with Wham! was easily forgetable, but the time I passed with Rolf was always memorable. The book accurately conveys the balance in which I remember events – so it's the truth, at least in regard to how my mind works. Some people might say 'truth' would be better represented by a journalistic approach, describing every last thing that happened during the period. But that would be a lie to my memory of it.

So which is the more truthful account - the one I spontaneously recall, or the one I would have to go back to and research?

SATURDAY JUNE 21, 2008

From: Eloïse Hendl, Stuttgart, Germany
I can tell you, Mr. Simon Napier-Bell, that you look a whole lot better when you push your head through a cardboard cutout and take over the body of well-shaped Thai gentleman. Anyway... greetings from an old friend. Hope you are well.

Eloise, my dear, taking over the body of a well-shaped Thai gentleman sounds a lot more exciting than having my photo taken with a passing tourist, and infinitely nicer than hearing from you. Actually, I'm surprised to hear you're still alive - you must be ancient by now, completely unphotographable I would have thought, even with the help of a cardboard cutout. Anyway, since you've decided to make contact after all this time (more than twenty years, isn't it) - please remember you still owe me a case of Dom Perignom for saying something nice about your horrible little pop singer on New Faces.

FRIDAY JUNE 20, 2008

From: Jamie Dorsett, Boston, Mass, USA
Hey Simon! You used to be so delightfully grumpy but lately you've been getting too nice. Where have all those cutting replies to readers emails gone? D'you think they might have cut your spleen out along with your gall bladder?

Perhaps they did. My endless good humour surprises even me. I mean, just look at the picture above. Three young Thai girls, out-of-towners, needed someone vaguely male to stick their head through the hole in a cardboard cutout in a shopping mall, and I was persuaded. Not just once, but three times, once for each girl. But it won't last, I promise you. I'm working hard at getting back to normal and it shouldn't take much - an evangelising email should do the trick, or a trip to a record company to meet an A&R man.

THURSDAY JUNE 19, 2008

From: Jack Addy, London, UK
hi si... i was amused at your story about boney m yesterday... i seem to remember you telling me at the time what a nightmare they were to deal with... now you make it all sound like fun... in fact i recall you saying they were the dumbest bunch you'd ever met...

Those things aren't necessarily incompatible. The group were certainly difficult to deal with - they argued incessantly - but they'd been together long enough that they knew each other intimately. Take sides with anyone of them and you'd be squashed by all the others. All in all though, it was fun, much more so than managing Wham! which is what had preceeded it. It was 'little business', not big. They were paid in thousands, not hundreds of thousands - and they played to only thousands of people too, not tens of thousands - which meant less pressure. But it's true they weren't the brightest bunch. Marcia and her husband, when they had their first baby, wanted it to grow up classy, intelligent and with good taste. So they mixed caviar with its baby food.

WEDNESDAY JUNE 18, 2008

From: Liz Heriard, Paris, France
Simon, a while back you said you managed Boney M when they had their big success in France in the mid-80s. If I remember right, that would have been at the same time as when Wham! were big. How did you manage to do both things at the same time. How many acts do you think one manager can manage on his own?

I managed Wham! jointly with Jazz Summers. I didn't start managing Boney M until after Wham! had disbanded. I managed them jointly with Donavon (one of my exes, much featured in "I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch").

The summer in which Boney M's single and album stayed for three months at number one in the French charts was one of the most enjoyable ever. The group worked in France four days a week, Thursday to Sunday. Since Donavon and I managed them jointly we would go with them alternate weekends. They lived all over the place and flew into Paris each Thursday morning, Bobby from Amsterdam, Marcia from Florida, etc. We'd always start with a cheerful late breakfast at Charles de Gaulle.

Although Boney M were at number one, working them round France wasn't quite in the same league as stadium tours of America, but it was much more fun. France on its summer holidays is one of the nicest place in the world and we were mostly by the seaside.

Halfway through the summer we changed to a new booking agent. He'd been well recommended, but the real reason we changed is because he paid us in advance for a hundred performances, which was no small chunk of money. But it began to go wrong from the first gig.

He met us at the airport in a large comfortable coach but after three hours driving I began to get concerned. If any venue was more than two hours from Paris it was in our contract we would fly. "How much further?" I asked.

"Just a couple more hours," he reassured me.

I settled for making a face. But six hours later with the group near rebellion I was standing over him yelling as the bus bumped furiously along at ninety kilometres an hour heading South West. “You lying bastard - where the hell are you taking us?"

Finally he owned up. “It’s just north of Bordeaux but it was impossible to get air tickets because of the holiday season.”

All lies. He’d probably saved himself £300 doing it this way. The problem was, these gigs always had the name of the local small town on the contract and when this one had arrived and I looked it up on the map and found a small town with the same name on the coast about two hundred kilometres miles from Paris. Perhaps he knew I would – maybe he’d planned to get round me by using that name. There was little we could do. Refuse to carry on. Insist on turning back to Paris. Stop and get out on the highway in the middle of nowhere. Or soldier on like the good pros we all were.

Nine hours after leaving Charles de Gaulle, the bus arrived. It was a seaside town with the usual super atmosphere of the South of France in August - holiday time, colourful, good humoured and impossible to continue in a bad mood. The dressing room was clean, with good local wine and decent French bread and fillings. So everyone calmed down. The performance would be at 9pm in a large marquee, big enough to hold a thousand people. Not exactly Madison Square Gardens, but I told myself that that was the beauty of the music business, one month in America doing stadiums, the next in France playing holiday resorts. And when it comes to eating and drinking and enjoying life, French holiday resorts win hands down. But the group got difficult again at the soundcheck

“This mike stand's too short.”

“Bobby's doesn’t have a switch.”

“There’s no tea in the dressing-room. You know I can’t drink coffee.”

“Have you told them no photographs?”

The last, from Marcia. She was obsessed with there being no photographs at gigs. Why, I had no idea. I think she’d read somewhere about super-groups taking hold of their own careers and earning money from every last detail. But how on earth she thought she could make a thousand French holiday-makers leave their cameras outside the marquee, I couldn’t think. When the performance started and flashes started going off all round her she would come to the front of the stage and glare at the audience - she did it at all these small gigs - harangue the crowd until they started booing, after which she'd get on with the gig as usual. It had become a standard part of the group’s performance throughout the summer. But tonight was a little different.

About ten minutes into it the sound system failed. Without the music blaring we became aware of an alternative sound, a howling wind and noisly flapping bits of tent. Then the tent simply disappeared from above our heads and in poured the rain - it had only been a couple of major gusts but it was enough to uproot the canvas and leave us standing in the middle of a thunderstorm. The rain came down in slashing waves, the group ran back to the dressing-room and I ran from the front of stage to the back of where the tent had been trying to reach them. But someone accidentally set off the firework display intended for later and I ran right into the middle of it - screaming rockets, giant roman candles, cascading flares and ear-splitting planet-shakers.

When I finally reached the dressing-room I found our agent under a settee crying his eyes out. The local promoter was a busty blonde and she was sitting on top of the sofa swigging from a bottle of red wine. "He's afraid of thunder," she explained.

I wrenched him out from under the settee and demanded, "Fetch the bus. Take us to the the hotel."

"The hotel's at the town where you're playing tomorrow," the busty blonde explained. "Lapin-Les-Bains."

"Are you the promoter of that one too," I asked. "It's not another tent is it?"

"No! We've built the stage right on the sand."

“Have you checked what time the tide comes in?"

She shrugged and took another swig. But actually, the next night's gig was rather good. The weather was marvellous and the mayor treated us to a late night banquet in the town square afterwards.

TUESDAY JUNE 17, 2008

From: Archie Shwartz, Douglas, Isle of Man, UK
hey Simon - having followed your emails earlier in the year about Guy Hands, I thought you'd enjoy reading this piece in the New York Times showing how totally wrong he's been about everything - pretty much what you forecast. Seems that now he's been through all the accounts he's found out that while he'd previously thought EMI Records had been running at profit, albeit a small one, it has only been doing so because of back catalogue - Beatles, Sinatra, Queen, etc.

Anyone in the industry with half a brain knew that ages ago, long before Guy Hands rushed in and bought the company. But then Hands is not from the industry and doesn't have half a brain - certainly not the half that's needed in the music business. Now everyone at EMI is sitting around on tenterhooks waiting to see how the new Coldplay album is going to do - will they still be in a job or out of one - which is exactly what was happening previously with each new Radiohead album, until they walked out. And it's exactly what Guy Hands - brash, blond and boot-headed - said would never happen again once he took over. When he first bought the company he was shocked to discover artists took drugs and stayed up late. Previously he was famous for turning round failed service stations on German motorways by putting in new toilets. I wonder, when he took over that company, if he was surprised to learn that the people who used those toilets ate sauerkraut and drove on the right. He's not strong on research, nor on taking advice, and he has a very nasty hairstyle. All good reasons for failing in the music industry.

MONDAY JUNE 16, 2008

From: Samnang, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Dear Mr Simon... I enjoy I know you from your website. I like comment on music and its business... also on other thing, like food which I have special interest cos I am chef. But chef who love music too... George Michael very much, Westlife too. I am 40 now and still singer in a band... but difficult cos chef and singer is both work in the evening. Anyway I want to ask you.... I know you like to cook... do you like to try new dish? I am send you Cambodia recipe for try.

Thank-you, Samnang. And in due course I'll try it. As you've probably realised if you read here often, I quite like cooking - open the white wine, have some nibbles and get on with a delicious main course to be eaten outside in the tropical night accompanied by some good red and a few sups of calvados to follow. Last time I wrote about cooking on the website I was struggling with a supermarket pack of ox penis bought to me by friends from China. To be honest, I couldn't turn it into a dish I would bother to repeat. But last night I was reminded of my struggles with the bull's knob when I tried a dish suggested by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in his column in the Guardian. It included chorizo, which once cut in half from the u-shape it comes in, looks suspicioulsy like a pig's dick. Which it isn't.

It is however a very coarse Spanish sausage, made from chopped fatty pork, or anything else from the pig that's left over, with a substantial addition of smoked paprika to make sure that anything evil tasting is covered by a peppery tang on the tongue. Actually, I rather like chorizo, and have done since I first went to Spain, nearly fifty years ago. That was years before it was a prime tourist resort. Then, a Spanish baguette about a foot and a half long, cut in half and filled with chorizo cut crossways in chunks, plus a full tumbler of Spanish brandy (like Fundador or Soberano, both pretty rough back then), cost a total of only 80 centavos (one three hundredth of an English pound in those days). A very cheap lunch indeed.

OK! Back to Hugh Fearsomely-Witless. He wrote a piece in the Guardian the other day about how all the greatest quickly-prepared dishes were perfect balances of three ingredients. The whole point of these three-ingedient dishes is the way each of the three ingredients are in balance with each other, like tricolore salad - three bland flavours - mozarella, avocado and tomato - which balance perfectly and make a combined flavour better, and less bland, than any of the individual ingredients. Anyway, one of the dishes Fearsomely-Witless was proposing (and which the equally witless Napier-Bell fell for trying to cook) was a sauté of broad beans, chorizo and fresh scallops. It struck me as unlikely they would balance well, scallops being amongst the most subtly flavoured shellfish and chorizo amongst the most coarsely flavoured sausages. But I tried it anyway. And it was exactly as you would expect - the chorizo totally dominating, the scallops totally crushed, the beans struggling somewhere in the middle.

Which just goes to prove, when you have a weekly food column in a daily paper, the pressure to find something new to write about will cause you to think up all sorts of rubbishy dishes that aren't worth a toss. Like having to write this email everyday for my website. Somedays it ends up almost as second-rate as a Fearsomely-Witless recipe.

SUNDAY JUNE 15, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK.
hey baby... i know you find this bleeder (Bob Lefsetz) a bit dreary sometimes, but this is a fair read.

Hi Gregory, I never said I didn't like Bob Lefsetz - he's one of the more clear-sighted commentators on the US music scene - but even so, when you read something like this (which isn't bad) you have to think - this guy is around 40 and it seems like this is the first time he's ever been to Asia. I mean most Americans still think the world is the USA plus a bit of backyard space for all the others. Then when they go there they're amazed - well, some of them are - and they're the good ones, like Lefsetz. The others just close their eyes and behave as Americans travelling overseas have always had the reputation of behaving. Like yesterday morning - Yo and I went to one of the five-star hotels in town to have a buffet breakfast. Two Americans sat eight tables apart and had a shouted conversation over the heads of everyone else. If they couldn't see how much the people sitting in that restaurant loathed the sound of their voices how could they possibly see all the really worthwhile things that surround them when they travel?

Cheers from grumpy Simon.

SATURDAY JUNE 14, 2008

From: Lillie Shuyo, Los Angeles, California, USA
Hi Simon, back in the 70s I was a mad Japan fan - a teenager in Tokyo - and I screamed till I cried from the back row when they played at the Budokan. I gather from some of the things you've said on your website that you speak Thai but I also noticed from reading Black Vinyl White Powder that in the Japan days, you studied Japanese too. Did you learn to speak it properly?

No! My Thai's pretty good but I never got far with Japanese. But you're right, I studied it for a while while I was managing Japan in the 70s.

I'd completely failed to break the band in the UK but when I went to Tokyo and met the Japanese record company I found people so committed to breaking the band that I thought it worthwhile learning a bit of Japanese. So when I got back to London I enrolled at the Anglo-Japanese Foundation in Beaconsfield and drove there every morning at 6am throughout the winter to spend three hours studying.

Next time I was in Japan I was amazed to find I'd mastered enough to be understood, but frustrated to find how little. Unlike every other country I'd ever been to, the Japanese didn't seem to much like foreigners speaking their language. It was as if they felt you'd learnt it to spy on them. And in the end that's exactly what I used it for.

We'd given permission to one of the Japanese music magazines to publish a 'special' on Japan - a hundred page glossy one-off edition for a royalty of 8 per cent paid in advance for the number of copies they intended to produce, which was 20,000. I got a tip-off from our promoter that they'd printed way over that figure so I asked for a meeting with the publisher. The editor and his boss came to the meeting and I had no idea how to pursue the matter because everyone had told me I absolutely must not be confrontational. So I congratulated them on the quality of the 'special' they'd produced, then said I'd heard they were going into a reprint over and above the 20,000 we'd agreed.

"Of course," I told them, "I know you'll be accounting to me shortly for the extra copies but since our agreement was only for 20,000 shouldn't we just add a note to our original agreement refering to this reprint."

I was so off-hand and polite they were completely thrown. They confered urgently and from the tiny amount of Japanese I'd learnt I thought I picked out the figures 20,000 and 42,000 thousand. I could only surmise that the editor was telling his boss that they'd agreed to print just 20,000 but had actually printed 42,000.

The magazine boss turned politely to me and said: "My editor says perhaps we will print another five thousand but we have not done so yet. You are right, we could make a letter to agree that."

I took a chance that what I'd heard was right. "I've been talking with the the fan club and from what I've learnt I think it would be possible to sell more than that. I think we should be able to sell forty-two thousand altogether. And I'd really like you to try to sell that many. If you could sell torty-two thousand I'd consider it a great success."

They were floored my mentioning the exact number they'd spoken of together. After talking frantically together for a few seconds the boss told me, "We agree. We ought to try to sell more. We will print a total of forty-two thousand like you suggest."

It wasn't much to have acheived. The total extra royalty to the group was probably only a couple of thousand pounds, but it made all those winter mornings when I'd got up at 5.30 to drive to Beaconsfield seem worthwhile.

FRIDAY JUNE 13, 2008

From: Bill Streed, London, UK
Hi Simon - there was a great piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Live Nation, the US company that used to be just an organiser of mega rock tours but is now signing artists to 360 degree deals, taking a percentage of their earnings from recordings and merchandise etc etc. Apparently the chairman and general manager are fighting. The chairman wants to spend another quick billion on more artists - the general manager wants to wait and see how things go first. What do you think Simon? Are these companies the future? Or are they as full of shit as record companies?

A couple of other people also drew my attention to that piece. These sort of companies are almost certainly going to turn out as bad as record companies - or even worse! Anyway, artists should hang on to what they've got and not sell it to anyone. Besides, if you run around paying artists the odd 100 million dollars or so in advance for their income from touring, they're going to be pretty stingy about using too much of that money when it comes time to doing those tours. Previously it was just record advances that were paid in advance but now, with so called 360 degree deals, they're getting paid up front for everything. United Nations have already thrown half a billion at Madonna, Jay-Z and U2. Now Michael Cohl, the company's chairman, is fighting with Michael Rapino, the company's chief executive, because Cohl wants to rush out and throw another billion at more artists while Rapino wants to first wait and see how things pan out. Michael Cohl seems plain daft to me - which isn't just a criticism of his business ability (because about that I couldn't care less, nor how much the company loses) it's just that in the end he'll kill the creative and artistic hunger of the artists he signs. Imagine paying a bank clerk, or a builder, or even a record company executive, two or three years wages in advance - how hard do you think they would work during those next few years? Getting too much money in advance does no good at all for hard work and creativity - it's just human nature. And artists have plenty of that.

(Though naturally, as a manager, if you want to throw a hundred million at my artist - with 20% going to me - I'll say yes like a shot. )

THURSDAY JUNE 12, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York, NY, USA
How you feeling?? I have a great Foie Gras story: Returning from Cannes Film Festival, I bought 5 tins of the best Foie Gras and put them in them my purse - $700.00. On my entry to the US, I declared that I had food. Customs took it from me and threw it in the garbage!!!

Ooooh - what a waste. But it's happened to me too. When I travel I always have a bottle of good whiskey with me so as not to raid the minibar for their crap miniatures last drink before bedtime. On my recent trip to India I thought, 'Why be so mean with myself?" Instead of whiskey I bought a bottle of Armagnac - Baron de Sigognac, 1938 - $700 the bottle. Silly me, I put it in my hand luggage - liquids not allowed. So when I went through the x-ray they found it and did the same as they did with your foie gras - threw it in the garbage. To give the chap credit, he said if I wanted to I could drink it. But the flight was leaving in 15 minutes and 75 cl of Armagnac in that amount of time was probably not a good idea. But it was s-o-o-o sad to see it lying in the junk bin. What terrible low moments life sometimes gives us.

WEDNESDAY JUNE 11, 2008

From: Susie Kahlich, LA, California, USA
Hi Simon, I just returned home from being wined and dined by a couple of producers who want to commission me to write a play. I only found out later that I was actually eating my commission. That's a great mention of the Bolan film in Cinematical. Let's hope little gossip leads to big bucks!

Hi Susie. Funny how that mention came about. Last Sunday there was a snippet in the Star (crass London tabloid) saying I was involved in a Wham! movie. I'm not. They tried putting two and two together and got it all wrong. I'd simply said that if anyone did happen to want to make a Wham! movie it would be doomed to failure unless George Michael approved it. Because he controls the rights to all the music he could simply refuse its use in any movie he didn't want made. Anyhow, this somehow got changed to, 'It was me who was trying to make a Wham! movie and George had put the kybosh on it'. Well who cares - it's all good gossip. But the amazing thing is, the Guardian took the Star piece and ran it the next day, which gave it credibility. As a result it's appeared in fifty or so newspapers round the world. To pad it out they visited my website and picked up on the other film things I'd mentioned, including your Bolan script. So little by little a buzz is building for it. (Well..., let's hope so anyway.)

TUESDAY JUNE 10, 2008

From: Ed Shorter, New York, NY, USA
Hi Simon - I just got the new issue of Butt magazine and enjoyed the interview with you - but, if you don't mind me saying - the photo in it makes you look ridiculously fat. The ones you put up on your website each week never look that bad. When was it taken?

I did a lecture at Guildford Music College on the same day. If you click on the picture at the top of the website it will take you to all the old 'top of page' pictures and you can compare the Butt picture with how I looked four hours earlier at Guildford (not quite so grotesque). But lets face it, the Butt picture's the truth. In February I was eight kilos heavier than I am now. When I'm doing the website I obviously search out shots which soften the blow but the Butt photographer only took a couple so I was doomed from the start. Never mind - the picture is on my desk - anytime I'm tempted to eat I look at it and change my mind.

(And I'm not going to put it here for everyone to see - it's just too damned awful!)

MONDAY JUNE 9, 2008

From: Jaime López, San Diego, California, USA
Hi Simon... just finished Black Vinyl White Powder... loved it... particularly interested in the chapter about Junior, the Spanish pop star. I was only ten, living in Madrid when his first big solo hit came out... I was mad about him... Now so disappointed to learn from your book how mean he was.

When it first came out in 1972, Perdóname, Junior's first solo hit, was the biggest selling Spanish single ever - Number One in Spain, then in every South American country too. The only Youtube clip I could find was of Shaila Dúrcal, Junior's daughter, singing the song. I absolutely loved Junior, and writing with him produced many great songs, particularly that first one. But love him or not, he could be annoyingly mean, though usually only with small amounts of money. If there was a couple of thousand dollars commission due to me, he paid up without a murmur, but if there was just a few cents at stake he would go to enormous lengths to avoid paying. Most nights he and his wife (actress/singer Rocío Dúrcal) would visit Madrid's ultra-posh show-biz disco, Boccacio, stuffed with film-stars, pop-stars, bull-fighters and business people with serious money. Junior and his party would invariably be bought drinks by someone rich for the priviledge of sitting with him. Around two-thirty or three, Rocío would want to leave, and if I was with them I'd go with her, but Junior, having accepted the hospitality of the drink-buyer, felt committed to stay until his host wanted to go home, staying till three or four in the morning just to avoid paying for his own drinks.
A year or so later when I'd stopped managing him and moved to France, he came to visit Allan and me at our flat in Paris. I had to go to London for the day and asked Allan to cook him a tasty lunch. Eager to be a good host Allan spent the early morning shopping and the late morning chopping and cooking. At one-thirty he went to Junior's room to announce lunch was ready but Junior made a sour face and mumbled about being immersed in creative thought. The dishes were the type that didn't keep easily and by two-thirty lunch was ruined, so Allan threw it away. At four o'clock Junior emerged from his room and said he was hungry. Allan explained that lunch was no longer; so Junior decided to go out and buy a sandwich. "Give me money, please," he said.
"Why?" Alan asked.
"Because Simon and you are my hosts. I shouldn't have to pay for my own sandwich, should I?"
Later, Junior left Rocío and his singing career went downhill somewhat. He went to the Philippines, were his records had always sold hugely, and started making movies. Some years later I was in Manila and happened to see posters for a new movie of which he was the star. Sitting in a bar talking to a couple of local lads I mentioned Junior and asked how well-known he was in the Philippines.
"Very famous!" they both agreed.
"What for?" I asked - meaning, was he still known as a singer or was he now famous mainly as a filmstar.
"For not wearing underpants!" they told me.
It seems on several occasions he'd been photographed attending parties in trousers so tight it was clear there was nothing underneath but Junior. To the guys I was talking to, for a famous person not to wear underpants was impressively daring, but the truth was probably more mundane. He was just too mean to buy any.

SUNDAY JUNE 8, 2008

From: Jane Deforges, Bel Air, California, USA
hi simon... i watched with interest earlier in the week as you debated whether or not your new digestive system (sans gall bladder) would or would not be able to deal with the consumption of fois gras. what i want to know is... in the week when a world food conference is discussing ways to produce sufficient food to feed the planet does your vulgar gourmandising never leave you a touch guilty?

Absolutely not! My gourmandising is never vulgar, always decorous and refined, a delight for all to observe. As for that idiot food conference - I've been watching the dialogue emerging from it, for instance, how to double world food production in twenty years. Not a single person attending it seems to have uttered the one piece of wisdom that a two-year-old monkey could come up with were it given the chance: 'Reduce the number of consumers'. The world is over-populated. All problems of global warming and insufficient water and food supply flow from that one fact. No-one ever talks about it (except the Chinese), so tough luck on them! May their children and grand-children starve! And if enough do (a billion or so, for instance), the problem will be solved anyway. But two-child families worldwide would solve the problem in a generation. As would terminating the two top religions. Or promoting a little more homosexuality.

SATURDAY JUNE 7, 2008

From: Ted Lustig, London, UK
Hello Simon, my wife and I are coming to Thailand for a holiday in September. We were thinking of doing what we usually do everywhere else we go, hiring a car and spending a month doing a complete circuit of the country. Some friends who just came back told us that driving in Thailand is unusually dangerous, but from reading your website I know that you drive there. So what do you think - good idea or bad?

If you've done it everywhere else, why not try it here too? If you don't, and you want to see the country from the ground rather than fly, you'll have to travel by bus. And that's even more likely to kill you.

Bus crashes happen every day and about once a month there's a big juicy one with thirty or forty deaths. A couple of years ago there was a famously good one in Bangkok which I remember vividly because I was about ten feet from where it happened. Two buses from competing bus companies were racing each other down Sukhumwit Road (one of Bangkok's main thoroughfares) when the driver of the bus in front (in the outside lane) hit his brakes and attempted a sharp left to get to the bus stop first. But his brakes failed. At sixty miles an hour the bus spun across the street crashing into fifty or so people waiting to cross the road, killing or crushing every one of them, then demolished a dozen cars for good measure. Which, had you been driving, surely would have included yours.

So how about staying at the beach instead?

FRIDAY JUNE 6, 2008

From: Max and Mandi, Cebu, Philippines.
Hi Simon, how long before you can travel again? I wondered if you and Yo could pop over to Cebu next weekend. We're having a party to celebrate our 10th. Any chance?

Hi Max. Sorry, I can't! I saw the doctor this afternoon and I'm virtually recovered - which is truly amazing considering it was only six days ago that I arrived at the hospital quite prepared to volunteer for euthanasia if they couldn't get rid of the pain any other way. Ten years ago having your gall bladder out left you wrecked for a couple of months - now it's just a few days. Even so, my wonderful surgeon, Dr Pornchai, suggested I didn't travel for another week, so I won't. Sorry about that. But have a good one anyway.

THURSDAY JUNE 5, 2008

From: Megan Armstid, Perth, Australia
Hi Simon - the other day I noticed your list of management credits included Wa Wa Nee - a great Australian rock group and one of my favourites. When was it you managed them?

In 1986! Chris Gilbey, their publisher, sent me an album to listen to with the suggestion I manage them. It sat on my desk unlistened to for weeks before I put it on one evening and after hearing just one track ('Sugar Free') decided I'd love to manage them. I called Dennis Handlin, the MD of CBS Australia and he said, 'Come at once'.

That weekend CBS were having their conference on Queensland’s Gold Coast and Dennis wanted to introduce me to the salesmen and marketing people. The flight to Sydney alone took a total of 26 hours, then I had to go through immigration, take another plane to Brisbane and a taxi straight to the conference hall. I arrived at 7pm and Dennis shoved me straight onstage and introduced me with the words, "If Simon Napier-Bell can’t make Wa Wa Nee number one in the USA, then at next year's conference I'll eat a dead rat". He wanted me to speak but all I could think of to say was that he’d just given me the greatest possible incentive to fail – couldn’t he perhaps agree to eat the rat anyway. Everyone laughed and the conference was over, but I still wasn't allowed to rest. As a finale Dennis had booked the entire Gold Coast funfair for two hours – all rides free. So having spent 28 hours sitting on aeroplanes, I now had to spend a further two on the Big Dipper, the Snorting Ripper and the Steaming Devil Whisk.

Later, Wa Wa Nee got in the US top twenty, but not to number one. And Dennis still hasn't eaten his dead rat.

WEDNESDAY JUNE 4, 2008

From: Leo Nine, Bangkok, Thailand
Dear Simon, Sorry to hear about your gall bladder, but deeply relieved to hear you can continue on the foie gras... reading about it suddenly reminded me of the Tom Lehrer routine where he talks about Dr. Samuel Gall - inventor of the gall bladder - who, after majoring in animal husbandry (until they caught him at it), went on to become a specialist, specialising in diseases of the rich. The gall bladder, if I remember correctly, was subsequently voted, in a nationwide poll, as being in the top ten organs.... Well, it was something like that!

Hi Leo, thanks for that further insight into the gall bladder. I've had a stack of emails on the subject this week and whether I can or cannot continue to gorge fois gras yet remains to be seen. On the basis I might not be able to, I did some research on other things and discovered that oysters contain only neglible amounts of fat, cholesterol and calories. First resolution is - I shall never again settle for a mere half dozen - from now on its 12 or nothing. Caviar too comes out a good deal healthier than fois gras, though at today's prices I suppose we should call fois gras the poor man's caviar. Anyway, I'm bored sitting around at home with an aching abdomen being fed take-away fried rice and stir-fried veggies by Yo. On Friday the doctor will inspect the four beautiful piercings of my stomach that he made last week and hopefully give me the thumbs up to head back to gourmet-land.

TUESDAY JUNE 3, 2008

From: Hugh Spring, Sataheep, Thailand
Dear Simon, I had my major gall bladder attack on a Thai flight 5 hours from Sydney. The pain was almost as indescribable as the food which brought it on. Getting the attack on a plane had one good side effect. I was lowered out on a food lift staight into an ambulance. Customs kindly cleared my bags and delivered them to the hospital - a hell of a way to avoid customs and immigration. However the good news is that all that bullshit about diet can be immediately ignored. You may have noticed my prodigious and unpunished appetite for all the foods those buffoons warned you off. As I understand it, the gall bladder is one of those residual organs from the times when we slunk around after major predators eating rotten offal. It could provide enough bile to digest steel, now not required by our more gentile diet. Have a good recovery! I'll give you two weeks. Then it will be Sunday lunch at Gians on the 15th!

Fabulous news, Hugh, thanks! I had a feeling what they were telling me couldn't be true. I wasn't exactly contemplating suicide but on the basis that what they'd said I was already calculating what my extra daily intake of oysters and caviar would have to be to make up for the loss of foie gras and stilton. The knowledge that you too are gall bladderless is a great comfort. I can't think of anyone I've ever met who eats with less restraint. What a relief! See you for lunch Sunday week.

MONDAY JUNE 2, 2008

From: Guy Smith, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Dear Simon, I'm so sorry to hear you're unwell and tied up in a Thai hospital. I recall your recent email to your sister about your 1964 experience in the NHS hospital. I think if you were ill now in England there's no way you would have the same chance of treatment... so best you're ill in Thailand if anywhere. I heard Thai hospitals are pretty amazing. True?

Hi Guy Thanks for your good wishes. You're right about Thai hospitals, the standard of care is amazing. Anyway, I'm out now, but still feeling pretty sore. Apart from hefty pains in the places where they cut me open, one of the results of the way they perform this operation (pumping your abdomen up with gas) is that a vast amount of gas and air is left inside when they finish. So one of the many pills I've been given to take for the next week is one that makes me fart a lot. Certainly not a medicine I'd normally need. Anyway, added to my normal propensity for such matters, the effect is prodigious. The house is echoing to the sound of not too distant thunder.

SUNDAY JUNE 1, 2008

From: Ed Shaw, London, UK
hi simon... yo just called to say you're in hospital and won't be able to travel for at least ten days... never mind... we'll work round it... but tell me more... are you OK?

More or less. Anyway, here's the story...

Saturday morning I felt great when I got up - I was off to Bangkok for the weekend, working on the Quentin Crisp recordings. But dammit, just as I was about to leave I got a nagging stomach ache. Probably imminent diarrhoea, I thought, and delayed leaving for a bit. But in a very short time the nagging tummy ache turned into a full blown blitzkreig of unbearable pain. So I jumped in the car and fled to the local hospital.

The hospital is good by any standards, but the charming women who work there have a particularly annoying habit. Whenever you arrive in a hurry to see a doctor they waste much time in smiling and putting their hands together in the Thai way.

"I think I'm about to die," I told the pretty girl at the front desk, "I need a doctor. I have unspeakable abdominal pain."

She flashed an unspeakably charming smile. "And where is the pain, sir?"

"In my abdomen for Christ's sake."

"And would you like to see a doctor?"

It was a frustrating fifteen minutes to say the least but eventually I was lying on a trolley with an efficent lady doctor poking hard into the bits that hurt most. "We'll have to give you a CAT scan and ultrasound," she announced. Then poked once more just to let me know it wasn't going to be pleasant.

I shrieked appropriately. "It does seem painful," she agreed.

"Could you give me something to stop it hurting?" I pleaded.

"Not till we've finished our diagnosis."

So that was that. She'd just condemed me to four more hours of breathtaking agony while they shoved me in and out the tunnel of a CAT machine and prodded me deeply with the ultrasound tool in the very place I least wanted to be prodded.

The long and the short of it was, at 5pm they removed my gall-bladder. It was done (the surgeon explained afterwards) by making four small holes in my abdominal wall, shoving microscopic tools through two of them, a video camera through the third and a gas pipeline through the fourth into which carbon dioxide was pumped in great quantities so my stomach blew up like a nine-month pregnancy. This gave them room to work in and eventually they removed my gall bladder, which is the size of an orange, through a hole the size of a pea. Quite a trick - the opposite of putting a ship in a bottle.

Anyway, that was yesterday and today I'm gall bladderless. Last year I had my prostate removed. I'm beginning to think, if I live long enough, I shall end up as a large outer shell containing nothing much of use inside.

The doctor says in no time I'll feel like a million dollars but at the moment I feel more like $1.99 - bruised and fragile, . Even so, it's better than how I felt when I arrived here yesterday. Tomorrow they'll send me home where I'll be able to feel miserable in comfort. After a week, I'm told life will get back to normal. Except that...

I've just been on the internet reading about the things I can't eat now I have no gall bladder. Top of the list is fat - no cheese, no creamy sauces, no foie gras, no deliciously buttered crusty bread, not even a dip of foccia into virgin olive oil. If I eat fat, I'm told it will run right through my body and emerge at the other end with no prior announcement. Very unpleasant, I'd have thought, for anyone in the vicinty.

For the moment alcohol is allowed, though I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they decide to rip out my liver too. In the meantime I intend to make full use of it. I

SATURDAY MAY 31, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
mister simon... since you're up to your lovely buttery scrotum in movies at the moment, i thought i'd shine a light on 'lush life'. i never knew before that billy strayhorn was a shirtlifter... i wonder if that was tricky in the jazz world? but it seems they've now done a biopic about it all...

incidentally, it was my birthday the other day and to add a double whammy to the affront i went to bed around 3am as usual and while wanking frantically to get myself to sleep i started wheezing! so there i was mid-stroke, reaching for my asthma inhaler... a most disarming senior moment. naturally i gave up... just glowered at the ceiling and angrily pondered my demise.

Hi Gregory! Sorry about your failed wank. At least you got started before it went wrong. Often these days I have trouble even doing that.

As for Billy Strayhorn - yes, he could lift shirts with the best of them, though as a rule playing jazz didn't fit with being gay, which was the main reason I gave it up in my early twenties. In touring bands, hotel rooms had to be shared and no-one wanted to share a room with someone gay. So coming out would lose you your job. Of the famous jazz names, only Cecil Taylor, the avant garde pianist, was out and unrepentant. But Billy Strayhorn was always gossiped about, as was Miles Davis who was famously bi. In earlier times there'd been the New Orleans piano player Tony Jackson who greatly influenced Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller. Way back in 1912 he wrote one of the great pop standards - Pretty Baby - a love song dedicated to a male hustler he'd fallen for, though actually it sounds more like an ode to incest. "I'd like to be your sister, brother, dad and mother too, Pretty Baby".

FRIDAY MAY 30, 2008

From: Susie Kahlich, Los Angeles, California, USA
Hi Simon, I noticed your mention of the Bolan script on the website the other day -- thanks! You get a promotion! You are now executive méllisse-eater and chief really expensive wine drinker. The script is under consideration by a couple of German companies that do a lot of big budget international productions. I'm approaching French companies as well, but as Cannes has just wrapped up, I imagine everyone's nursing hangovers rather than reading emails this weekend. Are you getting involved in that Dusty Springfield project? Of course I thought of you the minute I read about it... I'll keep you posted on any new developments, and will have them start preparing your installation at Mélisse.

Hi Susie, I'm not involved in the Dusty movie, but would love it to be great anyway. I seem to be around quite a few movie people at the moment so I'm mentioning to everyone that there's a great Bolan script around and that they should think about making it. Meanwhile, if I come across the odd twenty million, I'll make it myself. (But one million off the top for mélissing).

THURSDAY MAY 29, 2008

From: Shelley Brand, Sydney, Australia
Hi Si! Digging around in the nether regions of your website I discovered you managed Rupert Everett for a while in the 80s. Great story you tell about his knob hanging out of his boxers. But tell me, what's he really like? Is he as camp as he sounds? And as adorable?

Of course he is! Both! He's one of my absolute favourites. In 1986, when he first came to me he still wasn't out in general. I mean, his friends knew (in fact the whole world knew), but he still he thought he should cover it up. But something had happened just the day before that had changed his mind.

It was an interview with a girl from the Evening Standard - a full-page spread, "My life - my future", that sort of thing . In the morning Rupert had been shopping and during his shopping expedition had found himself in the cosmetic department of Harrods looking at all those nice creams for your face and eyes. He decided on Clarins but found it difficult to decided between "Night-time Regenerative Cream" and "Daytime Regenerative Cream", and then there was the "Eye Contour Cream" and the "Eye Wrinkle Control" and a thousand other little pots of promised perpetual youth. In the end in a moment of mad extravagance Rupert decided to take the complete range at well over a thousand pounds. He went home and arranged them lovingly around the shelves of his bathroom and indulged himself in an application or two of the most alluring potions, and then the phone rang and the girl from the Evening Standard said she was just round the corner and would be arriving in five minutes.

Rupert rushed to prepare tea and cakes and as he was doing so remembered his bathroom full of Clarins and realised with a pang of panic that this was not the image he wanted to project. So with the doorbell already ringing he rushed upstairs to the bathroom, gathered up all the Clarins pots and bottles and slung them in the waste bin.

Thereafter he had an exceptionally good interview. The girl liked him a lot and Rupert gave her everything she wanted, all of it with the nice straight slant he'd planned. Finally, around 6.30pm, she was ready to go back to the office and write just the article he wanted. But as she was about to leave she asked, "Could I use your bathroom?"

Two minutes later she came downstairs again with a puzzled look on her face. "I couldn't help noticing," she told Rupert, "there was a tube of my favourite Clarins face cream sticking out of your waste-bin. When I pulled it out to have a look I found there was a whole set of Clarins products in the bin - completely unused. How on earth could anyone throw away a whole set of Clarins?"

Rupert didn't hesitate. "Oh that was my ex-girlfriend's. We had a huge row a couple of days and she stormed out. I was clearing up the bathroom this morning so I slung it all in the bin."

"Is she coming back?" the girl asked, "or is it over for good?"

Then Rupert goofed. Thinking of keeping the young journalist ensnared in his charms and sending her home with the wishful thought that if she wrote a good piece she might end up in his bed, he said, "Oh! She's definitely not coming back. It's over for good and that's that!"

"In that case," she said. "Could I have that set of Clarins. It would be so dreadful to throw it all away."
So, a thousand pounds down on the day, that was the moment Rupert decided once and for all - he was coming out.

WEDNESDAY MAY 28, 2008

From: Amyra Michaelides, Hong Kong
Simon, my sweet, has your mood improved since that last intemperate missive you sent me? I really do miss you frightfully and think of you often and I know all those bad words you used about me are really only a form of affection. Even so, they can and do hurt and it would be so good if we could get back to how we once were. Please think carefully before you reply.

Listen, you ugly crunch-bucket - I always realised it was inevitable you would sooner or later raise your vilely crimsoned fingertips to the laptop keyboard and scratch out another messages of retribution. For you, I know, it was intended as loving faghag forgiveness but for me any communication from you must surely be retribution for some terrible deed I committed in a former life. Amyra - you simply don't understand. There was never a 'how we were'. I loathed you immensely from the first minute we met. Your face sickened me; your voice scratched my ears; your touch had the damp chill of octopus tentacles and your affection was like being suffocated under a giant vaginal face-mask.

TUESDAY MAY 27, 2008

From: Leo Nine, Bangkok, Thailand.
Hi Simon. I'm just back from Hong Kong where I have been playing a concert with a Harmonica player (who was rather good). Re what you said about tonal languages and perfect pitch, it explains something which had occurred to me viz Thais in that they are always confident that they have tuned their A strings correctly when they start to tune the others... and they are always right. With Europeans and Japanese the confidence (and the actual pitch itself) is far shakier.

Professor Diana Deutsch at UCLA did research into tonal languages and found people speaking them have almost perfect pitch. She did her research on Chinese and Vietnamese, but it seems to apply to Thais too. Reading from a list of fifty words over several days they always said the words in exactly the same pitch. I did some research of my own and found the difference in pitch between the highest and lowest voiced male speakers in Thai is normally no more than a tone, whereas people speaking English quite often vary as much as fifth. The low tone in most Thai men is usually between G and Ab below middle C. And when two Thai men with slightly different pitched voices talk together they usually adjust to a common pitch. From my next bit of web research I learned that speakers of tonal languages recognise the tonality of each word with the left lobe of their brain, but recognise the vowel and consonant part of the word with the right lobe, whereas in non-tonal languages we recognise the entire word only with the right lobe. So it seems no Westerner is ever likely to fluently understand a tonal language until he's trained up his left lobe a bit - perhaps by working with music and trying to develop perfect pitch. (The whole thing in reverse.)

MONDAY MAY 26, 2008

From: John Duffus, Bangkok, Thailand
Interested to read your comments about Filipina singers. Almost 20 years ago I was involved with Cameron Mackintosh when he was casting "Miss Saigon". Preliminary auditions were pretty dire so Cameron's regional director flew to Manila and spent 2 weeks going to every bar, onto every radio and TV talk-show - with the result that he lined up 50 excellent singers for the final auditions. 20% of that London cast came from those auditions, including Lea Salonga.

That was my excuse too for spending most of every night while I was there in Manila's best bars. One lengthy night I bought margaritas all round in a gay karaoke bar - from midnight to five in the morning - over three hundred of them if I remember rightly. At just over a dollar each it hardly broke the bank and seemed well worthwhile in the interests of research. Filipino guys, I soon discovered, didn't have the same amazing voices as Filipino girls. So as the night wore on I allowed my research into them to wander in other directions.

SUNDAY MAY 25, 2008

From: Heinz Eberstark, Frankfurt, Germany
Hi Simon! I want to tell you how much I really love your website. I was such a great fan of Japan in the old days too, and of Wham! also.... I think everything you've done has been marvellous, and I feel the need to tell you that I would so love to be able to meet you in person and tell you how much I admire you.

To be honest, Heinz, you sound a bit of a Bumlicker. I don't think I'd like to meet you at all. It could just be that I'm not too fond of Frankfurt, so when I see that's where you come from I take against you slightly. You see, I was once run over by a refrigerator in Frankfurt. Not a pleasant experience. I was with the members of Japan, who had just played a gig somewhere in your super-prosperous town, and we'd gone looking for somewhere to eat at 1am in the morning. Not much selection, and we ended up at an outside cafe opposite the railway station - sausages & sauté potatos, and actually not too bad. So we were sitting there on the pavement in the early hours, not at all unhappy, when suddenly this fridge appeared from nowhere and ran me over. I know it sounds dotty, but that's exactly what happened. It was a Westinghouse. The lady in charge of it was around eighty and was pushing it on a single roller skate, moving rooms in the middle of the night. As she approached she encountered a slight downward slope and lost control. The result? One minute I was gracefully holding a glass of red wine and scooping up a forkful of Bratkatoffelen, the next I lay crushed on the pavement under a 7-cubic-foot freezer-refrigerator in white with automatic ice dispenser. Moreover she was a hit and run driver. No sooner had I been smashed to the floor than she'd gathered up her fridge, re-positioned it on its roller skate and skittled off, leaving me bruised and forever with bad memories of your home town.

SATURDAY MAY 24, 2008

From: Peter Robertson, Arundel, Sussex, UK
Hi Simon, as a journalist, your very entertaining website is a handy source of stories for me from time-to-time (thank you for that!), and I’m curious to see your recent vague admission that there is at least one movie in the offing. Please can you email me any details you are able to share at this stage, particularly with regard to possible Bolan and Wham! films. And what’s happening with your book-writing these days?

Hi Peter. Nice to hear from you. Hope you're well and prospering. I've been very sloathful about a new book - lots of sitting and thinking but not quite getting on with it. But I've now started. It will be a sort of repeat of You Don't Have To Say You Love Me - 30 short stories, but this time from the 80s rather than the 60s. The advantage of writing a book that way is that each chapter is self- contained and doesn't look so daunting when I'm starting out on it. Re the films - yes, they're are several floating around. One, the most serious project and the reason Orian Williams flew out to meet with me, is secret for the moment. Another one is a Bolan film - a really good though quirky script by an American lady who's a professional scriptwriter in Hollywood and crazy about Bolan. She featured me a bit in the script hoping I'd get interested in the project, and I did. And of course there are several people sniffing round about a Wham! film, but I'm not sure any of them will come off because they all require Wham! music in them and since George controls that he effectively has the yes or no on each script presented. Another film project is You Don't Have To Say You Love Me - my book. That has been optioned and treatments and scripts keep appearing for my approval (though in general I'm pretty DISapproving). All in all it looks like there's a bit of a future for me lounging around film studios and eating huge business lunches. (Gosh - sounds pretty much like my past!!) There now!! What a lot of chatter. Aren't you honoured!

FRIDAY MAY 23, 2008

From: John Dang, Manchester, UK
Hi Simon, just read your daily email today. Reminded me... I contacted IE MUSIC a couple of times via their website and regarding their label. I sent a couple of emails to someone called Becks Mallet or something. Everyone there completely ignored me. I haven't found that at any other company in the rest of the world (even the USA) but it seems a trend in the UK and particularly at IE MUSIC.

Those unimportant emails and requests that come in every day are normally thrown at a junior who often deals with them badly, but I wouldn't say that makes a company like IE any less good at its core business of managing artists. But for me it was different. I spoke to the secretary for David Enthoven and Tim Clark, the two heads of the company, and sent her information and a letter to pass on to them. Consequently, 'no reply' has to be rudeness on their part or intefficency on hers. Either way, at that level in the organisation it makes for a crappy company.

When I was writing Black Vinyl White Powder one of the things that gave me great pleasure was contacting people who had been at the top of Britain's biggest record companies in the 60s and finding how receptive they'd become to being called. Back then I was a new manager and frequently didn't get my calls returned. Now these people were in their 80s and 90s, mooning around at home waiting to die. When I called them they would talk for hours and simply didn't want to stop. One man who had been particularly evasive and rude in his heyday at Polygram actually begged me not to ring off, "No-one ever seems to call these days," he told me. I almost felt sorry for him.

THURSDAY MAY 22, 2008

From: Stevie D, New York, N.Y., USA
hi Simon... a while back you mentioned you had a record you made with Quentin Crisp in the 70s... you said you'd never released it and perhaps it would make a good duet for Robbie Williams... sounded a great idea... is it happening??

Not as a duet! I contacted Robbie's managers - David Enthoven and Tim Clark - and let them know about it but they never came back to me. About par for a record company executive, but worse than usual manners for a manager. Still - best not to go moaning on about the boringly bad-mannered music business. Anyway...

I'm delighted they didn't because I thought further and decided on a remix. And it's brilliant. From the one song we have five great dance tracks together with the complete song as an up-to-the-minute remix. The whole package will be finished in three weeks and will be released first in the UK. I'll put a sample on the site when it's ready.

WEDNESDAY MAY 21, 2008

From: Ed Anderson, Maidenhead, UK
Hi Simon, I remember a few weeks ago you were arguing with Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode about the lousy quality of mp3s. He said it was impossible to make sensitive records with a format that was so compressed and you pointed out that AM radio, which is how all records were heard in the 60s and early 70s, was even more compressed yet records still sounded great. I saw in today's paper that Peter Gabriel (of Genesis) has sided with Alan Wilder. He's starting a special digital download club where all the material will be downloadable with full frequency range and not in mp3 format.

All these old farts are living in the past. They're behaving the same way as the major record companies - refusing to face reality. Pop music is current, transient and of the moment, and so is its technology. The best music coming out today is produced by people who explore the current technology and find ways to exploit its weak points as well as its strengths. But if all those decrepit rockers want to sit around at home listening to their old records on ancient hi-fi sets, who cares! I like mp3s - loud, easily downloadable and compressed to buggery.

TUESDAY MAY 20, 2008

From: Trev Shirland, London, UK
hey simon... yesterday i saw a great movie... control... about ian curtis and joy division... really really excellent... then today i log onto your website and there's a photo of you with the guy who produced the movie... orian williams... and the other guy is a bloke who once edited mojo magazine... so you can't tell me there isn't something brewing... a wham! movie?? a movie about you?? the marc bolan movie you were talking about a month or so back?? come on sime... spill the beans...

Of course something's brewing, and it is indeed a movie. But it's none of the ones you mention above, it's something far better (though to be honest a couple of the subjects you mention are also brewing but a little further from the boil). There are others too. In fact movies are brewing all over the place, which is odd. After nearly forty years out of the film business it looks like I'm going back into it. Life's full circle I suppose.

MONDAY MAY 19, 2008

From: Derek Anderson, Singapore
Dear Mr Napier-Bell, when you were in Kuala Lumpur last year I gave you a CD of my son Branden to listen to. I've written to you once since but haven't received a reply, so I'm trying again. Have you found time to listen to his songs yet? What did you think of him? I'd be most grateful if you could let me know.

You'll remember I told you not to bother giving it to me but you shoved it into my hand anyway. Your first email went unanswered because it seemed a waste of my time to bother. This morning though I found myself with nothing much to put on the website so I thought an answer to your email might fill the gap. As far as the CD is concerned I threw it in the waste-bin in my hotel room when I was packing to leave. I hadn't listened to it but from the picture on the sleeve I'd guess your son is rather like you - somewhat gormless and rather annoying. I hope that answers your question.

SATURDAY MAY 17, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
"Playing music is the most fun thing there is" ....my rank little heart raced for a moment as i read that.

Hi Gregory - always happy to make your heart race anyway I can. But it's true - from playing blues on the piano in the middle of the night alone (except for a bottle of course), to blasting out a trumpet solo above a pounding rhythm section in some smoky cellar - playing music was probably what gave me the most pleasure in life when I was young, even more than sex. Also, on a few occasions, it gave me an experience I never got anywhere else - that of being in a perfect physcially-coordinated team. To be in a five-piece trumpet section in a twenty-piece big-band, playing syncopated phrases so tight they sound like a machine, with bass and drums steaming full speed ahead underneath... riding a wave of human togetherness... quite the most exhilarating experience I ever had. I can't remember now why I gave it up. Nor how I managed to.

FRIDAY MAY 16, 2008

From: Susan Napier-Bell, Teddington, Middlesex, London
Hi Si. Thank you for the update on Reg. Isn't that what happened to you many years ago? Yesterday I did a test clarinet practice with my neighbour forewarned so I could get her opinion of the sound nuisance. With all the windows closed she could only just hear. That is good news. I had decided that if I was annoying neighbours I would think of a new hobby because I am never going to get better than I am now and I still don't play well enough to play the music I want to play.

Hi Sue. I saw Reg again yesterday He's now without catheters and today he's coming out, so everything seems OK.

Re me many years ago - yes, same sort of thing. It was in 1964. For months I'd been going to the doctor's surgery complaining of pains in the appendix area but whenever I was there they disappeared. Then over a bank holiday my stomach blew up like I was pregnant. My doctor was away and his answering service referred me to someone else. When I called him he said he was a brain surgeon but agreed to see me if I drove to Harefield Hospital. As I walked into reception he came out of the operating theatre, his gloves covered in blood, took one look at me and said, 'You've got a burst appendix'.

He wasn't in a position to operate so he called Wembley hospital and told me to drive myself because it would be quicker than waiting for an ambulance. Halfway there a motorcycle policeman came alongside and helped clear the traffic in front with his siren, so the doctor had been pretty effective at setting things in motion. When I arrived they were waiting at the gate with a trolley. The anaesthetist gave me my pre-op before I even laid on it and they pumped out my stomach as they wheeled me towards the hospital. I was unconcious before we got inside.

And about the clarinet playing.... So glad you're not going to give it up. Playing music is the most fun thing there is. I miss it still today even after forty years. Lots of love.

THURSDAY MAY 15, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York NY, USA
Simonator: I love the new picture of Yo feeding you a strawberry... reminded me of Eve feeding the apple to Adam...hmmm. But what really has me puzzled is your Dorian Gray appearance... How have you managed to keep the signs of years of abuse from your appearance? It's no secret that you eat too much, shag too much, drink too much, travel too much, take too much sun and yet you appear to be early 40's. Please share your anti-aging secrets with me!

Strawberries, darling, strawberries!! And have Yo feed them to you.

WEDNESDAY MAY 14, 2008

From: Dean Gailer, Los Angeles, California, USA
hi simon... i'm doing a media studies course and want to ask you three questions to help me with a workstudy... would you possibly answer them for me... they are... what's the best thing about being a manager? what's the worst? why does the artist neeed one anyway?

BEST: Intelligent interplay with a complex industry and the pleasure of helping young artists expand their creative horizons.
WORST: Dumb time-wasting with stubborn overpaid record-company executives and having to deal with pop stars whose egos have overtaken their talent.
WHY NEEDED: Artists are stuck in a strange position between super confidence and permanent lack of it. They need someone who can prick their ego when it’s getting too big, and help build it up again when it shrinks uncontrollably.

TUESDAY MAY 13, 2008

From: Sean Mallory, Perth Australia
I've just finished reading I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch and as a musician I really enjoyed the anecdote about the sax players on Careless Whisper - George insisting they weren't playing the opening phrase right and making them go on and on trying to find that illusive quality. In your view... What was that illusive quality? And did it really make a difference?

Illusive qualities are illusive, which is why it's impossible to pin them down. I couldn't hear it. Nor could the two sax players we got in (and one was David Sandborn, for heaven's sake). Nor could Jerry Wexler, probably the world's most experienced record producer. But George could. George felt there was something in the way the sax had been played on the demo that wasn't coming out of David Sandborn's sax, nor from the sax of the second player we got in. Eventually George got the same guy to play on the track as had played on the demo - an amateur musician from North London. The secret seems to have been that he hadn't been properly trained and therefore fingered the instrument wrongly which produced a fractionally different texture on a couple of notes. Inaudible to me, but not to George. And since it was the biggest selling record he ever made he was almost certainly right. Although no-one else could hear the difference, there must have been a subliminal quality that seduced the world into loving the record. And buying it.

MONDAY MAY 12, 2008

From: Terri Sherringham, Newcastle, UK
Hi Simon - good to see you back in full grump-mode (yesterday's email). It seemed a long time since you'd given someone such a full-bodied insult. Most enjoyable! May there be many more!

Insults are not something I plan, they just pop out, especially when the email I receive is idiotic. In general, though, I try to avoid them - they can so easily come back to haunt you. The danger time is after midnight. A bit sozzled I start answering emails (not for the website, but for business matters), and sometimes in the morning I'm totally shocked by what I've said. I've tried to get over the habit of going to the computer when I come back from dinner, but it's so enjoyable. A last glass of calvados and a handful of itchy fingers and almost anything can be said to anyone. Letters were never like that, nor phone calls. The email insult is an art (or a pitfall) all of its own.

SUNDAY MAY 11, 2008

From: Saarski, London, UK
Hello, I write quirky melodic pop music with lyrics that will make you smile... I'd love you to give it a listen and see what you think.

Trite, dull, boring, unamusing, time-wasting, masturbatory, clichéd, self-indulgent, self-centred, vacant and vacuous. You must be a most entertaining person to know!

SATURDAY MAY 10, 2008

From: Jack Shelbourne, Liverpool, UK
Hi Simon. I'm an old rocker - gave up playing in a band much too late in life and finally got a proper job in my early forties. Now fifteen years later I've got enough to retire if I do it cheaply. I've been looking at Thailand and you seem to know about the place. I'm worried by its politics, so please tell me - if I invest all I have in making a new life there, could everything be wrecked by a change in government? Could there be another coup?

Far be it for me to tell you about Thai politics, you can read all manner of experts on the subject, though there's one thing they never seem to point out - the difference between how the country is run by elected governments and non-elected ones is negligible. After each coup, plenty of longtime politicians find their way into the ensuing government. And similarly, after each election half the members of the resulting cabinet turn out to be people who were previously in the military. It's simply two different methods of changing the team at the top but the policy usually remains the same - let things carry on as usual and cream a bit off the top. Now back to your question....

In 75 years since the end of absolute monarchy and the beginning of democracy, there have been 13 coups and 33 years of non-elected governments. On the law of averages, if you decide to retire here and live for another 20 years you should have 12 years of democracy, 8 years of dictatorship and the fun of three more coups. None of which will make the slightest difference to your life whatsoever.

FRIDAY MAY 9, 2008

From: Sir Harry Cowell, London, UK
Hi Simon: At Musexpo last week in LA it was quite obvious that the record companies think they have the future worked out... yes the answer they all have is 360!!!!!

That's the best they can come up with... something that existed 30 years ago...hardly new. Wankers every single one of them. Have a great weekend thinking of their total demise.

Hi Sir Harry - you're right, you're right, you're right!
These '360-degree' contracts were in place with all sorts of small record companies 30 years ago but the courts kept finding against them. As surely they will do again, because...
Once records don't exist, in exchange for their '360 degree' lien on artists' earnings from all sources, the 'record companies' will have to agree that their job is to build an artist's career in every way possible. The courts will deem this to be 'artist management'. And in the EU, Australasia and many states in the USA, 'management' contracts are held by the courts to be 'personal services' contracts. Which means, if the relationship between the two sides irrevocably breaks down, and if one party to the agreement is an individual who is thus unable to continue with his career, the contract can be terminated. So a couple of test cases somewhere along the line should put an end to the whole thing.
On top of this, we all know the majors come from a corporate culture that cheats artists out of money at every opportunity. Until now this has just meant record royalties, but with these new contracts they'll soon be cheating artists on money from every other source too. And that won't stand up too well in court either.

THURSDAY MAY 8, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York, NY, USA
Hi Simon: Hahaha, who would have thunk it!!! Warner's are to cease paying dividends to their shareholders (see here). Instead of cutting divyys, they should cut all pork from management...

Just think - if they've stopped paying dividends to the shareholders (which include a good few of the top executives), think how much they're lopping off royalties due to artists. It's so utterly inevitable that record companies will disappear yet none of them are doing anything constructive to give themsleves a future in a different shape. They just go on blindly, almost as if it's not happening. It reminds me of years ago when the investigators were closing in on Richard Nixon over his involvement in Watergate. Suddenly the investigators discovered there had been tapes recorded of every conversation Nixon had ever had in the Oval Office. It was amazing, instead of instantly destroying the lot Nixon admitted they existed, then after a while handed them over, guaranteeing his eventual downfall. It was like the news last week when Sony handed over its entire catalogue to Nokia for free downloads. Like an animal frozen in the glare of headlights from an approaching truck - like Nixon handing over those tapes - co-operating fully in their own demise.

WEDNESDAY MAY 7, 2008

From: Ed Delisle, West Hollywood, California, USA
hey simon... i only just worked it out... those pictures of unknown people at the top of the daily post page... they're all politicicans who are atheist or agnostic... and the previous page of daily post were all politicians who are gay... does that make me thick or what..?

It was just an idea - a way to make the top of the page more interesting. First I did that row of photos of gay politicians. When I researched it there were plenty to choose from - Britain had both cabinet ministers and MPs - Holland, France, Germany and Scandinavia the same - even the USA managed to have one openly gay member of the House of Representatives. But when it came to the newest set of photos, the ones of atheist or agnostic politicians, it was really tough. I could only find 22 listed worldwide. And from those I took away the ones who'd made communism an alternative to religion (Castro and all the former Eastern European leaders). It seems that having to admit they don't believe in God is the thing politicians are most scared of. Yet for me (and I'm sure hundreds of thousands of other people) it would be the one single statement that would get my vote - look at Turkey last year when a million voters took to the street to protest the intrusion of Islam into their happy God-less lives. (Anyway - yes, it makes you as thick as a black hole. All you had to do to was click on the photos and read.)

TUESDAY MAY 6, 2008
From: Theo George, Manchester, UK
Hi Simon. What did you think of that report in the paper this week that back in 1968 Generalissimo Franco cheated Cliff Richard out of a Eurovision win with 'Congratulations' by fixing a win for the Spanish artist Massiel? I remember when you were involved with that artist, Alsou, from Russia. She did Eurovision and came second. Can you now reveal all? Was there a touch of Generalissimo Simon about it?

Of course there was - that's how everyone does it except for the naive British. On the way to Alsou coming in second, I travelled with her to every European country, arranged TV shows to make her song known ahead of the contest, and in each place introduced people from Moscow to make appropriate deals. Oil was discussed with the Roumanians, bacon with the Maltese (where the head of the local Eurovision committee owned a pork farm), and so on in each country. To a greater or lesser degree people representing the contestants of all the other countries were roaming round Europe doing much the same thing. Except of course the Brits. They seemed utterly naive about how Eurovision really worked. Just before the show that year the head of the BBC organising committee told me how much he enjoyed Eurovision because "it's probably the only big competition of its type left which is totally honest and straightforward in choosing the winner." Poor him! Two hours later Alsou had come second for Russia while Nicki French had got nul points for the UK.
Sounds to me like, back in 1968, Generalissimo Franco did everything right. Cliff Richard, presumably, just sung and prayed.
Perhaps God didn't much like the song.

MONDAY MAY 5, 2008

From: Geoff Patterson, Birmingham, UK
Hello Simon. Cheerful looking bunch, your guests last night, but tell me... dinner for eight with that lot - what on earth do you talk about?

Just about everything! They all come from Roi-et in the northeast of Thailand, which is where Yo comes from too. And most of them went to school together. Amongst them is Pooki, who owns the salon the others work in. She's of Chinese extraction, very sharp in business and has a longterm boyfriend who drives a motorcycle taxi. One girl doesn't work at the salon. She had her snip last year and has been in Scandinavia learning the call-girl business. Another had five years of that in Malaysia and is now back permanently. Then there's the one who just got back from eight years in China. She went there with a bunch of dancers to work in a night-club but a few days into the trip had a row with her room-mate and slung a knife on the floor in a temper. It bounced and landed in the other girl's groin and thirty minutes later she was dead. Hence the eight year holiday (expenses paid by the Chinese government).

You see! Quite an interesting bunch. And that's just the start of it.

The view from my end of the table

SUNDAY MAY 4, 2008

From: Bee Futon, Bangkok, Thailand
dear simon... was thinking about U a lot today... hope u r well. hugzz

Hi Bee - how nice to be thought about - even a little would do, but a lot is more than I can reasonably expect. I was thinking of you too, mainly because the other day I bumped into your manager with that nice film-maker Peter Christopherson out slumming together in a seedy night club. (And obviously I was out slumming too or I wouldn't have met them.)
I hope Futon are doing well and producing good music, I'm afraid I've been rather out of touch lately, working hard on a couple of film projects, which is a new direction (well - an old one actually, since movies was what I did before I got into pop three hundred years ago). I'm still struggling with my new book and also considering some sort of book collaboration with Muir Vidler, a truly brilliant photographer (see yesterday's email).
Other than that, as usual, I'm eating too much. Last night Yo and I were at a dinner party where I disgraced myself by objecting to the way all the expats at the table moaned about foreigners - one couldn't stand Koreans, another Indians, another French, and so on. I was thoroughly condemned for suggesting that, to the people they were objecting to, they probably looked equally distasteful themselves. The expat lifestyle doesn't always suit me and the orginal idea of being here was to be amongst Thais, which is how it was tonight. Yo invited eight of his friends round to eat - mostly transvestites, all of them working in a beauty salon in Soy 6, Pattaya's number one vice street. The salon gives the local bar-girls a daily deal - 250 baht each morning for a total do-over of hair and make-up, then 20 baht each time they suffer a 'dishevelment' and come back for a touch-up. Throughout the day the banter between lady hookers and transvestite hair-stylists is nonstop soap-opera. Tonight I got three hours of it repeated over dinner - a little endless, but at least I didn't get moaned at.
There now... see what a lovely email you get just for saying you were thinking about me.

SATURDAY MAY 3, 2008

From: Muir Vidler, London, UK
Hi Simon, so sorry I haven’t replied... no indication of my enthusiasm for a collaboration, more an indication of my inability to keep on top of things. I had to go back to New York last week and the solo show I have in Germany is taking up 99% of my time right now. A travel book around Thailand would be great but I agree it needs a distinguishing ‘angle’. Did I mention I’m trying to collect a few projects I’ve done into a book, the loose theme being cultural contradictions - death metal music in Israel, beauty pageant in Libya etc. I was shooting disabled models for it the other day. I’m going to Spain with the writer Robert Sandall this afternoon for a PR jolly at a festival in Jerez - horse-riding, flamenco-dancing and sherry-drinking (I should be able to manage the sherry-drinking at least). Very keen on a collaboration though, so lets, as you suggest, bounce a few ideas around.

Hi Muir! A collaboration will take place, I'm sure of it. But as you say, it's a matter of the right angle.
Re Jerez - I first went there donkey's years ago - in fact, when donkeys were still the main transport in Spain, 1958 I think it was. A sandwhich with a brandy would cost you 80 centavos in most bars, and a cheap hotel not more than five pesetas.
In Malaga I joined a 'sherry and flamenco' trip - three days by coach to Jerez and Seville. I seem to remember it cost 200 pesetas (less than two euros) including two nights hotel and all meals. We were a mixed bunch - German, British, Swedish, French - twelve men, five women, all getting on rather well. In Jerez we went to half a dozen wineries and were given a short tour and a quick taste in each before arriving at one which had with the reputation as the oldest and most genuine. After being shown around we were taken into a yard in which a large tank was buried in the ground, looking surprisingly like a septic tank. We stood around it while the guide explained that in due course this would become that year's production. As a solera wine, he explained, it contained some small amount of sherry dating back three hundred years plus a small amount of every other year's production since. He took a large ladle and pushed it down into the tank leaning forwards as he did so which caused his sunglasses to slip out of his top pocket. Despite grabbing at them frantically they fell into the murky liquid, but he seemed not too perurbed, presumably these things happened often enough. He pulled out the ladle (a biggish one, containing perhaps a pint), and sent it round the group for us each to sip. Dark and bitter but potently acloholic, we sipped hard, trying to taste the part of it that was three hundred years old and forcing him to return the ladle to the tank for a second scoop for those who remained. Then we headed for Seville, stopping on the way at a remote hotel where we were to have dinner and spend the night, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
It was a small hotel with only ten rooms and our group occupied it completely - mostly two to a room with one big shared bathroom, all on the first floor, downstairs being the dining-room and the owners residence. It was round midnight that one by one we started waking to find we had explosive diarroea. First one to the bathroom was a German man who locked the door, but massive banging from the other men got it re-opened. The toilet was already occupied but there was a bath over which five of us hung ourselves - a shower took three more and the window ledge another one, which left two men and five women running downstairs to the woods and mosquitos outside. It wasn't a five minute thing either; it went on all night, and this was the pre-immodium era in the middle of nowhere in prehistoric Spain.
Anyway, Muir - enjoy your weekend in Jerez.

FRIDAY MAY 2, 2008

From: Francis Connor, Sataheep, Thailand
Dearest Simone, how could I have possibly missed your natal day? Well I did! For which mea maxima culpa and belated congrats. You are oft in my thoughts and there is much to relate. Aek, the gentleman's gentleman who rules my roost and prepares my food, goes from strength to strength. Current favourites are a selection of mezze (from a book on Arabic cuisine by a Jewish lady) and a mean risotto of shrimp and baby clams. I would love to share these with you if only we could be in touch.

Francesca - I've no idea why you find being in touch so difficult. It simply takes an email. And if it includes an invitation to feast on Aek's cuisine it won't go unanswered. So when do I come?
As for missing my 'natal day'. With a view to pricking your linguistic pomposity I searched around the web to see if anyone else ever used that expression. There was just one - the town of Halifax in Nova Scotia has an annual 'Natal Day' to celebrate the foundation of its local brewery, which seems an even more pompous use of the word than yours. So I'll lay off complaining and wait for my lunch invite.

THURSDAY MAY 1, 2008

From: John Dang, Manchester, UK
Hi Simon - just read your daily email today. Made me laugh out loud. I must go and get myself into these kind of troubles!!!

For what? It's simply not worth it. You see, I didn't tell you the end of the story. Pissed and battered in the back of a taxi, I headed for Putney where I then lived. Crossing Putney Bridge it started to pour with rain and I saw a forlorn young chap sheltering in a doorway. I stopped the cab and gave him a lift - all the way to my bed. The trouble was, I was so pissed I still felt no pain. So on top of having had my lips punched senseless, I subjected them to an hour of snogging before finally lapsing into unconsiousness. The way they looked in the morning was so shocking my visitor fled before I managed to struggle to a mirror and check them out. I looked like an Egyptian camel, my lips big and black and bruised. And in just another hour my boyfriend was arriving back from a weekend with his family and I hadn't even begun to think of an explanation. So John, my sweet - hang on to your pretty face and stay out of trouble.

WEDNESDAY APRIL 30, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
hi simon.... dudley moore... did you know that before his acting thing he was a very young piano player for johnny dankworth?... apparently he was always distracting everyone during sessions with his luvable humour, they really adored him... but then one day, he just quietly upped and left to do the acting thing... no one even knew... anyway... here he is, the talented doll with his trio

I got to know him in the mid-1960s when he played regularly at the Cool Elephant, a jazz club that later became London's most famous music-biz hangout - the Speakeasy. By then I was managing the Yardbirds and was a bit of a lad about town. And Dudley was rich and successful, with his own TV show. But I'd first heard him play jazz five years earlier....
Dudley left the Dankworth band in 1959 when some friends decided to rehash a review they'd done while they were at Oxford University together and put it on in the West End. It became the biggest theatrical hit ever - Beyond the Fringe - with Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley. It finally finished its run in 1961 and Peter Cook used some of his earnings to buy a nightclub in Soho - The Establishment - which he turned into a comedy club featuring avant garde comedians from America (though I saw Frankie Howerd there too, giving the greatest performance of his life). Downstairs Dudley Moore and his trio played in a jazz bar where I managed to get my face bashed in one night. Some Aussie guy thought I was trying to pull his girlfriend and smashed his fist into my mouth. I was so drunk I didn't feel a thing. "That was pretty silly," I told him. "I wasn't even looking at her. I'm gay for heaven's sake. It's you I fancy" So he fisted me again. There was blood all over the place and he got thrown out, but his girlfriend stayed behind and helped me wash my face. So I thought, "Might as well try and pull her after all," and kissed her on the tits. She went beserk and had me thrown out too. Which is nothing much to do with Dudley Moore. But when I listened to the track you sent, that's where my mind wandered to.

TUESDAY APRIL 29, 2008

From: Marie Andaluz, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Simon - looking through your old emails I notice you often talk about your love of caviar. The sturgeon is now a protected species yet it seems you're still eating it. Have you no shame?

About caviar - none! Whatever people like to eat, other people will find a way to produce and make money from. As fast as sturgeon are dying out in the Caspian Sea, new caviar farms are being opened where the fish are bred in captivity. Not all of it as delicious as the orginal, but improving all the time. Also, in China there's a vast inland sea with a sturgeon that produces excellent caviar somewhat similar to Oscietra. And the Chinese government are extremely careful to stop it being overfished.

No animal which is a popular source of food is ever likely to die out - in fact, the best way to guarantee an animal's survival is to make sure mankind finds it tasty. Which brings me to cod, which I've been eating a lot of lately. I was stocking up on it in the supermarket the other day when a busybody woman from Germany said I should be ashamed of myself. "It's a protected species," she told me.

"Not yet, it isn't," I retorted.

"Well it should be," she said. "And if people go on eating it, it will soon be extinct."

Which might possibly be true. But if it's going to be extinct anyway, I'd rather its extinction was caused by me getting the pleasure of eating it now than by someone else in twenty or thirty years time.

And before you write back to say I'm just a self-interested glutton, let me confirm that you're right. I am. I like cod and I cook it beautifully - poached, with a large chunk of salted butter melted into the water to infuse and sweeten it, and liberally sprinkled with coarse-ground black pepper.
I eat it sitting on the terrace by the swimming-pool in the warm tropical night, fans whirring, garden lights blazing - doing my bit for global warming!

MONDAY APRIL 28, 2008

From: Andy Shaw, Tokyo Japan
Hi Simon - don't be so squeamish. I was at that restaurant last week and most of it was reasonably edible. Some of it actually looked pretty too - like the sheep's penis on a stick with cheese and mayonaise. To better inform you, here is a selection of pictures. From left to right, top to bottom - donkey's penis, the restuarant itself, the menu, sheep's penis on a stick, dog's penis dipped in spicy sauce, and yak's penis. Come on now, promise you'll give it a second try.

Andy - it's nothing to do with being squeamish, I rarely ever am. It's simply a matter of eating things that taste good. If I'd been squeamish I wouldn't have tried cooking the bull's knob to start with. It's just that I can't stand the texture - like tripe, or veal cheek, or pig's snout, or sweetbreads - they all have bad textures. And so do penises. In fact it wasn't the first time. I suffered a penis casserole long ago in Taiwan - one mouthful after another of bouncy flavourless chewy muck. But if you think I'm squeamish...
Many years ago (about forty) I found myself in a local restaurant in a remote and totally empty fishing village in a part of Southern Spain where no tourists ever went. The menu was simple, and in Spanish, and the waiter stood over me arrogantly, presuming I wouldn't be able to read it. Just to bug him I ordered the most local of all the dishes - pulpo en su tinto. I figured it would be a good stew of octupus and other sea food with a rich sauce incorporating the octopus's ink. What arrived was a small whole octopus about the size of a carriage clock sitting plum centre of the plate surrounded by jet black liquid half a centimetre deep - it didn't even look cooked. The waiter (bored, in this deserted restaurant in this deserted town) stood over me in arrogant triumph waiting for me to struggle in awful Spanish to explain that I couldn't possibly eat it. But because he was standing there in triumph, towering over me, I simply had to. So without flinching, I nodded in appreciation of the delicious dish he'd placed in front of me, reached my fingers into its bouncy head, plucked out an eye and ate it as my first mouthful. Then I looked up with a smile and told him, "Delicioso!"
Of course he still thought I was a cunt. He probably came from the north and wouldn't have eaten a lousy dish like that in a million years.

SUNDAY APRIL 27, 2008

From: Joe Selby, London, UK
Hi Simon... checked your website and noticed it was your birthday this week. I gather you had a good dinner, but I wondered... does an old geezer like you living in a foreign land get many presents these days? Or is it just a good nosh and a batch of congratulatory emails?

As a matter of fact, Joe, no presents at all. Well.... except for one. Sort of! A friend arrived this week from China. While he was there he'd been to the famous penis restaurant in Beijing, a place I've strenuously avoided on all my visits. But he was full of it. "They said dog was the best," he told me. "But they served it with the balls and when I saw it at the next table I just couldn't take it. So we had the mixed penis hotpot instead - donkey, dog and snake... snakes, by the way, have two penises - did you know that?"

I didn't. And didn't much care. But the thing I'm leading up to was that he'd thoughtfully bought me a present - beautifully boxed and vacuum packed - bull's penis! It wasn't the whole thing - just a half dozen thick cut slices looking like cross-sections from a substantial boudin blanc.

My friend was only staying a day so I considered throwing it away as soon as he left but that seemed unadventurous, and since Yo was away visiting his family in Roi-et I decided to pass a bit of time last night having a go at cooking it. I figured it wouldn't be much different from ox heart - fibrous, and best casseroled in red wine - so I prepared it like a chicken cacciatore with the best part of a bottle of Australian shiraz poured in. And it wasn't too bad. Well... the first two mouthfuls weren't. But after that it tasted like shit so I slung it away and grilled myself a couple of lamb chops. Still, it's always good to have a new experience. And I can now tell you with great authority that animal's knobs are definitely best not put in your mouth. Which most people, I suppose, figured out ages ago.

SATURDAY APRIL 26, 2008

From: Bobbi Marchini, Villa Christina, Zakythos, Greece
Hi Bello. Dont worry about the pope... according to St Malachy and a few other nutters he is second to last. Apparently the whole shebang is coming to a terrible end in 2012...they even gave us a date: 21/12/2012. This will effectively take care of the mortgage crisis... we will no longer wonder about Sir Cliff and who really shot Kennedy. Sorry I missed birthday greeting but have been trying to get this place open and totally distracted... but.. .the clanking creaking gates swung wide last week and with the help of that wonderful firm of Bluffit and Faker our first guests arrived. Happy 69. Big love.

Hi Bobbi. Glad to know you've managed to get the place open as usual. This year Yo and I really, really, really will try and make it for a weekend.
Re your pope and end-of-the-world predictions - they're a bit muddled. You're right about St Malachy, the barmy Irish saint, predicting 112 popes of which the next will be the last. But it's the Mayan calandar that says the world will end in 2012. In general people don't seem to be worrying much, except of course Tom Cruise, who's planning a $10 million bunker beneath his home in preparation for the event. He believes it will result from an intergalactic attack led by a fellow called Xenu (the dictator of the Galactic Confederacy, according to Ron Hubbard). I've heard from some of his fellow Scientologists that Cruise believes he can save the world by making Xenu fall in love with him. They will then live together for eternity as man and wife (I mean, intergalactic dictator and catamite), in the bunker, safely hidden from the prying eyes of tabloid journalists.

FRIDAY APRIL 25, 2008

From: Harley Sears, Kansas City, USA
Hi Simon, Nice photo... a pope and a dope. Here's hoping George W joins John Paul very soon!.

Two dopes actually! And very sickening. The trouble is, George W will shortly be replaced by someone better. In due course, the Pope will NOT be.

THURSDAY APRIL 24, 2008

From: Paul Rymer, Middlesborough, UK
Hi Simon, Well, I'm back from my break in New York, so thought I would catch up with your site and what do I see a the top of the page.... only the same bloody thing I saw all last week in New York...

Sorry about that, Paul. You see, I promised someone a picture without me smiling, but everyone seems to be missing my enigmatic grin so it will be back there at the end of the week. Actually the 'Pope' picture was a mistake for another reason. Religious right organisations in America have started using digitial recognition techniques to research websites and email addresses. The picture of the Pope guides them to me. You'll remember about a year ago I was getting endless emails from religious nuts trying to persuade me of this and that. Well this week a good many came back again. The nuttiest was from someone trying to persuade me to buy Christian shoes - yes, seriously! Their blurb promises that, 'feeling your body supported by Christ does wonders for your spiritual well-being'. They have a selection of trainers in different colours with different names - for instance - 'Psalm 23' trainers in charcoal, 'Walk on the Water' trainers in purple, and 'Christian Saviour' trainers in lilac and green with a 'Jesus Christ' motif (a bit like Louis Vuitton).
Aren't you pleased you're back home again?

WEDNESDAY APRIL 23, 2008

From: Paul Granville, Shanghai, China
Hi Simon! Happy happy 69th birthday to you mate, hope I look as good as you when I get to that ripe old age. Will keep it short as I know you didn't catch up on emails yesterday and I'm sure you'll be quite hungover this morning from last night's party.

Thanks Paul! (And thanks to everyone else who sent me birthday greetings.) As you rightly observe, I am indeed a touch hungover this morning. Yo and I had a great dinner at Louis Noll's restaurant, Mata Hari, far and away the best in the area.

mmmmmmm
LOUISmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm YO

Louis is from Holland. For the first fifteen years of his adult life Louis was bass-player with a Dutch rock group whose name I've clean forgotten, though I remember him telling me they had a hit (or it might even have been two). Later he moved to another group who didn't. But they had a good time playing all over the place and ended up one year with a summer season in a pub in the hills in the South of France. One night a famous local resident walked in - Mick Jagger. He had a few drinks, enjoyed the band and asked them if they'd like to play at a party he was throwing the following weekend at his house in St Tropez. What Louis and the band didn't realise till they got there was - it was the party for Mick's wedding to Bianca. The entire world of rock was there, and if Louis and his band had ever felt any disappointment about not becoming world famous, that evening helped overcome it. One after another all the guests sat in with them and by the end of the night there was hardly a famous face in rock that Louis can't claim he once played with. (Though I must add - if his band had been as good as the restaurant he now owns, he'd have ended up being more famous than the lot of them.)

TUESDAY APRIL 22, 2008

From: Jamie Anders, Toronto, Canada
hi simon... a little bird told me it was your birthday today.. well not a little bird actually... my computer... which usefully brings up everyone's birthdays on the screen each day... so what are you doing with yourself... lazing by the pool..? whatever it is have a good one..

Because it was my birthday I was planning to do very little. Unfortunately, yesterday I did an interview for a UK radio station. I did it the usual way - over the phone, recording my end digitally, then uploading it to a private web page from where it can be downloaded by the radio station. It should take just a few minutes and gives perfect quality sound, but when I came to upload the recording I found it was totally disorted. The only solution was to re-record it, which meant transcribing half-an-hour of garrulous crap (me talking about George Michael's legal battle with Sony in the 90s) and re-saying it all. Because I didn't get it done last night it became this morning's principal chore, and it wasn't quick. Typing it all out then re-recording it with attempted spontaneity took two boring hours. I kept on reading it wrong - going too fast and falling over my words, or going too slow and sounding like the Nine o'Clock News - and by the time I'd finished it I was in a thoroughly bad mood, which bought me to half-an-hour ago. Then I realised I hadn't yet updated the website. Since I was too lazy to read through all today's emails I grabbed the top one, yours. Which gave the excuse to write this rubbish.
Now it's lunch time. I'm going to open a bottle of champagne and drink it by the pool with some foie gras (not too much, though, because tonight I'm having a special dinner). So there you are... happy birthday Simon.

MONDAY APRIL 21, 2008

From: John Dang, Manchester, UK
Simon, I've just read your daily email... hahaha... just for the record I love your lovely smile. It's 2am and I'm currently stuck on a song I'm writing/producing for Sony Thailand... hence the detour to your website in an attempt to find some inspiration. And whilst we are on such creative matters... how's your new book coming along? No writer's block there I hope!

No writer's block - just no writing! I've no idea when it will emerge but certainly not at the moment. But who cares. Would Shakespeare be any less famous if he'd written one less play?

SUNDAY APRIL 20, 2008

From: Jane Sharpton, Dallas, Texas, USA
Hi Simon! I've been waiting intrigued to see the top of page picture without your usual enigmatic grin (especially for Mr John Dang, it seems). I can't think why he doesn't like your cute smile. Week after week it lights up my every morning.

In that case it's mornings in the the dark for the next seven days. But I'll bring it back next Sunday. Meanwhile, the combination of the above picture plus your address reminds me of a story. In the Seventies I often spent weekends in Dallas with my friend Howard Goldman who had the best decor store in Fort Worth. One evening he held a dinner party that included a local bishop - a gay one, though not particularly out about it with his congregation - and the previous Sunday he'd had an awkward experience. Out clubbing on Saturday night he'd picked up a young bedfellow then woken late on Sunday morning. With ten minutes to the start of service, he'd thrown on his clothes, grabbed his jewelry from the beside table and rushed to the cathedral. Only as the first member of the congregation bent to kiss his hand did he notice that on his fourth finger he was wearing a Betty Boop ring. (He obviously didn't go for the butch type.)
When he got back home his own ring was gone. In its place was a note from his new friend saying that exchanging rings was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to him.

SATURDAY APRIL 19, 2008

From: Ed Jennings, London, UK
Simon, I remember you once mentioned to me that you thought you had some blood tie with Byron. Just last week I was re-reading Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - an extraordinary story - and I remembered what you said. Or to be quite honest I couldn't remember at all. So tell me again, please, what's the link?

My great grandmother (Louise Bell) gave her son (my father's father) a written note of his family background which he lodged in the family bible. Amongst other things it said, "By your father's mother's side you are descended from the Gordons". (Which would have included Gordon of Khartoum, the real one, not the dodgy character portrayed by Charlton Heston in the movie.)
The note went on, "Byron's father and your great great grandmother were brother and sister."
Since this note was addressed to my grandfather it means the person who was Byron's sister was my great great great great grandmother. A long way back, yes! But if true, it means I must have some of the same blood in me as Byron.

FRIDAY APRIL 18, 2008

From: John Dang, Manchester, UK
I saw Gregory Gray's email to you... and that is certainly not a blissfully happy Simon Napier-Bell in the photo!! In fact, I clicked on it and saw all your 'top of page' photos and I'd say that in 80% of them you use the same smile. I assume this is your 'TV' smile - your polite smile - your "Simon Napier-Bell, man of the people, wise and affable, knows more than he lets on, keynote speaker type smile"! Take a look at your photos and tell me it's not true!

Well yes... of course it's true! If you're getting photographed a lot you work out how to give a good picture. If one particular smile is the best, why use the second best one? And laughing is too hit and miss. If I'm in charge of the camera (and subsequent photo) I can edit out the misses, but when anyone else is in charge of it they're going to be given the same enigmatic smile. But just for you, John, here are four pictures to prove I sometimes laugh too (although it looks like I need Yo with me to do that). And I promise... Next week's top-of-page picture will contain neither a laugh nor a smile (let's see if you like it better).

THURSDAY APRIL 17, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
"totally out of obligation"?? oh, i had a fair idea that you were corralled into the frame, which is cute enough in itself... but you must agree, it's a great picture.... and you look so well in it... sometimes you post pictures where you look a bit peeky from all the traveling... the best ones are always when you're at home rested.

as for the photographer from butt magazine, i fear you were on the receiving end of what i lovingly call 'london cunt behaviour'... it hardly matters what they write or print... just to be in that little publication is kudos in itself... i bet it'll be great fun.

i was out last night with my friend james richards, a chelsea art school graduate who was on the cover of butt last year... we went to the vauxhall tavern to see a performance artist/comedian called david hoyle... this man is a genius... he had some german performance artist on who urinated on the stage... he then interviewed some woman from the british arts council... silly cow was sat on a chair in a pool of this mans piss while they talked... she couldn't size up what was happening at all... he then pulled the german performance artist back on stage only this time he did a wolloping big shit in a beer glass... how we laughed and screamed!!! a big sheet of paper was stretched out across the back of the stage, so both artists started doing their own very shit painting with loud avant guard music playing along... flashing lights... the stench was FOWL, but completely hilarious and very 'fluxus movement'. the anodyne lady from the arts council was a good sport though, and everyone applauded her tenacity in such edgy conditions.

No performance art, please!! I suffered so much of it in the Sixties and Seventies, though its most outrageous days (I'm told) were the Thirties. In the Nineties I was dragged along to see Lennie Lee (still around, I think). He syringes a pint of blood from his arm into a ketchup bottle, then sprinkles it on boiled rice and eats it - brings a partner on stage to vomit with him, then they jointly eat it up - that sort of stuff. In the end though, you know they're doing it because it's an easier way of finding an audience than hawking demo tapes round all those fetid A&R men. Of course there was that famous American punk guitarist (so famous I've forgotten his name) who would crap on stage then throw the turds into the audience before settling down to a guitar solo (some of them really good too). But who the hell would want to hang around and risk getting hit by a turd when you could hear it on record? People who like getting hit by turds, I suppose. So I guess that's their audience.
No offence to you, Gregory, of course. I love hearing about your nights out. In fact, I'm sure that's the best way to experience them.

WEDNESDAY APRIL 16, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
simon... that new picture of you in the pool with those beautiful people is happiness itself...

Happiness??? And here I am trying to build an image of myself as a disgruntled old grump. I can assure you you're wrong. My dip in the pool with the other side of the family was totally out of obligation.
Incidentally, talking about dipping in the pool, the picture of me swimming naked on Christmas day that caused such a stir is about to be published in Butt Magazine. They did an inteview with me recently and it's out next month. It's just as well they're including the naked picture (which I like) because I'm sure I'm not going to like the main picture. The photographer turned up halfway through the interview at the Kensington Hilton in a hurry. He said he'd just photographed Madonna and urgently needed to get to his next appointment (Elton, I think he said, or it may have been Kate Moss, I can't remember now, but whoever it was he made quite sure I realised they were more important than me and he didn't want to waste too much time on my shot). He said he'd like to take me lying on my bed and asked to come up to my room. I didn't feel comfortable with that and told him no. While I continued the interview he wandered off to find somewhere else in the hotel he liked. He couldn't find anywhere and came back grumbling about my lack of co-operation. Then I went for a pee so he followed me and snapped me in the urinal. It seemed funny at the time but in retrospect I didn't much like the idea. For sure, it's going to have people making George Michael jokes. Still it's done now, and out next month. So I guess I'd better get used to it.

TUESDAY APRIL 15, 2008

From: Simon Henderson, Bangkok, Thailand
Hello Simon, I just wanted to thank you and Yo for a lovely couple of days in your Pattaya retreat. The lunches and dinners were wonderful (even to my untrained palate), not to mention the ‘private sex show’. How nice of them to let me take a picture.

Yes! Those daredevil geckos - sex at ninety degrees, the lady gecko hanging onto the wall for both of them.
As soon as you left, the inlaws arrived. But what a change from last year when ten of them spread themselves across the living-room floor to sleep and I fled to Bangkok. Now we have our new guest wing, which you experienced over the weekend. The newly imposed house rules are... inlaws are limited to as many as can sleep there (four reasonably comfortably). That means we can spend the day entertaining them but order them back to barracks at sundown. And with these new conditions imposed their visit has been almost pleasureable.

MONDAY APRIL 14, 2008

From: Tony Stone, London, UK
Simon - you once told me when you were writing you quite often referred to things you'd written at the time. Now you're saying you don't. Which is it?

Bloody hell! What's this? An inquisition?
I didn't say I never referred to things I'd written earlier, just that I've never kept a diary. I'm too undisciplined - too drunk in the evening, too forgetful in the morning. But there were often moments when I jotted down four or five hundred words about something that happened. Trouble is, I used to throw these bits of paper into a file and forget where they were. And since I hate cluttering up my life up with things, each time I moved house I tended to throw the files away. However, this morning I found the following, which seems to have been written during the summer of '68 or '69. It was something I had no recollection of until I read it. But when I did, it became as clear in my mind as if it had hapened yesterday......
A wonderful summer Sunday, the weather warm and sunny. I didn't wake up till midday and around two Vicki called from New York and chattered about what she was doing with herself. I was at home in the flat, the windows wide open, a warm breeze blowing through. While we were talking a trail of fire engines went wailing around the one way system twenty floors below and made it hard to hear. They seemed to go on and on so I walked across and slammed the window.
“God, it sounds just like New York,” Vicki said.
“Dreadful,” I agreed. “What ever happened to those nice little fire trucks with bells?”
The sirens abated and Vicki told me about Labelle. “I’m going to be their manager. Kit’s coming over next week to produce them.”
“Wow! That’s sensational”
It really was. Vicki had been hanging around on the fringes for so long. Not the outer fringes either, I mean she’d been a producer at Ready Steady Go for five years, then done PR in New York, then worked making independent TV for Alan Klein. It’s time she had a big break.
“How did Kit get involved?”
“It was him who made it happen. I said I could get them the Who’s producer and that’s what swung it.”
“Fantastic.”
Twenty minutes later I hung up feeling good. It’s nice when friends get something good in life. It was nearly 3pm. I thought I might pop across to the Italian over the road with the Sunday Times - have a good read with some lasagna and a bottle of Chianti, but there was a loud knocking at the front door.
“Anyone in there?”
I walked across and opened it. Outside were two firemen in full gear – boots and yellow oilskin hats with axes in their hand.
“You shouldn’t be here,” they told me. “We evacuated the building fifteen minutes ago.”
“Jesus. I’ll go now.”
“It’s too late. There’s no way out at the moment. Wait inside. You should be OK. The fire’s three floor’s down from here. We’re expecting the others to come up from below it in a few minutes. My blokes are tackling it from the top. But at the moment there’s no way through. Keep the front door shut and put towels under it. And open your window so the people below can see where you are.”
He slammed the door shut. I was left alone. The flat sounded eerily quiet. I went back to the window and opened it. Twenty floors below was a mess of parked fire trucks and ladders and pumps and people running round them. On the other side of the street a crowd of people stood staring up to more or less where I was, at the window. It was a cloudless summer afternoon. Across the street were the gardens to Buckingham Palace, a view that had sold me on the flat the minute I came to look at it. I leant out and looked down and around to the left and right. Nothing dramatic was happening. No flames were shooting out of windows or anything like that. So after a moment I went back to the armchair and started on the Sunday Times.

SUNDAY APRIL 13, 2008

From: Mel Yu, Shenzhen, China
hi simon... just finsh 'm coming to take you lunch and luv it... want to ask somethhing.... am jus finish soon my own book about i'm was a child in fujian province... smtimes i writing from memary smtimes from diarys i keep at the time.. often nothing more than criptc phrase... almos unreadible... sntimes very long piece like poem cos i was child of the sun and want to poet... but soooo bad!!! do you keep a diary..? or do you write memary..? i start determine to write by memary... then begin look into old diarys... then realize half of thing is remember wrong... now i'm confuse... torn between 2 thing... memarys and diarys....

I never kept diaries. And it didn't worry me when I came to writing books. I reckoned anything interesting would still be in my memory and anything I'd forgotten was probably not worth remembering anyway. That way I could get on with it without worrying about the correctness of unnecessary detail. So if I was you, I'd throw your diaries down the toilet.
By the way, I'm presuming you're writing your book in Chinese. If not, perhaps that should go down the toilet too.

SATURDAY APRIL 12, 2008

From: Martin Lloyd-Elliott, London, UK
Dear Simon, I hope this finds you both well. When are we next going to see you in London? The legendary Thai Princess restaurant has moved from Philbeach Gardens to Earls Court Square so I have both fantastic Thai food, literally on my doorstep, and an eyeful of amazing tall exotic 'ladies' both as staff and customers, which always makes me think of you!

Now really, why should a bunch of Thai transvestites coming and going outside your townhouse make you think of me? You know I fancy only boys - well, sometimes girls - but not transvestites - my theory being, if you realise you're an imperfect man, why turn yourself into an imperfect woman? But by getting to know Yo's tranvestite friends I've come to rather love them (in a platonic sort of way). I can certainly understand them involving themselves with a restaurant, they have enormous appetites - must be something to do with an imbalance of hormones. One time, in our old flat, Yo and I had a dinner party and asked a local chef to prepare Thai food. We had eight guests so we ordered eight different dishes but asked for three portions of each so there would be ample of each one for each person to taste. We knew it would be too much food, but what the hell!
But the cook got it wrong. At 8pm he arrived at the flat with 3 portions each of 8 dishes for each person - 24 dishes per person - 192 dishes in all (he was used to catering for buffet parties so it didn't seem odd to him). We stacked most of it away and got on with the dinner - very successfully. But at midnight when all the guests had gone we still had 174 untouched dishes of food.
Yo called a friend who works at the Alcazar, Pattaya's famous transvestite theatre. Twenty minutes later more than sixty elegant 'ladies' invaded our flat. I opened more wine and we had an all-night food orgy - well, not exactly all night, they devoured the lot in twenty minutes. Not only did it make use of our over-ordered food, there was more good news to follow - they were excellent washer-uppers. By 2am our flat its usual pristine self.
Hope you're well. Lots of love to wife and kids. And how are all those crazy rock stars you have on your couch all day?

Yo's birthday 2005

FRIDAY APRIL 11, 2008

From: Guy Smith, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Hi Simon. You have talked eloquently many times on different genres of music... mainly jazz and pop of course, but also classical & others too... but I can't recall any comments or opinions about country music? You ever have the chance to manage any country artists at all? Or even like the music? I'd be interested to hear your views please Simon.

Do you mean the simpering sentimental stuff? Or Country hoe-downs that swing like trad jazz? 'Country' is such a broad definition. And populated with such unhip people. Like Dolly Parton, a cartoon advertisement for breast enlargement and peroxide. Even the people with a credibile image are still dreary beyond belief - Johnny Cash, for instance, or Waylon Jennings. Apart from a few great hits which have transcended it, like Stand By Your Man by TammyWynette (one of the all-time classics of pop record production), it's the influence it's had on other styles that's given Country its greatest kudos - like when it was mixed with Ray Charles's voice to produce Georgia, or with benzedrine tablets to speed up and morf into rock'n'roll in the 50s. For me, in its pure form it's too sweet, too sentimental, often too morbid and nearly always too cute. (Or is the right word 'cutesy'?)

THURSDAY APRIL 10, 2008

From: John Duffus, Bangkok, Thailand
Hi Simon - Talking of Charlton 'Hest-on with his vest on', it's even more of a pity he was occasionally let loose in the theatre. I wonder if you ever saw Sheridan Morley's review a decade or so back of some ghastly readings he did with his wife at London's Haymarket Theatre. Having torn him to shreds as an actor, Morley summed it up: "The most moving part of Heston's performance was his hairpiece."

Good for Sheridan! He was a strange man - the biographies he wrote of famous stars were in the most deadly dull prose but as a critic he could be delightfully bitchy. It must have been difficult for him being the son of a famous film star. Robert Morley, his dad, caused a stir when he turned up at our school, checking it's suitability for Sheridan. In the end he turned it down, as he had a dozen others. (It was reported that at one he'd asked the headmaster why he'd started the school and been told, "Because I've always wanted to smack the bottoms of small boys in short trousers.")
I met Sheridan quite a few times - at TV chat shows and show-business parties. He was very big, both upwards and outwards, and veered from borish to amusing. It was famoulsy reported that Robert Gore-Langton said, "he was a hard man to ignore but well worth the effort", which was probably true. But on the strength of his put-down of Charlton Heston I prefer to think well of him.
Sheridan had the loudest voice I've ever heard and was definitely not someone to sit next to at dinner. I suffered it once, at the Caprice. He was so big it was like sitting next to a brick wall with a loudspeaker on the top.

WEDNESDAY APRIL 9, 2008

From: Arnold Sands, Tampa, Florida, USA
Hey Simon... I was wondering about something... you said in one of your books that you thought gay culture to the British music business was much like black culture to the US music business... and you credit the music business in the last forty years as loosening up attitudes to gays and changing the public's perceptions... do you think the same is true of black music in the US business... for instance... do you think the music business in the US can claim some substantial credit for Barack Obama being able to run as a credible presidential credit?

Absolutely not! As far as those Americans who are racially chauvinist are concerned, singing and entertaining is what black people are meant to do. All the music business has ever done is to re-inforce that image amongst people who already had it. I'd say the person most influential in making Barack Obama appeal broadly to the American electorate is Tiger Woods. Blacks were meant to be good at sports which required running about and being tough - football, basketball and boxing - but not at golf. Twenty years ago, the two areas of American life most off-limits to blacks were the presidency and pro-golf. America's most passionate golfers include many of its most racially bigoted. They not only thought it impossible for a black man to become president; previous to Tiger Woods they thought it impossible for a black man to become a world golf champion. I reckon Tiger Woods smashing that myth probably did more than anything else to open the way for Obama.

TUESDAY APRIL 8, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
about charlton heston, "he loved guns more than he hated gays"- typical closet fagg, into his gun sex...

talking of stars and sex... last week... hilary, the lady who runs the french pub in dean street took me to an exhibition at the sadie coles gallery on south audley street... it was water colours of men and woman fucking with a total focus on the good reliable cock servicing the vagina... no less pleasing to the eye than a truckdriver stretching out a nice piece of man-twat... mick jagger was there... it was torture for me to not stare...TORTURE... but what was so cool about the man is after decades of being under public glare, he's past giving a fuck... he just relaxes, leans against a wall... clicking on his mobile... no need for a shield like so many lesser stars.. and his hair is in fine nik... he has the skinniest legs in tightest jeans i've ever seen.

that sadie coles gallery is a trip... everyone was there... hugh grant, slobbering over the wimmin... neil tennent bumping cocks with janet street porter... and last week that guy, angus fairhurst was exhibiting there... he was doing well... then off he hops to scotland and hangs himself from a tree... heaven help people... it seems success is no match for human complexityy...

i KNEW charlton hest-on with his vest-on was closet fagg and into gun sex... i told you so i told you so.

You might be right. There was something odiously false odious about him. If he was a closet queen, thank goodness he stayed firmly inside it. Pity, really, that they let him out to do movies.

MONDAY APRIL 7, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
simon... i woke up this morning... reached over without thinking to flick the telly on and hear the stilted sunday hymns... but then i bolted right up when i heard a newsreader report that charlton hest-on [with his vest on] is now dead. FINALLY!!!!

Now then , Gregory - you're being too harsh on him. I recall you once called him 'a rancid old slab of lard', but that really doesn't put him in the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ian Paisley class. He was just a ham actor who wanted every American to have a gun and spoke out against gays. I remember, the morning we had our little contretemps on Breakfast TV all those years ago, he was quite civil to me afterwards over bacon and eggs in the canteen. However, I have to admit he was a contrary old fart, as the photo below goes to show. After campaigning vociferously against the possibilities of gays entering the military, he attended a rally of the Pink Pistols - an American gay gun group - and then spoke out for them. When it came to the crunch, he loved guns more than he hated gays.

SUNDAY APRIL 6, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York, NY, USA
Dear Simon: hope this email finds you in great health.What are your thoughts on this new Myspace venture? Big kiss.

Strangely enough, just one week ago I suddenly had a vision of where the music business was going - one hundred per cent to Myspace. But my vision was different to what has happened ...
Myspace would start a chart - an audio chart. Everyone who had a site on Myspace and posted their music there (basically, every amateur, professional, known and unknown musician in the world) would have their songs entered automatically into a world wide chart - permanently shifting, totally computer controlled, chosen by the number of listens (or downloads) that each song got. It would become the accepted worldwide popularity chart and would be created, referred to and listened to by the entire world. Recorded music would become totally free and record companies would become instantly redundant.
The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became, and I figured it would only be months or weeks before Myspace hit upon it. Then suddenly this announcement by the majors that they're creating a Myspace download site. To me, it's obvious. The majors saw the same thing I saw. And were terrified of it. So they rushed to make a commercial pact with Myspace and create a download site, part of the deal being that Myspace would agree not to create a worldwide chart for unsigned artists that could result in the end of record companies as we know them.
Surely, though, it will still happen. It's just that it won't be Myspace who do it.

SATURDAY APRIL 5, 2008

From: Dennis Horton, Mexico City, Mexico
Hi Simon. D'you remember Roland Grantham? I bumped into him last week, the first time in twenty years, in Buenos Aires, on a cruise round the word. He's 80 now (still wearing that same safari jacket) and he mentioned you. He stills remembers whizzing you round Bangkok thirty-five years ago. I believe it was me who introduced you. I think you rather took his fancy.

You're right. It was at your instigation that I met Roland when I first came to Thailand, thirty-six years ago, in 1972. I had no idea he'd taken the slightest interest in me. I was passing through on the way to Australia and had a seven hour stopover - arrived at 7am, came in from the airport and met him in the lobby of the Sheraton.
He was the biggest man I'd ever met, six-foot-four and at least as wide as three ordinary people, with that vast shirt-cum-safari-jacket hanging over his baggy black trousers. He gave me a quick tour of the city on a tuk-tuk. But sitting on a tuk-tuk with him was well nigh impossible because he was so huge he had to sit dead centre behind the driver to stablise it, which left me only the tiniest bit of room to squeeze in beside him (though I was quite small in those days).
He whisked me round Bangkok in the blazing sun, apalling heat, about 95 degrees, until I was streaming with sweat. To start with just huge wet patches under the arms. But eventually my shirt just changed colour - soaked all over - and my trousers felt like I'd pissed in them.
He took me to the royal palace, the royal boatyard, three temples, Jim Thompson's house and a boat trip, then at midday sent me back to the airport in a taxi looking so wet you'd have thought I'd fallen in the river (the driver even insisted on spreading newspapers over the seats). Yet huge-bodied Roland still looked pristine, dry and perfect. I asked him how he did it.
"Thai’s despise a man who sweats," he told me. "So I worked out a technique."
It turned out his safari jacket was lined with oilskin.
"Underneath it," he told me, "I'm so wet, I haven't been bitten by a mosquito for years; they just drown."
But outside, the cloth remained as dry as a shirt in a wardrobe. Apparently all the sweat flowed down inside his trousers and out through holes in the bottom of his shoes.
When I got to Australia I wrote to thank him for showing me around but I never ever heard from him. I'm surprised to hear he fancied me. The thought never occured to me. Bloody hell - it would like being run over by a truck.
Anyway, as far as I was concerned, I was just a bedraggled water-rat.

FRIDAY APRIL 4, 2008

From: Eric Lindsey, Oakland, California, USA
Hey Simon. Best to you and soulmate. I assume you know by now that an entire USA television program is based on George Michael songs speaking as a spiritual guide (via a brain aneurysm) to a San Francisco attorney - Eli Stone. Last week saw George's guest acting debut. Sadly he looks a tad hideous, but I must say that all this renewed profile on his songs, compared to today's radio crap, has left me a bit nostalgic for an artist that at least appeared to give a crap about crafting a good heartfelt pop song vocal performance. Thoughts?

Anything I've said that was less than flattering about George has certainly not been about his music. That was always his great strength. And I have to say his acting looks pretty good too. I've only seen the small clip on Youtube, but I suddenly saw the possibility for him in a lead part in one of those classic American sitcom movies. Well... maybe not the lead, 'cos as you said he's not quite Grant-Everett in the face department. But he seems genuinely at ease with his part. And really funny.

THURSDAY APRIL 3, 2008

From: Andy Teller, Los Angeles, California, USA
simon... I remember you once telling me that the original Italian composer of You Don't Have To Say You Love Me didn't really write the song... but I've forgotten the full gist of what you said... the other night I got into an argument with some people at a dinner party then found out I couldn't remember what I was talking about... not so unusual at a boozy meal... but still... could you remind me what it was you said...

I was grumbling to you about - for every dollar Vicki Wickham and I make jointly from the English lyric, the writer of the original Italian lyric (which hasn't helped sell a single copy of the record for the last forty-three years), makes double. We rather begrudge him that, though to be honest, that's just the way of the music business. I then went on to point out that there was probably someone else who begrudged the Italian writers some of the money they've made - Dmitri Tiomkin, the American film composer.
Pino Donaggio, the writer of the original music for You Don't Have To Say You Love Me, was originally a composer of scores for 'spaghetti westerns'. His musical hero was Dmitri Tiomkin, who wrote the score for one of Hollywood's greatest westerns, High Noon.
The melody line of the principal song in High Noon is note for note the same as the first chorus line of "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me". It was written 13 years earlier and Donaggio has said publicly it was a score he admired. So there seems to be little doubt where he nicked it from.
Ayway try it yourself... "Do not forsake me oh my darling on this our wedding day." "You don't have to say you love me just be close at hand."

WEDNESDAY APRIL 2, 2008

From: Ed Sanders, Brighton, Sussex, UK
Simon - where did you hear that story about Dirk Bogarde and the silk lining for his miltary uniform? I'm a great Dirk Bogarde fan and have read all his books, and all the books about him too, but I never heard that before!

In the early 60s, when I was in my twenties, I had two great friends (who were a couple), both in their late forties - John Merrick and Harvey Woods. They were both casting directors for the film industry, in fact they were two of the very top casting directors. They'd been in their mid-twenties when the war started and they knew Dirk Bogarde well, having cast him several times in different movies. It was John that told me about the linings to his various military uniforms, and he also told me dozens of other brillant stories about a (gay) Britain so different it was unrecognisable. “The war spoilt it all," he once told me. "Before it, you could always find a guardsman for half-a-crown by the all-night tea stall at Hyde Park Corner. But best of all was Wales. We used to go there at the weekends. You could get a lovely miner for a shilling.”

TUESDAY APRIL 1, 2008

From: Jonn Lindsay, Sydney, Australia
I'll be in Pattaya from 28th April for 3 weeks if you are in town we'll have dinner... you can choose. Kerri-Anne sends her love - she is still shocked. I saw her at a party for Catherine Deneuve and she said she was almost tongue tied when you told her the David Bowie sex story!!

Tongue-tied? Kerri-Anne? I can't believe it. Though I must say I thought the Bowie story most unsuitable for prime time morning TV. But just before the show she spoke to me in the dressing-room and ran through seven or eight stories I might tell. The Bowie story was one of them and I remember thinking she'd reject it. But haf-an-hour later there I was there live on the show when she bought it up. Live TV talk shows don't give much time for hesitation so I plunged in. Even so, I tried to make it a bit less than clear exactly what it was I was trying to say.
It'll be good to see you at the end of the month, I should be here - this is a writing month, except for this week, because Donavon has just turned up, minus the wife and kids. He's now into kick-boxing and has arrived with his English trainer en route to a training camp in Phuket. Half the point of these Thai kick-boxing camps is the toughness of the regime. But Donavon is going to stay at a 5-star hotel nearby. And if that's not bad enough, he's made a deal with the camp that he'll be driven back to his hotel each day for lunch. What a softee! Reminds me of when Dirk Bogarde joined the army in 1943 and had his uniform lined head-to-toe with silk.

MONDAY MARCH 31, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York, NY, USA
Simon: This picture makes me think you rubbed the lantern and got twin genies with 6 wishes!

Wouldn't interest me! I'm not too good at wishing. I may have told this story before, but when I was eight or nine I told an auntie that when I grew up I would have everything I ever wanted. Superciliously she asked, "And how will you do that, dear?" "By not wanting anything," I told her.
By and large it's worked pretty well. I never wish for anything and I only like experiences. I've no interest in possesions, they're a bore and an encumberance, and to pass muster as 'real', experiences have to happen by chance. You see, I don't like choosing, I like being surprised. When I watch a movie, I never wonder how it's going to turn out because in due course it will let me know anyway. I dont much like menus in restuarants either - I'd much rather just have a meal brought to me. And on the same basis, I prefer radio to records. It's because of this that I've never thought of writing fiction. What a bore - having to choose what will take place - much better to make interesting reading out of what really happened.
I only ever seriously wished for something once. It was when I first went to public school. There was a ghastly housemaster, Mr Hoare, who picked on me and bullied the hell out of me. He took me out of the dormitory and made me sleep alone in a tiny room (a cupboard). He gave me every punishment available for doing nothing wrong, forbade me to mix with the other boys at weekends and wouldn't allow me to eat my meals with them. I truly wished he'd die. And he did. He suddenly dropped dead one day.
This outcome of my having wished for something so strongly rather unsettled me and I decided not to try it again. So there you are.... no wishes for me thanks. And no genies either. To have one hovering over me asking me for my every command would be like one of those ghastly lingering waiters in restaurants who top up your wine every time you sip it and whisk away your bread plate if you pause for a second between rolls.

SUNDAY MARCH 30, 2008

From: Morgan Williams, The farm, North of Sydney, Australia
Hello Simon .... having a lovely relaxing day on the farm before we leave for Sydney tomorrow then Argentina on Tuesday next. Will be coming back thru Thailand later in July so would love to see you then. I liked the look of this article in the Spectator by David Selbourne and would welcome your take on it. Britain looks to be pretty well fucked... xx

Hi Morgan - to be honest, I don't understand a word of that crappy piece in the Spectator. Prejudiced intellectual historianism at its worst. The future of Britain as a unified territory may be fucked but it's still a pretty happening place. Everyone I know is having a great time. But then I don't mix with the moaning classes. Who wants to - I mean, in any country? I'm a great believer in self-help. These days Britain is full of self-helpers. Many of them new immigrants, and as immigrants always have done they work hard, look after themselves and add to the country's prosperity. David Selbourne is a tired old ultra-conservative hack. He writes historical books, the accuracy of which has often been challenged. I would class him little short of a bigot. Anyway, his knowledge of the current scene in the UK doesn't come from living there - he lives in Italy. He moans about the stupid Archbishop of Cantebury and his desire for Sharia law but it doesn't take a historian to know the archbishop's an attention-seeking fool - just look at his dumb hairstyle. I mean... By becoming Archbishop he earned the right to wear any one of a dozen glittery long frocks and all manner of weird headgear. You'd have thought would be enough but he still has to have that ridiculous hair. It just proves what a dedicated show-off he is, which leads you to think that everything he says is simply to draw attention to himself too. David Selbourne also moans about Gordon Brown being a Scottish Prime Minister who helped with devolution but now wants to introduce compulsory exams on being British. Again, everyone knows what Gordon Brown is (a tooth-sucking Presbyterian with a scrubby wife), and they don't much care. Because everyone is busy having fun - going on holiday, watching football, looking at X-Factor, eating out and binge-boozing. You see... David Selbourne is just a bigoted old joy-spoiler, and a bit of a liar into the bargain. Here's a good piece about him; it's to do with a previous Spectator piece he wrote. He's virulently anti-Islam, to which I have no objection, though pesonally I prefer to be against religion of all sorts. Acceptance of one is acceptance of them all. You really can't rail againt Islam from a Christian stance. It's like being a paedophile and objecting to bestiality. It would be great to see you when you're passing through Thailand next. All the best.

SATURDAY MARCH 29, 2008

From: Paul Rymer, Nightporter, Middlesborough, UK
Simon, your site today reminded me of a quote from a story on the BBC's website about new legislation to do with copying CDs. "Owners would not be allowed to sell or give away their original discs once they had made a copy." What the fuck? I buy newly released albums, new. I also buy back catalogue, new (if I can, because some things you just have to buy second-hand if the record company decides it's no longer profitable to make new copies). I also sell my used CD's if I no longer listen to them - just like I would sell a car, an antique or a CD player. If they stop people from selling used CD's how on earth will music journalists be able to put food on the table? That's about as angry as I get!

If we're not going to be allowed to sell or give away our old CDs then presumably throwing them away will be illegal too - in case the dustman picks them out of the bin. That means we'll all have to sign an agreement when we buy a new CD saying we agree to destroy it when we've finished with it. All this to keep record companies alive? I've never cried when someone I disliked died. When the Reverend Falwell died earlier this year, I broke open a bottle of champagne. I was thrilled too at school when the housemaster who made my life a misery suddenly dropped dead. And don't we all feel the same about Hitler and Sadam Hussein and Ian Paisely (coming soon, I hope). So why not with these greedy life-clinging major record-companies? Come on BMG, EMI, UNI and Warners - give us all a Christmas present at the end of the year and jump in your coffins.

FRIDAY MARCH 28, 2008

From: Harley Sears, Kansas City, USA
Your tales of farts and bowel movements are far more entertaining than anything currently offered by the music industry, which is also shit - but I'd much rather read about yours.

Hi Harley, good of you to let me know that. Actually, I felt I'd been ignoring the music business for a while and was trying to find something to write about it, but it seemed so damned boring. The latest thing, of course, is Warner's idea of putting a universal tax on the entire population of the United States to raise 20 billion dollars a year to pay record companies not to go out of business. I really wouldn't object to the tax if its purpose was the opposite - to bury them once and for all. Michael Arlington writing in in Techcrunch calls it "little more than a classic protection racket". Not surprising since the scheme is being proposed by Warners whose history was an amalgamation of Reprise (Mafia), Atlantic (now they're both dead I suppose I can say it - Turkish Mafia), and Steve Ross at Warner Music, who came to Warners from a dodgy car park business ('pay up or have your tires slashed'). Anyway, when I considered all the current things I could say about the music biz I thought a description of my bowel movements would be far more entertaining. And I'm glad you found it so.

THURSDAY MARCH 27, 2008

From: Peter Sugden, Perth, Australia
simon... whatever happened to all those succint comment you used to make on social matters and the delightful stories you used to tell about the music business..? with the help of this friend of yours, hugh, it seems your website has finally sunk to the depths of lavatory jokes and farts...

Personally, I felt my exchange of correspondence with Hugh Spring was of great social relevance. After all, everyone knows that to dispense a crisp, sharp, hard fart with proper resonance and reverberation is one of life’s great private pleasures. But at lunch on Tuesday, with an uncomfortable gathering of wind in my stomach towards the end of the meal, I predicted (quite rightly) that there might be something more ominous brewing. Which is why I deserted Hugh and went quickly home. As a matter of fact he'd just been on much the same subject as we downed a few end-of-lunch grappas. We were discussing the looming recession in America for which Hugh, an ex banker, placed the blame entirely on Alan Greenspan - both for his ineptness and for the degree of worship he elicited from US financial circles. "They used to parse his farts to see if they held a clue as to what stock they should buy," Hugh explained. "A whiff of Bolognese sauce from his lunchtime spaghetti and they’d be rushing to buy into Società Edison; a touch of curry and they’d be throwing their money into Bangalore computer chips."
Which rather reminded me of the way Thais are about the lottery. Last year, in Bumrungrad hospital in Bangkok, I passed out while having a routine blood test. In the few moments I was unconscious a panicky nurse shouted out, "I think his heart’s stopped."
I came round to find myself on a trolley being raced along the corridors to the intensive care department, three nurses running beside me, and two doctors. One of the doctors shouted at me, “Did you dream while you were unconscious? Did you see any numbers?” (This, apparently, is their favourite way of predicting the lottery.)
I shook my head. “Pity,” he muttered. And immediately left the rushing procession to go back to his surgery. Not at all interested in my well-being, only in divining a winning ticket.
(Now then... isn't that more interesting than knowing the size of Bruce Springsteen's willie? Or what I think about the American election?)

WEDNESDAY MARCH 26, 2008

From: Hugh Spring, Sataheep, Thailand
Thank you for your racy description of your bowel movements. May I take it, that after this new "crackatoa", we will enjoy lovely sunsets for the next few years?

I was only explaining the reason for my sudden departure from our delicious lunch together. Anyway, 24 hours later I'm still suffering from 'aftershocks'. I'm not sure if it was from what we ate for lunch or from something that went in earlier which was re-activated by the lunchtime champagne. Either way, I will survive. And don't forget we have a date to go and see Leo Nine conduct some sort of local orchestra (he says it's very good) at the Regent School on the 5th. I'll try and get him to join us for our Sunday lunch at Gians the following day.

TUESDAY MARCH 25, 2008

From: Susie Kahlich, LA, California, USA
Hi Simon. Glad to hear from you. I told Rolan Bolan that I've been in touch with you - he's delighted (although I think his exact words were "right on!"). You're right about the height issue for any actor who plays Marc, but your suggestion to look to the Billy Elliot kids is a great one. I shall research forthwith. As for who plays you, well, it's a pity Michelangelo's David isn't a real man. Also that it's 17 feet tall. And made of marble.

At least my dick would be rock hard. On the other hand, at the age you're portaying me in the movie, it always was anyway. So let's go for a real live actor instead.

MONDAY MARCH 24, 2008

From: Steve Shand, Belfast, N. Ireland, UK
simon... you promised me a resume of your asia travels looking for artists... particularly in india where i'd bet you you'd find zilch... was i right or wong..?

Wrong, Steve (as usual!!). Delving into contemporary Indian music was a treat. Everywhere we went there were groups playing stuff that was a blend of every possible style of Western rock plus something local and culturally Indian. In India, 'everywhere' means a 'north, south, east and west' that is as culturally diverse as the north south east & west of Europe was thirty years ago, before its current homogenisation via the EEC. The end result is that young rock bands all over the place are making contemporary music which is uniquely their own. What we had to decide on was - which of those bands might be able find a market in the West. As a manager and long time promoter of artists, I had to consider those distasteful negatives that people who listen only to the music prefer to ignore - the barriers that Western consumer prejudice often presents in terms of race, accent and attitude. It's all very well presuming that music alone will carry the day, but it's not realistic. The artists themselves have to have a personal charisma that at least equals the quality of their music. The exciting thing in India is that we found so many who did.

SUNDAY MARCH 23, 2008

From: Andrew Denton, London, UK
Simon, you sound like you're doing India the way the Brits did it in the days of the Raj - touring around in your chauffeur driven SUV like a white Maharajah. I hope you're also getting out and meeting the ordinary man.

Bloody hell, you can't accuse me of that. Apart from anything else I suffered eight hours at the 'Rock in India' festival in a field of ten thousand. And I've spent three weeks talking to rock groups and musicians - no lauding it over anyone. But there's one other thing I did too. Although I've been to India many times, and Delhi quite a few, for some reason I'd never been to look at the presidential palace and governemnt buildings (usually a bore in any country). They really are impressive. Built between 1912 and 1920 by the British, they're vastly grandiose and daunting. The British never built anything like this in their own country, probably because it's the type of building that is only needed in a totalitarian country - in Russia or Roumania, to endorse the power of Communism - in Hitler's Germany, to intimidate with Facism - in India, to show the magnificence of the British Empire - utterly 'fuck you' buildings intended to daunt the ordinary man and let him know how insignificant he is.
But India will soon get its own back. The changes in the last fifteen years are incredible - prosperity is bursting out all over. In another ten years India might even start to outdo China. Either way, between the two of them I'm sure it won't be long before the West begins to look at Asia with the same sense of awe (and intimidation) that poor Indians once looked at the British administration buildings in New Delhi.

SATURDAY MARCH 22, 2008

From: Anne Patterson, London, UK
Simon - I gather from your emails this week that you're in India. It seems strange you don't write about it. Your last book - the one about Wham! in China - was in places so much like a travel book it seems odd that when you're travelling you don't tell us more about the places you're in.

Whether I remember or not is down to the emails I receive. Yours has arrived on a good day. I'm in Delhi. And today is Holi, India's biggest and most raucous annual festival. It's not just a religious festival, it's an excuse for a booze-up and a free-for-all in the streets, painting and spraying each other with bright colours. The most striking thing about it is that the boozing is not alcohol but cannabis. Bhaang, a derivative of hashish, is stirred into Thandai, a drink made from fruit, milk, aniseed, cardoman and (more intoxicants) poppy seeds. India's drug laws officially ban cannabis (U.S. pressure as usual), but it's such a traditional part of religion and culture that the government has a hard time enforcing it. In fact they even licence special shops to sell the stuff. Bhaang is basically hashish - a derivative of the dried leaves and flowering shoots of the female cannabis plant - mixed with ghee, milk and sugar, which makes it into a sticky paste. This is mixed with drinks or made into sweet cookies or savoury pakoras. If you want to know how much of a blind eye is turned towards its consumption; today across India some hundreds of millions of people will drink bhaang-laced 'thandai'. The Times of India (every bit as erudite in India as the Times in Britain, or the New York Times in the USA) publishes a family recipe for it, warning people not to drink it too quickly... "the intoxicating effects of the herb usually takes half an hour or so to set in, so wait before going to the next glass..." It then wishes its readers a happy holiday "with lots of thandai and bhaang pakoras".
In the streets people spray each other with a paint that is hard to wash off your skin and impossible to get out of your hair. I wanted to go out and photograph it but Colleen (whom I'm travelling with) is blond. She refused, other than we went safely inside a locked car. So we were chauffeured through town in a large SUV, windows up, people peering in.

FRIDAY MARCH 21, 2008

From: Francis Connor, Sataheep, Thailand
Dearest Simone, you are in India, as I learn from your website. I was in New Delhi recently on biz; it could have been worse. The high-light of the trip was meeting William Dalrymple, whose latest book, The Last Mughal, is a treasure. William gave a talk to our group of worthies on the history of Delhi which was vastly entertaining; he arrived pissed and demanded more champagne half way through the presentation. By the by, who is your correspondent The Honourable Ronald Franklin? Is it worth my while to seduce him into attending one of my state luncheons? Also, of what is the honour in honour?

Francesca, you silly thing, you've spelt it wrong. Ron is the Honorable (not the Honourable). It's the title given to an honorary judge in the United States and it was bestowed not on Ron but on his father who unfortunately died before he could accept it. The local State dignatories were so upset by his death that they offered the title to his teenage son. And in the spirit of 'waste not want not', Ron accepted.
I've known Ron for thirty years, having first met him in Disco Disco in Hong Kong in the mid-70s. He's an extraordinary mix of cultures and languages. His parents were one French, one German. They married and emigrated to Brazil, where they conceived Ron. Just before he was due, his mother flew to the USA where she arrived in the nick of time, giving birth to Ron just minutes after passing through immigration and thus bestowing on him the thrill of American citizenship. But he's also Brazilian. And French and German. And has passports for Britain and Israel too. And speaks all the languages. As for inviting him to one of your luncheons; Ron occasionally ventures southward from Bangkok, but not often. If you were to entrap him, you'd find yourself with an exceptional guest. Try it!

THURSDAY MARCH 20, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York, NY, USA
Simoncito: The last time I commented about your appearance was to call you a Beluga Whale. This new picture got me to snap my thong!!! You look great and have a hot hot Armand Assante vibe going!!!! I hope Yo is with you, cause you might get pinched, looking the way you are these days!!! Big Kiss, lil bitch.

Hey Bibi -that's great to hear. This week's been a stinker for keeping the website going. Trolling round India looking at rock groups - lots of them - auditioning, talking, checking out venues, sitting in meetings, getting back to the hotel room late ready to get boozed rather than ready to update on emails - Bangalore, Calcutta, Mumbai - hectic!! Then in midweek a manic American lady took hysterics 'cos of an email I'd posted. She sent shrieking emails through the night begging me to unpost it, which I did, rather than suffer the pain of argument. And that picture itself... no light in the room so the camera compensated with an ultra-slow shutter speed, which meant, without a tripod every picture was slightly out of focus. The miracles of photoshop sharpened it up just enough to use. But pretty second-rate, I thought. Though now a compliment from Bibi tells me it's OK afterall. Thank-you darling. Today I'm off to Delhi for the last leg of this talent search. Then it's back home by the pool. By the way... No! Yo is not with me. He's having a short holiday in Vietnam with his friend Pooki, the transvestite owner of a Pattaya beauty salon, and a couple of friends who work there. As for getting pinched from him - across the length and breadth of India I've had not a single offer, neither boy nor girl... though there was an ageing hooker when I was walking by the waterfront in Bombay yesterday evening who offered herself for 100 rupees (3 dollars). I ran back across the road to the safety of the Hilton bar and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

WEDNESDAY MARCH 19, 2008

From: Baron Michael, Norfolk, UK
Dear Old Thing, warm wishes from chilly Norfolk. And to think only 3 nights ago I was still in Pattaya decorously watching the show at Wild West Boys. The management initiated a competition to Hoopla, on stage, a rather well-endowed young man's cock. The prize a bottle of champagne. Second up to try his luck was our Aussie friend. He didn't win despite three attempts - but he did it with great aplomb, and more than a hint at showmanship. Hope you're surviving the Indian trip without the shits (or the collywobbles as we call it in Norfolk).

What lovely imagery! So different from thrashing rock festivals. But then that's the beauty of our subversive gay lives - moving back and forth between totally different social sets yet fitting easily into both, or more than both... several. Sorry! I'm rambling - 3am and full of wine, with more going in all the time - not the ideal time to post something on the website. Sometimes in the morning I see what I've put and rush to ammend it. Oh shut up Simon... stop mumbling... go to bed!!!

TUESDAY MARCH 18, 2008

From: Gregory Gray, Hertfordshire, UK
hi buggerluggs... it's quite unsettling to read these jim jims who figure the western world is the 'real world' yet somehow the east 'unreal'... it's that very attitude that sends the west bombing eastwards so freely. i learned to play the guitar in singapore at the age of eleven... i had a malaysian guy teach me... simon, it was the grooviest thing to sit outside changi bowling alley with this long black haired cat and learn the hits of the day... 'venus' by shocking blue... 'lola' by the kinks... 'have you ever seen the rain'... those musicians in the far east were beyond groovy... they have naturally fantastic hair (very important) and i remember how well they locked in together as they played in the sundown lounges in boat clubs on balmy evenings... looking back it seems like a dream... but it was very very REAL. why do people have to be such cunts?!

You're so right about the hair. I attended the 'Rock in India' festival in Bangalore last Friday. Two out of the six Indian bands were tremendous, the other four were mindbogglingly dreadful, but such beautiful hair. When long and washed and shaken, Asian hair beats all.

MONDAY MARCH 17, 2008

From: Peter E, London, UK
Hello Simon.... still mucking about in Asia are we??? When am I going to start hearing some of these 'fabulous' acts you've been finding??? Ever??? Anyway... if you get bored and decide to come back to the real world I want to interest you in my nephew... he's still at school but he's passionate about music and I've decided to be the benevolent uncle and finance some recordings. First though I want to find the right manager... I'm attaching an mp3 to get you interested.

Peter - he's awful. He's only a schoolkid so I'm not going to put it on my website for everyone to listen to and laugh at. But I can promise you, you're doing him a disservice by encouraging him. Why not pay for him to have a year out and a trip round the world? Or at the very most, just give him a year when he can go off and confront the music industry for himself. Your getting involved is just going to guarantee his failure (which, having listened to the tape, seems pretty guaranteed anyway). As for 'coming back to the real world' - Asia IS the real world.

SUNDAY MARCH 16, 2008

From: Paul Rymer, Nightporter, UK
Hi Simon, I hope you are well. I have updated the "Nightporter" site this weekend and in doing so came across the attached picture. Can you help me out? Do you know who the guy is with Japan? I don't believe it's you - never had a beard did you?

Nope! Never had one, never wanted one.

The person you're asking about is Finn Costello, the group's favourite photographer. He did most of Japan's album sleeves including the famous one for Quiet Life, which had David alone on the front cover in a red leather jacket. (David had blown the group's entire clothing budget for the album on that one jacket so there was no money left for the others. Solution - leave them off the cover.)

But that was later. The shot above was taken at the photo shoot for the cover of their 2nd album, Obscure Alternatives. But as you can see below, David was already pretty much into hogging the whole picture.

THURSDAY MARCH 13, 2008

From: The Hon. Ronald Franklin, Bangkok, Thailand
I couldn't help but think of the somewhat parallel, but then again, of course, vastly different situations when reading in Time Magazine about the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea and Wham!'s first visit to China. Time magazine wrote in conclusion to Wham!'s visit in 1985, "Just five years ago, rock 'n' roll was denounced as "decadent" and said to be a cause of rape, prostitution and drug addiction. But the judgment on Wham!'s music by Zhou Renkai, an official of the Al-China Youth Federation, which invited the group, was that it was "very healthy for the youth."

Now Time writes 23 years later: "At a dinner after the concert, an emotionally spent New York Philharmonic president Zarin Mehta said, "I'm over the moon right now." He said he had "misted up" at the playing of the U.S. national anthem in Pyongyang..."

Hi Uncle Ron! Interesting, the difference in the two pieces from Time. They seem to show that Wham!'s visit to China was far more subversive. Wham!'s music was presented as harmless happy youth culture but was almost certainly one of the many Western influences that leaked into China in the 80s and helped forment what happened in Tianamen Square. The problem with the NY Philharmonic's visit to North Korea was that it typified the 'America as a Religion' approach of US thinking. The big deal was to play the Star Spangled Banner in the land of the disbelievers. American dreamers, imagining North Koreans rallying around the US flag and planting it, Iwo Jima style, in the middle of the main square in Pyongyang. Far too 'in yer face'!

WEDNESDAY MARCH 12, 2008

From: Susie Kahlich, Los Angeles, California, USA
Dear Simon, I had, in fact, considered installing you at Melisse for a week or two, just to get people talking. Kind of a stealth marketing approach but I have to re- review my budget first.

Here's a little background on where the script stands now: Demon Records (pre-1972 catalogue), very enthusiastic about the project and eager to cooperate; Spiril Records (post-1972 catalogue), also very enthusiastic. Working Title Films has shown interest in the script, but several UK producers recommended I attach talent before finding a producer. I've attached the script and I'd love to discuss your possible involvement further.

My involvement in anything these days requires money food and fun (best in combination). Melisse on the house for two weeks sounds OK, and as a fee I could charge you an amount equal to ten times my daily bill there. Now to the fun...
Well I suppose the script has already given me that. It's very good! The only criticism might be that to understand the story you have to know it already. But then I do. I particularly enjoyed your description of mid-twenties 'me' ("dapper, aristocratic and fabulously gay") drinking whiskey from a crystal decanter as I worked in the office. Wonderfully wrong but I wouldn't change a word. My Ford Thunderbird, though, should be blue not red.
Now then - in what way do you want me to get involved?

TUESDAY MARCH 11, 2008

From: Susie Kahlich, Los Angeles, California, USA
Hi Simon, I'm a screenwriter in LA and I've worked with Rolan Bolan and Gloria Jones on a biopic of Marc Bolan. It's not your typical biopic - it's more like Rocky Horror meets Finding Neverland in a back alley and they get it on, if you can picture that. You're portrayed in the script as well, one of only five people in it who are still living. I'd love to have you involved in the project but I have no idea how to convince you that I'm not a complete nut.

Well thank-you for making me feel incredibly ancient. The description of your script gives me not a clue as to what it might be about but the saving grace could be that, contrary to your protestation, you are indeed a complete nut. You see, I like nuts.
Tell me how you think I should be involved (preferably by being flown first-class to LA to eat endless meals at Melisse), and I shall try to help.

MONDAY MARCH 10, 2008

From: Andy Jay, London, UK
hi Simon... i was going through some old pictures the other day and came across this one... it's you getting an award at the GALAs (the Gay and Lesbian Awards) at the Savoy hotel a couple of years ago... i thought you might like to have it... what was it for anyway..? i can't remember..

I could never really figure out what that award was about. They said I was 'Media Person of the Year', which appeared to mean I was openly gay and often got my name in the papers. But because there were so many other gay people who got mentioned a lot more than me (Elton John, George Michael, Sir Ian McKellen, and at that time three British cabinet ministers too), I suspect the real reason I got it was because I'd agreed to turn up, whereas perhaps the others hadn't.
Since being gay is the thing that's given me the most (and most consistent) pleasure throughout my life, what it boils down to is - I was being given an award simply for enjoying myself. On which basis I think I should be given lots more.

SUNDAY MARCH 9, 2008

From: Brad Anderson, Los Angeles, Calif, USA
Hi Si! Yesterday, rather belatedly, I read your Observer piece about the fall and fall of record companies. A fine read, but tell me, when you do an article of that length for a paper like the Observer do they edit it much? Last time I wrote a piece that long my editor shredded it then put it together quite differently. I was furious for weeks.

Hi Brad. Caspar at the Observer is a really good editor and sensitive too - a few surplus lines went but not much of importance. My real horror story about editing was in the 80s when I used to write a regular monthly piece for The Times. One month, the day before it was due to be published I got a call from Ron Greenslade, the editor of The Sun, which was owned by the same group. He asked if he could run the piece too
It seemed strange. Why should The Sun, at the very bottom of the heap of world newspapers, want to run verbatim an article that The Times considered suitable for its arts page.
"Will you want to change anything?" I asked him.
"Not a word," he assured me.
To be told my writing could straddle such a huge divide in reading tastes was too flattering to resist so I said yes at once. But the next day with both newspapers propped up in front of me at the breakfast table I suddenly noticed that The Sun's version finished two paragrahs short. The whole thrust of my well-argued thesis was in the conclusion of the last paragrpah. Without it, there was no point to the piece. I wrenched the phone off the hook and bellowed my way to Ron Greenslade's office.
He was surprised I was upset. "I think the piece looks rather cool," he said.
"But you've completely left out the last two paragraphs!"
"Oh yes! We ran out of space. But it doesn't matter much. I mean, there's plenty before that. And your name's nice and big."
I wanted to kill him. It was total humiliation. Ten million people were going to read a piece that stopped dead in the middle of nowhere. But as the day passed nobody seemed to notice. Times readers had got the piece in full; Sun readers were unaware anything was missing.
Like I tell artists who want to sue their record company for editing a track without permission, "Don't be so fucking precious!"

SATURDAY MARCH 8, 2008

From: Bobbi Marchini, Villa Christina, Zakynthos, Greece
Simon, I'm an early riser, so having checked in the mirror to see that it's still me and clutching a bucket of coffee I log on top see what my old friend is up to, so I saw the little mention. Thank you darling for appreciating my cooking... it's amazing what a few bottles of wine can do to an old cock!

It seems that every year we promise to meet up but never manage to be on the same continent at the same time, and I do miss you so. My friends all went and had a wonderful time in Cam/Nam, but you were travelling through Feb so I would have missed you anyway... and there was so much to do here, refurbishing the apartments and "remastering" the grounds.

Also I have a small boring painful back problem caused when messing around in my speedboat and it threw me... but most important was wanting to be here if the muse came to call. Having managed to catch the writing wave and ride it to shore I discovered just how much hard work is needed when doing a foodie book, so I stuck close to home to get that done. Which I haven't. But will!

It's pouring outside and a gang of cats are sitting at the window looking in at me in that accusing way that animals do when they want food... the dogs are rather more vocal and I expect the parrot's in a temper, so best get out there and feed them all. By the way, have loved the music pieces and was appalled that Candi Staton has never received royalties. Much love and a big hug. XXX.

Hi Bobbi. Lovely to hear from you. Always so much imagery in your emails. I know your book is going to be fabulous.
I cheated when I included your name in that silly food questionaire. I just wanted you to write to me (though that
coq au vin really was one of life's sublime moments). Your energy amazes me - refurbishing, remastering, messing around in speedboats, feeding dogs and parrots, drinking plenty (I'm sure), and still finding time to work on your book. And this is the 'closed' season too.
I promise you this year we're going to meet up, either on your Greek island or in Thailand. And get the book finished. Please! Like you, it's going to be irresistable.

FRIDAY MARCH 7, 2008

From: Olaf Juerss, Bremen, Germany
hi simon ! if u haven't read this article already, do yourself a favor & read it now ! (by Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode).

Hi Olaf - to tell the truth, I couldn't find much in the article which made me feel I was doing myself a favour by reading it. As far as I'm concerned, whingeing artists are as bad as whingeing record companies. Alan Wilder's principal grumble-point seems to be that current recording/playback technology (i.e. mp3) compresses the records more than ever before which makes it difficult to make pop records of sensitivity.
Anyone bought up wth AM radio will remember the amount of compression that was used on those stations - all in mono, and compressed to the point where there was no rise and fall whatsoever in noise level. As a result, all records made before the advent of FM radio sound better today on mp3 than they have for years. Anyway, pop is transient and is meant to be. It's fashion. And as such should be made for the current mode of sound distribution. In the 60s we made records for AM radio and did our mixes, not on the big studio speakers, but through little radio speakers. Alan Wilder made pop in the 80s for vinyl LPs and FM radio. He's upset that those days have passed. Thankfully he'll soon be a grandfather and will have his grand-children to moan to, instead of us, about the good old days.

THURSDAY MARCH 6, 2008

From: Bibi Espedes, New York, NY, USA
Dearest Simon: I am sending you a song written about me and for me. Please use it to keep the mosquitos at bay in the evenings. Biggest Kiss

Bibi, it's amazing! It actually works. As soon as I played it all the mozzies disappeared. Trouble is, when it finished they all came back again. To keep myself mosquito free from 8pm to midnight I had to listen to it 80 times. I'm now tired of it. Perhaps you could make a high frequency version, inaudible to the human ear.

WEDNESDAY MARCH 5, 2008

From: Julian Downes, London, UK
caviar and spinach? what strange food favourites you have simon... but listen... while you're in an off music mood... (i mean, there's hardly been an email this week on the subject...) i want to ask you something i once asked you when i was researching for a tv programme but you never gave me the answer... your most embarassing tv moment... did you ever have one? or one of your artists...

Bloody hell, Julian, you don't give up easily, do you! But you're right - I'm bored with music this week. Anyway, the embarassing moment was nothing very sensational - I mean I wasn't left speechless by an awkward question, or suddenly discovered my flies were undone - it was just a matter of being forced to celebrate Roland Rat's birthday. I was on the TV AM Breakfast Show with Keith Emerson. We'd both done our bit of chatting with the host, Henry Kelly, when he announced, "Today's Roland Rat's birthday". And he made us get up from the sofa and walk across to where the horrible rodent puppet did his daily five-minute stint.
There was me, Keith Emerson, Henry Kelly, footballer Jimmy Greaves and the weather girl. And bugger me if Henry didn't make us all sing Happy Birthday... to a stupid puppet! In a live TV situation there's not much you can do about it - you either join in and look like a prick or walk out and look like a prick. So we all joined in. But I'd have rather wrung the bloody thing's neck. (And Henry's too.)

TUESDAY MARCH 4, 2008

From: Julia Shand, San Diego, California, USA
Dear Mr Napier-Bell, I have been travelling round the world conducting an amusing poll amongst well-known foodie people asking them what their favourite ten foods are. I will be using this to write a piece about our preferences and how our adult sophistication works as nothing in forming our tastes as compared to the influences of childhood. I want you, with absolute honesty, to think, then list, the ten most delicious and comforting foods that come into your mind - I'm not necessarily talking about complete concoctions like a chefs signature dish including trimmings (i.e. pan-fried chicken breasts with fragrant spices, butternut squash and brie ), although it could be that, but it could also be chocolate chip ice-cream or mashed potato. To make my research conclusions work this needs to be done with total honesty, not false sophistication. (Please mark with an asterisk anything you had never eaten till you were over eighteen).

I hate being asked these sorts of things but I found this actually made me think a bit. Whatever was going to go on the list would obviously have to be pretty arbitary because so much about choosing food is down to one's mood at the time. It would have been much easier if I could have extended the list to thirty or forty things - I mean, look at it - I've left out croissants and pork crackling and even bread and butter. But on the basis of a quick choice, and on the understanding that the following ten things would be of the highest possible quality and preparation, I'd go for...
Caviar* - lamb vindaloo* - new potatos - foie gras* - spinach - bacon - Peking duck* (forget the pancakes, just eat the crispy skin) - cod (baked, fried, battered or even stewed Portuguese style) - oysters* (especially from Donegal or the American east coast) - and Bobbi Marchini's Coq au Vin*.

MONDAY MARCH 3, 2008

From: Jipp Denton, Newcastle, UK
Simon - I can hardly believe that you - the great gourmet - spent Sunday lunch alone in his garden eating nothing more than a salad (albeit with champagne). So what sort of salad was it? Caesars? Niçoise? With freshly poached salmon? With sauteed goose livers?

Nothing of the sort - just a packet of mixed green salad from Tesco and a bottle of Vazart Coquart (from the village of Chouilly, sumptuously full-tasting, with more chardonnay than pinot). What made the salad worthy of the champagne was my miraculous salad dressing - olive oil, apple vinegar, dijon mustard and a little sugar. Get the proportions just right and nothing in the world tastes better.
But in case you think my lunches are getting too simplistic, today I ate at the Normandie (still in my favourite top five). The set lunch is the world's greatest bargain in haute cuisine - today, a rondeau of snails and frogs legs followed by knuckle of lamb and desert from the trolley. Accompanied by plain water it will cost you only a thousand baht, but the temptations of the wine list can easily up that to a thousand dollars or even a thousand pounds. Best thing is to avoid fine wine and bring fine friends instead - like my favourite Bangkokians, Ron Franklin and Leo Nine. We shared a bottle of Chateau de Loei - Thai chenin blanc, and not bad at all.

SUNDAY MARCH 2, 2008

From: Andrew Ball, London, UK
Hi Simon - long time no see. I'm thinking a might come to Thailand for a break in a few weeks. Is everything calm there after the elections and things? I mean with Taksin coming back and all that. Just checking.

Good heavens! What do people think goes on here? Life is always calm in rural Thailand, even if the news makes you think it isn't. Today, in fact, was another election day – voting for the upper house - the Senate.
Senators are not allowed to be affiliated to any political party, though they nearly all are of course, which was one of the biggest objections to the deposed Thaksin government - he packed the upper house with his own nominees. Today’s election was strangely subdued. In the run up to it there have been none of the normal posters round town advertising the candidates - Yo didn't know the name of a single one. We went together to the polling office at the local school. Things were very quiet and outside was a board with photographs of the candidates – five of them - a fat fellow with horn-rimmed glasses, a pompous twat in an overblown military uniform, a slightly less pompous twat (though not a lot in it), a strict-looking woman in white uniform who I took to be a nurse (but when I read her details turned out to be a naval officer), and the only male candidate to be neither old nor dressed in uniform. Yo liked the twinkle in his eye, so he became the chosen one. Outside we bought a mid-morning snack of fried bananas and headed to the flower market to buy orchids for the pots outside our front door. Yo then went off to have lunch with friends on the beach at Sataheep while I fancied a salad by the pool with a book and a bottle of Sancerre. But the wine rack was clean out of white.
Because it was election day I coudn't buy anymore till 6pm so I settled for champagne instead. I ate a bit - read a bit - slept by the pool a bit - and am now belatedly updating the website. Sunday in a seaside town in Thailand.

SATURDAY MARCH 1, 2008

From: Debbie Shaw, Sydney, NSW, Australia
hi simon, i was wondering whether you ever got involved in anyone who did religious music... i mean, could you?? seeing how allergic you seem to be to religion... and what do you think of the current upsurge of Christian Rock which is going through the roof here in Australia... do you think this music really helps promote religion?

I don't really care what the music's about, but I do care who I have to deal with. And my real allergy is to record companies. The same question was asked by someone a while back (but I accidentally wiped their email before I could answer it). They wanted to know, with Christian Rock, did I think it was religious people using music to sell Christianity, or business people using Christianity to sell music. Well...
For two or three years I managed Candi Staton, as charming and delighful a person as you could ever wish to meet or work with. She was passionately Christian yet could hardly find a good word for the Church itself. She'd been married to a Reverend and made many albums of religious music. She'd also worked a great deal singing in churches (and still does) yet seemed to have the lowest possible opinion of the Church as an organisation. (I guess in her case she was talking about the Baptist Church in the southern USA.)
I didn't deal with Candi's work singing in churches, only her secular work. Amongst the things I tried to redress was that in her entire career, although she'd had all those enormous hits - from Young Hearts Run Free to You Got The Love - she'd never ever received one penny of royalties from any of the major record companies. Despite this, she was adamant that when it came to the very worst business practises it was Christian record companies you had to watch the most.
Which more or less answers your question.

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