UP TO -40°C

FOR 49 DAYS
When Paul-Emile Victor was
researching the ice-cold arctic
region in 1936, his Longines
chronometers continued
to work accurately – helping
him to calculate the longitude
when he dared to cross the
Greenland ice cap. “These
watches made the difference
between failure and success”,
Victor stated.

Paul-Emile Victor
 What else can we do
for our children?
Help make the world more sustainable?
And our portfolio too?

The value of investments may fall as well as rise and you may not get back the amount originally invested.
© UBS 2021. All rights reserved.
For some of life’s questions, you’re not alone.
Together we can find an answer.
 73

62

33
Editor’s letter 73
Film
Luxury is about to open back
up... way up. Who’ll be first to “And Best Actor goes to...” Sorry, who?
book their holiday in orbit? With last year’s Oscar bait landing

43
worthy minnows, the ceremony is set
to shake up the Academy for good.

Details 74
Amanda Gorman steps GQ Preview
into history; Breitling’s This month’s events, products and garms.
biker bonanza; the Style
Shrink goes back to the gilet
for future-proof fashion; merch 82
Television
for movies, mags and, er, Monet.
Thought The Trip was relaxing? More
44
68
switch-on-to-switch-off shows are on the
Tony Parsons way and they’re attracting major stars.
Zoom is here to stay and business class is out.
But is your job also up in the air?

47
Politics
77
Can Britain cut out the middleman and take
the EU’s place between China and the US?

52
Style
Sporty? Yes. Laid-back? 85 70
Obviously. Functional? You
got it. Boss and Russell
Athletic present their
coordinated capsule collab.
85
Cars
58
56 Get upfront and personal with Mercedes’ new S-Class;
the GR Yaris is a hot-headed rally hatch; plus, TAG Heuer
Grooming and Porsche pay homage to their Carrera namesake.
Hermès’ new fragrance
is an haute-tech cologne
15 years in the waiting.
Here comes the science bit...

62
85

Taste
Eight culinary tastemakers
share lockdown tips,
tricks and tipples;
Michelin-starred chef
Rob Howell gets to the 52 56
root of vegetarian cooking.

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 21

 dolcegabbana.com. Necklace, £450. Rings, from £300
Suit, £2,070. T-shirt, £575. Both by Dolce & Gabbana.

each. All by David Yurman. davidyurman.com

From the dark depths of drug addiction in Cherry to swinging from skyscrapers in Spider-Man 3,
90
Tom Holland’s stellar young career is on an upward trajectory in 2021.

Story by Jonathan Heaf Photographs by AB+DM Styling by Law Roach

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 23

F EATU RI NG SA M CLAF LIN

AVAI L ABL E
AT F LAN NE LS

102
Frank Sinatra vs Gay Talese
For the most highly lauded and influential magazine feature
of all time, writer Gay Talese spent months on the heels of his
subject and never caught him. Here, we recount the story behind
the story of “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold”.
By Mark Rozzo
168
Spring fashion
Bags, high-tops and shades.
Photographs by Dennis Pedersen
174
Olly Alexander
From stage to It’s A Sin, the
star shows up and represents.
By David Levesley
196
Olive Pometsey
secures the bag!
144 With Oscar-winning
filmmaker Steve McQueen.
Features and fashion
110 Cameo.com
Celebrity shoutouts and the new stan economy:
how the business of fame opened a new branch.
By Thomas Barrie
118 Don’t call it a ‘space hotel’
The first commercial tourists are expected to
check boldly in at the ISS next year.
124 War, justice and ‘Marine A’
How the British military almost escaped scrutiny
over the killing of an injured Taliban fighter.
By Simon Akam
134 Domestic abuse
Although an important new law is due to pass this
year, more must still be done – by all of us – to
confront the complexities of this insidious crime.
By George Chesterton
144 Slowthai
The Northampton star slays in Dior and unpicks
the pressures of his public/private personae.
By Ciaran Thapar
154 The apple that didn’t fall far
How James Brown’s own unruly past couldn’t
prepare him for the rebellious heights to which
his teenage son climbed.
162 Jed Mercurio
The Line Of Duty showrunner puts government,
TV critics and corrupt public servants on blast.
By Ben Allen
168
154
APRIL 2021 GQ.CO .UK 25
 Editor
DYLAN JONES
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT Sophie Hamblett

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Paul Solomons CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER Jonathan Heaf

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Vincent Peters, Rankin, Mick Rock, Mark Seliger, Søren Solkær, Mario Sorrenti, Ellen von Unwerth, Mariano Vivanco, Matthias Vriens-McGrath, Nick Wilson, Richard Young

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ART EDITOR Jeffrey Lee PARTNERSHIPS DESIGNER Duarte Soares SENIOR VIDEO PRODUCER Lucy Hewitt
SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER Fiona Hill ACTING SENIOR PROJECT MANAGER Amma Greenstreet PROJECT MANAGER Sian Bourke

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 Editor’s Letter
As the high life returns, champagne in space (yes, actual space!) will let you one-up your frenemies’ travel plans
Sky’s the limit? Not any more...
he concept of luxury has
been much devalued in the last few years. Ever
since the last pre-Covid economic downturn,
the emphasis of high-net-worth spend has been
leaning towards experience and comfort rather
than conspicuous consumption – spa breaks,
then, rather than fancy new pants – so when
we went into the first lockdown last year, the
Photograph Getty Images
custodians of every luxury goods company from
Abu Dhabi to Zhengzhou went into collective
meltdown. Was this the end of the world as we
knew it? Were all their urbane, urban consumers
suddenly going to move to the country, throw
away their designer togs and start parad-
ing around in overalls, Crocs and gardening
twine? Would George Clooney soon be playing
Worzel Gummidge? Would the next environ-
mental disaster be colloquialised as GLL (Gucci
Loafer Landfill)?
Designers, PRs and marketers the world over
started to shuffle uneasily in their cream leather
Barcelona chairs, wondering how quickly they
could swap their dockland high-rise or West End
townhouse for a lateral conversion on Kalihiwai
Beach. I lost count of the number of Savile Row
impresarios I saw wandering around Hyde Park
dressed in scuffed sneakers and double denim,
muttering to themselves as they clutched empty
cardboard coffee cups, running off like Gollum
if anyone dared to approach them.
Luxury, it seemed, was over. If it wasn’t exactly
in a critical condition, it was definitely looking
a little pale around the gills. And yet... and yet...
we all started getting vaccinated, the world >>
Few things can beat
three months in
Mustique. Space travel
is one of them
APRIL 2021 GQ .CO.UK 33

Private dining at Amazónico, London
>> opened up again and the sybarite in all of us
started waking from its slumber. Who said luxury
was dead? What fool decreed that the world of
fancy restaurants and expensive shoes had gone
to the wall for good? No, no, no, we had all spoken
too soon and yes, yes, yes, we were actually
extremely interested in squeezing ourselves
into a business-class seat on a crowded Boeing
777X, thank you very much. And did we want a
complimentary glass of Veuve Clicquot while we
waited for boarding to be completed? Well, come
to think of it, we could probably
manage two. At least.
The space
station’s
L
uxury, it seems, is back.
Really back. Backer than large window
Burt Bacharach and his
backing band wearing back-
observatory
packs. Which is just about as will double as
back as you can get – legally, a dining room
anyway. And while we are
all desperate for some sunshine, some front-
end-of-the-plane action and some seriously
leveraged seven-star hotel treatment, we’re also
very much in the market for a Richard James
suit, a brand-spanking-new TAG Heuer/Porsche
Carrera watch and the upgraded white truffle
menu at Locanda Locatelli. We’ll take it all...
Far from disappearing to the countryside,
buying a couple of chickens and planting some
nasturtiums, what we actually want to do is
spend a lot of money on clothes that intimidate
everyone in our address book, fly private halfway
across the world to a secret island only we have
Follow us
@britishgq
@dylanjonesgq
34 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
EDITORÕS LETTER
ever heard of and then fly back again and tell
everyone what a great time we had. Then, when
we’ve finished bragging to all our frenemies who
are still out in the Cotswolds growing mung beans
and pretending to be happy about the prospect of
early retirement, we’ll slip back to the city, switch
up our wardrobe and get ready to prepare for our
first trip to space. That’s right, space.
When we finally fall out of lockdown and
when the world once again welcomes those for
whom travel is a calling rather than a burden,
the appropriate luxury experience will become
even more of a benchmark status symbol. And
while few things can beat a three-month sojourn
in Mustique or a year-long sabbatical in the
Amangiri in Canyon Point, Utah, space travel
is one of them. Especially space travel in a real
fancy-pants space hotel.
O
n page 118 of this issue you’ll see this
year’s ultimate travel brag, a berth on
the successor to the International Space
Station, after its gradual decommissioning. Axiom
Space’s cofounder, president and CEO, Michael
Suffredini, was previously the programme man-
Behind the scenes with Tom Holland
ager of the ISS, so we can assume Find out more about our cover star on GQ.co.uk.
he knows his stuff. Axiom plans
to host groups of space tourists
on board its commercial station,
the interiors of which have been
designed by Philippe Starck. Like
many stations, Axiom will have
a decidedly commercial bent,
described as it is by many as
“the in-space industrial park for
manufacturing products to be used on the ground
and in orbit”. Space tourism will be only one of
Become a British GQ YouTube subscriber
its many functions. Apparently the station will Join us for the latest video drops and
also have the “largest window observatory ever exclusive content.
constructed for the space environment”, which
will double as a dining room.
Even better than that: in space no one can hear Smarten up your inbox
you scream... when you’re presented with the bill. Sign up to our
An eight-day trip on the ISS will cost you £40 newsletters, the
GQ Daily and GQ
million, each, although this obviously includes Commuter, for your
your accommodation, all your fancy space gear daily briefing.
and 15 weeks’ training on earth as well as the
launch costs. What’s not to love? G
On the cover and subscribers’ cover:
Suit, £2,090. Shirt, £715. Tie, £170.
All by Prada. prada.com. Necklace,
£450. Rings, from £300 each. All by
David Yurman. davidyurman.com
Photographed by AB+DM
Invest in your spring wardrobe
The best items and trends to look forward
Dylan Jones, Editor to this season.
 Contributors
Law Roach
For Tom Holland’s GQ cover shoot, the actor
and his stylist, Law Roach, were reunited to
celebrate the beginning of a year that will see
Holland appear in three major films. Roach
has worked closely with the young British
star – who is currently filming his third
appearance as Spider-Man – on photoshoots
and red carpet appearances.
Ben Allen
GQ Online Production Coordinator Ben Allen
profiled Jed Mercurio, the creator of Bodyguard
and Line Of Duty, ahead of the latter’s sixth
series. “Mercurio has made a career out of
revealing the grimy underbellies of our public
institutions,” says Allen, “first with Cardiac
Arrest and more recently with Line Of Duty. So,
unsurprisingly, he had quite a lot to say about
the government’s handling of the pandemic.”
AB+DM
For this month’s cover shoot, photographic
partnership AB+DM (AKA Ahmad Barber and
Donté Maurice) shot Tom Holland in Atlanta,
Georgia. “We loved working with Tom so much,”
say Barber and Maurice. “It was such a joyful
shoot with a lot of laughing, dancing and social
distancing! Tom has such a welcoming nature
about him that would make any shoot amazing.”
Danny Kasirye
Photographer Danny Kasirye shot
Northampton rapper Slowthai for this month’s
issue and an online GQ Hype cover story that
explored Slowthai’s chaotic, punkish approach
to life and hip-hop and marked the upcoming
release of his second album, Tyron. “Slowthai
is super mellow and chill,” says Kasirye, “but
can switch on instantly in front of the camera.
It makes him so fun to shoot.”
George Chesterton
In this issue, GQ Managing Editor
George Chesterton examines in depth the
broader story behind an alarming uptick in
domestic abuse during the pandemic. “After a
year of lockdowns,” says Chesterton, “and with
tech abuse adding another layer to this social
catastrophe, we had a chance to talk about an
issue many men know virtually nothing about.”
Hannah Blacklock
In January, GQ.co.uk saw its most successful
month for traffic ever; at the heart of the drive
was GQ Social Media Editor Hannah Blacklock
and her team. “‘Always on’ has been given new
meaning over the past year and community has
never been more important,” says Blacklock.
“A recent highlight for me? Stirring up a
Twitter storm with our Marvel movie ranking...
Healthy debate is never a bad thing.” G
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 39
NEW F-PACE
HARD TO FORGET.
New Jaguar F-PACE. A performance SUV unlike any other, now restyled to be even more
assertive, even more distinctive. The all-new premium interior features the best in contemporary
British design, and next-generation infotainment features the latest connected technologies.
The extensive new engine range now includes Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle and Mild Hybrid
Electric Vehicle technology. Every journey can feel extraordinary. New Jaguar F-PACE.
Easy to love, hard to forget.

DJ/PRODUCER
Official WLTP Fuel Consumption for the F-PACE 21MY range in mpg (l/100km): 23.1 - 130.2 (12.2 - 2.2). WLTP CO2 Emissions 275 - 49 g/km. PHEV in mpg (l/100km):
a fully charged battery. For comparison purposes only. Real world figures may differ. CO2, fuel economy, energy consumption and range figures may vary according
production vehicle over a standardised route.
Combined 112.5-130.2 (2.5 - 2.2). CO2 Emissions 57-49/km. The figures provided are as a result of official manufacturer’s tests in accordance with EU legislation with
to factors such as driving styles, environmental conditions, load, wheel fitment, accessories fitted, actual route and battery condition. Range figures are based upon
w w w . c h e a n e y. c o . u k
 Edited by
Charlie Burton

+
Spring on the steps: poet
Amanda Gorman and the end of
America’s long winter – p.58
Photograph Kelia Anne

This month: Is Brexit Britain the new superpower broker? p.47 We don’t make the rules,
Jordan Peterson does... again p.71 How television found its inner peace p.82
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 43
D E TA I L S Ð M A N T H I N G S

A
t the New York Times’ dialled down after the great business now. And working from your career from home or in an
Dealbook conference financial crash of 2008 and it will home is just the start of it. office is delusional.
in November 2020, Bill surely shrink even further post- Hybrid working means a team

Gates mused on how working life
will look post-pandemic. “There
will be a very high threshold for
taking that business trip,” he said.
“And there will be ways that you
can work from home a lot of the
time.” Gates’ face then contorted
into a mask of quiet contempt as
he contemplated an imaginary
business traveller who had crossed
the planet just to be in his presence.
“Yes, you flew all the way here to sit
in front of me!”
Gates looked deeply unim-
pressed. He is probably right.
Business travel – especially at the
front of the plane – was radically
global pandemic. The cost, the
health risks, the carbon footprint
– these will all drive a nail in the
coffin of executive travel. And while
that is all horribly inevitable, it is
also a shame. One of the joys of the
working world was the thrill of air
travel on somebody else’s dime,
the glamour of flying to another
country for professional reasons,
the excitement of checking into a
new hotel, the bars of Toblerone
and room service trolleys, the
chocolate on your pillow, the
meaningless sex with a succession
of anonymous strangers. But
hybrid working is the way we do
that is split between two worlds:
office and remote. For many, this
is the death of the daily commute
and the twilight of the nine-to-five
weekday slog in an office. Hybrid
working entails doing on screen
what you once did at a desk. Hybrid
working renders the business trip
obsolete. And many love hybrid
working because it bestows the
independence of the freelance life
with none of the uncertainty around
payday. From the Square Mile to
Shanghai, most white-collar work-
ers look forward to never climbing
onto another crowded train in their
life. After all the trauma of 2020,
W
orking from home or
working at the office
is the very least of our
problems. It doesn’t just mean
the company is reluctant to fly us
to Frankfurt or Los Angeles for a
business meeting (bad) or that
we don’t have to get on a crowded
Tube train every day (good). Hybrid
working is the byproduct of an
economy that is fighting for its life.
“Lockdown and social distancing
means business has discovered
ways to operate with a smaller
number of people and that will have
a lasting effect after the restrictions
have gone,” wrote Forsyth. The
question we should all ask ourselves

Bill Gates has seen the

is not “Should I work from home or
the office?” The real question is “Do
I have a job?”

future of your working life

(and it doesn’t include business trips)
Tough times lie ahead, so make yourself indispensable and come out on top
Story by Tony Parsons
our annus Boris, a significant part
of the population believes the world
is rendered a vastly improved place
by hybrid working. But there is one
fatal flaw in this new orthodoxy.
Because underlying the siren
song of hybrid working is a central
fallacy: your job is secure. And it
is not. Your job is not safe. My job
is not safe. When the economy is
suffering its greatest contraction
for three centuries, nobody’s job
is safe. “We can add this to the
obvious threats of the new remote-
working template,” warned James
Forsyth in the Spectator. “If you can
do your job from home in Britain,
can someone else do it from abroad
for a fraction of the cost?” Probably!
When the developed world
is steeling itself for years of
post-pandemic mass unemploy-
ment, job security is off the menu.
The myth of hybrid working is built
upon self-delusion. In Asia, they
once called a job for life an iron rice
I don’t blame anyone who wants
to work from home – I have done
it since I was a washed-up music
journalist walking out of the NME
for the last time at the age of 25. But
all the cosy chatter about hybrid
working masks the cruel reality
that there are hard times ahead. UK
unemployment is predicted to reach
2.6 million by the summer of 2021,
although some economists think
that figure is overly optimistic.
Our definition of what constitutes
hybrid working could change as
we get deeper into the 2020s. It
may come to mean negotiating the
fraught path between employment
and unemployment or between
gainful employment and reduced
hours, job insecurity and slashed
salaries – the nextdoor neighbours
of redundancy. “My prediction
would be that over 50 per cent
of business travel and over 30
per cent of days in the office will
go away,” Gates told that online
Dealbook summit. But what Gates
didn’t contemplate was how many
millions are going to be waking up
at 3am wondering how to pay our
way on vastly reduced moolah.
There can still be golden years
ahead, you can still have a 50-year
career, but only if you make yourself
indispensable to your firm and only
if you make it unimaginable that
Illustration Bruno Mangyoku

bowl, but there are no more iron
rice bowls. The notion that you will
get to choose whether you conduct
Hybrid working may
improve your work-life
Is professional travel now a distant dream?
balance, but it loosens
your grip on your job
your role could be sourced out for
half the price. Even then, you should
expand your streams of income
with side hustles and a second
or even third career. The future
belongs to the truly flexible. And
being flexible doesn’t mean taking
a few Zoom lessons in your jimjams.

44 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 GQ − PREVIEW

Back to the future

Lace yourself into the Prada Linea Rossa
Collision Cross shoes for an ultramodern
step into Spring/Summer 2021
Story by Sophie Clark
Photograph by Charlie Surbey

I
f the stars are anything to go by, this
could very well be the dawning of the
age of Aquarius. There’s a fundamental
shift of energy right now. It’s a time of
forward-thinking innovation and off-
beat originality. It’s the future. And
who better to embody these revolutionary
themes than Miuccia Prada? Enter, the
Prada Linea Rossa Collision Cross shoes.
Showcasing a “Pressure Air” cushion at the heel
and a honeycomb shock absorber at the front,
the design sees no technical detail spared. This
is high-performance footwear, engineered from
durable ripstop fabric with geometric 3-D
shapes on the surface and zig-zagging elastic
laces, complete with toggle closure. You can
expect these trainers to take your feet to
another dimension. G

Trainers by Prada, £750. prada.com

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 45

D E TA I L S − S O C I A L S T E R E O T Y P E
Annals of The One Per Center #8
Haven’t you heard?
We’re in a full-blown
podcast gold rush
And the super wealthy are keen to see some upside
Story by
The new lexicon: words and phrases heard in the wild this month...
Dreampolitik
The fantasy-based world views
of vaccine Karens and Newsmax
addicts. Also known as: idiocy.
46 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
Rachel Johnson Illustration by Guy Shield
B-school
Shorthand for “business school”,
used by people who have never
done anything cooler than go to
business school.
Studio Henhouse
presents: a ’cast of one
‘Baby’ wine
Wine merchant buzzword – “Baby
Château Latour”, “Baby Pommard”
– denoting a bottle that’s a lot
cheaper (and worse) than the name
implies. Rule for life: unless it’s for a
child, never buy a “baby” anything.
M
r One Per Cent slid
off the Peloton and
did an inventory of
his perspiration and
pain levels, but only a
cursory one. He didn’t
bother with a warm-
down – who does? – but kept the audio from his
Bose QuietComfort Earbuds playing. It was the
debut Harry and Meghan podcast.
Instead of heading from the home gym to
the wet room to shower, he walked into the
bespoke, farmhouse-style kitchen in his Lycra.
Miranda was listening to Economist Radio via
Sonos and reading the Times.
“Miranda,” he said. She winced at his
padded seat and crotch. “Have you heard these
Harry’n’Meghan podcasts?”
He’d seen how much Spotify’s Gimlet studio
had ponied up for the Sussexes. He also knew
how much Amazon had spaffed on the podcast
platform Wondery – £220 million, to be precise
– and he hated to miss out on the next big thing.
“It’s time I had a podcast,” he said.
“You are joking,” said Miranda.
He wasn’t sure if he wanted a podcast or a
podcast platform, but even he was self-aware
enough to realise that people wouldn’t tune in
to him wittering into a mic under a duvet.
“I’ll convert the henhouse into a studio.”
He added a clincher, as if he wasn’t doing this
for him: “You and the kids will love it.”
“But what will you talk about?” she asked.
She knew where this was coming from: the
chatelaine of Belvoir, the Duchess Of Rutland,
had a podcast and interviewed other duchesses
about the hell of running stately homes. “And
you’d be the host?” Miranda carried on. “Which
is hilarious. I mean, ask yourself: when did you
last go out to dinner and ask the woman to your
left or your right a single question?”
“But it won’t be me interviewing women,”
he said, “would it?”
She realised then that he saw himself as a sort
of grizzled Andrew Neil of the financial world.
One alpha silverback interviewing another.
“I could do mine on captains of the universe,”
he said, confirming her suspicions. “You could
do a posh one, you know, like the Duchess Of
Cornwall’s book group thingy for Instagram.
You love reading.” He said this as if it was the
one thing he could say about his wife with
certainty and without being reprimanded.
Mr One Per Cent knew he was late to the
party, but talk was still cheap. He only wished
he’d moved faster! If, like opinions and assholes,
everybody has one, there was no time to lose.
Advodating
A romantic entanglement with
someone from that protest march
you went on to chat up strangers
after getting disillusioned with Tinder
fight climate change.

Brexit Britain needs to pick
a side in the new Cold War
With the EU on manoeuvres and drifting from its 20th-century allies,
a free-wheeling UK can leverage its role as a global power broker
B
rexit means many things
to many people. Food
shortages. Immigration.
Job losses. Sovereignty. Spitfires.
Fish. If you were looking for a
recent historical event to bring out
your repressed misanthrope you
would have to go some way to beat
it. A plague on both your houses
barely does the thing justice.
Dinner-party metropolitans
have spent the past four years
accusing everyone else of being
racist. Hardline Brexiteers pined
over blue passports without ever
making a meaningful case to leave
(Iain Duncan Smith indelicately
suggested Britain can “dominate the
world again”). But both sides have
missed a trick. Perhaps Remainers,
of whom I was one, have been more
insular than they’d care to admit.
They forgot about the dirty subject
of geopolitics. Amid all this talk of
Britain’s diminished role in the
world, the likelihood, more by acci-
dent than design, is that Brexit may
turn out to have the opposite effect.
The regrettable global narrative
is of a slide into a new Cold War
between the US and China, but
more generally between liberal
democracies and the authoritarian
regimes who seek to undermine
them (especially Russia and Iran).
The oddity in this latest game of
Risk is the EU. Comprised of liberal
and rather illiberal democracies
itself, the EU is hedging its bets
Photographs Shutterstock
Story by George Chesterton
between precarious economic sta-
bility and ideology, agreeing a new
investment deal with China, which
can be hailed as a shrewd example
of the EU’s strategic autonomy or
condemned as a snub to the US that
drives a wedge between democratic
allies while rewarding Chinese
aggression. To make sense of this, as
the director of the Chatham House
think tank, Robin Niblett, explains,
we should remember the EU is a
geoeconomic bloc, not a geopolitical
one – it stresses dialogue where
the US sees rivalry. Where does
Brexit Britain fit into all of this?
By cutting itself out of an economic
superpower, Britain can and must
urgently rethink its global role.
“ We’r e l e s s s t rat e g i c a l l y
important than before, because
we’re just not big enough to be a
player,” says Niblett.
“And this doesn’t fit Remainers
very easily with the
Brexit narrative. So
forgot about
the UK will have to the dirty
work even harder subject of
to be relevant. We
can no longer think
geopolitics
of ourselves as a great power, but
we can think of ourselves as a
global broker. And that might not
sound great, but, actually, it’s a
really important and useful role.”
This year, pandemic permitting,
Britain will host the G7 summit
and the COP26 Climate Change
Conference, a golden opportunity to
fashion a new role that focuses on
engagement with the world beyond
the EU. “Britain needs to use its seats
in all of these different institutions
[Nato, G7, G20, UN Security Council,
WTO, the Commonwealth] and use
our combined network develop-
ment in defence, intelligence
and diplomacy,” says Niblett.
Boris Johnson’s rather nau-
seating obsession with having
his cake and eating it applies in
this context: neither Britain, nor
the EU, nor even the US, can com-
pletely disentangle itself from China
economically. Britain also has deep
China and the US continue to spar, but can Britain punch above its weight?
ties with other avowedly undemo-
cratic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia,
but strategically it should build its
new bilateral agreements with genu-
ine democracies around the world.
L
iberal democracies have
to stand for something.
Occasionally lines in the sand
have to be drawn. Taiwan may be a
test case. The former US secretary
of state, Mike Pompeo, announced
a relaxation of the US’s self-imposed
restrictions on a country China will
never accept has a right to exist. Any
future confrontation in this region
would present the UK with deci-
sions that were as much ideological
as economic. So Britain needs to
work harder in the organisations
to which it already belongs and go
looking to sign up to new clubs like
a virgin in freshers’
week. Being unable
to employ the heft of
or apportion blame to
the EU means Britain
has opportunities to
pursue a more dex-
trous and adaptable
foreign policy, but also one that
aligns with its closest strategic
partners in the Anglosphere.
The key to moving this to a new
phase is the other allies Britain
courts. Primarily this should be in
the Asian Pacific. “The Japanese
and South Koreans are desperate
for strategic partners,” says Niblett.
“The EU aren’t committed politi-
cally to that part of the world. It’s
a place we can make a difference.”
All this is another reason why
the decision to cut Britain’s over-
seas development contribution
is a mistake. Unlike the first
Cold War, the aim should be
protecting democracy rather
than exporting it. After all,
China does not seek to destroy
Western democracy, but to bring
it to heel – and with China’s rivals
so disunited, Britain can play a lim-
ited but significant role in holding
this uneasy coalition in place.
D E TA I L S Ð P O L I T I C S
The ignominy Donald Trump’s
insurrectionists brought on the US
means Joe Biden will need to reas-
sert the vigour of American values
even more emphatically. If the EU
is perceived to lack the will to con-
front China then Brexit Britain will
(almost by default) be valuable to
Washington as a buttress in a new
Cold War. With China so influen-
tial in Africa and Central Asia (for
influential read: it owns a lot of it),
the US needs partners willing to
stand in an unofficial bloc against
unfettered authoritarianism.
Biden has been pro-China in
the past and won’t actively seek a
trade war, but he can’t be seen to
do nothing. With Russia, too, the
new American administration can-
not simply accept one humbling
cyberattack after another. If the
US cannot be pre-eminent eco-
nomically it cannot be politically
– and vice versa – so there is no
strategic value in the US taking a
softly-softly approach to China for
the sake of an easy life. The chess
moves we are about to witness will
determine the next two or three
decades of international politics.
Brexit may be divisive, but it may
also align Britain in a completely
new, positive way.
As Dirty Harry once whispered,
“A man’s got to know his limita-
tions.” In Britain’s case, knowing
ours may inform the decisions that
broaden our horizons.
D E TA I L S Ð T R E N D S

1
4

Luxe up your staycay

Story by Teo van den Broeke Photograph by Colin Ross

1. A beach towel

I
Planning a t was only a matter of time before products” – in a bid to keep clients (that’s
the world’s biggest fashion brands us) engaged. From Hermès’ playful Petit H for Brighton
local summer caught on to the fact that, thanks collection, which includes candle holders, By Dolce & Gabbana,
trip? Be smart £475. dolcegabbana.com
to the global pandemic, people charms and fans, to Celine’s Collection Maison
haven’t been spending as much on of hair combs and alligator leather dice Jazz up your visit to
and invest your the capital’s local beach
expensive clothes as they usually holders, the options are as varied as they this summer with a
lockdown would. Stands to reason, then, that the are plentiful. And what’s even better is that bold D&G towel. The
savings in the smarter labels in the world’s luxury dream pretty much everything on offer is perfect to designers are masters
of overstated summery
pool have started investing heavily in the help improve all the staycations you’ve got
new breed of creation of, well, stuff – miscellaneous objets planned for this dismal year. Here’s what to
stuff and this terry
option will stand out
luxe leisure gear more commonly referred to as “lifestyle pack and for where. against the pebbles.

48 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021


2. Headphones
for the Scottish
Highlands
By Montblanc, £525.
montblanc.com
Launched early last
year, Montblanc’s over-
ears are as practical as
they are elegant – just
the thing for a long
drive up north (which
you should do in a
luxe-y camper van).
6
3. Playing cards 4. A water bottle 5. A fragrance 6. Bat and ball 7. A backgammon
for Penzance holder for the case for Fowey set for the set for Bath
By Celine By Hedi Brecon Beacons Case, £390. Afternoon Isles Of Scilly By Smythson, £445.
Slimane, £280. By Métier, £325. Swim, £200 for 100ml. Bat and ball set, £640. smythson.com
celine.com metierlondon.com Both by Louis Vuitton. Towel, £465. Both by There’s little better after
Celine’s Collection uk.louisvuitton.com Hermès. hermes.com a morning swim than
There is nothing chicer
Maison is bursting with at this moment than LV’s scents are upscale, Hermès has long settling down by the
monogram vide poches this canvas and leather but it’s the leather produced luxe objets. pool with a Picante De
and silver matchboxes, carrier. It’s the ultimate bottle holders with This set will prove an La Casa and a game of
but this canvas-lambskin incentive to think which we’re most taken invaluable distraction backgammon (so long
playing cards set is ideal sustainably about your – this one being the for slow afternoons as said game is played
for a lazy evening on liquid consumption on best in show. Spritz on on the tropical-feeling on this leatherbound
the brosé in Cornwall. your hiking holiday. for a fish supper. beaches of the Isles. Smythson beauty).
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 49
 Attack the week

Featuring cover stars from Michaela Coel to Sir Elton John, GQ Hype is your
weekly digital fix of fashion, politics, sport, entertainment, health and travel

Cover drops at 7am every Monday at GQ.co.uk and @BritishGQ


Don’t be a digi-thrall!
Why the net is a snare
that CAN be cut loose
A new book, Value: What Money Can’t Buy, argues the digital revolution
has dislocated us from the simple yet vital pleasures of the everyday.
In this exclusive for GQ, the author offers a solution... Story by Stephen Bayley
W
hat happens when you
tire of Netflix? Who
ever thought anyone
might ever ask such a question?
Charles Baudelaire foresaw
the 21st-century condition:
“A vengeful God has granted
the wishes of the multitude.”
He certainly has. We have
instant access to merchandise,
entertainment and people. But
all joys, thrills and fears are now
mediated by a plasma screen.
Before too long, some predict,
we will not be given National
Insurance numbers, instead a SIM
will be embedded at birth.
Tim Robinson, a nature writer
who spent much of his life in
rugged, windblown Connemara,
says technology is advancing at a
rate that will soon be “beyond the
adaptive capacities of biological
evolution”. Or, put it this way:
we will very soon stuff ourselves,
royally. Algorithms have tamed
decision-making; frank personal
opinion is subordinated to
British writer and critic
Stephen Bayley
bland groupthink. The wisdom
of crowds has turned out to be
the bovine crudity of the mob.
Powers of discrimination have
been shrunk by an ugly and
manipulative online “democracy”.
California’s surveillance
industries have exceeded
the reach of the
infamous East The Stasi
German Stasi. At
the height of its
had files on
deranged imperium, 5.6 million.
the Stasi had files on Facebook
(a mere) 5.6 million
people. Facebook,
has 2.6
by way of contrast, billion users
has 2.6 billion users,
which means it has files on all of
them. And the Stasi needed to
employ 90,000 Cold War spies in
homburg hats; Facebook employs
half that number wearing cargo
shorts in sunny California.
Plato thought writing shifted
memory and knowledge from
the internal life to somewhere
external, more public and less
D E TA I L S – L I T E R AT U R E
precious. The internet has been
infinitely more damaging in
compromising the freedom
and integrity of the individual.
Instant access has been acquired
at the cost of personal identity.
Technology’s promise of freedom
is a delusion – it’s actually
enslavement. With a
few keystrokes I could
send an indiscriminate
message to thousands
of people. But wouldn’t
it be more valuable
to send a single
handwritten letter to a
chosen individual?
I’m no technophobe,
but it’s time to rediscover the
pleasures of analogue – what
the beardy poet Walt Whitman
called “the hourly routine of your
own or any man’s life, the shop,
yard, store or factory”. Whitman’s
approved activities included
“house-building, measuring,
sawing the boards, blacksmithing,
glass-blowing, nail-making,
coopering, tin-roofing, fish-curing,
the work of men on ferries”.
O
f course, this Ruskinian
kind of artisan infatuation
seems dated now, but we
can find 21st-century equivalents:
making coffee as a sacred ritual;
even sweeping the floor. You can
take pleasure from the quotidian.
When a visitor found Joan Didion
laying a crisp linen tablecloth and
selecting a Baccarat
drinking glass for a
solitary lunch, they
were flabbergasted.
“Do you do this
every day?” they
asked. Didion
replied, “Every day
is all we’ve got.” It
is one of the most
poetic statements
I know.
Meanwhile,
during the
compulsory confinement of The
Great Isolation, the wise have
learned to travel in their heads.
Blaise Pascal believed that most
of man’s unhappiness came from
an inability to sit alone in a room.
Perforce, that’s an experience
we’ve had inflicted on us. But,
once bored with Netflix, why not
find a way to enjoy it?
This is what Count Xavier de
Maistre did in 1790 when he found
himself imprisoned for six weeks
after a duel went wrong. His
Voyage Autour De Ma Chambre
(A Journey Around My Room) is
an eccentric masterpiece of self-
awareness and self-help, told with
detached wit and wisdom. He
enjoyed himself alone, but it took
discipline and a high IQ.
Less than 60 years later, Henry
David Thoreau built his cabin
by a pond in Massachusetts and,
sitting alone, wrote Walden,
which became a counterculture
classic. Thoreau tells us, I think
correctly, to beware of any
enterprise requiring new clothes.
Solitude is not at all the same
as loneliness. And privacy has
nothing to do with privation.
Privacy is delectable; it was one
of the modern age’s greatest
creations and has become one of
its first casualties. Unless, that
is, you choose to cultivate it, as I
recommend you do. But just as I
am no technophobe, nor am I in
any sense antisocial. Indeed, I am
as pro-social as they come. It’s just
that I am advocating taste and
care in society rather than artless
and promiscuous connectivity.
James Salter, a Korean War
fighter ace and award-winning
novelist, was more of a hero than
Ernest Hemingway and just as
great a writer. Salter says, “Why
is it so difficult to assemble those
things that really matter and to
dwell among them only? I am
referring to certain landscapes,
persons, beasts, books, rooms,
meteorological conditions, fruits.”
After a lifetime of fast jets and
Hollywood, Salter learnt the very
greatest pleasures are the simple
ones: preparing a generous meal
to be enjoyed in edited company,
preferably by candlelight.
My own advice for peace of
mind when this is all over?
Think no further ahead than
lunch or dinner.
VALUE: WHAT MONEY CAN’T BUY BY STEPHEN
BAYLEY (£18.99, CONSTABLE) IS OUT ON 11 MARCH.
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 51
How ‘high-low’ can you go?
Boss’ new collaboration with
Russell Athletic is a top-tier
sync-up of elevated style
and laid-back functionality
Story by Teo van den Broeke

Y
ou’d have to have been living
within the protection of a
fashion-averse force field to
have missed the high-low
collaboration revolution that
has taken hold of menswear in
the past few years. First Louis Vuitton – under the
aegis of Kim Jones – teamed up with NYC street
label Supreme to create a collection so desirable
that dedicated pop-up shops had to close due to
overcrowding. Then Dior partnered with skate-
cum-surf brand Stüssy and, most recently, Gucci
got into bed (or should that be sleeping bag?) with
hip outdoors brand The North Face.
Now, in a bold move that upends its tradition-
ally tailoring-focused sartorial credentials, Boss
has teamed up with easy-wearing sportswear
brand Russell Athletic and the results are the
perfect marriage of polished, Zoom-ready style
and normcore functionality. In short, just what we
need to get us through the rest of 2021 unscathed.
Consisting of tracksuits in shades of satsuma
and dusty pink, hoodies emblazoned with a “Boss
x Russell Athletic” logo plus a range of varsity-
inspired cardigans and overshirts that nod to the
preppy history of Boss’ new American partner,
the collection, which launches this month, will no
doubt prove one of the sellout collabs of the year.
One of the most clever aspects of the capsule is
that each of the colours featured work perfectly
together, so you’re free to mix and match. “There
has already been a shift within our collections to
increasingly casual styles, often combined with
tailored pieces,” says Ingo Wilts, chief brand
officer of Boss, “so this collaboration is a continu-
ation of our search for new ways to embrace a
more relaxed aesthetic, stay relevant and resonate
with what consumers are looking for right now.”

52 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 D E TA I L S Ð T R E N D S

‘This collaboration
continues our
embrace of a more
relaxed aesthetic’
Coat, £595. Hoodie, £139.
Opposite, from top:
Jumper, £269. Sweatshirt,
£129. Trousers, £119.
Trainers, £219. Socks, £11.
Jumper, £269. T-shirt,
£69. Trousers, £119.
Jacket, £449. T-shirt, £69.
Trousers, £199. Pouch,
£119. All by Boss x Russell
Athletic. boss.com

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 53

D E TA I L S Ð T R E N D S

+ Our pick of the pieces

1
From Boss x Russell Athletic’s sporty capsule of apparel, accessories
and footwear, these are the winning buys worth adding to basket

The casual suit

Cut in a summery
shade of pastel pink,
this suit, which can
also be worn with
matching shorts (our
preference), is just the
thing to wear for those
pesky Zoom meetings.

2
Clockwise from above right:
Jacket, £449. T-shirt, £69.
Trousers, £199. Trainers,
£219. Bag, £139. Trainers,
£219. Socks, £11. T-shirt,
£69. Coat, £595. Hoodie,
£139. Trousers, £179. Hat,
£55. All by Boss x Russell
Athletic. boss.com
The varsity sneaker
A mood in nude, this preppy take on
a classic trainer will quickly become
your go-to option for park jaunts in
the summer. Team with matching
socks for full Ivy League effect.

Clockwise from back left: T-shirt, £69.

Trousers, £199. Top, £179. Trousers,
£179. Shirt, £119. T-shirt, £69. Trousers,
£199. Hat, £45. Hoodie, £139. Shorts,
£149. Trainers, £219. Socks, £11.
Cardigan, £269. T-shirt, £69. Shorts,
£69. Trainers, £219. Socks, £11. All by
Boss x Russell Athletic. boss.com

3
The millennial trench
This voluminous trench coat is the
perfect combination of Boss’ tailored
pedigree and the collaboration’s
low-key sporty aesthetic.

4
The modern mock-neck
Cut from sweatshirt fabric, this
understated mock-neck T-shirt will
prove an excellent layering option
as the weather begins to warm.

54 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

D E TA I L S Ð S C E N T

Is this the future

of fragrance?
Hermès’ first
masculine scent
in 15 years is a
science-laced
olfactory
banger
I
n 2006, storied French leather goods house
Hermès launched its signature scent for men, the
Jean-Claude Ellena-concocted Terre D’Hermès.
An earthy-cum-woody neck lacquer that instantly
redefined the masculine fragrance market, it was a
global success on a scale few could have foreseen.
Now, 15 years on, the brand has worked with perfumer
Christine Nagel to create H24, a cutting-edge
fragrance for men. It fuses natural ingredients – a
mix of clary sage, rare rosewood essence and narcissus
absolute – with sclarene, an innovative synthetic
molecule with a sensual metallic scent. The effect is
botanical, springlike and intriguingly futuristic.
“To create this new Hermès signature fragrance, I
had to open up other, less predictable paths, to move
away from the conventional woodiness of men’s
scents,” says Nagel. “I like to go towards natural raw
materials and work them using technologies that give
other textures.” Indeed, Nagel is so consumed by this
she sourced inspiration from the fabrics in Hermès’
menswear. “When I attend Véronique [Nichanian]’s
shows, I am always struck by how I’m able to feel
the texture with my eyes. For H24, I was thinking of
‘urban nature’, the accelerated image of this little shoot
pushing through concrete to claim its space. I find the
expression of this movement, this life force, moving.”
Story byTeo van den Broeke
£84 FOR 100ML. HERMES.COM Photograph by Colin Ross

+ Three more futuristic scents you need to know about We sniffed out the best forward-thinking blends so you don’t have to

Signature Fusion D’Issey Mixed Emotions

Costa Azzura By Issey Miyake, By Byredo, £178 for
By Tom Ford, £120 for £68 for 100ml. At 100ml. byredo.com
100ml. At Selfridges. The Perfume Shop. A curious olfactive
selfridges.com theperfumeshop.com representation of our
The modern metallic This new L’Eau D’Issey troubled times, this new
flacon hints at the features strains of scent from Swedish
juice within, based volcanic rock, making fragrance master Ben
as it is on an ultra- it arguably the most Gorham of Byredo
modern twist on masculine scent ever contains strains of black
fougère fragrances. created (don’t @ us). tea and papyrus (yup).

56 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021


Since it was founded in 2016,
subscription website OnlyFans
has paid out £1.5 billion to the
content creators who publish
videos, pictures and writing
(and, no, it’s not just adult
entertainment) to an audience
of more than 100 million users
Monetise something that
already exists
When OnlyFans launched it was the
first platform of its type and it was
deliberately set up to host all types of
content creators. There were a lot of
creators already producing incredible
content, but on free social media. You
could see the explosion of influencer
marketing, but the influencers were
getting paid via ad campaigns and
product endorsements. Our thinking
was always, “OK, what if you could
build a platform where it’s exactly [the
same] or very similar to existing on
social media, but with the key difference
being the payment button?” So all of
these creators, making this amazing
content for free, had a very simple way
of earning from that content.
Build a product that scales
down as well as up
On other platforms, there was no
one-size-fits-all solution to monetise
content beyond product endorsements
or sponsored ads. That business model
was only catering to maybe the very
top percentage of influencers, whereas
ours works for all content creators,
regardless of the size of the fanbase.
Find a niche
We made a decision from the start that
it was a sensible and safe rule for all
users to be over the age of 18, primarily
because of the payment element to the
platform. But, of course, with all users
Photograph Getty Images
D E TA I L S Ð E N T R E P R E N E U R
The
SECRETS
of MY
SUCCESS
Tim Stokely, founder and CEO of OnlyFans
Story by Thomas Barrie
being over 18, and all content being
securely hidden behind a payment
wall, that allowed us to have more
progressive and liberal content policies
than other social media platforms. But,
from day one, OnlyFans was launched
for all content creators – we never
Profile marketed it to any specific industry.
Age
37 Use your own
Born product religiously
Harlow, Essex
We’re an incredibly fast-growing
Lives
Hertfordshire company, looking to hire people who
really, really buy into the concept. It’s
Drives
Range Rover SVR important that staff, and everyone
Relationship status within the company, are using the
Single platform. You’ve got to understand
Hero the product. In my own case, I’m
Tom Brady
subscribed to James Haskell and
Chris Robshaw. As a rugby fan, it was
fantastic to see those guys join up.
Develop based on
direct feedback
We have more than 100 million users.
There’s a lot of feedback. A good
example of [implementing feedback
from users] is paid messaging. We
started, quite early on, to get feedback
from creators saying, “Hey, it would be
really good if I could send messages to
all of my fans [which the fan can then
pay to access].” Another example is the
livestream. We had multiple requests
from creators who wanted us to provide
a way for creators to co-stream and so
that’s something in development that
we’ll be launching shortly.
Don’t assume that because
you’ve built it, they will come
I worked on previous platforms prior
to OnlyFans and one of the mistakes I
made was to focus on building what
I felt was a great marketplace. But I
didn’t, through inexperience, give
enough consideration to the growth
plan: how was I going to get users onto
this marketplace? [That problem was]
solved, in the case of OnlyFans, by
creating a referral programme, which
incentivised third parties to bring
creators onto the platform.
Learn from your family...
My father is the company’s CFO and a
result of that is work conversations can
tend to dominate [family occasions],
but I really enjoy it. One of the bits
of advice he taught me, which is
particularly relevant now, was the
importance of compartmentalising,
particularly in the tech industry, where
you’re working across all time zones.
...as well as your idols
[Choose] an entrepreneur or
businessperson whom you admire
and go from there. I’m a big admirer
of Warren Buffett – I have been for a
while. I regularly find myself reading
through his quotes and also one of his
books, Warren Buffett On Business.
From an investing point of view, I
like the quote that says, “Be greedy
when others are fearful and fearful
when others are greedy.” [That is]
great advice.
Don’t underestimate a
high-profile endorsement
We were witnessing strong growth
towards the end of 2019. There were
definitely events that accelerated that
growth, whether it be the Beyoncé
name-drop [on her verse on Megan
Thee Stallion’s “Savage Remix”] or
Cardi B (pictured, left) joining the
platform. One of the first things she did
was drop the official behind-the-scenes
video for “WAP” onto her OnlyFans.
That’s a really great example of how
celebrities are using the platform.
Interaction trumps name
recognition on social media
You’d expect to see a clear link [among
OnlyFans creators] between income and
how famous the creator is – how many
followers they have, for example. But,
actually, it’s not just celebrities making
money, there’s a much wider range of
creators doing really well. That comes
back to interaction, which seems to be
a bigger factor than anything else for
the most successful accounts.
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 57
W
WH Auden wrote that “poetry makes
nothing happen”. Well, it has certainly
made Amanda Gorman happen. After
reading “The Hill We Climb” at Joe
Biden’s inauguration in January, the
22-year-old claimed bestseller spots for
three books that hadn’t come out yet.
There’s this month’s special edition of
The Hill We Climb with a foreword by
Oprah Winfrey; then in September we’ll
get Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem
and The Hill We Climb And Other Poems.
Her publisher will print a million copies
of each. Oh, and as if you needed to feel
any worse about how little you achieved
in lockdown, she also performed at the
Super Bowl, signed to IMG Models and
caused a boomlet in lemon coats – post-
inauguration searches for the items
reportedly increased by 1,328 per cent.
But why did her poem resonate quite
so much? Arguably, its power as a piece
of art was inseparable from Gorman’s
performance. After four years of Donald
Trump, the mere tableau of Gorman
reading that poem and delivering that
message at that moment and with such
grace was a neon-bright sign that this
was no longer Trump’s America.
Gorman’s critics accused the poem of
dealing in platitudes, but they can’t deny
it left people profoundly moved. And
part of the reason for that, perhaps, is
that the final act of Trump’s presidency,
culminating in the storming of the
Capitol, ignited intense, messy emotions.
Auden believed that while poetry
“makes nothing happen”, it is a “way of
happening” – of “moving people from
passion to desire”. In marshalling her
audience from outrage to a state of
purpose, Gorman offered a psychic
release. And a sense of possibility.

How
THE HILL WE CLIMB: AN INAUGURAL POEM FOR THE
COUNTRY BY AMANDA GORMAN (CHATTO & WINDUS,
£9.99) IS OUT ON 30 MARCH.

Story by Charlie Burton Photograph by Win McNamee

Amanda Gorman
happened
Photograph Getty Images

When the youngest ever poet to perform at a presidential

inauguration addressed her country in January, she was standing
at the foothills of a career whose ascent the whole world will watch
58 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
 D E TA I L S Ð I C O N

Oh, she also

performed at the
Amanda Gorman arrives
Super Bowl and
at the Capitol to read at caused a boomlet
Joe Biden’s inauguration,
20 January in lemon coats
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 59
Kitchen
confidential:
These are
the recipes, Melissa Hemsley

gadgets,
The chef, author and sustainability
advocate recommends sharing,
not wasting

cookery “The free Olio app (olioex.com) has been

a lockdown lifesaver for many. Simply

books and
sign up and if you have a spare portion
or two after cooking, you can upload an
image and share it with your neighbours,

secret
who can arrange a contact-free collection
from you. It started in the UK, but is now
available worldwide and is a fantastic

ingredients
way to feed other families and assist key
workers by providing a home-cooked
meal. Another tip is Farms To Feed Us

we learned
(farmstofeedus.org), an online data-
base that connects customers to
small-scale producers. So instead

to love in
of defaulting to the supermarket,
buyers can go straight to the source
and support independent farmers,

lockdown
bakers, growers and wine-makers.
And to bring them all together, I
have been using my KitchenAid
blender (£279. kitchenaid.co.uk)
From a curry that costs less to make smooth, delicious soups
than a burger to one-hour that I top with halloumi croutons,
wine delivery and three jalapeño salsas or pesto. Anything
condiments to revolutionise where I can throw in loads of
your home repertoire, these healthy greens... #wastenotwantnot
are the staying-in steers and all that.” melissahemsley.com
we all need now...
Story by Paul Henderson

The recipe Mia Johansson Ben Tish

from Bar Swift on her go-to The Norma culinary
lockdown cocktail with a kick director on his current
go-to cookbook...
“The one drink that has kept me stable during
social isolation has been a Margarita. I love a
classic, but we also have a delicious Spicy Margarita “I really love chef and food
that we make for our delivery service (from £15,
speakeasyathome.co.uk/swift). However, if you don’t
writer Claire Thomson’s books.
mind doing the hard work yourself, the recipe on Her latest is Home Cookery
which it is based is below. Cheers!” barswift.com Year (Quadrille Publishing,
£30). I don’t have
Ingredients children, but her
(Serves one)
recipes transcend
50ml Olmeca Altos
all that and are easy,
10ml pineapple eau de vie
10ml Ancho Reyes Verde
inspired and healthy
15ml lime juice midweek meals. I go
20ml green syrup (made from blended green back to her books
peppers, coriander and sugar)
time after time.”
Method normalondon.com
Shake and strain all the ingredients over ice.
Garnish with lemon balm and a lime twist.
 D E TA I L S − TA S T E

The recipe Aktar Islam of

Opheem on rediscovering
an affordable childhood
classic, curried mackerel
Ingredients Method
(Serves four) Heat oil in a
75ml olive oil nonstick pan, add
garlic, green chilli
4 cloves of garlic,
followed by onion.
finely minced
2 green chillies, slit Add salt and soften the
onion till translucent.
1 large cooking onion,
finely sliced Add spices and cook Tom Kerridge
¼tsp salt out on a low heat.
Once the oil separates The Hand And Flowers chef
¼tsp turmeric
from the onion and recommends crispy chilli in oil
1tsp chilli powder
spice masala, add the
1tsp ground coriander
fresh tomatoes and “Laoganma – it means “old
powder
tinned fish. godmother” – Chinese chilli
¾tsp mild madras
curry powder Simmer for 10 minutes sauce (£5. amazon.co.uk)
“Lockdown made me reflect on my journey
through life and it conjured up memories of 2 fresh ripe tomatoes
and finish with loads is the finest condiment
of fresh coriander.
times from my childhood when fish from a tin 4-5 small tins (approx known to man. It’s
500g) mackerel, Serve with boiled
didn’t mean caviar. I remembered a recipe my
mother made using mackerel or sardines in sardines or pilchards rice and a simple hot and has a crunch
tomato sauce to make a fragrant and spicy Generous amount crunchy salad. with an incredible
curry. It was a clever way to feed a nutritious of fresh coriander umami-style flavour.”
meal to a family of six for less than a price of a including stalks,
single meal at McDonald’s.” opheem.com finely chopped thehandandflowers.co.uk

Skye Gyngell Tom Brown Ravinder Bhogal

The chef director of Spring and Spring To The chef patron of Cornerstone and GQ’s The Jikoni chef and food writer
Go has felt her passion for cooking stir Best Chef 2020 has tucked into pies and wine has become a condiment queen
“Before lockdown, my kitchen “For me, the killer combo of “I love sauces. Everything
was just the room I dropped lockdown has been ham with from sriracha to mustard that
my bag and keys in on the truffles. My wife is completely is worth a squeeze and a glug
way up to bed. Having more obsessed with them. Talk finds its way into my pantry. I
time at home this about expensive taste! As for a look for saltiness, sweetness,
year has reignited takeaway, I can’t get enough tang, rich funk and umami
the pleasure in of Top Cuvée – it specialises bombs to provide quick flavour
cooking for myself. in pies (the chicken and boosts – it’s the key to turning
I’ve even enjoyed tarragon is outstanding) the lacklustre into luscious!
re-engaging with my and natural wines. The last Right now I am obsessed
own utensils – many banger I had was a bottle with Trubel black truffle paste
that have been with of Le Grappin Beaune (£11.95. trubel.co.uk), which I
me forever, such as 1er Cru Boucherottes fold into scrambled eggs, or
Photograph Jason Bailey Studio

the hand-crafted Pinot Noir (£55. Super Ghee turmeric ghee

lemon wood shopcuvee.com). It (£6.99. superghee.co.uk),
spoons (from £3. delivers within the hour which I use to fry
bohemiadesign.co.uk) in London and has been eggs that look like
I bought in Marrakesh.” a real godsend these they have been
springrestaurant-shop. last nine months or so.” touched by Midas.”
co.uk cornerstonehackney.com jikonilondon.com

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 63

 Chef Rob Howell’s
buttermilk-fried celeriac and
(below) his debut book, Root
The recipe Buttermilk-fried
celeriac with Korean-style sauce
Forget fried chicken, this celeriac is all you will need to
satisfy your KFC cravings. The sauce is easy to make,
demanding just a few specialist ingredients, and will
help transform all sorts of dishes

Ingredients Rub the celeriac with

(Serves five) a teaspoon of oil and
then rub over a good
For the sauce amount of sea salt and
150g gochujang paste wrap in foil. Cover
100ml dark soy sauce with a further four
layers of foil. Bake for
50g light soft
about 90 minutes, until
brown sugar
tender. Remove from
25ml mirin the oven and leave to
75ml rice wine vinegar cool in the foil for two
2 garlic cloves hours or so.
50ml sesame oil Remove the foil and
50g stem ginger then, using a knife,
1tbsp syrup remove the celeriac
skin. Using your
For the fried celeriac hands, tear the celeriac
1 celeriac flesh into chunks of
1tsp cooking oil different sizes.
Sea salt Pour the cooking

Growing underground 1 litre cooking oil oil into a deep pan

200g buttermilk (or
oat milk)
Dredge (a mix of 400g
Michelin-star chef Rob Howell is making a big noise in Bristol with strong white bread
flour/gluten-free flour,
his vegetable-led menu. His new book shows you why Story by Cass Farrar 40g corn flour, 2g
baking powder, 6g
until two-thirds full
and heat to 180C (or
preheat a deep-fat
fryer to 180C).
Get two mixing bowls.
Put the buttermilk/oat
milk in one bowl and

I
t’s no longer necessary to open a tweak them. Cheese arancini, vegetable bhajis, garlic powder, 8g onion the dredge in the other.
restaurant in a West End hotspot in mushroom duxelle and a salt-baked celeriac and powder, 10g white Place the celeriac pieces
pepper, 6g smoked into the buttermilk/oat
order to make some noise on the food almond curry are just some of the recipes you’ll paprika, 5g cayenne milk first, then into the
scene. From pop-ups to fish trucks, find to really amp your plant-based home cook- pepper, 3g ground dredge. Make sure the
some of our most-celebrated food can ing. And while there are plenty of very tasty, turmeric) celeriac pieces have a
be found in the most unexpected of utterly healthy dishes to be found, there is also 2tsp coriander, good coating. Fry the
chopped pieces in batches, for
UK corners and that’s never been truer an entire chapter dedicated to cheese, if you
2tsp sesame seeds, about three minutes
than of Root, located as it is in two shipping want to really undo all the good work. per batch, until golden
toasted
containers in Bristol’s Wapping Wharf area. “The recipes in this book will, I hope, open and crisp. Set each
From its dockside locale, the restaurant’s head minds to the wonder of a vegetable-led diet, Method batch aside to drain
chef, Rob Howell, has been producing beautiful packed with wonderful flavours,” says Howell. on kitchen paper
For the sauce simply while you fry the next.
vegetable-led food (there is plenty of meat and “Hopefully they will help change people’s place all ingredients Once all the pieces
fish too) and all is now found within the pages thinking about how we eat our way through into a food processor are fried and drained,
of his new book. life. There are few things you really need for and blend until place them in a clean
smooth. Add water bowl, season with
Root, which showcases vegetables as the a life well lived, but good food is definitely one
if needed. Keep in salt and coat in the
leading ingredient for each dish (rather than of them.” the fridge in a sealed sauce. Finish with a
the accompaniment), transforms his restaurant container until needed. sprinkling of chopped
favourites into simple home dishes that can be ROOT BY ROB HOWELL (BLOOMSBURY ABSOLUTE, £26) Heat oven to 200C/180C coriander and toasted
completely vegan or vegetarian if you want to IS OUT ON 18 MARCH. (gas mark 6). sesame seeds.

Ichiro dreams of whisky...

This small batch ‘London Edition’ by a master distiller is an amazing Japanese malt

Ever since Bill Murray checked into the Park Hyatt Tokyo in Lost In Translation, we’ve
made a point of keeping up with whisky’s “third way”. Of course, we could have
cottoned on sooner (“Suntory times” have been happening since 1923), but this
bottle comes from a distiller who started making his a year after the film’s release.
The award-winning Ichiro’s Malt was founded in 2004 by Suntory alumnus Ichiro
Akuto and, from one megacity to another, it’s his latest “London Edition” that calls
for investment, a pleasingly saccharine drop, tempered by peated barrels during
maturation. It’s available from Sakaya, the new whisky and sake destination in
southwest London’s Pantechnicon, which, pandemic-willing, plans this spring to open
a bar to showcase the capital’s most exciting Japanese whisky list. So once a night on
the brown stuff is back on the cards, for relaxing times, make it Ichiro times. Aaron Callow

ICHIRO’S MALT CHICHIBU LONDON EDITION 2020, £550. AT PANTECHNICONSTORE.COM

0 0 0 G Q . C O . U K N OV E M B E R 2 0 2 0
64 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
 For last year’s unique virtual presentation of the 23rd annual Men Of The Year Awards,
GQ compiled a very special selection of winners’ films – all available to watch at GQ.co.uk

Lashana LYNCH
Directed by Greg Barnes
We gave new 007 Lashana Lynch a polygraph test
to extract all she knows about No Time To Die.

Captain SIR TOM MOORE Directed by Marie Schuller

We pay tribute to the incredible fundraising achievements of Captain Tom and
his bright-eyed sense of humour, which helped so many through the pandemic.
Ozzy OSBOURNE
Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts
The heavy-metal legend on dark magic and the
true story of Black Sabbath’s origins.

Michaela COEL
Directed by Jade Ang Jackman
Everyone wants to know what’s on her mind
– and famous friends have emailed to ask.

With special thanks to

Lewis HAMILTON
Directed by Tom Hingston
The record-breaking racer on the politics, impact
and importance of taking a knee in Formula One.
Marcus RASHFORD Directed by Toby Dye
With the help of fellow campaigner Jack Monroe,
the footballer revisits his school and learns what it
takes to cook a meal on a budget.
D E TA I L S Ð H O R O L O G Y

The strap
We’re used to seeing a
Top Time on a leather
strap, but this one
has been given racing-
style perforations.

The dial
Cosigned with Deus,
the silver dial switches
out the standard round
counters for squircle-
shaped ones and is
teamed with a special,
lightning-shaped
chronograph hand.

Case back
A Deus-style
engraving of a bike
and its rider adorns
the back of the watch.

The movement
The 41mm polished
steel case contains
a B23 calibre with
48-hour power reserve.

In 2021, the rules

of cool are shifting gear
Breitling’s collab with the hip bikers of Deus Ex Machina calls
time on gauche luxe Story by Charlie Burton Photograph by Mitch Payne

H
as the pandemic changed our tastes?
Breitling CEO Georges Kern believes
so. “What was cool pre-Covid is not
cool post-Covid,” he says. “I think in-your-face
luxury – with V12, yellow, loud cars – is over.”
The new luxury, in his eyes, is much more
informal, defined by meaningful experiences,
authentic lifestyles and the great outdoors.
While Breitling has never operated at the
“flashy car” end of the watch market, its latest
piece is particularly keyed into Kern’s vision of
post-pandemic credibility. The Breitling Top
Time Deus Limited Edition (1,500 will be made)
partners the watchmaker with Australian
custom bike specialist Deus Ex Machina, which
has a cult following both for the quality of the
machines it makes and for the culture it has
fostered. Its shops are hybrid spaces where
you can enjoy a coffee, listen to music and buy
products in the company of like-minded others.
It might seem a niche brand, but Kern says that
if you enjoy “that segment of motorbiking, with
café racers, with street scramblers... you come
across this company by force”.
It’s no accident that the model chosen for
this collaboration is the recently revived Top
Time chronograph, which debuted in the 1960s
as a timepiece for young, active professionals.
Breitling’s “Deus” watch, says Kern, had to
embody the idea of “land”, as opposed to sea or
sky. “The two typical ‘earth watches’ we have
are the Premier and the Top Time. The problem
with the Premier is it’s too elegant. It didn’t
fit that message.” The Top Time, then, was a
no-brainer – and its distinctive design proved an
enabling platform for Deus touches (see above).
Breitling is ratifying its involvement with
the bike brand through the creation of a “Deus
Squad”, bringing three luminaries (such as Cali
surfboard shaper/Deus Ex Machina off-road
racer Forrest Minchinton, pictured) into the
Breitling fold, all of whom, says Kern, embody
that new notion of cool. “I love all these pictures
[of them] driving on beaches and surfing. It’s
beautiful and reassuring and reminds us of the
good old days when the world was still in shape.”
£4,100. BREITLING.COM

68 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 D E TA I L S – C U LT U R E

Hey, ART SNOBS! You’re going

to hate the next big thing
Immersive, experiential art is about to get a post-pandemic boost...

T
Story by Charlie Burton

here’s a certain type of critic

(you know the sort: stud-
iedly dishevelled, wanted to
be an academic but wasn’t
clever enough to get tenure)
who despises the vogue for
experiential art. To them,
all those smoke-filled cor-
ridors, “rain rooms” and nightclub vibes are
just vacuous nonsense. Why? Ignore the word
salad they might offer up by way of explanation.
The real reason is snobbery. These shows are
ridiculously popular. They generate vast, snak-
ing queues of people desperate to get in and
Instagram it all. They are, heaven forbid, fun.
And that’s precisely why that area of the art scene
is set to go gangbusters. Hundreds of millions of
dollars are pouring into new immersive openings
targeted at experience-starved post-pandemic
audiences – on a global scale. The immersive arts
production company Meow Wolf is investing £115
million to expand across the US; hit Swedish out-
fit Fotografiska is opening in Berlin; Pace Gallery
Photographs Es Devlin Studio; Getty Images; Yayoi Kusama

has set aside room at its massive new Mayfair

space for immersive events. As if heralding this
new era, Tate Modern is, right now, readying two
LED-laced Yayoi Kusama (pictured right, inset)
“Infinity Mirror Rooms”, one of which “creates
the illusion of a boundless universe of rotating
crystal chandeliers”. Is it art? Who’s to say. But
here’s a telling sign: it upsets all the right people.

One of Yayoi Kusama’s

‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’
creates the ‘illusion of
a boundless universe
of crystal chandeliers’

‘Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled With The

Brilliance Of Life’ by Yayoi Kusama, 2011,
will be at Tate Modern; (left) ‘Forest Of
Us’ by Es Devlin, 2021, comes to Pace
Gallery’s Superblue space in Miami

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 69

D E TA I L S − A D V I C E
Want to be Marty
Mc-really-Fly? Be
bold with your gilet
Style Shrink
By Teo van den Broeke
Dear Style Shrink,
What’s your final word on gilets? And if you do
approve of them, where shall I buy mine from?
Oh, and how should I wear it?
Tom M, West Ham
Hi, Tom. Contentious little suckers, gilets.
They’re defined by a padded torso, a sleeveless
construction and the fact they can most
commonly be found on the backs of suspiciously
short fintech entrepreneurs. Worn well, a
gilet can make you look stealthily chic; worn
badly and you’ll just end up looking like, well,
a suspiciously short fintech entrepreneur.
In my opinion, therefore, if you do decide to
wear a gilet – and now’s a good time, being a
trans-seasonal period – it’s best to go all out
and embrace the garment as the centrepiece
of your outfit. Attempts to conceal it beneath
your coat or blazer – as is the wont of many
70 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
City boys – will simply make it seem like you’re
embarrassed of it. And, as we know by now,
good style is all about boldly embracing the
sartorial decisions we make. If in doubt, think
of Marty McFly’s cherry-red gilet and denim-
cum-flannels combination in Back To The
Future. Bold, brilliant and fully embracing the
garment’s relative brashness, it’s a strong look
that makes the very best of the puffy chest pal
he’s wearing. When it comes to buying your own
gilet, Tom, I would recommend investing a little
extra cash and going for something cut from a
wool or cashmere, to avoid the squashed-insect
vibe that can occur with the inevitable wet-look
nylon takes. At the deeper end of the budgetary
pool both Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli
do a mean line in gilets cut from muted shades
of cashmere, filled with the finest down.
Elsewhere, The North Face has an excellent
range of trendier padded gilets
with serviceable appeal, but be
warned, these must be worn
Gilet by
with casual items rather than Loro Piana, £1,770.
tailoring to avoid looking like a At mytheresa.com
burnt-out commuter from the
Home Counties. At the shallower
end, meanwhile, your best bets
are Oliver Spencer’s trendy fleece
gilets or Arket, where the options
are a little more function-focused
(and all the better for it).
Dear Style Shrink,
What are your must-have pieces for SS21? I’ve
been saving my pennies during the pandemic
and I’ve got money to burn (on one or two nice
things). I’m in my early forties and like to make
an effort, but I don’t want to look like a wally.
Min, Derby
Hi, Min. Spring/Summer 2021 is going to be a
strange season, primarily due to the fact so few
brands were able to produce or show collections
last year, meaning desirable products are
surprisingly thin on the ground. There were,
however, still a few standout pieces. First up,
the rope-soled sandals Kim Jones showed as
part of his Amoako Boafo-inspired collection for
Dior: part espadrille, part sandal, part sneaker,
they’re just the thing to wear with socks in
spring (whether you’re working from home or
otherwise) and/or to the beach when we can
finally go on holiday again. Elsewhere, Prada’s
knitted long johns very much encapsulated
the nesting-focused mood of the season. Cut
in shades of periwinkle, sage and dusty rose,
they’ll keep you warm until spring kicks in in
earnest. And, finally, the pièce de résistance: a
cobalt-blue puffer jacket from The North Face x
Gucci collection, which hit select stores earlier
this year. Fail to cop at your wardrobe’s peril,
Min (or just lie low in your Prada long johns till
June and be done with it).
Dear Style Shrink,
I need a new face care routine.
What would you recommend? Jacket by The North Face
x Gucci, £1,300. gucci.com
I’m 25 and I’ve got
combination skin. I have a
tendency to look quite grey
and I want that Insta glow
without the filters.
Rob, Sussex
OK, Rob, here goes. Every morning,
after washing with a light, oil-based cleanser,
such as the excellent one from Crème De La Mer,
opt for Eve Lom’s Rescue Peel Pads to prepare
the skin and remove dead cells (the greyness
culprits). If you still feel as though your skin
needs a boost, apply Dermalogica’s Multivitamin
Masque for ten minutes, remove and then finish
Illustration Joe McKendry
with an application of Susanne Kaufmann’s
Intensive Power Serum and an under-eye dab of
The Ordinary’s Caffeine Solution. You can thank
me in ten years’ time when you still look 25.
SEND YOUR MENSWEAR-RELATED STYLE QUESTIONS TO
STYLESHRINK@CONDENAST.CO.UK

Story by Sam Leith
T
here’s a lovely little bit in
Norman Doidge’s foreword to
his friend Jordan Peterson’s
12 Rules For Life. Noting that most of
us don’t like rules, Doidge tells an old
joke about Moses bringing down the
Commandments: “‘I’ve got some good
news and some bad news,’ the lawgiver
yells to them. ‘Which do you want first?’
‘The good news!’ the hedonists reply.
‘I got Him from 15 Commandments
down to ten!’
‘Hallelujah!’ cries the unruly crowd.
‘And the bad?’
‘Adultery is still in.’”
It won’t have escaped anyone’s atten-
tion that Peterson gave the world 12 rules
to the Almighty’s ten. What now becomes
clear, though, is that had Moses been in
possession of a publishing contract he’d
have shot back up Mount Sinai for more
Commandments as soon as paperback
sales of the original set started to flag.
This spring, Peterson is following up his
multimillion-selling book with a sequel,
Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
Writing it will have posed a conundrum.
Should his new rules qualify the existing
rules or contradict them or introduce
loopholes? For if the 12 more rules seem
less important than the original 12 – a set
of codicils, if you like, or minor admoni-
tions he forgot to include in the first book
– readers may think it a bit of a swizz to
be charged full whack for them.
Conversely, if they signify a wholesale
rethink in the Peterson system, devotees
of the first book – backs aching from rule
one (“Stand up straight with your shoul-
Photographs Getty Images; Jake Stangel
ders back”), streaming with allergies from
rule 12 (“Pet a cat when you encounter one
on the street”) and having suffered years
of killingly boring pub chat from rule
three (“Make friends with people who
want the best for you”) – may demand
their money back. As a guru specialising
in the meaning of life, it’s important not to
give people the impression you just pulled
a round number of bromides out your ass
and can just as easily supply more. So it’s
a delicate line to walk.
+ Music’s hottest trend: selling out? Meet the power brokers racing to master music’s new income streams...
A battle is raging in
the music business.
Thanks to Spotify
et al creating a gold
rush in publishing
rights, a wave of
savvy investors are
duking it out to
buy up the biggest
Hipgnosis Songs Fund
Run by: Merck Mercuriadis
hits by the biggest
hit-makers. We Spent: £1.3bn
crunched the On songs by: Neil Young, Shakira, Blondie,
numbers... CB Timbaland and Mark Ronson (above).
It doesn’t matter what’s
inside Jordan Peterson’s
new self-help book.
The reason it will be a
success is because of us...
The New York Times columnist David
Brooks, for instance, sold scads of a self-
help book called The Road To Character
and then announced he’d completely
changed his mind about the meaning of
life and published another self-help book,
called The Second Mountain, which said
mostly the opposite to the first. I asked
Canadian author
and psychologist him whether readers of the first book
Jordan Peterson could apply for a refund and he was a bit
evasive on the subject. Then again, chang-
ing his mind didn’t do Wittgenstein’s
reputation any harm, so on we forge.
J
ordan Peterson is, in any case, a very
interesting figure. We may sneer at
him for writing self-help books –
but, as Alain de Botton points out with
some justice, Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics was a self-help book.
Much of the history of philoso-
phy, one way or another, is in a
self-helpy direction: it asks us
what matters, how we tell right
from wrong, what the good life
consists of. Peterson’s genius
was not just to produce a solid
publishing proposition in a
well-established mass-market
genre, it was to make the
whole package – because the
book is just one part of a brand
replete with stadium tours and
YouTube gotcha clips – chime
with the spirit of the age. He
brings not just a set of instruc-
tions, but a complete world view
Primary Wave
Run by: Lawrence Mestel
Spent: Close to £730m
On songs by: Stevie Nicks, Bob Marley
(above), Whitney Houston and Ray Charles.
D E TA I L S – L I T E R AT U R E
too. In an age of rights, he makes a big-
ger thing of responsibility; in an age when
“normativity” tends to be a dirty word, he
insists on some very traditional norms.
We can argue back and forth about
whether Peterson is right or wrong
about lobsters and whether (if he is right)
there are important lessons to be learned
from them about humans. We can get in a
Twitter spat about whether his insistence
on associating order with masculinity and
chaos with femininity is old-fashioned
misogyny or a subtle reading of histori-
cal myth. We can get in a punch-up about
whether his refusal to use trans students’
preferred pronouns is a bold stand against
“coerced speech” or an attention-grabbing
culture-war dick move. We can follow,
goggling, his own personal “hero’s jour-
ney” through benzodiazepine addiction,
an induced coma in a Russian hospital
and the appalling gastric consequences
of an all-beef diet. And we do.
Indeed, it’s our collective enthusiasm
for doing all these things – whether
we’re mooching teens whose lives turned
round because he suggested we tidy our
bedrooms or progressives who think he’s
some sort of well-mannered Canadian fas-
cist – that makes the brand work. If Moses
had had a YouTube channel, he’d certainly
have been looking to Jordan Peterson for
tips. He might have managed to come up
with a few more Commandments too.
BEYOND ORDER: 12 MORE RULES FOR LIFE BY
JORDAN B PETERSON (ALLEN LANE, £25) IS OUT NOW.
Round Hill Music
Run by: Joshua Gruss
Spent: £695m
On songs by: Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley,
Rolling Stones (above) and The Beatles.
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 71
 The winner of
79 major awards

GQ is the only magazine in Britain dedicated to bringing you the very best in style,
investigative journalism, comment, men’s fashion, lifestyle and entertainment.

GQ is the brand to beat

2021 BSME Editor Of The Year, Digital 2012 Help For Heroes Outstanding Contribution
2020 PPA 30 Under 30 2012 Px3 Prix De La Photographie Paris Gold Medal
2020 BSME Writer Of The Year 2011 Foreign Press Association Media Awards, Sports
2019 PPA Writer Of The Year 2011 Amnesty International Media Award
2019 PPA New Talent Award Editor, GQ.co.uk 2010 Amnesty International Media Award
2019 PPA New Talent Award 2010 One World Media Press Award
Engagement Manager, GQ.co.uk 2010 The Maggies Magazine Cover Of The Year
2018 Comment Awards Popular Columnist Of The Year 2010 P&G Awards Best Styling (GQ Style)
2017 BSME Editor Of The Year 2009 PPA Writer Of The Year
2017 Lovie Best Website For Lifestyle 2008 BSME Editor Of The Year
2017 Digiday Publishing Awards Europe 2007 BSME Magazine Of The Year
Best Use Of Facebook Live 2007 BSME Brand Building Initiative Of The Year
2017 Digiday Publishing Awards Europe 2007 MDA/MJA Press Gazette Awards Best Cover
Best Branded Content Program
2007 P&G Awards Best Styling (GQ Style)
2017 PPA Writer Of The Year
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2017 AOP Audience Development Team Of The Year
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2017 CNI Best Brand Financial Performance In
Native Advertising 2006 MDA/MJA Press Gazette Awards
Interviewer Of The Year
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2016 BSME Editor Of The Year Best Designed Consumer Magazine
2016 Digiday Awards Europe Video Team Of The Year 2006 MDA/MJA Press Gazette Awards
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Of The Year - Series 2006 PPA Writer Of The Year
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2014 FMJA Online Fashion Journalist Of The Year 2000 Jasmine Award Winner
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2013 BSME Editor Of The Year 1999 PPA Designer Of The Year
2013 FMJA Outstanding Contribution To 1995 Ace Press Award Circulation
London Collections Men 1995 Ace Press Award Promotion
2013 PPA Magazine Writer Of The Year 1995 PPA Columnist Of The Year
2012 Mark Boxer Award 1994 PPA Publisher Of The Year
2012 BSME Editor Of The Year 1991 British Press Circulation Award
2012 DMA Lifestyle Magazine Of The Year Best Promotion Of A Consumer Magazine

This year’s Oscars are going
to be hilariously weird
But could it be the shake-up the Academy needs?
E
very year, savvy number crunchers in
Hollywood cobble together all the films
that have been released and predict who
will be nominated for an Oscar. They always
get it right, because it’s inevitably an insider’s
mix of the obvious Meryl Streeps and Tom
Hankses plus a precocious 14-year-old who
carried some unlikely indie to unexpected
heights that nobody involved in it will ever
reach again.
Last year, the biggest winners were
Parasite, Renée Zellweger and Joaquin
Phoenix. Yet there were plenty of others who
could have sauntered off with an Academy
Award to the upset of pretty much nobody.
Remember The Irishman? It had an expensive
de-ageing technique and won... nothing.
Imagine, though, if that film was eligible this
year. Given the pandemic and consequent
drop in the number of films actually released,
something with The Irishman’s gravitas would
win it all – even Best Actress, despite it barely
having any women in it.
The Oscars 2021 are a bit like the Premier
League if the top half didn’t show up so the
title was won by Burnley. Fun? Sort of. But
quality and flair are also nice. When you read
the experts’ predictions and see that Ben
Affleck stands an excellent chance of winning
Best Actor, well, you do wonder if they should
skip a year.
Another tip for the top male? Gary Oldman
in Mank, for a performance so convincing that
when the 61-year-old actor yelled, “I’m 43!”
I burst out laughing. There’s also a campaign
for Delroy Lindo, very much just one part of
Spike Lee’s scatty Da 5 Bloods, a film really
only remembered for Chadwick Boseman,
given it was released soon before the Black
Panther star’s death.
Boseman’s emaciation tells a story in that
film that the public would only find out later,
as it does in his final, excellent role in Ma
Rainey’s Black Bottom, and he should win
Best Actor for the latter. That would be richly
deserved. But don’t bet against a late George
Clooney surge. Incredibly, he is in the mix
for The Midnight Sky, a film so slow it might
actually be a sloth.
Photographs Netflix; Shutterstock
Things get weirder with women. Not for
Best Actress, which, somehow, is as strong as
ever, but, rather, Best Supporting Actress. Yes,
your eyes do not deceive you: that really is
It’s like if the top half of the
Premier League didn’t show up
so the title was won by Burnley.
Fun? Sort of. But flair is also nice
D E TA I L S Ð F I L M
Story by Jonathan Dean
Maria Bakalova, from Borat Subsequent
Moviefilm, on the list – the one who was
maybe going to give Rudy Giuliani a
blowjob. Strictly speaking, she was acting,
but, also, that film is really a documentary
and, besides, I doubt even Sacha Baron
Cohen, while making the film, considered
his prankster sequel Oscar-worthy. A
welcome shake-up to a formulaic parade?
If you must. But I mustn’t. It’s not like they
ever gave anything to Jeremy Beadle.
The moment I lost interest in this year’s
race was when five men from The Trial Of The
Chicago 7 were mooted for Best Supporting
Actor. The film – reliant on wigs – saw Aaron
Sorkin take a wild court case and tame it. In
any other year, the film would have left the
race around November, when all the better
films usually come out. Still, someone who
might challenge Sorkin’s few wooden men is
Paul Raci, who is in the Riz Ahmed-starring
film about a deaf drummer, Sound Of Metal.
I saw it recently. It’s really good. Yet I have
absolutely no idea who Raci is.
A
ll in all, Hayden Christensen must be
gutted. This could have been the year
his Anakin Skywalker won big. Holy
Hanks, the ceremony will be drab: a parade
of trussed-up actors, being richly awarded for
mediocre jobs, accepting prizes over Zoom.
“I’d like to thank...” begins one of the Chicago
Seven, before his Wi-Fi dies. “I’d like to thank
the key workers.”
Still, there are positives. A brash film
such as Promising Young Woman, for
instance, initially slated to come out last
April, is now in the mix. A release in April
tends to mean its makers do not consider
it Oscar-worthy – it is too early in the year
for voters, especially the many old ones, to
remember. However, a delayed release and
lack of the standard safe alternatives Academy
members usually go for means that Emerald
Fennell’s film, starring Carey Mulligan
offering a masterclass in revenge and grief, is
very much in contention. It is the sort of fare
the Oscars usually ignore. Too violent. Too
incendiary. Too weird. Yet it is being talked
about, which means more people will hear
about it and see it.
The result? Maybe a bolder slate of nominees
in years to come. There should, at least, be a
bumper crop in 2022, given what has been held
From top: Potential 2021 nominees over. Well, it’s either that or Jason Statham,
Carey Mulligan, Sacha Baron because, post-pandemic, maybe the Oscars will
Cohen, Chadwick Boseman,
Delroy Lindo and Gary Oldman lose their value entirely. “And the Academy
Award goes to... Crank 3: Vaccinate This.”
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 73
 Spruce up for spring
Mark the new season with thoughtful but effective wardrobe updates.
From block-colour trainers to a new signature scent, here’s our edit
Edited by Sophie Clark

1 2 3 4

5 6 7

8 9

1. Face mask by The Light Salon, £395. thelight-salon.com 2. Eau de parfum by Horace, £55. horace.co
3. Jacket by Barbour, £249. barbour.com 4. Deodorant by Bulldog, £4.50. bulldogskincare.com
5. Watch by Longines, £1500. longines.com 6. Trainers by Camperlab, £150. camper.com 7. Polo shirt by Canali, £290. canali.com
8. Holdall by Dune London, £75. dunelondon.com 9. Swimming shorts by Hermès, £350. hermes.com

74 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021


Dialled-up denim
Jeans might have been your style saviour for
decades, but this Spring/Summer, Armani has
some fresh ideas for upgrading your bluewear
Story by Sophie Clark Photograph by Charlie Surbey
Sweater, £930. Bag, £930. Cap,
£280. Jeans, £520. Trainers, £560.
All by Giorgio Armani. armani.com
GQ − PREVIEW
I
s there anything more reliable in your wardrobe than a pair of
jeans? Chances are you’re wearing them right now. That’s because
denim is (and forever will be) a fast track to cool. But prepare
yourself, because there’s a new wave of denim emerging. From flared
1970s silhouettes to tie-dyed conversation starters, these guys are eager
to replace your old faithfuls. Not quite ready for that? Whether you’re
a connoisseur of the “Canadian tux” or you’ve given up on your well-
fitting jean dreams, the Giorgio Armani Denim collection promises
to rethink how you wear it. It’s a world where the fabric is reimagined
not just in cotton but cashmere too, promising to add elegance to your
everydaywear. This collection goes way beyond your average pair of
jeans: invest in a hooded sweatshirt, double-pocket cross-body bag and
baseball cap – all crafted from denim adorned with motifs. Consider
these souped-up twists on a classic as a fine way to level-up your
wardrobe this spring. Thanks, Mr Armani. G
ARMANI.COM
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 75
D E TA I L S Ð M U S I C
Why on earth has country
music suddenly exploded?
The genre was in the doldrums, but while you weren’t paying attention
it began to reinvent itself in unexpected ways... Story by Grady Smith
C
onsider the musical titans of
the streaming age. You might
call to mind diamond-dripping
hitmakers such as Rihanna, Post
Malone, Travis Scott and Ariana
Grande. Equally, you might think of the
total unknowns – the amateur rappers
and pyjama producers amassing TikTok
clout from their parents’ kitchens.
Either way, you probably didn’t think
about country music, a genre rife with
twangy songs that don’t easily blend
into Spotify’s algorithmic sea
of trap beats. Strangely, that But wait,
could be changing.
Country music has had didn’t we
an astonishing year in the write off
streaming world, soaring 16 the genre
per cent in 2020 (compared to
a three per cent rise for music back in
streaming overall), thanks to 2013?
gigantic hits from stars such
as Luke Combs and Thomas Rhett.
Morgan Wallen, in the weeks before he
was suspended from his record deal
for shouting a racial slur, shattered
streaming records in January with
his second LP, Dangerous: The Double
Album, which racked up 240 million
first-week streams in the US alone. And
with high-profile discs such as Eric
Church’s triple (yes, triple) album Heart
& Soul set for release in April, the trend
shows no signs of dissipating.
76 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
But wait, didn’t we all write off the
genre back in 2013, during the era of
“bro country” when every song had the
same blaring electric guitars, R&B beats
and lyrics about girls sliding into trucks
and kissing under the moonlight? Didn’t
we all cotton on to the fact that every
act was just copying Florida Georgia
Line, who, in turn, started copying
themselves, rhyming “party” and
“Bacardi” on three separate records?
Well, yes. We all did. But since then,
something interesting has
happened. Here’s an analogy:
remember a decade ago,
when every song on pop radio
started imitating LMFAO’s
“Party Rock Anthem” and
including a fist-bumping
EDM build that sounded
like an over-caffeinated
zipper? Once people grew
bored of that vibe, pop let itself
get Lorde levels of weird. Now,
something similar seems to
be happening in country,
to the benefit of listeners
who crave variety. And
it’s generating a new
line-up of superstars.
Country music today
doesn’t have a sonic
centre. The rocking
tones of bro country are
still alive with guys such as Hardy and
Luke Bryan, but a new sound called
“boyfriend country” has also arisen:
soft, sappy, acoustic offerings from
well-dressed gentlemen such as Brett
Young and Dan & Shay. Then there
are the independent outlaws, such as
Tyler Childers, who have built serious
followings on streaming. But classic
country fans have reason to celebrate too,
with a neo-traditional movement led by
artists such as Jon Pardi, who’s bringing
back the Bakersfield style, and Midland’s
Texas honky-tonk naughtiness.
At the opposite end of the spectrum,
artists such as Kane Brown and Maren
Morris dominate pop-country with
crossover collaborations (check out “The
Middle”). Whether the likes of “Old
Town Road” should be called country is
a matter of debate. But arguing about
authenticity in a genre that reveres its
roots is part of the experience.
The genre’s biggest star is Luke
Combs, a gruff-voiced everyman known
for his black fishing shirts and red Solo
cups. His success is due to his music
catering to many of these micro-trends.
Some songs feel like they should be
played at a raucous bonfire party; others
are suited to a first dance at a wedding.
He will sing over steel guitars and
mandolins on a true-blue country song,
then rock out to a contemporary beat on
Thomas Rhett
the next. Lately, he’s been experimenting
streams from
Nashville, 18 with buzzy artists, such as bluegrass
September 2020; wunderkind Billy Strings. In short, he
(below) Maren
offers something for everyone.
Morris at the 55th
Academy Of Country
Music Awards,
T
he richness of the current
26 August 2020
scene is just one side of the
story. The other is that the
lockdowns of 2020 have forced the slow-
moving country industry to nix some
antiquated habits. Country stars relied
on radio station visits and Walmart
displays as their main methods of
promotion, while hip-hop blazed
bold new trails using social media to
drop music and talk directly to fans.
Country has finally caught on, having
been forced to release quarantine work
tapes and play livestream concerts –
they’re even “leaking” songs on TikTok.
It’s about time. The fact it spent so
long lagging behind rap and pop on
streaming services gave it the most
room to grow and it took
a pandemic to make that
happen. But maybe the
pandemic drove people to it
Photographs Getty Images
for emotional reasons too. Country is
often homespun, rooted in stories about
family and faith. Perhaps that offered
comfort to weary listeners feeling adrift
in the world. Once people clicked off
of “WAP” they wanted a tamer kind of
“WAP”: wholesome and pleasant.
 D E TA I L S Ð F O R E C A S T

+ How the merchscape

came for your hinterland Could this year raise 100%
Time was, merch was for music. Then, in an
Extremely Online move, it became for, well,
anything and the latest wave allows you
to rub your cultural capital in everyone’s
faces. Dumb way to project irony-drenched
the stakes on 2020?
As the vaccine rolls out and the prospect nears of life
sophistication? Sure. Do we dig it? Guilty...
starting to – at least partially – return to how we
remember it from the distant past, what will dominate 90%
the news agenda in the months ahead? Betting markets
are a surprisingly good bellwether (ask a data scientist) 88% (1/7)
and, based on these odds, 2021 certainly won’t stint on 2020 Olympics to
potential surprises. Here’s what to look out for – or not... be postponed
Story by Thomas Barrie until 2022 83% (1/5)
Bank Of England
80%
to announce
Film production co merch!
negative
These days, if you’re an independent film
company and you haven’t got a hypebeast interest rates
retail line, people openly laugh at you. Our
favourite? A24’s, the studio that brought you
Hereditary, starring Toni Collette (above).
TONI SCREAM PIN, £7.50. SHOP.A24FILMS.COM
71% (2/5) 70%
Lewis Hamilton
67% (2/1) to win the next
Twitter to ban any F1 season
elected member of
the US Congress
60%

Podcast merch!
50% (1/1) 50%
If you spend your Tube journey peering
over the top of your copy of Infinite Jest Slowthai to be
just to see who’s looking, podcast merch nominated for the
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APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 77

 Golden
threads
The debut Spring/Summer Gold Standard
collection from Barbour sets a new bar for
outerwear craftsmanship
Story by Kevin Perry Photographs by Tomo Brejc

Jacket by Barbour,
£449. barbour.com.

78 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 GQ Partnership

G
iven that Barbour started
dressing the North East’s Jacket by Barbour,
fishermen all the way back £449. barbour.co.uk.

in 1894, it’s no surprise that

throughout its long history
the brand has consistently set an important
benchmark for craftsmanship and quality.
Its iconic wax jackets regularly receive the
royal stamp of approval and have been
seen on every British great from Bond to
Beckham, so naturally, with the weather
getting warmer, all eyes are now on the
first ever Spring/Summer collection
from the new premium luxury sub-brand
Barbour Gold Standard.
The highly desirable and tightly curated
five-jacket collection showcases Barbour’s
staggering attention to detail and gives
a contemporary update to some timeless
classics. It was inspired by a deep dive into
the Barbour archive, which contains original
items dating back to 1910, and the resulting
designs are both sophisticated and eminently
practical, making reference also to Barbour’s
rich military heritage. That’s evident in the
core colour palette of navy and khaki, as well
as in details such as the traditional bellows
pockets, which come in handy for storing just
about everything.
Take, for example, the Ripstop Beaufort
Casual jacket (left), worn by brand
ambassador and Peaky Blinders actor Sam
Claflin, who grew up exploring the great
British countryside from his family home in
Norfolk before becoming the international
face of Barbour Gold Standard. The two large
bellows pockets at the front ensure you always
have plenty of storage space. It comes in a
“dusky green” with a honey-coloured corduroy
collar and the shape is based on the iconic
1983 Barbour Beaufort, which was originally
designed by Dame Margaret Barbour. Unlike
the heavier waxed cotton of the original, the
new Barbour Gold Standard version is
lightweight and thus much better suited
to everyday wear. designed with inverted box pleats that expand a testament to the sheer quality of Barbour’s
The new collection’s military influence when in use. craftsmanship – and confirmation that even
is also readily apparent in the Overdyed While each of the jackets in the new after 127 years in business, it continues to set
Corbridge Casual jacket (above right), which collection are ideally suited to the brighter, the standard.
features a stand collar and epaulettes on sunnier days of spring and summer, The new Barbour Gold Standard Spring/
the shoulders, both of which are directly they’ve been designed with the perpetual Summer 2021 collection is available now
inspired by classic uniform designs. Pictured changeability of British weather in mind. from leading luxury retailer flannels.com
here in “military olive”, this elegant jacket They’re extremely lightweight yet still provide and direct from barbour.com, as well as from
features four front pockets – two on the chest great protection if the wind whips up, the Selfridges, Mr Porter, Harvey Nichols and
and two lower bellows pockets – which are all temperature drops or the heavens open. That’s other selected stores, when open. G

+ Standard bearers Three more luxurious and lightweight designs from the Barbour Gold Standard collection

Nylon Overdyed Oakby Wax

Transporter Beaufort Casual By Barbour, £429.
Casual By Barbour, £449. barbour.co.uk
By Barbour, £349. At barbour.co.uk An iconic silhouette
Flannels. flannels.com A relaxed update of the given a contemporary
classic Beaufort, the overhaul thanks to
A lightweight, casual
new version is rendered Barbour’s eye for subtle
jacket available in “blue
in an overdyed cotton details, such as corozo
metal” and “cumin”
canvas that’s perfect nut buttons, nickel
(as well as navy and
for warmer days. The hardware and a neat
khaki), making it the
hood is detachable for leather tab over the
perfect choice for the
extra versatility. left bellows pocket.
summer months.

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 79

D E TA I L S Ð U S P O L I T I C S
The United States so reviles
itself, it might actually break up
From ‘Calexit’ to ‘Cascadia’, secession movements are spreading.
Can Joe Biden hold this divided country together?
I
f you think America went mad
after Donald Trump lost the
2020 presidential election,
imagine what might have happened
if he had won. Trump’s opponents
would probably not have stormed
the Washington Capitol, as Trump’s
fans did on 6 January, but large
parts of the country would have
exploded in rage, cities would have
burned and serious pundits would
have declared America finished.
The Democratic Party could well
have outdone even Trump in refus-
ing to accept the result, claiming
that foreign interference and “voter
suppression” meant the election
wasn’t valid. The largest media
organisations would have taken
these allegations far more seriously
than they did Trump’s madcap talk
of mass voter fraud. If you think
that’s hyperbole, consider how
credulous most journalists were
in 2016, when Democratic opera-
tives said Trump was in hock to
Vladimir Putin because the Russian
leader had a secret tape of the 45th
president being urinated on by
prostitutes. The 2020 meltdown
would have been far greater.
Some Democrats may well have
thrown their tantrum further and
called for secession, a break-up
of the United States. After all,
the process is already underway.
After 2016, a growing number
of Californians, disgusted by the
idea of President Trump, called for
“Calexit”. The word was, obviously,
taken from “Brexit” – yet the con-
cept is more inspired by Scottish
80 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
Story by Freddy Gray
Joe Biden’s inauguration on 20 January occurred under the
shadow of the Capitol invasion two weeks earlier
nationalism. “Yes California” is a
group that, much like the Scottish
National Party, argues that their
state is and always has been differ-
ent to the rest of the US. It is more
progressive and independent than,
say, Alabama.
Calexit might have only minority
support, but then so did the SNP
not so long ago. And, similar to the
way many Englishmen feel about
Scotland, many Americans wouldn’t
be too fussed to see the Golden State
go. As FH Buckley puts it in his book
American Secession, “A California
that asks to secede might even be
met with a heartland that answers,
‘Don’t let the door hit you
on the way out.’”
It’s not just California.
America is
ripe for a
Some northwestern lib-
erals fantasise about break-up.
“Cascadia”, which would
It is one
nation,
bring the states of Oregon
and Washington together
with the Canadian prov- divisible
ince of British Columbia
– a mega region of eco-friendliness,
legalised pot and yoga lessons. And
there are right-wing southern seces-
sionist movements in Texas, South
Carolina and elsewhere. It’s no
accident that some of the Trumpy
mob who swarmed the Capitol
waved the Confederate flag.
U
ntil the end of the last cen-
tury, America remained
truly exceptional in its
cohesion. Separatist movements
were ascendant or had succeeded
everywhere else: in Britain, Ireland,
Canada, Pakistan, Indonesia,
Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iraq, Turkey,
Eastern Europe and Russia. But
in America, despite its enormous
size, the disparate states rubbed
together reasonably well.
Perhaps America’s relative
unity stemmed from its youth. It
was only founded in 1776. In the
middle of the 19th century, approx-
imately 700,000 Americans died
in a civil war that established the
power of the Union over individ-
ual states. Nobody wanted to do
that again. In the 150 years that
followed, thanks in no small part
to its enormous economic rise,
America’s federalised
system successfully
juggled the com-
peting demands of
central and state-
level governance.
But America today
is older, crankier and
more ripe for a break-
up. It is one nation,
divisible. Americans are more split
than at any time since the civil war
– by geography, history, religion, val-
ues and, increasingly, politics. In the
1990s and 2000s, the “culture wars”
were mostly fought over hot-button
moral issues such as abortion or
gay rights. Now, Americans distrust
and despise each other over
almost everything, from pandemic
responses to election results, from
sports to the stock market. Class
animosities are intensifying and
Americans everywhere feel that
their social fabric is unravelling.
A poll in 2018 found that 31 per
cent of probable voters think there
will be another civil war within five
years. Another survey at about the
same time found that 39 per cent
supported the right of states to
secede and that Democrats were
more likely to support secession.
Republicans tend to be more
nationalistic. But thanks to Trump,
many right-wingers embraced
a nationalism that puts them in
conflict with other Americans.
More ardent Trump fans regard
themselves as “patriots”; their
opponents are “traitors”. Christians
who once regarded their land as
“God’s country” now see the Devil
winning everywhere. Left-liberals,
for their part, equate any pride in
the flag as equivalent to racism.
Both attitudes are antithetical
to national unity. Americans
don’t even agree on the origins
of their country: the New York
Times’ controversial 1619
Project seeks to recast America’s
founding as a shameful 400-
year-old slave state, rather than
a grand 245-year-old experiment
in liberty.
President Joe Biden has, bless
him, promised to restore the
bonds that tie America together.
“Without unity, there is no peace,
Photographs Getty Images
only bitterness and fury,” he said
in his inaugural address. “No
progress, only exhausting outrage.
No nation, only a state of chaos.”
But can a 78-year-old career
politician hold together a country
that increasingly reviles itself?
British GQ. Winner of 79 major awards. The world’s leading men’s magazine.

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D E TA I L S Ð T E L E V I S I O N
Made in conjunction with a
meditation app, A World Of Calm
is a star-studded snooze-fest – and
we mean that as a compliment
The new era of
‘MINDFUL TV’ is
spectacularly banal
But its calming nothingness might be exactly
what we need Story by Stuart McGurk
O
n America’s HBO Max
streaming service, the
network recently launched
a series that is, by some distance,
the most star-studded TV show
ever to grace the new Hollywood-
at-home era.
The first episode boasts Lucy Liu,
but that’s just the hors d’oeuvre.
The third stars Nicole
Kidman, the fourth Cillian
Murphy, the fifth Keanu
freaking Reeves (right).
Others have Idris Elba,
Oscar Isaac, Kate
Winslet... They even
got a double Oscar
winner on board:
Mahershala Ali.
But it’s no high-
octane drama.
In fact, it’s anti-
octane anti-drama
– a “balmer”, if you
Newsflash: virtual reality is no longer rubbish The Oculus Quest 2 headset has changed the game forever
Virtual reality has been the “next
big thing” for decades – Nasa’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory was working
on it way back in 1977. But in a
blink-and-you-missed-it moment,
it has finally hit its inflection point.
The catalyst? Facebook’s Oculus
Quest 2 headset (£299. oculus.
com). The reason it has made an
impact is that it’s actually good. It
works wirelessly; it’s refreshingly
comfortable to wear; and it has
a strong catalogue of content in
82 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
will. Titled A World Of Calm and
made in conjunction with mind-
fulness app Calm,
each half-hour epi-
sode transports you
We have
to a different ultra- progressed
high-def world, as to the epoch
the dulcet tones of an
A-lister lulls you into
of lean-back,
tranquility. Sometimes pass-out
they take the form of television
space documentaries,
as Elba intones, “Out there, in
the galaxy, are endless permu-
tations of texture and form,”
while we glide through the
solar system. Sometimes,
they look like crafting how-
tos, in which Reeves is no
longer murdering for pets
but watching a man build
a canoe from scratch. In
the first episode, Liu glides
us through coral reefs,
which to immerse yourself, from
Call Of Duty-esque online shooter
Onward to velociraptor freakout
fest Jurassic World Aftermath.
Basically, it’s the antithesis of every
failed VR headset to date.
People are noticing. One in three
paid apps on the Oculus store
have made more than $1 million in
revenue, while the most popular
titles have permeated pop culture
in their own right. “I was getting
my hair cut and was asked what I
culminating in a sea turtle settling
in its own “underwater spa”, at
which point we’re told nine min-
utes pass between each beat of the
turtle’s heart. The instruction for
the viewer is plain: let’s see if you
can beat that record.
Clearly, in our locked-down world,
we have left the era of “lean-in” TV –
those prestige dramas that demand
attention and raise blood pressure
– and have progressed to the epoch
of lean-back, pass-out television. In
the UK, the BBC hooked up with the
meditation app Headspace to create
Mindful Escapes last year on BBC
Four: a series of nature documenta-
ries made in conjunction with the
broadcaster’s Natural History Unit,
only without the brutality of nature
and the complexity of history. Is it
good television? Heavens, no. It’s
spectacularly banal, but then its
banality is the point. Animals aren’t
killed. Space travel isn’t complex.
You end the Reeves episode on HBO
Max feeling like you could knock up
a canoe yourself, if only you could
stop yawning.
But it’s also the sharp end – or,
rather, the softest squidge – of a
type of TV that began in the early
2000s and is reach-
ing its zenith at the
tail end of Covid. At
the end of a day of
caged nerves among
wearisome walls we
need a break, not
just from our allotted
square footage on the
planet, but also from
the half square foot in our heads.
B
lame The Trip. Seinfeld
might have been the first
to proclaim itself a “show
about nothing”, but The Trip took
one look at its tightly wound
plots and calmly asked it to hold
its glass of rosé. We arrived for
the impressions, but stayed for the
calming sun-kissed shots of clifftop
alfresco dining.
did and, unprompted, the person
brought up [VR rhythm game] Beat
Saber,” Mike Verdu, VP of content
at Facebook Reality Labs, tells
GQ. Given that Mark Zuckerberg
has already teased a new Quest 3,
Facebook clearly wants to strike
again before Apple and Sony
weigh back into the market with
heavily rumoured headsets of their
own. In these confined times, it’s a
tech arms race that can’t escalate
too soon. Robert Leedham
When Gone Fishing effectively
replaced The Trip in 2018 – a show
in which nothing happens apart
from two ageing comedians, Bob
Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse,
trying to catch fish – they could
hardly have predicted their 2020
Christmas special would have been
roundly proclaimed as the festive
highlight. And yet here we are –
and it was.
Almost unwittingly, all had
stumbled on a new genre. In aiming
for realism they gave us some-
thing else: relaxing TV, mindful
TV, unhurried TV, more about the
calming experience of place than
the adrenaline rush of plot. The
cookery show of the year wasn’t
Gordon Ramsay expletive-bombing
hapless chefs, but The Great British
Bake Off or Nigella Lawson’s soft-
focus Cook, Eat, Repeat. The drama
of the year wasn’t about police
corruption or mafia gangs, but
The Queen’s Gambit, the story of
an undramatic girl playing only
mildly dramatic chess. We’re no
longer hate-watching reality TV
stars screech and squabble, we’re
agreeably tuning in to watch people
sew (The Great British Sewing Bee)
and make pots (The Great Pottery
Throw Down).
And we may not have even
reached non-entertainment’s nadir.
The BBC’s Winter Walks is exactly
as boring as it sounds. Each week,
on BBC Four, a different celebrity
armed with a GoPro on a stick sim-
ply went for a lovely countryside
walk and... well, that’s it. I watched
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi go for a
gentle stroll across the Dales and
I enjoyed every mind-numbing
minute of it. The show, filmed
mostly pre-lockdown, was “ahead of
Photograph Getty Images
its time”, boasted the BBC when it
announced it, “before everyone was
out walking for their mental health
and wellbeing. We need a series like
this now, more than ever.”
And, God help us, it might just
be right.

Pallabrousse Legion
post-War ancestor
This is 2021’s most modern
boot... and it has a
silhouette from the 1940s!
This year, French brand Palladium is relaunching its first ever boot, the
iconic Pallabrousse, first made in 1947 for the heroes of the Foreign Legion.
It’s a stunning and sustainable update that retains all the hallmarks of the
original: durability, comfort and style
Story by David Annand
A
ny shoemaker that tennis shoes from the 1970s or the
has made it past 70 brilliantly lo-fi basketball boot. They
will by definition might look at the gloriously simple
have accumulated black Pampa sneakers that became a
quite a back key part of the uniform of Downtown
catalogue. And so New York’s counterculture in the 1980s.
it is with French But sometimes you’ve just got to head
brand Palladium, which has amassed right back to the start. And that’s
a fair few iconic shoes along the way. exactly what they’ve done this year with
Today, when Palladium’s design team the remastering of the brand’s iconic
opens up the archive they are seriously first boot, the Pallabrousse, created in
spoilt for choice. For inspiration they 1947 for the French Foreign Legion.
could turn to the brand’s super-popular Palladium was born as a division
GQ Partnership
of an aircraft tyre company, which
Palladium’s new diversified at the end of the Second
was based on its World War. It used its knowledge of
heavy-duty direct vulcanisation processes to create
shoes that fused lightweight, quick-
drying canvas with hard-wearing
rubber, the dream combination for the
legionnaires, who wanted a boot that
was comfortable and durable.
Fast forward 74 years and the brand,
now a leading player in the global
footwear market, is remastering the
boot as the “Pallabrousse Legion”,
a modern update on the distinctive
original. This, of course, is something
that needs to be done with appropriate
reverence. Palladium’s brand president,
Christophe Mortemousque, is quick to
point out the boot’s iconic status in
the company.
“It is the shoe that has set our DNA
as a brand,” he says, “and it has set
our values: simplicity, durability,
protection, comfort.”
Therefore it was essential that the
new boot kept many of the elements
of the original that were central to
its popularity. That meant giving the
modern version supportive stripes
on the quarters, which stabilise the
foot inside the boot, and Palladium’s
When Palladium’s
design team opens up
the archive they are
spoilt for choice
signature protective toe cap. It meant
keeping the original multi-terrain
lugged sole unit for enhanced structure
and support. It also meant retaining the
features that made the shoes so popular
with legionnaires on their epic treks:
bars on the soles to help prevent fatigue
in the arches of the foot and a gusset
on the tongue to stop mud and dust
getting into the boot. And the materials
are, of course, the same: durable
natural cotton canvas and a protective
rubber patch on the ankle bone.
But as Palladium head of design
Adrien Touati explains, the team also
made a few upgrades. “In terms of
materials,” he says, “we moved to a
more sustainable approach, using
organic cotton, and we improved the
comfort by adding an anatomical
insole for better cushioning.”
What makes the remastering stand
out is how seamlessly it combines a deep
respect for the merits of a much-loved
heritage product with a contemporary
emphasis on a light environmental
footprint. It might have a 74-year-old
silhouette but the Pallabrousse Legion
Boots by is a thoroughly modern boot. G
Palladium, £85.
palladiumboots.
co.uk PALLADIUMBOOTS.CO.UK
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 83
The definitive collection of GQ’s automotive greatest hits in all
their high-revving, tyre-squealing, era-defining glory.

F E AT UR I NG
Bugat ti Veyron
Aston Martin One-77
Ferrari 458 Italia
Rolls-Royce Wraith
Porsche 918 Spyder
Mercedes AMG GT
Ford GT
Maserati MC12
And many more...

ON SALE NOW
By Paul Henderson, with foreword by Jenson But ton.
ISBN 9781784725990 RRP £25
 Edited by
Paul Henderson

+
From HUD to headrests, the Mercedes’ new S-Class schools the competition on smarts, speed and style

This month: Quiet in the back! Mercedes-Benz tops the class with a limo you’ll drive yourself;
plus, the 143mph Toyota Yaris, Volvo’s turbo-hybrid S60 and a Carrera for road and wrist.
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 85
CARS

Driver, take the

day off... Hell,
take a whole year!
The new S-Class is great from the back seat,
but better at the wheel Story by Jason Barlow

M
ercedes has invested a fortune in the all-new, seventh-generation
S-Class, but let me sum it up in one word: headrests. They’re
primarily a safety feature, designed to minimise the effects of
whiplash in an impact. But the items that appeared in the rear compartment
of the outgoing S-Class have now made it upfront in the new car. These
rectangular, pillowy little miracles scope out a new dimension in softness
and someone has worked very hard indeed to redefine an in-car object that
doesn’t generally get a whole lot of love.
Now just imagine what the rest of the S-Class is like. Few cars enjoy
total dominion in their market sector, but the Mercedes Sonderklasse is
the undisputed heavyweight luxury champ. Rivals from Audi, BMW, Jaguar
and Porsche have all locked swords with the big Benz and in some areas,
perhaps, even edged fractionally ahead. But only Mercedes delivers the
whole enchilada and this new one is the most complete and technologically
superior in the model’s 49-year history.
Pity the product planners, though, because the S-Class’ technical specification
reads like a moonshot. Where to start? On the inside, because it’s here the
biggest strides have been taken (the exterior is a paragon of unflustered
elegance, whose crisp modernism dallies with something altogether more
outré on the Maybach version). Note, however, that on your way to the
interior two different types of door handles are available. The flush-fitting
optional ones (pictured inset) detect the key fob and rise smoothly out to meet
your hands. It sounds like needless frippery but actually helps reduce the
S-Class’ drag factor to a world-record low of 0.22. Coolly efficient.
Less streamlined, however, was the first iteration of
Mercedes’ infotainment system, known as MBUX.
There were many clever ideas, but some made
simple tasks (retuning the radio, for example)
infuriatingly complex. Version 2.0 looks
intimidating but is blessedly simple in action,
due in part to 50 per cent more available

processing firepower, but also to The S-Class comes in

Maybach, AMG and
a fundamental rethink.
plug-in hybrid iterations
It sits at the heart of a cabin
that is contemporary luxury
incarnate. The screens “float” above
a dashboard that’s dominated by an
expanse of polished wood, raffishly pin-
striped in GQ’s test car, that flows seamlessly
into the door trims. The window buttons are NEED
housed in a panel that also has a floating effect. TO
Ahead of the driver is a 12.3-inch instrument KNOW
display, complete with 3-D functionality. Two Mercedes-Benz
different types of head-up display are available, S500 4Matic
the larger one using augmented reality so that the Engine
satnav graphics hover directly in your eye line. 429bhp 3.0-litre
mild-hybrid
Floating is clearly futuristic, as if being gently
Performance
untethered from humdrum reality is the way to go.
0-62mph, 4.9
The central display is the real masterpiece, seconds; top speed,
though. Dispensing with a rotary controller or 155mph (restricted)
touchpad is a risky move, but simply swiping Price
across it prompts a perfectly judged haptic buzz £94,135
on the 12.8-inch OLED display. The full-screen Contact
nav display uses data from five cameras, five mercedes-benz.com

radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors to render a
real-time overhead view of the car’s position on
the road. Not only does it all look majestic, but
crucially the functions used most often float (see
what I mean?) to the surface so the driver doesn’t
enter a tedious and distracting sub-menu hell.
Mercedes is also delighted with the way
the second-generation MBUX is networked, to the
extent that its Interior Assist package recognises
eye direction, hand gestures and body language.
Voice activation is available via “Hey Mercedes”,
which can support 27 languages and understands
dialects and timbre, although it’s not foolproof
(I suspect it’ll struggle with Devon farmers).
Lighting, outside and in, is a big deal on the
S-Class. The interior uses 250 LEDs and draws
on a lengthy list of colours to alter the ambience.
Lighting strips that encircle the cabin pulse as a
safety warning. Then there are the seats, magnif-
icent leather-clad thrones that can be specified
to include 19 massage motors that work with the
car’s biometric sensors to deliver the appropriate
treatment if they detect occupant stress.
Got a dash?
Ahead of Alpine’s F1 debut, Tissot
puts a new watch front and centre
As Renault’s new, rebranded
Alpine F1 Team readies for
its first outing at Sakhir in
the Bahrain GP, the romance
of Alpine’s past has been
channelled into a new
watch. Tissot entered the
world of motorsport in 1973,
sponsoring Alpine in the
Monte Carlo Rally. It was a
shrewd call: Alpine’s A110
“Berlinettes” secured all three
podium spots, a moment
honoured in the dials of
the 516 new, limited-edition
Tissot Alpine On Board
Automatic Chronographs,
which reference the car’s
counters. But that’s not
the most pronounced nod
to motorsport history. The
45mm case itself can be
detached from the bracelet
Mercedes’ seventh-gen
S-Class pairs futuristic and clipped to the interior
tech with stately poise
of your new or vintage A110,
The exterior recalling how rally drivers
would affix chronographs
is a paragon of to their dashboards. Inside
elegance, its interior the watch, however, it’s all
luxury incarnate about the here and now:
it’s powered by a bang-
In the midst of all this technological splendour, up-to-date automatic ETA
actually driving the new S-Class risks being a movement with 60-hour
disappointment. Many owners never will, of
power reserve. Charlie Burton
course, this being the ne plus ultra of luxury
automotive travel and the promise of level-three
autonomy – that’s hands-off traffic jam stuff – £1,895. TISSOTWATCHES.COM
negated by the fact there’s likely someone already
on the payroll to do the driving. Logan Roy and
his real-life ilk didn’t get where they are by
driving themselves. They’re missing out.
The S-Class has various drive modes to alter
the car’s setup, but wherever you end up on the
spectrum there is an expensively engineered
sense of comfort, compliance and poise, while
four-wheel steering promotes high-speed agility
and impressive ease of use at parking speeds.
The S500 4Matic is powered by a silken 3.0-litre
turbocharged six-cylinder, making 429bhp, and
will be joined by a raft of other options, including
a plug-in hybrid that’ll do 62 miles in electric
mode and some less abstemious AMG versions.
There is no such thing as the best car in the
world, but the new S-Class gets very close indeed.
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 87
Toyota’s 257bhp
runabout rally cry
Its WRC stablemate might have been parked,
but this street-legal substitute is a riotous pocket rocket
Story by Alex Goy
Toyota GR Yaris
W
hen a road car is designed purely
to justify a rally car, you know it’s
going to be special. Toyota might
have killed off its upcoming WRC entry, but it
didn’t axe its counterpart: the GR Yaris. This
is an absolute win for fun enthusiasts.
Like your nan’s Yaris, it’s a practical shopping
car, except hers doesn’t have bodywork devised
by a rally team, one of the slickest manual
gearboxes outside of an MX-5, all-wheel drive or
a roof made of forged carbon polymer. The GR
take on the Yaris isn’t “standard” at all.
It’s small, aesthetically aggressive and a
Volvo S60 T8 Recharge
88 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
Toyota’s high-spec
four-wheel-drive
Yaris has carbon
bodywork
hoot to drive. Within moments of moving
off you know it’s got the makings of an
outstanding car. Thanks to a 257bhp 1.6- NEED
litre three-cylinder turbo motor, it’ll crack TO
0-62mph in 5.5 seconds and buzz its way to KNOW
more than 140mph. That power is fired to Engine
all four wheels for grip and pace befitting 257bhp 1.6-litre
far more senior metal. With precise and Performance
wonderfully intuitive steering, threading 0-62mph, 5.5 seconds;
top speed, 143mph
it about town and country is pure joy. The
Price
downside? It’s a bit noisy on the motorway. Below: The Volvo S60
£29,995 T8 is petrol-powered
But this is the kind of car that begs you to go Contact up front with e-drive
faster, play harder and enjoy the act of driving. toyota.co.uk through its rear wheels
T
hat Danish hygge thing? Across the It’s not quite that saintly in practice. Volvo’s
Oresund Bridge and 200 miles up the sole engine is a 2.0-litre four-cylinder, driving
coast in Gothenburg, Volvo has been the front wheels, with the 11.8kWh electric
delivering the automotive equivalent for years. motor sending 86bhp to the rears. Volvo
The S60 T8 Recharge is a prime example: a reckons on around 30 miles in electric mode,
plug-in hybrid whose petrol engine is both but the reality is you’ll zap through it in no
turbo- and supercharged so that the whole time. This isn’t a hardship, because it’s a
lot combined is good for almost 400bhp, smoother, much less raucous companion than
while delivering a claimed 122.8mpg and a its BMW M4 or Mercedes-AMG rivals. And
mere 39g/km of CO2. If that doesn’t that makes it a very 2021 sort of proposition.
give you a warm, fuzzy feeling, The S60 is an expertly sculpted piece of
nothing will. design. The headlights, dash-to-axle ratio
and crease over the rear wheel arches are all
masterful details. Inside, it shares the same
architecture as other Volvos, with its slender
little gear lever and truly magnificent seats. It’s
an under-the-radar choice that also manages to
reassure amid unpredictable times. JB
FROM £45,230. VOLVOCARS.COM

TAG Heuer Carrera
Porsche Chronograph,
from £4,850. tagheuer.com
TAG Heuer x Porsche:
a Mexican love story...
Having both drawn inspiration from the same iconic race,
two grand masters of Mitteleuropa rekindle a six-decade
affair with their new collab Carrera Story by Jason Barlow
T
his one was surely fated. Arguably
the world’s greatest car company
in partnership with the watch
brand whose immense character has
been shaped, more than any other, by
its motorsport affiliations. There’s also
the small matter of a shared name:
Carrera. It’s Spanish for “race”, as used
in the infamous Mexican car-breaker
the Carrera Panamericana, which
spanned more than 2,000 miles, ran
annually between 1950 and 1954 and
claimed a fair few lives among the many
great names that accepted
its gruelling challenges. ‘No other car
Porsche, a still-young
and watch
brand share
company, did well enough
for the bosses at home
near Stuttgart to first use a link as deep’
the name on a racy ver-
sion of its 356 model. Meanwhile, a few
years later, engineering graduate Jack
Heuer got sucked back into the family
business and, having met Mexican racing
prodigies the Rodríguez brothers at the
Sebring 12 Hours race in 1962, decided to
name his new chronograph after a race
they enthused about.
The first Heuer Carrera pioneered a
Photograph Alamy
pure look, designed so that its dials were
legible to drivers during the heat and
dust of battle. Heuer later befriended
and supplied watches to Swiss racing star
“Smokin’” Jo Siffert, who also happened
CARS
The calfskin strap has the same stitching
you’ll find inside a 911; the alternative
interlocking bracelet reflects
Porsche’s more competition-honed
characteristics. But this is just the start.
“This partnership is about bringing
creativity and innovation to
the world,” Arnault continues,
“the sort you will only see given
the connection between these
two brands.”
Porsche’s sales and marketing
boss, Detlev von Platen, was a TAG
Heuer fan before he took the phone
call from Arnault two years ago. “This
isn’t just a communication partnership.
It’s establishing a global footprint
where we can share values and think
about working on common challenges,
digitalisation, connectivity, electro-
to be the country’s Porsche importer, gave mobility,” he says. “I thought
the legendary 917 its first competitive this was a huge opportunity
outing and inspired Steve McQueen to strengthen our relevance,
when he was developing the character both for Porsche and TAG
he’d play in 1971’s Le Mans. A decade or Heuer, for a new generation of
so later the brands’ paths crossed again customers. There is high tech
when a TAG-Porsche engine powered and clarity in the Carrera’s
McLaren’s F1 entry. design code. We try to reinvent
Such are the historic overlaps between the 911 without changing it.
TAG Heuer and Porsche, says the former’s It’s a completely new car, but
CEO, Frédéric Arnault, that many assume the soul is the same.”
the two titans have been in cahoots for Honestly, what took them
years. Not so. “When I joined the brand so long? G
three and a half years
ago, I reviewed the part-
From top: The current Porsche
nerships we had,” he 911 Carrera S; ‘Smokin’’ Jo Siffert
in 1971; a 1954 Porsche 550
tells GQ. “There was one
Spyder Carrera Panamericana
brand we immediately
saw strong potential
in. TAG Heuer is the
watchmaker that’s most intrinsically
and authentically linked to motorsport.
Porsche is motorsport. And we share
a name. No other car and watch brand
share a link as deep as this.”
The result is the new Carrera Porsche
Chronograph, a watch that’s been almost
60 years in the making. It adds nuanced
Porsche elements – the famous logo on
the bezel, signature black, red and grey
elements, an oscillating mass shaped
as a steering wheel – to the Carrera’s
clearly defined aesthetic and the
in-house Calibre Heuer 02 movement.
APRIL 2021 GQ.CO .UK 89
TOM HOLLAND
Suit, £2,070. T-shirt,
£575. Both by Dolce &
Gabbana. dolcegabbana.
com. Shoes by Jimmy
Choo, £495. jimmychoo.
com. Socks by Falke, £13.
falke.com. Necklace,
£450. Ring, £480.
Both by David Yurman.
davidyurman.com.
Bracelet by Saint Laurent,
£285. ysl.com

Opposite: Suit,
£2,090. Shirt, £715. Tie,
£170. All by Prada.
prada.com. Rings by
David Yurman, from £300
each. davidyurman.com

‘I was separate
from a lot of kids.
Let’s face it, I was
doing ballet...
Still, who’s
laughing now?’
 Tom Holland
is the
next last
great
film star
Whether as Marvel’s Spider-Man
or heroin addict Cherry in his
game-changing new role with the
Russo brothers, Britain’s most valuable
‘Hollywood asset’ has been on one high
or another since the age of 19. Now, as
the business of moviemaking rewrites
the rules of topline renown, we ask the
face of a ten-figure franchise how he
learned to swing with the big dogs
and where he plans to land when
(and if...) his feet finally
hit the ground

Story by Jonathan Heaf Photographs by AB+DM Styling by Law Roach

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 91


The fact that the first few words that tumble
out of Tom Holland’s mouth include “dildo”*
and “heroin” give me a good indication of how
much the 24-year-old ballet dancer from South
London has grown out from Spider-Man’s long,
elastic shadow since the world last saw his “Peter
Tingle” tingle.
Another indication is the emotional and
physical pulp Holland found himself in 14
months ago: clucking, sweat-drenched and
wide-eyed, with a pair of off-colour Y-fronts
around his thighs, on the set of Cherry, an
independent film shot in Cleveland, Ohio, and
directed by the Russo brothers Anthony and Joe
(Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil
War; Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame), with
a screenplay by their sister, Angela Russo-Otstot,
and Jessica Goldberg.
Cherry is Holland’s moment to try on his
big-boy movie star pants. The ride is wild,
traumatic and fist-bitingly raw. The subject
matter is distinctly adult: it is a toxic junkie love
story, set before and after the Iraq War of 2003.
“Have you ever taken heroin before?” Holland
asks me, I assume rhetorically. “Because I have
not. I couldn’t sit there on set and inject heroin
into my chest – that’s not how it is done. I had
to get it right. This role took
me to some of the darkest
‘Disney might
be confused
places I have ever been, emotion-
ally, physically, anythingly... I
would never go back there again, as to why their
not for anyone. I am pleased
Spider-Man
became
I did it, but that door is now
closed and locked.”
For myriad reasons, Holland’s an addict’
performance in Cherry is aston-
ishing. For almost the entirety of the film you
can see – almost feel – the chemicals rattling
around in his pale, gasping veins. Yet it’s more
Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting, however, than
Timothée Chalamet in Beautiful Boy; there’s
horror, sure, but there’s also a distinct sense the
directors want empathy for their character’s story.
The dude’s skin gets pallid, with all the
colourless putridity of raw chicken that’s three
days turned. It’s a film in which the demons (and
America’s contemporary problems) are stuffed
down your throat, via your eyeballs, while
Spider-Man’s cherry-red and royal-blue Marvel
92 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
Cinematic Universe-issued spandex morph suit
is entirely absent. Spidey fans will be shocked
out of their Butterkist sugar comas.
“I think there might have been some people
at Disney confused as to why their Spider-Man
had become a heroin addict.” Holland says,
chuckling, clearly enjoying the idea that a few
of the Disney execs – who bought Marvel in
2009 for a cool $4 billion (£2.4bn) – might be
sweating under the lights here a little. Holland,
after all, is one of the world’s most valuable stars,
if not the most valuable star in the MCU.
The actor is currently talking to me from a
rental house in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is
shooting Spider-Man 3. He’s been here since
September and “We’re close to finishing, actually”.
Today (a Monday) is a good day because it’s
Holland’s one day off a week. After talking to me
he’ll go to a local golf club with one of his younger
brothers – Harry, who has been doubling as his
assistant; Holland has two other siblings – and
thwack a few irons into the clipped turf in a bid
to just forget. To forget who he is and to forget,
just for a fleeting moment, the insurmountable
pressure that comes with being who he is.
Cherry is an adaptation of author Nico
Walker’s literary debut, a (mostly) factual
autobiography that tells the
story of a smart yet vulnerable
man, “Cherry” (Holland),
who flees stale suburbia’s
all-day bongs, unpaid bills
and unemployment bore-
dom by signing up for the US
Army and heading promptly
into the oil-soaked stench of
Iraq. Clue: this turns out to be
a massive fucking mistake.
He trains to kill the “Haji” (a derogatory term
for an Iraqi, used by US military throughout
the 2003 conflict), learns to stuff his comrades’
hot guts back inside their blackened, hollowed
chests as an army medic, hauls out to Iraq’s
“Triangle Of Death”, waits, masturbates in a
Portakabin in the middle of the desert thinking
about his beautiful, doe-eyed wife back home in
Cleveland (played superbly by Ciara Bravo) and
then waits a bit more.
Just as things are getting boring he watches
as his marine buddies suffer a direct hit and
burn alive in their dust-coloured Humvee, his
bunk buddy’s wedding ring shining out from the
blackened mass of charred bodies and twisted
metal like a crescent moon in a midwinter sky.
Experiences like this affect a man.
Returning home, our antihero finds his
post-war life utterly shaken by severe PTSD,
which, in turn – thanks to US doctors handing
out opiates prescriptions like parking tickets at
the time – leads to Oxycontin abuse. Cherry’s wife
also becomes a slave to the dope. Then they start
to inject heroin intravenously and our character
makes a decision to fund their spiralling habits
with a spree of amateurish, pistol-wielding
bank robberies.
Holland is devastatingly uncompromising in
his depiction of addiction. The specific scene
mentioned – the one that begins with Holland
coming to on the floor in his underwear – is par-
ticularly anxiety inducing. It shows Holland and
his wife in tatters after a four- or five-day bender,
having cracked the safe of a drug dealer and
found it full of enough dope to raise the ghost of
John Belushi. “I needed to make the drug taking
and the drug aftermath look realistic,” Holland
explains. “I had to get wired, without getting
wired, if you know what I mean? So I got myself
a secret weapon. His name was Brian.”
Brian used to be a junkie but now he instructs
movie stars on how to deliver gut-punching
authenticity. “He works in a rehab clinic, but he
would come to set and advise on things like drug
street names, how much certain drugs should
cost, what their effect would be to me and how
to take them.”
Brian’s notes were invaluable for Holland,
an actor who builds his characters, inside and
out, like huge 3-D jigsaw puzzles, a hundred tiny
adjustments to complete a convincing moving
picture. What did he tell you? “Like, how an
addict would lick the drop of blood off their
needle’s entry wound on the skin of their inside
forearm to get the last possible bit of dope. Or
*Holland was concerned a pair of hair clippers might look like a sex toy over Zoom. They did.
the rush of taking a ‘speedball’ before a robbery
– heroin mixed with cocaine – compared to the
sleepy, wooziness of taking just heroin. Stuff that
I just wouldn’t have known.”
For that one scene on the floor, however,
Holland needed a bit more than just paper
notes from Brian. “I just didn’t think I could do
it,” explains Holland. “I mean, what does it feel
like to wake up from a four-day drug bender?
I know what a hangover feels like, but this is
very different. So I asked Brian and he told me,
‘It feels like you want to rip your skin off.’ I sat
him down and told him I didn’t think I could get
there. He was like, ‘Well, Tom, I am going to fix
this for you. I have just the thing...’
“I know,” says Holland, smiling, seeing
my eyes bulge in anticipation of what Brian
asked Holland to take to ensure a knockout
performance. “Trust me, I was ready to call my
agent too. Anyway, Brian pulls out two small
plastic bottles of pre-workout. They’re like super-
charged energy shots, the kind of thing that gym
freaks neck before a big session. Brian told me,
‘Drink this.’ So I did. And for the next three hours
it was like I was plugged into the mains, totally
jacked up on caffeine. It felt horrible but >>
 TOM HOLLAND

‘Cherry took me
to some of the
darkest places
I’ve ever been.
I would never
go back there,
not for anyone’

Shirt, £500. Trousers,

£2,200. Both by Gucci.
gucci.com. Necklace,
£450. Rings, from £300
each. All by David
Yurman. davidyurman.
com. Bracelet by Saint
Laurent, £285. ysl.com

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 93

 Shirt, £525. Trousers,
£470. Both by Saint
Laurent By Anthony
Vaccarello. ysl.com. Boots
by Christian Louboutin,
£965. christianlouboutin.
com. Necklace, £450.
Rings, from £300 each.
All by David Yurman.
davidyurman.com.
Bracelet by Saint Laurent,
£285. ysl.com

‘I haven’t got my
own Spider-Man
suit yet. I should
just go home in
one and be like,
“Come and take
it off me!”’
94 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
 TOM HOLLAND
T-shirt by Boss, £69.
boss.com. Necklace by
David Yurman, £450.
davidyurman.com

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 95

TOM HOLLAND
>> it helped me get to where I needed to be. I
would steer clear of those things, by the way.
They must be impossibly unhealthy.”
A great deal of what Holland can do on screen
that others simply cannot is about an ability to
control his body. Holland has weaponised his
physicality much like Marlon Brando weapon-
ised the plain white T-shirt or Morgan Freeman
weaponised a voice that sounds like a lion
gargling manuka honey and gravel.
Throughout his entire career, in fact, whether
playing Billy Elliot on stage in the West End aged
12 or spinning webs round supervillains along-
side Tony Stark in the MCU, a great deal of what
makes Tom Holland Tom Holland comes from
how he moves, rather than the lines he delivers.
(Although, before you @ us, Holland fans, he
does these with aplomb too.)
Think Holland’s incarnation of Spider-Man
is “clumsy” by accident? Forget it. It takes the
taut, controlled precision of a top ballerino to
make “not quite hitting your mark accidentally
on purpose” look so beautifully and spontane-
ously accidental – not least while dressed in a
Lycra condom swinging upside down in front of
a five-storey green screen.
“I had to lose a lot of weight for Cherry,” Holland Holland’s Spider-Man 3 – have been largely
tells me. “And I don’t think I would ever do that
again.” The film was shot in chapters: he did the
“dope” part of the movie before any of the US army
scenes, so he had to lose a lot of weight fast and
then bulk up again even faster. “I lost around 27lbs
by running in a bin bag every day.” Twenty-seven
pounds is about the size of a small toddler hold-
ing a large pineapple, or the average amount of
cheese an American eats in one year. Not a mas-
sive amount if your name is, say, Dwayne “The
Rock” Johnson, but, for Holland (5’7”; 141lb), that’s role? Anthony and I are extremely opinionated
about a quarter of his body mass.
“It was awful. Truly. It was only about ten
weeks out of shooting that I realised what I was
getting into and what I need to do to transform
into the role. So I sat down with my trainer,
George Ashwell, and he told me, ‘Right, you
need to eat only 500 calories a day and run ten
miles. Go.’ Great. It was brutal.
And then bulking up, going ‘When I became
from a drug addict to shooting
scenes as a marine? I got very Iron Man few
sick, actually. And it’s changed had even heard
my relationship with food of him... But
completely. I think I would find
it very difficult to find a role everyone knows
that would warrant that sort of Spider-Man’
abuse on my body again.” Robert Downey Jr
T
his character makes bad choices,” Joe
Russo, one half of the formidable Russo
brothers, directors of Cherry, explains.
“We knew the audience would have difficulty
with the lead, so we needed someone who
was charming and empathetic to carry them
through. The mission with Cherry was to make
people have an emotional response to the mate-
rial, not an intellectual response.
The director continues: “You tend to intel-
lectualise when you are distanced from the lead
character. Tom’s incredible charm can counteract
96 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
that. After we read the book we felt that the only
person who could play this and carry the correct
level of empathy was Tom. I think we were doing
some ADR work after Avengers: Infinity War
and we asked him outright. He threw himself 150
per cent in, physically, emotionally, spiritually –
it takes its toll, this kind of material, you know?”
So the Russo brothers owe Holland? Sure.
Although Holland, let’s be clear here, had some
payback due. Big time. These are the directors,
after all, who gave Holland, aged 19, the biggest
role of his life; quite possibly the biggest role he’ll
ever land, if we’re talking about sheer audience
size and volcanic eruptions of cash from bonkers
box office takings. You see, it was the Russos, six
years ago while preparing for Captain America:
Civil War, starring Chris Evans, who cast Holland
as your next friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.
“It was a unique experience casting Spider-Man
then because we were working with Sony,” con-
tinues Joe Russo. Although Spider-Man is a fully
sworn-in Avenger and now part of the MCU, Sony
is the company that actually owns the big-screen
rights to Spider-Man’s intellectual property. Sony
Pictures chairman Thomas Rothman and former
chairwoman Amy Pascal – now a producer on
responsible for forging the deal with Marvel,
allowing Holland to flex and swing between
the two studios without too much bickering on
creative direction. This wasn’t always the case.
“I can’t think of another time in movie history
where two studios shared an asset as valuable
as Spider-Man,” explains the director. “So, of
course, this made it a little bit of a complicated
process from a casting standpoint. Like, who is
going to be responsible for the casting of this
and very bullish in our opinions, especially when
it comes to cast because we cherish our opinions
with them and have a very particular taste when
it comes to our work style.”
“This is the guy. You are going to love him.”
These were Sarah Halley Finn’s words to
the Russos just before Holland walked into
the audition room for Civil
War to be cast as Spider-
Man. Remember, Holland had
already been through several
arduous months of screen tests
and hoop jumping before he
got this face-to-face with the
film’s directors.
Finn, at this point, already
had a knockout record with
casting across the MCU. Perhaps
more than anyone, she has held
influence over which actors get cast as which
immortal cape wearers, time benders and
hammer throwers. She’s Marvel’s headhunter-
in-chief, corralling the likes of Robert Downey Jr
for Iron Man in 2008, Chris Hemsworth for Thor,
Benedict Cumberbatch for Dr Stephen Strange,
Chadwick Boseman for Black Panther – it goes
on and on. The fact is, if you want to get into a
Marvel movie, Finn (even more so than Marvel
president Kevin Feige) is the gatekeeper your
agent needs to initially impress.
“Sarah [Finn] should get all the credit for
casting Holland as Spider-Man; she’s the best in
the business and she knows us,” says Joe Russo.
“We had already done two films with her. So
Holland came in. He did his test. We called Sarah
straight after and said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s incred-
ible. He’s a movie star: he’s got the charisma;
he’s got the range.’ It’s very rare someone walks
into a room who has all the elements that make
up a bona fide star. Holland had that thing.”
Anthony Russo quips, “Plus, Holland’s ability
to do a standing backflip right in front of you –
that helped!”
So Holland was a shoo-in? Hardly. Casting
Spider-Man, at any moment in time, is a big
deal. As the juggernauting commercial success of
Marvel continued to ramp up in 2014 and 2015,
however, it became an even bigger deal. A lot of
people could make a lot of money. And a lot
of people wanted sign-off on who would be the
next Peter Parker. Sony knew this only too well.
“We talked with Feige at Marvel about Holland
and he got excited and then we went to Sony...”
explains Joe. “And they were like, ‘Let’s think
about it for a minute.’ We could tell we were
meeting resistance from Sony. So we brought
[Holland] back, brought him back, brought him
back, and we were relentless in our pursuit of
jamming him down the throat of the studio who
owns this IP. It came down to a fight, yet Sony
just kept dragging their feet.”
I ask the brothers what they think Sony’s
initial reservations were about Holland? “Look,
we have a great relationship with Kevin. Winter
Soldier was a big hit, doubling the box office
from the previous film, then coming into Civil
War Sony is looking at us going, ‘OK, so you guys
have the Midas touch, here’s our [Spider-Man]
IP.’ But, also, they were reticent, nervous, about
handing off something that could ultimately
cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, if not
billions of dollars down the line.
“Sony’s reservations were: ‘Are we loaning it? Or
are we giving it to them to help us reinvent it in a
way that adds value for us?’” Anthony Russo also
thinks it was Holland’s age, rather than anything
else, that gave Sony the jitters. “It was the first time
Spider-Man had ever been cast as an actual teen-
ager, right? Which was very important to us; there
was a distinct nervousness of casting a kid.”
Yet Joe Russo was – and is – empathic about
his vote for Holland: “It is a very disruptive time
we are in. Brands are becoming a driver; stars are
becoming arguably less important. I think narra-
tive and media are going to be disrupted over the
next ten years, like cars and energy have been. But
there’s a universe where Tom Holland is the last
great movie star coming in underneath the wire
of disruption. It takes a perfect storm of events to
create a star: talent, timing, marketplace.”
So what happened?
“Robert Downey Jr happened.”
W
ithin the labyrinthine story that is
Tom Holland’s Spider-Man casting
origin tale there is a crucial part that
Marvel stans love to mythologise: the part when
Tom Holland screen-tests with Iron Man, Robert
Downey Jr, in Atlanta with the Russos.

Suit by Giorgio Armani,
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“I remember it very well,” Holland chuckles,
lost a little in the reverie. Although what some
casual Marvel fans might not know is that
the Spider-Man audition story is even more
charmingly Tom Holland than the charming
Tom Holland Spider-Man audition story they
think they know already.
“I was obviously nervous,” Holland tells me.
“I mean, it would be strange if I hadn’t been
nervous. Thankfully, weirdly, something hap-
pened that loosened the pressure valve on my
anxiety that day. I saw Ant and Joe and then
I saw Downey standing there in the casting
room. I went over. I introduced myself. But I
remember thinking, ‘That’s a bit odd. He doesn’t
look like I’d imagined him or remembered.’ Still,
I shook his hand, telling him, ‘It’s a pleasure
to meet you,’ saying how excited I was at the
opportunity, how much it means to me...” And
then? “Well, then a door opens and in walks the
actual Robert Downey Jr. I’d been chatting up
his stunt double the entire time. So, actually,
I got my jittery, loser vibe out of the way. And
then, when I actually met ‘I introduced
Downey, I was a little more
cool and collected.” myself and then
What advice did Downey in walks the
give you that day? “He took actual Robert
me to one side and said, ‘I
remember the feeling. I’ve Downey Jr. I’d
been through this before and been chatting up
it is incredibly stressful. Enjoy
the process and let your body
his stunt double!’
take over.’ Which is advice
that I still use. I was doing a new Spider-Man
scene just the other day and I had to eat a bowl
of cereal. And I just couldn’t eat a bowl of cereal
like a normal person – I was too in my head.
And the director, Jon [Watts], goes, ‘What are
you doing?’ And I was like, ‘Sorry, I’m lead-
ing with my head and I need to lead with my
body.’ So it was good advice. And I think that’s
the piece of advice that got me the Spider-Man
job ultimately.”
Downey also remembers the casting session
with Tom Holland. “He had a lot of hair,” Downey
TOM HOLLAND
tells me, laughing. “I remember thinking, ‘What’s
with the hair, dude?’” The scene Downey and
Holland went over for the now fabled audition
was Holland’s first scene in Civil War, where
audiences get to meet the new Spider-Man:
following Peter Parker’s school backpack into
the small NYC apartment he shares with Aunt
May (Marisa Tomei). On entering, Parker is
gobsmacked to see Tony Stark sitting on his
couch talking to his aunt about a “grant”, cover
that will allow Parker to work alongside Stark.
Marvel movies are heavily scripted and, usually,
so too are such casting sessions. But that didn’t
stop Downey from changing the first line in a bid
to test Holland’s chops.
“Yeah, I may have done that. I did that,”
admits Downey. “And the kid handled it. He
was seasoned, good presence. I could tell he had
good kung fu; he could roll with the punches
and keep it more than interesting. Remember,
I’d been testing with a bunch of kids that day.
They shall remain unnamed, but they all did well
and any one of them would have brought some-
thing else to the part of Spider-Man. But why
Holland? That’s your question, right? Gravitas.
Gravitas and the confidence to be able to take
on the mantle.
“Look, becoming Spider-Man is a lot,” Downey
underlines. “So why does Tom Holland get to be
Spider-Man? That character is the gold standard
in the MCU. Iron Man? Whatever. When I
became Iron Man few had even heard of the
character, ergo less pressure. But Spider-Man?
Everyone knows Spider-Man. Andrew Garfield
did a good job. Tobey Maguire did a good job. So
I ask you again: why does Tom Holland get to be
number three?”
Downey, of course, has an answer for this.
In typical freewheeling Downey style he’s able
to zoom out, get macro and stop sweating the
small stuff. “What happened at the casting isn’t
irrelevant but it isn’t everything. Like I said, it
comes down to being able to carry the mantle.”
Meaning? “To be able to weather the trial by fire
that rains down on someone when taking on
such a thing. Marvel fans are
wonderfully yet terrifyingly
committed. They absorb all of
you. They expect to. Becoming
Spider-Man is a bit like going
down a K-hole: it’s easy to get
lost in there. Add in the fact
that you are worked relent-
lessly. It’s crazy. But Tom can
handle it. I could tell. He’s
a beekeeper.”
A what?
“A beekeeper. Sure. Me, Tom, the Marvel guys,
we’re beekeepers. It’s not sexy. It’s hot under
those damn suits. You can’t see us. We’re sweat-
ing to make the sweet, sweet syrupy nectar to be
consumed for our leaders. We’re all beekeepers.
Overpaid beekeepers. The great thing about
Tom is he has that Chaplin-esque thing. He’s an
honourable cockney. Do you know where the
terms ‘cockney’ comes from? Middle English
‘coken-ey’, or a ‘cock’s egg’ – a small, unshapen
egg. Tom’s different. He’s got moxie. He’s needed
it. I can relate to that. And I’m so glad he got >>
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 97
>> this radically different note in with Cherry
with the Russos in the interim. He’s full circle.”
How then could Cherry affect Holland’s own
trajectory, I ask Downey. “Look, Tom won’t be
playing Spider-Man when he’s 37. At least I
hope not. And when you’re in the MCU, there’s
a feeling of all life beginning with it and end-
ing it. But there’s life outside too. I can confirm
this. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. It’s
funny, I bumped into Keanu [Reeves] the other
day, somewhere in Malibu, I think, and he told
me he’d just been filming The Matrix again; he’d
stepped back into that world that he once occu-
pied. I asked him what it felt like: ‘Like being
in Australia.’
“What I am saying is there was a Spider-Man
before Tom Holland and there will be a Spider-
Man after Tom Holland. That’s facts, Tommo.
Sorry.” What about Downey, I ask, unable to
resist: now he’s out, could he ever find himself
stepping back into the MCU again? As Iron Man?
“Well...” he mummers. “I have alighted, for now.
Real world to save. But never
say never.”
Much has been made of the ‘There were 400
relationship between Downey tough guys
and Holland and, more spe-
cifically, Parker and Stark.
training to be
The relationship, certainly soldiers... I wore
in the films, purposely taps my England
into a master-apprentice vibe
between the pair. Downey is
rugby shirt. It
clear to nix a theory that he was my armour’
knows only too well is out in the
real world, mushrooming on Marvel forums and
fan sites: that Holland/Parker/Downey/Stark are
forming a bond or legacy that goes beyond team
members and colleagues with superpowers.
“I am protective of Tom, sure,” explains
Downey. “But I protect his right to be his own
man. We have a very, very difficult to explain
affinity for each other. I won’t, for example, if
asked, extemporise about how incredible he is
in the movie. This is because my endorsement
is automatic. Did I expect him to get good
notices from his part in Cherry? Yes. Do I need to
supercharge these notices? No, I do not. We are
brothers. He comes to my house in Malibu when
he rolls through town. I FaceTime him when he’s
in the pub. I am not his weird, rich uncle. He is
not my protégé. We’re just... folk.”
B
efore he began work on Spider-Man 3
Tom Holland shot another movie,
Uncharted, due out in 2022. If Cherry is
an independent “action” film shot by directors
who have more affinity with someone like
Steven Soderbergh, then Uncharted has more
in common with a Michael Bay action movie.
It required more bulking up from Holland. It
also required a little more cool. Not cool cool. Not
Soderbergh. But cool, as in Holland had to stand
“looking cool”. It was an experiment in vanity
that left an odd taste in his mouth.
“As soon as you start worrying about ‘Do
I look good in this shot?’ acting becomes
something other than playing a character. I
think there are elements of my performance
98 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
in Uncharted where I kind of fell under that
spell of being ‘I want to look good now. I want
this to be my cool moment.’ I had to play this
very tough, very stoic guy – basically be Mark
Wahlberg. My character is supposed to be a
fucking action hero in this moment! Look, I
haven’t seen it, so I don’t know if I succeeded
in that. But it was an important lesson learned,
because, at times, it was less about land a mark
and go through this scene and more about
land a mark, stand like this and see my bulging
biceps... It was a mistake and is something that
I will probably never do again.”
Comfortingly enough for many young men
reading this, however, Holland has never
really fitted into those traditional old-school
chest-beating masculine traits (although he
does assure me he has a fiery side: “I am my
mother’s son, after all”). Growing up in South
London he went to a Catholic school where, as
with all teenagers, credibility, kudos and cool
came either alongside sporting triumphs on the
pitch or dossing off, flipping
the teacher the bird, smoking
cigarettes, snogging whomever
and being generally adolescent.
“I was bullied, picked on,
called names, stuff like that,” he
says. Holland also suffered from
dyslexia, although he is ada-
mant the diagnosis didn’t hold
him back, at least not socially. “I
wasn’t going to school and get-
ting the shit kicked out of me
every day. But I was definitely separate from a
lot of kids, mainly as between eleven and 13 I
was working on Billy Elliot. Going from such a
grown-up working environment, I found it hard
to switch back into school. I found it odd others
weren’t doing their homework; I’d been condi-
tioned to do as I was taught. And, let’s face it, I
was doing ballet, which as a young boy wasn’t
the coolest thing in the world. I didn’t finish but
I might go back, maybe study woodwork. Still,
who’s laughing now, hey?”
Yet Holland had a not dissimilar experience
on the set of Cherry last year. The Iraq War
scenes were shot in Morocco and the actor
had to fly out there promptly after shooting
the emotionally draining dope scenes from the
film. “All of a sudden, from doing those intimate
scenes, a film about two people and PTSD and
addiction in Cleveland, I was in a full-blown
war movie.
“There are explosions going off, Humvees
everywhere, guns. You know, the closest I’ve
ever got to shooting a gun is a Nerf. All of a
sudden I had eight or nine actors, my pals in
the marines, who were playing my best friends.
I found making such rapid relationships with
these people really, really difficult. And, in truth,
it reminded me of my school days. All these
guys and the hundreds of extras had been out
there in the desert for weeks, bonding, and I just
didn’t fit in with the really masculine, toxic, war,
soldier vibe.”
Rather than allow the ground to swallow him
up, however, Holland reached for a costume. Or,
more specifically, a shirt. “Four hundred extras,
all tough American guys training to be soldiers
– I wore my England rugby shirt. Stuck it on and
it grounded me as who I am as a man. I went out
there like number nine against the All Blacks,
ready to go. It was my armour.”
Still, some warmongering manliness must
have rubbed off on Holland, as when he joined
Spider-Man 3 in Atlanta in the autumn of
last year, super-producer Amy Pascal noticed
something distinctly different about him. “Amy
was like, ‘Tom what happened to you? You’re a
man now. Well, you need to be a boy again...’”
T
om Holland is trying to figure out Tom
Holland all the time. All. The. Damn.
Time. He is learning, sometimes uncon-
sciously. He pushes himself and then adjusts his
trajectory. Accelerating. Braking. Accelerating
some more. He worries, deeply, about his
decisions and the consequences of his decisions.
He is fully aware of how bright the glare of fame
is currently. It bothers him.
Take his famous lip sync battle from May 2017.
If you aren’t one of the almost 75 million people
who have gawped at Holland’s winning perfor-
mance, the two-minute-and-24-second-long clip
shows him miming to Rihanna’s “Umbrella”
and dancing like, well, someone who can really
fucking dance. In black Latex shorts with white
frills, a sheer black body, a black bob wig and
scarlet-red lipstick. In fake rain. With pyro.
“Sensational” doesn’t do it justice.
Just before, however, Holland’s father,
Dominic Holland, a comedian and author
himself, attempted to dissuade his son from tak-
ing part. He called Tom up in LA and told him to
tell the show, his agents, everyone he’d changed
his mind. He was worried that such a risqué
performance could wobble what was already
an insane career trajectory. One can empathise
with his father’s concern. After all, why take the
risk? He was Spider-Man. What would it achieve,
really? Who was Tom performing for anyway?
The show will find someone else. They always
do. They’d get over it. His career might not. Stop.
Play it safe.
“Look, I am really glad I did that show and
I had a lot of fun. It was incredibly stressful.
It has been incredibly successful and has been
a really great thing for my career. But my dad
always taught me when I was younger and
coming up in the business that you want to get
famous as slowly as possible. You don’t want to
get super famous tomorrow, because you won’t
be able to handle it. It will ruin your life. I am
very selective of who I talk to and what I do. I
don’t ever want to overexpose myself, because
my privacy is the last thing I own. I think that’s
why he was so worried. And he’d tell me the
same thing today I am sure: ‘Pace yourself,
you’ve got a long career ahead of you.’ I don’t
want to lose myself to all... this.”
Navigating Hollywood is something Holland
has spoken to his Spider-Man costar Zendaya
about, as recently as last week, in fact. “Talking
to Zendaya’s helped me a lot, actually,” admits
Holland. “I used to come across sometimes as a
bit of a dick to fans, mainly as I was always >>
 TOM HOLLAND
‘My dad taught me
you don’t want to
get super famous
[overnight],
because you won’t
be able to handle it’

Suit, £2,070. T-shirt,

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APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 99

 Suit by Giorgio Armani,
£1,700. armani.com.
Vest by Dolce & Gabbana,
£195. dolcegabbana.
com. Boots by Christian
Louboutin, £965.
christianlouboutin.
com. Necklace, £450.
Rings, from £300 each.
All by David Yurman.
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Producer Sienna Brown

Digital technician
Cristian Bernal
Tailor Jeff Gillies
Costumer Melissa Walker
Grooming Rachael Speke
using Kevin Murphy
and Dr Barbara Sturm
Production assistant
Kiana Baldon
Styling assistant
John Martin
Digital assistants
David Morico;
Immanuel Powell

‘Holland had all

the elements of
a bona fide star.
Plus, his ability
to do a standing
backflip helped’
Anthony Russo

100 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021


>> so surprised that they’d want a picture with
me or signature or whatever. I’d have the typical
Londoner reaction, one of instant suspicion:
‘Why are you talking to me?’ Zendaya spotted
this and quickly told me that this sort of reaction
was going to be more aggro than just smiling
and taking the picture. She totally changed
the way I am able to be more comfortable
in public.”
Holland, of course, is already Coca-Cola
famous. Does it annoy him when fans, the
media, whomever, link him romantically
with his costars? “You mean, because I tagged
Zendaya over my groin in an Instagram post?”
Holland says, leaning back and laughing. “That
was so funny; it was obviously a mistake. But in
all seriousness, it is also incredibly frustrating.
It’s very nerve-racking. It means that if you are
dating someone, you have to be really conscious
of their feelings, because if something does
happen between the two of you, it’s not just hap-
pening between the two of you, it’s happening
in front of the entire world. And it can be very
complicated. It’s one of the things I worry about
most, of all the things in my career.”
So here’s a totally casual, not-putting-you-
on-the-spot kind of a question on that precise
subject, Tom: has becoming Spider-Man been
beneficial for your love life or not?
Silence. And a wide smile spreads slowly across
Holland’s cherubic, clean-shaven face. There’s
a nervous chuckle. “I’m not going to answer
that question.”
Y
ou could fit what Tom Holland can tell
me about the new Spider-Man film
onto the back of a matchbox shrunk by
Hank Pym’s Pym Particles. (No? See Ant-Man,
gramps.) One thing, for sure, is that his brother
Harry features. “Yes! He’s in it, I can tell you
that. We were having a barbecue and I asked
Jon Watts [the director] if Harry could have
something to do and he liked the idea. I got
to hang Harry upside down; it all cues off my
dialogue. He’s on the wires for
quite some time, so it felt like
payback of sorts. I took pity on ‘Neither Andrew
him after a while and brotherly nor Tobey are in
love kicked in.” Spider-Man 3...
Is he back playing opposite
Zendaya? “It’s so fun being If you see a red
back with them, especially dot on my head
as Zendaya and I are going it’s a Sony or
through similar things in our
career, having taken on more Marvel sniper’
adult roles to now come back
to Spider-Man. I am so proud of what she has
accomplished with Euphoria and also Malcolm
& Marie. I think we both had to adjust again for
Spider-Man 3: I had to lift my voice up a couple
Photograph Capital Pictures
of octaves higher and we both had to go back to
playing these naive, charming teenagers again.
We were talking about it yesterday, in fact. We
were filming a scene where we go back to school
and, well, I haven’t been to school since I was 15.
It was really strange.”
And Andrew Garfield, what’s he like on
set? And Tobey Maguire? Rumours have been
Tom Holland as Spider-Man in Far From Home (2019)
and as the PTSD-stricken solider in Cherry (2021)
flooding fan forums since last
summer that both former
Spider-Men (Spider-Mans?)
are returning to star alongside
Holland in his third feature.
There have been unconfirmed
sightings of Garfield in Atlanta,
where shooting remained until
February. “I knew you were
going to ask me that. No, they
are not on set. And neither of
them are in this film. But I am being asked that
question a lot. If you see a red dot on my head
it’s a Sony or Marvel sniper about to blow my
head off.”
The staggering thing is, however, that this
could well be Holland’s very last Spider-Man
film. Yes, really. “We haven’t got long filming now
and it’s quite sad, because this is the end of my
contract after this film is up,” Holland reveals.
“I really don’t know what the future holds, so
I am just savouring every moment, as it could
potentially be the last.”
TOM HOLLAND
Come on, I say, they aren’t going to fire you.
And you aren’t going to walk. “No, sure, I hope
not, but I don’t have another contract – yet. As
I was cast as Spider-Man six years ago, I have
always had the contract there as a safety net. I
would never need to worry as, next year, I always
had another Spider-Man film – but not any more.
I’m just looking at my phone waiting for it to ring
with a new contract.” Holland famously found out
he’d won the Spider-Man role via a press cutting
online, before he even got a phone call or text
from Marvel. Maybe the same will happen here?
“Yes, maybe I’m already signed up for Spider-Man
4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 without even knowing it.”
So he’d say yes? “Absolutely. One hundred
per cent, yes.” Any renegotiation clauses? “We’d
need to keep the same core team. The direc-
tor, Jon Watts, is as much Spider-Man as I am.
Zendaya, Jacob [Batalon].” And what about
extras? “Extras?” Has he, for example, got his
own Spider-Man suit he takes home? “You know,
I haven’t got my own suit yet. I could ask for one
of those. Good idea. And they have loads of them
lying around. Or I could just steal one. I should
just go home in one from set and be like, ‘Come
and take it off me!’ They’d never find the hidden
zips, though.”
Hidden zips? “Yes, it’s pretty uncomfortable.
A privilege to wear, but uncomfortable.” What
does Holland wear underneath his Spidey suit?
“I wear a thong. Like a jockstrap thing. I have
a thong and a mesh underlay suit and then the
Spider-Man suit, made from very coarse material,
goes over the top.” Holland pauses for a second,
lost in thought. “If I did steal a suit, what would
I do with it?” Role play? “I couldn’t put it on a
mannequin in my living room, could I? Like a
trophy. People would think I was utterly self-
obsessed. I was in the costume house the other
day and they have a foam model of my body. Like,
it’s a perfect replica, accurate to the millimetre.”
A bit odd?
“Yes. I was looking at it. It’s really weird check-
ing yourself out. I looked at my bum and I was
like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be doing that...’ But then I
realised it was my ass and I could do that. So
I had a proper look at it, a proper butcher’s. Yeah,
so that’s strange. I wonder what happens to that
mannequin once filming ends? Who takes replica
me home?”
I leave our most valuable, most friendly
neighbourhood movie star with deep existential
questions that would give any Beverly Hills psy-
chotherapist a good run for their money. Robert
Downey Jr was absolutely right: there will always
be another Spider-Man. Another Tom Holland,
however? Unthinkable. G
CHERRY IS OUT ON 12 MARCH ON APPLE TV+.
+ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
EVERY MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE MOVIE (AND
TELEVISION SHOW), RANKED (GQ, January 2021)
MEET THE INSANE CAST OF SPIDER-MAN 3
(Thomas Barrie, December 2020)
HOW TOM HOLLAND’S SPIDER-MAN COSTUME
EARNED HIM A PUNCH (Stuart McGurk, June 2017)
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 101
Frank Sinatra backstage
before a performance
in 1965. The following
year, the singer was
profiled by writer Gay
Talese, who described
a morose Sinatra
silently nursing a glass
of bourbon, struck
down with a cold
and unable to sing

Photograph Getty Images

102 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 TA L E S E V S S I N AT R A

Midcentury
swing, ‘Frank Sinatra Has A Cold’ was
published in 1966 and instantly
enshrined in journalism’s hall of fame.
But the cat-and-mouse tale of how

Rat Pack Gay Talese made Ol’ Blue Eyes sing

from a distance is just as astonishing
Story by Mark Rozzo

recollections,
it even starred
his mother,
but the greatest
ever portrait
of Sinatra was
still missing
one thing... APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 103
104 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
 TA L E S E V S S I N AT R A

In November of 1965,
the journalistic fates
brought Gay Talese
and Frank Sinatra
together in Beverly
Hills and Las Vegas,
Manhattan and
Hollywood. Well, sort
of. They were two
guys from New Jersey,
both of them
Italian-American,
given to continental
tailoring, unstoppable
ambition and
unrelenting
perfectionism in
their chosen crafts.
Talese, the writer, was travelling on assignment
for Esquire, the “it” magazine of the decade.
Edited by Harold Hayes, Esquire made the
so-called New Journalism famous – or infamous,
depending on your point of view. (Talese disliked
the term, which had been promulgated by his
friend Tom Wolfe.) Sinatra, the singer, was the
20th century’s reigning entertainment icon,
the Rat Pack ringleader, a tuxedoed man’s man
in the shaggy era of The Beatles and The Byrds.
Hayes had commissioned Talese to write a
cover profile of the singer. It was meant to be
a celebration of all things Sinatra as the living
legend approached the golden, if worrisome, age
of 50. (His birthday was 12 December.) Amid an
outpouring of projects that would make younger
pop stars blush (two network-television specials,
two albums, a movie), the Esquire cover would
top it all off. There was just one hitch: Sinatra
Photographs Neal Boenzi/The New York Times; Getty Images

had a cold.
Fifty-five years later, the resulting piece, “Frank
Sinatra Has A Cold”, which ran in the April 1966
From top:
issue of Esquire, remains one of the most incisive Writer Gay
portraits of Sinatra ever created and probably Talese in New
York, 19 June
the most renowned, studied and picked-apart 1969; Sinatra
celebrity profile in American nonfiction. Talese poolside at
turned Sinatra’s post-nasal drip into a metaphor home reading
a script for
for the singer’s outsize impact upon the entire Marriage On
entertainment industry. The seasonal ailment, as The Rocks,
Palm Springs,
Talese told it, also became Sinatra’s opportunity California,
to renege on an agreement to sit for an interview: 1965;
a profile of Sinatra, with no Sinatra. (opposite) the
entertainer
Talese went into gumshoe mode. The 33- between
year-old writer observed his quarry at The Daisy scenes while
filming The
in Beverly Hills, a members-only redoubt of Detective in
California cool where Sinatra got into a scuffle >> New York, 1967

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 105

 The story’s renown was nourished by the drama of its creation:
the high-pressure assignment, the young writer, the evasive superstar

Sinatra saying goodbye

to his parents, Dolly
and Martin, 1965;
(opposite) with fellow
Rat Packers Dean Martin
and Sammy Davis Jr for
a benefit performance
at Carnegie Hall in
New York in honour
of Martin Luther King,
27 January 1961

106 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 TA L E S E V S S I N AT R A
>> with the science-fiction screenwriter and
author Harlan Ellison over a pair of trendy boots;
at a jam-packed Jilly’s, on West 52nd Street, in
Manhattan, where Sinatra held court and even
the New York Giants’ halfback Frank Gifford
couldn’t get through the crowd to him (“only
seven yards in three tries”); at the Muhammad Ali
vs Floyd Patterson heavyweight-title bout in Las
Vegas, on the second anniversary of the Kennedy
assassination (Patterson, profiled by Talese the
previous year, was TKO’d in the 12th); at
the Sahara and the Sands, where Sinatra partied
all night with his Rat Pack pals, including Dean
Martin, who emptied a bottle of whiskey on his
own head; at NBC’s Burbank studios, where the
congested singer failed to get through a taping
of the TV special Frank Sinatra: A Man And His
Music (“Boy, I need a drink”); on the Paramount
lot, where Sinatra shot a racy scene with the
Italian siren Virna Lisi for Assault On A Queen
and made frequent, inscrutable references to his
“bird”; and inside United Recording Studios in
LA, where Sinatra’s voice, back in form, caused all
jaws to drop, including Talese’s. Here, at last, was
Sinatra in his glory, beyond the reach of fame or
age or clogged sinuses: an American artist.

U
nable to score the customary interview,
Talese, by his own estimate, spoke
with more than 100 people in Sinatra’s
orbit, gathering insight into the singer’s retinue
of employees and attendants (including the
“superbly tailored” press agent Jim Mahoney
and the “little grey-haired lady” who allegedly
earned $400 a week carrying Sinatra’s hairpieces
around in a satchel), his vast holdings (including
a missile-parts firm), his famous temper (you
were not, under any circumstances, to present Mr
Sinatra with a hot dog dressed with ketchup) and
his famous generosity (an expansive Christmas
gift list, covering friends’ hospital bills).
Talese viewed Sinatra as not only a sublime
jazz singer, maestro of media attention and movie
star, but also as a singular midcentury figure who
personified two distinct, and opposing, masculine
types: the jet-age swinger and the ancient Sicilian
padrone – the village patriarch who commanded
respect, settled scores, solved problems, >>
Photographs Getty Images

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 107

‘I gained more by watching the
reactions of those around Sinatra
than if I had been able to talk to him’
Sinatra, alongside
bodyguard Ed Pucci
and comedian Joe E
Lewis, talking with TV
personality Ed Sullivan
while at dinner at
the Eden Roc Hotel
Miami Beach, Florida,
February 1965

108 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021


>> righted wrongs. And yet the guy could be
brought low by the most quotidian and human
of infirmities. “Sinatra with a cold,” Talese wrote,
“is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel.”
Today, “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” is considered
a high-water mark of the New Journalism, a Hall
Of Fame feat of immersive reporting on a non-
participating subject. It’s the ultimate instance
of a reporter turning his biggest nightmare –
known in the trade as a “write-around” – into
storytelling gold. “I gained more by watching him,
overhearing him and watching the reactions of
those around him,” Talese once said, “than if I had
actually been able to sit down and talk to him.”
It is a Rosetta stone of profile writing, along
with, say, Joseph Mitchell’s “Professor Sea Gull”,
a 1942 New Yorker profile of Joseph Gould,
the indigent Greenwich Village bohemian
allegedly scribbling away at a nine-
million-word Oral History Of Our Time, and
Lillian Ross’ 1950 profile in the same magazine
of a bibulous, malarkey-talking and uniquely
charismatic Ernest Hemingway, “How Do You
Like It Now, Gentlemen?”
You pore over Talese’s story and wonder: how
did he do it? Where was he standing when the
altercation at The Daisy blew up? How did he
ever end up talking to the singer’s mother, the
formidable Dolly Sinatra of Fort Lee, New Jersey?
How did he create the cinematic closing scene
of Sinatra in his Ghia at a stoplight, smiling at
a girl on the sidewalk? (“It looks like him, but is
it?”) In recent years, some of these mysteries have
been cleared up by Talese himself here and there,
as in the annotated version of the piece posted
online by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard in
2013 and in the Paris Review “Art Of Nonfiction”
interview in 2009.
If anything, Talese’s elucidations – showing the
stitching underneath the fabric, as it were – have
only added to the story’s leg-
end. Its renown has also been
nourished by the drama of its
‘Sinatra with a
creation: the high-pressure cold,’ Gay Talese
assignment, the young writer, wrote, ‘is
the evasive superstar. Ever the
tailor’s son, Talese made his
Picasso without
outlines on shirt boards. On paint, Ferrari
the multicoloured one he cre- without fuel’
ated for “Frank Sinatra Has
A Cold”, Talese recorded hopeful anticipation
upon arrival in Los Angeles to begin the report-
ing: “Article would be an opportunity to ‘swing’
– have fun,” he jotted, amid swirling arrows and
cascading paragraph symbols, a DIY riot of black,
brown, blue, green, red, orange and yellow ink
that feels almost Blakeian.
Instead, Talese experienced dread, mistrust,
self-recrimination, fear and paranoia – with
room service. (He took careful note of the
Beverly Wilshire’s “sexy chambermaids”.)
“Mahoney was saying, ‘Be careful – don’t talk to
Photograph Getty Images
him.’” No interview! What a headache! Didn’t
With thanks to Air Mail
Harold Hayes know that Talese liked profiling
the little guys, the unknowns, the losers, the
has-beens? Sinatra! Would this assignment ever
amount to anything? Was he being typecast
as an Italian-American? “FUCK HAYES,” Talese
wrote, all caps. He was reporting his own
TA L E S E V S S I N AT R A
writerly meltdown in addition to an Esquire
cover story.
Yet, for all the turmoil, modern readers of
“Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” – including creative-
writing majors, MFA nonfiction candidates and
j-schoolers – discover a window onto a colourful,
glamorous heyday of print journalism. Talese
was able to spend as many as ten weeks to report
and write. He accumulated expenses of nearly
$5,000 (the equivalent of about $41,000 today)
and filed a 50-page draft derived from what he
described as a “200-page chronicle” – all those
shirt-board outlines, interview notes and general
observations, a veritable kitchen midden of
reporting that Talese ran through his typewriter.
This document still ostensibly resides in
Talese’s writing “bunker” beneath his Upper East
Side townhouse, where he has lived and worked
for more than 50 years, creating whopping
bestsellers such as Thy Neighbor’s Wife and Unto
The Sons, presiding over his extensive archives
and occasionally weathering Twitterstorms, all
while being married to the influential publisher
Nan A Talese and raising two daughters.
B
y the late 1980s, Talese was already
bemoaning the lapsed glor y of
magazine journalism, which he argued
had been compromised into mediocrity by
sleepy, tape-recorded interviews and budget
cuts: “Fast-food, computerised, bottom-line,
impersonalised workmanship.” More than 30
years further down the line, in an age when
magazines are being turned into Instagram
accounts and newsstands have vanished, the
investment in storytelling represented by
“Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” seems downright
gaudy. It’s a jarring artefact from a time when
journalism aspired to art and ad-glutted
magazines could make or break Hollywood
movies, presidential campaigns
and even global entertainment
icons with head colds.
Well, here we are: another
end-times threnody on the
lost splendour of legacy media.
There is still great magazine
writing out there, with new
voices emerging every week.
Read them. They are the Talese,
Wolfe, Didion, Sontag, Baldwin and Kael of now.
Yet don’t forget that on a winter weekend in the
exasperating 21st century, with something more
serious than rhinovirus going around, you might
want to go read or reread “Frank Sinatra Has A
Cold” – the story of the 20th century’s greatest
entertainer and the reporter he tried to elude but
who captured him for all time. G
+ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
TEN REASONS WHY FRANK SINATRA WAS A BADASS
(Eleanor Halls, April 2016)
PHOTOGRAPHS OF FRANK SINATRA AS YOU’VE NEVER
SEEN HIM BEFORE (David Williams, November 2015)
WHY YOU NEVER GROW OUT OF FRANK SINATRA
(Tony Parsons, August 2015)
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 109
CAMEO.COM

CAMEO.COM’S
STAN
ECONOMY Story by Thomas Barrie

Photographs Alamy; Getty Images; Shutterstock

When the world locked down in March 2020, celebrities of all stripes began to seek new ways to stay
relevant while staying at home. After all, if they couldn’t perform or appear in public, then how would
they make a living? The answer came in the form of Cameo: a little-known video-messaging platform that
allows its users to record short clips for fans in return for a fee. Almost overnight, talent was making
hundreds of thousands of dollars by talking directly to their following, cutting out the middlemen – agents,
producers and marketing gurus alike – in the process. For those who were more recognisable than they
were wealthy, it was a revolution. But when everything’s for sale, what happens to the value of fame itself ?

For a few clicks and a surprisingly modest fee, Cameo’s roster of faces are on call for an (almost) anything-goes personal message
 £374.25
David Hasselhoff £250 Steve Harvey £225 Boy George

£375 Chris Tucker £450 Chaka Khan £365 Trey Songz

£149.25
Sean Spicer

£224.25
Carole Baskin
£224.25
The Game
£224.25
Melora Hardin £333 Akon

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 111


When she’s not
out hunting
ghosts,
Stormy Daniels
shoots Cameos.
Every few days,
the adult film
star, who
spectacularly
accused Donald
Trump of
paying her
$130,000 to
keep quiet about
an affair, stands
in front of a
mirror, does her
make-up and
glues on a set of
false eyelashes.
Usually, she’ll wait until her tour bus is parked
up at the side of the highway to do this – Daniels
spends most of her time on the road filming
a paranormal investigation TV show called
Spooky Babes – and once she’s satisfied with her
appearance she’ll grab her phone, arrange her
hair and hit record on the front-facing camera.
There’s usually a script to follow, but if not,
she’ll improvise. “Hi, Gary,” Daniels might say,
breathily. “I want to wish you a very, very happy
birthday. Your buddy, Mitch, tells me you’re
a bit of a political junkie – if any of that ever
gets you too down, I invite you out to see one
of my shows, where I’d be more than happy to
help you relieve some of that stress.” Then she
watches the video back to make sure her child
hasn’t walked into frame or that she hasn’t
mispronounced the recipient’s name, hits send
and starts recording again, sometimes up to 20
times. Each video follows a slightly different
script, but the premise is the same. Daniels
sends some sort of greeting or acknowledgement
to a dedicated fan, addressing them by name
and mentioning something specific that the
fan’s friend, colleague or family member –
perhaps not their wife – has asked for in a
pre-submitted request. Most are flirtatious, but
otherwise innocuous. “I’m actually pleasantly
surprised at how sexually clean my requests
are,” says Daniels. Occasionally, she will
mention Trump. “For the right price, I’ll even
say, ‘You’re fired.’”
112 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
Daniels charges £187.50 per video and has
almost 600 videos under her belt. Seventy-five
per cent of the fee goes to her, while the rest is
taken as commission by Cameo, the direct-to-fan
video platform that hosts her messages. Daniels
is just one of more than 30,000 celebrities and
public figures who have signed up to Cameo
since it was founded in 2017 – a third of them in
the last year – each of whom is available to hire
to send a personalised video message for a price
and who between them span a vast and varied
spectrum of fame.
At the upper end of the scale, global sports
stars, singers and actors give you a ten-second
shoutout for hundreds or, occasionally, thousands
of pounds, while on the cheaper side, an army of
aspiring TikTok personalities and D-list socialites
will make you a birthday video for as low as
75 pence. An entire cross-section of the global
celebrity ecosystem is represented on Cameo,
which, in allowing its talent to set their own
prices, has naturally organised itself into a sort
of Darwinian hierarchy of fame. And since the
beginning of the global coronavirus pandemic,
as film and TV sets shut down, gigs have been
cancelled and public appearances severely
restricted, Cameo’s numbers have only swollen.
The platform has offered celebrities an entirely
new way to convert their fame or notoriety into
cash, without ever having to leave their own
homes. In some cases, it has allowed talent to
bypass traditional industry gatekeepers such as
record labels and film studios entirely.
I
f every start-up needs an answerable problem
as its starting point (“How can people sell
their old books once they’ve read them?”;
“How can people watch films they don’t own on
DVD from home at short notice?”) then Cameo’s
is the disjoint between fame and income. “The
great reckoning in entertainment that Cameo
is solving,” the company’s CEO and cofounder
Steven Galanis explains, “is that people today
are more famous, because of social [media],
than they are rich.” One of the knock-on effects
of the rise of social media has been to elevate
a huge number of individuals to prominence
for all sorts of reasons, says Galanis, but with
surprisingly few ways to
cash in on that prominence. Michael Cohen
For someone such as Stormy
Daniels, whose fame is films from house
widespread but quite difficult arrest after his
to monetise, Cameo is the conviction for
perfect solution. Previously,
she relied on in-person media perjury in front
appearances, stripping and of Congress
comedy shows to make money
and forfeiting these during the pandemic would
have both restricted her means of making money
and of engaging with her fanbase. On Cameo, she
can continue to do both from home or the road.
The most expensive names on Cameo are
people you might expect. Caitlyn Jenner tops
the list of active talent, at £1,875 per video (all
proceeds, according to her website bio, go to
her charitable foundation). Boy George will sing
happy birthday to your mother from his kitchen
for £225, while Chaka Khan will do it for £450.
Other prominent figures, from Jerry Springer,
Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen to John Cleese
and Michael Owen, are all on Cameo at various
price points.
But one of the first things you realise as you
scroll through the website’s listings is quite how
many celebrities there are. More people are
famous – or consider themselves so – now than
ever before in history and most users won’t have
heard of the vast majority of talent on Cameo.
Pro wrestlers, YouTubers and reality TV stars
abound. But the hinterland of fame is huge and
the website is one of the few ways to turn it into
profit. All you need is a cameraphone.
Such is the sheer volume of talent, it’s not
hard to spend all day scrolling through Cameo’s
website and weighing up what a celebrity
thinks they are worth. One popular tactic is to
go for volume by pricing yourself relatively low,
hoping to record ten videos at £40 each rather
than waiting for the superfan who will shell out
£400 for a few minutes’ work. And if you’re lucky
enough to have played a cult sitcom character,
Cameo could feasibly up your income streams
by a whole order of magnitude.
James Buckley, who played teenage chauvinist
Jay on The Inbetweeners from 2008 to 2010,
charges £41.25 for a Cameo message. Buckley
shoots many of his videos in character and in
2020 he was the ninth highest-earning talent
on the site, the only Brit in the top ten (Brian
Baumgartner, who played Kevin Malone in the
US version of The Office, ranked number one).
Buckley has more than 2,400 reviews on the
website; even accounting for Cameo’s 25 per cent
commission, that rate means he feasibly could
have made more than £74,000 from the website
alone (he is also a prolific Twitch streamer).
Steffan Rhodri, best known as Dave Coaches
from Gavin & Stacey, costs £35.25. Paul Chuckle,
the remaining Chuckle Brother, offers a 24-hour
turnaround on videos for £36.75.
Other talent prefers quality over quantity.
Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy in the
Harry Potter film franchise, charges £449.25 per
Cameo, but he will write and perform a personal-
ised song for you on his guitar. Occasionally, the
pricing is inexplicable. The lingerie designer and
heiress to the KFC fortune, Kaila
Methven – surely a niche video
request at the best of times –
charges £750 per video, as does
former Chelsea, Portsmouth
and West Ham manager Avram
Grant. That’s 75 pence more
than undefeated heavyweight
boxer Floyd Mayweather.
Perhaps most tellingly, there’s
a high density of flash-in-the-pan American
political figures on Cameo, including Sarah Palin
(£186.75), Anthony Scaramucci, the man who
Photograph Michelle Groskopf
was White House communications director for
eleven days in 2017 (£41.25) and ex-White House
press secretary Sean Spicer (£149.25, though,
like Caitlyn Jenner, he donates his fee to charity).
Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen films
his videos from house arrest after his conviction
for perjury in front of Congress. Might Trump
himself be found on Cameo in the next few >>
 CAMEO.COM
Cameo cofounders (from
left) Martin Blencowe,
Steven Galanis and
Devon Townsend

‘We believe we’re building an enduring internet treasure. We’re full steam ahead
on making sure this becomes one of the most valuable companies on earth’
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 113
Blencowe, Townsend
and Galanis in the
pool at Galanis’
Los Angeles home

Photograph Michelle Groskopf


Stormy Daniels says she has done ‘a couple’ of
break-ups and also fired someone via Cameo.
‘It was a housekeeper. They were caught stealing’
CAMEO.COM
>> months, shooting off charmingly abusive
messages to fans and haters alike from the comfort
of Mar-a-Lago? It’s hardly a leap to imagine.
C
ameo was launched in March 2017 by
three college friends: Galanis, Martin
Blencowe and Devon Townsend. Since
then, Silicon Valley has very much backed their
proposition: Cameo has raised more than $65
million in funding over the past four years. Snoop
Dogg numbered among the early investors,
while Cameo’s Series B round included venture
capital heavyweights such as Kleiner Perkins,
The Chernin Group, Spark Ventures, Bain
Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The original idea for Cameo was to focus on
athletes alone. Fans would be able to pay them
to do almost anything the fans asked – you
might pay to play golf with Michael Jordan
or invite Carmelo Anthony to your son’s bar
mitzvah – but Townsend nixed that idea,
arguing that it was too nebulous and too broad an
offering, like “trying to boil the ocean”. Instead,
they decided to focus in on video greetings and
vacillated between various brand names:
Starboard, Powermove, HeroHub, hypd.co,
Thrillo. It was Galanis’ brother who eventually
suggested Cameo.
Any good start-up has a good origin story
and Cameo is no different. Galanis, Townsend
and Blencowe all had significant careers prior
to Cameo and each of the trio contributed a
different essential skillset in the early days.
Townsend, a former Microsoft engineer, had been
a viral star on social network Vine, racking up
hundreds of millions of loops on the platform.
More importantly, he had the coding ability to
build an early iteration of the site. Blencowe,
meanwhile, was an NFL agent and movie
producer, with the contacts to match – he dealt
with the talent. Galanis quit a full-time job in sales
at LinkedIn and had worked in finance before
that; he describes himself as “an options trader by
background”. The division of roles, with Blencowe
overseeing talent, Townsend as chief technical
officer and Galanis as CEO, was a natural
three-way fit. “There was never a question of who
was going to be the CEO,” says Galanis. “We all
know each other. We trust each other.”
The first Cameo was sold in March 2017. The
website URL, at that point, was powermove.io
and there was only one celebrity on the platform:
Cassius Marsh, the Herculean linebacker who
then played for the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks.
Blencowe was his agent and had encouraged him
to sign up.
It was a disaster. The payment processor
broke, so, on launch, anyone who tried to buy
a video via the link Marsh tweeted out to his
fans ran into a brick wall of broken code. Other
Seahawks fans berated him on social media for
charging for something they believed he should
have been doing free. But the Cameo team did
get one breakthrough: a reaction video from the
father of the recipient of a video from Marsh, who
wished her a happy 16th birthday. “She was so
excited that she was crying,” Galanis recalls. The
video offered a visual example Blencowe could
show talent to convince them of the genuine >>
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 115
>> value and connection Cameo could offer and
bookings and talent soon began to pick up.
To grow the site, the trio introduced a talent-
to-talent referral scheme. Emphasis was placed
on the fact that stars chose their own price; if
they didn’t want the hassle of recording ten
videos a day for $80 each, they could double
their price and get half as many bookings. (This
is how Stormy Daniels eventually signed up:
after being pestered by her manager, she agreed
to test the water with an ironic $666 (£485) fee
per video, not expecting anyone to pay it. Within
a day, she had three bookings.)
That summer, Cameo hired a
team of 15 college interns to
‘You don’t want
directly message celebrities to go from pro to
on Twitter and invite them to comedic relief
the platform, painstakingly
building up talent numbers
and then not be
until they reached critical able to make
mass. Looking to poach engi- your way back’
neers from tech businesses in
the Valley, Townsend booked a plane to fly over
Facebook headquarters trailing a banner that
read, “Tell Mark you quit. Cameo.com/jobs.”
Today, Cameo has approximately 200 employees
and Blencowe’s front room in Los Angeles is
dominated by cabinets full of hundreds of
collectible Funko Pop vinyl bobbleheads, each
representing a celebrity he has delivered to the
website since 2017. The company’s executive team
is littered with alumni of household names in Big
Tech and Cameo is positioning itself for a massive
growth push (“We’re trying to fire ourselves from
every job somebody else could do better,” says
Galanis). Townsend is no longer CTO but works
on new product features; Rob Post, the former
CTO of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s failed white elephant
Quibi, joined the company in that role in January
this year. A former head of marketing at TikTok is
now Cameo’s CMO. The company has also hired
new chief financial, people and operating officers.
The app has been downloaded half a million
times on the Google Play store and by May 2020
Cameo users had booked more than a million
messages; last year, the company sold more than
its previous four years of operation combined.
Cameos have been sent in 178 countries and all
seven continents, including ten in Antarctica.
By the end of last year, more than 150 talent were
earning at least $100,000 (£73,000) per year on
the platform.
C
ameo saw a huge increase in talent
joining up in spring 2020, as the reality
of the pandemic began to dawn on
entertainers. They weren’t the only platform
to benefit from this phenomenon. From March
last year onwards, comedians began streaming
stand-up routines over Instagram and
Facebook Live and turning to voluntary sub-
scription websites such as Patreon to make
money. OnlyFans, the content subscription
service used by sex workers, among others,
quickly entered the mainstream after
Beyoncé name-dropped it on a song. Cardi B
and the actress Bella Thorne both opened high-
profile (non-pornographic) accounts on the
site. The celebrity ecosystem adapted to the
116 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
new reality at warp speed; by November, when
Dua Lipa streamed a concert online with a
production cost of more than £1m, five million
people bought tickets.
There’s no name for this new system of
interaction, but it could loosely be called the
“influence economy”. It’s a system in which
name recognition is the only thing that matters
and it has been massively accelerated by the
pandemic. It has also empowered famous people
to control their creative output more closely than
ever before. Galanis summarises the influence
economy as a move towards
“talent as brands, versus studios
as brands”.
Social media, combined with
the new ability to monetise fame
from home through platforms
such as Cameo, Patreon,
OnlyFans, Etsy, Fiverr or
Kickstarter, is enough to sustain
a successful career in the public
eye without being beholden to a studio or a
music label or having to rely on legacy media
to communicate with fans. “When The Rock is
in a movie,” says Galanis, “he’s got 200 million
followers – distribution through his social
channel is more important than the marketing
budget that Marvel might put out, or Warner
Brothers.” Talent might use a traditional form of
entertainment – a prestige TV show or an album
released through a major label – to become
famous initially, but once they have a fanbase
Ice T, Bethenny Frankel and Snoop Dogg are among
the celebrities, grouped into categories, who have
recorded personalised videos for a fee via Cameo
they can quickly outgrow brands and command
far more loyalty among followers.
Take Lily Allen, for example. Allen signed up
for Cameo in September with the express purpose
of raising enough money to record her fifth
album without the financial backing of a major
label. Allen is no stranger to new expressive
platforms, having built up her earliest following
on Myspace in the early 2000s, when she was
still a teenager. She has also been vocally critical
of her label, Parlophone, and its parent, Warner
Music, in their handling of a sexual harassment
complaint she made against an industry execu-
tive. In her Cameo announcement video, posted
to Instagram, she explained why she joined up:
“It’s getting closer to the time that I want to start
releasing music again and it’s the first time in my
career that I’m going to be putting an album out
not on a major label, so I’ll be using these funds
to finance my musical output. Ask me to do some
dumb shit. Your wish is my command!”
I
n all sorts of situations, then, Cameo is a
blessing for artists who want to control their
own image and monetise their fame in a new
way. But it’s not without its own dangers. Last
July, Tiger King star Carole Baskin caused a brief
stir online after she was tricked into wishing “a
happy birthday” to convicted paedophile Rolf
Harris and “your best friend, Jimmy Savile” –
almost definitely a situation where, traditionally,
a vigilant agent or PR rep might have stepped in
to save her embarrassment. Nonetheless, Baskin
remained the fastest-growing talent on Cameo
by number of bookings in 2020. In 2018, ex-NFL
player Brett Favre was tricked into reading veiled
hate speech in a Cameo in which he gave a shout-
out to a group of anti-Semitic YouTubers. Cameo
quickly formalised a set of company guidelines
for avoiding hate speech, but it’s not difficult to
imagine why agents and PR reps might be uneasy
about the unfiltered mass access Cameo offers.
Less obviously, there’s also something
undeniably undignified about the sight of an actor
or singer having to jump at the command of their
fans. Seeing a celebrity record a video message
from their bedroom for a quick £50 quickly
erodes any aura of mystique they might have.
John Egan, the CEO of tech forecasting agency
L’Atelier BNP Paribas and a one-time venture
capitalist, is a close watcher of start-ups including
Cameo. He sees many of the individuals on the
website as performing the role of “court jesters”.
“A lot of famous people are very, very broke for
various different reasons,” explains Egan. On this
point, he agrees with Galanis. But the very act
of signing up for Cameo, Egan continues, is an
admission that a celebrity is willing to perform on
command for a relatively small amount of money.
And those who advise talent are acutely aware of
this. One prominent industry professional, who
works closely with blockbuster film stars, admits
that being on Cameo could be “challenging”
for the way clients are perceived. “If a casting
director is looking at you for a role, and you’re
also on Cameo for a £45 personalised video, does
that have an impact on their view of you?”
Egan suggests there’s something “quite cruel”
about Cameo. For one, birthdays, anniversaries

and retirements aren’t the only reasons people
buy video messages on the site. “Want a divorce?”
enquired a New York Times headline in January.
“Try Cameo to break the news.” Stormy Daniels
says she has done “a couple” of break-ups. “I got
one [for which] this girl had obviously caught
her boyfriend cheating on her and had me call
him out. I was like, ‘This is really shitty,’ but he
did something really shitty to her.” Daniels has
also fired someone via Cameo. “It was a house-
keeper or something. They were caught stealing.”
In one video shared on Cameo’s own YouTube
channel, Bruce Buffer, the veteran MMA
ring announcer, puts on his game voice and
bombastically declares, “It’s time... for Kayleigh
to move on!” Like all popular things on the
internet, it’s hilarious and cruel in equal parts.
And on YouTube, an entire subgenre of videos
plays up to Egan’s “court jester” accusation.
These videos all follow a similar format: teenage
and twentysomething vloggers guffaw as they
pay older Cameo talent to recite nonsensical
scripts. What’s more, these videos can make the
younger talent on YouTube considerably more
money via ad revenue than most Cameo talent
earns for recording a video. “People are now
actually being subcontracted to create content,”
explains Egan, “that somebody else is monetising
at a higher level. And that’s fascinating.”
Jack Massey Welsh, a YouTuber from Bishop
Auckland who has made three videos about Cameo
under the username JackSucksAtLife, agrees that
he would be reticent to sign up to Cameo if his
career relied on being taken seriously. “It would
be seen as perhaps a bit of a step down,” he says.
“But obviously it’s their decision whether or not to
go on.” Welsh is 24 and has been making YouTube
videos for almost eight years. Originally, he pro-
duced Minecraft content, but when he realised his
personal content was popular with viewers,
he gradually branched out into comedy and
commentary videos. Welsh now has three million
subscribers across five main channels. Many of his
videos are about YouTube itself or other internet
phenomena, though he also has a channel on
which he tests out features on his Tesla Model 3.
For a twentysomething making videos in his
bedroom, Welsh is hugely digitally savvy and
data-driven, explaining that
he saw other creators making
Cameo videos and decided
‘You just go
to try his own version. When along with it
YouTube analytics told him and hope that
how popular the video was,
he kept going. Many of the
you’ve not said
cheapest stars on Cameo something
are TikTok wannabes and really offensive’
Welsh decided to focus on
them, both to save money and to drive search
interest. “It was 2019,” says Welsh, “so TikTok
was still up and coming. I knew that if I involved
TikTok somewhere in the thumbnail it would
still generate a lot of interest.” He began sending
out Cameo requests, testing the limits of what
he thought Cameo talent would do for money.
The resultant 17-minute video is irreverent and
very funny. It is also occasionally uncomfortable
to watch. Many of the aspiring TikTok stars who
became the butt of Welsh’s jokes are alarmingly
young teenagers, including one whose Cameo bio
said he was 15 years old. It’s difficult to shake
the feeling that you’re witnessing half a million
people laughing at children who are considerably
more vulnerable than the middle-aged, long-
established talent on Cameo. Welsh, for his part,
accepts that some of the talent in his video might
have been too young to offer video shoutouts,
but says it’s up to Cameo to enforce the age
restrictions (the company does not recommend
anyone under 16 uses the website and under-18
talent needs parental permission).
The question of agency and dignity is key to
understanding why some celebrities sign up to
Cameo and others don’t. When someone such
as Stormy Daniels records a video message,
she’s in on the joke. Daniels has been in the
self-promotion industry for years and is no
stranger to media attention – she’s just
leveraging her brand. James Buckley and Brian
Baumgartner are adults who understand the
implications for their personal brands and
careers. Did Buckley and Baumgartner dream
of repeating catchphrases over the internet
for money when they chose a career in acting?
Perhaps not. But they can absolutely make that
decision as professionals, whereas a 15-year-old
who joins Cameo to imitate his favourite TikTok
influencers and sports stars cannot.
Wary of ridicule, most celebrities discrimi-
nate carefully on Cameo. Kristian Nairn, the
DJ and actor who played Hodor in Game Of
Thrones, says he was initially reticent to sign
up after being approached by Cameo reps at fan
conventions pre-Covid. “In the most respectful
way possible,” he explains, “I do plan to work
again.” But, during the pandemic, Cameo became
a way to connect with fans he used to meet face to
face. Nairn joined up after seeing other Thrones
alumni, such as Lena Headey, on the platform
and confesses he was pleasantly surprised
by the heartfelt reactions his videos got.
“I started to realise that, actually, it really gave
people a bit of a lift,” Nairn says. “Seventy per cent
of the messages I do, I get a reply like, ‘It made
my week.’ I don’t feel worthy that me staring into
my iPhone can conjure that reaction, but it does.”
Like Stormy Daniels, Nairn has strict rules about
what requests he accepts and
turns down on Cameo. He won’t
record a video where he only says
“Hodor”, before you ask. Nor will
he do brand endorsements. “You
have to be careful. But 99 per cent
are just genuine people who love
each other.”
Nairn’s experience on Cameo is
echoed by none other than Welsh,
the YouTuber. Welsh joined Cameo himself after
making his videos and raised “a few hundred
pounds for charity” doing shoutouts to fans at
$20 (£14) per video. He, too, was surprised by the
heartfelt reviews he got. “People will generally
say how much their son or daughter absolutely
loved the Cameo. It is quite rewarding to see
that something that isn’t a lot of effort on
your end has actually made a big difference in
somebody’s day.” And given that his whole public
persona is based on pointing out the absurdities
CAMEO.COM
of internet celebrity, Welsh is happy to laugh at
himself. “When I’m doing Cameos, I’m not taking
it seriously. I’m expecting to be asked if I can say
something ridiculous. You just go along with it,
with no context, and hope that you’ve not said
something really offensive.”
A
s a possible end to the pandemic draws
nearer, Cameo is forging ahead with
new features to keep users and talent
engaged. A new one-on-one system of video
chats called Cameo Calls is in beta testing and, in
December, demand to video chat with the Phelps
twins, who played Fred and George Weasley in
the Harry Potter films, caused Cameo’s entire
app to crash as tens of thousands of fans tried
to join the virtual queue at once. James Phelps
now estimates he’s spent 1,000 minutes in Calls,
on top of the 2,000 traditional videos he has sent
fans for around £90 each.
Plans are also afoot for something called
Cameo For Business. Typically, says Galanis, five
per cent of Cameo requests are turned down by
talent and the team realised that requests for
product endorsements were the cause of more
than half of the refusals. The idea, then, is that
Cameo For Business accounts will connect talent
willing to do endorsements to the small and
medium-sized businesses who generally request
them – albeit for a higher fee than the average
fan would pay.
All of this raises one question: do Galanis,
Blencowe and Townsend have a route out?
Egan, the tech forecaster, suggests a sale to
a Silicon Valley giant would be the sensible
option. Cameo would certainly slot easily into
the massive arsenals of features at Instagram,
TikTok or Snapchat. And Cameo, unique among
major tech companies, is already running a fully
distributed office, with no single physical space
from which employees are expected to work.
Instead, employees work from home, spread
around the world and in 26 different US states.
Does this suggest a potential sale and an attempt
to keep overheads low?
Not if you ask Galanis, who is openly set on
emulating Facebook and Google by going public.
“It is the next mountain for this company to
climb,” he explains. “We believe we are building
an enduring internet treasure.” He also wants
Cameo to go international, pointing out that it
costs next to nothing to host talent anywhere
around the world. There’s no reason, he says,
that Cameo shouldn’t ultimately be as important
an entertainment company as Disney. “From our
perspective, we’re full steam ahead on making
sure that this becomes one of the most valuable
companies on earth.” G
+ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
CLUBHOUSE: THE INVITE-ONLY APP EXPLAINED
(Nicolas-Tyrell Scott, January 2021)
THE NEW RULES OF FOUNDERHOOD
(Charlie Burton, October 2020)
HOW THE ATHLETIC CHANGED SPORTS JOURNALISM
FOREVER (Oliver Franklin-Wallis, March 2020)
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 117
DON’T
CALL IT
A ‘SPACE
HOTEL’
Although you
will be able
to book a stay
on the Axiom
Space Station...
for a price
Story by Thomas Barrie

The Axiom Space Station

is expected to revolutionise
commercial activity in
low-earth orbit

118 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 TECHNOLOGY

F
ear not, Tom Cruise stans: the megawatt grin
will remain safely here on earth, at least for
the moment. There has been ample speculation
that Cruise was set to board one of the first ever
commercial trips to space, Axiom Space’s AX-1
mission to the International Space Station,
after the then head of Nasa, Jim Bridenstine,
Tourists join missions in announced, “Axiom is working with Tom Cruise
the understanding that in the making of a movie.” Axiom has now announced the names of
the three amateur astronauts who will travel into orbit sometime
they will help carry out after January 2022 and Cruise was not among them. Instead,
research while in orbit once their training is complete, three men – businessmen >>

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 119

120 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
 TECHNOLOGY
Axiom’s mission is the
next major step in
the diversification of
orbital activity
>> Larry Connor
and Mark Pathy
and Israeli fighter
pilot-turned-
venture capitalist
Eytan Stibbe – will
join former Nasa
astronaut and
mission commander
Michael López-
Alegría to spend
eight days aboard
the ISS.
Axiom’s mission is
the next major step
in the diversification
of orbital activity,
which, until now,
has been largely
government-
controlled. As
the ageing ISS
is gradually
decommissioned, its
older modules will be
removed and a series
of new, privately
owned Axiom ones
added sequentially,
beginning in late
2024. The first
part of the Axiom
Space Station, a
module housing
crew quarters and
manufacturing and
research facilities,
will be attached to
the ISS that year,
followed by three
more modules with
extensive research,
life support, storage
and manufacturing
capabilities. “By
2028,” says Axiom
spokesperson
Beau Holder, “the
Axiom segment will
be ready to separate
from the ISS, when
its lifespan ends, and
operate free-flying
into the future.”
The effort to take
individuals into
space has led Axiom
to be characterised
as the galaxy’s first
The station’s “space hotel”, given
habitation capsule
was designed by the 360-degree
Philippe Starck viewing pod >>
The station
will also
serve as a
testing
ground
for future
space
exploration
– trips to
Mars, for
example
>> planned for
guests’ use and the
interiors designed
by Philippe Starck.
Holder says that it
“is better described
as the world’s first
commercial space
station”. Would-be
“space tourists”
join Axiom’s
missions in the
understanding that
they, too, will help
carry out research
while they’re in
orbit (how’s that
for “experiential
travel”?). Axiom
hopes the low-
gravity environment
can lead to scientific
breakthroughs that
would be difficult to
realise on earth.
The station will
also serve as a testing
ground for future
space exploration
– trips to Mars, for
example – to be
carried out. If Axiom
is to be believed, it’s
a vision of the future.
But mass space
tourism may be a
while off yet: a berth
on AX-1 is believed
to cost around
£40 million. G

The first part of the

Axiom station, a module
housing crew quarters
and research facilities,
will be attached to the
ISS in late 2024
 TECHNOLOGY

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 123

A F G H A N I S TA N

War, justice
and the real
story behind
‘Marine A’
Known only by a codename at his trial for killing a wounded Taliban insurgent in Afghanistan, Alexander
Blackman was the first British serviceman since the Second World War to be found guilty of a battlefield
murder committed overseas. But when veterans, politicians, a bestselling author and a national newspaper
successfully campaigned to overturn the conviction, the subsequent culture war should not have been about
the morality of one man, but how armed conflict is waged by 21st-century Britain. With rare access to court
documents and previously redacted reports, GQ uncovers how a commando unit was allowed to go rogue and
why a failure to deploy ‘courageous restraint’ was ignored and almost covered up by the military hierarchy

Story by Simon Akam

‘It is often said

Photograph Getty Images

in the army
there is no such
thing as a bad
soldier – only
bad leaders’
124 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
Alexander Blackman’s
wife, Claire (centre),
outside London’s Royal
Courts Of Justice prior
to the decision to quash
her husband’s murder
conviction, March 2017

APRIL 2021 GQ.CO .UK 125

Daylight
The Taliban treat dead bodies callously and
hang them from trees. A month earlier, someone
threw two grenades at Blackman while he was
talking to Afghan civilians outside the camp. The
grenades fell into a drainage ditch, funnelling
the blast upwards and saving the sergeant’s
life. Blackman isolates himself in the container

murder
that serves as a control room at Omar and has
become increasingly irritable, in particular
with those beyond the checkpoint that defines
his world.
On 15 September, insurgents attacked
checkpoint Talaanda with small arms fire. At
Shazad, the operations rooms observed through
Nad-e Ali North, southern Afghanistan, 15 September 2011 PGSS – the “persistent ground surveillance
system”, tethered balloons with cameras – two

T
he 30mm cannon under the nose of
the Apache helicopter, the weapon
whose movements are slaved to
movements of the gunner’s head,
makes a low, basso noise – there is
an echo to it. The sound comes in two bursts.
Down among the marines on the ground, on
the dry earth under the parched vegetation, a
man shouts, “Yeeeah.” It sounds slightly ironic,
as though he is yelling as he imagines a man
should do in such a situation.
Out in the cornfield beyond the tree line
where the marines are sheltering, one man
falls. Another is seen to escape. These are
Afghan fighters.
“They’ve got fucking Hellfires, for fuck’s sake,”
says a marine, referring to a type of missile
carried by the Apache in parallel to its cannon.
“Why don’t they use a fucking rocket?” The
speaker sounds frustrated; he emphasises each
syllable. “Fuck me, mate; it’s just error after error
after error.”
The head of a Vallon metal detector – used to
locate IEDs – emerges from a marine’s pack. The
marines are tasked with heading out to conduct
a “ battlefield damage assessment”, a BDA,
to see what is there, or what is left, of enemy
insurgents. It can involve swabbing skulls to take
biometric data.
Now, from one of the marines, come the words
that mark the start of all that
is to follow. “I don’t think he’s
An IED
joined J Company just before the tour and did
not complete pre-deployment training.
Also in 42 Commando is Major Matthew
Parker; he commands a different company to
that of Blackman, but knew him from a previous
role when they had worked together eight years
earlier. Parker remembers Blackman then as a
junior NCO who required “close supervision” –
not in a tactical sense, but rather to stop him
cutting corners. (Claire Blackman, Alexander’s
wife, disputes this characterisation.)
In March 2011, shortly before Blackman’s
deployment to Afghanistan, his father died of
Parkinson’s disease. On 27 May, during a patrol
in the Loy Mandeh area, an IED killed two men
in Blackman’s company, Lieutenant Oliver
Augustin, a 23-year-old whom Blackman had
mentored, and Marine Sam Alexander, who
had won a Military Cross on a previous Afghan
tour. Blackman’s original company commander,
Major Steve McCulley, was also blown up in May,
but survived.
After Augustin’s death, Blackman became
the commander of the “multiple”, or half-troop,
operating at checkpoint Omar. On 24 July,
during his mid-tour R&R, Blackman scattered
his father’s ashes. His wife, Claire, who works
in communications for the ambulance service,
noticed he looked at the ground a lot while
walking in the country: he was so used to look-
ing for IEDs.
Although only two kilometres
individuals “believed to be armed insurgents”
in the region of checkpoint Talaanda. They called
the Apache helicopter from Camp Bastion; its
call sign is “Ugly-51”. It located the apparent
insurgents in an open field and fired 139 rounds
of 30mm ammunition. Those watching the
operation, including the helicopter’s pilot and
those at Shazad, believed the target could not
have survived.
But he had.
Men from Blackman’s patrol, conducting their
BDA, find the insurgent in the middle of the
field. They take his AK-47, two magazines and
a hand grenade. The second marine guards the
wounded fighter with his pistol. The insurgent
is clearly still alive.
“Why couldn’t [he] just be fucking dead?”
someone says. One of the marines starts to drag
the insurgent towards the side of the field. Ten
seconds later, he is dropped. His clothes are
bloodied; his eyes are open. A marine leans
towards him.
“You’re browners, fella,” he says, meaning
brown bread – dead.
They drop and move him multiple times with
increasing impatience and decreasing care.
“Right,” Blackman says. “Get him closer in so
PGSS can’t see what we’re doing to him.”
The marines take up positions around the
man in a semicircle. “Anybody want to do first
aid on this idiot?” Blackman asks.
“No,” the others respond.

dead,” he shouts of the man on
the ground.
42 Commando, the unit from
which this ill-starred patrol is
explodes every
as the crow flies from FOB
Shazad, Omar is isolated and
16 hours. The difficult to reach safely. The
troops call previous holders of the check-
“I’ ll put one in his head if you want,”
someone says. There is laughter. A few seconds
pass. Blackman comes closer and stands over
the body.

patrol ‘Afghan
drawn, is based in the north
of an area known as Nad-e
Ali, in Helmand Province in roulette’
southern Afghanistan. Their
centre of gravity is at a forward operating base
(FOB) named Shazad. Beyond Shazad lie smaller
outstations, termed checkpoints. These include
checkpoints Talaanda and Omar.
The commander at checkpoint Omar, and the
man in charge of the patrol on 15 September, is
a 37-year-old sergeant. He has served for over
13 years in the Royal Marines, with previous
tours in Iraq in 2003, 2004 and 2006 and in
Afghanistan in 2007. His name is Alexander
Wayne Blackman. He is part of 42 Commando’s
J, or Juliet, Company. Both Blackman and his
company sergeant major, WO2 Andy Place,
point had 25 men; Blackman has
16. They patrol between five and
ten hours per day in tempera-
tures that approach 50C, carrying
a minimum of 45kg. (One Royal Marine officer
disputes the claim, later given in court docu-
ments, that they were undermanned.)
Blackman’s multiple sometimes conducts
patrols both in the morning and evening.
Ambushes and the threat of IEDs are constant.
There is an IED explosion on average every
16 hours. The troops call going out on patrol
“Afghan roulette”. By this late stage in the
six-month tour, they have begun to refer to
themselves as “walking Figure 11s”, after the
cardboard target used for shooting at on rifle
ranges at home.
“No, not in his head,” Blackman says. “’Cos
that’ll be fucking obvious.”
A minute or so later, Blackman is speaking
on the radio, explaining that the insurgent has
a sucking chest wound, when air is sucked into
the thoracic cavity through a puncture in the
chest wall instead of into the lungs through
the airways. The helicopter can still be heard,
buzzing in the background.
“Where’s that Ugly now?” a marine asks,
referring to the hovering Apache. “He’s over there
and he can fucking see us,” Blackman replies.
Blackman speaks on his radio and suggests
the insurgent may already be dead. Someone
bends down to the insurgent with a first field
dressing. “For fuck’s sake, I cannot believe I’m
doing this.” >>

126 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 A F G H A N I S TA N

‘The decision to kill was

probably impulsive.
The adjustment disorder
impaired his ability to
exercise self-control’
Alexander Blackman
during a training
exercise in Oman, 2001
Photograph PA Images

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 127


>> “Wait a minute, just pretend to do it,” another
marine replies, “till he’s behind them trees.”
Again, he is referring to the helicopter.
“Al,” another marine says, to Blackman, “just
strangle him.” There is general laughter. Another
five seconds pass.
“Yeah, he’s passed,” Blackman says. “Fuck it,
he’s passed.”
Blackman reports on the radio and promises
to collect biometric data. The marine with
the dressing begins to apply it. “Wait, Jack,”
the marine with the dressing says. There is a
discussion between the marine with the dressing
and the guard with the pistol about the fact that
the insurgent had a grenade in his possession.
They swear at the man. “Yeah, maybe we should
pump one in his heart,” one of them says. Jack
Hammond, another member of the patrol, will
later write in his diary: “So there I was, pistol
drawn, waiting for the sergeant to get off the net,
so I could pop this little wanker and be done
with it.”
They turn the insurgent over onto his back.
His eyes are open. “Er, he’s dead,” Blackman
says. “Don’t waste your fucking FFDs [first field
dressing] on the cheeser. Take it off him. Right,
get the... get the HIIDE camera out, see if you can
get a picture of him.” HIIDE stands for “ handheld
interagency identity detection equipment”; it
can establish and verify iris, fingerprint and
facial recognition.
Blackman’s pistol is in his holster at his waist.
The helicopter can no longer be heard above
– it has been tasked with turning its attention
to a compound. Blackman speaks on the radio.
The insurgent’s right arm moves. He is visibly
breathing. Blackman has drawn his pistol and is
looking up at the sky. “Where is the CAT [combat
application tourniquet]... Ugly call sign?”
“It’s gone that way,” the marine who was
applying the first field dressing replies. “Went
south, mate.”
Blackman crouches down and aims his
pistol at the centre of the insurgent’s chest. He
fires once, at point-blank range. He stands
back up. The insurgent’s
legs, which are bent at the
knee, begin to move left
The marines were
and right. His upper body young and
and arms start to writhe. aggressive,
His head shakes back and
forth. His breathing starts
raised on stories
to become laboured. of previous tours
Blackman watches for 15
seconds. He adjusts his backpack. “There you
are,” he says. “Shuffle off this mortal coil,
you c***.”
Ten seconds later he addresses his party.
“Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas.
I just broke the Geneva Convention.” As
Blackman speaks, the insurgent continues
to writhe.
A marine replies, “If anything gets heard,
mate, it’s as a warning shot went down.”
Blackman gets back on the radio. “Fully dead
now.” Blackman did not know that Christopher
Watson, one of the marines in the patrol, was
wearing a camera on his helmet throughout. It
is, after a fashion, the ultimate YouTube war film.
128 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
_____________________
A changing war
T
he Alexander Blackman killing is perhaps
the best-known scandal of the Afghan
War and one of the biggest outrages of
the entire post-9/11 conflict period for Britain
and its armed forces. However, to understand the
chain of events that both preceded and followed
Blackman’s actions requires the examination
of a broader issue: the entire subject of
military accountability.
In the Iraq and Afghan Wars, Britain developed
a globally unprecedented web of accountability
measures for individual malfeasance on the
battlefield. Yet it did so while establishing almost
zero accountability for the high-level decision-
making that led to the prosecution of two deeply
troubled campaigns.
At no point in the ten years that passed
between the planes striking the World Trade
Center in 2001 and Sergeant Blackman’s patrol
leaving his Helmandi checkpoint in September
2011 did the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan
become existential matters for the British state.
In general, they rated as no more than the third
or fourth crocodile out from the canoe; there
was always something more important, be it a
looming election, a scandal or a prized domestic
reform. The military stakes were low and so
accountability for strategic failure was not
a priority.
Afghanistan in 2011 was not the same war as
when the Helmand campaign began in 2006.
Camp Bastion is no longer tents around a rough
airstrip in the desert. The base has swollen to
become a 26 square kilometre conurbation –
newspapers compare it in size to the town of
Reading. It even has its own Pizza Hut.
Alexander Blackman’s “Bad Lands” in the
north of Nad-e Ali and Camp Bastion, some
15 kilometres apart, are distinct universes.
A boundary called the “wire”, a hermetic
perimeter of cable, reinforced
with dogs, sangars and optics
and searchlights, divides safe
bases from what’s beyond. A war
without a front line, that old saw
about insurgency, has become a
war with a very clearly defined
front line.
More importantly, the combat
outside the wire is not same as it was in 2006
either. After the chaotic initial deployment,
the Marines followed the Paras into Helmand.
One of the company commanders with 42
Commando on that deployment was Major
Ewen Murchison.
A thickset rugby player, Murchison led a
“mobile operations group” out in the desert,
engaging in firefights with the Taliban. Their
actions were violent – “kinetic”, in military
parlance. Matthew Parker, who on that 2006
to 2007 tour was working in 42 Commando’s
headquarters, described Murchison’s behaviour
as “quite unfettered”.
He was the “alpha male of the organisation”,
said Parker. Another senior Royal Marine
officer described Murchison as a “neanderthal”.
In 2007 Murchison was awarded an MBE; not
for the first time, the honours and awards system
rewarded intense fighting, regardless of whether
that was in fact the most sensible approach.
By the time of the 2011 killing, Murchison was a
lieutenant colonel – and Alexander Blackman’s
commanding officer. (Murchison did not
respond to a request to comment.)
After the Paras and the Marines, the United
Kingdom’s traditional two forms of shock troops,
had shot their respective bolts in 2006 and early
2007 and it became clear that the engagement in
Afghanistan was to be an enduring commitment,
the remainder of the infantry joined the rotation
en masse – earlier they had served as additions
to the elite units. The notion of Afghanistan as
a venue for licensed mayhem and violence –
promulgated through YouTube clips and racks
of accumulated gallantry medals – was also
becoming established.
By mid-2009, as Afghan IEDs became
commonplace – present in such numbers as
to effectively turn some locations into low-
density minefields – casualties mounted and
the Afghanistan conflict began to threaten the
survival of Gordon Brown’s government back
in London, just as Iraq in early 2007 had
threatened the last days of Tony Blair’s premier-
ship. By July, the number of British soldiers
killed in Afghanistan rose above the total lost
in Iraq.
President Obama – elected the previous
year, in part due to his opposition to the Iraq
War – sacked General David McKiernan, the
commander of the International Security
Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, the
first firing of a wartime theatre commander
since the Korean War. His replacement, General
Stanley McChrystal, represented a new breed
of commander. A special forces veteran, he
called for “courageous restraint”, for troops to
limit their use of violence and said, “We must
avoid the trap of winning tactical victories – but
suffering strategic defeats – by causing civilian
casualties or excessive damage and thus
alienating the people.” An influx of US Marines
allowed the British in Helmand to increase their
force densities to something that might make
these new strategies more feasible.
“Courageous restraint” was a contrast to
previous British tours in Afghanistan, in particu-
lar the early ones. Yet not only did the new policy
have to contend with soldiers’ understandable
desire to keep themselves safe, it also had to
address their own notions of the kind of behav-
iour that was aspirational – of what they went to
Photographs Getty Images; PA Images
Afghanistan for.
Some of this military generation had concluded
that what conflict in the first decade of the 21st
century represented – what its purpose was,
really – was a chance to engage in extreme
violence. The 2010 change in approach left some
individuals feeling short-changed, while others,
who had been rewarded for a very different kind
of behaviour in a previous time, were reluctant
to embrace the new world.
The case of Alexander Blackman, therefore,
 A F G H A N I S TA N
was as much about what the British military
wanted to be doing in Afghanistan by 2011 – as
opposed to what it should have been doing –
as it was about the individual morality of
battlefield murder.
The clock was also ticking on the Afghan
campaign itself. On 1 June 2010, the new
British prime minister, David Cameron, had
assembled his military chiefs, foreign policy
experts and security officials at Chequers. The
US had already decided to reduce troop levels
and Cameron planned to follow their lead. In
November, at a Nato summit in Lisbon, the
North Atlantic Council endorsed Cameron’s
proposed timeline: all combat forces would be
withdrawn by the end of December 2014.

_____________________

A marine from 42 Commando assaults a Taliban-held village on the outskirts of Kajaki in

Helmand Province, 18 March 2007; (below) Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Lee of 45 Commando
A tale of two units
during a winter warfare training exercise at Innset, Norway, 26 January 2010

W
hile Alexander Blackman’s 42
Commando was in the north of
Nad-e Ali, another Royal Marine
unit, 45 Commando, was in the south.
45 Commando’s commanding officer was
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Lee. The son of a
Queen’s counsel and judge, Lee was a Cambridge
graduate who had written a thesis on battlefield
atrocity while at staff college in Shrivenham.
Regarded as a star of his generation of Royal
Marine officers, before the tour he set about trans-
forming 45 Commando as it prepared for a very
different form of campaign, one that fell in line
with the new theories of courageous restraint.
Throughout pre-deployment training, Lee
and Stephen Moran, 45 Commando’s regimental
sergeant major, attempted to turn them into a
unit that would operate within the new rules
of counterinsurgency warfare. It was in some
ways an uphill battle. The marines were young,
supremely fit and aggressive, raised on stories of
fighting on previous Afghan tours and the longer
Falklands legacy.
Moran says they “were absolutely gutted” when
it became clear the approach this time would be
different, “especially the young lads who were
on their first tour”. Lee put together ten “key
principles”. “It is an Afghan counterinsurgency
and we must keep Afghan needs at its centre,”
ran the first one. “Kill the enemy when necessary
but remember body count will not always indicate
success,” was number four. “Have the courage to
use absolute minimum force,” read another.
In his “Operational Design”, dated February
2011, Lee wrote, “However justifiable our kinetic
actions, they result in Afghan funerals which gen-
erate brothers and cousins bent on revenge.” He
went on to note, “We will maintain our discipline
always and in every eventuality; there is no
place, for example, for feral soldiering because of
austere conditions. High standards will win.”>>

After resigning, Lee asks

to speak at Blackman’s
sentencing hearing.
That request is denied
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 129
>> There were several study days and a reading
list that included such texts as An Unexpected
Light, an account of travels in Afghanistan by
the British writer Jason Elliot. Before the tour,
in March 2011, Lee drew up his men in a hollow
square at Lunan Bay, a beach a few miles from
their base at Arbroath in Scotland, looking out
over the North Sea. The chaplain blessed the
men; then the commanding officer spoke.
“We will give those who seek to oppose
us an honourable way to become part of the
legitimacy of Afghanistan,” Lee said to the unit.
“But if they refuse that and become irreconcil-
able, we will fight them hard and ruthlessly as
45 Commando always does. And we must look
after the people who have known nothing other
than war and oppression in their lives to date.
It is about Afghans before it is about anybody
else, ourselves included. We must and we will,
I know, deep in my heart, get this right. I wish
you good luck, Godspeed and I will stand at your
shoulder throughout.”
By contrast, in a subsequent internal review by
the Royal Navy, Brigadier Ian Huntley found 42
Commando had taken a very different approach.
42 did not want to do finessed counterinsur-
gency. They wanted to go toe-to-toe with the
Taliban, to be aggressive, to see who blinked first.
A company commander in 45 in 2011 said one
of his peers in 42 described their approach as
“one that sought to ‘blunt’ the insurgency. To hit
him hard so he wouldn’t want to get up again.”
42 Commando wanted to do what they had
done before.
At the outset of the 2011 tour, when a company
130 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
from 42 reported at Camp Bastion for
“reception, staging, onward movement and
integration”, the final training package all troops
arriving in theatre have to undergo, every
member of the company, including the major
in charge and the company sergeant major,
refused to acknowledge their names in a roll call
because they were playing a game called “don’t
talk to females” – the NCO trying to register
them for training was a woman. Eventually, a
Royal Marines colour sergeant on the training
team had to intervene.
Footage from an embedded documentary
maker, Chris Terrill, is, for some, similarly
telling. The marines lounge at their combat
outposts in colourful boxer shorts, sometimes
firing their weapons. They openly express hatred
and disparagement for the local Afghans. They
shoot a local who is “dicking” them – “watching”,
in military jargon, a term from Northern Ireland.
Terrill films an officer, topless, briefing marines
before a patrol: “That’s what it’s all about, engag-
ing them on our terms when they think they’re
OK. Key thing is to try and kill them, if you get
the chance. That’s the priority,” the officer says.
This is not counterinsurgency as its advocates
traditionally frame it. (Terrill pushes back at the
notion that the marines he filmed were out of
control or feral.)
In 42 Commando, companies were using
their own weapons extensively and calling
Apache attack helicopters. Lee says a company
commander in 42 was walking around carrying
a sniper rifle that had belonged to a dead
marine, a practice that suggested an unhealthy
preoccupation with revenge. Another 45
Commando officer said that in J Company,
Alexander Blackman’s sub-unit, he saw a senior
NCO responsible for stabilisation projects
carrying a 66mm rocket inscribed with the words
“Fuck COIN” (counterinsurgency), along with
compensation notes given to locals to allow them
to claim money for damages to property with the
words “Fuck off you gay c***” written on them.
By contrast, the entirety of W Company of 45
Commando, whose area of operations directly
bordered J Company of 42 Commando where the
Blackman incident would take place, passed their
full seven-month tour without firing a shot in
anger. Overall, 45 Commando saw an 86 per cent
reduction in the number of violent actions in the
south compared to the previous deployment.
As a W Company officer says, “The difference
between the areas, as several groups of local
elders and Afghan security force leaders often
told me, was not topography but the way
ISAF forces were viewed. The Afghans have
a unique code and they will treat groups very
differently depending on the respect they have
for them. Where honour and general decency is
disrespected the locals will ‘allow’ or even
encourage certain activity in their patches.”
Photographs Alpha; The Times
During the tour, David Petraeus, the overall
ISAF commander in Afghanistan by that point,
visited 45 Commando. In front of the brigade
commander, Brigadier Ed Davis, he described the
unit’s work as “PhD[-level]” counterinsurgency.
By June 2011, the difference in approach
between the two units would come to a head.
The cerebral Lee, in charge of 45 Commando,

and Murchison, the “neanderthal” in charge of
42, were both selected to go into the promotional
pool for full colonel. Lee, several years younger
than Murchison, was selected for promotion.
Murchison was not.
A month later, David Cameron would
announce the withdrawal of another 500 troops
over the next year, contrary to the advice of
military commanders. One result of this move
was to collapse British boundaries between
Nad-e Ali North and Nad-e Ali South. After much
debate, the rifle companies of 42 Commando
remained in place, while its headquarters was
disbanded. 42’s constituent companies now
fell under the command of 45 Commando’s
headquarters. The unification took place on
7 September 2011. Oliver Lee now had three
additional companies under his command,
British soldiers at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province,
2007; (opposite) then Major Ewen Murchison of 42
Commando with locals in northern Helmand, 2007
including J Company, Alexander Blackman’s unit.
Murchison, according to Lee, was “mortified”.
Earlier in the tour, Lee had made his concerns
about 42 Commando’s behaviour across his
northern boundary known to the chain of
command. On 7 August 2011, a month before
the official unification took place, Lee had
gone to see Davis. He told the brigadier that 42
Commando in Nad-e Ali North was “operating
counter to his intent and at odds with the
interests of the campaign”. Lee also told Davis
that he feared “something grave was going
wrong in Nad-e Ali North”.
“I know that Brigadier Davis’ staff officers were
alerting him to similar concerns of their own, as
I had been discussing this with them for at least
two months,” Lee later said in a court submission.
Davis told Lee that he knew Murchison was
difficult, but said he felt things were broadly OK.
He added that, in his view, much of Murchison’s
behaviour was driven by jealousy of Lee and
that he would keep a careful eye on things in
Nad-e Ali North. The brigadier described how
he himself had lost friendships when he had
been promoted.
Lee struggled to see his superior officer’s
logic. “I frankly found Brigadier Davis’ response
to my concerns unsatisfactory,” Lee wrote in his
court submission. “I had not gone to see him to
talk about personal jealousies but instead, after
much anxious deliberation, to discuss the grave
threats I saw to the mission for which he was
ultimately responsible.”
The meeting lasted just over an hour. In just
over a month, 15 September, the Blackman
An officer briefs marines
before a patrol: ‘The key
thing is to try and kill them.
killing would take place. Yet no one in the chain
of command will know about it until a year later.
On the day itself, they are oblivious.
Murchison, his previous command cut from
beneath him days before, is at Bastion on 15
September, where he is photographed with
former Girls Aloud singer Cheryl Cole, who is in
theatre on a morale-boosting trip. The change of
personnel means that on the day of the killing,
Alexander Blackman, a man Oliver Lee has never
met, is officially under his command.
That autumn, both Lee and Murchison
participated in the obligatory post-operation
lecture and debriefing circuit. Murchison would
receive the Distinguished Service Order, whose
rubric states, “Awarded for meritorious or
distinguished service by officers of the armed
A F G H A N I S TA N
forces during wartime, typically in actual
combat, serving under fire and usually awarded
to those above the rank of captain.” Lee, whose
tour, at least in part by design, had involved
far less fighting than Murchison’s, received at
a ceremony in July an OBE, regarded in the
military as a less prestigious gong.
_____________________
The trial
O
n a Saturday morning in October 2012,
there is a knock on the door of Alexander
Blackman’s home in Taunton in Somerset.
At the door are two uniformed policemen and
three members of the Royal Military Police.
That’s the priority’
Blackman offers his visitors a cup of tea. They
chat in the kitchen before the police conduct a
brief search of the house. The police lead the
man, whom his wife calls Al and who the rest
of the world will soon know as Marine A, out of
the house for questioning. Blackman comes back
later that night.
A month later, while Claire is attending a
work conference, her phone rings. It is the Royal
Military Police saying her husband has been
arrested on suspicion of murder.
The clips from the helmet camera had
bounced around various laptops after the
2011 tour. The police came across them while
investigating an unrelated claim that a marine
possessed contraband pornography. The police
found a series of clips showing the build-up >>
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 131
>> to the shooting. The last one, depicting
Blackman actually pulling the trigger, was miss-
ing, but those that existed suggested something
amiss was about to happen. The police were
able to forensically recover the final clip from a
memory card. They charged Blackman.
Lee is a full colonel by this point, running
one of the courses at the Defence Academy at
Shrivenham in Oxfordshire, when he realises
that the incident took place on his watch. He
informs the chain of command and is eventually
contacted by Ed Davis, by now promoted to
major general and, since December 2011, the
commandant general of the Royal Marines,
the professional head of the organisation.
Davis explains he hadn’t realised the incident
happened under Lee’s command.
For Lee, “this didn’t wash”, given their
discussions in Helmand about the actions of 42
From top: Major General
Commando. He believes the matter to be serious John Holmes (left) and
and wishes to have a full and proper part in any Frederick Forsyth open
post for the Daily Mail’s
subsequent process. (Davis also declined to Alexander Blackman
comment for this story.) campaign; Blackman
Lee periodically checks in and expects to be appears in court via
video link one month
brought into the looming military legal process. before his murder
Yet by the time the court martial takes place conviction is quashed,
February 2017; a
in the autumn of 2013 – by this time two years Daily Mail editorial in
after the incident itself took place – Lee has support of Blackman,
still not been contacted. It appears to him that 9 April 2019; British
serviceman calling for
the system is trying to approach the incident the release of Blackman
through the narrowest of prisms – suggesting march to Ten Downing
Street, October 2015
that Blackman was a lone bad apple and that
there are no wider issues at stake.
In November 2013, a court martial at Bulford
in Wiltshire finds Blackman guilty of murder
with a five-to-two majority. On the following
Monday morning, Lee resigns from the Royal
‘I struggle to
Marines. He would later tell a naval inquiry, understand
“My view was that a serious breakdown of the how we have
sacrosanct relationship between command
and commanded had occurred and that the
not taken
chain of command was not only responsible greater
for this but, more gravely, had wilfully failed in responsibility
its obligations.”
At the moment of resignation Lee asks that
for Marine A’s
he be allowed to speak at Blackman’s sentencing conduct’
hearing, which he knows lies ahead. That
request is also denied. In early December 2013,
Blackman is sentenced to life and told he will
serve at least ten years in prison.
After the sentence is passed, the Royal
Marines put up Brigadier Bill Dunham, the
deputy commandant general, to face the cam-
eras. “What we have heard over the last two
weeks is not consistent with the ethos, values
and standards of the Royal Marines,” he says. “It
was a truly shocking and appalling aberration.”
They are pushing the lone bad apple line, even
though the academic literature on atrocities
committed in war shows that bad apples
are almost never the issue and instead poor
leadership is the culprit. As one Royal Marines
officer says, “The analysis and lessons from
My Lai, Somalia, Abu Ghraib, Black Hearts,
Baha Mousa et cetera highlight a surprising
consistency in the combination of factors that
lead directly to atrocity. Indeed, it is often said in
the army there is no such thing as a bad soldier
– only bad leaders.”

132 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021


_____________________
The media
I
n May 2014 Blackman loses an appeal to
have his conviction quashed at the Courts
Martial Appeal Court, which, like his trial,
is extensively covered by the press. One particu-
larly interested party turns out to be the author
Frederick Forsyth, who feels that Blackman’s
lawyers have done a poor job and that there is a
bigger story to be told.
He gets in touch with Blackman, as does MP
Richard Drax, a former Coldstream Guards
officer. Blackman’s cause is also taken up by
those who feel he has been mistreated: an online
petition emerges demanding “the immediate
release of Marine A”. By November 2014, the
petition has received 107,261 signatures,
above the threshold of 100,000 required to be
considered for parliamentary debate.
In September 2015, under pressure from the
media, the government publishes the executive
summary and recommendations of Brigadier
Ian Huntley’s Operation Telemeter review. Begun
in March 2014, the initial assumption was that
Telemeter would be a fairly quick job, concluding
that better training was required on rules of
engagement. Yet Huntley soon concluded that
there was more to the issue than met the eye and
discovered that a number of individuals, not just
Oliver Lee, had had concerns about the behaviour
of 42 Commando, ranging from pre-deployment
training through to the deployment itself.
Huntley and a civilian psychologist conducted
around 30 interviews, including individuals from
both 42 and 45 Commando. Together they used
an approach called “human factors analysis”, an
approach initially developed to investigate
aircraft crashes, which examines four levels of
“active errors and latent failures” – these include
unsafe acts, preconditions for unsafe acts, unsafe
supervision and organisational influences.
Most revealing were the people on the
pre-deployment training teams who had worked
with the units, staff officers from brigade and
people who took over from the units afterwards.
They generally accorded with Lee’s version of
events. Huntley was particularly alarmed by how
often “Vietnam” came up as a point of reference
Illustration PA Images Photographs Shutterstock; Solo Syndication
for 42 Commando’s behaviour.
Huntley believes, in retrospect, that when it
first appeared that individuals had made errors
of judgement, they should have stopped the
Telemeter process and convened a more formal
board of inquiry, with a more robust legal
framework that could apportion blame if
required. That did not happen and arguably that
is the real failure in the Blackman saga.
The intention was that the Telemeter report
would be kept on a close hold inside the Navy
and all that would come out in public would
be the lessons from it. Yet the report leaks and
names start to get in the public domain. Ewen
Murchison puts in a formal “service complaint”.
The Daily Mail reports on a “damning internal
letter making clear the inquiry found failings in
the chain of command”, while revealing a “media
handling strategy” to release only a single page,
in heavily redacted form.
In September 2015, the Mail launches a
campaign to fund new legal representation for
Blackman, with support from Forsyth and Drax.
Most damning, a document from Lee leaks, in
which he says, “Sgt Blackman’s investigation,
court martial and sentencing authority remain
unaware to this day of the wider context within
which he was being commanded when he acted
as he did.” He adds, “The cause of this is a failure
of moral courage by the chain of command.”
As the Mail campaign gathers pace, Lee finds
himself in a complex position. He has no time
for the argument that what Blackman did was
an act as old as war and something for which
he shouldn’t be held culpable – an attitude that
certain members of the wider Blackman cam-
paign and some individuals commenting in the
media seem to espouse. But he does feel that
the wider issues in the case need to be examined.
A year later, on 6 December 2016, the Criminal
Cases Review Commission announces that the
case will indeed be referred
back to the Courts Martial
Appeal Court. The appeals pro-
Blackman is not
cess concludes in March 2017. innocent, but a
At the Royal Courts Of Justice, manslaughter
Blackman’s murder convic-
tion is quashed and replaced
charge takes
with one of manslaughter on into account
the grounds of diminished external factors
responsibility. They declare
that Blackman had been suffering from an
“adjustment disorder”, a recognised psychologi-
cal condition characterised by the development of
emotional or behavioural symptoms in response
to an identifiable stressor (or stressors) occurring.
“There can be little doubt that on 15 September
2011 the appellant was angry and vengeful and
had a considerable degree of hatred for the
wounded insurgent. On prior deployments,
similar emotions had been controlled by him,”
the judges state. “The appellant’s decision to
kill was probably impulsive and the adjustment
disorder had led to an abnormality of mental
functioning that substantially impaired his
ability to exercise self-control.”
The judgement references the Telemeter report.
While a covering note to Telemeter stated, “This
report went beyond the remit of its original terms,”
the Court Martial Appeal Court judges reach a
different conclusion. They describe Telemeter as
an “impressive and well-written report powerfully
supporting the conclusions it reached”.
Oliver Lee is there that day in London in
2017, with Stephen Moran and both their wives,
despite his discomfort with associating himself
in public with the Drax-Forsyth axis. But he
feels that the ultimate verdict is the right one.
Blackman is not innocent, but a manslaughter
charge, he feels, takes into account the external
factors that went overlooked before.
Blackman’s sentence is reduced to seven years.
The general rule is that you are released – absent
good reason – “on licence”, with a set of conditions,
at the halfway point and so Blackman goes free the
following month. On 28 April 2017, Blackman and
his wife are whisked away to a country hideaway,
A F G H A N I S TA N
after he is smuggled out of prison in Wiltshire
hiding under a blanket in the back of a police car.
Today, in 2021, it is eight years since Oliver
Lee resigned from the Royal Marines. “I struggle
to understand institutionally how we have not
taken greater responsibility for Marine A’s
conduct,” he wrote in his 2013 resignation letter.
“I am convinced we as Royal Marines officers
could and should have done more to reduce the
likelihood of him behaving as he did.”
By contrast, Aaron Fisher, Blackman’s com-
mander at the time of the killing, was promoted.
Likewise, Ewen Murchison, 42 Commando’s com-
manding officer, has since been promoted three
times. He is now a major general and – somewhat
ironically – deputy advisor to Afghanistan’s
Ministry Of Interior Affairs. Brigadier Ed Davis,
who ignored Lee’s complaints, was also promoted
and, after his stint as commandant general of
the Royal Marines, became in 2016 governor
of Gibraltar – a position he held until 2020. The
promotion of commanders who bear responsibility
for failure was painfully common in Britain’s post-
9/11 wars. But there is another way.
Last November, Australia
published the Brereton Report into
allegations of war crimes commit-
ted by Australian special forces
in Afghanistan. The report found
credible evidence that 39 Afghan
civilians were killed by Australian
troops. It also referenced a slew of
institutional failures. There was
“blooding”, in which young special forces soldiers
would be instructed by their patrol commander
to execute detainees. There were “throwdowns”,
weapons or radios placed on bodies to justify kill-
ing them post hoc. There was a culture of secrecy
and cover-up.
After the report was published, General Angus
Campbell, the chief of the Australian Defence
Force, said, “The unlawful killing of civilians and
prisoners is never acceptable. It’s my duty and
that of my fellow chiefs to set things right. To the
people of Afghanistan, on behalf of the Australian
Defence Force, I sincerely and unreservedly apol-
ogise for any wrongdoing by Australian soldiers.”
Around the same time, the Navy turned down
a Freedom Of Information request to release the
Telemeter Report. “On balance, it is considered
that the public interest lies in withholding this
information,” they wrote. Even within the institu-
tion Telemeter remains highly classified. As one
Royal Marines officer said, “It has been seen by
only a handful of individuals in the Navy.” G
ADAPTED FROM THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD BY
SIMON AKAM (SCRIBE, £25).
+ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
STAKEKNIFE: THE MOST NOTORIOUS DOUBLE AGENT
IN BRITISH HISTORY (James Harkin, November 2020)
INSIDE THE TRIAL OF SHAMIMA BEGUM
(Anthony Loyd, October 2019)
HOW TWO SURGEONS TOOK ON THE WOUNDED
SOLDIER’S LAST TABOO (Jonathan Heaf, May 2018)
APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 133
 Special Report

CONTROLLED,
CONFINED
and CUT OFF
Although widely reported, the heightened domestic abuse crisis in Britain during 2020 has been hard to
quantify. By definition, it mostly occurs behind closed doors and the lockdowns also stymied already
beleaguered sources of help. This year, new hope arrives with the passing of the much-delayed Domestic
Abuse Bill. But, campaigners say, the courts cannot stand alone. We must continue to question why,
across class, cultures and creed, this is a gendered crime, committed almost exclusively by men.
And with social media and smart tech opening new fronts of attack, we ask how much can
one law do to reverse a decade of cuts to society’s critical safety nets?

DOMESTIC
ABUSE
AFTER
LOCKDOWN Story by George Chesterton Illustrations by Noma Bar

134 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 DOMESTIC ABUSE

Physical violence is only one

of the ways abusers assert
control over their partners
‘If we pretend
domestic abuse
is something
it’s not, we’re
never going to
tackle it’

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 135

DOMESTIC ABUSE
Charlie had already tried to leave
her boyfriend once before, when
she was four months pregnant
with their daughter. She was sick
of him coming home every night
drunk and high, when he would
smash up her flat, threaten her
and keep her awake by turning
the bedroom lights on and off
like some Cold War torturer.
But, as with so many women who endure
domestic abuse, walking away was not quick or
easy. Maybe it was her fault. Maybe she was selfish
and spiteful. That’s what she’d been conditioned
to think. So she took him back. A year later she
tried to leave again.
In 2018, one afternoon in her ground-floor
flat in Northamptonshire, Charlie crossed a
line. After another argument, her boyfriend
pushed her onto her sleeping eight-month-old
baby. He then wrapped his hands around her
throat and began to strangle her before punch-
ing her repeatedly in the ribs. She freed herself,
took the baby and dragged her seven-year-old
son to her car outside. She put the youngest in
first then went around to the other side. The boy-
friend followed, snatched the baby and began
running along the road, its unsupported head
thrown up and down by the force of the chase.
What followed was pandemonium touched
by farce.
There was a Scout hut a few doors away and
on hearing the screaming the teenage Scouts
ran out. They subdued the boyfriend, rescued
the children and called the police. After a trip to
hospital Charlie was granted a non-molestation
order, which her boyfriend broke 17 times, facing
nothing more than a few £10 fines. He continued
to abuse her for two more years: smashing
up her car, threatening her with a knife and
calling her phone constantly to leave abusive
messages. “That is when I started feeling like
there’s no light at the end of the tunnel,” she
says. “There were no voices for people like me.
I just asked myself, ‘Why is this happening
to me?’”
For the survivors of domestic abuse, it never
truly ends. That man was Charlie’s second
abusive partner. The first also strangled and
136 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
hit her. But in some ways Charlie’s ordeals took
place in a different world. In a lockdown there
would have been no Scouts to rescue her and the
children. Leaving her abusive partners during a
pandemic would have been even more difficult.
The police are even more stretched. Services are
harder to reach. Smartphones, tracking devices
and spyware now enable abusers to mine their
coercion to new depths.
Before lockdown, a woman in need could go to
her GP or just find a sympathetic ear at her chil-
dren’s school gates. When she or her partner went
to work, there might be an eight-hour window
when she could reach out to someone. If the part-
ner had a drink or drug problem he would often
be out of the house for protracted periods. Since
the pandemic that eight-hour window has shrunk
to one hour. Surgeries closed. Schools closed.
There were no visitors and the only way she could
touch the outside world was through media her
abuser is almost certainly monitoring. A refuge
site manager in London told me her properties
saw an increase of 70 per cent in referrals
last spring.
The legacy of domestic violence is immeasur-
able. Whatever statistics you find, they will fall
short of the reality. Men suffer domestic violence
too and this does not seek to diminish that fact,
but what makes violence against women and
girls so pernicious and so much more common is
that it is a manifestation of how society sees and
treats women and girls per se. There is no other
way to explain the prevalence of abuse, which
crosses ethnicity, culture, religion and class. It
encompasses coercive behaviour, psychologi-
cal torture, economic crime, surveillance and
stalking, physical violence, sexual abuse and
murder. It can last for years, ruining the lives
of family and friends as well as the victims and
their children. It is just as likely to a be a track-
ing device on a phone as a punch in the face.
What binds these things is that men do them
to women.
There was a 34 per cent increase in calls from
women logged by Refuge’s National Domestic
Abuse Helpline in 2020 compared with 2019. It
is widely believed that incidents rose during the
lockdowns, though since it was so much harder
for women to escape their abusers at all during
this period, let alone seek the help of the police
of social services, the next set of official figures
may not tell the whole story.
The Office Of National Statistics says that
for the 12 months up to March 2020 an esti-
mated 2.3 million adults aged 16 to 74 years
experienced domestic abuse, 1.6m of them
women. That’s 7.5 per cent of adult females in
England and Wales. The police recorded 758,941
domestic abuse-related crimes in England and
Wales (excluding Greater Manchester, from
where figures are unavailable) and 529,077 fur-
ther incidents were not recorded as a crime.
Worryingly, referrals of suspects from the police
to the Crown Prosecution Service for a charging
decision fell 19 per cent to 79,965, from 98,470 in
the year ending March 2020.
Every year, two
women a week
are murdered
by partners or
ex-partners
in England and
Wales alone.
It’s no secret. Their names are read out on
International Women’s Day in the House Of
Commons by Jess Phillips, Labour’s shadow
minister for domestic violence and safeguarding.
If 100 Britons were killed in terrorist attacks
every year the public outrage and demand
for action would be heard from Westminster
to Wearside. And lying in the murk beneath
these horrific killings is a reservoir of vio-
lence and coercion that goes on unreported,
undocumented and unchallenged. From this
it’s tempting to come to one conclusion: these
victims do not matter; they don’t matter politi-
cally and they don’t matter to the rest of society.
It is no coincidence, of course, that the vast
majority of them are vulnerable women. “If we
pretend it is something that it’s not, we’re never
going to tackle domestic abuse – and domestic
abuse is a gendered crime,” says Phillips. “That’s
why it’s such a clever crime, isn’t it? A crime
of power.”
Domestic abuse is a collective catastrophe and
it requires a collective response. We all pay for >>
 62%
The home front
The most recent Femicide Census counts the terrible cost of male violence
against women in the UK between 2009 and 2018

d
ek
of all women
. killed by men
were killed by
partners or
ex-partners.

of these
deaths took place 70%
in the HOME of the
victim or the perpetrator.
A third

52.2% More than half of the deaths can

be described as “overkilling”.
The Femicide Census describes
of women
killed by
men were
known
to have
reported
previous
abuse to
Illustrations Valerio Pellegrini

this as “gratuitous violence the police.

beyond that necessary to
cause the victim’s death”. Source: Femicide Census (2009-2018)

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 137

‘There’s been no
Vem nos fic maximus
hum utem adductu

violence in any case

rentia? ines se acresso

I have seen without

abuse being
nonviolent first’

138 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021


>> it in one way or another, because it begets more
abuse. It traumatises children. It wrecks women’s
education and careers. The legal process that fol-
lows it is costly, slow and, until now, has been
weighted against the victim. It feeds dependency
and crime. It costs the state an estimated £66
billion in policing, health, social services, lost
taxation, the CPS and the prison service (what it
actually costs is anyone’s guess).
“It’s a hidden crime,” says Detective Inspector
Kelly Allen, deputy lead responsible officer for
domestic abuse and secondary investigation lead
at the Metropolitan Police. “It usually takes place
where there are no other witnesses. For the vast
majority it takes place indoors, which reduces
the number of people who can see and intervene.
That’s always made it difficult to investigate.”
We at least begin 2021 expecting the much-
anticipated Domestic Abuse Bill to become
law. But even the most effective legislation will
struggle to change centuries of gender-defined
behaviour. If these crimes are predictable, they
should be preventable.
Two words
came up every
time I spoke to
anyone about
domestic
abuse:
“control” and
“entitlement”.
There are some men whose instinct is to control
and coerce the women they have been inculcated
against from boyhood: women are the object and
other; they are the enemy. “Some men feel entitled
to control partners and they feel entitled to own
them,” says Dr Jane Monckton Smith, a former
police officer and now a forensic criminologist
who specialises in homicide and coercive control
at the University Of Gloucestershire. “That has
such a strong historical, cultural, legal, medical
Illustrations Valerio Pellegrini Source: United Nations
history. It operates at a subliminal level – and
if your entitlements are taken away, you are
then entitled to act.” What Monckton Smith
and others have recognised is a clear pattern
of behaviour rooted in control and entitlement
that escalates and, for some, ends with murder.
Monckton Smith has identified eight stages of
abuse in her research, beginning with aggressive,
needy demands for affection and attention, often
a form of “love bombing” whereby an abuser
will convince his victim they are engaged in a
whirlwind romance of intoxicating intensity.
“I was 17 and my partner was much older and
he seemed like a responsible, loving, caring, man,”
A gendered crime
Global statistics from a 2019 report show how domestic
homicide rates disproportionately affect women
Total homicides
81%
19%
Intimate partner or
family homicides
36% 64%
Intimate partner homicides
18%
82%
Male Female
victims victims
says Natasha Saunders, a survivor once based in
Sussex and now a seasoned campaigner against
domestic abuse who works with Refuge, the
country’s largest provider of specialist domestic
abuse services. “And so very, very quickly I was
getting 30 texts an hour. ‘Are you OK? Where are
you? Who were you talking to? Do you miss me?
Do you love me? I love you so much. I’ve never
felt like this before.’” Within three weeks her
abuser was turning her against her friends – who
all told her to get out – playing an incessant and
calculated game of good cop, bad cop. “It’s so hard
to know the point where he hooked me in because
I knew I should walk away.”
In three months they were married. He
would threaten to kill himself, blame his ex-wife
(whom, it turned out, he had also abused) for
his behaviour and keep Natasha confined to
their house from where he would remove food
so she couldn’t eat or take light bulbs and the TV
remote when he was away.
The relationships typically progress through
further levels of coercion until stage four, which
is when the abuser feels at risk of losing control.
Stage five is his effort to regain control and if the
relationship is allowed to continue it becomes
physically very dangerous for the woman.
“There’s no incident of violence that occurs
in any case I have ever seen without domestic
abuse being nonviolent first,” says Phillips.
In 2004, Charlie, who had been beaten by her
stepfather, was 16 when she moved in with
her first abusive partner, who was six years
older. “I never felt that unconditional love. And
I looked for it in the wrong places. He was a
violent person, but I didn’t see that; I just saw
the little bit of love he was showing me. And
then before you know it you’re in this bubble
with them. And they can see that vulnerability.
They strip you of worth and dignity.”
There is no doubt that many of the women
who suffer are already in an exposed state and
that men who follow these patterns of behaviour
seek them out or just seem to know when a
woman will be susceptible to their manipulation.
DOMESTIC ABUSE
It’s common to find that survivors have either
endured or witnessed abuse themselves as chil-
dren or that they are vulnerable in some other
way – financially, emotionally or within the con-
text of a particular family or community that
neither acknowledges nor understands their
vulnerability. Despite all this, it could happen
to any woman given the wrong time, the wrong
place and the wrong man.
“I had no money,” says Natasha. “It was a
joint account and he held the card. He had to
know where I went. If I walked to the shop, he
had to know why. I used to pick his daughter
up from school and he’d phone me when I got
there. I had to text him when I got home. He’d
ask his daughter if I spoke to anybody. If we had
a workman round, I had to go to another room.
I’ve just had six teeth out because he wouldn’t
ever let me go to the dentist, because he thought
I was having an affair with every man I met.”
Cordelia Tucker O’Sullivan, a Refuge helpline
volunteer, illustrates a key characteristic of
domestic abuse: women have been conditioned
not to recognise their own experiences. “We
get calls from women who sense something
is wrong, but they don’t identify what they’ve
experienced as abuse. Then they tell you that the
perpetrator controls their finances and punishes
them through taking her phone away. Or they
tell you about violence or sexual abuse and you
unpack it and they suddenly realise they didn’t
have a choice and it was wrong.”
When snow arrived in early January this year,
the helplines fell silent. “It was really quiet, partly
because of the weather and because we’re in lock-
down. They couldn’t call because everyone was
in the house. And they can’t really go outside.”
T
hese relationships reach a tipping point
when the abuser loses total mastery. It
can be the woman’s attempt to leave or
it can be the arrival of a baby, which is usually
an inconvenience for him as well as drain on
the woman’s time and devotion. At this stage
there are really only three outcomes: escape,
submission or tragedy.
“There’s a trigger and it’s usually separation,”
says Monckton Smith. “Then you see the escalation
stage, which is where they think, ‘I’m losing this.’
Because, you’ve got to remember, the type of
person who does this needs control. They’re not
ambivalent about it.” Either the relationship goes
back the way the abusers want it or it never does.
If the woman is able to extricate herself the man
will often simply move on to another person. If the
separation is messy and difficult, for which there
might be a hundred reasons, then the motive turns
from control to punishment and revenge.
“The earlier you can deal with cases, the more
successful an outcome you will get,” says Allen.
“As soon as there’s a delay, you’re more likely to
lose the victim’s support for prosecution and the
greater the chance the perpetrator has to talk
to the victim and to convince them it wasn’t as
bad and withdraw. You start to lose evidence.
The earlier we can separate the suspect from
the victim by arresting them and then put safe-
guarding measures in, the better the criminal
justice and safeguarding outcomes will be.” >>
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 139
DOMESTIC ABUSE

Charlie was
they had no one. But I don’t know when he started a family court. When he was eventually convicted
raping me. Obviously [the police] dated it: they in 2018, his first wife gave evidence against him.
had four counts of rape in the trial and he was But what about the women who, for whatever

able to escape found not guilty of one because I couldn’t give a

physical start date. So they prosecuted him for rap-
reason, are not able to evince their own freedom?

to a refuge T
ing me from the day my second child was born.” he historical view of domestic homicide
Natasha’s escape was heroic and lucky. It also was that it was a crime of passion,
shows how women at this late stage of the abusive somehow a spontaneous act or trig-

after her cycle are so close to disaster. In 2015, having seen a

rare opportunity, she called the national helpline,
gered by something the woman had done. This
is a whopping great lie. Domestic homicides, in

first abuser
which arranged an appointment at the local police particular “intimate partner” homicides, are the
station the next day. After dropping her children dreadful terminus of abuse. Nonfatal strangula-
at school she then concocted a story that she tion, a particularly blatant expression of power,

strangled her needed to go in person to the council offices to

argue about council tax payments. Her husband
is a key signal of potential homicidal intent.
Campaigners argue it is considered merely com-

in front of
insisted on driving her there and once inside she mon assault, which does not recognise how serious
begged a stranger to talk to her to make her story it is in a domestic abuse environment (as well as
convincing as he watched from the car window. a “red flag” it can also cause brain damage and

her son.
However, she admits she was not ready to take
the therapeutic help she was offered, which meant
she was not ready to handle the next manipula-
tive relationship. For Natasha the abuse increased
when she was pregnant with her first child in
2008 (she is convinced he used their German
shepherd to unwittingly knock her down the
stairs when she first became pregnant a year
before, causing her to miscarry). Her husband
would insist she travel around the country on his
long-distance courier work. He would starve her
(and eat in front of her) and make her sleep on
wooden pallets in the back of vans. Her pregnancy
was traumatic – she was working and travelling
every day, she was overdue and haemorrhaging –
but her husband refused to let her take an ambu-
lance and delayed her arrival at hospital, where
the baby lost its heartbeat before an emergency
procedure saved her.
She returned to his work immediately, this time
with a newborn in the back of the car. “I always
say to people that there was not a lot of physical
abuse, but then I’d remember he used to push me
and choke me unconscious,” says Natasha. “He’d
kick me in the shins and punch me on the arm. I’d
look at a knife on the side and I’d think, ‘Surely
in court they’d see compassion in this.’ The only
thing that stopped me were my children, because
After he had gone, she ran across a park to reach
the police station, terrified that he would appear at
any moment. “I realised there was a good chance
of him either driving back to the council offices to
see if I’m still there or he’s going to take this route.
And if he takes this route there is nothing on
this road but a fire station, courts and the police
station and I have no reason to be here.
“I remember getting to the inquiry desk and
being like, ‘Oh, my God. I made it.’ I just broke
down and told them everything. What I didn’t
know at the time was that my husband managed
to get both my kids out of school and was eventu-
ally arrested walking down the road back home
towards our house where he had hidden a cour-
tesy car. I heard the arrest on a police officer’s
speakerphone as the patrol car doors opened,
followed by the words, ‘We’ve got him.’ The next
day, we found out my husband’s car contained a
laptop and anything of value from the house in it,
including his and the kids’ passports. He’d once
said to me, ‘If you leave me, I’ll drive me and the
kids into the lake and you will have to live with
it. I’ll kill them and you will know it’s your fault.’”
It wasn’t yet a happy ending. After the
husband’s arrest he was bailed and Natasha
endured the ordeal of finding somewhere safe to
live. The investigation into her husband’s abuse
took three years and even when she had moved to
Nottinghamshire he managed to abuse her, espe-
cially when she had to return to Sussex to attend
internal bleeding) and the justice secretary, Robert
Buckland, now says he hopes to make it a specific
offence in a future police and sentencing bill.
“If it’s just a case of ‘Oh, the red mist came
down’, then we look for a proximate cause, such
as an argument or a pregnancy that caused too
much stress in the home,” says Monckton Smith.
“Those things don’t tell the story at all.
“It puts a burden on the shoulders of men who
aren’t of this profile. If you say these homicides
are spontaneous, what you’re actually saying is it
could be any man. But that’s not true. How can we
target people with certain personality profiles and
issues if we don’t point the finger and say, ‘Well,
actually, you’re one of them’?
“Whenever I talk about intimate partner
homicide somebody always says, ‘But what about
men?’ It’s a distraction. If we’re talking about
lung cancer, they don’t say, ‘Shut up talking
about smoking.’ The most important gender
distinction is that nearly all the perpetrators
are male. Not all victims are. Women make up
82 per cent of domestic homicide victims, which
means we’ve got 18 per cent who are men, but that
doesn’t mean the perpetrators were women. Gay
men are at more risk of this kind of abuse and
homicide than heterosexual men.”
“When you’re working on domestic murders,
there is an acknowledgment they won’t make the
news very often,” says Allen. “And those that do,
unfortunately, are when the focus is on unusual >>

The eight stages of abuse: from early warnings to murder

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
FIRST SIGNS EARLY ESTABLISHED TRIGGERS ESCALATION CHANGE IN PLANNING HOMICIDE
RELATIONSHIP RELATIONSHIP THINKING
Look for clusters The abuser The concerning Increased levels This can be a
of related The abuser pushes The abuser imagines a behaviour This point inflicts of stalking and clear homicide
behaviour and for an early isolates the victim constant threat becomes more loss of status on surveillance, with confession,
patterns rather commitment, from family and of separation. frequent or the abuser, often possibly homicide followed
than focusing on often with “love friends. Often, Financial problems severe, with more accompanied accompanied by suicide, claims
specific incidents. bombing” and the first signs of are common, as threats of suicide by a serious by withdrawal of provocation,
use of possessive sexual aggression deterioration of
The first risk is is deteriorating as well as verbal and change in a fake missing
language. There mental health.
if someone has and violence physical and threats to harm behaviour with person claim,
Illustrations Valerio Pellegrini

is pressure for Stalking becomes

a history of appear. The mental health on pets and children. more menace. homicide made
early cohabitation, more common
domestic abuse, abuser increases one or both sides. The language Attempts to to look like an
after separation. If
regardless of marriage and the intensity of This is the most used becomes isolate children accident, or
the former partner
their criminal pregnancy, as well coercive control common point absolute: “If I are seen at this children as targets
does not respond
record. And are as jealousy. It’s and enforces rigid of attempted can’t have you, to reconciliation, stage. Weapons or witnesses.
they controlling, much easier to routines. There separation by no one can.” further threats, and tools may be
unable to accept get a successful may be threats the victim and It’s much more crying or begging gathered for an Research by
challenge, break in the of suicide and an can be proceeded difficult to find ensue. Ignoring attack and abusers Dr Jane Monckton
thin-skinned or relationship if increase of drink by begging a safe resolution police orders is a often tell others Smith, University
confrontational? it’s cut off now. and drug use. or threats. from here. key warning sign. of their plans. Of Gloucestershire.

140 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 758,941
Lockdown: before and after
The full effect of the pandemic on domestic abuse in the UK has yet to
be counted, but signs suggest the crisis became more acute during 2020

For the 12-month

period to March The number of domestic abuse-related
crimes reported by police in England and
2020, an estimated Wales (excluding Greater Manchester) in
7.5% of adult women 2019/2020. A further 529,077 incidents
(1.6 million) in were not subsequently recorded as a crime.

England and Wales Domestic abuse is a key contributor to

experienced women losing their homes. A third of
St Mungo’s female clients reported it as
domestic abuse. a reason behind their homelessness.

Increase in calls to Refuge’s

34%
National Domestic Abuse
Helpline in 2020.

2019 2020

Refuge has
9%
The homelessness charity
St Mungo’s reported that
50% of its female clients
have experienced
experienced
domestic abuse, compared The increase in
funding cuts to
to 8% of male clients.

80%
offences flagged as
domestic abuse-related

50% between April and

May 2020 (the number
increased again between
May and June).
This coincides with
the easing of lockdown
measures from 13 May
of its services
since 2011.
Its refuges have on
average experienced
2020, when it may have cuts of 50% in funding.
been safer for victims to
8% contact the police.
Sources: Office Of National Statistics; Refuge

APRIL 2021 GQ.CO .UK 141

>> or horrific details rather than the overall
issues.” Allen was involved in a notorious case that
has since become a rallying cry for campaigners,
in which Judith Nibbs was attacked with an iron
bar and decapitated by her partner of 30 years at
their home in London in 2014. Dempsey Nibbs
then flushed the remains of his partner’s head
down the toilet. Days before, she told colleagues,
“If I’m not in on Friday, I might be dead.” Dempsey
Nibbs was sentenced to life in 2016. The most
famous “wrongful deaths” of the past 30 years – of
Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman by OJ
Simpson, who was found not guilty of murder –
are remembered now for their sensational media
coverage and cultural importance, rather than as
a textbook domestic killing by an ex-husband. Half
of domestic abuse homicides can be described as
“overkilling”. The Femicide Census describes this
as “gratuitous violence that goes further than that
necessary to cause the victim’s death”.
“The attitude that ‘It couldn’t happen to me’
puts a moral mark against the victim,” says
Phillips. “‘Why didn’t you leave?’ Well, actually,
people are often more likely to be murdered if
they leave. This idea of ‘I would have walked out
after the first incident’ makes people feel safe. But
it puts a huge burden on victims, as if something
they did led them to it. We’ll never have a hope of
reducing the number of murders unless we recog-
nise the reason why women are murdered by men.
If we ignore that, if our positions in society mean
nothing, then it’s whitewashing, as if gender roles
don’t exist. It’s bullshit, because they do exist.”
E
ven as the world plans a return to some-
thing approaching normality, abused
women face a future complicated and
imperilled by the omnipresence of smartphones
and home technology. Tech abuse is not only
fiendishly easy, but it also has had other less obvi-
ous, equally damaging ramifications. Perhaps the
worst of these is that, until very recently, ignorance
about tech among under-resourced children’s
services, the police and the CPS meant women
were simply not believed when they reported their
partners seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of
every conversation they’d ever had, journey they’d
ever taken and website they’d ever viewed.
Home automation systems and cameras make
it possible for abusers to know what’s going
on inside the home and even activate devices
remotely to persecute or frighten their victims.
Doorbells can now monitor when someone leaves
or visits. Tracking devices in phones allow abusers
to follow the journeys of their partners. Some or
all of these are then connected to systems that
transcribe conversations. Tech abuse goes hand in
hand with economic abuse, since it involves PINs,
online banking and a host of other logins that
can be controlled, watched and hacked. Abusers
harass through fake accounts, recruit others for
social media pile-ons and use bad reviews to
damage ex-partners’ businesses or jobs.
“We’ll tell the police there’s been tech abuse
and they’ve gone into a property of a client we
supported and found 17 recording devices,” says
Emma Pickering, Refuge’s tech manager. “They
didn’t identify the issue. We’ve had women who
were put through mental health assessments by
142 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
social workers because they thought they were
going crazy, when really it was tech abuse.”
Cara is a survivor who arrived in the UK with
her husband in 2011. He became increasingly
controlling, mixing emotional abuse with physi-
cal violence over the following nine years. “I lost
my career, my life. I started to believe it was my
fault. He lied to me about everything,” she says.
“In the past
couple of years
there was a lot
of violence.
I shut myself
away when
I could and just
lived for the
children.
During the first lockdown he hit me and I decided
to leave. I didn’t want my boys to see this.”
What she didn’t know was that the more fearful
her husband became that she would leave, the
more he used technology to harass her. Having
a job in IT gave him an advantage, especially
since he controlled all the devices in their smart
home. Last year he hacked her email accounts. He
hacked her WhatsApp. He linked her phone to his
laptop and tracked her Google searches. All this
was happening while Cara (not her real name) was
unable to move freely during the lockdown.
“I called lawyers and women’s organisa-
tions and told them I had to leave him. Then he
stopped all my money, so I had nothing to pay for
the paperwork that I needed. All the time he was
collecting data on my plans. He stopped my bank
card and I have no access to our joint account. I
have nothing now, no support, no money.”
Refuge has reports of women who have gone to
the police to say a man must have been monitoring
her because of his knowledge of her discussions
and actions and it turns out there are listening
devices in the children’s Barbie dolls and clothing.
One woman who came to Refuge had lost custody
of her children and been sectioned because her
partner had convinced the authorities she had
delusions she was being listened to and was there-
fore a risk to the public and herself. Refuge found
evidence that he had monitored all her accounts
and had been recording her, which led to him
being prosecuted and the children being returned.
“We still found ways to contact clients and
they found ways to contact us during lockdown,”
says Pickering. “We’ve increased the purchase of
burner phones for clients, to make safe contact
with them, and we assign times to speak to them.”
An equally dark aspect of this is that surveil-
lance technology turbocharges the abuser’s
obsessions, feeding every wild conspiracy and sus-
picion. “Controlling people are often paranoid,”
says Monckton Smith. “Tech has made it easy to
feed the paranoia. And it gives him huge amounts
of control. Though we had one case where a guy
inadvertently recorded himself committing mur-
der with the cameras he’d hidden in the house.”
One of the ways men harass women after a rela-
tionship, which can be while he is on bail or even
in prison, is by installing spyware around their
children. Tracking and listening devices have been
found in children’s lunch boxes and iPads.
Another campaign to amend the Domestic
Abuse Bill before it becomes law regards the
“threat to share”, which seeks to criminalise
the use of private or intimate images as a means
of coercion and blackmail. “We had a real influx of
clients saying, ‘My ex-partner is threatening to
share an image of me online,’” says Pickering.
“They’ve told us they’ve gone to the police, who
just say, ‘Come back when he shared it and we’ll
see what we can do.’ Deepfakes are a big prob-
lem, with images superimposed on pornography.
We’ve had that with victims of honour-based vio-
lence, where the woman is not just at risk from
the perpetrator but her whole community.”
“I’ve talked to survivors who have been threat-
ened with intimate image abuse,” says the former
Conservative cabinet minister Baroness Morgan.
“It’s horrific. I want to use my voice in the Lords
to push for change, to make sure women and girls
are better protected.”
The long-awaited Domestic Abuse Bill, set to
become law this year, has a range of important
new ideas and there is a consensus across politi-
cal parties, agencies and charities that it will be a
significant step forward. But there are plenty of
issues it evades and grey areas that give pause. To
give the beleaguered Houses Of Parliament their
due, a growing number of politicians on both
sides are deeply committed to the issue at large.
The bill introduces a domestic abuse commis-
sioner, Nicole Jacobs, who was appointed as it was
going through parliament. Her job will be to assess
the services and strategies of local authorities and
report back to government with recommenda-
tions. “This role depends on the personality,” says
Phillips, who has been involved in the passage of
the bill. “The person the government picked was
a rare moment of good judgement. There is a real
opportunity for them to shame the government
when they’re not listening.”
New Domestic Abuse Protection Notices and
Orders are being introduced, with the formal
power of arrest, crucially to include nonviolent
forms of abuse and coercion. The Notices will
enforce an immediate 48-hour ban, while Orders
can be extended for long-term protection by
criminal, civil and family courts. Breaching one
will be a criminal offence. “They will be a massive
improvement,” says Phillips.
The new law will make it a statutory obligation
for local authorities to provide safe accom-
modation, though it has been noted there is no
specification about the number of beds or how
much resource the local authority must invest in
them. This remains the biggest grey area of all.
 DOMESTIC ABUSE
“We have to ring-fence funding that goes down the most impactful type of crime.” The 80-year-old
Tech abuse locally,” says Phillips. “We have to demand those actor Sir Patrick Stewart says that he still has ther-
Perpetrators now have the facility to buy services are provided. [Otherwise] the local apy to cope with the abuse he witnessed as a child.
cheap and easy-to-install technology for use
authorities who don’t want to prioritise it just Toxic masculinity exists on a sliding scale and
at home and outside, giving them even more
opportunities to coerce and control won’t do it. During the lockdown our local Nando’s clearly the majority of men do not behave this
will have had more than our local women’s refuge.” way, but many men are complicit. “Men are still
One universally welcomed new ruling is that bonding over misogyny,” says Monckton Smith.
TRACKING DEVICES the perpetrator is not
AND SPYWARE around. Now, the abuser perpetrators will no longer be able to question “There are so many men out there who feel
can see every time and confront the survivors in Kafkaesque fam- uncomfortable about it, but who go along with it.”
their victim leaves the ily courts, places few involved in domestic abuse The Refuge helpline gave me an example of
house and who visits
and when, cutting off cases have anything good to say about. “I had to a call it found particularly distressing, in part
one of the few ways for go through that process with these men that were because it seemed to encapsulate the bitter
her to make contact abusing me,” said survivor Charlie. “You’re in the miasma of cruelty and apathy that character-
with others discreetly.
There is even a device
same room as them and you’re petrified.” ises so much of this landscape. It recalled how
Even something as basic
as a “find my friends” that locks a front door “There’s a victim complex that goes on among a woman had separated from her abuser and
app gives an abuser the remotely, trapping some men in the family courts,” says Phillips, “the knew of an incident that several neighbours had
opportunity to monitor anyone inside.
idea that ‘They’re all stopping me doing this and witnessed. But when the police interviewed the
his partner. Keystroke
trackers can transcribe
that’. No. We just don’t want violent perpetrators neighbours, they denied having seen or heard
what somebody writes to have access to children. I don’t hate men. I hate anything. The next day those same neighbours
on a laptop, desktop or SMARTPHONES rapists. And I understand the difference.” approached the woman and said, “Sorry, I did see
phone. A perpetrator
can also mirror their
There is also a consensus that more and better it but I don’t want to get involved. He might come
partner’s screen to use should be made of Clare’s Law, named after back.” The woman begged them to tell the truth
directly view what she is Clare Wood, who was murdered in 2009 by her to protect her and her children but they refused.
doing. Tracking devices
ex-boyfriend, who had a history of recorded vio- “She felt so alone,” says Tucker O’Sullivan. “She’d
commonly used to keep
children safe are also lence against women. The scheme allows either done what society would tell her to do, to leave
installed secretly in toys the woman or, in some cases, a friend or family and tell the police, and she still had no support.”
and clothes.
Abusers typically set member to ask the police to disclose information “It’s the sheer volume that gets me every time,”
up all their partner’s they hold if it relates to domestic violence. says Phillips. “It will be a life’s work for me and
email and app accounts “I think Clare’s Law is a very good idea,” says the likelihood is, in the end, I won’t have achieved
CAMERAS AND and privacy settings
on their phones and Monckton Smith. “But with one of the homicides that much. At least people don’t say, ‘Oh, it’s just a
HOME HUBS
use monitoring apps I looked at the woman had said, ‘Now you’ve told domestic’ any more. It’s a journey for the general
to track movements. me how dangerous he is I’m too scared to leave.’ public. Education is the only way in the long run –
Smartphones make it
much more difficult for
It really does depend on the support available for to re-educate the idea of gender roles and healthy
women to reach out to the victim once they get that information.” relationships. Let’s hope that work goes on.”
anyone without being The lack of affordable housing affects educa-
Home surveillance listened to by their

C
abuser. Burner phones
tion, health, employment, homelessness and harlie, of course, is not her real name. She’s
cameras, ostensibly
are a double-edged many types of crime. So the lack of a holistic, 30 now. She says the counselling Refuge
designed to deter
burglars, are used to sword, since support cross-department approach, more noticeable in provided saved her life. She has a new job
watch victims while agencies and charities
the past decade, also holds back attempts to tackle and hopes to move to another part of the country
the perpetrator is give them to women
looking to escape or domestic abuse. Couple that with the zombie-like as soon as possible. That’s because her ex-partner
away. Syncing all the
family tech to a home avoid someone, but resilience of toxic masculinity and hopes of really is due to be released from prison. “He knows
hub gives someone abusers also use them moving this issue along can feel decidedly bleak. where I live. I don’t want to be in my house.” He
the facility to activate to make contact without
being traced and “It’s way more difficult to get through to hous- was eventually convicted for an attack on another
devices – this could be
lights, the thermostat continue their abuse ing departments and local authorities that are woman. “These men make you feel like you can’t
or something more while under protection working remotely,” says Refuge volunteer Tucker trust anyone,” says Charlie. “And when you
bizarre – to gaslight orders or in prison.
O’Sullivan. “Before lockdown, we could advise can’t trust them you have no one to turn to. And
and terrorise. Refuge
reports one perpetrator
women to go to the housing office and make a that’s when you start to think about suicide.
remotely turned up the SOCIAL MEDIA
verbal application and they could stay there until When you aren’t getting help you think, ‘This is
temperature on a hot they are seen. Now, you have to do it by phone and normal.’ You get compliant, you get used to it or
tub in order to frighten
his victim. Home
often they can’t get an answer. But our services you get too scared to leave.”
hubs can also record remain open and safe.” Charlie ended her interview in tears, but there
conversations and Cuts to services pile even more on charities was no self-pity, only righteous anger and hope.
send the transcriptions
such as Refuge and Women’s Aid (the acute end “I’m very driven. I’m here to set an example for
directly to the abuser.
of this is with those who fight for women with my children. And that’s my be-all and end-all.
A common tactic of
an abuser, particularly “no recourse to public funds”, such as migrants). They’ve been through enough and I have to fix it.”
after separation, is to “I am waiting for accommodation from the She shouldn’t have to, but she will. G
DOORBELLS use fake social media council,” says Cara. “I’m staying at a friend’s house
accounts to harass and IF YOU NEED SUPPORT, CONTACT THE NATIONAL
intimidate their former and if I didn’t have her I’d be on the streets with
DOMESTIC ABUSE HELPLINE, RUN BY REFUGE, ON
partners. This is made my children. By not giving support they are push- 0808 2000 247 OR VISIT NATIONALDAHELPLINE.ORG.UK
easier because often it ing you back to the perpetrator.”
doesn’t fall under the
“There is endless frustration, which comes
community standards of
+ More from GQ For these related
Illustrations Valerio Pellegrini

Facebook and Instagram down to finances and a lack of accommodation,”

and trying to report it is says Allen. “I think we’re going to see the effects stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
New smart doorbells are very difficult, given the
extraordinary number of
of the lockdown for the next couple of years,
a particular problem, ‘I WAS TERRIFIED HE WOULD SHARE SOMETHING
since women’s access fake accounts generally. leading to really long delays going to court. This SO INTIMATE’ (George Chesterton, August 2020)
to support (or even A recurring theme is abuse damages the children who are exposed to MALE SEXUAL ABUSE (Paul Flynn, July 2020)
simply informal contact abusers recruiting other
it, and potentially those children go on to have
with the outside world) anonymous accounts MEN HATING WOMEN: A LOOK INTO THE PSYCHOLOGY
is often dependent on to pile on their relationships where they don’t understand how OF MISOGYNY (George Chesterton, November 2018)
leaving the home when estranged partners. they should be treating each other. I still find it

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 143

 Shirt. T-shirt, £790. Beret.
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Chaos theory
After a debut that declared war on politics, Slowthai became Britain’s
most disruptive lyricist. Now, his kaleidoscopic musical roots have a
fresh thesis to feed on... and things are about to get loud
Story by Ciaran Thapar Photographs by Danny Kasirye Styling by Angelo Mitakos

144 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 SLOWTHAI

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 145

Rapper Slowthai explains this – a duality that
structures his new album, Tyron – in terms
of visits to and from the pub. “You’ve got the
geezer who’s like, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Y’know what I
mean!? Deh, deh, deh, deh!’” he cackles loudly,
puffing his chest out and throwing his arms
up to embody bar-stool bravado. “But when he
gets home, he’s like, ‘Oh, hi, babe! D’you want a
cup of teeeaaa?’” he continues, slouching, his
voice dipping then climbing, like your grand-
mother calling through from the kitchen to offer
you a cuppa.
“I’m very snuggly. I love cuddles and shit,”
the 26-year-old continues, applying this duality
to himself. “I’m very emotional. I’m pretty
sensitive. If someone does something to me,
I don’t hold grudges, but, at the same time, I
remember shit. I feel it. I’ve got empathy towards
everyone I meet. Even if I meet you for five
minutes, I really care about you. When I’m
out, from the way I’ve grown up and where
I’ve come from, I’ve always felt a need to be on
point, the leader. But sometimes I just want to
chill and be in the background. I’m happy being
stoned, watching programmes, laughing and
playing blackjack.”
Much ink has been spilled about the
lovable chaos of Tyron Frampton, or “Ty” for
short (people used to call him slow because
of his mumbling speech). His story starts
in Northampton, a market town in the East
Midlands surrounded by pastoral villages.
As poverty, instability and tragedy enveloped
his formative years – single-parenthood;
early teenage alcoholism; the death of his
one-year-old younger brother, Michael; his
mother leaving his stepfather,
with whom he had a close ‘I’ve got
relationship – his mother, empathy for
Gaynor, was a constant, his
saviour. “Only queen lays me up
everyone I
and kept me clean / Tell me right meet, even if
even when I’m wrong,” he raps I meet you for
on the chorus of “Northampton’s
Child”. Gaynor is half-Bajan and
five minutes’
because of the multicultural community in
which he grew up, a tiny minority in his home-
town, despite appearances Ty came to identify
more with his black British roots than anything
else. He earned “the respect of Rasta man”
from a young age “because of the way I carried
myself... hanging out, talking patois, rolling
round with the boys, getting a patty and some
yard food, chilling. That was life.”
The second constant in his life was, of course,
music. Some of Ty’s earliest memories are of
146 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
Gaynor taking him to Sidewinder, a record
shop regarded as one of grime’s most important
institutions outside of the capital that birthed
the genre. He would look up at DJs mixing jungle
and garage and adults skanking around him.
His uncle drove him around in his car listening
to American hip-hop giants such as Dipset,
Ludacris and OutKast and at home, when
he babysat him, his uncle would play Dizzee
Rascal’s seminal album Boy In Da Corner on
a loop. “I remember sitting there, bored out of
my head, but this CD kept playing and playing,
to the point where I was like, ‘Ah, man, I wish
they’d put something else on.’ But at the same
time, I loved it! It’s just that when you listen to
something 50 times, it becomes mental torture,
bruv, come on!”
Ty bought the VHS of 8 Mile for £2 from
someone at the barbershop – where many of his
anecdotes are set – and started writing rhymes
after watching Eminem’s victory (“I remember
thinking, ‘If he can do it, we can do it’”). He
hung out with older kids on his estate in Lings,
where he lived until he was 14, where residential
buildings were constructed in the 1970s to
catch population overspill from nearby major
cities. They’d spit bars in the shadows of the
underpass. A makeshift pirate radio station was
set up in “this guy called Frustration’s mum’s
kitchen, where everyone would write on the
yellow walls... I’d jump in, but I wouldn’t write
anything. I’d just freestyle and they’d be like,
‘Nah, you’re still a kid, let us get on with our
shit.’ But I’d be there, still trying. Like, ‘One day,
you man are gonna take me seriously.’”
Ty was introduced to indie outfits such as The
Libertines by his older stepbrother
and his friends. They would “get
drunk and stuff. But I came from
the estate, so I was like, ‘You lot
are weak!’” he recalls. The first CD
he bought “with my own free will”
was Linkin Park’s 2003 nu-metal
sophomore classic Meteora. After
his brother passed and the family
left the estate he “went through a mad emo
phase”, sporting flares and skater shoes,
then on return to Northampton picked up
tracksuits and caps again, leaving the temporary
“screamo, depressed kid” behind, like it had
never happened.
All the while, the cover of his mother’s copy
of The Streets’ debut album, Original Pirate
Material, became a fascination. Ty’s eyes
focused on Mike Skinner’s Clipper lighter logo
laid onto the iconic image of Kestrel House, a
social housing block in East London, shot on
film in 1995 by Rut Blees Luxemburg, a German
photographer who told the Fader in 2017 that
she “found modernism in these social housing
estates, yet [they] were stigmatised”. Ty found his
community and their circumstances represented
in architectural symbolism. “This is where I
come from. This is it,” he thought.
S
lowthai emerged in 2016 by forging his
own take on grime, riding the genre’s
popular resurgence, a lone, beaming
street lamp between the bright lights of London
and Birmingham. The first showcase of his
awkward, catchy style, giving a voice to small-
town council estate living, other boys in other
corners, was “Jiggle”. During 2018, he became
a respected barrer and broadchurch artist,
uniting inner-city clash purists and regional
rockers alike through releases such as “Ladies”,
“North Nights” and EP Runt. All of these were
accompanied by eye-catching, surreal videos
– now his trademark – whose potency was
reinforced by their creator’s reputation for elec-
tric, semi-naked live performances, a demand for
which soon spread across the globe.
Meanwhile, the United Kingdom drifted into
an existential crisis following the EU referendum.
Government cuts became visceral, visible and
talked about – just like Slowthai’s indomitable
rise. It was like his and the country’s exposed
fates were moving in opposite directions. Yet
they were subtly interwoven. The cold trick of
David Cameron’s small-state conservatism lost
its glitz against the backdrop of unravelling
social breakdown. Disability benefits became
harder to access. Youth clubs closed. Food banks
opened. Despite being a Tory stronghold, a
nostalgic portal of regional Englishness favour-
ing low taxes and tradition, Northamptonshire
county council suffered, effectively declaring
itself bankrupt in 2018. Its potholed roads,
emptied libraries and boarded-up shop fronts –
the same infrastructural failures that Slowthai
would have seen demean his family and friends
all his life – became a case study of neglect.
“Northamptonshire was once known as the
county of ‘spires and squires’,” wrote Sam Knight
in the New Yorker in November 2018, traversing
the county to report on the impact of austerity,
“but the familiar fabric of landowners and vicars
has all but gone.”
Slowthai’s willingness to speak for the
lived but suppressed experience of neglect,
disenfranchisement and anger therefore cut
through. Yet his tone has never been bleak. >>
 SLOWTHAI

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APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 147

‘I’m not political.
I’m just giving
my views to
spark the
discussion’

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148 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 SLOWTHAI

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 149

>> His lyrics combine eerie, piercing
commentary and boisterous ranting with warm
compassion and infectious cheek. His top-ten
debut album, Nothing Great About Britain, from
2019, whose sound is glued together by rave-
scene euphoria and everyman protest, featured
hits such as “Inglorious” with Boy Better Know
veteran Skepta, punk rock-infused “Doorman”
and, in the deluxe edition, the personal-
perspective anthem, delivered like spoken word,
“T N Biscuits”. Its cover depicts a menacing,
ever-cartoonish Slowthai, grinning like a child in
a sweetshop, pilloried naked in the littered, open
space of a housing estate. Union Jack flags drape
behind him, hanging on for dear relevance. In
the final seconds of the introductory title track
– in a mocking plummy accent that I dare you
to resist chuckling at – he calls Queen Elizabeth
a c***.
“It’s got to hit a nail on the head. It’s got to
be outspoken,” he says, when I
ask about the “political” label that ‘I just want
has been slapped on his music. the album to
“But I don’t think it’s necessary.
It’s never going to be one thing,
rumble any
because you grow and change place, to be
and evolve. What was pissing me louder than
off at the time of the first album
was everything around politics.
everything’
But I’ve always said I’m not a politician. I’m
not political. I’m just giving my views and
opinions to spark the discussion. I don’t feel
it’s my mission to continuously be a political
rapper. I’ll stand up for what’s right and fight
against what’s wrong, but sometimes you’ve got
to do things that are more around the people,
especially when the first album was driven at,
like, reinforcing the power to the people, saying
we are what makes this country great. It’s
not all the history. It’s not the politics. It’s us.
That’s it.”
O
n Tyron, earlier grime influences are
replaced by the behemoth of a heavy,
American-style trap that has come to
dominate much of UK rap’s modern aesthetic.
Other scene leaders who started off in grime,
such as Skepta and AJ Tracey, the latter of
whom Slowthai collaborated with recently for
the thumping “Graveyard Shift”, have taken
comparable diversions in recent years. And if the
first album looked outward at Britain’s broken
body politic to mobilise the masses, the second
turns inward – like we all have, faced with the
paralysis of pandemic.
“I feel like at this point in time, being in
lockdown, it’s more pressing to talk about
our mental health and how we are,” Slowthai
explains. “In my head, I was at a down point.
My mental health was being tested even before
lockdown. Then coming into lockdown, it was
even more prominent. So I had to base it around
what I was feeling at the time, rather than what
people expect of me.”
Last February, Slowthai was heavily criticised
after trimmed clips of him being booed off
stage at the NME Awards went viral. During the
evening he’d engaged in a banterous exchange
with comic and cohost Katherine Ryan, but
150 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
it stretched on too long, to the point of being
drunkenly rude and bordering on aggressive.
Upon collecting his award the crowd turned on
him. He threw a drink and leapt towards them.
A media storm rained down for days, brand-
ing him unquestionably sexist. Ryan defended
him, dismissing any wrongdoing and denying
discomfort. Slowthai forwarded her his Hero Of
The Year award and apologised for his behaviour,
tweeting, “What started as a joke between us
escalated to a point of shameful actions on my
part. I want to unreservedly apologise. There is
no excuse and I am sorry. I am not a hero.”
He knew he’d messed up, that the rock star
habits of touring had caught up with him. But
behind the scenes, the fact he’d been cham-
pioned as a literal hero one minute and a
misogynist villain the next haunted Slowthai.
He spent much of 2020 in the basement of
his home in Northampton with his family
and fiancée, the Russian model
and singer Katerina. One might
interpret Tyron’s self-exploration
as a partial response – a therapy
and attempt to make amends – to
this ordeal. The first half of the
album is Slowthai’s loud geezer at
the bar: he who wears the mask,
entertains and risks overstepping
the mark. He brags. He vents. He is confused
and angry.
Slowthai explains that “Cancelled” came
about after he’d taken some shrooms and met
up with “big bro” Skepta. Skepta saw that he
was “in a dark place. He came over, like my
shaman,” Slowthai recalls in appreciation. “He
was guiding me. It’s like he could see what was
going on in my head and he’s just gone, ‘This
ain’t your defining moment.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’”
This alchemy of fraternal healing led to them
freestyling the song into existence. They stayed
up all night then went for breakfast together the
next morning, shortly before the first lockdown.
“It’s a ‘fuck you’ to that whole scene that only
really exists in this small pocket of Twitter.
People forget, but it’s not even one per cent of
the world’s population. These people are playing
judge, jury and executioner, but none of them
are advocates for change. Most of them are troll
accounts with a St George’s flag in their photo.
And then there are the other people jumping on
the bandwagon. I’m like, ‘Bro, you lot were just
singing someone’s praises and now you’re saying
this guy is over?’”
Other song titles on the first half of Tyron
are blunt provocations scribed in capital
letters. The raw rap remains, but the punk
influence of yesteryear has darkened into a
window-shattering bass that could be described
as almost grunge on songs such as “Vex” and
“Dead”. “If my attitude is bad, it’s cause of you,”
spits Slowthai on the former. He says he only
wanted “the slammers” – songs enabling him
to be the “elephant in the room, always. That’s
why I’ve got it on my neck.” He grins and flops
his head to the side, pointing to his tattoo of a
bloated elephant. “I just want it to rock heavy,
rumble any place. You put it on in the dance and
it’s louder than everything.”
In the Fear And Loathing-esque video for
“Mazza”, featuring A$AP Rocky, Slowthai trashes
a room in a return to playful form. “It’s funny,
because we only had one ashtray, which I had to
smash, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna smash it on
my head,’” he says, giggling. “Peter, the director
of photography, was doing some mad stuff with
the camera, spinning it around. He can hold his
breath underwater for, like, five minutes.”
The second half of Tyron is more delicate.
Filled with mellow beats, sung in parts, it
platforms the pub geezer’s retreat: the return
home to lick post-inebriated wounds; the
making of regretful promises, a type only
realised in a hangover, mug in hand (Slowthai
has been sober since the NME Awards). Here is
his removal of the mask, the sustained remorse
for his mistakes and determination to grow.
“I’m not wallowing in self-doubt now. I’ve
always known it’s OK to make mistakes, but
now it’s like, ‘Fuck it. We just keep moving.’
Little things and being young and my past...
we can forget about them, but they can
still creep up and by bringing them back up
through making music you can get clarity.” A
determination to keep learning joins the dots
on songs such as the boom-bappy “I Tried”,
Kenny Beats-produced “Focus” (“No second
chance, I just gotta be better”) and “Terms”,
featuring Florida-born Denzel Curry. Other
singles from the album include “Feel Away”
with James Blake and the only overt allusion
to politics, “NHS”. His favourite song – “I don’t
even have to think about that” – is the final
track, “ADHD”. Why?
“I’ve removed all the layers. This is the
most stripped-back me you’re gonna get. This
is me on the sofa having a down day. I’m just
explaining how at that point in time I was
feeling. Obviously, those feelings will always
creep up and stuff, but it’s, like, the appreciation
of people who have helped to change my life
and who are always there for me, even when
I seem ungrateful for it.” The song features
a short phone call with his friend, just to tell
him he loves him. Then, unexpectedly, there is a
last-minute return to the energy of the album’s
first half – a final exorcising of demons.
“It’s me venting all the frustrations that it
takes going through to get to this point, things I
should understand, that I shouldn’t be worried
about. But it’s still in me, as much as I try to
escape, it’s still there and maybe I get my anger
under wraps, but there will still be underlying
feelings because of what’s happened when I
was young to now. It’s just me venting. Then it
closes. Boom!”
TYRON BY SLOWTHAI IS OUT ON 12 APRIL.
+ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
SLOWTHAI: ‘EVERYTHING BORIS JOHNSON SAYS IS
A FACADE’ (Kathleen Johnston, September 2019)
SLOWTHAI IS FEARLESSLY VOICING BRITAIN’S
POLITICAL FRUSTRATIONS (Olive Pometsey, May 2019)
HOW THE MAINSTREAM FINALLY CAME TO GRIME
(Dorian Lynskey, July 2018)
 SLOWTHAI

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APRIL 2021 GQ.CO .UK 151

‘I’m not
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to make
mistakes’

152 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 SLOWTHAI

Coat, £2,050. Jacket,

£2,600. Shirt, £1,350.
T-shirt, £790. Trousers,
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Grooming
Jimmy Owen Jones
using Weleda
Photography assistants
Tom Porter; Jem Rigby;
Jack Storer G

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 153

PA R E N T H O O D
Toronto as seen from above
in Tom Ryaboi’s ‘I’ll Make Ya
Famous’, an image that
popularised the dangerous
online subculture of
‘rooftopping’, 24 April 2011

154 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 m
fi lms fro r this
g o
s makin ed him f
like pa r
s life for adn’t pre
sk h
ld son ri ing past
r-o ek
r 15-yea thr ill-se
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w h en y on his ow
do ati
t do you
ng realis
ha fyi
t? But w he horri
gh ht
it ab le, ri s throug
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io n is ine ather pi oi
bell f
e re H er e, a m Ryab
ag t? To
Teen ly heigh g raph
s by
ad Pho to
a de rown
es B
J am
y by
Stor

As you get older

you keep fear
at a distance...
And yet this is
what my son
was doing,
night after night
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 155

The worst 24 hours of my parenting life started
with a short, simple phone call on a dark
November night five years ago. I was driving
home from a football match and fast-flowing
southbound M1 traffic was sharking into a dark,
wet London jam when my girlfriend’s voice came
on the carphone speakers. Her news concerned
my then 15-year-old son, whom she calls “MB”.
I was used to receiving calls from school about
his behaviour, but this was a Saturday. Even so,
I was too busy studying red brake lights cutting
me up to catch her slightly concerned tone.
“James, Katy has just called round with
MB because the police brought him and Luke
back to her house after they found them on a
building site.”
“Is he OK?”
“Yes. The site security guard
The thrill of
had called the police after he breaking into
caught them 15 feet up some the building site
scaffolding. The police said
there’ll be no charges because
wasn’t the point:
the boys said they were taking getting a clip for
photographs for a school art YouTube was
156 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
project and were apparently very polite and
apologetic. I think he’s more concerned about
when you get home than the police.”
And so it began: a run-of-the-mill teenage
situation that would escalate into a very modern
issue and leave me with a sense of sickness and
powerlessness I had never experienced before.
Who hadn’t strayed or broken into places
you were expressly told not to go? Even Theresa
May had her cornfields. The call reminded me of
my own childhood. I’d spent my middle school
years in Leeds legging it through allotments,
climbing railway sidings, sitting on garage
roofs, roaming the brutalist University Of Leeds
buildings and looking for adventure inside the
Yorkshire County Cricket Club and Leeds rugby
league grounds at the bottom of the road I grew
up on.
Even when I was 17, a night watchman with
an alsatian and half the Humberside police force
caught me and a friend, post-pub, at the top of a
huge, undulating fairground slide in Bridlington,
having stumbled into a stakeout after a takings
burglary the night before. Getting chased out of
places was half the fun, to feel the adrenaline
pumping, not knowing how close you were to
getting caught. I assumed this is what my son
had been doing.
When I arrived home in London, MB was in
his room, glued to his laptop. It was only when I
was told this that an alarm bell rang. Normally
he’d appear and start his defence. But he’d
recently shown me a photo of him and four of
his friends on the roof of a six-storey council
block near us, with the financial district in the
background. I was more impressed by the photo
than worried about the location; I was sort of
glad they were exploring and not just drinking
or playing Fifa. And he’d also been talking a
lot about hanging around the high-rises at the
Barbican Centre.
I opened my own laptop and found his YouTube
channel on which he posted his skateboard
videos, then watched in disbelief as a new film
showed the two boys climbing the inner iron
rungs of a crane ladder. They weren’t 15 feet
high; they were 15 storeys high. I was stunned.
Worryingly, the video was racking
up hundreds of views. The thrill
of breaking into the building
site wasn’t the point: getting a
day-to-night clip for YouTube of
the London lights and skyline
from a dangerous vantage point
was. I put my face in my hands
and wondered what I was >>
 PA R E N T H O O D

The two boys

climbed the
crane ladder.
They weren’t 15
feet high, they
were 15 storeys

Ryaboi towers over

his native Toronto,
8 September 2016

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 157

Looking north over
Toronto’s Union Station,
5 February 2017

More people
saw the video
because he died
than if he’d lived.
Maybe that’s
what he wanted
158 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

Meenakshi Moorthy (left) and Vishnu Viswanath at the Grand Canyon before their fatal Yosemite fall
>> going to do. When a young person’s got no
concept of fear and is actually getting peer group
acclaim for their actions, how do you convince
them to do otherwise?
W
hile looking for a different shot of
Toronto at sunset in 2007, a young
Canadian photographer named Tom
Ryaboi embarked upon what became known on
social media as “rooftopping”. He noticed an
open gate on a seemingly deserted downtown
building site and walked in, finding some stairs
and climbing them until he was at the top.
As he has since explained on photographic website
500px.com, “When I got to the top and opened
the door to the roof I got an instant rush of
adrenaline... The city was right in my face, like
I’ve never seen it before. The sun was setting and
all the lights were starting to turn on. The noise
from the street was muted: the cars and people
moved about in what seemed like slow motion.”
Four years later he got the shot that propelled
an online subgenre of urban exploration into the
mainstream – he called it “I’ll Make Ya Famous”.
He took it standing over his friend and fellow
photographer, Jennifer Tse, on the roof edge of
one of Toronto’s tallest buildings. It’s a moment
in time: skinny jeans, ankle socks, Converse, huge
drop to the city grid below. He published it two
days later and within 24 hours Flickr, Reddit and
500px had all had significant traffic on it. The
following weekend he woke up to 500 emails,
including media requests from the BBC and
National Geographic.
Three years on, a young Ukrainian, Vitaliy
Raskalov, and his Russian friend, Vadim
Makhorov, posted a GoPro film of them illegally
climbing the second-tallest building in the world,
Photograph Facebook
the Shanghai Tower, on their YouTube account,
On The Roofs. With its bed of soft techno the
video looks more like art than a daredevil
feature film. There’s a moment when they walk
out to the edge at the top and there’s cloud and
the peaks of other huge buildings beneath them
and your stomach just goes as you realise what
you’re looking at. Naturally, it has had tens of
millions of views.
These were the landmark creations that
drove a generation of copycats, including MB.
And it wasn’t just in pursuit of art – risk and
one-upmanship were also in play. One video my
son showed me was of a young Londoner throwing
himself over Tower Bridge into the Thames for
a dare. The clip was fascinating and infamous.
Teenage daredevils getting high off racking
up hits; it was hard not to watch. The Tower
Bridge jumper survived with the help of the
emergency services but not all of these films have a
positive result.
In November 2018, the Turkish newspaper
Daily Sabah, which is also
published in English, posted ‘Is our life
footage of an unnamed worth a photo?’
17-year-old Russian attempt-
ing to jump from one rooftop they wrote.
to another in Ankara while Seemingly
being filmed for social media.
The video, shot from another
it was
rooftop by his friends, who had climbed up
using a fire escape, shows him failing to reach
the second building as he attempts the parkour
move. There’s a sickening crack, followed by an
immediate thump. Eyewitnesses said he hit his
head on a window ledge on the way down and
died at the scene. Probably more people have
seen the video because he died than if he’d lived.
Maybe that’s what he would have wanted.
At roughly the same time the Russian boy and
his friends were looking for kicks to attract clicks
on the rooftops of Turkey, Vishnu Viswanath
and Meenakshi Moorthy, married Indian
software engineers and sunset-seeking travel
bloggers based in Silicon Valley, were posing
for photos to post on their Instagram account,
@holidaysandhappilyeverafters, at the edge of
a popular and very high outcrop in California’s
Yosemite National Park. If you’re old enough to
sleep together legally, you should be old enough
PA R E N T H O O D
to know not to mess around with fire, sea or
gravity, but it seems again that likes and shares
were more important than personal safety.
D e s p i t e w r i t i n g , “ S o o o t o d ay o n
#socialmediabadasstribe we are talking about
limits of #doitforthegram. Yeah, sure, it can be
limitless, but guys, we reaaaallly need to have
boundaries,” under an Instagram post from
March 2018, seven months later they disappeared
off a Yosemite ledge and fell to their deaths 250
metres below the steep rock face. Another selfie-
seeker who saw them there said they were so close
to the edge it made him queasy.
The second half of Viswanath and Moorthy’s
aforementioned caption was this: “A lot of us,
including yours truly, are fans of daredevilry
attempts of standing at the edge of cliffs and
skyscrapers, but did you know that wind gusts
can be fatal? Is our life just worth one photo?”
Seemingly it was.
Their death isn’t a rare occurrence: hundreds
die in search of the ultimate Instagram shot,
many from high points of interest. At one point
Reddit had to ban its “Watch People Die” channel,
which featured body-cam footage among other
gory endings. It’s the way of the child: poke the
dead thing, watch life switch to death. As you get
older you negotiate fear, keep it at a distance.
Apart from mountain walking in the Himalayas,
I don’t remember volunteering for fear in a long
time. And yet this is what MB and his friends
were doing night after night between school and
being texted to come in. From their perspective,
they were just marvelling at the freedom, the
view, the rush of the air.
L
ater, I showed my girlfriend the video: two
familiar skinny 15-year-olds in hoodies
squeezing through loosely chained gates,
crossing the site and hopping onto a platform.
The camera veers vertically and focuses on hard
industrial ladders inside the
crane. And up they go. Arse.
Legs. Trainers. Repeat. One
hand on a rung, another on
the phone. Then they carry on.
Higher and higher. Daylight
turns to dusk. They climb so
high that the view below looks
like it was taken from Google Earth and from
the shape of the lights and the paths I recognise
a park we’d lived by years before.
From the very top of the crane you could
see out over London – it looked fantastic – but
all I could think of was the pain and terrible
consequences of an unexpected, jagged shard of
steel on a rung, stabbing into a soft palm while
the other held the phone, or the unanticipated
starburst volley of a late bonfire rocket, or just
a big gust of wind. It felt surreal watching it. It
wasn’t Hollywood or Instagram or looking out
from someone’s high-rise apartment. It was raw
nature, right up there in the sky. When I used to
walk my son to nursery, we would wave to a man
in a crane just 100 yards away from where he’d
filmed this and imagine him waving back.
A flood of memories of his early life flashed
back: his curly blond hair as a toddler, innocent
questions such as “Why does Luke Skywalker >>
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 159
>> always wear his dressing gown?”, wrestling for
a football with him on a sandy beach in Cornwall,
him falling asleep on me while we watched
television. There were so many waves of fear
rolling through me; I didn’t want my son doing
this. Ask any parent what they want and the
number one reply will be “for my kids to be OK”.
We seemed to be at a crossroads where his
desire to explore had overtaken his sense of
self-preservation. He was at an age when dark
nights out with friends were more attractive
than being at home, but it scared me. There was
a lot of knife crime in our area, there are people
he was at school with serving murder sentences
now, but it never occurred to me that the biggest
threat to MB’s safety might be himself.
T
he ten minutes it took for his mother
to come over, after I had explained how
serious this was, gave me enough time to
tell MB I’d seen the video, that it wasn’t a good
situation at all and that he should stay in his
room until I called him.
He said, “I knew what I was doing.”
I replied, “I’m sure you do, but it’s when
something unexpected happens that terrifies me.
Those guys working on the cranes wear boots
and heavy-duty gloves.”
His mother looked stunned. I’d never seen her
this way before, like her whole world was ending.
I sat with her for 15 minutes in my bedroom; we’d
not been alone together since our divorce a decade
before. I explained I thought the best thing we
could do was listen to him and then make him
realise how scared we were of losing him, rather
than scolding him (I didn’t want to drive him
to do it more). I said she should leave without
speaking, rather than being angry. Trying
something different might make him realise this
was a higher level of concern. It was the first
instance in all that time she agreed to go along
with my take on things. MB was
shocked when I told him his Every moment
mother was too upset to see him, we’d had with
that every moment we’d had
with him would be shattered if him would
he’d fallen from the crane. shatter if he fell
The big challenge was
convincing him not to do it any
from that crane
more; have you tried negotiating with a head-
strong 15-year-old? As the discussion unfolded,
what made it even harder was that this wasn’t
just a whim, there was a whole strategy behind
it: “This is what I’m going to do for a job. Casey
Neistat has two million followers. He has
sponsors. He’s a multimillionaire.”
“You can do what you want when you’re 18,”
I said, sounding like the parental cliché from
a kitchen-sink drama. I spent half an hour
discussing it with him. I even told him I admired
what he’d done, but I would feel better if he left
it a few years. Telling him his mother didn’t want
to see him seemed to get some sort of message
home. His instincts were right, though: vlogger
Neistat has more than 12m subscribers now and
sold his short-form content app, Beme, to CNN
for £18m.
Perhaps this interest was inevitable. Since
he could crawl, I’d been taking MB to soft-play
160 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
James Brown photographed with his son, ‘MB’, in his London home, 20 January
centres and children’s assault courses full of
brightly coloured crashpads, slides, climbing nets,
punchbags and ball pits. They are essentially a
cross between a padded cell and a building
site. The primary school years were kind of OK,
but mid-teen parenting took me by surprise.
I assumed because I’d taken drugs with musicians,
had been in fights, done daft things in vehicles
that veered between cool and stupid, it would
cast me in a different light from the traditional
teenager-controlling parent. Then it dawned on
me that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done your-
self as a teenager or an adult. You are the parent
and they are the teen. The positions are drawn.
What fuelled my part in our inter-generational
standoff was fear. As I edged nearer to 50, I
had an overwhelming concern
I would die before MB knew
how to look after himself, how
to make the right decisions, to
work, earn, stay alive and be a
good person. I eventually worked
out why I felt like this. When my
mother died, aged 52, of an acci-
dental overdose, possibly in the face of another
nervous breakdown, I was left shocked and
traumatised. I was 26, but rarely shaved, owned
just one shirt with a collar and didn’t really know
much about life beyond my job as an NME jour-
nalist. That was my big underlying fear. And now
MB was adding to this by flirting with gravity
from the tops of vehicles and cranes.
I woke the next morning with the worst
feeling I’ve ever had, which I recognised from my
twenties and early thirties: coming round from
a foggy sleep and sensing a deeply embedded
nervous regret, an awareness that I’d crossed
some line, scrambling my brain to comprehend
the previous night’s behaviour and what the
consequences would be, wondering, “What is
this going to cost me in friendships, cash and
other people’s contempt?”
But this went beyond that, because with my
own behaviour I had the opportunity to make
amends. In this case it was MB’s actions that had
sewn that terror, someone I cared about more
than myself who had inspired this worry.
Having MB in my life had kept me sober for
almost 20 years. I didn’t want to be thinking what
life would be like if he fell off a crane. Thankfully
he joined sixth form, found a girlfriend, got a
part-time job and the clock face of teenage life
moved on to another important hour.
A
s I was writing this feature I rang up
MB to ask him about that moment. He’s
studying film at the University Of Leeds
now and living in the area in which I grew up.
He knows a lot more about life now. He’s on his
second Instagram account – this one full of band
shots he’s taken. He doesn’t take so many images
of buildings or cityscapes any more. When I
asked him how he felt, five years on, about the
crane climb he dismissed it, saying he probably
doesn’t even have the footage any more.
“People had been doing that way before they
started putting photographs and films [online],
you know? We stopped because the security
changed. Before, you could be arrested for it,
but it wasn’t an actual crime. Then they realised
the security implications of how easy it was and
it changed. Anyone could have gone up any of
those buildings with a bomb. Like, the Shanghai
Tower, it was mad they could just get all the way
up there unchallenged. There’s no way I’d do it
Photographs Benjamin McMahon; On The Roofs
now; looking back, it was deranged. Maybe boys’
brains don’t detect fear until they are older?” G
+ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
GORDON RAMSAY ON WHAT KEEPS HIM UP AT NIGHT
AS A PARENT (Olive Pometsey, June 2019)
I CAN’T HELP MY KIDS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA. I BARELY
UNDERSTAND IT (Jonathan Dean, November 2018)
INCREDIBLE PICTURES OF LONDON FROM AN URBAN
EXPLORER (Ailis Brennan, February 2016)
 PA R E N T H O O D

It doesn’t matter what you’ve

Russian rooftoppers
and
Vemphotographers
nos fic maximus
Vitaliy
hum utem
Vadim
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adductu
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and
were
ines se acresso done yourself. You are the
behind this image from
Shanghai Tower,Rollneck,
Jacket, £4,650. 2014 parent and they are the teen
£1,070. Trousers, £1,860.
All by Loro Piana.
loropiana.com. Shoes
by Paul Smith, £350.
paulsmith.co.uk. Socks
by Falke, £16. falke.com.
Watch by Cartier, £6,150.
cartier.com

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 161

 JED MERCURIO

With police thrillers Bodyguard and Line Of Duty and medical dramas Cardiac Arrest
and Bodies, former doctor Jed Mercurio has carved a corner of television that debunks
the great and disturbing myths about Britain’s public institutions. Here, as the crew of
AC-12 (below) finally return to root out ‘bent coppers’, the straight-talking showrunner
speaks about filming around Covid-19, claps back at his critics and – in the strongest
word possible – decries the government’s pandemic ineptitude

Photograph Getty Images

Story by Ben Allen

162 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

‘To portray
policing as a
bureaucracy
that has dark
secrets is still
eye-opening to
the audience’

When Jed Mercurio was in the Royal Air
Force in his early twenties, before his
stint as a doctor in the NHS and long before
he began to pen the most scintillating
dramas on British TV, simply flying high-speed
aircrafts was not quite enough of an
adrenaline shot.
Despite having only been on an aeroplane
once before signing on – a package holiday to
Mallorca in his teens – he adjusted quickly
to the feeling of hurtling through the air at speed
and, soon enough, he and his fellow officers
were egging each other on to break rules and
take risks. They’d fly above the operating ceiling
over the base in Cosford and dive to exceed the
speed limitation (an eye-watering 500mph) or,
perhaps most worryingly, slam the aeroplane
onto the landing strip to record the highest Gs.
This kind of recklessness was enabled by a
certain confidence in having mastered the basics,
which then provided a basis for experimentation.
“You started to push the envelope and try things
that you knew you weren’t allowed to do,” he
says, “or that you felt might be fun or interesting.”
In many ways, his approach to TV writing and,
well, everything else, is the same. In his critically
acclaimed dramas Line Of Duty, Bodyguard and
Bodies, an intimate understanding of the mechan-
ics of the world about which he writes, whether
it be a hospital or a police unit, and precise
attention to detail tell the audience they’re in
safe, capable hands, meaning that when he does
introduce intricate plot points and
shocking twists that go beyond the ‘Casualty
parameters we’re used to in TV
drama, we are swept along for the [wasn’t]
ride. It goes some way to explaining informed by
why Keeley Hawes’ home secre- what was
tary was killed off halfway through
Bodyguard (her second onscreen happening
death at the hands of Mercurio), in the NHS’
164 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
why DC Georgia Trotman (Jessica Raine) was
thrown from a fifth-floor window in the final sec-
onds of the first episode of Line Of Duty series
two after being set up as a co-lead and why
undercover agent John Corbett (the brilliant,
Scorsese-beloved Stephen Graham) had his
candle snuffed at the close of episode four last
time around. As his fiercest critics will attest, he’s
not afraid of upsetting anyone. He doesn’t want
to just land – he wants to land hard.
M
ercurio is 54 and has short grey hair
and freshly shaven cheeks. Speaking
from his home office in London in what
looks like an ergonomic office chair, he is polite
and engaged, even when we touch on topics that
merit (at least in his eyes) use of the c-word.
I had been slightly on edge in the build-up to our
conversation, having witnessed him dismantling
journalists on Twitter several times over for
perceived inaccuracies – he once labelled the
Telegraph’s Ed Power a “moron” for an article that
suggested Line Of Duty had become “too clever
for its own good” and called James Delingpole of
the Spectator a “prick” for a piece complaining
about the diverse casting in Bodyguard. But as
our conversation gets going with zero sign of
hostility, I’m put at ease.
As a former doctor, Mercurio is exactly
the showrunner – an outlier in British TV, he
oversees all aspects of the series from
page to screen – you want when making
a series in the Covid-19 era. But
there was only so much he could
do when, while filming the sixth
series of Line Of Duty – the
most popular continuing drama
of British TV set in an anti-
corruption unit of the police – in
March last year, the government
stopped community testing
for the disease. “If you can’t test people then
you can’t protect them.” They shut up shop a
week and a half before the national lockdown.
After a six-month hiatus, they got back to filming
in September. Despite rigorous restrictions in
place that included frequent testing for cast and
crew, PPE and quarantining, they couldn’t film the
show as they had originally planned. Rather than
chuck out the first four weeks of filming, which
would have been enormously expensive, Mercurio
made tweaks to the script to allow them to
complete the series. He set as many scenes
outdoors as possible and for the series’ now-iconic
long interrogation scenes he had an entirely new
set constructed with increased ventilation.
As the first prestige drama to return to British
TV with a series filmed under Covid restrictions,
all eyes in the industry will be on Mercurio and co
to see how much, if anything, was lost in the name
of keeping everyone safe. Unlike, for instance,
Holby City, where the filming of an intimate
scene required an actor’s real-life partner as a
stand-in so they could legally kiss on screen, there
isn’t much smooching in Line Of Duty. “We’re
fortunate in that a lot of what we do in the series
doesn’t involve that level of intimate contact.”
Mercurio has been damning about the
government’s handling of the crisis throughout
the pandemic. His Twitter feed, which, until
last year had been a stream of clap-backs at
critics and jovial shots from set, is now filled
with white-hot rage directed at Boris Johnson
and his colleagues. On the day we speak, the UK
death count passes 100,000 and, as a writer who
has spent his career chronicling how corruption
corrodes our institutions, he is well placed to
isolate the wrongdoings of the people at the top.
“The government very seriously considered
herd immunity. They, it would seem, probably
had decided they were going to go for that,”
he says. “And then they spent a lot of time
denying that and trying to pull back. They then
lied a huge amount about testing. Rather than
admitting they hadn’t invested in increasing the
resources for testing, they downplayed testing,
even having one of the public health officials,
Jenny Harries, saying testing wasn’t important.”
It creates, he says, “a kind of miasma where
it’s OK to trade lies. So then you get a certain
cohort of prominent journalists who don’t know
any science, but feel that they’re libertarians and
contrarians and they practise disinformation...
These people are fundamentally a bunch of c***s.”
Jed Mercurio, it should be plain, is not one to
hold back.
B
orn in 1966 to Italian immigrant parents
and raised in Cannock, Staffordshire,
Mercurio’s father was a coal miner, his
mother worked part time as a machinist.
His otherness, with a foreign name and non-
native English speakers for parents in a
particularly undiverse town, was “at best conspic-
uous, at worst stigmatising”. He was an academic
teenager, in part because he knew that his only
way out of his small town was through the pursuit
of higher education. While he watched plenty of
TV – Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man – a
career in writing never seemed like a possibility >>
JED MERCURIO
>> for someone with his background. An English
teacher at his school actively discouraged his
pupils from pursuing a degree in the subject. “He
was saying that what this country needs is people
who’ll roll their sleeves up and get their hands
dirty.” Mercurio picked medicine in part because
it had been glamorised in TV dramas, glamour
that he would eventually spend a large part of his
professional life stripping away.
In the third year of his studies at the University
Of Birmingham Medical School, he joined the
RAF and learned to fly planes while in pursuit of
a career in aviation medicine, a dream that was
later killed off by cuts following the end of the
Cold War, which meant the position he coveted
(medical officer pilot) ceased to exist. He was
urged to join the NHS to gain work experience
and started as a junior doctor in Birmingham
in the early 1990s, working, for the most part, in
emergency medicine. “It was a really intense
experience. You were working really hard, really
long hours: 100-hour weeks, long, unbroken
periods on call and just a steady onslaught of
patients to deal with.” These years informed his
first TV series, Cardiac Arrest,
a 1990s dark comedy set in a
hospital, as well as Bodies, his
lauded medical malpractice
drama from the mid-2000s,
and Critical, which aired on
Sky One in 2015. His series
are littered with storylines
that shock audiences used to
a more sanitised depiction of
healthcare professionals: doc-
tors’ errors are frequent and
catastrophic and, worse, they
seem to be treading water, rather
than in control, the majority
of the time.
Mercurio owes his career
in television to chance: while
working as a junior doctor, he
happened across a notice in a
newspaper in the early 1990s ‘Critics
seeking a medical professional to
advise on a series for the BBC. He misinterpret
met the producers, who were so scenes and
impressed by his insight they let make up things
him have a go of writing instead.
“We all watched shows like to bolster their
Casualty with a degree of frus- arguments’
tration that they seemed to be
informed by other medical dramas, rather than
about what was actually happening in the NHS,”
he says.
Though he was admittedly “clueless”
about the actual process of writing TV, he
intrigued producers by likening his idea for
a more realistic medical drama to the rough-
around-the-edges police procedural Hill Street
Blues, which probed urban decay and life as a beat
cop. “I started talking [to the producers] about
the messy world of Hill Street Blues in comparison
to the cleaner, neater world of most cop shows
that had preceded it.” The producers showed him
the ropes and he took it from there. “I hadn’t
even seen a script, let alone written one.” He
approached it like learning any other skill, going
166 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
through the basics of learning the techniques and
getting more and more creative, eschewing the
rules here and there, as he went on.
Cardiac Arrest, written under the pseudonym
John MacUre as he was still a working doctor,
starred a young Helen Baxendale as jaded
senior house officer Claire Maitland. It’s dated
by an early 1990s electric guitar score, hazy
lighting and flagrant indoor cigarette smoking,
but tonally it feels like the kind of thing you
might find on Sky Atlantic today. It dismantled
the airbrushed portrayals of hospital life we’d
seen before: the doctors are stressed out and
exhausted, the facilities are subpar (in an early
episode a new starter has to use pages from a
medical journal because the run-down toilet
is out of paper) and the patients are not there
simply to be saved (a haemophiliac teenager
dies needlessly from a nosebleed in A&E; a dying
patient is mercifully euthanised by Maitland).
The audience avatar, Dr Andrew Collin (Andrew
Lancel), is a fresh-faced graduate who is shocked
by the grim reality of the profession he signed up
for. In a scene that would later be echoed in the
Jed Mercurio on the
set of Sky One
medical drama
Critical, 2015
pilot of Bodies, Maitland tells
Collin, who has just delivered a
bumbling speech to a deceased
patient’s widow, “Soon you’ll
worry how little this all affects
you, not how much.”
Perhaps the development of
a callous outer skin is part
of the development process of
a doctor. “I think when you first become a house
officer you’re seeing things happen where the
outcome isn’t good for the patients and I think to
begin with you’re overwhelmed. And then there
comes a period of normalisation. We just went
through a process; we were passive.”
The series drew criticism for its warts-
and-all depiction of the NHS. Then-health
secretary Virginia Bottomley likened it to a Carry
On film for its depiction of nurses: lazy, horny,
cold. Her Tory colleagues went a step further,
suggesting it was anti-NHS propaganda. But it
was a hit, with eight million viewers at the height
of its popularity during a three-series run, and
was widely praised by doctors, 600 of whom
campaigned to have it released on DVD in the
2000s. They heard Maitland tell Collin, “You work
in a pool of excrement, your job is a swim to the
shallow end” and thought, “That’s about right.”
W
hile Cardiac Arrest exposed
audiences to the reality of life as a
junior doctor, it was 2004’s Bodies,
adapted from Mercurio’s novel of the same
name, that truly laid the foundation for Line
Of Duty and everything that came after it, with
Mercurio setting out to expose the cracks in
the medical system as a whole. Bodies took the
basis laid out by Cardiac Arrest – of a hospital
run by exhausted doctors who make mistakes
that lead to fatalities – and built it up into
something far more troubling, taking aim
at the omerta-like code that leads doctors to
shield one another from scrutiny, even when it
means allowing them to continue a pattern of
ineptitude that leads to the deaths of patients. Max
Beesley plays Rob Lake, a registrar who forms an
adversarial relationship with his boss, Dr Roger
Hurley (Patrick Baladi), an incompetent consult-
ant whose errors in judgement regularly lead to
surgical mishaps. In series one, a
whistle-blower who attempts to
dob Hurley in to the authorities
is ostracised by her coworkers
and winds up being sectioned
due to the emotional strain it
puts on her. Although Hurley is
the clear villain, the system in
which he thrives – administrators
attempting to secure a three-star
rating for the hospital gladly over-
look the issues – is just as much of
a target.
“In terms of the broad reality,
I honestly feel that what I’ve
been writing about in terms of
our public services over all these
years of my career has been
f u n d a m e n t a l l y a c c u r a t e ,”
Mercurio says. “Hospitals
as an institution have tended to be
portrayed in a certain way, in what we would
call the ‘drama of reassurance’. And to portray
hospitals and, more lately, policing as
bureaucracies that have dark secrets, that
engage in cover-ups, that tolerate people who are
incompetent or corrupt. Those are things that
are still eye-opening to the audience and are still
largely controversial.”
Bodies is a harrowing watch, with graphic
surgical scenes – a lifeless stillborn is lifted
from its mother’s stomach during a C-section
– and, more often than not, grim outcomes.
While Mercurio is hesitant to discuss direct
transference between his medical background
and his writing, he does admit that some of
the plotlines come from his own experiences or
stories he heard from colleagues. “We were all
sharing stories, sharing anecdotes and, occasion-
ally over a drink, talking about deeper things in
relation to our experiences.” So, in episode one,
when a doctor inadvertently inserts his tie into
a patient’s vagina while searching for a lost
condom... “That’s a story I was told, yeah.”
Was the NHS, as he experienced it, really

plagued with corruption? “In the past, I don’t
think we were calling what was going on in
the NHS corruption. It was much more about
that battle between whistle-blowers and the
closing of ranks between the professions. And it’s a
complicated issue because a lot of the time
doctors close ranks as a defensive posture.
Unfortunately it does happen that people are
scapegoated if something goes wrong. You don’t
want to see yourself or a colleague scapegoated.
So you can’t trust the system to deal openly
and honestly and fairly with medical error. You
become defensive about it.”
M
ercurio writes the scripts for his shows
single-handedly and he is very much
in control of every other step in the
production process too. He’s on set at all times,
getting in the ear of his actors and directors
when necessary. “It’s very, very rare that I
discover something has gone wrong after it’s
gone wrong. Obviously every now and then we
get to a point where we can’t agree and we see
it differently and then we have to go with what
one person says.” Will that per-
son most likely be him? “Yeah.”
With Line Of Duty, Mercurio With actor
brought the same energy of his Adrian Dunbar
as Superintendent
medical dramas to the police, Ted Hastings, 2018
taking on corruption at the
highest levels of the force. It’s
slightly more conventional in
that its protagonists – the team
at Anti-Corruption Unit 12
(AC-12), played, among others, by
Adrian Dunbar, Martin Compston
and Vicky McClure – are more
straightforwardly heroic, as they
root out the bad guys (though
the notion was challenged in the
most recent series, in which the
audience were led to believe that
Dunbar’s Ted Hastings, the most
beloved character of the trio, was
a bent copper).
The series works so well because Mercurio
constantly upends the audience’s expectations
while grounding the drama in well-executed and
laboriously researched day-to-day procedure.
Line Of Duty is as famous for the frequent use of
jargon – real police acronyms that the audience
has had to learn over time – as it is for killing
off lead characters played by massive stars. Its
famous interrogation scenes, which began as
an experiment and soon became the show’s
hallmark, are meticulously crafted, a pressure
cooker of tension that sees the team attempt
to poke holes in the story of officers accused of
wrongdoing. Every detail of the environment is
important, not least the long, mechanical beep
that plays at the beginning of each interview,
which Compston described to me as being “like
the bell before a boxing match”.
Mercurio had watched shows making basic
errors in their portrayal of police interviews – such
as officers contaminating evidence while present-
ing it to a suspect – and sought to correct them. “It
seemed to be informed by other cop shows, rather
than the real world of policing,” he says.
In making Line Of Duty, with the help of
police advisors, he got granular: how you present
evidence, the nomenclature, the terminology, the
relevant articles of law that govern the way you
conduct those interviews. “All of that adds to the
verisimilitude of the show,” he says.
This attention to detail is something Mercurio
is proud of, so when he feels a critic has made an
error or misunderstood something in the show,
he will gladly correct them, often on Twitter,
generally with expletives. “A lot of the time I think
critics can overplay their views – and it’s very easy
for me to find articles written by critics where they
say things that are wrong, where they completely
misinterpret scenes, where they even make up
things to try and bolster their
arguments. So, they’re not really
a group of people I’ve got much
‘What I’ve
written about
time for.”
That became particularly our public
evident when, in December
services is
fundamentally
2019, a storm erupted on Twitter
after he called out the Guardian
for including Line Of Duty in an accurate’
article titled “The Biggest TV Disappointments
Of 2019”, which also included Game Of Thrones
and Killing Eve. In a now-deleted tweet, he
directly addressed a young critic for her involve-
ment in the article. In it, she suggested that the
show had gone “catastrophically off-piste” by
revealing that the mysterious “H”, supposedly
the inside man at a high level in the police with
links to organised crime, was not one, but four
people. “The biggest disappointment these jok-
ers really experienced in 2019 was when they
realised what they do for a living,” he wrote, fol-
lowed by another message directed at her that
lead to several fellow journalists tweeting back
angrily on her behalf, defending her right to
criticise the show.
He felt the need to respond directly, he says,
because of the tone the article took on. “I think if
people write something then they’re responsible
for it. I don’t see why it’s OK for a journalist to
participate in an article which is fundamentally
sneering and not at least have some insight into
what a c*** she’s being. If you go into the public
domain having a pop at people then expect some
comeback. There was actually an enormous
JED MERCURIO
pile-on from journalists saying, ‘She’s just doing
her job. She’s a talented writer.’ She’s a piece of
shit. Fuck her.”
I wonder if he now regrets it. Why, I ask, did
he delete the tweet? “I tend to go through my
Twitter feed and just kind of remove certain
things. I don’t know which one was deleted.
I think the original one remains up.”
That was the last word on the matter during
our conversation, but a few hours later I receive
an email from Mercurio, clarifying his comments.
“I specifically objected to the Guardian article
because its sole objective was to sneer at TV pro-
grammes. The journalists lined up shows to take
a pop at them with no constructive purpose, as if
they’re somehow superior to mere
TV writers. I tagged the writer in
the thread to give them a chance
to respond. When they didn’t, I
deleted the thread post.”
The Guardian wasn’t the only
publication to criticise the most
recent series of Line Of Duty,
but there is little doubt that the
audience is still very much with
Mercurio. It was the BBC iPlayer’s
second most-watched show of
2019, with 27.3m requests, and
anticipation for a new series
is at an all-time high. There is
no sign that Mercurio will take
his foot off the gas this time
around, with the addition of the
brilliant Kelly Macdonald to the
cast – playing an investigating
officer on a murder whose
conduct attracts the attention of
AC-12 – likely to breathe new life
into the show.
With a seventh series of
Line Of Duty still yet to be
confirmed and Bodyguard series
two still only “in talks”, Mercurio
might have some free time on his
hands in the near future. Given his track record
of taking aim at corrupt institutions, could he
channel his rage into a drama about the govern-
ment’s fumbling of the coronavirus pandemic?
“I think there are a number of people working
in that area anyway, so it’s not something that
is immediately available to me,” he says, before
allowing, “I suppose if the opportunity arose
it would be something I’d seriously consider.”
Boris, now might be a good time to delete your
Twitter account. G
LINE OF DUTY SERIES SIX STARTS ON BBC ONE IN THE SPRING.
+ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
FOURTEEN TV SERIES TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2021
(Ben Allen, January 2021)
AN ORAL HISTORY OF LINE OF DUTY (Ben Allen,
August 2020)
WHY BODYGUARD IS A BLESSED RESPITE FROM THE
NETFLIX BINGE (Eleanor Halls, September 2018)
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 167
FA S H I O N

Rock your
body wallet
Styled by Teo van den Broeke Photograph by Dennis Pedersen

Where leather tote bags and canvas suitcases were once the only luggage items we clamoured to carry, these days,
when the most exciting trips we’ve likely made have been to the local corner shop and back, it’s all about on-body receptacles
focused solely on the task in hand. Case in point: the sea of tiny man-bags that swamped the SS21 menswear runways,
with enough room for your AirPods, phone and a small bottle of hand sanitiser. Show us an accessories trend
that is more 2021-appropriate and we’ll probably capitulate – but only if it’s a facemask.

168 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

Clockwise from left: Loro Piana, £1,050. loropiana.com.
Gucci, £750. At matchesfashion.com. Dolce & Gabbana,
£975. dolcegabbana.com. Hermès, £3,070. hermes.com.
Boss, £219. boss.com. Burberry, £990. uk.burberry.com.
Celine Homme By Hedi Slimane, £790. celine.com

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 169

 Pumped-up
kicks
We may have spent more time than ever before wearing tracksuits
and trainers, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve got a collective
free pass to start dressing like slobs. Enter, the new breed of
super-modern high-top designer sneakers, which work just as well
worn with sweatpants on a long lockdown walk as they do with
jeans – or, indeed, tailored separates – when we all start dressing
like self-respecting humans again. Failing that, you could just
break out your cherry-red gilet, denim jacket and dad jeans and,
well, look to the future.

170 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 FA S H I O N

Clockwise from left: Prada, £750. prada.com. Saint Laurent By Anthony Vaccarello, £615. ysl.com. Christian Louboutin, £660. christianlouboutin.com.
Hermès, £650. hermes.com. Celine Homme By Hedi Slimane, £590. celine.com. Louis Vuitton, £760. uk.louisvuitton.com

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 171

 Hey, specsy!
Allow us to level with you, whether and where you’ll be heading
off on a foreign holiday will be up in the air for some time to come.
Far from being something to feel sad about, however, it’s a prime
excuse, in our opinion, to dress up with all the sexed-up splendour
you’d usually reserve for your overseas summer break and make
like you’re strolling a beach in the Seychelles, even if you only
make it as far as Swanage. This new breed of super-futuristic
sunglasses is the best place to start on your journey into
staycation self-actualisation. Team with a tan. Fake is fine.

172 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

 FA S H I O N

Clockwise from left: Giorgio Armani, £283. armani.com. Berluti, £400. berluti.com. Gucci, £290. At matchesfashion.com. Bottega Veneta, £315. bottegaveneta.com.
Tom Ford, £285. tomford.co.uk. Louis Vuitton, £500. uk.louisvuitton.com G

APRIL 2021 GQ. CO.UK 173

 O L LY A L E X A N D E R

‘I want to make the community

proud. And I don’t know if I’ve always

got it rightÕ
As Ritchie Tozer in Russell T Davies’ devastating 1980s-set drama IT’S A SIN,
OLLY ALEXANDER told a story from a tragically formative decade in gay
history. As himself and as frontman of synthpop trio YEARS & YEARS,
he contributes to a new narrative. But, as he reveals here, the insecurities
and anxieties written into minority identities are not just a personal challenge:
they can shape stories told by, for and about all his peers

Story by David Levesley Photographs by Hugo Yangüela Styling by Nick Royal

174 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021

‘We understood
these characters
with a kind of
shorthand that
gay people Jumper, £800. Trousers,
£1,050. Both by Gucci.
understand’ gucci.com

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 175

It is the afternoon before
It’s A Sin is broadcast to
the nation and its star,
30-year-old musician
and actor Olly Alexander,
is buying a cat cushion.
“It’s for a friend!” he says,
mortified to be caught in the
act of buying a plush feline.
Where once being the star of a primetime
Channel 4 drama might mean greenrooms,
watch parties and a celebratory afters, this is
January 2021, so a flame-haired Alexander is
sitting in his kitchen, drinking a smoothie the
exact same lilac as his top.
“I’ve had a lot of restless energy,” he says,
having binge-watched The Real Housewives Of
New York City in between doing lots of squats
and “watching homoerotic YouTube workout
videos”. It’s not quite the normal build-up to a
game-changing drama, but is there a better way to
remember peacetime than watching a show filled
with period pieces such as “friends drink indoors”
or “strangers have guiltless sex at a house party”?
It’s A Sin is both a masterpiece and a reminder
that someday we will, once again, be able to
be eaten out by hot men. “You’re so welcome,”
Alexander says, laughing. “If I can bring anything
to the British public, it’s a lesson in anal hygiene.”
Anal hygiene are two words we have probably
never published together in GQ, but, more
importantly, are probably not the subject of
many – if any! – scenes in a piece of media not
uploaded to OnlyFans. They are, however, the
subject of a crucial scene in the first episode of
It’s A Sin, in which Alexander’s character – an
18-year-old fledgling queer from the Isle Of Wight
called Ritchie Tozer – gets rimmed by his campus
crush, Ash Mukherjee (Nathaniel Curtis). No gay
men watching came out of that scene not feeling
seen and, like all the other sex scenes in It’s A Sin, it
feels deeply realistic and fantastically homosexual.
“I can tell you I’ll never forget being practically
butt-naked with my arse in the air in front of
colleagues,” says Alexander, laughing. But by
176 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
that point, he says, he had done so many sex
scenes that it felt somewhat rote. “‘Ritchie’s got
a dirty bum! Stick that arse in the air and look
disappointed!’” What was interesting, he says,
was the dynamic of trying to produce the most
authentically gay experiences possible on camera.
They were working with Ita O’Brien – a
movement director and arguably the OG
intimacy coordinator – but, for her sins, not a
gay man. So while everyone would have an input
in how a sex scene would be best shot, “There
came a point when they would say, ‘Please tell us,
because we’re not gay men.’” So then the writer,
the performers, the director and O’Brien’s team
would come to a consensus on how to make a
threesome look like three men shagging, yet
also make it look the best it could on camera
and make sure “you never touch each other’s
genitals, basically”.
Alexander says O’Brien’s input was a “lifesaver”
for him on set. Although by the end he felt
comfortable, he was at first intimidated by just
how exposing this would be. “I had a bit of a
hysterical breakdown. I was really worried I
couldn’t do it. I just didn’t feel safe.” This was
interesting to hear from Alexander, the proudly
queer frontman of the band
Years & Years, who “spent four ‘I have this –
years on the road performing I think
and finding this character that I
do feel sexy in”. It was then that irrational
O’Brien and the team asked him – anxiety
to bring whatever made him feel about gay
comfortable on stage into the
room before the cameras rolled. men tearing
“So I would sing before the takes, me down’
be a little bit of Olly on stage,” he says, laughing.
“That was my way of tricking my brain and think-
ing it was a character. Which, of course, it was.”
B
efore he was Olly Alexander, consummate
gamine artiste, Olly Alexander Thornton
was a singled-out kid at a primary school
in Gloucestershire (where his mother ran a
music festival). He was, like many other gay
kids growing up, bullied and harassed for being
something “other”, which everyone is able to see
long before you can define it yourself. “I remem-
ber being in primary school and I had long hair
and people would call me a girl,” he says, and the
wound still feels raw when he recounts it.
“I knew that was bad for boys. I didn’t like the
things that other boys liked: I just wanted to play
with the girls and watch Disney movies. Which
obviously straight boys do as well,” he mentions,
always making sure to provide caveats to include
all facets of the human experience. Although the
bullying began to subside by secondary school
in Monmouthshire, he still stood out: he had big
curly hair – “I was trying to hide my ears” – and
would wear make-up or a choker sometimes on
nonuniform days. “I think I was trying to figure
out who I was,” he says. “Imagine
getting to discover your own sexuality
without any preconceived ideas!
I mean, maybe that’s impossible. But
it would be nice, right? Why should
people bullying you be your first
brush with your own sexuality?”
Like Ritchie Tozer, Alexander
moved to London at 18 to pursue
acting, but he also had designs on

becoming a musician. “Because when you’re
writing a song, you’re the director, the star,
the producer, the writer. I wanted all of that!
I needed that to be able to express myself,” he
proclaims with faux hysteria. For years he found
success as an actor in a diverse selection of roles:
he appeared in Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void,
costarred with seemingly every other white
British actor in The Riot Club and also in God
Help The Girl, a musical film written by Belle
And Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch. “Then Years &
Years just got to a place where it was going to
take over and needed my full time,” Alexander
He tries to think of how to put it and comes up
short. “It can chip away at you.”
He wouldn’t change a thing about his
success, he says, but that doesn’t mean there
aren’t times when it isn’t hard to be out and
proud while also getting your foot in the door.
“When we’re playing a pop music festival, I’m
looking at the other acts in the lineup and there
aren’t that many gay people on them,” he says.
“You see how quickly your show isn’t family
friendly any more because I want to take my
top off and I’m like, ‘Well, I just
watched Jason Derulo and Liam
‘Imagine
O L LY A L E X A N D E R
touring Palo Santo and, to Alexander, it felt
like the stars had aligned.
While the anxiety of performing queer sex
scenes might have been particularly exposing
for a gay man like Alexander, there were huge
benefits for him being in a cast and crew that were
predominantly LGBTQ+. “It was a revelation. I’ve
never been on a set with so many queer people.
I’ve never even worked with a gay director, so it
was a completely new experience.” Plus, being
asked to play part of a group of gay best friends,
portrayed predominantly by
gay actors, meant the chemistry

discovering
says. So his focus moved to the music. Payne take their tops off and came very quickly: “We under-
It was on their third single, “Real” – released have all these women in under- stood these characters [with
in 2014 – that Alexander first felt his art and his wear, but now I’m not allowed?’ your sexuality a] kind of shorthand that gay
sexuality really intermingle. “It was the first time What do you do with that?”
without any people understand.”

preconceived
I put in a male pronoun – I say ‘Do it, boy’ – An inclusive, comfortable envi-

I
and it’s quite subtle, but it was a big deal for me t’s A Sin marks a return to ronment was beneficial for more
at the time.” This was when Years & Years were acting but, also, a chance ideas!’ than just sex scenes and simulat-
trying to get signed to a major label, so doing to refresh Alexander ’s ing a decade of friendship. It’s A
something so consciously queer felt like a risk musical batteries too. Following Years & Sin also required its cast to grapple with the issue
(the band went on to sign with Polydor later Years’ second album – 2018’s Palo Santo – of HIV and aids, not just as a part of the furniture
that year). the third album was proving hard to pin – as we do in the 21st century, with our knowledge
While pop music has long had an element down. “I’ve been trying to make this album of viral loads, sleeping with undetectable
of queerness about it – you need only look at for about 18 months at this point, stopping partners and new medications such as Prep – but
the artists featured in It’s A Sin to see how gay and starting, listening to all the songs and... really putting a forgotten part of British queer
1980s pop was – Alexander has long been frank it’s just not feeling relevant any more.” Alexander history under the lens, who it affected and how
that sexuality and success are not always seen had always loved Russell T Davies’ work, so it changed the LGBTQ+ community irrevocably.
as natural bedfellows. At a Stonewall event in when he heard Davies was making a new TV “It’s an issue that is deeply surrounded by stigma
2018 he recounted being told during his media show he “had to be in it. I would just jump at the and there’s a lot of trauma there and a lot of fear,”
training, “Maybe it’s better not to say anything chance to work with him. And that was before I Alexander explains. “I know, personally, it was an
about your sexuality at all.” In the same year, he read the script.” Years & Years had just finished area that I was scared to really engage with.” >>
told NME there had been progress, but that “I
just know there are people who are hiding their
sexuality, so it’s still not gone completely”.
Alexander doubled down on it with the music Olly Alexander as Ritchie Tozer in hit Channel 4 drama It’s A Sin
video – featuring his Bright Star costar Ben
Whishaw – where he “purposefully made it gay.
There’s a cruising element to the very beginning.
It’s slightly ambiguous, though, because back
then I wasn’t quite ready to launch into being
the gay crusader I think I am now.” In 2015
the band won the BBC’s Sound Of 2015 poll,
releasing their first album, Communion, the
same year. It became 2015’s fastest-selling debut
album from a UK-signed band.
But despite the success, and the realisation that
audiences were either supportive of – or simply
unfazed by – the queerness of Years & Years’
music, there is always an anxiety for Alexander
about just how accepting people are willing to be.
“I’ll tell you for real,” says Alexander, “I go out on
stage – even if it’s for our own audience – and I’m
like, ‘What if some of them don’t like me? What
if some of them have an issue with me today?’
I always feel like I’m going to try a bit harder next
time, try to do a bit more.”
While the character of “Olly Alexander, Years
& Years frontman” is one that bespangles its
performer with confidence, being queer in the
music industry isn’t always an easy thing to
navigate. He remembers seeing a tweet from
someone who said Alexander’s sexuality was a
ruse to try to attract the pink pound – a term for
the spending power of gay men – “And it had an
impact on me, because I’ve consciously tried to
[be openly gay] in a lot of circumstances where
I wouldn’t normally. And then for someone...”

APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 177


On Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage with Years & Years, 30 June 2019
>> He mentions that just before filming he
made friends with an older gay couple at his
gym and in talking about the show with them
he was offered a rare opportunity to hear about
personal experiences of the aids crisis. “It can
be so difficult as a gay person to feel like you
have intergenerational support,” says Alexander.
“Elders are so important in our community. You
can get so much from the people who have gone
through so much before and fought that fight.”
For Alexander and the cast, It’s A Sin was
a rare opportunity: a chance to be brought
together with a whole group of men and women
who were there at the time and who were willing
to share their experiences with them. “I feel so
lucky that I got to engage with that and keep
learning. I was just scratching the surface and
there are so many stories you
can tell from this period. It’s ‘I just watched
impacted us all the way until
now and it will in the future.” Liam Payne
Starring in It’s A Sin has also take his top
changed what Years & Years’ off, but
third album is going to sound
like. After the initial writer’s now I’m not
block, Alexander says, he allowed to?’
focused instead on the music of
the show (Bronski Beat, Kelly Marie, the titular
song by Pet Shop Boys) “and it really took my
mind back to the club” – especially in the midst
of a pandemic, when the queer nightlife venues
that are the backbone of our community are so
desperately missed.
“All the music I wanted to listen to in lockdown
was high energy. It was dance floor. It was club
music.” This was the music that had played
such a huge role in his early life in London, had
inspired the first Years & Years album and a genre
that owes a great debt to the LGBTQ+ commu-
nity. “I think at their heart, lots of these songs are
about joy despite crushing pain. I just thought,
‘God, imagine hearing “I Feel Love” on the dance
floor for the first time.’ What a transcendent
experience that would be.”
178 GQ.CO.UK APRIL 2021
And so Alexander went into the studio – as
soon as it was safe to do so – and created a bunch
of new songs. Is it easy to find collaborators
behind the scenes who get it when he says,
“I want it to feel like Britney meets Rihanna
meets Hot Chip via New Order”?
“It can be a challenge to find someone that
really understands,” admits Alexander. He
recalled being sent round the songwriters and
producers in LA that all artists are sent round
at a certain point, “And some of those people are
amazing – some amazing queer people as well –
but predominantly... You know, they’re straight,
so it can be quite challenging.”
Feeling safe with his collaborators hasn’t been
an easy journey, but now he’s in a good place for
it. He also pointed out that it’s not just queers who
can understand his vision: his
bandmates are straight, he points
out – “I really believe in working
with straight people! Some of my
best friends are straight!” – and
his frequent collaborator, the
producer Mark Ralph, “is a real
ally to us gays”, who was always
willing to vibe along to Paris
Hilton singles with him.
A new sound – a queerer sound – isn’t just a
risk in a world where Alexander’s performances
are held to double standards and the linchpins
of queer culture can still be seen as synonymous
with perversion. The impossible standards queer
work is held to don’t just come from the straight
world: gay men can be terrible recipients of work
designed for them too.
Russell T Davies has dealt with it his
entire career: “There’s the problem of lack of
representation, but there’s the problem that
when you are represented, it’s just not seen,” he
explained when I spoke to him recently. “You just
learn to cope. I worry about it. I probably worry
about it more than I say here, but at the end of the
day it’s never stopped me writing the next thing.”
But he gets it because he, too, is a gay man who
consumes art and he sees the same biases coming
out when he watches other queer-centric work.
Yet he was amazed that artists younger than
him are still dealing with the same crises: “It’s
what comes with being a minority. It’s what
comes of oppression and you kind of expect this
to pass. But then you talk to young people like
Olly, who’s a different generation from me, and
you find them thinking the same things,” Davies
said. “I was lucky to have my training during an
age when you’d be lucky to get one review in the
Times. Now you live in a world of reviewers.”
When I ask Alexander if he worries how gay
men will respond to a gay artist’s work, it is no
easier for him to respond than it was for Davies.
“Oh, God, you’re making my heart race now,” he
says, breathless. “I should be careful, because
I don’t want to demonise anybody. But I tried
to really unpack this myself and... I’ll just sort
of say it.” It is clear that this is intense for him:
his eyes are looking watery as he tries to phrase
it delicately.
“I have this – I think irrational – anxiety
about gay men tearing me down. And I tried to
interrogate that within myself and I think it’s
complicated, because a lot of it has to do with
internalised phobias and shame, about how
I see myself versus how other people see me.”
He begins to cry. “What I do know is that I want
them to not hate me. And I want to make the
community proud. It’s been at the heart of pretty
much every decision I’ve ever made. And I don’t
know if I’ve always got it right.”
It’s tough being an actor asked to shed light
and humanity on a complex phase in British
LGBTQ+ history; it’s just as tough to be a gay man
trying to make pop music that speaks to the queer
experience. But Alexander is doing both and,
what’s more, he’s being unapologetically queer
in the public eye. There aren’t many LGBTQ+
people in the position Alexander is in and it must
be exhausting, I suggest, to be expected to speak
for the needs and fears of an entire spectrum of
sexual and gender identities. After all, he’s just
one man who wants to be proud of who he is.
“Sometimes, when I feel the most anxious, I
have a voice in my head that goes, ‘Oh, Olly, why
on earth did you put yourself in this position?
You really are not the strong person people think
you are.’” But, he says, he is learning he can’t
speak for everyone, even if people expect it of him.
Instead, he’s focusing on being proud of
what he’s done – the visibility, the audacity, the
bravery – rather than the critique of his anxieties
or Twitter trolls. “I’m always thinking about me
as a teenager and how I’m creating the person I
wanted to be in the world. I’m actually doing it!
Holy fuck!” G
Photograph Ian Gavan/Getty Images
+ More from GQ For these related
stories visit GQ.co.uk/magazine
RUSSELL T DAVIES ON THE CRITICISM OF GAY MEN
ON SCREEN (David Levesley, January 2021)
‘I’M GAY, BUT I’VE NEVER BEEN ON A GAY PRIDE
MARCH’ (Teo van den Broeke, June 2020)
OLLY ALEXANDER: ‘I’M SURPRISED THAT MORE
PEOPLE AREN’T TALKING ABOUT MALE SUICIDE’
(Alastair Campbell, January 2019)
 O L LY A L E X A N D E R
Jumper, £800.
Trousers, £1,050. Both
by Gucci. gucci.com

‘Elders are so important

in our community.
You can get so much
from the people who
have fought that fight’
APRIL 2021 GQ.C O.UK 179
 LA DOLCE VITA
Good food, great wine and plenty of sunshine –
escape to Italy this spring to explore these five unique properties,
from historic villas to contemporary apartments

Piantaverna A view of Hotel Castello di Reschio, the castle at the heart

of an ancient 3,700-acre estate in the Umbrian hills

PIANTAVERNA, UMBRIA
Set on the Reschio estate, this four-bedroom
property sits in the middle of unspoilt
countryside, with views across rolling hills.
Recently refurbished, it has an airy, light-filled
interior and is filled with bespoke furniture.
Outside is an infinity pool, surrounded by
lavender gardens. €5.2 million.
www.reschio.com
I
n the rolling Umbrian hills lies a
remarkable, thousand-year-old estate
that looks as if it has sprung straight
from the pages of a fairy tale. Bought by
the current owners in 1994, Reschio
has been returned to its former glory, with
many of the historic buildings having been
restored and now available as holiday
rentals. At the heart of the 3,700-acre
estate is an old castle, which is set to open
as a hotel this spring. Steeped in history and
atmosphere, it’s a true retreat, surrounded
by some of Italy’s finest countryside. And
if the place truly captures your heart,
there’s currently a property for sale on
the estate grounds – a former farmhouse
that’s now the epitome of rustic chic.
For those who are keen to run an estate
of their own, there are two currently for
sale in San Casciano in Tuscany, each
located in the depths of the countryside, yet
just a short drive from Florence. The first is
a small estate of 12.36 acres, which dates
back to the 13th century, and is surrounded
by olive groves, vineyards, cypresses and
forests. With more than 20,000 square feet
of living space, it comprises two villas and
seven apartments, ring plenty of space
and flexibility for future buyers to transform
and manage the buildings as they wish. The
estate also includes a 17th-century chapel,
and classically inspired formal gardens.
 SAN CASCIANO, TUSCANY
Located in the rolling hills just half an hour’s drive from
Florence, this villa is set on 12.36 acres, with over 20,000
square feet of living space in total. There are four formal
gardens, vineyards, a forest, and three swimming pools
with spectacular views. €12.7 million.
Christie’s International Real Estate: 020 7389 2942

I GIARDINI DI AURELIA
ANTICA, ROME
Lovers of contemporary
architecture will be drawn to
this stylish new development,
which is set in parkland but
is within close proximity to
the centre of Rome. The 77
apartments come with a
concierge service, a swimming
pool, a children’s play area,
and private parking spaces.
From €263,500.
Savills: 020 7016 3740

PODERE GLICINE, CHIANTI

Five minutes from the charming
village of Volpaia lies this Tuscan
farmhouse, which has plenty of
characterful original features, from
the exposed beams of the ceilings
to the terracotta tiles on the floors.
The two hectares of grounds include
a small olive grove, a barn and a
swimming pool. €2.3 million.
Casa & Country: 020 7993 2967

SAN CASCIANO, TUSCANY

This impressive 17th-century villa was the subject of an award-
winning restoration and is filled with exquisite period features. The
estate spans 101 acres, which include a swimming pool, a vineyard
The second estate centres around one and plenty of secondary accommodation. POA.
of the largest and most elegant villas in Knight Frank: 020 3553 7755
Tuscany – an imposing 17th-century
building with 15 bedrooms and soaring
rooms decorated with exquisite plasterwork
and frescoes. The house was the subject
of a meticulous restoration in 2002, since
when all of the rooms have been returned
to their original magnificence. Along with
its two substantial wings, the villa encloses
an 18th-century formal garden which is
filled with roses, herbs and lemon trees.
And with over 100 acres and a number of
outbuildings, there’s unlimited potential
to create your very own fiefdom in a truly
romantic setting.
CONDENASTJOHANSENS.COM
LAS ISLAS, COLOMBIA
Masterfully Designed Living
DISTINCTIVE ARCHITECTURE, RESIDENCES & HOMESITES
GOLF CLUB • TENNIS • BEACH CLUB • EQUESTRIAN

WINDSORFLORIDA.COM • 772 388 8400 OR 800 233 7656

 In a special supplement, Condé Nast Property shines
spotlight on the key players and the most exciting new
B R I TA I N | P R O P E R T Y
developments on the property scene. Discover the
remarkable people and places on our radar this spring

Reception room at a three-bedroom

Knightsbridge duplex apartment, available
to let through Mar unstall Property
tunstallproperty.co

Centre Stage PROPERTY | PROMOTION

Centre Stage
The Ultimate Urban Eco-Sanctuar y
Amid the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, two iconic towers provide a tranquil antidote to life in
a bustling financial metropolis. Wardian London offers apartments with wraparound sky garden
balconies and wellness amenities that harness nature with style and elegance
I
n the 19th century, Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward
popularised sealed glass cases for rearing butterflies and
transporting plants to and from the British colonies.
Coinciding with the rise of the Victorian “cult of the
home” – the ideal of a domestic refuge separate from
the world of work – these often ornate cases soon became
fashionable interior features, displaying botanical wonders
Each Wardian inside a family residence. Roll on to the 21st century, and in
London apartment the very location that ships once docked with exotic plant
with spacious sky cargos, the unique residence of Wardian promotes the
garden balcony is restorative powers of nature.
a wellness-boosting Walk around the central entrance lobbies of the 50- and
oasis high above 55-storey Wardian buildings on the Isle of Dogs and you are
Canary Wharf immersed in horticulture courtesy of vast glass cases that
CONDƒ NAST PROPERT Y
bring the changing cycle of nature inside the building.
Astonishingly uplifting, these set the tone for the dance of
light and natural energy that flows seamlessly into 776
apartments, where an expansive planted outdoor area
creates a private green haven or sky garden for each resident.
Floor-to-ceiling windows maximise vistas of the Docklands
riverscape and enhance living spaces with glorious light.
Canary Wharf is world-famous as a hub of financial
institutions, luxury boutiques and restaurants such as Roka
as well as old gems like The Grapes, with slick transport
connections served by the Jubilee Line, Thames Clipper,
Docklands Light Railway and the soon-to-open Elizabeth
Line (which will provide a 39-minute link to Heathrow). And
yet home could be a mere stroll from the buzz – an apartment
sanctuary with amenities that include a 25m outdoor heated
pool framed by lush canopies of foliage, a spa, gym,
treatment rooms and private cinema with breakout lounge.
A joint venture between EcoWorld and Ballymore,
Wardian’s residences promote wellbeing at all levels.
Materials such as marble, wood and glass harness organic
patterns, combining contemporary style with signature
touches. This year, the Sky Lounge Observatory is set to
open on the 53rd floor of the East Tower. The eclectic
space, perched at the highest point of the development,
will evoke a botanical collector’s den: a place to enjoy a
quiet drink, to read, to meet friends or relax as you watch
the city light up after sunset. How easy life could be!
Wardian London represents the best of both worlds –
proximity to the energising frenetic workplace and the
calm green paradise of home.
Please visit wardianlondon.com or call 020 3797 4535

The King of Turn-key Lettings
The appeal of luxury rental property gained extra allure during the challenges of the past year.
With his superlative network of contacts and trusted boutique service, Mar unstall presents the
most exceptional tur ey properties in London’s exclusive postcodes
T
he flexibility of renting is the savvy choice for people
during unsettled times, but never have the advan-
tages of taking on a magnificent property – without
the administrative and maintenance inconveniences of
ownership – been so emphatically highlighted as during
this period of on-off international travel restrictions.
Clients jetting into London, often at short notice, expect
tip-top standards from the first turn of the key in their
desired residence.
This is a personalised service provided with forensic
perfectionism by Mark Tunstall, who finds himself busier
than ever in his respected role in managing rewarding
landlord-tenant dynamics. With more than 20 years of
experience offering premium lettings to discerning global
nomads, London’s Mr Super Prime, a beacon of authority
in the luxury market, is quietly confident about the year
ahead. “The top end of the rental market has proven
surprisingly resilient with supply constraints forcing people
Some of the into bidding wars,” Mark observes. “The outlook for
super-luxurious landlords is very positive.
properties “On top of the usual level of relocations to London,
available to rent there is also the significant pool of people who had to delay
through Mark moves. Clients were ready to commit to a family house or
Tunstall apartment last summer, with children registered at schools,
Centre Stage
only for their new endeavours to be thwarted by lockdown.
Some took temporary respite in country rentals for outside
space; others delayed their move to 2021.”
With the April 1 introduction of the two per cent stamp
duty surcharge for overseas buyers on the purchases of UK
residential property, rental becomes an ever-more compel-
ling choice. The demand for superlative properties, such as
the perennially popular park-facing contemporary apart-
ments at One Hyde Park or Holland Park Villas, promises
a bumper spring and summer market for landlords.
For tenants, there is recognition that requirements have
changed. Clients prioritising access to gardens or an
outdoor balcony are well served, whether they seek a
lateral living space or a traditional London townhouse.
Sought-after access to the capital’s beautifully landscaped
communal gardens are part of the package in a two-
bedroom apartment in Queen’s Gate Gardens and a
spectacular family house in Ennismore Gardens. Virtual
viewings have made the search process considerably
more efficient, with clients taking a focused approach to
video tours, virtual walk-throughs and the study of floor
plans. As ever, Mark’s portfolio represents the finest
property available.
For further information, please visit tunstallproperty.co
CONDƒ NAST PROPERT Y

Sanctuar y in the Sun
With its secluded natural beauty and abundance of
wellbeing amenities, La Reserva de Sotogrande offers a
magical quality of life on the Iberian Peninsula –
exemplified by the magnificent Villa Dorado
O
h, to step into the page… to relax in a chic,
private infinity pool, to revel in sophisticated
architectural spaciousness and luxuriate in the
extraordinary lifestyle offered by Villa Dorado. With
clean lines and cool stones softened by sensitive planting,
this stunning newly built, multi-level property is integrated
into its landscaped garden to maximise serenity whilst
showcasing soul-soothing vistas from its living spaces, pool
and terraces towards the Mediterranean Sea.
Thanks to grand proportions and a prominent position
in this sought-after sunny pocket of the southern Spanish
coast, Villa Dorado has big-statement film-set allure, yet it
rejoices in utter privacy on a lush 1.28-acre site. Located
within El Mirador, a gated community of six contemporary
villas – itself an enclave within La Reserva de Sotogrande,
Europe’s finest private residential club – Villa Dorado
represents the new ideal for residences in our Covid-
wary times.
Sotogrande is more than a seasonal leisure destination.
“People are seeking alternatives to city living or looking
Villa Dorado for a place that offers a bit of a pause,” says Sotogrande
rejoices in stunning SA Chairman of the Board Marc Topiol. “The nearby
interior and exterior international school has made El Mirador a perfect year-
living spaces, indoor round residence for those wishing to make Sotogrande
and outdoor pools their home, and now the concept of working remotely has
and views across the been proven internationally, more people than ever are
golf course down considering a move, or reinterpreting their dream
to the sea vacation property into a primary residence.”
CONDƒ NAST PROPERT Y
With five championship golf courses, international
polo, upscale marinas and tennis courts, Sotogrande has
long been hailed as a sun-drenched oasis for relaxation
and the promotion of wellbeing. Twenty minutes from
Gibraltar, Europe’s most exclusive private resort has been
a haven for high-profile celebrities since the Sixties.
That low-key but illustrious allure – and the enticing mix
of Mediterranean beachfront, elegant architecture
and the security that its landscaping and design affords
– has created a paradise environment for those seeking a
discreet, luxury lifestyle.
With a community of 2,500 full-time international
households, it is also home to more than 300 businesses.
There’s a pastoral magic to such exclusive boutique-style
living (especially with the draw of those immaculate golf
courses and a private beach club), but which is also still
within easy reach of buzzy towns like Marbella and cultural
centres such as Seville, Cordoba and Cadiz. As Topiol says,
“The location is ideal in its accessibility for those who make
spontaneous decisions. Property owners can hop on a plane
for three days, three weeks or three months.”
Certainly, time spent in Villa Dorado equals ultimate
ease of life. Designed by leading Andalusian architect
Manuel Ruiz, the 2,095sqm residence has a palatial
master bedroom and suite, five further suites and nine
bathrooms alongside extensive external terraces, both
outdoor and indoor swimming pools, gym and spa. It also
incorporates two staff bedrooms and covered parking for
up to four vehicles.
For those who seek the turn-key gratification of having
art on the wall and wine in the cellar, Pedro Peña is on
hand to offer an additional interior design service. Inspired
by his strong vision of modern Mediterranean culture, the
Spanish designer specialises in conceiving harmonious
and evolved open spaces that are flooded by sunlight and
appeal in their comfort and attention to detail to both
contemplative and active lifestyles.
Above all, a property is to enjoy. In this, residents here
have a head start. Not only does the indoor/outdoor
living dynamic make homes like Villa Dorado a unique
proposition, ownership also comes with exclusive access
to the state-of-the-art amenities of La Reserva Club,
enriching every moment spent on Sotogrande’s celebrated
shores. Where health and fitness were once considered an
element of a rewarding lifestyle, wellbeing is clearly now a
fundamental factor in how people are reappraising their
way of life.
“Our philosophy is simple – protect, nourish and keep
healthy,” says Marc Topiol. “That is, to protect life, to
nourish ourselves physically and spiritually with local
delicacies and mindfulness, and to safeguard health with a
sound sanitary environment and services.”
For residential enquiries, please visit sotogrande.com; for country
club and golf enquiries, visit lareservaclubsotogrande.com
or call +34 956 785 252
Centre Stage
Centre Stage
Between the Sea and the Moors
Introducing Raithwaite Village, a covetable collection of sustainable holiday lodges, cottages and
coastal villas that lies between the sweep of Sandsend beach and the wilds of the North York Moors
National Park – the perfect heritage base for stylish living and thrilling outdoor adventures
F
or 36 miles, dramatic cliffs and sheltered sandy bays
mark the boundary between the North York Moors
National Park and the North Sea, creating an idyllic
holiday playground for all seasons. Midway along this
unspoilt coastline – notable for fossil-rich rock pools,
exploring opportunities and picture-postcard fishing
harbours – lies the tranquil enclave of Sandsend, two miles
north of Whitby. And nestled here, with the wholesome
allure of open-sky views of moorland and expansive beach,
is Raithwaite Village, an exciting new community of
sustainable lodges, cottages and coastal villas.
Over four years, 190 stylish second homes will be built
on the restored 19th-century Raithwaite Estate with
transparent sustainability measures. Each environmentally
friendly property will enjoy the benefits of a private holiday
CLOCKWISE
home to own or to let in a beautiful natural setting with
FROM TOP LEFT access to the luxury facilities of the chic 73-bedroom
Toby and Max Raithwaite Sandsend hotel. As well as a Spa, Brasserie
Hunter of Maritime and pet-friendly Conservatory restaurant, a Village
Capital; Sandsend Square will be the hub of the community, lined with
beach; Neptune coffee shops and artisan boutiques showcasing the best
Suffolk kitchen local fare. The historic city of York, spa town of Harrogate
painted in Flax Blue; and the market town of Malton, renowned for its food,
Woodland Hilltop are under a two-hour drive away.
Lodges; Coastal The development is backed by Maritime Capital,
Villa Courtyard founded by Toby Hunter and his son Max in 2014, with a
CONDƒ NAST PROPERT Y
proven record in transforming and managing exceptional
property in which people genuinely want to spend time. In
partnership with interiors brand Neptune, the aim is to
create special family homes that will stand the test of time
for generations to come.
People buying their dream holiday home will enjoy the
lifestyle vibe of a niche coastal hotspot: beach yoga, surfing,
fishing, cycling, dolphin spotting and coastal hikes, followed
perhaps by cocktails in the Bar. Or an evening hamper
delivered to your door. Neptune will provide every property
with bespoke kitchens, bathrooms and elegant interior
furnishings, inspired by the palette inherent in the beach,
coast and moorland landscape. As a bonus, every property
sale includes a £10,000 Neptune voucher to spend on
additional decoration and fittings.
As a furnished holiday let, a Raithwaite home represents
a savvy investment. From the in-house team of experts on
hand to advise throughout the process of buying off plan to
the on-site full maintenance, lettings and turn-around
services, investors will find it easy to rent their property
year-round or just when not in personal use. The first
phase will see 21 units built: three coastal villas (Yorkshire
countryside meets cool LA pad), four eco-style lodges
and 14 traditional cottages. Prices range from £350,000
to £850,000.
For further information, please visit raithwaitevillage.com
 Centre Stage

In the Business of Dream Fulfilment

Navigating the evolving conditions of the top-tier residential property market, Rose & Partners
offers boutique estate agency services to manage the life cycle of clients’ property needs.
With flexibility key, the agency has added residential rentals to its highly personalised services

I
f 2020 was a year of seismic change, 2021 is a period of
transformation. “It’s all about capturing optimism and
opportunity, and for us that means helping people fulfil
their dreams,” says Simon Rose, the pioneering founder of
boutique estate agency Rose & Partners, which brings a
refreshingly personalised approach to best-in-class
residential property across Prime Central London and the
Home Counties. “It was evident last year, when the first
lockdown ended, that people were keen to move forward
with future plans, and we were there to handle their
property needs as if they were our own.”
The silver lining of the pandemic-induced pause to
normal life was that people had time to reflect on their
lifestyle and priorities. While it is human nature to crave
certainty, the answer to the question “how do we actually
want to live and work and connect?” means embracing
uncertainty – because many concluded that they wanted specialist, Zoë Rose, who joined the team to expand these
considerably more from their home and personal space. services in response to client demand.
Where the open-plan uber kitchen is a must-have, families Flexibility is key in the “new normal” interpretation of
also now seek private study areas to facilitate both working domestic space. With more than 25 years of knowledge
from home and home schooling. Some desire proximity and understanding of residential lettings, Zoë focuses on
to parks or access to communal gardens; others want to clients’ rental needs; either renting out and managing their
upgrade to maximise outdoor space or get more room. A property or finding them homes to rent. “Clients are seek-
number want to move further afield, but are keen to ing options whether that be for sales or lettings and renting
“try before they buy” so they are opting to rent in and offers them flexibility; a chance to move out and back in or
outside London. to eventually sell,” she says. “Sales and Lettings dovetail
This level of life reinvention requires specialist planning, and it was natural for Rose & Partners to add this core
sympathetic and efficient private client guidance. Who service, covering PCL and exceptional properties along
better to turn to than Rose & Partners? Simon is on hand, the M3 and M4 corridors, giving the opportunity to list CLOCKWISE
as ever, with his legendary commitment and black book of property to rent. FROM ABOVE
contacts to assist people in selling and acquiring superior “I enjoy advising people how best to let their property Albert Hall
property. In expertise and long-term client relationships, and helping people to find their perfect rental home, Mansions SW7;
he is well supported by consultant Tom Tangney (an further building on the company’s ethos, commitment to Simon Rose; Zoë
established authority in PCL, particularly Kensington, personalised service and achievements to date.” Rose; Onslow
Holland Park and Notting Hill) – and by leading rentals For further information, please visit roseandpartners.co.uk Gardens SW7
Centre Stage
Putting the Pieces Together
Bats, labyrinthine plumbing, planning dilemmas? Call on Country House Building Consultants to
avoid the pitfalls of country house building and restoration. With 30 years of first-hand experience in
repair and construction, Tim Moulding brings an unparalleled breadth of wledge to each project
A
n Englishman’s home is his castle, so the saying
goes. Perhaps that’s why people buying a country
house assume the process of transforming it into
their own rose-clad idyll will be the stuff of fairy tales. But
to meet expectations of 21st-century living standards,
many houses require a more rigorous approach than the
waving of an interior designer’s wand, says Tim Moulding,
the eighth-generation owner and managing director of
R. Moulding & Co, which was established in 1798 and
specialises in high-end residential building projects.
“Most houses have makeovers in 100-year cycles,” he
says. “So, while some just need decoration, others need a
complete strip-out to repair and restore the roof (and
improve thermal efficiency), strengthen walls, consolidate
CLOCKWISE FROM
the facade and replace windows and floors. Scale, material,
TOP LEFT, Tim heritage and compliance make each country house project
Moulding; stylish utterly unique. It is important to establish a strategy from
bathroom with the outset.”
freestanding fittings; Frustrated by the lack of robust process and understanding
elegant English across teams working on specialist projects, Moulding
country-house launched Country House Building Consultants, which
entrance hall; operates across the United Kingdom to provide property
restored Jacobean owners with invaluable impartial advice aimed at mitigating
manor house risks, reducing costs, saving time and minimising stress.
CONDƒ NAST PROPERT Y
He offers a pre-purchase survey, spending time with the
buyer to understand their aspirations. With experience from
90-plus country house projects, he will give an overview of
the planning and compliance process, a strategy for repair
and installation of services, with a broad idea of cost and
timescale, as well as future running costs.
After purchase, Moulding will develop the restoration
process, helping to get the right team of architects, surveyors,
planning and ecology compliance for the project. “I charge
a small fee to broker the arrangements and get the
components together to optimise the process, having had
many years of experience in project delivery of this nature.
This saves clients considerable stress, unnecessary delay and
very costly mistakes throughout the project.” Post-
completion services include snagging process advice and
the creation of household manuals – as the modern
plumbing and electrical systems installed are often on a
commercial scale, so documenting everything for the family,
staff and services engineers is crucial.
As builders, Mouldings has for five years consecutively
been selected as one of only two building firms in the
Country Life Top 100 annual listing.
Please visit countryhousebuildingconsultants.co
thecountryhousebuilders.co
For your masterpiece
MEGÈVE, FRANCE PARADISE ISLAND, BAHAMAS

Kalista, Megève Casa Mia - Ocean Club Estates

Up to 2,700,000 € $25,500,000 Property ID | B8SXHW
Megeve-SothebysRealty.com SIRbahamas.com
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 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

Tranquil Riverside Living

At The Heart Of The City

Photograph of Fulham Reach.

The hustle and bustle of London life can leave many yearning for the countryside, but with hundreds of
the world’s best restaurants, galleries and shops on its doorstep, the tranquil riverside neighbourhood
Fulham Reach offers the best of both worlds.
Perfectly located on one of the most dramatic
stretches of the River Thames, and set in
beautifully landscaped gardens, Fulham Reach
offers premium apartments boasting views
that stretch across to Hammersmith Bridge
and beyond while perfectly positioned for the
best that the capital has to offer.
For total relaxation, residents benefit from
the exclusive Tamesis Club - a private leisure
and entertainment club where the hotel-style
facilities comprise a virtual golf simulator,
Computer generated imagery, indicative only.
private screening room, snooker room,
residents’ lounge and temperature-controlled
wine cellar.
With a strong focus on holistic wellbeing, a
wealth of five-star facilities include a 15-metre
swimming pool, state-of-the-art gym completed
with Technogym equipment, jacuzzi, steam
room, sauna and private treatment rooms.
Additionally, this exciting new community is
also home to Fitness Space, a boutique gym
offering customers a personalised service.
The most recently launched Holland House
and Holland Court comprise a collection of
contemporary one, two and three-bedroom
apartments which boast bright and colourful
interiors entwined with a quintessentially
English style. These new homes enjoy the
best of traditional and contemporary design
with spacious open plan designs and flooded
with natural light through floor to ceiling
windows. Residents will also benefit from their
own private balcony or terrace overlooking
the award-winning landscaped gardens and
elegant courtyards
From fine-dining to alfresco afternoons, a
variety of popular café’s, Michelin-starred
restaurants and bars are located on the
doorstep of Fulham Reach. The waterside
setting has attracted famed restauranteurs to
create a bustling and vibrant cultural enclave
in a quieter corner of the capital. Raymond
Blanc’s authentic French restaurant Brasserie
Blanc and the lively Blue Boat bar are both
sandwiched by new openings including the
renowned Michelin-starred River Café and
Sam’s Riverside, - a new brasserie by West
London restaurateur Sam Harrison and
headed up by famed chef Rowleigh Leigh –
making it a top riverside destination for
all to enjoy.
Residents are moments from the extensive
mix of high-end boutiques and Michelin-
starred restaurants along the famous
King’s Road as well as the luxury shopping
districts of Chelsea, Knightsbridge, Belgravia
and Sloane Square. This well-connected
destination further boasts excellent transport
links to the West-End and City.

Prices at Holland House and Holland Court start from £780,000

For further information or to book an appointment please contact the
Fulham Reach Marketing Suite on 020 3811 2069,
email sales@fulhamreach.co.uk or visit www.fulhamreach.co.uk.
#STB
Secu res t he b a
Olive Pometsey...
g !
The highs, the lows and the hustle with... Sir Steve McQueen
S
ir Steve McQueen has requested I tell you
a specific story. Warning: it has nothing to
do with him. It’s my personal go-to “proof
racism exists in the UK” story, the one I dig out
from my past in response to “Things aren’t so
bad in this country”. I’ve told it before, but who
am I to deny McQueen, the Turner Prize-winning
visual artist and Oscar-winning director, who
last year received a knighthood for his services
to art and film? Besides, after the events of last
year and speaking to McQueen, I’m beginning to
see the tale from a different perspective.
I was six years old, watching cartoons with my
two-year-old brother in our conservatory on a
January evening. Two undercover police officers
knocked on our door. “Where are your children?”
they asked my mother, the only adult in the house,
as my father was away for work. After some ques-
tioning to check the officers’ identities, she gave
them an answer. “Get them out of the conserva-
tory,” they said. “We think they could be in danger.”
Panicked, she ushered us upstairs. The officers
sat her down and showed her photographs of
racially motivated lynchings. The village’s vicar
had contacted them, concerned after death
threats directed at our family began appearing
on the church’s doors. They’d then found more
threats against us online, apparently serious
enough for them to feel they needed to park
outside the pub opposite our
house and keep watch overnight.
‘It’s not
beautiful,
Unbeknown to me, they also kept
watch outside my primary school over
the following weeks, in case a racist it’s horrific
tried to kidnap me at lunchtime.
– but
beautiful
When I asked why the police were at
our house that night, my mother told
me they’d come to warn about ghosts in a way’
in the village, which was situated on
the outskirts of Hull. It’s a weird feeling growing
up believing a frightening lie, only to later learn
the truth is much more terrifying. Eventually, we
simply stopped going to church.
“It’s beautiful – not beautiful, it’s horrific – but
beautiful in a way,” starts McQueen, after hearing
my account. Beautiful is not an adjective I would
have ever used to describe this story. But while
its content may be distressing, I’m realising it’s
not the anecdote itself that’s “ beautiful”, rather
the meaning and power it holds. “To tell you
guys about ghosts, because then you understand
+ The rise of McQueen From YBA to multi-award-winning film-maker
1978 1990
Visits the Tate aged nine and is Enrols at Goldsmiths, before
inspired by “Merry-Go-Round” joining New York University’s
by Mark Gertler. Tisch School Of The Arts.
the real horror of it. To make it into a fantasy
in order to make it palatable, because the real
horror would just do your head in.”
McQueen elects to keep his camera off for our
Zoom call, but I can sense his brain whirring as
he speaks. Occasionally, I hear him tapping on a
surface while searching for the right
words. This, I think, is what makes
Steve McQueen tick: stories, ones
he hasn’t heard before, that perhaps
inspire deeper thought.
While preparing for this inter-
view, I came across a quote from
Gillian Flynn, his writing partner
on the 2018 thriller Widows. “He
can get very giddy and excited about
things, which is pretty adorable,” she told Vanity
Fair. Now I’m beginning to understand exactly
what she meant, although I wouldn’t call this
particular exchange adorable. The right word
is fascinating. I’m listening to his mind work
in real time. “People need to hear that,” he says.
“OK, what else do you want to ask me?”
Well, a lot of things, but we should probably
talk about Small Axe, the series of five films that
aired on the BBC towards the end of 2020, filling
in cinema’s historical blind spot of West Indian
life in London between the 1960s and 1980s.
1999 2014
Wins the Turner Prize for an Becomes the first black
exhibition that included short film-maker to win an Oscar for
films and video installations. Best Picture (12 Years A Slave).
The series brought such stories to light as that
of the Mangrove Nine, a group of black activists
who were tried for (and eventually cleared of )
inciting a riot at a protest in response to the
police targeting The Mangrove, a Caribbean
restaurant in Notting Hill.
It was a historic trial, with two defendants
– British Black Panthers leader Altheia Jones-
LeCointe and writer Darcus Howe – choosing
to represent themselves. Ultimately, the judge
admitted that the proceedings had “shown
evidence of racial hatred on both sides”. The
fact that no one with the power to do so thought
this story was worth retelling until McQueen
is astonishing.
“As far the black community was concerned, this
was kind of a reminder of vindication. Sometimes
in order to know your future, you have to know
your past,” he says of the series as a whole. “I think
a lot of white people, possibly, were ashamed
[while watching it]. I know they were, because
people wrote to me.” He tells me that Leroy Logan,
the police officer who John Boyega plays in the
series’ third film, “Red, White And Blue”, received
a letter of apology from an old colleague who’d
never spoken to him but knew of the racism he
endured. “This is after thirty-fucking-five years.”
I
ask more questions. McQueen talks about
his pursuit of truth in art: “We have an idea
of who we like to be, but I’m interested
in who we actually are.” He explains how the
pandemic and Black Lives Matter might inspire
a renewed interest in art: “I think there’s going
to be more thirst for understanding.” And he
touches on his upcoming project, The Occupied
City, a documentary about Nazi occupation in
Amsterdam, where McQueen has lived since
1997, based on a book by his wife, cultural critic
and historical writer Bianca Stigter: “This is a
17 th-century city that wasn’t really bombed,
so you can see where things were happening.
Even on my street, there was a gentleman who
Illustration Derren Toussaint
was hiding and, in order to pay for his keep,
gave silent drumming lessons to the [house’s]
occupants. These are beautiful stories.” There’s
that word again: beautiful.
After all that, to my surprise, he’s still thinking
about my story. “How does it make you feel
about your own existence?” he probes before we
say goodbye. Boy, is that a big question. G
2020
Receives a knighthood.
That’s Sir Steve McQueen
to you now.