Gordon Brown, Labour’s leader-in-waiting, can’t win the next election. This week’s address to the Labour Party Conference might as well have been his speech conceding victory to David Cameron. Why is Gordie such a liability? Not because of the disdainful verdict of dodgy Newsnight focus groups, or his recent impatient… Read More »Gordon Isn’t a Moron – But He’s a Terrible Liar
(Originally appeared on the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ as ‘Long live the metrosexual!’ ) More evidence that reports of the ‘death’ of my Frankenstein monster with perfect skin, the metrosexual, have been greatly exaggerated. In Europe and the UK at least, it seems he’s alive and looking very well indeed in his lovely new eyeliner –… Read More »How ‘Big Brother’ is Giving Boys Big Tits
by Mark Simpson (Originally appeared on Salon.com, April 2003) It’s tough growing up British. Not just for all the obvious Austin Powers-esque reasons, such as our medieval dentistry, endemic mold problems and epidemic dandruff, but for something much more existential. The British are great and enthusiastic believers in Original Sin.… Read More »Why Doesn’t America Love Robbie Williams? When He Love-Hates Himself So?
Thanks largely to a crowd-pleasing musical, the crowd-panicking Mr Bowery’s name is forever linked in the public mind with Taboo, the fin-de-siecle drugs, sex, and dressing-up club in Leicester Square, London, he captained in the 1980s – the decade in which the 20th century and possibly Western civilisation actually ended.… Read More »Leigh Bowery: Decadence in the Dole Queue
by Mark Simpson (Originally published on SHOWstudio.com, 2002) Oscar Wilde famously donned cowboy duds for the Western leg of his tour of the US in 1882, after discovering that his usual dandy garb didn’t go down quite so well in the hard-bitten cattle and gold-rush towns as it had in… Read More »Tailor to the Desert Stars: a Tribute to Nudie