There'll be another one along in 15 minutes...

March 17th – There are other members of the rock/pop industry (see yesterday’s opening line – recycling of used words and phrases; no waste here) that evoke real feelings of a shared experience by having known them through their music; for me, Jimi Hendrix, Ralph Vaughan Williams and The Who are but three.

There are also those you wouldn't touch with someone else’s barge-pole; not because they’re satanic or evil or that, IYHO, their music is rubbish, but because everything you understand about their life and they way they live it is anathema to the regular levels of sensibility that we, most of us living in a co-operative society, operate to. Everything they seem to stand for, as portrayed by the media, runs at total odds with this measured society we inhabit; and that’s the killer phrase; ‘as portrayed by the media’. Some of the terminology in what follows you may not like; I just try to tell it as I found it then and now.

A whole industry has sprung up around the lives of the stars, most of it spurious and intellectually insulting both to reader and subject. It’s nothing new. Beauties in the 18th century were subjected to invasions of privacy and a level of made-up cartoons and caricatures in the press that would not be out of place today, except that what we have now has taken an ugly twist to fit the demands of the gritty, real-life drama nation we now favour. Like the star machines of the various Hollywood studios of the 40’s and 50’s, the present-day publications, mainly the Red-Tops, seek to disseminate details about the stars of a highly personal nature (whether they are true or not) details which, under normal circumstances those stars would never dream of letting out into the public domain; but the modern star magazine doesn't deal in normal circumstances.

Those studio machines of yesteryear, although they exploited their stars to the n-th degree in order to wring back every dollar spent, they at least wrote their star press releases with a little wit and stardust; not so the weekly or monthly goss-mags of today. Their sole survival depends on reporting, along with as much lurid detail and unflattering photo’s as possible, the acrimonious relationships and heartbreak that sadly accompanies many a bright-start partnership; (some of the details released and the innuendo circulated about yesterdays’, March 16th, matrimonial debacle make sobering reading). What we have to ask is why? Why would anyone, anyone who relies on the good nature of the public to maintain their earning potential and position in show-biz, why would that person release details of their abortion, affair, infidelity, violence, drunken behaviour or surgical procedures into the public domain.

Why?

Well, here’s a thought.

Pre-Warhol, for someone to have the opportunity to become famous, for someone to achieve popularity and even stardom, they first of all had to have a level of talent that got them noticed and then a work ethic that built on that talent, as well as reassuring their paymasters sufficiently to get them to commit the funds required for perpetuation. This in turn allowed the paymasters to feel secure that their fledgling property (the talent) would continue to grow after the money had been invested and  so make a handsome return…so they could promote other stars in the making to do the same; self perpetuation of the industry and, ergo, their jobs; and did these stars work? You only have to read the daily work-load itinerary of, say, the up-and-coming Clark Gable or Joan Crawford to appreciate the phrase, ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’.

Post-Warhol and Thatcher, the belief is that anyone can do it and the combination of effort, magic and talent has been all but replaced by publicity at any price with a sprinkling of bribery and a bucket of innuendo, lies and fabrications all driven by greed. The publicity photographers of the 30’s/40’s/50’s all had a track record. They studied their art and the technology that went with it, now any jerk with a mobile ‘phone can happy-snap and manipulate the image…now the camera really does lie. Unfortunately for those ‘stars’ involved but to the delight of the press and public, the poorer they’re prepared for the limelight the better and brighter is their crash and burn…and Britney Spears is possibly the gold standard of gutter-press brutality and cruelty.

What you have to understand is that I’m writing this purely from the punter-recipient of all the press coverage she got out, of which I tried to fill in the blanks as various shock-horror stories unfolded. I’m quite happy for folk to correct me and I mean no harm to her as I feel she was unjustly vilified...but also feel she had a fair hand in creating the events and sensationalist behaviour out of which much of the by-lines were written.
Flown in on the wing of the plane that was Madonna (‘pop-starlet’ not ‘mother of Jesus’) my take on her was that she was seen as a shoo-in for Madge’s crown; a torch-bearer for the gossip symphony conducted by the press and played by the orchestra of the music business’ promotion’s departments, whose brief is to create a through-line of strong female performers (for ‘strong female performers’ read ‘must have big tits and blonde hair’). As a bonus to the making of money through their performance and recording, a regular supply of sexy women sells newspapers, and, as a further bonus, maintains the mostly male agenda; the one about keeping women in the pop industry, in any industry, firmly in their place. Anyone who showed steel or displayed an unwillingness to play the big-tits-small-brain game was branded a lesbian and struggled to make a column-inch of reporting per year. I wrote a while ago (Jan 24th) that a bad career move in the music business is just being female; certainly seemed to be the case with Ms. Spears.

As soon as the adult-dressed-as-school-girl video for ‘Hit Me Baby’ (interesting title – a woman ready to be abused, already pliant for the papers) came out it was obvious (to me anyway, honest, not a case of ‘horse-stable door-bolted’, I really did think it at the time) obvious she was a car-crash waiting to happen. The media fixated on her under-wired to within an inch of it’s life bust size and speculated on the back-story of how she could play a coquettish hussy so convincingly…and when she exchanged ‘that kiss’ with Madonna, she was now not just ‘a lezzer’, now she became an ‘outrageous bi-sexual, lesbian slut’…but even sexier in the wet-dreams of masturbating promo people…and the column inches that followed her and used the terminology above about her played on that.

As the attention-scrum grew so her ways of dealing with the intrusions and stories became more scatter-brained and this caused more reporting, more running, hiding, shouting, bad behaviour…from then on she was fair game; it was open-season on Britney. Much of what happened in the interim passed me by until she was captured on film and by a veritable stampede of camera crews at a gas station somewhere trying to buy some fags or pop or summat and she eventually locked herself in the toilet.

I guess, in the way they are marketed (and market themselves, it has to be said) one could sit back and watch these folk get hoisted by their own petard and think, ‘Well deserved’, and that’s what the press want you to think. They want you to side with them because it gives their actions and behaviour credibility. However, I remember thinking at the time, as I watched this gas-station hunt continue,

“Well, whatever you've done, lass, you don’t deserve that; nobody does.” 

It was on this day in 2004 that Ms. Spears injured her knee at a concert and had to cancel the following gigs and I bet, given the press coverage she’d had up ‘til that point, no one believed it for an instant, certainly not several elements of that press; depending on who you read, it was either the drugs, or booze, or spoilt idleness, or over partying, or possible pregnancy that caused it.

A purely personal thing; I stopped supporting anything Murdoch funded about ten years ago. Not because I have anything personal against him (although his hand-in-glove affair with Thatcher didn't endear him to me) but because I firmly believe that his publications peddle the wrong message and that too much press and TV in one set of hands is an inherently dangerous thing. The only way to put these things right, these scandal stories in weekly rags of dubious content, as with those who continue to post pictures of naked girls in daily newspapers is…to not to buy them. Not gonna happen, is it?

Even with all the coverage of the Leveson enquiry and in particular the Millie Dowler unpleasantness, we’re hooked on them just as we were in the 30’s thro’ the 60’s; build ‘em up and knock ‘em down…and the bigger they are the harder we like to see them hit the ground. Funny thing fame unless, like the Big Brother contestants of the past ten years you’re on the receiving end of even as little as fifteen minutes of it. Then it lacks even a vestige of humour, and there’s few things more cringe-inducing than being a spectator to someone destroying his or herself with the help and corroboration of the press and us…as Justin Bieber is finding out.