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MY WEEKLY PIECES FROM SEP 2005 TO JUNE 2006

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

Something else I did last month in London apart from catch a terrible cold was to find a free morning to go with Yo and have our civil partnership ceremony. OK then…. get married!

Why on earth would you want to do that?” my friend Gerry Salmon asked (thirty years with his wife, three children, four grandchildren). “I mean - I've nothing against gays but all this marriage stuff – it's pathetic – like when Elton had that great big party at Windsor registry office, dressed up in drag with that silly wig”.

“Actually,” I explained, “Elton and his partner went very quietly to Windsor registry office in lounge suits with their two witnesses and half-a-dozen close friends. Everything else you read about the ceremony was made up by the media for people like you. Anyway, how can you be so anti-gay? I saw you letching after that transvestite last time you were in Thailand. If the missus hadn't been with you you'd have shagged her in a jiffy.”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“Well can't you connect the part of you which goes that far towards being gay with something in other people that goes a bit further?”

“Look here,” Gerry argued. “You know I'm not prejudiced. I've got nothing against gays – so long as there's not too many of them around at the same time.”

Away from Gerry, I had my own doubts about this ‘gay marriage' stuff. Thirty years ago I would have told you one of the benefits of being gay was being able to avoid getting married. But many things have happened since then. For one, I've been living with Yo for sixteen years and have grown old enough to think about what should happen to my estate when I die. If, at my death, we were to be ‘just friends', Yo would have to pay death duties on our house before he could continue to live in it. If we happened to be on holiday in America and one of us got sick or injured, the chances are the other one would not be allowed into the hospital to visit him. In most parts of the world, sanity reins; in America sanity in these matters has long become a thing of the past. Any gay couple traveling there would do well to travel with a photocopy of the certificate given them at their British civil partnership ceremony.

British civil partnerships for gays are effectively marriages. Every right that comes with marriage comes to gay couples with a civil partnership. In fact, the British government chose to call them civil partnerships not because they were different from marriage but precisely because they were exactly the same. Had they called them marriages the bill would not have passed through the House of Lords.

Still I felt very wary about doing it. There's something about the state interfering in my life which I find intolerable. It reminds me strongly of being a child and the way adults always wanted to check on what I was doing or thinking. The idea that we were promising each other something at the moment we stood in front of the registrar rankled. It simply wasn't true.

When the registrar read out the list of things to which we agreed and asked us to say “I do” (or as we chose instead, “I agree”), that was not the moment the agreement was made. What the State thought we were agreeing to under their auspices had been agreed between us many years before and had long been substantiated by the way we live our lives together. I simply couldn't enjoy the feeling that the State was muscling in on something so personal and intimate. Still – the benefits outweighed the intrusion and I smiled, and assented, and signed the book.

Several gay friends who'd already had their own ceremonies said I would find it more moving than I had thought. I didn't. It felt no different from renewing my driving license or checking in with Thai immigration authorities every three months. But it does feel great to know I can now pop off whenever I like without having to worry that some damn fool lawyer has made a cock-up of my will.

The more cynical amongst my ex-pat friends in Thailand tell me, from now on I should watch out for soap on the stairs. Never mind, the new house we're building is a bungalow.

RELATED LINKS

"Gay marriage is an eclipse of God" (pious crap from the Pope)

A quick guide to registering civil parnerships in Britain

Wikipedia on state of same-sex marriage in the USA

No gay marriage.com (welcome to Bigotland)

Wikipedia on marriage and its history

Tiffany - Thai transvestite show

The Ratzinger Record

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Sunday, June 11th, 2006

Last month in London it rained every day and the temperature was about right for winter pond life. Sure enough, in due course I caught a cold, and it was a real stonker. After a week it went down to my lungs and I started coughing up green bits. When I woke up one night unable to swallow it was time to call the doctor.

These days MDs in England require you to make an appointment and wait a couple of days, so by the time I got to see my doctor I'd thrown off the worst effects of my cold. All that was left was to go along and have a nice chat with him. And why not? I hadn't seen him for a couple of years and he's a pleasant enough chap.

For old time's sake he decided to run a few checks on me – cardiogram, blood tests, that sort of stuff. When he'd finished he stood me on the scales which immediately whizzed round to 18 stone as I could have told him they would.

“You're too heavy,” he said. “You need to lose some weight. You've got bad cholesterol, bad gout and swollen ankles. Lose four stone and they'll all get better.”

Then he gave me a bill for £380.

It's no secret I'm too heavy. Each morning when I pass in front of the bathroom mirror I'm confronted by the jelly monster. If you see a reflection like that every day you don't need an posh English doctor to tell you you're fat, my doctor in Thailand has been telling me the same thing for years. But the trouble is my Thai doctor only charges me four quid and at that price his advice doesn't seem too important. For £380, though, it feels like something worth listening to.

Three days later I got back to Thailand and my bad throat came back again. Doctor Four-Quid put me on antibiotics and told me not to drink alcohol for a week, which seemed like a suitable cue for starting my mega diet.

I haven't tried it since the 80s, but I remember it worked well then. It consists mainly of eating celery, an ounce of which provides just 2 calories yet requires the body to use 5 calories to digest it, a win-win situation. On the first evening I set about making a sort of celery cacciatore (sauté onions with garlic, add seasoning and peeled tomatoes and a little white wine, allow it to meld for fifteen minutes then add chopped celery). Once finished, the trick is to pretend your eating lombata di capretto in Ceconni's, or better still at Savini in Milan - sip your bottled water as if it's Pinot Grigio and with a bit of luck you'll be full enough afterwards that, providing you leap instantly into bed, you'll get to sleep before you feel hungry again.

The problem was, not having gone to sleep sober for the last two hundred years, I'd completely forgotten how difficult it is to nod off when you're not drunk. No matter how tired you are, instead of going to sleep the minute your head hits the pillow you find yourself thinking about things.

To begin with they were quite nice things – the new house we're building, which is beginning to look a treat – the wonderful way Brothermandude played at the Café de Paris last week - the young man at the supermarket who smiles so nicely when he carries my groceries to the car. But after a while I ran out of nice things and had to resort to other things, niggling things - the swimming pool lights which have been fixed three times but still refuse to work - my argument with the local garage who scratched the car while they were servicing it - and the phone bill that includes calls to Kuwait and Mecca that I never made.

After a while I realized sleep was going to be impossible and it was only then that I remembered I'd forgotten to weigh myself before I went to bed. I put on the light, went to the bathroom and stood on the scales.

Brilliant!! I'd lost twenty-five grams, though I couldn't for the life of me think how much that came to in proper British weight. Perhaps working it out would finally put me to sleep. I jumped excitedly back into bed, turned out the light and started calculating. By the time I'd realized twenty-five grams was half a pound I was so wide awake it felt like morning - half a pound weight loss from one meal of celery; that was amazing, I needed to celebrate. So I went to the kitchen, poured myself a celebratory brandy and found a couple of chocolate cookies to go with it.

I was just about to eat them when Yo came home. I heard him opening the front door and just had time sling the cookies in the waste bin and the brandy down the drain, then rush back to bed.

A few moments later he came into the bedroom. “How's your diet going,” he asked.

“Shhh,” I hissed grumpily. “I'm trying to get to sleep.” So he got into bed, put out the light and within seconds was snoring like a warthog.

When I'm full of booze I'm completely unaware of Yo's appalling night noises but when I'm sober they're unbearable. Eventually I turned on the bedside light and read a book till morning.

That was two nights ago, and last night was much the same. For lunch today I had sautéed broccoli, for dinner there's an ounce of fish. The good news is I've lost another half pound, though maybe it's not such good news after all – for even if my weight continues go down at the same rate it will mean four more months of celery and snoring.

All because of the awful English weather.

RELATED LINKS

Best brandy

Cecconis.co.uk

About British weather

Wikipedia about celery

Savini restuarant, Milan

Wikipedia about snoring

Really good chocolate chip cookies

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Sunday, June 4th, 2006

Back in Thailand after three weeks in London, it was a joy to browse through the local papers over breakfast and see oodles of political incorrectness. Newspapers in Thailand love it. Writing in Thai, respected and serious columnists call Koreans ‘pickle-eaters', Chinese ‘floor-spitters', Americans ‘burger-belchers' and Australians ‘kanagaroo johnnies'. I can't think of the last time a British newspaper dared to call a French man a frog or an Italian a wop. But when President Mugabe visited Thailand last year no-one cared that a prominent journalist referred to him as coming from the land of stinky-armpits.

The one nationality which escapes all this is the English. For some reason the Thais overlook all the bad characteristics of package-tour drunks and girl-lusting yobbos and refer to the English as ‘phoo dee', which while it translates literally as ‘good people' actually means ‘classy people'.

“Why?” I've asked Thais many times.

“Because that's how we see you,” they tell me. “The English are the best behaved of all the foreigners who come here.”

I've seen plenty who aren't! Sometimes, with sufficient over-indulgence of wine and brandy, that might even include me. It's incredibly difficult, once suitably filled with alcohol, for an Englishman abroad to be indifferent to bad service or lousy food or a wrongly inflated bill. And if you ever hear me protesting in Thailand that's what it's likely to be about - the bill has come to twice what the menu said it ought to - the ‘selection of fine cheeses' to finish off the meal turned out to be some ancient cheddar and Danish blue kept rotting in the fridge for three months – or the wine by the glass came out of a bottle opened a week ago last Tuesday. But while, in the case of restaurants, we're talking about the genteel grumbles of a classy English poofter like me, for real loudmouths you need to visit girlie-bars and listen to beer swilling football fans over here for a week of cheap fucking.

It's surprising how quickly these visitors forget how little everything is costing them. A beer in a pleasant outside bar costs less than a pound, but if the bar over the road charges sixty pence and the one they're sitting at costs seventy pence that alone will be enough to trigger belligerence. Worse still is when they discover that the pretty bar-girl they're chatting up has subtley wooed them away from cheap Heineken and got them onto imported Japanese beers at three quid each. The bill still only comes to forty pounds but it's a lot more than the four quid they paid last night. Foul-mouthed abuse is just the start of it. If they take the bar-girl to their hotel and find she's a ‘banana surprise' it might require the police to calm things down.

Yet Thais continue to refer to the English as ‘classy people'. It's as if they simply don't see us when we're behaving badly. Or perhaps they don't see anyone in that light. Thai society is without doubt the most tolerant in the world, but the tolerant surface of compromise and smiles actually covers a sinister underbelly.

This morning I drove into town. Coming round a corner a girl was standing in the middle of the road. I swerved to avoid her and stopped, almost touching a parked Toyota. At once the owner was with me.

“You broke one of my rear lights,” he insisted.

My car was close to the man's car but had never made contact with it. Nevertheless one of his rear lights was broken.

“You'll have to pay to repair it,” he muttered menacingly, and glowered at me through the window.

I got out of the car to take a closer look. “I didn't break it,” I said.

“Yes you did – look!” The man pointed to the broken plastic. “It's going to cost 2740 baht to fix. You can check the price at the shop. Now give me the money.”

A policeman arrived and a small crowd began to gather.

“It seems strange," I told the policeman, "that he should know exactly the price a new one will cost. Perhaps it got broken some time ago and he was waiting for a bit of luck."

In Thailand people are killed everyway day as a result of arguments that start like this. Sometimes it happens there and then; more often a little later – usually by a third party who is paid as little as £50. The papers are full of these stories - a policeman shot and killed for accidentally standing on a colleague's toe in a discotheque - a man knifed to death for flashing an admiring glance at a friend's fiancé - a driver machine-gunned for overtaking a flashy car and giving a cocky wave.

Although I knew all this, circumstances overcame caution. "If it was me who broke his light," I asked the policeman, "where's the broken plastic on the ground?”

There wasn't any of course and the man looked at me menacingly, ready to kill. Normally, foreigners, unable to speak Thai, would not be able to say what I'd said, and that's just as well. By plunging in and speaking Thai, I'd effectively called this man a liar in front of a small crowd of people. In Thai eyes that was a worse offence than breaking his rear light.

The policeman, recognising that our positions were now entrenched, turned to the owner of the Toyota . "We need to find a compromise. Perhaps you could find a cheaper light."

The man considered for a moment and agreed. "Maybe I could get one for 1500 baht."

"There you are," the policeman told me. "Give him 2000 baht and it's solved."

"Why 2000 baht?" I asked.

"500 for me," the policeman explained. "Talking to you has made me thirsty. I need a drink."

And there we were! A thoroughly Thai compromise. The policeman smiled, the owner of the Toyota smiled, and since it would have been bad-mannered for me not to do so, I did too.

“Where do you come from?” the policeman asked.

When I told him he immediately said “phoo dee", as if my Englishness had been the reason for me to pay up rather than the threat of being gunned down later in the day.

I handed the man 2000 baht and he gave 500 to the policeman. The policeman turned and gave me a wah - palms touching, fingertips to the nose – a masterpiece of well-mannered politeness - and the owner of the Toyota followed suit. A moment earlier I'd felt I was being defrauded out of 2000 baht, now I was in a circle of respect and politeness. It almost made me forget I hadn't broken the man's rear light at all.

So that was that, the whole thing solved for forty quid, less than the cost of getting someone killed. It's this sort of unexpected occurrence that makes Thailand so intriguing - delight and frustration in equal proportions.

It's good to be back.

RELATED LINKS

Thai blogs

Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand

A Thai teenager in trouble with the police

Police force can't live without taking bribes

Thailand's complete lack of political correctness

Corruption and governance in the New Thailand

'Mango Sauce' - Taking a prurient interest in Farang life in Thailand

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Sunday, May 28th, 2006

Sometimes it beats me how so many people can have so much to say. Open any of the world's top newspapers any day of the week and there are half a dozen highly paid journalists sounding off about something - Simon Jenkins in the Times, David Aaronovitch in the Guardian, Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph, Bob Herbert and a dozen others in the New York Times; not to mention the Washington Post, the Times of India, Le Figaro, the Globe and Mail and another couple of thousand other papers around the world - and all this on just one single day, thousands of forceful well-argued opinions with more to come tomorrow and more the day after that.

Finding things week in week out on which to express a controversial opinion seems a pretty tough job. I know all too well the three or four things in my own life that get me agitated. To have to add a new one to the list each week would be mind-numbing.

This was confirmed to me when I spent a couple of hours last month chatting with Julie Burchill. For many years Julie has been Britain 's opinionist par excellence. Not only is she commonsensical and down-to-earth, she has the good sense never to be fair or well-balanced. In the period of her life when she was taking cocaine, she argued that drugs were essential to a healthy intellect and anyone who didn't take them was an idiot. When she lived in London anyone who lived anywhere else was a halfwit. Now she lives in Brighton anyone who's still in London is brain dead.

You'd have thought someone like Julie would be happy to earn her lifelong income from expressing opinions. But in the end she couldn't stand it. A few weeks before our chat she'd suddenly realized her house in Brighton was worth enough that, if she sold it, she would never have to express an opinion again. So she did. She bought a flat for a quarter of the proceeds, invested the rest and handed in her notice to The Times. ‘What a relief,' she told me, ‘to be able to read newspapers without having to scour them every day for something I could profoundly disagree with.'

If Julie's story is the norm it means that behind all this opinionising in our daily newspapers there is nothing more than the need for a pay cheque. Most of these opinionists are clever enough to know their rants will do nothing to change the world. Politicians will continue to be corrupt, religionists to preach intolerance, racists to racialise, pacifists to pacify, England to lose test matches, Americans to talk loudly in restaurants, and Ken Livingstone to say daft things. Not to mention all the other events that make life interesting – wars, terrorist acts, sex scandals, earthquakes and tsunamis. Which brings me to the most popular subject on which opinionists like to opinionate - saving the planet.

The ecological state of the world seems to be every opinion maker's number one fallback. In no time at all they can knock up a thousand words on why we (or politicians, or scientists, or multinational corporations) should be doing more to save the planet, yet the reality is all too clear. People who say they want to save the planet aren't really interested in the planet as such; they're interested in the continuance of human life.

For my part the planet isn't something I get too excited about. I reckon it's doing fine. I admit, left to its own devices, it might eventually turn into a lump of ice or a whiff of gas (and bang go all of us), but as someone who likes to read a book without wishing to change the storyline I'm reasonably happy with that.

Which brings me to the one thing that happened last week that really should have got me writing a Burchill-like tirade. I was sitting in Le Suquet, an excellent fish restaurant in Kensington, eating a dozen fine claires, when the person at the next table lit up a cigarette and blew smoke all over my food.

It's extraordinary that this sort of thing can still happen in London. I may not care much what happens to the planet – but blowing smoke on my oysters……

RELATED LINKS

About Le Suquet

History of oysters

Wikipedia on Ken Livingstone

The Julie Burchill random recycler

Pieces by Simon Jenkins for The Times

David Aaronovitch argues in favour of ID cards

Janet Daley - British should learn to be like Americans

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Sunday, May 21st, 2006

Arriving in London last week, it was straight from the airport to a TV interview for a new pop programme. I do lots of these things – I Love the 80s. I love the 70s, Hall of Fame, Battle of the Rockstars, all that sort of stuff.

There are two good reasons why I do these programmes - firstly, it proves I'm still alive - secondly, it pays for a few extra dinners and bottles of wine.

This time it was ‘Battle of the Popstars' – a three hour programme during which a dozen or so well-known popstars will get voted down to a final three, and then to a winner. The lady producer seemed to have decided I should be the industry's gay spokesman and nearly every question was pointed in that direction. “What do you think about Westlife's Mark coming out?” was the first thing she asked.

It didn't seem worth explaining that I'd never heard of Mark leave alone his ‘coming out'. All I know about Westlife is that they're a stiff looking boy band who wear clothes that make them look manikins in the window at Aquascutum. My ignorance of the group's more intimate details didn't seem worth going into, so I simply told the producer that if this chap Mark had come out it seemed like a sensible thing to have done.

“But please could you put it this way…” she asked; then gave me the soundbite they were hoping to get. Since it didn't seem to clash with my general view of life I gave her what she wanted.

I was meant to have recorded this programme six weeks ago but couldn't because I was abroad. The programme is now almost finished and the producer knows exactly what she's missing. “We'd like you to say that Boy George's emergence as a star in the eighties helped other young gays come out,” she said.

“I'm not sure I agree with that. It might even be the opposite. Boy George was so outrageous that a lot of young gays were turned off by him. They didn't want to say they were gay for fear of being lumped together with him.”

“That's not what we wanted from you on that one,” she told me, so I tried a different tack, “Well how about this then… Boy George probably helped a lot of effeminate young gays realise they could be proud of what they were and should have no fear of being themselves.”

She seemed happy with that so we moved on to Elton. “Could you please say that Elton's video with drag-queen Rupaul for his remake of Don't Go Breaking My Heart was a further instance of the music industry helping young gays gain confidence in themselves.”

Although I'd heard the Elton-Rupaul duet I'd never seen the video so I didn't feel qualified to answer. The producer and I fenced around a bit until I found something that satisfied her. Elton had once told George Michael that at the beginning of the eighties he'd deliberately lowered his voice (he'd decided it was unbecoming for a person of his age to sing in such a high timbre), so I told her, “The beauty of singing with Rupaul was that Elton could have a female person to duet with yet still be able to lower the key to his new manly voice.”

Then we reached the inevitable questions about George Michael. More fencing and more compromise.

If all this sounds tedious and annoying, it wasn't. Instead of the usual hour of meandering questions with the editor later having to search for the juicy bits, this had only taken fifteen minutes. All in all, I liked the efficiency and I wondered why the programme-makers didn't make their interviews even more efficient. Why not script the whole show, print up the list of required answers and send them out to a few dozen industry names. People could choose which answers they would be prepared to give and the filming could be done in just a few minutes per person. In fact, with modern technology perhaps it would be possible to create the whole thing digitally from a still photo.

Next time I must remember to suggest it.

RELATED LINKS

Mark of Westlife comes out

George Michael website

Aquascutum website

Boy George website

Wikipedia on Rupaul

Elton John website

Westlife website

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Sunday, May 14th, 2006

Jazz versus rock has long been a debate. I often hear people complain that so much time in a live jazz performance is taken up by waffle, going nowhere. And it's true. A live jazz performance is often like a séance, the group dithering around, trying this and that, improvising experimentally, looking for that magic moment.

When that moment arrives the band starts to swing. Swing is nothing to do with power or drive or musical aggression, it's to do with cresting a wave. Swing, when it clicks into place, is as if the entire band have lifted themselves simultaneously, miraculously, onto a huge rollercoaster of a Hawaiian wave. The trick is then to stay abreast of it, balancing on the crest as it pounds towards shore. The musicians are not in control of the power that drives them, it takes them over. All they can hope to do is keep their balance atop of it as it surges forwards, giving them and the listeners the most glorious lift-off. To be part of an audience when an artist pulls of this supreme trick is the reason for tolerating all of live jazz's dithering moments. To have been there when Oscar Peterson or Errol Garner or Miles or Dizzy or Charlie Parker actually ‘did it' was worth every second of pre-magic-moment waffle.

Rock music takes a different approach, as does most rhythm & blues and big band music. This is commercial music with an audience sitting waiting. The audience want something dramatic to be delivered and aren't prepared to wait around while the band experiment. Rock musicians don't have the luxury of paddling around in deep water waiting for a miracle wave that will project the forwards; they have to create their own momentum. Instead of searching for swing, rock bands pound ahead regardless - aggressively pressing forward with the song and its accompanying riffs.

For the most part rock adopts a different rhythmic form from jazz, the four beats of the bar being broken into even-sized portions while Jazz's ‘dotted' rhythm breaks them up unevenly. A rock band won't fall of its Hawaiian wave because it's not on one; a rock band's forward flow is more like being aboard a speeding bus, the band knows what the route is and there'll be no surprise twists and turns. While the jazz audience revels in the unexpected, the rock audience is usually waiting for the familiar. Jazz, when it swings, lifts up the mind like pot or E or acid and takes it somewhere unknown. Rock is like amphetamine, focusing the mind on simply surging forward. Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Guns and Roses, U2, Radiohead – all of them have delivered great music, but all of them turn their backs on swing in favour of adrenaline-fired rock.

In sexual terms, great moments of rock are like hard fucking. Great moments of jazz are like flying on a kiss.

RELATED LINKS

Wikepedia on Dizzy Gillespie

Oscar Peterson website

Wikipedia on rock music

Charlie Parker website

Led Zeppelin website

Wikipedia on jazz

U2 website

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Sunday, May 7th, 2006

Last Sunday Yo and I had lunch with an elephant. It wasn't what we'd planned - we meant to have lunch with Yo's grandpa, but the elephant rather took over.

For the last few weeks Yo's grandpa has been staying with his auntie in a small town just outside Rayong, a seaside city about forty minutes from where we live in Pattaya.

Rayong isn't a touristy city, it's the central base for the Thai navy and is also the centre of the Thai motor industry. Our plan was to take Yo's auntie and her youngest child together with Yo's grandpa to a beach restaurant. I should point out, we're not talking about white table cloths and Martini umbrellas. Rayong is totally Thai. Restaurants on the beach consist of plastic tables and chairs on the sand underneath large thatched umbrellas just a few feet from where the waves wash up. The cooking is done at the side of the beach road - flamed barbecues and smoke filled woks. The end result is seafood of unsurpassable freshness - mostly fish and crustacea.

There were five of us for lunch - Yo, me, his grandpa, his auntie and her one-year-old boy. For that many people we ordered far too much food - rock lobster with garlic sauce, fresh oysters with chili dip, crab sautéed with curry paste, prawn fried rice and a fried fish with ‘three-flavoured' sauce.

“The largest fish you've got,” I told the waiter, (because all too often they bring some tiny little red snapper with hardly enough meat for one).

Then the elephant appeared.

I first saw it some way off, lumbering towards us along the sand as the food was being delivered. At the time I was chatting to Yo's grandpa. He's a charming chap of seventy-eight who spent his twenties and thirties as a performer with a 'likae' troop.

'Likae' is traveling theatre. Largely dying out these days, it was once the only entertainment rural Thai towns and villages ever got. Somewhere between a British repertory group and a circus, the troupe would come into town for one or two nights, set up their stage in the town square and perform well known plays with lots of familiar jokes and bawdiness.

Yo's grandpa was the troupe's comedian. Anything funny - be it telling a joke, singing a comic song or falling off the stage and showing his behind. He hasn't done it for forty years but he still has the broadest smile and continuously spread across his face. Over lunch we ate our way through the mountain of food we'd ordered while he told us a few of the funny things he used to do. It was at the end of one of these stories, with Yo grinning broadly and me laughing loudly, that the elephant lumbered up. It was just a baby, exceptionally cute, waving its head from side to side like an Indian shopkeeper making an apology.

Since we were busy eating, its minders would normally have led it on past, but when the baby elephant heard my loud laugh, and saw Yo's big smile and his grandpa's great grin, it stopped, right in front of our table, and started pawing the sand with its foot like a petulant child.

Just at that moment the waiter brought the fish. I'd asked for the biggest and expected enough for four or five. What we got was something the size of a small shark - all of three feet long, beautifully battered and fried, with a large head and sad reproachful eyes. We were already satiated and had completely forgotten we'd ordered it. For it to arrive at this late stage of the meal and be so utterly huge was ridiculous. And we all burst into laughter.

The elephant took to this enormously. It shook its head vigorously and turned its eyes from mine to Yo's to his grandpa's. Then suddenly, totally unexpectedly, sat down.

I'd never seen an elephant sit before except in a circus. I'd always presumed it wasn't a natural position for an elephant, not really comfortable, but this was obviously not the case. The elephant was clearly as comfortable as could be and had no intention of moving. It liked our laughter and intended to stay for more, which made us laugh even louder. This in turn made the elephant join in, waving its trunk and making a noise that imitated our laughing quite closely. Its minders, fearful I was about to complain, urged it to get up and move on.

“Let it stay,” I told them, and with all that fish to get through suggested they join us.

I gave the waiter some money and asked him to run up the road to buy cheap bananas for the elephant. I hadn't realized how cheap they would be. He came back with twenty kilos and plonked them down in front of it leaving the minders looking most upset. “We could have sold you those”, they told me, piqued. Still, they got over it and we all ate and chatted happily.

Between noisy munches, the elephant appeared to take a real interest in what we were saying. “I think it's me,” Yo's grandpa said, “I always got on well with animals.”

The elephant's two minders were students who did this part-time on Saturdays and Sundays. One was a veterinary student the other was doing business studies. They were a pleasant couple and I didn't want to get into coflict with them over the exploitation of Thailand's elephants, so I just listened. "We pay a thousand baht to rent the elephant for the weekend," they told me, "and usually we can make a profit of three thousand baht from the food we sell to people who want to feed it."

The man they rented it from was an 'elephant entrepreneur'. He had about thirty of them. "All babies, poached from jungles in the north or sold through the back door of private zoos".

When they weren't being taken out by their minders these elephants usually weren't fed much. "Underfeeding keeps them small," the minders told me, "It makes them more attractive to the public."

The baby elephant who lunched with us was called Boon. By the time it had eaten all the bananas it was no longer hungry so I gave the students two thousand baht to compensate for their loss of business.

This may sound like a strange day out, but for Thailand it all seemed pretty normal.

RELATED LINKS

Thai fish recipes

About 'likae' theatre

Baby elephants not fit for shows

The unemployed elephants of Thailand

Everything there is to know about Thai food

Thai elephants play musical instruments in a band

The elephant situation in Thailand - a plea for help

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Sunday, Apr 30th, 2006

Last Monday's Bangkok Post had a close-up picture of a 13 year old Moslem boy being circumcised, his face twisted with pain. There was no anesthetic and the circumcisor was not even a trained nurse. Under the photo was a short piece in which the boy told a reporter how frightened he was and how much he would prefer not to have it done.

Admittedly this was Thailand not Britain, but every Jewish and Moslem boy in Britain suffers much the same fate and it puzzles me. How is it that in Britain fox-hunting gets people worked up while cutting bits off boys' knobs doesn't? Why aren't the adults who do this prosecuted? Religion is the obvious answer, but not a complete one, because, if a parent were to cut a boy's arm with a razor and let blood, claiming it was being doing in the name of religion, the child would be out of their hands and into care in a flash.

Circumcision is power-mongering – no different from taking a red hot branding iron and burning the name of religion into the flesh of the boy's bare buttocks. It both brands the child and warns him of religion's power to interfere in his life. But circumcision, as we all know, is only the visible tip of the iceberg - worse still is what religionists try to shove into children's brains. The Pope objected to Harry Potter books because, he said, they might stimulate children to think about good and evil in a way which didn't follow Christian teaching. Children thinking for themselves, of course, would be a disaster for religious dogma.

Whether it's Christianity, Islam or Judaism, it's all the same sludge. It clogs up young brains like saturated fat in old people's arteries and eventually leads to a brain attack. Christians have been a bit smug this year, looking on in a superior way as their fellow Islamic religionists suffered multiple brain attacks and ran around threatening to kill cartoonists. Forty years ago I remember Christian mobs doing much the same thing. John Lennon told a reporter the Beatles were bigger than Jesus and the next day religionist thugs flocked into the streets of southern US cities threatening to kill any Beatle who dared come to town. Not surprisingly the Beatles were scared. They never played live again.

Here's a few things that might be a step in the right direction. Secular governments should list religion as a mental disorder. Parents with this disorder should not be allowed to bring up children. Protection should be given to children under existing laws governing mental health. Three new laws need to be passed.

•  Churches and places of worship should be subject to the same licensing laws as pubs and bars and no-one under the age of 18 should be allowed into them.

•  The age of consent for entering into any religious ceremony should be 18 and a ban should be imposed on all christenings, baptisms, faith related circumcisions and religious initiation rites for anyone under that age.

•  Anyone attempting to convert a person under 18 to a religious belief should be prosecuted and put on the religious offenders register.

RELATED LINKS

Foreskin restoration

History of circumcision

Religion and brain damage

Circumcision as a memeplex

Can circumcision cause brain damage?

Thought contagion - how belief spreads through society

Religious belief causes higher murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide

Sunday, Apr 23rd, 2006

Lunch on Sunday, whether in summer by the river, or winter at a packed local restaurant, has a style and feel to it all of its own. Strange that a mere day of the week should have such an influence on the feel of a meal. Yet even now, living by the sea in a tropical climate, I find Sunday presents options for midday eating that are distinctly different from any other day. Mainly, I suppose, it's because normal life doesn't have to resume at 2pm but can be postponed till the next morning.

Today, for instance, Yo and I drove ten miles down the coast to a small fishing village where a dilapidated restaurant sits on stilts above the sea and attracts a Sunday crowd of film and television personalities from Bangkok. They come in hordes to eat fresh lobster and crab and shellfish, driven there by chauffeurs in S-type Mercs, bringing their own wine, posh bottles of La Tour and Montrachet. They drink it sitting on plastic chairs at scrubby old tables, but with a miraculous cooling breeze blowing off the surrounding sea.

Another option is Pascals, a classy local joint that provides a voluminous Sunday buffet. A couple of weeks back, proceedings were silenced mid-lunch by some visiting Korean opera singers at the next table who stood up and gave a magical impromptu performance. It reminded me of the restaurants Christopher Hunter used to run in London where this sort of thing happened week after week.

Before the days of Conran and Gordon Ramsay, Christopher was one of London's first great restaurant entrepreneurs. His initial venture was in the sixties, La Popotte in Knightsbridge, just thirty yards from Harrods. This was the number one Sunday lunch venue for the new young music industry – pop stars, groups, managers and songwriters – the Beatles, the Stones, Dusty, Cilla – at one time or another all of them turned up to Christopher's Sunday lunches, which often went on till 6pm.

At the Popotte Christopher was just the manager but by the end of the sixties he'd put together enough money to open his own restaurant, Hunters - a dazzling palace of luxury in Chelsea, with a white Steinway especially constructed for duetting and a display of plants to match Kew Gardens.

Christopher was the consummate charmer. One summer Sunday, when it might have been better to have driven out of town, a crowd of us woke late and arrived at Hunters in the early afternoon. Christopher came to our table and announced he had fresh lobster.

“That would be perfect,” I told him, “but will it be enough? Lobster portions are so small.”

Christopher was so willowy he could stand two feet from your table yet somehow lean forward from the waist with enough flexibility to speak intimately into your ear. Doing this, he whispered, “Sweetheart, don't tell anyone but I'll slip you a double helping.”

He did, and it was delicious. But when the bill came he'd charged double too. Well why not? He'd never said he wouldn't, and anyway, he needed the money.

Chris had a fatal addiction. On Monday mornings, having packed the place out all day Saturday and Sunday, he simply couldn't resist putting his fingers in the till and taking enough money for a few days in Tangier. Although the profit from Hunters was substantial, Christopher's taste for Arab boys matched it pound for pound, and after three years Hunters had to close.

Undaunted, Chris found new backers and opened Friends, a vast wharehouse in Chelsea where Sunday lunch became the restaurant's entire purpose. This allowed Chris to spend five profligate days a week squandering profits in North Africa. Friends was enormous (a disused warehouse), and held a five hundred people. Lunch was roast joints – lamb, beef, pork – the simplest of fare but matched by Chris's extraordinary flair for persuading the likes of Judy Garland or Shirley MacLaine or Danny La Rue or Frankie Howerd to turn up and do a show around four in the afternoon. How he persuaded stars of this magnitude to come I have no idea. He couldn't have been paying them or there'd have been no money left for Morocco on Monday.

Not surprisingly, after a few years Friends was closed and replaced by Company – new backers, new address, but basically more of the same. Chris took help for his addiction and swore off Morocco. For a whole year he turned up for work every day, packing them in seven days a week, using his charm to make sure every table ordered champagne. As before he also provided the best cabaret in London. It was there, before she became a famous novelist, that I saw Lynda La Plante doing exquisite stand-up comedy.

Like all recovered junkies, the day came when Chris's self-control exploded. In a matter of weeks, two years profits were thrown to the wind in Tangier. For a month Chris disappeared altogether. When he came back the doors to Company were locked and a bailiff's notice was posted outside.

Yet Chris still pulled the trick off one more time. This time downstairs in the Kings Road. Now there was no cabaret, just Christopher dispensing endless charm to the camp and famous. Sunday was still the big pull of the week, and as before, Monday was till-fingering day.

This time, though, when the restaurant sank, Christopher went with it. His energies finally drained by too many boys and bankruptcies.

RELATED LINKS

Liza Minelli website

Danny La Rue website

Franke Howerd website

Shirley Maclaine website

Wikipedia on Sunday lunch

Lynda La Plante biography

The 'Burroughs' report on Tangier

---

Sunday, Apr 16th, 2006

Before rock ‘n' roll, songs were the medium; records were simply a way of delivering them to the consumer. From rock ‘n' roll onwards, records themselves became the medium. The pop era had begun.

Record companies realised that a penny's worth of vinyl pressed with a hit song could be sold at a profit of ten thousand per cent, one hundred times its real value. In the course of just a few days, a million pennies could be turned into a million pounds. But before this could be done they had to embark on a few tedious chores – they had to find a singer, a song, and a record producer who could turn it into a unique sound.

A hundred years ago, when the recording of music first started, it was its ability to capture magic moments that made it so alluring – fantastic moments of classical performance or jazz improvisation could be captured and delivered to the home as recordings. But from the pop era onwards, recording ceased to be a mode of delivery; it became the art form itself. Recording pop and rock was not the art of capturing magic moments; it was the art of creating them.

Coupled with this was the art of marketing; music and commerce in perfect harmony, the packaging as important as the recordings it contained. A rock or pop album which didn't sell could not be termed an artistic success; commercial success was a defining part of the music's artistry. The work-of-art was the record, in its sleeve, in the shop, actually being sold.

Record companies learnt all this and for forty years executed it perfectly. Between pop and rock, singles and albums, reissues and compilations, record companies had half a century of stunning profits. Billions of albums were sold, all of them pressed from vinyl costing one hundredth of the album's retail selling price. But with downloads and the imminent demise of vinyl records, record companies are feeling fearful about the future. Only at Sony have they understood where things are going.

In a recent executive meeting in LA, I found myself with a group of people listening to a newly completed album. We were not, as we would have been in the past, trying to decide which songs would make the best singles. We were picking out the musical phrases which would make the best ring tones. Currently record companies see ring tones as an additional way of promoting albums, but, with the income they receive from licensing them, it won't be long before the ring tone is seen as the industry's new single. Even more important is that mobile phones will be the most popular way of delivering all other forms of music.

Sony have foreseen this and put themselves in an impregnable position. They are both a record company AND a creator of mobile phone technology. My guess is it won't be long before we see Nokia bidding for Warner, Motorola for Universal and Samsung for EMI.

 

RELATED LINKS

History of vinyl

History of Sony

History of rock and roll

History of recorded music

Forbes Magazine on the economics of ringtones

Q Magazine - 100 Best Record Sleeves - special edition - buy on line

A successful subway musician has some advice for an ailing music industry

Sunday, Apr 9th, 2006

So there are the Rolling Stones, playing in China twenty years after Wham! paved the way for them, and they can't even get a Chinese audience to come and see them. Well it's not surprising really. They're only playing China because the name Shanghai has a good ring to it – good enough to create a profit from a live telecast of ‘The Stones in Shanghai' back in the USA. So in the end, their motives come down to much the same as ours were with Wham!... TV.

Wham! played China in order to get an entire week of once-an-hour coverage on the three US news channels. It worked, and the resulting flood of publicity was enough to take them from being just another Brit pop act to being a ‘stadium' group. Three weeks after they played in Beijing we were booking up a US tour in seventy-thousand-seater venues. It seems weird, though, that twenty years later the name ‘China' still has enough of a ring to get the Stones a weekend of worldwide media coverage. At least with Wham! we got the hype right and played for an audience of Chinese teenagers.

The Stones average ticket price in Shanghai is around US $60. That means an entirely privileged audience – expats and the like. Besides, the Rolling Stones are completely unknown to the Chinese. Young people are more familiar with Linkin' Park or Coldplay, and older ones went through their youth with no Western music at all. What will be really exciting is when China becomes a market worth cracking for Western groups.

Sooner or later young Chinese will latch on to an up-and-coming Western rock or pop group and give it a market in the East before it has one in the West. It happened in Russia forty years ago with a British group called the Arrows, and all over South East Asia ten years ago with a group called Michael Learns To Rock. It's a weird phenomenon for a new group to find themselves a huge act somewhere in the East and absolutely nothing when they get back home again. Once China manages to do that for a Western act it will have come of age as a music market. Meanwhile, I suppose it's telling the world it's now open for pretty much anything.

Watching the Rolling Stones play reminded me that only last year Shanghai opened a world-class Formula One race track. In racing terms, the Stones are the equivalent of some dreadful stock car event - lumbering old wrecks with their doors hanging off, lolloping round the course crashing into each other and barely able to make it to the finishing line. It's not a great image for the Anglo-American music industry that a bunch of ancient decrepits like the Stones are representing it in the world's largest emerging market. But I suppose it's the truth. Just as the Stones look like a load of battered car wrecks, so does the Western music industry look to be in terminal decline.

Perhaps, even for pointers on business, the West might start looking to China to see how things could be done better.

RELATED LINKS

Yahoo news - the Stones in Shanghai

'I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch' - Buy on Line

Information on rock and pop music in China today

About Wham! (from 'I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch')

About The Rolling Stones (from 'Black Vinyl White Powder')

What people said about 'I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch'

Interview with me for Agence Presse re taking Wham! to China

Sunday, Apr 2nd, 2006

It was an idea I had many years ago, a sort of reverse version of Alistair Cooke's ‘Letter from America '… ‘PHONE CALL TO THE USA'.

Not by an urbane Englishman living in New York writing home to his fellow countrymen with an explanation of America's foibles, but a fifteen minute chat to an American audience from a gay, God-hating, globe-trotting, over-indulging, wine-aholic, opinionated, gossipy, cantankerous British pop manager.

The advantages of making a radio programme this way would mean I would not have to change my life in any way whatsoever other than the need to find fifteen minutes a week to record myself and perhaps another five to post, wire, or email the result to whoever in America would broadcast it.

As time went by offers started to crop up but I was profoundly lazy about chasing them up because I'd realised that to talk for fifteen minutes would mean preparing three thousand words to read from. And writing three thousand words each week was going to take a lot longer than fifteen minutes – it might well take as long as fifteen hours, which, with all the travel, socializing, eating, drinking, partying and pulling that had to be fitted into my life, simply didn't seem a practicable amount of extra time to be found. But out of the blue came Larry Flick.

Larry Flick has a daily morning show on that new phenomenon of American broadcasting, satellite radio. For some reason, American courts, or government, or powers-that-be, have for the moment decided that what comes into your homes via satellite radio is free of governmental controls and censorship. To receive satellite radio you buy a special radio and pay an annual subscription and initially it was thought this would be a slow growth situation. Then Sirius, one of the two corporations who plunged into this new form of radio, managed to seduce Howard Stern away from terrestrial radio.

Howard Stern is someone who likes to call a spade a spade – or rather, what he likes best is to call a penis a dick, a rectum an asshole, a vagina a cunt, and the President of the United States all three of those things. On Sirius radio he can; and the end result has been 3 million new subscribers.

But three months have passed and Sirius are beginning to worry Howard Stern might eventually run out of outrageous things to say. Looking for new ideas, Larry Flick had the idea to get hold of that gay, god-hating, globe-trotting, over-indulging, wine-aholic, opinionated, gossipy, cantankerous British pop manager I mentioned earlier, and ask him to contribute fifteen minutes a week to his own daily show on Sirius's 'Q' channel.

The beauty of Larry's idea is its lazy simplicity. I don't have to prepare a thing. Larry prompts me with questions, all I have to do is accept his prompts and go chattering into action. Radio isn't like TV - gaps and pauses can't be covered by hand gestures or frowns and smiles - in radio even the smallest silences are forbidden territory, as are ‘ums' and ‘errs'. Which is fine. Because as everyone who has ever filled me up with drink at dinner knows, the problem isn't starting me off; it's trying to make me stop.

But Sirius being Sirius, and Howard Stern having set the tone, Larry is after more than a few tips on pop management and a list of my favourite records – he's after dirt – the who's who of music-business scandal - who did what to whom, and when, and why, and what did they get paid? In fact, what he wants is pretty much what I give forth with towards the end of most evenings when I'm full of good food and wine. But since I wouldn't dare do a radio show, even on Sirius, with a sip of wine upon my lips, Larry is going to have to be my alcohol. His task is to lull me into that careless delightful world of after dinner indiscretion. And I'm sure he will.

Larry's simpatico voice and charming phraseology makes him a master of gossip extraction - he has the sort of teasing tongue that could persuade a vicar to tell a dirty joke or a headmistress to take off her knickers and wave them during school assembly. In short, he's a master at coaxing out stories that might be best left untold.

The programme is going to be bit of a contest. I want to hold on to some of the best things for a future book or two. Moreover I don't want to leave my house each morning and have to look both ways in case some hired head-stompers are lying in wait for me. On the other hand, I realize that Larry is interested in getting the best and most salacious tit-bits for his audience. Somewhere between our two positions lies the show he will get.

Actually, it's just what I was looking for. I can chatter about whatever I choose; I can be opinionated, gossipy, dodgy, bitchy or even downright dangerous. And if a wrong word slips out now and again, what the hell, this is satellite radio and verbal mishaps are what the subscribers pay for.

A mere fifteen minutes a week without preparation. What laziness. What a gift. What a fairy godmother you are Mr Larry!

RELATED LINKS

Sirius.com

About Lary Flick

Howard Stern.com

About Sirius's 'Q'channel

About satellite radio receivers

Howard Stern links and best moments

BBC archives - Alistair Cooke, 1999-2004

Sunday, Mar 26th, 2006

In America last week, after a little contretemps with US immigration officers (now branded with armbands declaring themselves part of ‘Homeland Security' with that awful thirties Germanesque ring about it), I was left thinking how strange it is that the USA is the only country whose national identity is based on a belief in what it stands for rather than the common background of its people. Freedom of speech and expression is a religion even between Americans who hate each other's views. And when you see American soldiers going off to Iraq it's always with the proviso (not just from the President but from everyone across the political spectrum) that they are going to ‘spread our values'. Which is pretty much what religious crusading has always been about, coupled of course with ‘securing markets', so that the crusading nation has enough money to keep up its lifestyle back home, thus providing a billboard for the values it wishes to spread.

That 98% of white America claims to be Christian while in Europe the figure is around 30% becomes more understandable when you realize that Americans are already believers anyway – believers in ‘being American'. It's this which so easily allows them to welcome strangers into their culture, for it isn't a culture as Europeans know it, of language and manners, but simply of assent. America is a church - ‘being American' is a religion - to become American the newcomer simply needs to convert.

This explains why Americans, anywhere in the world, whether soldiers or tourists or businessmen, are always so intrusive. It's because they are missionaries, full of righteousness and zeal about who they are. The European and Asian tradition has been to travel more unobtrusively. (OK, I know the exceptions – busloads of beer drinking Germans, football supporting Brits, floor-spitting Chinese, but, hey!– don't mess up my argument.)

Nowadays, as Europe becomes less religious it becomes increasingly difficult for its inhabitants to continue to believe in America. But, if America is a ‘religion', what is France, or Britain, or Germany?

France, with a language which always ends in phrases with an upwards inflection, seems to be a question. While Italy, undoubtedly, is a family lunch, with babies crying, cousins flirting and relatives arguing.

Germany is a mechanical noise – efficient but un-pretty, like its language. Japan is a huge bath-house to which foreigners aren't admitted. Holland is a slice of clean flavourless cheese; Andorra, an unreachable itch in the middle of your back; China, a loan shop; Thailand, a wet dream; and Australia, a gloriously rude fart.

England is still what it always has been - a big whinge.

RELATED LINKS

Attention all citizens living in God's country without his permission - a special invitation from the Department of Faith to become a real American

www.fart.fm - why Australia needs a new enery policy

On American morals, by GK Chesterton

Mind your manners when in Germany

The meaning of American citizenship

How to tell if you're French

The Italians, by AA Gill

Sunday, Mar 19th, 2006

I forgot my damned visa.

What an embarrassment. I was meant to be giving a talk in Shanghai to a hundred or so people on the subject of ‘How I Got Wham Into China'. Then, just 12 hours before I was meant to be flying, sitting at the bar of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club, I suddenly remembered I'd forgotten my visa.

I got it the next morning but by the time it was safely in my passport and I'd got myself to the airport it was 4pm, exactly the time I was meant to stand up and start talking at ‘M on the Bund'.

This was last Sunday, and I finally arrived in Shanghai around 7.30pm. I went straight to the venue, passing through Pudong, the new area of the city, gaudy and giddy.

Shanghai annually devours 80% of the world's output of cement. The city is a maze of skyscrapers, crazily designed glass and steel, some going up crooked instead of straight, some twisting around in the middle - anything clever that an architect can think of. Below them, the streets are neon madness, yet Shanghai has bad electricity shortages. On the outside, the skyscrapers are dazzlingly lit, looking like some sort of static firework display, inside, the power is cut, the heating is turned off and fifty story hotels operate with just one lift.

‘M on the Bund' is Shanghai's best European restaurant, and the event is the Shanghai literary festival. The woman behind the festival is Michelle Garnaut, who owns the restaurant and gives it over to seminars during the day.

When I arrive it's already 8.30 and literary events are over for the day. The restaurant is buzzing, with Michelle standing at the entrance greeting customers. I introduce myself and hang my head in shame. She leads me to the bar where a dozen or so people have stoically hung on waiting for me to arrive. They're an odd bunch, a professor from Oxford University, a Brit called Paul who runs an expats club, another Brit called Paul who has a local PR company, a couple in education who live in New Zealand, and a few assorted Americans and Aussies. They've been waiting five hours and deserve some entertainment so I give them the low-down on lecture tours in American colleges.

“You're met at the airport by a couple of blue-rinse grannies well into their sixties (honorary secretaries of the college speaking club), who drive you to your hotel. They're tiny, these two, the one driving can't see over the top of the steering wheel, and suddenly she'll turn and say, ‘I fucked Jeff Beck, you know. It was when the group were in Chicago.' These two old crones were teenage groupies when I toured America with the Yardbirds in the Sixties. Now they're respectable grandmothers. The driver nods towards her friend. ‘Annie went with Jimmy Page - sucked his little dickie.' Annie nods and grins, 'Bit disappointing sizewise.' She suddenly gives me a ferocious grope. 'For God's sake,' I shout, 'I'm gay'. The two grannies cackle with glee, 'Oh we love gays', then grope again. And then you're taken home to meet the grandchildren and eat bran muffins, all respectable and normal. This happens day after day, city after city."

The crowd in the bar are laughing now. These twelve people, at least, have forgiven me for not arriving earlier. Michelle comes to take us to the dinner-table. I order Moroccan soup followed by roast pork with crackling. Michelle seems intent on getting me as pissed as possible - each sip of my wine is a summons to the wine waiter to top up my glass. And he's exceptionally pretty. Michelle winks down the table to me, I sip more frequently. Clever woman.

Next to me is an Englishman who writes children's books. “How long do they take to write?” I ask.

“Sometimes just a day,” he confesses. “Children's books have more pictures, less pages and the print is bigger.”

He's currently number one on the Children's Book best seller list, so he's doing well. “I write about ten a year,” he explains.

I sip my wine. The waiter appears. It's like rubbing a magic lamp and getting a pretty genie. I've only been in Shanghai three hours and I'm pissed already.

Opposite me, becoming blurred, is the couple who live in New Zealand, both Brits, and both charming. She runs a website selling CDs, books & games shop; he arranges seminars and educational exchanges between New Zealand and South East Asian. “Malaysia 's my favourite place,” he tells me, but doesn't explain why. Or maybe he does and I can't remember. I'm distracted by the wine-genie.

The children's author leaves to watch a rugby match on TV and the New Zealand couple say it's bedtime. Surprisingly it turns out to be well after midnight. I thought I'd only been there ten minutes.

Michelle moves me up the table to join Paul the PR guy, and the Oxford professor and his wife. Paul is tall - horn-rimmed and smartly dressed with a Michael Caine accent. He admits to having had a hint of a homophobia until he read my book I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch. “It was your two exes that cured it”, he explains. “So cute the way they keep popping up throughout the book like a couple of characters from a children's TV show.”

The university professor starts grumbling about racist Britain. “They refuse to treat me as British,” he grumbles.

“But you're not, I point out, you're Indian, and have an Indian accent.”

He seems offended by this simple observation and I try to ameliorate his pique by explaining how much I enjoy living in Thailand and not being treated like a Thai. “Being a privileged outsider is better than just being one of the crowd.”

It doesn't work. The professor looks at his watch and leaves for bed. This little exchange has apparently taken two hours for it's now three o'clock. I wonder what else I said that I can't now remember?

While the wine genie ebbs and flows Michelle announces, “We need someone else gay at the table.”

I've no idea why. Did I say something? Never mind - Bruno, the restaurant manager joins us, sitting to my right, perfectly dressed, beautifully spoken and pleasantly bulky, like a bookend. Perhaps that's why Michelle asked him to sit there. Seeing me sway, she realised I would be safer hemmed in by his benign solidness. Now I can continue my flirtation with the genie.

Then suddenly it's all over. It's 5.30am and I'm being transported to my hotel room where there's a power cut. There's no heat. The room is spinning. It has twin beds so I grab both duvets and bury myself under them. In three hours I'll be on a plane to Los Angeles where I've got a business meeting later in the day.

Tiring work, these literary festivals.

RELATED LINKS

Lonely Planet on Shanghai

Frommers on M on the Bund

Architecture in modern Shanghai

About the Shanghai Literary Festival

Website of M on the Bund's architects

www.realgroovy.co.nz - CDs, books, games

Kunal Basu, fellow in strategic marketing, Templeton College, Oxford University

Sunday, Mar 12th, 2006

Last week I was in Hong Kong for the International Literary Festival. I've never been to a literary festival before so I thought I should try one. It's a strange set up. I'm used to music business events – the Grammy Awards, or the Brits, that sort of thing. Or the other type of music-business get together, like Midem, which takes place in Cannes each January, where thousands of music business executives from all over the world turn up to guzzle escargots and carre d'agneau and sit on luxury yachts in the afternoon sun getting wildly drunk on local wine. Then there are the music festivals where four or five of the worlds top artists come together for a half-million dollars apiece to play for 200,000 people in the rain in Glastonbury.

What simply doesn't exist in the music business is an event where famous pop stars and rock stars get together to talk about their work, telling each other how best to belt out a good chorus or wiggle a sexy buttock during a guitar solo, which in a literary way is what's going on at this strange festival I'm attending.

The participants are all authors, and every hour there's a little seminar or talk at which they discuss the literary equivalent of chorus-belting or buttock-wiggling – such things as, ‘how to make fact read like fiction', or ‘how to make fiction read like fact', or ‘how to give rural life in China a prescient story line within a Western literary framework.' That I, too, was supposed to be giving one of these erudite talks was a trifle daunting.

To say I'm no stranger to Hong Kong is putting it mildly. In 1969 when the British government increased the tax rate to 84%, like most people in show business I got up and left. I formed a company in Hong Kong, where the maximum tax rate was 15%, and then set about rolling around the world doing odd bits of business wherever they cropped up.

At that time Hong Kong was going through a most innovative period. A bright spark called Steve Beaver realised he could get licenses from major record companies all over the world to release hit songs in Hong Kong for very little money. In Hong Kong the market for English language pop was tiny, so if he wanted to issue an album featuring current top ten hits from England or America, a fee of a few pounds per song was sufficient. Record companies all over the world fell for this and as a result, for almost no investment at all, Steve Beaver put together the world's first compilation album featuring only top ten songs. Nowadays, compilation records are commonplace, but in the mid-seventies it was quite revolutionary. For Steve and the record company he workled for, what made it work particularly well, was that the records weren't just sold in Hong Kong but all over Asia, and then to the rest of the world too. In no time at all, Steve had made a small fortune, and as time went on an even larger one. And finally, of course, pop compilations albums became the standard all over the world.

There was another smart entrepreneur in Hong Kong at the time, an Austrian man who had the idea of recording Eastern European symphony orchestras playing well-known classics. He made the recordings in an old concert hall in Hong Kong which had rather fine acoustics and he used symphony orchestras from Russia, the Ukraine, Korea, China and Kazakhstan. With this technique he founded a record company which became the world's largest independent seller of classical music – Nexus Records. It was no rip off - the performances were superb, and so was the recording quality, and the prices were half of what major companies charged. So you see - Hong Kong has two separate claims for being right at the centre of international music-business history.

In the eighties, I was back again, passing through twice a month on my way to Beijing where I was negotiating for Wham! to play a concert in China. It was as a result of writing about that period that I was at last week's literary festival. My book ‘I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch', about taking Wham! to China, was published in Hong Kong last year and I was meant to be talking about it.

Actually I dodged around giving a proper talk. I persuaded a nice local fried of mine – Phil Whelan, a radio DJ and interviewer - to come up on stage and ask me questions, thus completely avoiding the necessity of preparing anything. As a result, instead attending of literary meetings trying to get ideas on how to pitch my talk, I spent three days in Hong Kong doing what I always do best - eating and drinking.

What's amazing about Hong Kong is how the economy, which has always boomed, is booming even more. Apart from an ever-increasing number of skyscrapers and bridges and tunnels, there's an explosion of restaurants. For the locals, being trendy has long been a passion, but whereas it used to be enough to sport an Armani bag or Nike trainers, nowadays it's equally important to be seen eating in trendy Spanish, Italian and Asian-fusion restaurants.

One night I ate in Soho - the restuarant specialised in 'Italian tapas'. Two years ago this area was steep-stepped alleyways leading up and down between warehouses that stored clothes or dried foodstuffs. Now the whole area (and it's huge) has been transformed into a centre for smart restaurants and bars, rather reminiscent of Sitges or Amalfi, but being Hong Kong there's a moving staircase running up and down alongside the stone steps.

Another day I had lunch at the Foreign Correspondents Club. This is the very opposite of the smart new places that are blooming everywhere, it's been virtually unchanged for a hundred years. It's THE place to eat a vindaloo, and I had a lamb one. Although it was distinctly Indian there was a touch of Chinese about it, all the chilis being fresh rather than half of them being dried which is more normal. It was truly sensational, as was the fire round the rim of my bum for the next forty-eight hours.

RELATED LINKS

Website on day to day life in Hong Kong from a Westerners perspective

Top twenty restaurants in Hong Kong

Hong Kong Literary Festival website

A selection of literary quizzes

Hong Kong world fact book

History of Hong Kong

Literary festivals

Sunday, Mar 5th, 2006

I spent last Saturday afternoon in ninety degree sunshine parading round a rural Thai village with a load of dancing drunks. The event was Yo's younger brother entering the monastery. In a week he'll be out again, but from today for seven days he'll be a monk.

It should have been Yo (and it should have been 12 years ago when he reached the age of 21), but he refused. He says it was his dislike of organised religion but I think it was more to do with having his head shaved. Anyway, it was decided by the family that one day Yo would make amends for his refusal by paying for his younger brother to do the same thing. How Yo managed to put it off for 12 years I'll never know – possibly by building his parents a house. But finally the day of reckoning came and he paid up (well actually, he got me to pay half).

I hadn't been to the family home for a while. On the day of the party I flew to nearby Roi-et; Yo had gone ahead by car. The area round Yo's house is truly rural and used to be extremely poor. Now it seems to be going up in the world.

The big news when Yo meets me at the airport is that the empty plot of land next door has been bought by a lawyer who's building a five bedroom house with a swimming-pool. This raises the tone of the neighbourhood even higher than it has already been raised by Yo having a European boyfriend. (By the way, ‘boyfriend' isn't the right word. The Thai word for lovers of all sorts - husbands, wives, fiancées, boy-friends, girl-friends and even people you met last week and have taken a temporary fancy to - is ‘fan' (derived from the English word associated with worshipping film-stars, pop-stars and footballers).

Yo and I arrive to find his mother and a dozen of his aunts sitting on rush matting outside the house preparing food and decorations, the two so intermixed that it's difficult to tell decorative food from edible decoration. Bawdy rural female talk is balanced by bawdy rural male talk emanating from a group of Yo's uncles on the other side of the yard, sloshing back local beer and whiskey. One of them stands up to greet me in a state of such inebriation that falling down is the only possible option, yet somehow he stays upright and, although he's unable to say a single word, manages to raise the whiskey bottle and take another swig. That's what these ceremonies are for – the women gossip, the men get blind drunk.

Midway between these two groups Yo's autistic nephew suddenly emerges from the house and stands peeing into the air. The breeze blows his pee into the faces of Yo's drunken uncles making the women scream with laughter.

Tomorrow is the ordination ceremony and there'll be open house all day but tonight there's a party - friends, relatives and neighbours – two hundred people seated at twenty or so tables. It's a trifle absurd that every impoverished rural family has at some time or other to find almost half the price of the cost of building a house just to give a party for their eldest son to enter the monastery for a week. But religious authorities know these things are made more attractive when a party's attached and there's usually someone around who can pay up. In Yo's case it's him, plus his European ‘fan', and why not? Dinner, beer and whiskey for 200 people, plus the hire of a stage and sound system, the cost of musicians, singers and dancers, and then tomorrow all of it for a second time plus another band to perform while a procession of relatives and friends weaves its way round the village to the temple – all this for less than two thousand pounds.

The party starts at seven in the evening and it's extraordinarily well arranged. It takes place in the space between the two family houses. One is Yo's (where his mother lives, together with his brother and his brother's ‘fan'). The other house is where Yo's brother-in-law and sister live with their two children, one of them the autistic boy with a flair for lively peeing. This bit of backyard between the houses now looks like an open-air night club – twenty large tables set for ten people each, red table cloths, a festive-looking stage, music playing, waiters running around serving food and drink, and more guests arriving by the minute.

Next to the entrance to Yo's little family estate his mother sits in her party best alongside a large gift-wrapped box with a slot into which new arrivals are expected to drop an envelope containing money. It won't be much – maybe just 40 baht (little more than fifty pence), but most of these people are poor, and besides, they have to attend too many of these parties, each one requiring a contribution. This same weekend, for instance, there are three other parties within a radius of sixty yards, all with their own group of party-goers - friends, neighbours, relatives, musicians, singers, dancers and drunken uncles.

The music is now in full swing and appallingly loud. “Why,” I ask, “does it have to be?”

“Thai people gauge enjoyment by volume,” Yo explains. “Ours is the loudest of the three parties, so it must be the best.”

Yo's table is the biggest and the most fun since it includes a glamorous group of transvestites, way prettier than most of the women at the party. It's extraordinary how accepted and liked transvestites are in rural society. I heard the female heads of two families talking. One of them admitted that in their family they didn't have a single transvestite. “A family without a transvestite?” the other one boomed. “What sort of family do you call that?” It could have been two Jewish mothers discussing a family without a lawyer.

The next morning I try to sleep late but at 7am it starts again. A minibus of monks arrives for some team chanting along with sixty or seventy relatives who occupy the party tables from last night and devour a substantial breakfast, the men already starting on whiskey and beer. The monks get barely a dozen relatives to come and join their on their dais. The rest of the visitors sit around chattering, eating and laughing, happy for the religious bits of the ceremony to drone on in the background. The children, even more oblivious to it, run around playing, knocking religious objects off the dais. The chickens and dogs run around with them; a passing buffalo sticks its nose through the front gate then wanders off again.

And thus the day dribbles by. After lunch the young monk's head is shaved and then there's the parade, which brings me back to the bit about cavorting round the village with a load of drunks dancing to an amplified drum-and-banjo band, the amplifiers and loudspeakers pushed along on a trolley by two small boys.

That's a bit unfair, actually, because the women are all sober, and the drunks, even the drunkest ones, are happy and benign without the slightest sign of aggression. But it's tiring. The sun is out, the temperature is in the high eighties, and we're all meant to look animated. For the first half hour everyone is, then the enthusiasm rather fades.

After half-an-hour we're meant to arrive at the temple where we're due to take a rest while the religious ceremony takes place. But today there are too many new entrant monks for them all to be accommodated so that bit's been delayed till later. It means that when we arrive at the temple we have to turn round and dance our way back home again, which is a bit of a strain. By the time the procession gets back to the house the sun has taken its toll. What set out looking like a happy wedding train has arrived back looking distinctly funereal. But water and shade (and more whiskey) quickly revive everybody, and the band plays on.

On Sunday morning, well refreshed, I set off with Yo and his family to watch the last bit of all this - a glimpse at the newly ordained monk in his temple surroundings.

Unlike Islamic or Christian temples, Thai Buddhists put the majority of the decoration on the outside of their temples. Despite looking enormously grand outside, the inside of this one is plain as can be - like a municipal youth club in Wigan or Cleethorpes.

Any time spent with Thais at worship soon convinces you that theirs is not like any other religion. It's as light-hearted and friendly as everything else in Thai life. There's none of that sense of being recruited into God's army – no ‘Onward Christian Soldiers' or ‘Warriors of Islam' - nothing militant, or threatening, or intimidating. While the senior monk chants, the women giggle and chatter and the men pop outside for more whiskey. The final part of the new monk's initiation ceremony requires relatives to tie bits of string round his wrist. There's just enough reverence to indicate respect, but no more. It's more like a family game after Christmas lunch than a religious ceremony - a pleasant community ritual, rather like a Tupperware party. Maybe that's what religion was always meant to be like.

Whoops! I'd better watch out. I seem to be going soft on it.

RELATED LINKS

Transgenderism in the Thai Buddhist Tradition

About Isan, the Northeast of Thailand

Transvestites change the Thai army

Life as a Thai monk (by a Dane)

Patterns of drinking in Thai men

About Thai Buddhism

Thai festivals

Sunday, Feb 26th, 2006

‘Have you ever been raped?'

I was eating lunch with a gaggle of friends last week when one of them asked the question in general around the table.

It reminded me that I had been - on a couple of occasions, actually - but for the purposes of lunch I bought up just one of them.

It was when I was twenty, hitch-hiking in Italy. I was alone with no fixed plan. I'd just got back from two years in North America working as a musician. I'd quit because I'd decided I was gay and didn't fit in, but the moment I got back to London I went potty over a girl. When she made it clear she had no interest in me I decided to head for the continent, to run away and clear my mind. I got together ten pounds and set off for France.

By the time I'd hitch-hiked to Menton on the Italian border I was down to my last fifteen shillings and still had no clear idea of what I should be doing with myself. In the absence of any clear pointers I carried on.

Later that day I was standing on the main road from Genoa to Pisa feeling exceptionally hungry when a small Fiat stopped for me. A pleasant Italian man, around forty perhaps, explained he was heading for the next small town. He didn't speak English so we got by in poor French, mine poorer than his. He explained he was the owner of a small factory and rather well-known in the small town we'd just left. He didn't have a current girl-friend so once a month he went to the next town to have sex with a girl from the local brothel.

His story made me strangely nervous and as we approached the next town he asked if I'd like to join him. If I did, he would pay for a girl for me.

I couldn't pretend sex hadn't been on my mind for the last few months, even so, sex with a prostitute sounded pretty adventurous. But one of my golden rules was to experience everything, so I went along with it.

In the event it turned out rather different from what he'd described. The brothel, which I was quite excited to see since it would be my first, turned out to be nothing more than an ordinary Italian cafe with rooms for rent and a few dingy women lounging round a juke box. The man paid some money to the manager then took me upstairs where we both had separate rooms. He told me he'd only booked one girl but we could share her.

Ten minutes later he knocked on my door and said he was ready. When I went to his room there appeared at first glance to be a large white sack on his bed. It could have been a heap of peeled potatoes but in the event it turned out to be a naked old whore.

‘You go first,' he said

Being somewhat naïve I thought perhaps if I undressed and climbed on it might all work out. But it didn't. I clambered aboard and she instantly hugged me in a grip of iron – she must have been a lady wrestler. While I lay there crushed and out of breath the Italian man jumped up behind and rammed himself home, a bullseye in one with no cream or spit to help.

Fuck me, did it ever hurt!

Ten minutes later I was back in my room in great pain. I checked things out in the loo and found there was a fair amount of blood. After a painful rinse I limped back to the bed and lay down. The Italian man popped in to say my room was paid for and so was an evening meal and breakfast in the morning. Then he left.

For a while I lay on the bed and moaned, but despite the dreadful throbbing in my bum, hunger became an even greater pain. I hadn't eaten all day and had scarcely any money left, so I showered and gingerly dressed myself, then hobbled downstairs to the dining room.

Later it occurred to me that this scene might take place in the hotel's dining room on a regular basis. If the man came to the town once a month, as he'd told me, this was probably what he did each time. The hotel would have witnessed a succession of butt-wounded young chaps like me passing through. At the time the thought never occurred to me so I was less embarrassed than I might have been. They served me food and I ate it - spaghetti with clams and a carafe of vino bianco.

Afterwards I limped back to my room and slept soundly. In the morning, still hungry, I had coffee with three croissants. But I was bloody sore.

From the hotel to the autostrada was a painful trek but I finally reached it and stood with my thumb pointing towards Rome. I didn't know why I was going on, but if I'd chosen to go back I wouldn't have known why I was doing that either. To advance seemed better than retreat.

It was just as well I did. In Rome I met a young hairdresser, the same age as me but much more sexually self-assured. He fell for me and me for him.

By the end of the week I had a much clearer idea of where my willie was leading me.

RELATED LINKS

About Pisa

About Genoa

About Menton

World brothel guide

Lonely Planet guide to Rome

Recipe for spaghetti with clams

Are Italian cafes are an endagered species?

Sunday, Feb 19th, 2006

One of the joys of traveling throughout the seventies and eighties was that the Iron Curtain was such a well-defined line between the world's good and evil countries. To pass through it onto the far side was one of life's thrills, as enjoyable as arriving at a famous ‘beauty spot', though in Eastern Europe the points you arrived at would be better described as ‘ugly spots'. In East Berlin or Warsaw or Moscow it wasn't the beauty of the city that made it worth being there, it was the underlying feeling of excitement and danger. It was a tension that stayed with you well past the moment you cleared immigration and customs on the way back home again. It only dissipated when the plane left the ground, and then only if you were flying British Airways or Air France, certainly not if you were on Aeroflot, and if you were travelling by train it continued until you finally crossed the border back into the West.

The train from Hamburg to West Berlin ran for several hours through forests in East Germany, the line fenced in on either side with barbed wire. More than once when I was on it, the train screeched to a halt and was suddenly filled with East German police running from end to end, shouting and banging their automatic weapons against compartment windows. On one occasion they found the person they were looking for in our compartment, a meek middle-aged man with glasses. He was dragged off the train and thrown into a waiting truck, leaving the other passengers nervous and afraid. Then, just half-an-hour later, we were getting off at West Berlin, as prosperous and safe and Western as any city in the world.

Once, going through immigration at Warsaw airport, someone from our flight was pulled behind a partitioned screen and within seconds horrific screams and ferocious shouts were heard. In the West, we would have wanted to find out what was happening. In the East, we hurried on, glad not to know.

These were just two small things amongst hundreds. Turning up to do a TV show, the director who had directed the show on previous occasions was no longer doing it. It was rumoured he'd been thrown in jail for going to a town near the Finnish border to watch a Western rock concert that could be picked up on TV there. Yet, peverseley, in a popular Moscow theatre a so-called 'rock musical' had been running for several years.

Thoughout the seventies and eighties Moscow was as drab as any city could ever be – dirty, unwashed buildings, dreadful grubby hotels full of rats and bed-bugs and bullying state tourist guides who would announce that your flight was delayed for a week, then hand out vouchers for seven days of hotel lunches and dinners that were identical, one after the other - smoked sturgeon followed by boiled chicken. This was the only place in the world where, if you didn't like the hotel food, you couldn't go out and buy something to supplement it – there was nothing in the shops. Occasionally in the drab cold of a Moscow winter you'd see a huge queue – the sort of queue that in Britain would mean tickets for the Cup Final or a Bruce Springsteen concert. On asking what it was for you'd be told, “They've got potatos.”

There were always a few foreign artists that did well in the Soviet Union. The state record company made a killing, paying a small flat fee for the right to press an unlimited number of records. In the eighties I managed a particulalry popular artist - a German girl called CC Catch whose records sold in Eastern Europe in huge numbers. As a visiting pop manager, I was able to see a side of life few locals ever got to see. Sometimes amongst the gloom and intimidation, you found pockets of entertainment and luxury. Hidden behind a peep-holed door on the third floor of a drab office building, there might be an illicit restaurant. These places served excellent food with lashings of caviar and vodka. The customers were ballet dancers, film stars, politburo members and mafia chiefs. Call-girls, and even boys, were sometimes offered by our hosts, though to indulge was madness, since the rooms provided for congress were bugged and taped, ready to provide state officials with ammunition for blackmail.

It was this sort of thing that gave us real life spies, like Burgess and Maclean and Philby and Blunt. And the extraordinary divide between sparkling Western European capitals and dilapidating Eastern European ones provided the backdrop for all those great gloomy spy books by Len Deighton.

Everything about Moscow was designed to intimidate. Even its greatest pieces of architecture were overpoweringly oppressive, the more so for being black and uncleaned. You didn't need to read about Soviet history to know what this place was about. You could feel it in the air - hanging like a thick mist on a cold country morning – suspicion and corruption.

Strangely, though, this atmosphere was magnetic. I never left Eastern Europe without feeling relieved to be out, yet was never away without wanting to go back again.

But nowadays it's all gone.

Nowadays, you check into the Moscow Marriot or the Intercontinental and it's as lavish and chic as any 5-star hotel in the world. You drive through streets lined with endless fine buildings, restored and floodlit. You go out to eat at any one of a hundred first class restaurants. And if your business is music you'll be dealing with the local branches of Sony or Universal or Warner. Moscow today is as pleasant and clean and prosperous as London or Rome or Paris.

And to be honest - it's a great loss.

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Sunday, Feb 12th, 2006

Male mosquitos, surprisingly enough, are benign creatures. It's the females who are the blood-sucking, disease-spreading, itch-producing monsters.

A male mosquito has fleshy lip-like mouths called palps with hairy antenna for gathering pollen from flowers and plants. A female has something quite different. To enable it to suck blood from its victims and inject a nasty dose of scratch-provoking saliva, the female's face is equipped with a hypodermic-like snout that shoves its way into human skin - vicious, pointed and sharp.

Needless to say, when mosquitos fall in love they don't do a lot of kissing. Things might be different, though, if a pair of males got together. With those big fleshly lips they should find it quite sensual - but apparently they've never been known to try it. According to Bruce Bagemihl in his book ‘Biological Exuberance', although there are 476 species of animal in which homosexual behaviour has been observed, including 67 types of insects, mosquitos are not one of them. If you were a water-boatman bug or a parsnip-leaf miner or a Mediterranean fruit-fly, then just like a human being you'd have a one in ten chance of fancying a member of your own sex. A tsetse fly or a checkerspot butterfly can turn out as queer as a coot, as can a hen flea or an ordinary old cockroach, but not it seems a mosquito.

Amongst most other animals gay romance seems to be in full bloom. At Slimbridge wildfowl reserve in England, two male flamingos, Carlos and Fernando, are inseparable. They've been cohabiting together for more than five years and twice a year perform the elaborate courtship dance usual to males and females. They then build a nest and make off with the freshly laid eggs of their heterosexual neighbours which they rear as adopted children.

In Coney Island aqurium Wendell and Cass, a pair of male penguins, have lived happily together for several years, and at the zoo in Jerusalem a pair of male vultures called Dashik and Yehuda recently reared a baby vulture chick. But for the full picture of gay behaviour in the animal world we need to look in the wild. There, it seems, just about every known mammal is at it, from elephants to bison to killer whales to polar bears. Plus, of course, Bonobo chimpanzees who are one hundred per cent bisexual and use recreational sex to deal with conflicts between individuals.

And when it comes to conflicts, there's a chap in America who certainly needs dealing with.

Fred Phelps runs a website called ‘God Hates Fags'. This week he's been demonstrating at funerals of US servicemen killed in Iraq . Phelps is a bit of a nutter. His raison d'etre for these demonstrations is that in the USA homosexuality is legal and therefore servicemen who loose their lives are being killed defending a sodomist country. He also has a website called God hates America, and another called God hates Sweden, which for some reason he's decided has even more gays than the USA.

Fred Phelps founded and runs the Westboro Baptist Church, whose sole purpose is to demonstrate publicly against gays. It's pretty offensive stuff, yet such are the rights of free speech in America that police are sent to these funerals to protect Mr Phelps and his family from the wrath of the deceased serviceman's relatives. The sort of signs Phelps' gang hangs out at these funerals say things like ‘Aids Cures Fags'', 'Fags Die God Laughs' and ‘America is filfthy as Sodom'.

Mr Phelps's and his gay-loathing followers number just 75, over 50 of which are from Phelps' own family, which on average would suggest at least four or five them are gay, a fearsomely difficult thing to deal with, I would have thought, with the head of the family being a manic psychopathic fag hater.

Of course, all the hatred Mr Phelps has inside him might be solved if he were to copy Bonobo chimpanzees and try a bit of gay sex with someone, though it would be a brave man who would suggest such a thing for he has a fearsome reputation for violence. Court affidavits from two of his sons show that as children they were battered and beaten almost to death by him.

Phelp's website, ‘God Hates Fags', is spawning lots of similarly named sites. One of them, ‘God Hates Figs', has been much objected to by the American fruit growing industry. And several gays websites have sprung up in retaliation, amongst them ‘Fags Hate God' and 'God Hates Fred Phelps'.

Fred Phelps's principal argument is that homosexuality is unnatural but this tenuous belief is undermined by Bruce Bagemihl's book about animals which demonstrates just how natural gay sex is. With nearly all mammals and birds, most fish, many reptiles and at least 67 types of insect enjoying gay behaviour, it seems likely that Fred Phelps is going to have his work cut out finding enough hatred to go round. But there might be a solution if he could turn his emotions the other way about. Instead of hating, if he were to find species totally devoid of homosexual tendencies, perhaps he could learn to love. And it's there that the mosquito comes in.

This dedicatedly straight insect could provide him with just what he needs - a Damascus vision, a heavenly revelation rejecting hate - perhaps it could turn Fred Phelps into a decent man.

On the other hand it could give him West Nile virus and Dengue Fever and leave him to die. Which, come to think of it, would be infinitely preferable.

RELATED LINKS

Godhatesfigs.com

Godlovesfags.com

Godhatesfags.com

GodhatesAmerica.com

GodhatesFredPhelps.com

Gay penguins spark debate

A survey of gay behaviour in animals

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Sunday, Feb 5th, 2006

A bloody stupid week all round. All those Western politicians rushing around telling us how wrong it is to say anything that might offend people's religious beliefs.

I don't get it. Christians, Moslems, Jews, Hindus – brain dead the lot of them. You've got half the world believing in Goldilocks and the other half believing in Humpty Dumpty, and now we have politicians running round telling us we can't draw cartoons of mythical characters.

By the time I was eight or nine I'd already observed that the people who ran the world around me were a difficult and contrary bunch. At that age, that meant school teachers. Children were meant to be in awe of them, yet the teachers made us bow our heads in prayer each morning and mumble for guidance from someone even more powerful than they were.

I've no idea why, but by the time I was five or six, I was convinced there was no such thing as God, and I was nonplussed to understand why all these school teachers needed to close their eyes each day and mutter voodoo nonsense to a fairy-tale omnipotent figure. It gave me, from the earliest age, a feeling of utter disrespect for school authority. And if I ever questioned anything that went back to a teacher's faith, I simply got punished. When I was ten, I asked a teacher how she could equate her Christian belief in the sanctity of life with support for the death penalty. And simply for asking, I was punished (made to stand in a corner with my arms outstretched). “For being disrespectful”, was how she put it.

I don't know what led me to see things from such a perverse point of view so early in life, but with all this lack of common-sense in the adults around me, I decided, well before I was ten, the only way I would survive was to treat the world as a game. I would play according to the rules imposed on me (i.e. do things the way adults told me I had to), but would try to come out winning. Later, having learnt to play the game successfully, I reached the age where I was first able to vote (21 in those days), but decided I really couldn't. Having set myself the challenge of getting by in the world as it was, to vote would be to cheat. Imagine playing squash, and then when you find yourself getting behind, proposing the rules be changed to help you win. My game was to play the world as other people had made it. I had no interest in trying to shift the rules in my favour. It would have taken the fun out of it.

But there was more to it than that. When I looked at the people we were meant to vote for, they all looked like my old school teachers – endlessly bowing their heads in prayer and referring to God almighty. Having survived school and moved into the real world, how could I possibly volunteer to put myself under the leadership of any of these potty God heads? And that's how things still are. Show me an ‘out' atheist in politics, and I'll do my best to vote for him.

This week, with everyone scared to say what an utter load of rubbish this whole cartoon thing was, it struck me even more forcibly than ever what an utterly dumb thing ‘belief' is. It reminded me of a friend I used to have, Ed Morris, a Canadian whom I met when we worked together in the mail room of the Toronto Star in our late teens, and whom I stayed in touch with long afterwards.

Ed was an atheist. But he came from a religious upbringing and later fell in love with a girl from a Catholic family. His wife-to-be's parents were adamant – they would not allow her to marry a man who had no faith. Ed refused to pretend he was a Christian but promised her parents that he believed in God "in his own way." They agreed to the marriage and shortly after it Ed told them he was a 'Chickenist'.

Only Ed knew the real degree of their fury, but for as long afterwards as I knew him, at least fifteen years, he stuck to his story with a totally straight face and I never once saw him laugh or twitch an eyelid as he expounded on his personal belief that God was a large purple chicken called George. Why it had a man's name Ed didn't explain, but it must have been a chicken (and not a cock) because Ed believed it had ‘laid' all the planets.

Ed never wavered in his straight-faced explanation of this delightfully Edward Learesque piece of nonsense and eventually no-one in his wife's family bothered to take him up on it anymore (though sometimes behind his back you might catch an aunt or a cousin making chicken wing movements with their elbows while softly clucking.)

Finally it was down to his six-year-old niece, Rebecca, to set things straight. One Sunday lunch she heard about his chicken theory and was aghast.

“Uncle Edie,” she said scandalised, “that's really stupid - absolutely stupid - how can God be a chicken?”

“Well why not?” Eddie asked her.

“Cos chickens don't have beards,” she told him. “And everyone knows God's got a beard.”

As a religious observation it seemed as sharp as any other. But with religions being best suited to six-year-olds and people who believe in giant purple chickens in the sky, it's very boring to be told by politicians that we have to be respectful of them.

TOTALLY UNRELATED LINKS (because I'm sick and tired of the subject)

Religious jokes

About the dodo

Colourful gay cartoon porn

Fifty best restaurants 2005

A fine piece of Japanese gay porn art

Bryanboy.com (self-love at its highest)

Babaslings - a trendy way to carry your baby - or even a substantial picnic

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Sunday, Jan 29th, 2006

Nothing is more disconcerting than to wake up in the morning and find a stiff cock pressing urgently against you when the person on the other end of it is someone you don't fancy.

As I've grown older, this unfortunate situation has occurred less often, but as a teenager, and in my twenties, usually as the result of hitch-hiking and unwisely accepting an offer of a bed for the night, it was something that sometimes had to be dealt with. I had no ability to deal with it through the obvious method of submitting myself to the organ's demands; I found it completely impossible to have sex with anyone I didn't fancy. It was either a matter of 'jump up and run', or of having a forceful discussion, sometimes followed by equally forceful physical determent.

Strangely, at one stage in my late teens, when I was in America and had just realized I was gay, it suddenly occurred to me that being a rent boy would be a marvelous way to earn a living – sort of outside society but not breaking the law (I'm not talking here about the legal requirements of the local police precinct, rather about my own concept of law as personal morality).

Excited with my new choice of career (which I intended to combine with being a writer), I bought myself a snazzy pair of jeans and a pale blue t-shirt, then hot-footed it to 42nd Street in New York, the most celebrated place for such things to be done. There I rested myself against an unused doorway and waited nonchalantly.

Two hours later I realized how wrong I'd got it. Old, grubby, bad-toothed, smelly or just plain unattractive – none of the men who'd approached me was even vaguely reconcilable with my idea of what sex was about. To go with them was inconceivable.

Broke and dejected, I gave up and wandered off down to the subway to spend 15c riding up and down New York on the A train all night. (In fact, once down there I got picked up by a young girl who took me back to her apartment where she turned out to be a not-so-young transvestite. But that's another story.) The long and the short of it was… being on the game wasn't for me.

Choosing to be a rent-boy to earn enough money to be a writer seemed a simple solution to a tricky problem. I'd always rather prided myself on finding such simple solutions, though usually it was more a matter of 'speaking' rather than 'doing'. Once, when I was thirteen, the English master at school asked each boy to prepare a speech to deliver to the class on various subjects he chose from a list. My allotted subject was "How To Get What You Want Out of Life". My speech was three words long: "Not want anything." For this bit of insolence I was given an hour's extra work. The English master was no fool; he set me an essay to write on the subject of "How to avoid the unwanted in life".

I soon realized that 'not wanting' was effectively the same as 'wanting'. And even if you were to resign yourself completely to fate and accept whatever was your due, it would be physically and emotionally impossible not to want to avoid unpleasant situations - hunger or hurt or pain - or even a stiff cock pushing its way into you when you had absolutely no liking for the person to which it was attached.

Which thought makes me all the more surprised by the number of people who manage, not only to make a successful career of it, but do so with a smile. Particularly in Thailand, where I now live, and where so many young people get by through a little hiring out of their bodies. But however big the smile it's as well to remember it probably doesn't go too deep.

Hiring out your orifice to satisfy itinerant erections isn't the greatest way to earn a living.

RELATED LINKS

Trusting-In-Fate.org

101 rent boys - 101 interviews

42nd Street in the 40s, 50's and 60s

Study of male prostitution in America

About Pierre Klossowski (see picture above)

Should pleasure and pain fall in the same category?

'Belief means not wanting to know what is true' (Quotes on 'Wanting')

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Sunday, Jan 22nd, 2006

One day in the mid-seventies a guy called Danny Morgan turned up at my flat in South Audley Street hoping I'd turn him into a rockstar. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a nose like a toucan. He was short and stocky and limped. "But I've got a wonderful voice," he explained.

"Forget it," I said, but he stayed on the doorstep smiling broadly.

"I'm a haemophilliac," he told me." I have permanently bruised knees so the government give me a car. It's only a mini but I could drive you around if you like.”

"I prefer taxis," I told him.

I can't remember how I finally got rid of him but the next week he turned up again. "There's a taxi strike. I thought I'd better pick you up and drive you around for the day. And I've been thinking ... If I can't be a rockstar, maybe I could be a manager? You could train me."

He pointed to a rusting blue mini on a double yellow line. "It's marvellous being disabled, isn't it. I can park where I like. I never get tickets."

I ignored him. I was in a hurry to get to a recording session and I searched for a taxi, but he was right, there wasn't one to be seen anywhere. "Jump in," he said cheerfully. "Where do you want to go?"

I was being hijacked and I wasn't about to be nice. "Barnes," I snapped. "Olympic Studios."

"Who are you recording?" he asked, but I refused to answer. He could drive me to Barnes if he wanted, but he wasn't going to get another word out of me.

"I've met a fantastic group," he said. "They advertised in Melody Maker for a manager but I'm afraid they didn't think much of me."

"I'm not surprised."

It popped out all of a sudden and I was annoyed with myself. I'd intended not to speak.

"They'd sign with you though," Danny said, "and you could give me all the work to do."

I stayed silent but Danny didn't. "The lead singer is stunning. He has red hair down to his waist, and his brother, the drummer, is dead ringer for Elvis at seventeen. The bass player's hair is the same as the lead singer's, so they look like twins. The singer's as beautiful as a girl but he has a voice like gravel, like Rod Stewart. And they write amazing songs ..."

It was non-stop all the way to Barnes, and as I got out of the car he said, "I've fixed an audition for you tomorrow morning."

"I'm not interested."

But he was insensitive to everything I said. "I'll pick you up at eleven. You'll love them!”

And of course, I did. They were ‘Japan' and I managed them for the next six years during which time they became one of the best-known and influential groups in British pop. 

Initially I thought Danny might be able to help me manage them. I gave him twenty thousand pounds to buy a van and equipment. After three days the van broke down. When he went back to the car lot where he'd bought it, it had closed down and disappeared. And he'd forgotten to take out insurance. 

Danny had a strange way of walking - caused by arthritis induced by haemophillia. When he tried to pick something up he moved his hands and arms in a weird way which was actually rather cute. And if you were rude to him or told him to get out of your sight, he fixed you with an insidious smile and stayed right where he was, as if he thought what you'd said was just a joke. 

Quite simply, he was the most annoying person I'd ever met. And the group felt the same. Nevertheless I split my percentage with him and allowed him to become a sort of co-manager cum general help cum general nuisance. 

Whenever Danny was around he would aggravate me like mad, and the group too. When he wasn't there we often felt sorry about how rude we'd been to him. Then he'd turn up again and be so annoying that within minutes we'd be telling him to bugger off. 

This went on for nearly five years during which time he travelled around the world with us - to Europe, to America, to Japan and the Far East - always trying to help and always getting everything wrong - annoying us pretty much continuously yet always paid for without question as one of the travelling party.

One day Danny turned up at a gig and told us he had Aids. He'd caught it from one of the blood-transfusions he'd been given due to his haemophilia. The strange thing was, although we were all incredibly sorry for him, he was still as annoying as ever. We tried harder than ever to be nice but in the end we ended up telling him to bugger off just like before. 

Eventually of course he did, for good, for at that time there were no drugs for Aids. 

But it's odd. Now, when I think of him, I can't remember a single annoying thing he ever did, only the things that were helpful. 

And sometimes he was quite funny too, and made us all laugh.  

RELATED LINKS

History of the mini

About haemophillia

Website of Olympic Studios

Nightporter - website about Japan

'Sign here, kid' - Japan's first audition

Get annoyed.com - How to annoy people

About contaminated blood transfusions in the 1970s

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Sunday, Jan 15th, 2006

Enough of this crap!

Sir Iqbal Sacranie is the Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain. And Sir Iqbal is being investigated by the British police for expressng the opinion on radio that homosexuality is "harmful".

Well why the fuck shouldn't he? And why shouldn't I say, here and now, that religion of all sorts, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and every other damned fool superstitional God-in-the-sky faith, is a load of brain-damaging piffle.

If Sir Iqbal is prevented from saying that homosexuality is harmful, it won't be long before I'm prevented from saying that religion is for the mentally unsound.

Now, Sir Iqbal, listen to this…

I live with a man. I have sex with him and not only is it not harmful, it's pleasurable, and loving and is the mainstay of a relationship that has lasted sixteen years. Yet I have no objection to you telling me how horrible it is since that's your opinion. My opinion is...

God is trash.

If you like, I will walk in a march to Trafalgar Square, or Hyde Park, or wherever else you like, arm in arm with you, to defend the right of both of us to say these things. That the police should phone you up and accuse you of breaking the law for saying you think homosexuality is detestable, is itself detestable.

My opinion is that all religion is vile. It drains the brain of thought and self-judgment. You, Sir Iqbal, have what I consider to be the awful disease of religionism. On the other hand, you might feel that I'm suffering from the awful disease of homosexualism.

I'm perfectly happy for you to express that opinion providing you're equally happy for me to say that anyone who believes in God has a depleted mind and is definitely stuck in the evolutionist period between monkey and human, if not between amoeba and turbot.

Now, if you can accept me saying that, and are prepared to embark with me on this march for freedom of speech, and can defend my remarks to your religious friends (as I will defend your remarks to my gay friends), then you're a good man.

If not, then you're just a ……

Well, why should I say the word? For obviously you're not one. You believe in freedom of speech or you wouldn't have said what you said. And so do I.

So let's not argue. For me, religion is crap. For you, being gay sucks. How wonderful that we can both say these things and not suffer from it.

Fancy dinner one night?

RELATED LINKS

"Society's not in a gay mood" by Dominic Emmanuel, Delhi Catholic Archdiocese

Website of Richard Dawkins, Britain's most articulate anti-religionist

The Ratzinger Record - The pope and homosexuality

Homosexuality in the light of Islam

Why gay is good, by Steven Kotler

The search for moderate Islam

To be gay and Muslim

Sunday, Jan 8th, 2006

A whole host of people emailed me this week asking, “Did you really mean it when you said rock management was a ‘dumb, witless, unrewarding job'?”

Well…

When you're standing at the top of a stadium, looking down on a hundred thousand people, stomping and cheering at an act that has been made successful largely due to your own efforts, the answer is “NO”.

When you're popping another bundle of cheques into your bank account and the total is now well up into the millions, the answer is “N0”.

When you're being interviewed on countless TV programmes, being hailed as the genius behind an artist who has become the new icon of youth culture, the answer is “N0!”

But when some nitwit rock-star, out of his head on drugs, or drink, or self-admiration, tells you to cancel the gig with a stadium full of expectant people waiting for the first chord, you quickly realize what a dumb position you've put yourself into. Likewise when he phones you from New York while you're in Tokyo fixing his next tour, and he's calling you because the TV's not working, or he's got no clean underwear, or his lights have fused.

Management is a wildly up and down occupation. At the beginning, the artist management relationship can be Svengali-like. The manager takes a young person he perceives to be of limited mental ability and turns him into a star. At which stage, the manager has to accept that, if the artist has found it within him to become the star the manager envisaged, perhaps he's not so stupid after all.

Once the artist has got the hang of things he'll no longer need the person who showed him how to do it. If the ‘how-to-get-the-hang-of-things' teacher continues to stick around he'll soon find himself in a pretty hopeless position. Eventually this Svengali-like manager will receive a letter from the artist's lawyer telling him his services are no longer required.

In the end, though, you have to see it from the artist's point of view. The artist takes all the emotional hits and is rewarded with the one concrete thing that can come out of the artist-manager relationship – his own fame. He's the one who will be booed off stage if he performs badly, or slated by the critics if he makes a bad album, or shot at by some maniac just for being famous. The manager may have given his all to get the artist to the top, but once the artist is there it belongs to him and him alone. No management contract can give the manager ownership of the other person's creativity.

Which is why most rock managers make the best of it while they can - jetting round the world, putting millions in the bank and quietly living it up way beyond the excesses expected of the rock star himself.

But shhh! Don't tell the artist. Just keep on grumbling. Tell him that management is a dumb, witless, unrewarding job.

ARTISTS, MANAGEMENT & DRUG STORIES

Rolling Stones

Tommy Steele

The Yardbirds

Little Richard

Marc Bolan

Wham!

Japan

Sunday, Jan 1st, 2006

Sometime last year, when I realized that writing had become something of a serious profession for me, I realized I would need a manager. And if I needed one, who better then me?

My writing half sat down with my managerial half and we had a good chat, focusing mainly on the subject of image. “If I'm going to devote time and energy in establishing you as a writer,” the managerial half said, “you'll need to lose fifty pounds. You're a fat-looking bastard and it doesn't make a pretty picture.”

My writing half didn't take too kindly to being spoken to that way. “Damn it!” he exclaimed, “you're just as fat as I am. What are you complaining about?”

In the end, with my writer's hat on, I agreed to lose some weight. “But only,” I told my managerial half, “if YOU do too. After all – we're in this together.”

That was nine months ago. And today, standing on the scales or looking into the mirror, I can clearly see we've both failed miserably. Which brings me nicely onto the subject of New Year's resolutions.

I've never been keen on them – never made them and consequently never broken them. But this year is different. Like it or not, a little weight is going to have to be lost – about twenty-five kilos to be precise – which, since I'm now 118 kilos (or over 18 stone), will bring me down to 95 kilos (or exactly 15 stone). Still not exactly thin.

Personally, I don't think age and thinness go together well. A bit of flesh is good for status – especially when you live in the Far East where Buddha worship is a central facet of life. Young people admire large stomachs and enjoy patting and stroking them. Contrary to traditions in the West, in the Far East a big stomach is more likely to attract sexual admirers than a big dick. It makes you look relaxed, confident and prosperous – it suggests intelligence, experience and wisdom – all in all a most attractive attribute. So the hell with the fit-&-healthy look, I'm not aiming to be one of those skinny over-sixties like Michael Palin or Tom Jones, I'm going for something more Churchillian.

Even so, knocking off twenty-five kilos is no small matter. Fifty-five pounds - that's a lot of pounding along the running machine - a lot of cheesecakes to be turned down - a lot of saying ‘no' to just-one-more-drink.

I have no doubt I'll manage it. My manager's a belligerent bastard, and a big bugger into the bargain. I don't want to go upsetting him.

RELATED LINKS

How to manage rock stars (website of U.K. Music Managers Forum)

How to manage smart people

How to manage your weight

How to manage your writing

NOT QUITE SO RELATED

How to manage masturbating kids (President and Mrs. Bush hope that you never have to deal with the tragic heartbreak of a child who masturbates)

How to manage your wanking

How to manage your farting

Sunday, Dec 25th, 2005

Because gay marriage has been so much in the news I feel duty bound to try and sort out what I really feel about it, particularly as I've lived with another man in a steady relationship for fifteen years.

I'm not sure at what age my own sexual awareness began but when I discovered gay life in London in my late teens I fell in love with it. Gay society was a tight-knit yet welcoming club based not so much on its members' homosexuality as on the shared experience of living with that sexuality - a wonderful secret world, frowned upon by society at large. Being part of it gave me an immediate feeling of superiority over everyone who lived in the normal world.

The gradual acceptance of homosexuality over the last thirty years has meant the privacy of the gay world has been invaded. Nowadays gay life is photographed, filmed, set to music, sit-commed, and glossed up for the Sunday supplements. But as a fair swap for letting the outside world intrude, gays have been granted equal rights and legislation to help prevent prejudice.

What the straight world never really understands is how different the gay world really is. Gays are not like any other minority - not like blacks, or jews, or newly arrived immigrants. Gays are born into, and brought up by, straight families. As a result they are totally bi-cultural. Like it or not, this makes each and every one of them a fully trained subversive, able to duck and dive invisibly through straight society, contributing to it whenever they wish but never fully entering it.

It's this command of the ways of the straight world while remaining immersed in the amusements of the gay world that makes being gay so intensely enjoyable. It's not so much the sexual aspects, it's the bi-cultural ones.

Gay marriage has been engineered by gays who've reached positions of high influence in government. It's a coup, and a big one. At the same time, for me and many other gays, there seems to be something rather intrusive about being asked to behave in so straight a manner. Besides, it's not quite as revolutionary as it sounds.

Effeminate men in the Cheyenne Indian tribes, when they came of age, where given the choice, if they so wanted, to marry as women. This allowed both the effeminate men in the tribe, and the men attracted to effeminate men, to lead a normal life. But it also allowed the majority to force the minority into the majority life style. It's this that seems slightly uncomfortable about the current concept of gay marriage.

For many us, rather than appearing to offer something, gay marriage seems to be taking something away - our freedom from the social mores of the straight world, the outsider quality that makes 'being gay' so worthwhile.

I don't think we should worry. The objective of gay marriage is equal rights, not normalisation. We're not about to be forced to assimilate into the majority. Gay society is gaining influence and remains as subversive as ever. But it's not the evil subversion the Christian right perceives, nor is it sexual subversion. It's the subversion of straight society's most frequent fault...

Being so bloody boring.

HOLIDAY GAMES

Tom Cruise Movie or Gay Porno - can you spot the difference?

Gay-O-Meter, determines how gay you are

The 'Gay or Eurotrash?' game

Gay or Straight? A photo quiz

How's your Gaydar?

Dress the gay dog

Gay Quizilla

Sunday, Dec 18th, 2005

There's nothing nicer after a couple of weeks travelling around the world than getting back home to Thailand. These days, everyone has heard about the famous Thai smile, the beautiful weather, the beaches and the food, so it's about other aspects of the country that I'm often asked. Politics, for instance.

To be born male and Thai is to have by-passed the necessity of growing up. From the moment they're allowed to leave home, Thai men change their life into some sort of naughty game. Successive Prime Ministers play with the country like a toy train set; policemen chortle with glee at discovering that all they need to do to get money for a night out is to stop a passerby and ask for it; workmen commissioned to paint your house (or worse still, to build it), smile happily as they tell you it will be finished next week when they know full well that next week is a holiday and they'll be going back to the countryside to see the family and drink whiskey all night.

This makes the country pretty much ungovernable, which is why the government never really tries very hard. Enforcement of new laws lasts about a week. Last year the government decided alcoholic drinks could not be sold between 2pm and 5pm in the afternoon. Shops and supermarkets observed it strictly for the first week, less so the next, and by the end of a month not at all. This happens all the time. In Thailand, laws are little more than pronouncements of general intent, to be obeyed if you choose to do so, but not if you don't. Every time a new government gets into power, they write a new constitution. It's easier than going through all the silly laws passed by the previous government and changing them back again. Since Thailand became a democracy in 1932 it's had 16 new constitutions.

The plus side to this lack of seriousness is a wonderful acceptance of people's quirks, more than can be found almost anywhere else in the world. For fifteen years the manager of the Landmark, a five star hotel in Bangkok, dressed in his formal manager's suit from 9am to 7pm, and then changed into an evening dress to manage the hotel as a woman from 7pm to midnight. He (or she) did this with no loss of authority and the hotel ran as well as any other in town.

This type of story is found everywhere, as is the Thai's wonderful way with the English language. They often use English words to name their children (two brothers I know are called Picnic and Golfball), but their real talent with English is the writing of signs.

In Thailand signs are often used as a cheap and cheerful solution to otherwise difficult problems. In Pattaya, which relies largely on its beaches for its income, there are a great number of stray dogs many of whom have rabies. The local government was commissioned to do something about this problem but being Buddhists balked at the idea of going round town shooting every stray canine. To protect tourists from rabid dogs they had a better idea and very soon signs began to appear in English on all the beaches stating THIS IS A RABIES FREE ZONE. Since most foreign visitors had no idea that rabies was around in the first place, it seemed poor judgment to tell them about it. But it would have worried the visiting foreigners even more if they could have seen on what basis the beaches had been declared free of rabies. The Thai translation simply stated DOGS NOT ALLOWED, and since most Thai strays can't read, it was hardly reassuring.

Like most things in Thailand, you shrug and live with it. The benefits are too great not to do so. There's nowhere I would rather be, and sometimes you come across signs that can charm the pants off you. In the back of a Chiang Mai tuk-tuk I recently saw an advertisement for a brothel. “Our staff are train to service you in standard fashion with clean and efficient.”

RELATED LINKS

'Mango Sauce' - Taking a prurient interest in Farang life in Thailand

Corruption and governance in the New Thailand

Police force can't live without taking bribes

Website of the Landmark Hotel, Bangkok

Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand

About rabies in Thailand

Brothels of Chiang Mai

Saturday, Dec 10th, 2005

King Crimson LP sleeve - 1969

Last week consisted of a quick whirr around the USA meeting a few of those people who are still great and good in the music industry. The occasion was the completion (almost) of the first album by Brothermandude, the brilliant rock group fronted by Sheikh Hassan Al Khalifa. Once anyone hears Hassan's name they expect to hear music that is strange or hilarious. What they get instead is classic stadium rock which leaves them fumbling for who it most reminds them of - Dave Mathews, say some people, King Crimson, say others - Hendrix, Zeppelin, Dylan – everyone seems to have a different idea. But they all agree it's epic stuff.

I was there with Iain Cooper, the group's day-to-day manger, planning how to tackle the US market. Strange to say, the major record companies no longer have the same control over it they once did. Independents are gaining the upper hand, which is a most exciting development. But as is always the case, there was more to the week than just business, there was the important activity of meeting old friends.

In New York, at Sarah Lee's on Central Park South, we had a classic dinner of reminisces with Vicki Wickham (my co-writer, a few decades ago, of You Don't Have To Say You Love Me) and her partner Nona Hendryks, who in the 70s was once was one of the songbirds in LaBelle. We were joined by Nancy Jones, once the American manager of the Monty Pythons and for many years was my favourite copmanion for out-and-about-ing in New York 's night life.

At Sony, we caught up with David Massey, whom I first met when he was fresh out of college, twenty years ago, managing Wang Chung. Now he's a vice-president at Sony. But he's done it well, accepting corporate strictures while maintaining an independent mind. A real show-biz charmer, David's uncle is Tony Gordon, manager of Boy George and Culture Club, and his aunt is Marion Massey, who managed British singer Lulu and guided her to fame.

In LA, we met with his counterpart, my old friend Kaz Utsunomyia, head of west coast A&R for Epic. In the 80s Kaz helped me get Wham! into China and he features a fair bit in my book I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch. But there was one delicious story about him I failed to tell.

Kaz was sent to school in England at age eleven. He loved it and basically never went home again. From school and university he went on to become a journalist for various Japan pop and rock magazines, living in London and reporting on the British music scene.

Kaz's father was a career diplomat, and a very senior one at that. He had wanted Kaz to be a politician or a diplomat and thoroughly disapproved of his defection to the world of popular music. But Kaz's brother had turned out even worse. He'd become passionately anti-establishment and joined the Red-Army.

The Japanese Red-Army was founded in 1970 by a young woman, Fusako Shigenobu, who aimed to overthrow the Japanese monarchy and help forment world revolution. In 1973 it was responsible for a massacre at Lod Airport in Israel, killing 23 people. It then hijacked a JAL 747 en route from Amsterdam to Tokyo.

The organization was targeting many high-level Japanese politicians for assassination, amongst them Kaz's father. Yet such are the bonds of Japanese family life that Kaz's brother was allowed to come home each evening for dinner and to sleep in his own bedroom as he'd always done. Then, each morning, he left for work, intent on the destruction of the Japanese hierarchy and the assassination of his own father.

His father, hoping he would one day calm down, had worked out a truce with the police - a truce too bizarre for any non-Japanese to begin to understand. At the end of every street in Tokyo is a small neighborhood police booth which checks all the residents in and out of their homes each morning and evening. Kaz's brother was supplied with a special pass. In the outside world he was a dangerous terrorist, hunted by the country's police. But in the evenings, he reported to them at the end of the street and was granted twelve hours immunity allowing him to go home for dinner and bed. Next morning, he would leave again given ten minutes head start to get away - a bit like playing hide-and-seek.

One day, Kaz arrived back home from London for a short holiday. He had by now become successful in journalism and was making a name for himself in the music business and he expected his father to welcome him with open arms - the son who had turned out alright. But not a bit of it.

Kaz's father was as disapproving as ever and over dinner he grumbled ferociously at Kaz for having fallen into the trivial world of popular music.

Kaz - agog at his father's lack of tolerance - pointed at his brother sitting next to them at the family dining table, and said, “But how can you grumble at me and not at my brother. I'm not a terrorist. I'm not a hijacker. I don't go round killing people like he does.”

“At least he's interested in politics,” his father replied

RELATED LINKS

Interview with Kaz when he ran Virgin Music, USA

About Brothermandude and Hassan Al Khalifa

Wikipedia about Fusako Shigenobu

History of the Japanese Red Army

About LaBelle and Nona Hendricks

Wang Chung's wesbite

About David Massey

Saturday, Dec 3rd, 2005

“Is that Simon Napier-Bell?”

“That's me.”

“The pop manager?”

“That's right."

"I've been trying to contact you for days. I've left endless messages.”

The voice was reproachful. Worse than that, it was unpleasantly coarse. This wasn't a nice way to be woken up.

“I've been tied up lately,” I said defensively. “I've not been listening to my answerphone. Who are you?”

“I'm a freelancer. I've been paid to do a job on you but I don't have your address - only your phone number.”

A journalist, I thought, commissioned to write an article of some sort, and by the sound of his voice, from one of the tabloids. I looked at the clock – half-past nine, unusually late for me.

“What d'you mean; ‘paid to do a job'?” I asked.

“I've been told to rough you up a bit – bust your kneecaps, something like that - but I've been having a hard time finding out where you live. Could you give me your address?”

Was this a practical joke or the real thing? I had no idea. “Maybe you'd like me to prepare you some breakfast?” I suggested. “Make some coffee, perhaps!”

The voice fell silent, then spoke up again sounding rather hurt. “There's no need to be sarcastic, mate. You might at least be helpful. We've all got our jobs to do.”

(This wasn't last week. It was a long time ago – in the Sixties, when I was managing the Yardbirds and living in a posh flat near Victoria station overlooking the gardens at Buckingham Palace.)

“Where are you now?” I asked.

“Clapham Junction.”

“Well I live in Catford,” I said, naming the furthest away place in London I could think of, “77 Sunsilk Drive.”

Later in the day, as I was coming out of my office heading for a meeting at EMI, I was hustled against a shop-front by a burly figure with a familiar rasping voice. “That was a bad thing you did, mate, sending me to Catford.”

A jolt of fright shot from my stomach to the back of my neck - like an electric shock. He grasped my arm and I found myself looking into a podgy, busted face. But when he didn't attack me, I managed to steady myself. The street was busy - Soho, in mid-afternoon, with people pushing past us in both directions.

“Normally,” the thug said, “I'm a reasonable bloke but I don't take kindly to being pissed around like that… I mean… sending me to Catford. So let's get down to business. Someone's paid me twenty-five quid to bust your kneecaps. Give me fifty and I'll leave you alone.”

(Kneecapping prices, as you can see, where relatively cheap in the Sixties. You have to multiply by ten to get today's equivalent).

I don't believe in buying people off – it never works, they just come back for more. On the other hand, negotiation means dialogue and I'm good at that. So I told him, “OK! Fifty quid. But it will mean going to the bank.” (This was in the days before cash machines.) “Or I could give you a cheque.”

The thug seemed unsure.

“Look,” I suggested. “Come and have a coffee. I'll write you a cheque.”

We sat in Valerie's in Old Compton Street and I bought him a slice of chocolate gateau.

“Who sent you?” I asked.

He smiled - a huge busted-nose, bulgy-lipped, chipped-tooth smile (but actually, quite endearing). “No-one sent me. I pick a name out of a directory then go round and find the bloke and offer not to beat him up if he gives me double what I'm being paid, which I tell him is twenty-five quid. It's a good trick - a mate of mine told me about it. At the moment I'm doing the music industry ‘White Book'. Me mate's doing the Real Estate directory.”

“That's extortion?” I said. “You'll end up with ten years in jail.”

He looked a touch forlorn.

“I don't believe you ever hit anyone in your life,” I told him bluntly. “You're just a fraud. I bet you can't even read and write.”

His eyes flashed with indignation. “You don't need to be rude, mate. I took ‘O' levels.”

“Did you get any?”

He paused defensively. “Just one.”

“In what? Carpentry? Metalwork?”

He hesitated. “Cookery.”

I couldn't help it, I just burst out laughing. “So I was right - you're not a thug at all. You're just a conman. What on earth made you choose cookery?”

“Me and me brothers was bought up by an auntie. There was five of us in the house and she put me in charge of the cooking. She taught me everything she knew. When I went to school it seemed an obvious subject to take.”

“How did your face get so bashed about?”

“I was working as a chef and a shelf fell on me. They gave me compensation and I left.”

“And doing this is better than being a chef?”

“Not really,” he admitted. “I quite miss cooking, but I've not been able to find a job.”

I had a friend, Stephen James, a psychologist who was also a restauranteur. He owned two of my favourite restaurants, the Matelot and the Elizabethan, both of which I ate at several times a week. I called him from the phone box opposite Valerie's. He thought the story was a hoot and told me to bring the guy over.

The thug was called Hector and turned out to be a really good cook. Stephen staffed his restaurants entirely with gays, so he asked Hector, "If I give you a job will it worry you that everyone else is gay?" Hector didn't seem worried so he got the job. A few months later I heard he'd run off with one of the waiters.

Anyway – the point of this long rambling story is… I was in London last week and popped into Valerie's for an espresso and there was Hector eating his way through a strawberry and banana gateau. Forty years older, more or less the same shape, his face looking like a cardboard box that someone had stamped on but with the same endearing smile. Not surprisingly, the thing with the waiter hadn't work out. Hector is now a grandfather and seems contented. He's two years off retirement, has a sandwich shop in North London and paid for my coffee.

One of life's little success stories.

RELATED LINKS

London gay venues that have disappeared, including The Matelot

Website for Valerie's patisserie

Open your own sandwich bar

Best chocolate cake recipes

Wikipedia about Ongar

About kneecapping

Saturday, Nov 26th, 2005

First class travel can be quite an addiction. Surprisingly, though, some people seem riled by my habit of flying first class. “How can you bring yourself to pay seven or eight times the economy fare?” they ask. Yet most of these people happily eat in restaurants where the cost of a meal is seven or eight times a burger at McDonalds.

The honest truth is - I feel good in first class - I feel good in a sleeper seat – I feel good being served fine food and wine. To put it bluntly, I feel it's where I belong, so I pay for it. People who complain about me doing so presumably don't feel the same. They save their money and sit in economy. I certainly don't grumble about them being there.

My addiction to first class was all the fault of Pan Am. It started in the seventies when Allan, my boyfriend, went back to his home city of Singapore to open a hairdressing salon. I had work to do in both London and Spain but wanted to find a way for Allan and I to spend a few days together each month. In those days, Pan American Airlines was still flying around the world – the only commercial airline ever to do so. Flight 001 flew from New York to Los Angeles , Honolulu , Tokyo , Hong Kong , Bangkok , New Delhi , Frankfurt , London and back to New York. Flight 002 flew in the other direction. In 1976, Pan American introduced something that floored all the other airlines – a cheap round the world ticket for £450. Better still, they introduced a first class fare for £1200. Even more remarkable, they then introduced a ‘stand-by' version - £250 in economy and £800 in first class. And if that wasn't enough, they invented the sleeper seat. In first class they halved the number of already big and comfortable seats and added footrests which came up in front of the seat to a horizontal position, at the same time allowing the back of the chair to tip back almost flat, thus converting the seat into a thoroughly comfortable bed.

With the first class stand-by fare, not only could you have as many stop-overs as you liked, there were certain side-trips. One of these was to Singapore from Hong Kong. The first class fare for this leg alone would normally be half of what they were charging for the complete round the world trip, yet it was completely free.

For just £10,000 a year I was flying round the world once a month in a first class sleeper seat being fed excellent wine and delicious food, and more importantly, managing to spend five days a week with Allan. But while I was at it, I decided I should make use of all the other places I was able to stop at.

In those days, communications were not as they are today – there were no fax machines and no mobile phones. There was no automated international dialling, just slow operator connections for international calls, and for written messages, the telex - a machine from the previous century.

For most Americans, even quite sophisticated music-business people, Europe more than once a year felt like too much. For these people I began executing music business commissions all over the world. An LA manager, too busy to travel, asked me to negotiate performances for his artist in Hong Kong . A Japanese record company commissioned me to get their artists released in Brazil. An Italian publisher wanted me to arrange for his songs to be covered in Mexico. As well as being a source of endless enjoyment, my travelling began to provide me with substantial extra income.

I turned up so frequently in Syndney, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Bangkok and Hong Kong that people who lived there thought that I did too.

There was supposed to be one big disadvantage to these ‘stand-by' tickets. If there was no room on the plane you were not provided with a hotel while you waited for the next day's flight, whereas for a first-class passenger with a full-price ticket, if the plane was overbooked there would be an overnight stay in a five-star hotel free of charge. But anytime there was no room in the first class cabin, the ground staff, by now all friends of mine, would check round the other passengers until they found one who they could dump into a hotel for the night without too much fuss, then give me his seat. In six years of flying with Pan Am first class round-the-world tickets I only ever failed to get on a flight twice.

Over those few years I made more deals in more countries, made more friends in more places, got to know more beautiful restaurants, clubs, beaches, bars and boys around the world than I would ever have thought possible. It was a magic, transient, luxurious life of decadence. And by the time the bubble burst and Pan Am went bust, I was addicted to it.

I'm not at all ashamed to tell you, I still am.

RELATED LINKS

Flying healthily - passengers in 1st class get three times more oxygen

Compare first and business class beds on different airlines

Via Magazine - the perks of flying first class

History of Pan American Airlines

History of air travel in the USA

History of air travel in the UK

Saturday, Nov 19th, 2005

Gay friends in Britain seem to think Thailand is a place where gays can flaunt themselves with impunity. But gays who do that are likely to be Westerners, not Thais. And the impunity comes only from Thai people's politeness and their awareness of the benefits of tourism. The reality is somewhat different, albeit only subtly.

In the West, whether we like it or not, much of our instinctive thinking is based on Christian ideas of behaviour, which includes amongst other things an innate desire to make other people agree with what we believe in. The delights of good curry, the benefits of not smoking, the superiority of cricket to football, how much more fun to be gay than straight - we may have thrown away the concept of God, but we find it very difficult to throw away the concept of pushing our beliefs onto others - a concept which came to us a couple of thousand years ago as part and parcel of Christianity.

Trying to persuade people to see things our way seems such a natural thing to do, but living in Thailand it soon becomes apparent just how pushy we Westerners are in these matters. Thais never pressure anyone to change or alter their beliefs about anything. People are accepted just as they are. An aspect of someone's character which in the West might seem unacceptable, in Thailand is likely be seen as a small defect, easily balanced by other aspects of the person's overall character. Which is how they've always regarded being gay.

In the West, gay organizations are insistent that being gay must not be seen as a human defect. But Thais see it as exactly that, and don't give a damn about it. A couple of hundred years ago, Westerners started arriving here preaching homosexuality as a terrible sin. Thais, wanting to appear suitably modern, pretended to copy their attitude and attempted to frown on it. But without much success.

The average Thai family has always wanted the same thing for its eldest son – that he will excel at school, get a good job, be tall and handsome and marry a beautiful woman with whom he'll have a happy family.

And what happens? He fails miserably at school, wears glasses, is only five foot four, and is gay. So what? The first was fantasy, the second is reality. And in the end most people feel more comfortable with reality.

Being gay has never been much of a hassle for Thais, except for that period when foreigners came here saying it was an aberration. Nowadays, though, there's a new type of Westerner who treats it as something of a religion, something to be proud about and show off. Thais can't deal with that either.

For Thais being gay is something totally ordinary. Something that should just sort of 'blend in'. Nothing worth getting too worried about.

RELATED LINKS

The art of persuasion. Could Islam one day become Britain's national religion?

P.J.Jackson: From Ancient Indian Pandakas to Modern Thai Gay-Quings

The Homosexual Curse - Stormfront White Nationalist Community

Writings and tidbits about the cultures of Thai gay males

About gay life in Thailand

Gay Thailand website

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Saturday, Nov 12th, 2005

Living in Thailand, I often hear music or singers that seem to be crying out to be promoted worldwide. Occasionally someone has a try at it – one of the Thai record companies takes one of their major artists and sends them off to try their luck in another market. Or a visiting British or American person from the music industry gets enamoured of a local artist and attempts the same. But they inevitably fail. Someone who is already a star in Thailand, with all the attendant star benefits, is not too attracted by the thought of having to start at the bottom in Britain or America and work their way up all over again.

Last year, though, that's exactly what Sek Loso, Thai's biggest rock singing star decided he wanted to do. Sek insisted to his record company, Grammy, that he be allowed a couple of years off to break the world market. They agreed, and an American ex A&R man, Tim Carr was put in charge of the project. But there was a mistake in Sek's thinking. What made his singing style so sensationally seductive was its Thai-ness. For the overseas market, he decided, he wanted to be mistaken for a Western rock star. He learnt English, copied international rock styles and changed himself into something which - while it was new for him - was totally old hat for anyone in the West. There is nothing of his greatness on this album. Sek's voice, which can raise the hairs on the back of your neck in Thai, sounds annoying and contrived in English.

If Thai music one day breaks into a Western market, it will have to have that distinctive Thai sound that seduces thousand of visiting foreigners every year. Years ago that's what first brought Juilio Iglesias success in Britain. He broke out of the Spanish market because his funny Spanish-sounding voice reminded millions of British holidaymakers of last year's glorious two weeks in the sun.

In the early Seventies, at about the same time Julio Iglesias broke out of the Spanish market, I was in Indonesia with similar ideas. I'd arrived in Jakarta planning to spend a long weekend, then met a young Indonesian, Ade, who was from one of the top families. His father was the mayor of the capital city, his brother the American ambassador, another one run the national airline – that sort of family.

I fell for Ade, his family, and Indonesia. I stayed in Jakarta with Ade and every weekend we drove up to Bogor, the capital city in the hills to have Sunday lunch with his family, which was often more than a hundred people. I learnt passable Indonesian, travelled round the country, studied its history. And, of course, enjoyed its music.

Amongst Ade's many relatives was a niece who was a top pop singer, Tety Kadi. She was just eighteen, and recordings of her sultry voice seduced me night after night, sitting late into the evening in the tropical darkness of an outside restaurant, her songs drifting in the air amongst the night-scented frangipani. Listening to her like this, I decided she would do equally well worldwide. So I told her family I would make a record of her for the British market.

In Jakarta, I found a suitable place to record her vocals – the National Radio Station, where yet another relative of Ade's was in charge. One night he gave us the run of the place after broadcasting ceased for the evening. The mosquitos were biting badly that night, but with the temperature inside the studio well into the nineties the windows had to be left open, so we had an ankle-slapping recording session.

I recorded Teti's voice with a piano, recorded on a separate track so I could replace it with an orchestra when I got back to London . We finished at 3am and by 8am I was on a Garuda plane for Heathrow, watching the jungles of Sumatra slip away beneath me along with my dream life of the past six months. By the time I left the plane in London it was as if I'd returned from an adventure, not as if I was still involved in one. However, I felt a duty to finish Teti's songs off in English.

I'd already written the lyrics and I now booked the best session musicians – a five piece rhythm section – thirty string players – eight woodwind – a harp – then worked with the arranger who'd created success for Englebert Humperdinck and Tom Jones. He did a wonderful job. At the start of each chorus the violins carried a sawing figuration rising ever higher while the violas followed the main theme and the cellos plunged to their bottom string.

We recorded the tracks at De Lane Lea studios in Wembley, and when the orchestra played it was truly beautiful - lush and arousing. But when we added Teti's vocal I knew at once this wasn't going to be a hit. Teti's voice was suited to warm evenings in tropical gardens with night-scented flowers and exotic cocktails and dishes of satay. Her cool languid style was never going to penetrate the energy and noise of life in London. Britain was moving at a thousand-miles-an-hour – this was the Seventies, the age of glam rock and cocaine-snorting androgeny.

I'd done as I'd promised, and I sent a tape of the two songs back to Jakarta where they were pressed and put out at once. Frankly, though, I'd simply wasted several thousand pounds. In Britain they were never released.

But at least I'd pulled myself out of my tropical stupour and was back in the real world.

RELATED LINKS

About Bogor and it's botanical gardens

Official website of Grammy Records

Julio Iglesias - official website

Lonely Planet on Indonesia

Sek Loso - official website

Teti Kadi albums

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Saturday, Nov 5th, 2005

Of all the extraordinary changes that have happened in my lifetime – the collapse of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of Apartheid, the astonishing shift in attitudes towards gays – there's also the extraordinary change in Australia, from an overtly racist society to one of the world's most cosmopolitan and tolerant countries. And I put it down to wine.

I first went there in the late Sixties. Sydney dazzled me from the moment I arrived. It was partly the sun sparkling on the water in the harbour with green commuter ferries running backwards and forwards to the suburbs on the far side, and partly the famous bridge just as it had always appeared in pictures with a permanent stream of traffic running across it, but mostly it was the sound of Australians getting on with their normal lives – that permanent stream of blunt Ozzy humour permanently in the air all around. Yet this was a strangely racist country and immigration was conducted under what was known as 'the white Australia policy'.

From the moment I arrived I discovered that everyday-life in Australia bred great anecdotes. One evening I was standing on an overcrowded bus when a fat red - faced Aussie got on. He wore shorts and had sturdy walking boots, his shirt was filthy and he reeked of sweat. He pushed his way down the crowded aisle to the seat next to where I was standing on which was sitting an elderly aboriginal man sleepily enjoying the effect of having had too many beers.

The red-faced Aussie glared down at him. “You fucking black bastard. Stand up and give your seat to a white man.”

The black man stood up unsteadily and the redneck sat down. The aboriginal fellow appeared to be only just this side of consciousness and swayed dangerously whenever the bus went round a corner. Each time he did so he toppled against me, and on the third occasion, I murmured something slightly peevish, like: “Look here, do you mind!"

In a flash the Aussie redneck was on his feet, his face pushed into mine, his voice raised. “Yer fuckin' pommie bastard! Don't yer fuckin' talk to an Australian like that mate. This bloke's one of ours. Show 'im some fuckin' respect.”

I couldn't help it, I just burst out laughing, and it would have cost me a bonk on the nose if the bus hadn't jerked to a halt at a bus stop making the fat Aussie fall back in his seat and allowing me to hop off.

A week earlier I'd arrived in Australia via Perth where I'd landed at two in the morning with an onward flight to Sydney six hours later. I asked a taxi driver to take me to a reasonably-priced hotel where I could get some sleep and he dropped me off at a guest - house called “Black Stump” which was ten dollars a night including breakfast. At six I was woken with porridge, kippers, toast, fresh fruit and a mixed grill of three eggs, five rashers of bacon, a rump steak, sausages, tomatoes and lamb's kidneys (called ‘lamb's fry').

I soon discovered that, apart from breakfast and fresh grilled fish, Australia was not a great place to eat in. On that first trip, Australia was not yet a good place to drink either. There was no wine in the pubs, just beer, and sweet sticky sherry for the ladies, and if a man asked for wine he'd be called a poofter.

In Sydney the pubs closed at six o'clock. For most people work finished at five thirty, they would then rush from their office to the nearest pub and order long rows of drinks. Half-an-hour later they would be falling out of pubs all over the city, lying boozed and helpless on the pavement. The lack of finesse in drinking, and the complete lack of wine anywhere except for one or two stuffy restaurants was for me the greatest downside to Australia.

Once, I was invited to a barbecue in a stunning old house next to the water at Elizabeth Bay. The water shimmered and so did the guests - they were Sydney 's finest, the nearest Australia came to having an aristocracy - the nouveau riche. They were much more respected in Australia than people who depended on their families for their wealth. Yet although many of them were multi-millionaires, they were all drinking beer and there wasn't a bottle of wine in sight. I didn't like beer so to their horror I asked for some sherry, which had been provided for the ladies.

The host was busy tossing bits of meat on and off the barbecue and having a good moan. “We only ever made one mistake in this country. When we killed the abbos we made the mistake of leaving a few alive, and unfortunately they bred giving us the problems we have today. If only we'd killed the bloody lot of them.”

For a moment, because of his stereo-typical Australian accent, and because he was tossing bits of meat around on a barbecue, I thought he was Barrie Humphries being funny, and I laughed.

He was furious. “Impolite pommy bugger! What d'you think? We should have given them all a pension and let them come and live in our houses? What are you then,” he shouted, glaring at my glass of sherry, “a fucking wine-drinking commie poofter?”

Of course he had it pretty well right - apart from the wine, I was also rather left wing. And as for being gay, in Australia at that time it was dangerous ground. In Queensland, for instance, it would get you a compulsory lobotomy.

Interestingly, though, if you go back to the sixties and track the social changes in Australian society, you'll find that multiculturism, racial tolerance and gay rights have grown at exactly the same pace as the wine industry - almost as if one had fed on the other. Which is rather a nice thought.

RELATED LINKS

"Let's get rid of multiculturism" - one Australian's point of view

Website of the Sydney Gay a Lesbian Mardi Gras

Recipe for Australian breakfast with lamb's fry

Official website of the Australian wine industry

Website dedicated to Australian aboriginals

Official website of the Sydney opera house

Annoying Australian personalities

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Saturday, Oct 29th, 2005

Living in Thailand means always living amongst huge optimism. That famous childlike Thai smile is one of the signs of it. The Thai smile is intended to avoid conflict, create rapport, and let everyone know that the owner looks at the world with an optimistic disposition. But the greatest optimism in Thailand comes not from its famous smile but from its Prime Minister.

Every time a problem rears its head, Mr Taksin asserts with unbelievable optimism that it will be solved in three months. From time to time he has assured us of many agreeable things… That in just three months Bangkok 's traffic problems will be solved – the country's drugs problems will be solved - police corruption will be solved - bird flu won't happen - and poverty will be eradicated with every poor family receiving a free house from the government.

Because everyone likes an optimist, Taksin is still there. But people are beginning to realize there's a fine line between optimism and self-deception.

Taksin is not the most optimistic man I know in Thailand. That title belongs to Anton Gebroek, a Dutch friend I've known for years. Anton divides his time between a flat in Amsterdam and another one in Bangkok. He gave up real work years ago and now claims to dabble in property, though I think not too successfully since both his homes look pretty near the poverty line. Nevertheless he's always bubbling with optimism and manages to live well enough, setting great store on presenting a prosperous façade.

Last month he took me to dinner at Mezzaluna and ordered Dom Perignom, as good a way of looking prosperous as of rendering himself peniless. Half-an-hour earlier he'd taken me to see a two-bedroom flat nearby in Silom road. He said he'd been offered it for just one million baht - the price the owner of the flat, another Dutch man, had paid for it twenty years ago. (The owner, now old and unwell, no longer visited Thailand and simply wanted his money back.)

“How much, do you think it's worth?” Anton asked, sipping champagne, waiting for our starters to arrive.

“I would say at least three times what he's asking. But it will need a lot of doing-up, and you'll still have to find the right buyer.”

“Three times, eh?” Anton repeated wistfully. “That's wonderful – two million baht profit – a quick fifty thousand dollars.”

“But do you have the money to buy it?” I asked, knowing he barely had two credit cards to rub together.

“I'll borrow it against my flat in Amsterdam. Do you mind…?” And he picked up his mobile phone.

For some considerable time he spoke in Dutch - long enough, in fact, for the starters to arrive and me to finish a mozzarella salad.

Finally he rang off and turned his attention to the plate in front of him. “That's fixed then,” he said, picking up a fork.

“Who was that?” I asked. “The owner? Or were you arranging the financial side of things with the bank?”

“Oh – neither,” he replied casually. “I was ordering a new Mercedes.”

RELATED LINKS

Facts about the Thai Prime Minister

Wikiquote - quotes on Optimism

Biog of the Thai Prime Minister

About Mezzaluna restaurant

About the Thai smile

Thai property guide

MercedesBenz.com

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Saturday, Oct 22nd, 2005

The first time I went to Russia was in the early Seventies. It was a dreary affair - a short state-arranged tourist trip to Leningrad (now St Petersburg), where it drizzled with rain the whole time. For three days we lived on the same food – boiled sturgeon for starters, boiled chicken for main course. When it was time to go home most of us were delighted, but there was fog at the airport and we waited for hours.

At ten in the evening they told us there would be no flights till the morning. Some of the waiting passengers were Russian and headed back to Leningrad but for the tourist group there would be a hotel near the airport.

It was a big place with a dingy, cavernous lobby. We were each left with a voucher that was meant to pay for a meal but the hotel's restaurant had closed and there was no room service.

After I'd checked in I carried my suitcase to the lift under the glare of a decrepit elderly concierge. I'd noticed him eyeing the previous guest in the same way but never once moving to help with his suitcases.

As I waited for the lift to come he came over and spoke swiftly and softly in my ear. I thought, with a bit of luck, he was going to offer to find me an illicit sandwich, or even a drink. But his suggestion was surprisingly different.

"Would M'sieur care for me to arrange a young man for him? "

I couldn't think what had made him pick me out from the other guests? Was I so obvious? I looked at him in surprise.

He was not a pretty sight. He had a single straggle of hair combed this way and that across an otherwise bald head, and his unshaven grey stubble was slightly covered with brown face powder. His mouth contained only two complete teeth, the rest having turned to black stumps. And the lips which surrounded this mean hole had been slightly smeared with unnatural redness .

I reacted in typical English fashion with a vicious hiss.

"Most certainly not!"

No-one in the lobby had noticed and the concierge withdrew at once. But as the lift doors opened I thought, how stupid of me.

Here I was in this dingy hotel on a miserable night. What could be more relaxing than half-an-hour with an agreeable young man before going off to sleep. But then I thought of the stories I'd heard about secret hidden cameras and blackmail and decided it would be an absurd risk. On the other hand, I could always say yes, allow the young man to come to my room and then just talk to him. Moreover, he might even know where I could get something to eat.

So I walked back to the concierge and said: "Yes please! I think I would like a young man if you could fix it, providing he comes complete with a sandwich."

The concierge smiled, showing me his rotting tooth-forest. "Of course, sir, I can arrange that. It should be half an hour."

I hurried back to the lift and closed the doors.

Upstairs, I unpacked and took a shower. The room was even worse than I'd expected but at least there was a mini-bar and inside it I found two warm Russian beers. I poured one and settled down to watch TV, a single channel on which a man in a suit talked endlessly in Russian in front of a map of Denmark.

My tummy was rumbling with hunger and I began to look forward with great pleasure to the concierge's young man bringing me a sandwich, and perhaps some extra pleasures too. Then there was a knock on the door.

It wasn't the young man, it was the concierge. He was holding a plate on which was a reasonable size chunk of French bread with bits of chicken sticking out of it.

He held it towards me. “Monsieur – for the sandwich it will be one US dollar – and for the other," he winked with leering conspiracy, “it will be another ten.”

Anxious to get rid of the concierge quickly, I pulled two ten dollar bills from my pocket, pushed them into his hand and took the sandwich. "When will the young man be coming?” I asked.

The concierge's face collapsed in pure hurt. “But M'sieur…,” he stuttered, almost in tears. “Surely you understood…. The young man! It is me!”

RELATED LINKS

Tours to Russia by Intourist (the state tourist agency)

St Petersburg information website

Recipes for sturgeon

Moscow hotel guide

Guide to gay Russia

Moscow rent boys

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Saturday, Oct 15th, 2005

Another week with more of the usual carry-on from the world's most ghastly people – Christians!

That silly old sod in the Vatican announced, “A tolerance which allows God as a private opinion but which excludes Him from public life, is not tolerance but hypocrisy.”

Surely by now he can see what happens when you put God at the centre of public life – you get a brain-damaged US President and a religion-contaminated vice-president (who, if you're old enough you might remember, voted for the continuance of racial segregation back in the sixties). And a leader of Congress who quotes the bible at Tsunami victims telling them they should have built their houses on firmer ground.

Britain's corridors of power are no better. It's not just the Prime Minister and his wife but also those Bishops who sit in the Lords, who this week have been speaking out against terminally ill people's right to choose to die. (God wouldn't like it!).

With the Conservatives choosing a new leader, I wondered how many millions of people in Britain of all political persuasions might be prepared to change their politics for the sake of secular sanity. Just imagine if a leader of any party were to stand up and say, “I am NOT a Christian. I DON'T believe in God. I take full responsibility for my own life and my own actions. And to the best of my ability I'll choose a cabinet of like-minded people, atheists the lot of them.”

Just dreaming, I suppose, but the annoying thing, is Christianity was once a bit of a buzz. Back in the 16th century they even had a half-decent pope. He was Alexander VI and he had a very different lifestyle from the popes of recent years. Vatican parties were all the rage - wild and costly – with every party having a theme of its own, like the 'Ballet of the Chestnuts', held in October 1501, recorded for us by the diarist Burchard….

“At the approach to the papal palace, guests were greeted by the sight of living statues - young men and women, guilded and naked, standing in erotic poses. Once the dishes had been cleared after the banquet, fifty of the city's most beautiful whores danced with the guests, first clothed, then naked, with the Pope and two of his children watching from the best seats. Guests stripped and ran onto the floor where they mounted, or were mounted by, the whores, the coupling taking place in front of everyone present. The servants kept score of each man's orgasms because the Pope admired virility and measured a man's machismo by his capacity to ejaculate. When everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed the prizes, the winners being those who'd made love with the courtesans the greatest number of times.”

Tony and Cherie– doesn't this give you an idea for better parties at No. 10?

RELATED LINKS

Did George Bush damage his orbitofrontal cortex when he passed out eating a pretzel?

The Black Informant - so confused - see how sad Christianity can make a man's brain.

Religious belief causes higher murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide.

Bible-believing Christian's extraordinary science.

Wikipedia on Pope Alexander VI.

How dumb is creationism?

This dumb!

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Saturday, Oct 8th, 2005

It sometimes bothers me that these days I listen to so little jazz. When I was in my teens and early twenties it was the obsession of my life.

I first got to like jazz when I was 11. Previously, the greatest excitement of the week had been staying awake late on a Sunday night, listening to the Top 20 on Radio Luxembourg fading in and out from 208 on the medium wave. The songs were dreadful and the lyrics excruciating, but even so there was a certain excitement in seeing which piece of trash got to Number One. But when my brother was given a trumpet for his birthday and gave up trying to learn it after a week, I decided I might succeed where he'd failed.

It was a terrible instrument to learn because it had to be done in public. My practice was audible five houses away. To force myself to continue, I needed inspiration and I turned to trad jazz, where the trumpet was a lead instrument.

On Sunday afternoons, at the age of 12, I would go alone to the 100 Club in Oxford Street and watch the Chris Barber band, a jazz group of five young guys having fun. It was exciting - they laughed around a lot when they played and made me want to be part of what they were doing.

Then I discovered someone even better – Bix Beiderbecke – a trumpet player from the twenties who played wonderful soulful phrases with a soft bell like sound. I had no idea what he looked like but one day on the sports page of the Daily Mail there was a picture of a blond cricketer who was playing that season for Cambridge University. There was something very likeable about him; so when I listened to Bix Beiderbeck's smooth, sensitive, musical phrases I imagined the blond cricketer, and it made a good combination.

I had no idea that jazz and my emerging sexuality were getting impossibly mixed up.

At thirteen, I was sent to public school. I found friends who shared my taste in music and they introduced me to modern jazz with which I became obsessed. I also discovered sex.

Four hundred boys together in a boarding school was a pretty steamy atmosphere and I soon found out with whom I could do it and with whom I couldn't. These boys rarely overlapped with my other friends, the ones with whom I listened to jazz, yet jazz and sex were somehow getting muddled up.

My heroes were all trumpet players, and all men. But although I'd read every word I could about them, I didn't fancy them. What stuck in my mind was the sound of each one's music.

For me, the jazz trumpet had become the sound of sex. The trumpet itself wasn't the phallus, it was the style in which it was played - Roy Eldridge's tightly-squeezed breathlessness – the sheer size of Ruby Braff's soft mellowness - Fats Navarro's cool, plump, foggy sadness. For me, when these jazz soloists improvised around the chords, they were working towards a point – nirvana perhaps - beyond consciousness, the place where an orgasm promised to take you, but never quite did.

This passion for jazz became completely muddled up with my excitement for sex. Each boy I did it with presented me with a different jazz experience. When James Mackswith opened his flies Dizzy Gillespie leapt out, improvising high and frantic; Anthony Spencer possessed in his crotch all the warm surprises of a Miles Davis solo, while Jeremy Lord had between his legs something as hard and cool as a final chorus by Chet Baker.

So that was my life at public school - a passionate miasma of jazz and sex.

Nowadays I listen to jazz as something pleasant in the background. And after fifteen years in a steady relationship, that's more or less what sex has become too. Perhaps it would need a divorce to get the excitement of jazz rekindled.

RELATED LINKS

Website for Chris Barber Band

About Bix Beiderbecke

About Dizzy Gellespie

About the '100 Club'

About Fats Navarro

About Roy Eldridge

About Chet Baker

About Miles Davis

About Ruby Braff

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Saturday, Oct 1st, 2005

At the G&LAs - Allan, Yo, Me, Donavon

Another week in London and far too much to eat.

Dinners with friends this week included Sunday with Duncan Millar (ex Blue Mercedes whom I managed in the ‘90s); Monday with James Palumbo (owner of Ministry of Sound); Tuesday with my wonderful ex, Donavon; Wednesday with my lawyer, Irving David; and Thursday some magnificent Cornish lamb at Gordon Ramsey's restaurant at Claridges, the event being a Terence Higgins Trust dinner to which I went with Hassan of Brothermandude. All these dinners were interspersed with equally fulsome lunches – with Vicki Wickham, Triss Penna, Simon White, and the always gorgeous Connie, who did my PR for so many years. As my wallet contracted my stomach expanded and it now looks like some sort of minor planet. A mega diet will have to be embarked upon immediately I return to Thailand next week.

Another result of all this eating out was being able to observe the benefits of bringing Eastern Europe into the common market. Everywhere – in restaurants, shops and hotels – there are smiling, pretty, well-mannered girls from Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Hungary. I've never been a great fan of waitresses - I always thought waiters did a better job at being pleasant - but not so at the moment. These imports into the service industries are as smiling and friendly as the waiting staff I'm used to back home in Thailand. Even the girls cleaning hotel rooms are now happy, blond and beautiful. It never occurred to me before just how good-humoured Eastern Europeans are compared to us rich Westerners.

Strangest thing in the news this week was Lance Price's kiss-and-tell diaries about his time in Tony Blair's inner circle.

For goodness sake, Tony Blair is the Prime Minister, can't someone tell him how to draw up a decent employment contract? No self-respecting rock star would have anyone on his production team, neither a manager nor a roadie, who didn't sign a contract forbidding them forever from writing or speaking about anything they saw or heard during their period of employment. If rock stars and their managers can draw up safe and protective employment contracts why can't the Prime Minister? In the end you just have to look at him and say it's the result of pathetic naivete, which is probably the reason for all his other mistakes. Anyway – next time Downing Street is looking around for a decent supremo they should ignore the Alistair Campbells of this world and search for one from amongst the most experienced of British rock managers. They should check with MMF – the British Music Managers Forum. There are plenty to choose from - Jazz Summers, who managed Wham! with me, then Lisa Stansfield, the Verve and Badly Drawn Boy. Or Brian Lane, who looked after Asia and Yes and other heavyweight rock bands. Or Tom Watkins who was responsible for Pet Shop Boys, Bros and East 17. Any of these three would do a better job at managing the media and securing secrets than the chattering crowd now employed at Number 10.

On Friday I went to a dinner at the Savoy celebrating the first Gay & Lesbian Awards, and most surprisingly received an award. A strange thing this, my own feelings being that one's sexuality should be of no interest to anyone else (unless perhaps they're trying to get into bed with you). To achieve this happy state of sexual indifference, Gay and Lesbian organisations have worked long and hard, but whether they should continue to emphasise the differences between people's sexuality by giving awards to gay people, I'm not sure. However, it would be churlish to turn down such a nice a gesture so I duly turned up with a smile on my face and was told I was their ‘Media Person of the Year'. How that could be, when someone like Ned Sherrin continues to dominate all other gay contributors to media, I can't think.

The point is – if I really deserved an award for something I'd done in music, I would presumably have been given one of the music industry's many awards (which has never happened). Much the same argument applies to the books I've written. So that means this ‘media person' award has been given to me simply because I'm gay, which is the one thing in my life I can claim absolutely no credit for.

Moreover, throughout my life ‘being gay' has been the source of continuous and amazing enjoyment. It's been at the very centre of everything I've done and wanted to do. It's led me round the world a thousand times, in and out of other people's lives and pushed me into situations that have been pleasurable, financially rewarding and profound. By and large, I've always behaved in a passive manner to this particular aspect of my make-up, taking advantage of all the pleasures it offers whilst deftly skipping round any obstacles it throws up. But - the long and the short of it is - being gay has been the best thing in my life.

And then they give me an award for it!!

Truly weird, but rather wonderful, and they also threw in an excellent dinner which made it even better.

RELATED LINKS

Downing Street comments on Lance Price diaries

About Brothermandude (on this website)

About Ned Sherrin and Loose Ends

Website for No.10 Downing Street

Wikipedia about Alistair Campbell

Yahoo biog. for Blue Mercedes

Website for Ministry of Sound

Music Managers Forum (UK)

Gordon Ramsey at Claridges

Website for G&LA Awards

Terence Higgins Trust

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Saturday, Sep 24th, 2005

This week I've been in London and the news has been all about one thing… Kate Moss.

I find it incredible. Everyone knows that the world of modeling is a world of drugs. Every book written by every model or ex-model has said it, and court cases with Naomi Campbell during the last two years have splashed endless news of it across the tabloids. Yet now – oh my gosh! – Kate Moss has done a line of coke. And this from a girl who lives with a rock musician publicly known to have a heroin problem. This is not about learning that Kate Moss does an occasional line of coke - it's about journalists searching for a story.

Nowhere – among any sector of society – will you find more coke being taken than amongst those London journalists who cover show business. Any tabloid journalist who didn't do coke would find himself totally ostracized from the scene he was trying to cover.

And now that silly tosser Sir Ian Blair has jumped in on the act, saying Kate Moss will be investigated. Well what's the point? She's already admitted she took it – she's been photographed taking it – what's going to happen next? Are shoot-to-kill police going to storm the next party she goes too? Surely in these days of tube bombings and terrorism Britain's number one police officer has something better to do with his time. Besides, if he was really serious about grabbing celebs who snort coke he could round up any number of them any night simply by raiding a few parties in Notting Hill Gate.

It's quite clear the police have no interest in enforcing narcotics law as it now stands, and quite right too. It's a big muddle. One drug is tolerated, another one isn't. Suppliers are prosecuted, users aren't - unless, that is, Sir Ian Blair decides they are a role model for others. And on that score, I don't believe Kate Moss is a role model. Men would like to screw her and women would like the money she earns, but I don't believe anyone sits around and says, “I'd like to be just like Kate Moss.” For a start, who would want to shack up with that dozy, puffy-faced junky rockstar?

It's not as if Kate wanted her drug habit all over the papers. If her drug-taking is said to influence young people, then it's the tabloids who've made young people aware of it, not Kate herself. Perhaps Sir Ian should consider prosecuting a few journalists too!

Anyway – the obvious answer – and it's been the obvious answer for so long now it hurts to think about it – is to decriminalise the sale and use of ALL narcotics. Making them illegal hasn't restricted their availability one little bit. It's just made them less controllable.

On the personal side, as a pop and rock manager I've had to deal with the bad effects of drug-taking on all the artists I've managed – heroin, coke, ketamine, acid, angel dust, MDMA – you name it! It's never been easy, yet I've never seen any reason why these things should be criminalized. For all the damage these drugs do, I've never seen it as the fault of the drug but of the person who takes them, and more importantly, the bad company they have to keep in order to get hold of them.

‘Waiting for the man' is the real downside of drug-taking. ‘Queuing at Boots' would be so much better.

RELATED LINKS

Former top drugs cop says 'Legalise drugs' (from the Daily Mail)

'Don't legalise drugs' (from the Observer)

Fashion clips, photos, news, gossip

Website for legalising drugs

Wikipedia on Kate Moss

Kate Moss website

All about cocaine

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Saturday, Sep 17th, 2005

The first time I came to Thailand was in 1970. Bangkok airport was a collection of Nissen huts which on the day I arrived were without air-conditioning.

The immigration hall was dirty, teeming, disorganized and steaming. I scooped some sweat off my forehead. On the wall next to the immigration officer's desk a thermometer touched ninety-three.

“How long you want to stay?”

The immigration officer scratched his head and studied my visa.

I'd been told I didn't need a visa if I was coming for just a few days, but some friends who knew Thailand well said I'd be better off getting one, so I had.

“ This visa not so good,” he told me. “Why you didn't get better one?”

It seemed a strange question, difficult to answer.

“It was the one they gave me at your embassy.”

“Business?”

“No. I just want to see a little of your country.”

“Better you give me five dollar.”

“I haven't got any cash,” I lied.

He didn't seem to care at all – just stamped my passport and handed it back with a smile. I couldn't work it out. That an immigration officer should ask for a bribe surprised me. That he should give up on it so easily and smile instead surprised me even more.

It happened again at customs. Sweating profusely, my jacket slung over my shoulder, I headed across to where the baggage was stacked on a trolley. Mine was about three down in the pile and when I pulled it out all the other bags fell off the trolley with a crash. A customs officer who'd been waiting at a counter in the corner strolled across to see what I was up to. He looked scathingly at the mess I'd made.

“I was trying to get to my bag out from underneath,” I explained lamely.

“Have you anything to declare?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe you want to pay Non-Declaration tax,” he suggested.

“How much?”

He smiled. “Up to you.”

That was 1970, and at the airport things are different now. In thirty years I've never again encountered bribery at immigration, though in a way I didn't on that occasion either. It wasn't extortion, nor even a demand, just a suggestion, and there appeared to be no downside to ignoring it. Nevertheless it was the perfect introduction to a country where giving and taking small bribes is a normal part of everyday life.

The insidious thing about bribery in Thailand is that it's easy, efficient, not very expensive, and done with politeness on both sides. And it exists everywhere. Every conversation with a policeman in Thailand ends with a small payment – a hundred baht maybe – just to leave things ‘tasting nice'.

Once, enquiring after a residence visa, I was required to have a short interview with a lady at the immigration office. I already knew the scale of charges involved but somehow it cost five hundred baht more than I'd expected.

“To help us have nice meeting,” she explained cheerfully.

And we did. It was most pleasant.

Renewing an annual visa will require a letter from your bank stating you have one million baht in your account. If by chance you don't, it's not unsual for someone at the immigration office to let you know that in exchange for a good-sized tip, it could be deposited in your bank while your visa is issued.

My advice would be to turn it down flat. When dealing with state officials, there's always a downside - they have a record of it. But for millions of Thais these things are a normal part of every day life. A little money placed in the correct hand will get your car delivered quicker, your operation done sooner, your package passed through customs unchecked or your fine for any number of driving offences waived. At the very top end of the scale it might even get you off a murder charge.

In the west this sort of thing is called corruption. Thais see it more as a buffer to life's downsides. Bribery is the poor man's insurance, and in the end most Thais feel comfortable with it.

However much people in the West disapprove, most Thais feel it gives them more personal freedom than they would otherwise have.

RELATED LINKS

'When bribery is good' Richard Posner makes a point on the economics of bribery

Ludwig Von Mises Institute 'In defense of bribery'

One of the best (straight) websites on Thailand

One of the best (gay) websites on Thailand

Tourism wealth boosts bribery in Thailand

Thai immigration and visa information

Tips on getting around Thailand

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Saturday, Sep 10th, 2005

In 1982 I was managing Japan. They still hadn't had a hit single but they'd gained the respect of the critics and had an album in the UK album chart. I decided America could be delayed no longer.

By some perverse piece of contracting, their UK record company, Hansa, had allowed all rights in the group to go to CBS for America . CBS America was a company with no understanding of the underground side of the music-business, no knowledge of how to create fame and success through stealth and guile. They were a mainstream company. When something looked potentially breakable they threw all the money in the world at it. Otherwise they weren't interested. But still..., I had to try.

Clive Davis had recently been dismissed from CBS for getting involved with independent promoters (i.e. supplying cocaine to get records played) and the man now in charge was Dick Katz, dour and dull. For three months I tried to fix a meeting with him and finally he agreed, "10am tomorrow".

I flew to New York by Concorde taking no luggage, planning to come back in the afternoon on the 2 o'clock flight. I arrived at Kennedy at 8am and the taxi into town was unusually quick. I arrived at the CBS building at quarter past nine with forty-five minutes to spare, so I went into a sandwich bar across the road to have a coffee. It was May and the weather was warm and pleasant but as I sat down in the sandwich bar it started to rain.

This was not ordinary rain, this was monsoon stuff. The raindrops were big like beads and they came down in billions per square foot. There was no way I could get across the road in a fit condition for a meeting.

Miraculously, at ten to ten it stopped. The sun came out and the streets started steaming! I paid my bill and went outside. They were big puddles everywhere.

Rather than walk twenty yards to the next intersection and cross with the traffic-lights like a good New Yorker, I waited for a gap in the traffic, English style, then ran across. But a motor-scooter came from nowhere and forced me to swerve, plonking my foot in a large puddle.

It turned out to be more than a big puddle. It was one of those classic New York holes in the road, circa 1980 - about twelve inches deep and six feet square. I stumbled and fell and went flat on my face, literally under water.

The motor-cyclist swore at me and the oncoming traffic some thirty yards away didn't look like it was going to slow down, so I leapt out and ran to the other side of the road.

Thus, I arrived at the CBS building at five-to-ten for my ten o'clock meeting on a sunny spring day looking as if I had just taken a bath with my clothes on - which is exactly what I had done.

I'd waited a long time for this meeting - it didn't seem a good idea to cancel it - so I rushed into the toilet in the lobby, went into a cubicle, took off all my clothes and wrung them out. Then I put them on again and presented myself to the security guard.

Two minutes later I was upstairs being shown into Dick's office by a puzzled secretary.

"Dick will a few minutes," she told me, and offered me a magazine. "I think you'd better sit on it."

She was right. The wringing out hadn't done a lot of good. When I walked my shoes and socks squelched. When I sat my bum squelched. And the air-conditioning was going to freeze me to death.

Dick Katz walked into his office and was displeased with what he saw - a sodden Englishman messing up his pristine armchair.

I decided at once that apologies would be out of order. Dick Katz was too dull for that. He was a tall man with thickset features, a boring grey suit and those huge policeman-type black shoes that the dullest of American executives like to wear. I decided to play play the eccentric - make him think this is how I went to every meeting, dripping wet.

I opened my sodden document case and pulled out a wet record.

"This is Japan 's new album. They finished recording it two days ago."

Dick looked agonised about the wet marks on his carpet. It was a good thick carpet too, and when it reached the walls it ran all the way up to them to the ceiling. I'd only ever seen anything like that in a place where they were trying to contain violent people.

Dick put the album on his turntable.

I looked round the room. "Where are the speakers?"

"It's clever, isn't it?" he grinned. "I had them concealed."

"Behind the carpet?" I asked.

He nodded, and my heart sank.

What was the point of asking him to make a musical judgment if he covered his speakers with two inch carpet? This was the type of executive who makes his judgments based on other people's judgments. I shouldn't have even bothered to come.

The record started playing and it sounded like it was coming through the walls from the next office. Dick wasn't interested and I didn't care - I was wet and cold and wanted to go home. Then the buzzer sounded and his secretary's voice said: "Bob Dylan on line one."

Dick hesitated. "Can I call him back?"

There was a pause. "He says no. He wants to talk to you now."

Dick looked perplexed. I could see he was about to have a conversation he didn't want to have in front of me. If I'd been a normal person he would have excused himself and taken the call elsewhere, or asked me to leave the room. But this soaking wet fool in front of him....!!!

He took the call and left me sitting there. Dylan had phoned him to discuss the last few points in his new contract, something that wouldn't normally be done in front of anyone.

It wasn't that interesting - just percentages and advances and costs per album - albeit quite large ones. But I was cold and wet and disinterested. Until, that is, they got to the clause about religion.

I couldn't hear Bob's end of the conversation. But Dick suddenly yelled down the phone: "I've told you Bob - no fucking religion! If you can't agree to that the deal's off....."

(Eighteen months previously there had been huge publicity about Jewish-born Bob Dylan becoming a born again Christian. He made an album full of Christian imagery and evangelical zeal and it had bombed. Now his contract had come up for renewal.)

On the other end of the phone Bob was obviously arguing the point, but Dick was having none of it.

"Look, I'm telling you. There'll be no fucking religion, not Christian, not Jewish, not Moslem. Nothing. For God's sake man - you were born Jewish, so stick with it - which make's your religion money doesn't it? For Christ's sake, I'm giving you twenty million bucks - it's like baptising you, like sending you to heaven. So what are you fucking moaning about. Look, I've put this clause in the contract and we're gonna hold you to it. You want twenty million bucks from us, well you gotta do what we tell you. And what we're telling you is... No Torah! No Bible! No Koran! No Jesus! No God! No Allah! NO FUCKING RELIGION."

When he put down the phone, I decided our hopeless little meeting had best come to an end. I stood up soddenly.

"If you do decide to release Japan ," I told him. "At least there's no religion in it. None at all."

"So....?" He looked at me questioningly.

"Well, with you being an atheist I thought you might approve."

"Atheist?" he echoed in fury. "How dare you call me an atheist! I'm a God-fearing man. At synagogue with the family every Saturday. Now get out here and stop messing up my office."

He was still mumbling savagely as I shut the door.

RELATED LINKS

'Nightporter.co.uk' the best website on Japan

Radio interviews with Bob Dylan - 1955-2005

Book by Clive Davis about his years at CBS

About Japan on this website

Website about Concorde

Wikipedia on Clive Davis

Bob Dylan fansite

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Saturday, Sep 3rd, 2005

Alec Ewe runs a restaurant in Ramsgate with his Dutch partner, Jo. It's a very good restaurant indeed. It serves Nonya food which is the cuisine that derives from the Chinese community in Malaysia – a blend of all that is best in Chinese and Malay cooking mixed into one.

Alec was once my boyfriend. He came between Donavon (my black friend who now lives in Sweden with his girlfriend and their one-year-old child) and Yo, my Thai friend, with whom I've now been for fifteen years.

Alec, when I met him twenty years ago, was stunningly beautiful and beautifully bright. He was nineteen - a law student in London, and had just failed his first year examinations. As a result his parents didn't want to fund him for the next year.

Shortly after we met, Alec told me about this over dinner at the Savoy Grill. Greatly taken by his charm, his wit and his good-looks (in other words, under the influence of too much wine) I agreed to pay his next year's tuition fees and in-house residence costs at law school. Quite outrageously, he challenged me to prove I meant it by demanding a cheque on the spot. Rather enjoying the competitive atmosphere, I pulled out my cheque-book and wrote him one (around six thousand pounds, if I remember rightly), then pointed out he'd be mine for the next twelve months.

We had a roller-coaster relationship. Alec was amazingly worth-knowing – amusing, provocative and great to sleep with. He was also downright argumentative and would never climb down in the face of an intellectual challenge. Dinners happened three or four times a week and were always rumbustious.

He had an excellent palate and in no time we were ploughing through wine lists and menus in search of culinary education (but always with dispute close at hand). One night at the Inn On The Park I ordered one of the remaining great Burgundies from the Dr Barolet collection – 1934 Epenot Pommard. I asked the wine waiter to decant it and serve it without the label being visible. Then I asked Alec what he thought of it.

Having given it a good sniff and taken a first sip, Alec asked, “How much did it cost?”

“Nothing to do with it,” I snapped. “I want a judgment based on enjoyment alone.”

“How can I possibly know how enjoyable it is unless I know how much it cost. I need to know how much I'm MEANT to enjoy it.”

“Totally absurd,” I insisted. “Wine should be a pleasure in itself, devoid of any financial consideration.”

“I'm Malaysian,” Alex insisted. “Wine is not part of our culture. If I'm to assess the deliciousness of this wine I need to know what value you put on it.”

(Our arguments usually started like this, then descended into aggressive, less-rounded phrases.)

“You should be able to judge the wine from the point of view of absolute taste,” I maintained.

“And do you...” he snapped back,“...always choose wine by knowledge and not price?”

“Of course!”

“I don't believe you.”

He might have been half right, but since that would also make him half wrong the argument seemed worth continuing.

“The trouble with you,” Alec sneered, “is that you never think about money in a practical way – you make lots and spend lots but you're not responsible with it.”

“How can you complain when I'm paying your school fees and your living costs and take you on holidays?”

Our anger was getting noticed by people at other tables. To keep the thing going we had to lower our voices.

“I want to respect you," Alex hissed. "I want to learn from you. If I see you squandering money how can I learn?”

“Learn from the school, for God's sake. That what you're there for isn't it?”

“I don't want to. It's all contracts, and tort, and real estate. I'm bored of studying law. I want to learn about life. I think I'd like to make movies, or...," he paused dramatically, "perhaps be a a prostitute.”

I saw the woman at the next table gag on her soup.

“A prostitute?" I sneered. "Well that's more or less what you are right now, isn't it?”

Alec's eyes opened wide and angrily. “Glad you can see it. You didn't think it was love did you?”

But love, of course, is what it was. Alec was fantastic and I was crazy about him. And it seemed he was pretty keen on me too. Anyway – on this particular evening, under continuing pressure - he finally gave in and agreed to comment on the wine without knowing its price.

He took a deep sip. “It tastes like bananas,” he said grumpily, then refused to say another word about it.

I was incensed. He was trying to annoy me. I'd just paid three hundred pounds for the wine and he refused to treat it with proper consideration. And from then on dinner descended into even worse bad temper.

The next day, remembering the events of the night before, I looked up my wine books and searched for a comment on 1934 Epenots Pommard. I found one by Cyril Ray (or was it Hugh Johnson, I'm not sure)….

“Intense… lactic aromas… sour red cherries… with a hint of bananas.”

I never told Alec

RELATED LINKS

Website of the restaurant at Inn on the Park (now the Four Seasons Hotel)

Website of winespectator.com

Website of Alec's restaurant

Website of the Savoy Grill

Website of decanter.com

About Epenots Pommard

Books by Hugh Johnson

Books by Cyril Ray

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