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82 Politics
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Editor’s letter Tate Modern welcomes back the GQ Men Of The Year Awards with (double-jabbed) open arms.
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Britain’s youth voters don’t want to change society – they want fairer access to it. Only if the left can harness that energy will it succeed at the polls.
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Details
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Take your trainers technicolour; the GQ Car Awards wave the chequered flag on 2021; from Hull to London, graffitist Xenz on the art of ecology; the Style Shrink saves your black-tie season.
GQ Preview This month’s events, products and garms.
106 Watches As the Tudor Black Bay adds the Fifty-Eight Bronze to its celebrated roster, GQ’s Contributing Luxury Editor tips his hat to a brand within a brand that punches well above its weight.
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Style Collab connoisseur Moncler scales the fashion summit with post-lockdown outerwear.
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Comedy Bob Mortimer shares tall tales and home truths in his new memoir. 106
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Cars Celebrating its 50th anniversary, Lamborghini’s space-age Countach gets a 21st-century rebuild; plus, a daily drive triple threat. 96
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Luxury
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216 The thing Tommy Hilfiger on the personal connection between his private yacht and his flagship brand.
From Celine to Cire Trudon, GQ sheds light on the olfactory alchemy behind your new flame: scented candles.
72
Taste Niklas Ekstedt fires up Great Scotland Yard Hotel; Nocturne toasts the Roaring Twenties; Ollie Dabbous serves his essentials.
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OCTOBER 2021 GQ.C O.UK 23
Photograph Will Crooks
Beeple wears jacket, £545. Shirt, £99. Trousers, £209. Bow tie, £55. Shoes, £279. All by Boss. boss.com
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From masters of make-believe, such as NFT artist Beeple and actor Sir Anthony Hopkins, to the realest queens of 2021 (stand up, you vaccine heroes), welcome, live and in person, to the GQ Men Of The Year Awards! OCTOBER 2021 GQ.CO .UK 25
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IN CINEMAS SEPTEMBER 30
Editor’s Letter
Bobby Gillespie, this year’s recipient of GQ’s Outstanding Contribution award
Photograph Sarah Piantadosi
‘Touch, I remember touch...’
I
t might, to some, seem a bit frivolous to be throwing an awards ceremony at a time like this. In truth, when we were putting together the GQ Men Of The Year Awards last year – with the vaccination programme but a moonshot and the autumn wave of the pandemic cresting in full grizzly style – we all agreed: go digital, cancel the parties, take the champagne off ice, hold the air-kissing and stop all that touchyfeely hugging. Begrudgingly, we did just that. Twelve months ago, the scientists, doctors, nurses, school teachers and frontline workers all needed more time, more of our stoic patience (and more pay), to heroically wrestle this virus into submission. Last year, the gongs and the speeches could – and should – wait. Stay home, mix a killer Negroni,
complete Netflix and leave another batch of hash brownies on the doorstep of your mother-in-law. Of course, we still managed to produce a bombastic awards issue of the magazine last year, together with an incredible awards show that streamed live on YouTube. Hosted by the one and only Jack Whitehall (loved your ’fits in Jungle Cruise, by the way), we were, albeit somewhat more quietly, able to honour the likes of Michaela Coel (for her unparalleled creative tour de force I May Destroy You), Marcus Rashford (for his role in holding the government to account in regards to its atrocious decisions regarding free school meals), the artist Charlie Mackesy and, the late, great Captain Sir Tom Moore. I remember being on a shoot with photographer Mariano Vivanco last summer, deep in the throes of putting together that issue, with another of last year’s winners, our Breakthrough Actor Of The Year, Paul Mescal. The young >>
This year, it did feel right to welcome our guests and throw one hell of a Covid-secure party OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 41
EDITORÕS LETTER >> Irish star was collecting a GQ gong for his unforgettable appearance as Connell Waldron in the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I was fortunate enough to get to know him a little and interview him for the magazine. That show with Mescal and costar Daisy EdgarJones was itself a welcome creative reprieve from all the failed homeschooling, the damned baking and teary, drunken sessions on Houseparty; one that helped get many of us through the pandemic’s earliest, darkest days and nights. On hearing that there wouldn’t be an actual awards ceremony, however, Mescal took a serious drag on his cigarette and gave me strict instructions: “Listen, next year [2021], when life is, hopefully, back somewhat to normal, you better promise to have a big, fuck-off party and you’d better be inviting me. OK, Jonathan?” Well, Paul, I was taking notes. By the time this issue of British GQ comes out, you should still be nursing a sore head from two nights prior; either that or we’re both still singing from the rooftop of Tate Modern, dinner suits drenched in sweat, with an endless caravan of Espresso Martinis and lots of hand sanitiser. Yes, distinguished guests (and readers), I am thrilled to say that the GQ Men Of The Year Awards, in association with Boss, returned like never before, live and in person. This time, it did feel right to welcome our guests and commercial partners (thank you to Maddox Gallery, Peroni and Deezer), clients and colleagues, award winners and prolific presenters and throw one hell of a Covid-secure party. We even had Sabrina and Idris Elba hosting – honestly, pinch me. (It went without saying if your name wasn’t vaxxed, you weren’t coming in...)
A
s ever, I need to congratulate the teams behind not only the awards event itself, but also this very issue; I merely stand on the shoulders of giants here. Our creative director, Paul Solomons, once again conjured the art across all platforms, be that the live event, the covers or our digital products. His vision has always been one of this magazine brand’s superpowers. Associate Editor Stuart McGurk should also be thanked, not only for his writing and editing, but his skills as a talent wrangler have been invaluable; quite simply none of this would have happened without him. I must also thank Condé Nast Europe’s Managing Director, Natalia Gamero del Castillo, and Deputy Managing Director, Albert Read, as well as our commercial team, led by the unflappable, everdashing Nick Sargent. Special thanks must also go to Events Director Michelle Russell and Producer James Williams, whose perseverance and skills are some of this brand’s best-kept secrets. Also my thanks to GQ’s Art Director, Kevin Fay, Photographic Director, Robin Key, and GQ’s digital and social media crew, Robert Leedham and Hannah Blacklock, who have steered GQ.co.uk through a period not lacking in challenges. Finally, I would like to extend my immense gratitude to our umbrella sponsor Boss, including the brand’s new CEO, Daniel Grieder, and its PR and marketing director, Taranjit Goodwin. This year marks an astonishing nine-year partnership between British GQ and Boss, in which together we have managed to deliver an unparalleled number of zeitgeist-defining cultural moments. The reach and legacy of this event is down to Boss’ invaluable, unwavering support. It’s been an incredible run and we can’t wait to sit down with Daniel and Taranjit to talk about how we can shape the GQ Awards, editorial and events for the next nine years. The future starts now. Welcome back, everyone. Pop a cork and enjoy this very special awards issue. G
Men Of The Year has delivered an unparalleled number of zeitgeist moments
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s watch collection is as action-packed as you’d expect
We’ve taken a deep dive into the Predator and Terminator actor’s watch collection, from an ultrarare Panerai Pre Vendôme Luminor to a classic Audemars Piguet.
Furry shoes are all the rage
The world’s most important menswear designers seem to be going nuts for fluffy, furry, Big Footfriendly shoes right now.
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Jonathan Heaf
Chief Content Officer, British GQ Follow us
@britishgq 44 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Fifa 22 gives goalkeepers their long-overdue glory
The latest release in the franchise is a tale of small changes that add up to a more organic game and goalkeepers are finally getting their day in the sun.
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fall winter 2021
Contributors
Photograph Alice Zoo
Paul Solomons
Rebecca Myers
Danny Kasirye
This issue, GQ contributor Rebecca Myers, who covered the Olympics in Tokyo for the Sunday Times, wrote about why Team GB deserve to win Outstanding Achievement at the GQ Men Of The Year Awards 2021. “The Olympic Games is not usually an event where you hear ‘It’s the taking part that counts’,” says Myers. “In Tokyo, however, it was poignant and true.”
Ed Sheeran is GQ’s Solo Artist Of The Year and photographer Danny Kasirye shot him for the interview feature and one of this issue’s nine covers. “It was such a pleasure shooting Ed,” says Kasirye. “Funnily enough, I had actually taken his picture before, when I had first picked up a camera seven years ago. It was a nice little ‘full circle’ moment for me.”
Over the past few months, GQ Creative Director Paul Solomons has headed our art team for his 17th and final GQ Men Of The Year Awards, which culminates in this issue. “This portfolio has given me many of my fondest memories during my 20 years at GQ,” says Solomons. “My deepest thanks go to all of the talent, contributors and staff who have helped me produce these issues. I hope you have enjoyed reading them as much as I have enjoyed making them.”
Sirin Kale
Stuart McGurk
John Phipps
To mark their Heroes win at this year’s awards, the scientists behind the Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccine were profiled by GQ contributor Sirin Kale. “Meeting Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, I felt conscious of the incredible significance of the work they’d done,” says Kale. “But they were so disarmingly modest that it almost seemed normal work to them.”
For this month’s special Men Of The Year issue, GQ Associate Editor Stuart McGurk oversaw the editorial portfolio of winners for his tenth – and final – time. “While we have some incredible winners this year, from Quentin Tarantino to Sir Anthony Hopkins,” says McGurk, “being able to honour the scientists behind the Oxford/ AstraZeneca vaccine is a career highlight.”
With the publication of his first novel, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino is our Writer Of The Year and GQ contributor John Phipps profiled the directorturned-author. “What’s more exciting than talking to someone who changed your life?” asks Phipps. “There’s a version of me somewhere in the multiverse that never saw Tarantino’s movies as a teenager. Poor guy.” G OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 49
featuring sam claflin AVAILABLE AT FLANNELS.COM AND SELECT FLANNELS STORES
Edited by
Charlie Burton
+
Photograph Mark Clennon
Sing-rap is taking over... and Lil Tjay is leading the charge – p.89
This month: Why HBO’s The White Lotus could only be made in lockdown p.67 Enough with the Trump books already! p.68 The UK’s sceniest new restaurant p.72 OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 51
Consider this your wardrobe apex Moncler’s new 1952 collection is peak post-lockdown activewear Story by
Teo van den Broeke Photographs by Elliott Morgan Styling by Angelo Mitakos
52 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Grooming Aga Dobosz Model Del W at AMCK Models Location London Fields Stronghold Climbing Centre
D E TA I L S Ð S T Y L E
GIlet, £775. Jacket, £1,055. Trousers, £405. All by 2 Moncler 1952. moncler.com. Vest, stylist’s own. Opposite: Jacket, £1,105. Sweatshirt, £405. Trousers, £405. Shoes, £365. All by 2 Moncler 1952. moncler.com. Socks by Falke, £13. falke.com. Vest, stylist’s own.
I
talian outerwear brand Moncler was one of the first luxury labels to harness the power of high-fashion collaborations to full effect. With its Moncler Genius project, the brand has teamed up with everyone from Pierpaolo Piccioli to Craig Green. Now, for AW21, it has looked closer to home for its directional 2 Moncler 1952 offering, working with designer Sergio Zambon to create a collection that is part lockdown-inspired loungewear, part comfy urban outerwear, part outdoorsy climbing gear – the kind with which the brand first made its name back in the early 1950s. “Basically, the collection is a mix of the cosy stuff we used to wear during lockdown mixed with outerwear,” explains Zambon. “It is like going out in the street straight from your bed, with your pillow and a vintage version of pool slippers,” he continues. “The opposite inspiration is, of course, the longing for the thing I like the most: travel.” OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 53
D E TA I L S Ð C O M E D Y
‘Loads of people are funnier than me. I’m just lucky’
Bob Mortimer’s memoir reflects life and near death (with perhaps a few tall tales along the way)
Bob Mortimer went from Big Nights Out with Vic Reeves to quiet nights in watching TV, but his life hasn’t all been fun and laughter bars with peppermint cuddles. As he reveals in his autobiography, there has also been shyness, depression, grief and open-heart surgery... none of which have put him off ‘car meat’ Story by Paul Henderson
I
t is 19 February 1996 and Jarvis Cocker has been “arrested” by security at the Brit Awards for storming the stage during Michael Jackson’s all-kinds-of-wrong performance of “Earth Song”. The normally mild-mannered Pulp frontman had been so enraged by Wacko Jacko’s act – the King Of Pop was suspended from a crane at the time, in full Messiah mode, surrounded by children – that he took matters into his own hands and protest-mooned the peak-Britpop crowd that included Oasis and Blur, David Bowie and Chris Evans. In the ensuing chaos, Jarvis had been roughly removed and detained in a Portakabin. And just when you thought this story couldn’t get any more 1990s, here is the best bit. Oblivious to all the controversy, comedy royalty Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are at the height of their Shooting Stars fame making merry at the backstage bar when someone asks the question, “Is there a lawyer in the house? Michael Jackson’s goons have grabbed Jarvis.” A slightly bleary Bob snaps to attention and his legal training kicks in. “It was really intimidating and the atmosphere was terrible,” Mortimer, who had been a solicitor before answering the call of comedy, remembers. “I’d had a drink but I was quite forceful and I convinced a police officer I was Jarvis’ lawyer, so I got in to see him and we managed to sort it out. Later that evening, Jim [Moir, AKA Vic Reeves] beat Liam Gallagher in an arm wrestle... But that’s another story.” Mortimer laughs and flashes his boyish daft-lad grin. When it came to writing his autobiography, the 62-year-old explains, his attitude was to include all the most memorable stories that had the biggest impact on his life and then simply weave them together. Some are funny, some are sad and painfully poignant and plenty are delightfully and deliberately ridiculous (there is even one about how he came to squeeze the biggest spot of all time, but he may be taking the pus), yet together they make a wonderfully entertaining and surprisingly poignant tale. “I’m not a writer,” he says modestly. “I would describe myself as an usually melancholic, occasionally sprightly, sometimes-worth-listeningto TV-watching dad-next-door, but I wanted this to be my book with my voice. And most of the stories in And Away... are true... There are only a couple of chapters where I put some lies in.” As anyone who has seen him on the panel show Would I Lie To You? will know, Mortimer is a consummate fibber. He is also, as far as his career goes, half of one of the greatest double acts in
‘I convinced a police officer I was Jarvis’ lawyer... Later that evening, [Vic Reeves] beat Liam Gallagher in an arm wrestle’ 54 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
From staying in to, er, staying in the car, here are Bob Mortimer’s three favourite things in the world... Watching TV
“Television is my best friend. I love it. My favourite TV show at the moment is The Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills.”
Going to bed
“As silly as it sounds, I just love going to bed. Sometimes I spend the whole day just looking forward to it.”
Being on my own in the car
“I love a solo long journey, listening to a crime podcast and eating ‘car meats’ – particularly the Scotch egg, which is very vehicle friendly.”
comedy history (Vic & Bob), an enthusiastic but clumsy fisherman (Gone Fishing), a master podcaster (Athletico Mince) and a bona fide camp-a-choo-choo-drinking comic genius (all of the above). He is also, as he reveals in his book, someone who suffered from crippling shyness for much of his early life, endured five years of debilitating depression in his early twenties, spent the best part of a decade battling “imposter syndrome” and a lifetime coming to terms with the impact of his father’s death when he was just seven. “I didn’t realise how important it was losing my dad until I was about 50,” he tells me. “That is what has defined who I am.” And if all that wasn’t enough, in late 2015 he survived a triple bypass in which his heart was “dead” for 32 minutes and subsequently gave him a new lease of life. After the surgery, artist Damien Hirst visited and gifted Mortimer an ox heart in formaldehyde that “inspired me and gave me hope that I would be OK”. But just in case you were thinking Mortimer is now living each day as if it were his last, he would like people to know that he really isn’t. “Honestly, I don’t go out that much,” he says proudly. “Most nights you will find me at home, in front of the TV with the wife and our two cats, Mavis and Goodmonson.” However, about once a year he will go into London with his showbiz pals Matt Berry (Toast Of London) and Reece Shearsmith (The League Of Gentlemen; Inside No 9) for a gossip, a giggle and to discuss which of their “less talented but suddenly hugely popular” comedy peers have inexplicably found themselves dining at “the Lucky Table”. And right now, Mortimer has no hesitation in admitting he is not only sitting at the head of the Lucky Table, but he is also perched on the Lucky Throne, wearing the Lucky Crown and occasionally scratching his Lucky Arse or adjusting his Lucky Balls. “That’s funny,” he says. “Because there are so many funnier people than me wherever I go. My friends, lads in the South Stand at Middlesbrough, even my brothers are funnier than me. I know they are. I’m not even the funniest person in my family. So, yeah, I’m lucky, lucky, lucky.” AND AWAY... BY BOB MORTIMER (SIMON & SCHUSTER, £20) IS OUT ON 16 SEPTEMBER.
Anti-magnetic. 5-day power reserve. 10-year warranty. The new Aquis Date is powered by Oris Calibre 400. A new movement. The new standard
D E TA I L S Ð H O R O L O G Y
You can have any colour you like. So long as it’s... The new Omega Seamaster Diver 300M: so black they named it twice. Meet the Black Black Story by Charlie Burton
Crystal The sapphire crystal has been given a treatment on both sides to ensure that reflections don’t obscure the subtle contrasts on which the watch’s readability depends.
Movement The Calibre 8806 movement is a certified Master Chronometer, approved by METAS, resistant to magnetic fields reaching 15,000 gauss.
Lume Unusual dark SuperLumiNova means the indexes, hands, 12 o’clock dot and diving scale don’t detract from the blackness when they’re not glowing.
T
he watch world’s dark ages began very recently. Sure, since the 1970s makers have experimented with black cases and dials, but a watch where the indexes, hands, subregisters, bezel gradations – the whole shebang – is blacked out? This now relatively commonplace trend only began about 15 years ago – and not everybody does it well. See, handled badly, an all-black watch looks flat and is therefore completely illegible. How do you ensure at-a-glance readability when the colour palette is colourless? That’s the challenge that Omega confronted
Ceramic To create the black ceramic, Omega takes zirconium oxide and cooks it with iron at 1,400C.
head on when designing its new Seamaster Diver 300M Black Black. This entirely black 43.5mm ceramic piece (yes, even the helium escape valve and crown are made from the material) has four different finishes, achieved with lasers, that heighten contrast between different elements of the watch. Look at how the smooth diving scale stands out from the ablated bezel, for instance. Or take the wave motif on the dial, which is something that comes as standard on a Seamaster Diver 300M but here serves to distinguish the handset.
Flip it over and you’ll see the only bit of the watch that isn’t black: the Calibre 8806 movement, a state-of-the-art Co-Axial Master Chronometer. While the advanced engineering inside a watch is often at odds with the more traditional design cues of the exterior, here the two go hand in hand. As with Omega’s allblack Speedmaster from 2015, the blackness defamiliarises the Seamaster’s design and recasts it as an object of the future. Bright idea, no? £7,410. OMEGAWATCHES.COM
OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 57
D E TA I L S Ð F R A M E
E
rik Torstensson doesn’t want you to buy more of his stuff. “I want you to slowly replace your wardrobe with my stuff and for you to be able to keep it for longer,” he says with a grin. That’s the big idea behind Frame’s imminent menswear relaunch, the brand of which he is both founder and creative director. “This new vision for us is all about form, fit and function – and about creating pieces that real men will want to wear.” Torstensson is a fashion industry polymath. For starters, he’s one of Business Of Fashion’s 500 most influential professionals in the world. He’s also the cofounder of Wednesday Agency Group, Man About Town magazine and the person who launched Mr Porter with Natalie Massenet.
All this before he changed tack to found Frame in 2012. “For many years, menswear was like the forgotten stepchild,” Torstensson says playfully. “Our womenswear took off and was very successful on a number of different levels, so our men’s was always on the back burner.” If you’re familiar with the brand, this may come as a surprise. Over the past nine years, Frame has established itself as a go-to source of elevated wardrobe staples for both men and women, stocked by the likes of Mr Porter and Matches Fashion. Even so, Torstensson is determined to raise its game. “I decided last year that if I was going to put my name to it, Frame’s menswear had to be based on what I believe in: dressing a man’s character rather than following fashion.”
Shirt, £285. T-shirt, £75. Jeans, £305. All by Frame. frame-store.com. Shoes, model’s own.
Frame’s style hit squad T takes down fast fashion Erik Torstensson has assembled a crack crew to put more high-grade staples in your wardrobe… and keep them there Story by
Aleksandar Cvetkovic Rollneck by Frame, £505. frame-store. com. Sunglasses, model’s own.
o realise this new direction, during the first UK lockdown Torstensson pulled together a “menswear swat team” who were tasked with designing what a modern man’s “wearable” wardrobe could look like. Frame’s new CEO, Nicolas Dreyfus (formerly global CEO of The Kooples), also brought a wealth of experience to the table. “My strategy was to work with the team to propose a new system of dressing,” Torstensson continues. “I wanted a blueprint for men of all ages to be able to put something together.” This blueprint underpins Frame’s new Fall 2021 collection, which features three tight sub-collections. The first is “Modern Classics”: “True staples that are perhaps just ten or 15 per cent more directional than you might find elsewhere, like the tailored overcoat or cashmere sweater you fall in love with and keep for 20 years.” Then comes “Smart Comfort”, Frame’s response to the “casualisation” of menswear that’s been accelerated by pandemic life; standout pieces include technical padded blazers, nylon gilets and tapered drawstring trousers with discreet cargo pockets. These two ranges are anchored by the third collection, “Denim”, comprising refined versions of those long-standing designs the brand has built its name on – truckers, jeans and cords – many of which use the same high-performing characteristics seen in Modern Classics and Smart Comfort. “We’ve got antimicrobial and biodegradable denim running through the collection,” Torstensson says. Other pieces feature stretch fabrics, breathable fabrications and the brand is experimenting with waterless denim for 2022 too. At the heart of all of this, however, lies an emphasis on slow fashion – these are pieces designed to last for many years. It’s something Torstensson thinks other designers should embrace too, especially in a world where, postCovid-19, we’ve all had time for reflection. “It’s more important than ever for you to have a long-term view,” he says. “Social media, quickturnaround production and throwaway trends create enormous stress for fashion brands, but it can take 50 years to build a company or turn one around. I think it’s very healthy for brands to remember this, especially in today’s landscape.”
‘Frame’s new vision is about form, fit, function’
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#ThisIsYourTime
TISSOT prx automatic. A SWISS MADE THROWBACK TO A FLAGSHIP TISSOT DESIGN FROM 1978. T I S S OT WATC H E S . C O M
The car that fell to earth Fifty years ago, the Lamborghini Countach arrived like a UFO. Now it is reborn in 2021 and it still looks out of this world Story by
Jason Barlow
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ineteen seventy-one: this was the year that finally faced up to the huge legacy of the previous decade and said, “Now we do things differently.” David Hepworth’s sublime book 1971 – Never A Dull Moment: Rock’s Golden Year dissects the year’s incomparable musical milestones – Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and David Bowie’s Hunky Dory to name two – but there was creative fever in the automotive world too. At that year’s Geneva Salon, Lamborghini unveiled the Countach LP500, a design study that completely reset the coordinates for the coming decade. Its creator, Marcello Gandini, had already sent car design spinning in a quasi sci-fi direction at Bertone with 1968’s Alfa Romeo Carabo and 1970’s Lancia Stratos Zero. This pair saw the Italian design house reject the curves and sensuality epitomised in Lamborghini’s Miura to create a spectacular new idiom. No one expected it to make the hyperspace jump to reality, but the still-young Bolognese supercar maker ran with Gandini’s vision for 1974’s production version. “This was a car that really shocked,” Lamborghini’s chief technical officer, Maurizio Reggiani, tells GQ. “It arrived in the world like a UFO.”
60 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Old and new design elements combine in the 50th anniversary Lamborghini Countach
Here was a rare example of a car that became a cultural phenomenon, which lit up the 1970s and bestrode the 1980s too, as it sprouted priapic wings and wheel arch extensions in a way that mirrored an egocentric new attitude (remember the Quaalude scene in Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street?), its mid-mounted V12 eventually gaining four valves per cylinder to make 414bhp. So imagine the scale of the challenge Lamborghini faced when it decided to do a 50th anniversary homage. This could have been a zerosum game were it not for the people involved and the quality of the execution. Lamborghini’s design boss is a guy called Mitja Borkert, who has form in his past life at Porsche: he did the Mission E Concept that prefigured the Taycan and he also had the temerity to reimagine another automotive lodestar, the Porsche 917. That one didn’t make it, but the new Countach is alive and well,
D E TA I L S Ð C A R S
NEED TO KNOW Engine 6.5-litre 804bhp V12 Performance 0-62mph in 2.8 seconds; top speed, 221mph Price £2 million Contact lamborghini.com
will be produced in a run of just 112 units and is yours for somewhere in the vicinity of £2 million. Its full name is Countach LPI 800-4 and its technical spec will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the recent Sián hypercar. The truth is, this isn’t a wholly new car but another spin on the hard points that underpin the hugely successful Aventador and its derivatives. But this is our kind of spin: the engine is a 6.5-litre V12 that produces 770bhp under its own steam, aided and abetted by a 48-volt electric motor that throws another 34bhp into the mix. The “I” part of LPI stands for Ibrido (hybrid), indicating Lamborghini’s tentative first steps on a road that will eventually culminate in full electrification. Typically, there is a degree of Lambo wilfulness here: the e-motor is directly connected to the wheels and that extra power is there primarily to ride out the torque interruption during gear changes. It’s also fed by a supercapacitor rather than a lithium-ion battery and has a greater power density as a result. But really this is about how the car looks. In difficult times there’s a tendency to raid the past for succour, but the car industry has thankfully weaned itself off retro. Like Land Rover’s latest Defender, the Countach envisions a car that never ceased production, instead cycling through the iterations it might have enjoyed if it had continued. The result is a car that is quintessentially Countach, without a hint of pastiche. “The Countach went through a lot of versions during its life, so the idea was to have a clean, timeless design for this one,” Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann tells us. “We wanted to highlight the signature elements: the squaredoff wheel arches, the quad exhaust and the air intakes. We didn’t want to overload the car. “This is a pure celebration of something that happened 50 years ago. I don’t like retro cars; I prefer to have a forward-looking vision. But the original didn’t just change Lamborghini’s DNA, it changed everything in the world of super sports cars. So this is a valid exercise. The Countach is always the reference car. It was the first of a kind.” And now it’s back.
Car pool What else GQ has been driving this month...
DS 9 Oddly enough, being different in 2021 means rejecting the SUV and embracing one of the oldest car forms of them all – the saloon – and also swerving the tyrannous need to be sporty at all costs. DS Automobiles is a French brand that prioritises sumptuous interior design and remarkable refinement over handling smarts, although the 9 glides down the road with a pliancy and hush that chimes with the push for mindfulness in general. Go for “Opera” spec for maximum luxury, nappa leather and pearl stitching. If Louis Vuitton did cars, this might be the result. From £40,615. dsautomobiles.co.uk
Audi R8 Spyder V10 Performance The legendary R8 Spyder should, by rights, feel like yesterday’s news. And yet, despite having turned heads (and turbo-rattled teeth) for more than a decade, this everyday supercar is still delivering shock, awe and shit-eating grins galore. The numbers alone are enough to get us hot and bothered: the 5.2-litre V10 produces 612bhp, 0-62mph in 3.2 seconds, a top speed of 204mph and the roof goes down in 20 seconds flat. But it’s the way it sounds that lives longest in the memory. When electric cars eventually rule the world, GQ will miss the sonic soundtrack of the R8 Spyder more than anything. From £163,580. audi.co.uk
‘The new Countach is a pure celebration of the original 50-year-old car’ Peugeot 508 Sport Engineered
The new Countach (left) alongside the original concept, first shown in Geneva in 1971
Related to the DS 9 but on a performance mission, this 508 builds out on what may well be the best-looking mainstream car currently on sale. It’s technically fascinating: its 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine makes 197bhp, but coupled to that are a pair of electric motors worth another 108bhp on the front axle and 111bhp on the rear, plus a 11.5kWh battery – except that it’s not all working at the same time, with peak power limited to 355bhp. It’s all about bandwidth, including a pure electric mode good for 26 miles, as well as more aggressive chassis configurations. Different, fast and desirable. From £53,995. peugeot.co.uk OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 61
D E TA I L S Ð E N T R E P R E N E U R
Ethan Brown has been conducting a lab-based quest for better plant-based meat alternatives since founding Beyond Meat in 2009. Today, foodies can order his products in 119,000 outlets in more than 80 countries worldwide. Here’s what he’s learned... Cross the streams When you take something from one field and apply it to another, and you’re the first to do that, you can be successful. I was working in energy for a company that was making proton-exchange membrane fuel cells. I was going to conferences with the [US] Department Of Energy and others, talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of investment necessary to set up a world that runs on renewable energy. So I was used to the idea that if there’s a global problem, you try to put together the best engineers and scientists in the world and let them do what they’re good at. Before we started doing this [developing plant-based meat alternatives], there were a lot of very talented people in the food business who were doing it, but they were approaching it as a culinary exercise that had some food scientists [helping them]. What we tried to do was take that mentality of the best engineers, best scientists, robust budgets, a big mission and bring that to food.
Hire people who build systems, rather than rely on them Let’s say we have 800 employees. You hire someone from Ford and they come in and they say, “Wait a minute, there’s not the right systems here. And I can’t believe it.” You’ve got to look them in the eye and say, “Did you expect it? Why? You’re coming from a massive company [of 186,000 employees].” So we want people who come in here and take ownership of growth.
62 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
The
SECRETS of MY SUCCESS Ethan Brown, founder of Beyond Meat Story by
Thomas Barrie
a brand you could point to and say, “Look, we’re killing it at Walmart, at Whole Foods, etc.”
Lose the safety net A CEO is paid to take risks. People that start businesses but hedge too much just don’t get the growth they want to get. It’s crazy advice, but you have to remove the safety net if you really want to be successful. So trying to do it while you have another job [is a mistake]. I went through all my finances... then my mind started to focus!
The future isn’t necessarily remote
Don’t hide your failures
Profile Age 49 Born Washington, DC Lives Los Angeles Relationship status Married with two children
By the time someone has reached me [for interview], it really comes down to intangibles: how badly they want it; how they deal with adversity. Often, you’ll see something on their résumé that maybe was a failure – maybe someone took a turn in their career when they decided to start their own business and it didn’t work. They shouldn’t hide that. That’s a really great thing. I say, “Oh, tell me all about that and how you rebounded.”
Supply-side, name recognition still matters I started the business selling into restaurants, hospitals, hotels and universities. In 2012, the New York Times had done a front-page “Sunday Review” article on the quality of our then chicken product. I felt so confident in the quality of the product we had that I hired a nationwide sales team in food service. And it didn’t work. Basically, we hadn’t built the retail brand. People wanted to see if their customers wanted it and we didn’t have the level of awareness that you needed. Even if the consumer was heading this direction, the people I was talking to in the back offices were lagging behind. [We needed to] build
For my industry, you need to be here in the office, because what we’re doing is so full of challenges that require group connectivity. When you’re trying to launch a new product, it’s the moments in and out of meetings that matter so much and nonverbal cues and communications are so important. Trying to rally a team and keep a team intensely engaged in a distributed workforce is hard. I think people’s expectations have changed [during the pandemic], but this is a very important part of our business.
Read lots of books at once For anyone who is interested in entrepreneurship and innovation, Steven Johnson is a terrific writer. One of the things he writes about, which I follow, is reading in quick succession. Have four or five different books going [at the same time], keep notes about them in the same notepad and then your brain starts to make these connections across adjacencies. One of my favourite books is The Everything Store [by Brad Stone] and I think Loonshots by Safi Bahcall is a really good book on how to create a culture of innovation. I had him come speak to the company, I liked it so much. And I just sent Warren Buffett’s The Making Of An American Capitalist to a younger colleague here. I read a lot. I don’t understand how people generate new ideas without reading.
D E TA I L S – L U X U R Y
What does your scented candle say about you? Actually it says a lot, the menace Teo van den Broeke
nce the preserve of the world’s snootier fashion boutiques, spas and madams’ boudoirs, scented candles have, over the past decade or so, risen to the same level of masculine must-have as a go-to fragrance or pair of lucky pulling pants. The truth is, however, that far from being a one-size-fits-all situation (that Yankee Candle you picked up in Sainsbury’s will not cut the wax, rest assured), there’s a specific art to figuring out which flaming fragrance disseminator will best suit your home. If you’re a Barolo drinker, for instance, and have a thing for ponyskin sofas, you’ll probably want to try Cire Trudon’s Ernesto for size. If, on the other hand, you’re a little fruitier by nature, Jo Malone London’s Pomegranate Noir might be the one for you. See, told you it was complicated.
If you want to look chic AF Celine’s new scented candle line is the embodiment of Gallic “look-at-me-don’t-lookat-me” elan. With one swipe of a match you’ll be as cool as Hedi Slimane and Serge Gainsbourg (left, with Jane Birkin) rolled into one. Promettre. Tambour Noir by Celine, £75. celine.com
If you are absolutely fucking fabulous
If you ate too many penny sweets as a child
If you’re more of a summer person
If you’ve got a bit of a kinky side
An orgy of leather, lavender, sage and iris, this banging scented candle from the master of souped-up sexiness, Tom Ford, does precisely what it says on the tin (and then some).
Sweet and dense, not unlike a Black Jack, Jo Malone’s Pomegranate Noir is laced with notes of pomegranate (duh), guaiac wood and patchouli and smells good enough to eat.
As bright as orange peel and as rich as Campari, this summer-laced candle from Acqua Di Parma will transport you to the Amalfi Coast, even if it’s tricky to travel there right now.
Smoked through with notes of tobacco and leather, Cire Trudon’s Ernesto is also a favourite of Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, so you know what you’re getting yourself in for.
Fucking Fabulous by Tom Ford, £98. tomford.co.uk
Pomegranate Noir by Jo Malone London, £50. jomalone.co.uk
Aperitivo In Terrazza by Acqua Di Parma, £55. acquadiparma.com
Ernesto by Cire Trudon, from £35. trudon.co.uk
64 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Photograph Getty Images
Story by
Three days of live, in-person interaction, conversation and entertainment with the world’s biggest names in business, fashion, technology, sport and culture
First speakers announced...
Guy Berryman Coldplay bassist and founder of the Road Rat magazine and fashion label Applied Art Forms.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II American actor and star of The Trial Of The Chicago 7 and the highly anticipated Matrix sequel.
Ben Francis Entrepreneur and founder of fitness brand Gymshark, which in 2020 was valued at £1 billion.
Billie Piper Olivier Award-winning actor and star and cocreator of Sky Atlantic’s I Hate Suzie.
Riz Ahmed Actor, producer, director, musician and Oscar-nominated star of Sound Of Metal.
Griff Pop singer-songwriter and this year’s winner of the Brits Rising Star award.
Olly Alexander Singer-songwriter, LGBTQ+ advocate and lead of critically acclaimed drama It’s A Sin.
Matt Haig Journalist and bestselling author of Reasons To Stay Alive and The Midnight Library.
To register interest for tickets and accommodation, sign up now at
gqheroes.com
3 - 5 November 2021, Soho Farmhouse, Oxfordshire
D E TA I L S Ð T E L E V I S I O N
The White Lotus is dark, weird and completely brilliant But it would never have been commissioned were it not for Covid Story by
Stuart McGurk
for whom the quiet intimacy of vacation is a slow-burn torture of microaggressions and culture clashes (he’s from money; she is not). There’s the Mossbacher family, also of mismatched wealth (Nicole, played by Connie Britton, is a rich CFO; her husband, played by Steve Zahn, feels emasculated as a consequence), who spar with their sulkily woke daughter (Sydney Sweeney), who is against their own white privilege, just not enough to have stayed at home. There is Tanya, a woozy emotionally raw heiress (Jennifer Coolidge, whose performance deserves every award going), who has arrived to scatter her late mother’s ashes and who sucks everyone she can into her emotional orbit. And buzzing around them all is the tight-grinned hotel manager, Armond (Murray Bartlett), whose own battle to stay off the booze and the drugs... Let’s just say it doesn’t go well.
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Mike White’s scathing examination of privilege features (right, from left) Sydney Sweeney and Brittany O’Grady
Photograph Home Box Office, Inc
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The result is not only one of the darkest, ast summer, TV showrunner Mike White was cooped up at home and doom-flicking smartest shows of the year – the genesis of the the news channels like the rest of us when mismatched couple having expanded to be an acute social satire about wealth, privilege, power he got a call from HBO: the prestige US cable and sex that follows several of the resort’s guests channel was in trouble. The pandemic had caused – but also, frankly, one of the weirdest. severe delays to some of its productions and shut others down entirely. And while film companies The White Lotus starts with a typically splashy setup. We see one of the guests, an entitled douche chose to simply shift their major releases back a guy from a wealthy New York family, waiting for year, that was hardly an option for a subscription his flight home on his own after the holiday is cable channel: without any new shows, it ran over. He explains to fellow travellers that someone the risk of those subscriptions being cancelled. died during his time at the resort and And so it asked White, who had a rep Not a lot that he was there on his honeymoon. as a fast writer and is best known for He does not explain where his wife is. Enlightened, if he had any Covid-safe happens... So far, so murder mystery. Except, well, ideas up his sleeve. White had always but it’s not a murder mystery at all. In fact, wanted to make a show about a couple everything right up until the penultimate episode on honeymoon suddenly realising they matters – which contains the only moment of had wildly different values. And while genuine violence in the show – you almost forget he knew it would have to be more than that, he about the setup entirely. Instead, you find yourself also knew that, for once, he was holding all the sucked into a tense, tight series of interlocking cards. Maybe, he thought, he’ll just be able to go character studies that have more to say about our and do exactly the show he wanted to do. current anxieties and alienations than any other The idea was this: the production would essenshow on TV. It’s a biting social commentary in tially rent out an entire luxury resort (the Four Seasons in Maui, Hawaii, shut down at the time) which not a lot happens – they’re on an island, after all – but everything matters. and so create a Covid-safe filming bubble for all the cast and crew. White began writing in August There’s the aforementioned couple, Shane and Rachel (Jake Lacy and Alexandra Daddario), and they started filming in October.
atching TWL you wonder if there’s any way this would have been commissioned in a pre-Covid world. Even by the standards of slow-burn TV, it’s distinctly action free and beyond the dead body MacGuffin there’s hardly a high-concept sell to speak of. But the tightly wound manager sets the tone: the realisation that it’s only on holiday, when the distractions of the everyday are no longer taking up our time, that we finally face everything that was festering all along. The result isn’t relaxation, but almost permanent agitation (even the show’s soundtrack is jumpy). And at the root of it all: wealth. It’s most obvious in the misguided marriage of the newlyweds, of course, and it’s clearly there in the Mossbachers, not least in their daughter’s college friend, Paula (Brittany O’Grady), the only guest who isn’t white and who embarks on an ill-fated liaison with one of the staff. And just as importantly it’s there in the disparity between the guests and the staff themselves, including the casual cruelty that privilege often provides. This is no better shown than when Tanya befriends spa manager Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) with the seemingly well-intentioned encouragement to set up her own spa... and maybe she could invest? This would be life-changing for Belinda, but we always suspect it’s never more than narcissistic manipulation: Tanya’s way of ensuring someone has to listen to her. The show is only six episodes, but it’s a marvel. Who knew what we were really missing in Covid times was the holiday from hell? THE WHITE LOTUS IS ON SKY ATLANTIC NOW.
+ The GQ black book: life-improving contacts from our Rolodex of insiders Tim Pateman, hairstylist to the stars For a long time, the only way to have your hair cut by Tim Pateman (left) was to know someone who could introduce you. He didn’t have a salon, he didn’t have a website, he had a number – a number that was lodged in the phones of a good chunk of the “it” crowd. These were typically people whose hair he had cut on the set of photoshoots for brands such as Nike and magazines such as Vanity Fair (musicians, actors, sports stars) and who were so enamoured of the results that they wished to see him privately. Before awards shows, Pateman would find himself driving between hotels and residences to sharpen up the dos of attendees, who counted on him to make them look their best. Inevitably, his roster of clients became so great he had to open a permanent base. The result was his salon, The Lion & The Fox, near London’s Chancery Lane, where even mere mortals can book a haircut with the man himself. That is, if you phone well in advance... 28 HATTON WALL, LONDON EC1. THELIONANDTHEFOX.COM
OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 67
D E TA I L S – L I T E R AT U R E already gave us A Very Stable Genius, return to the scene for I Alone Can Fix It: Donald Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year. And that catastrophic final year is also the subject of a book by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, out this month, and Betrayal by Jonathan Karl, out in November. The odds of any containing profound, paradigm-shifting new insights for the historical record are longer than the odds of Eric Trump becoming president in 2024, but each promises what really matters: the chance to revisit an excitingly chaotic story with fresh morsels of gossip.
Why are we still crazy about Trump books? Readers remain agog for accounts of the Trump presidency – and, boy, is the publishing world delivering. But the reasons behind it aren’t political, they’re literary... Story by Sam Leith
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t was the devoutest hope of many people around the world that, after losing power in the 2020 presidential election, Donald J Trump would vanish back into dignified or undignified semi-obscurity. Perhaps he’d eke out his remaining days shuffling about Mara-Lago with his tie trailing on the floor, glad-handing golfers and photobombing the odd wedding party. Perhaps he’d spend years mired in inconclusive legal proceedings or ranting on Gab about the stolen election. It didn’t even matter much what. He just needed to leave the national and international conversation and let nature heal. That hope was nowhere more fervently held, I suspect, than in the Biden White House. You’ll notice that, like a Hogwarts press conference in which He Who Must Not Be Named is very much not named, the T-word never seems to pass the lips of a White House press spokesperson. You might get a prissy mention of “the previous administration” and Biden has been known to refer to “the other guy”, but you don’t hear the name of Trump all that often. It’s like they hope if they don’t say his name he’ll disappear. Sleepy Joe just wants politics to be boring again: technocratic, moderate, gradualist, competent and not more personality-driven than necessary. Well, good luck with that. For, alas and alack, the media and publishing industries have other ideas. How can
Biden expect a clear run, a calm framing of a new era, when all anyone is really interested in is looking at the scratches and gashes left behind from the last guy chewing the scenery? “I am not only witty in myself,” says Shakespeare’s Falstaff, “but the cause that wit is in other men.” To adapt the quote for another distinctively Shakespearean figure, Donald Trump is not much for books himself – but he is the cause of books in other men. You might imagine by now that there was no Washington journalist who had not written a book on the Trump administration, no unindicted co-conspirator or short-lived White House employee who had not shovelled out a tellall memoir. But my goodness, they keep coming. And they keep selling. Two of the biggest names in high-end US journalism, Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright, have just released accounts of the first pandemic year – which is to say, in large part, accounts of the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19. Another – Nightmare Scenario, written by a pair of Washington Post reporters – covers the same territory. Many are returning for a second or even a third bite of the cherry. Michael Wolff is on his third Trump book – following Fire And Fury and Siege with Landslide, which taken together sounds like the elevator pitch for the Bruce Willis movie someone wisely declined to make. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, who
Trump’s ‘good copy’. And that’s the problem
68 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Trump still looms large in a slew of new books from major political writers
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rump might no longer have juice – at least not outside the increasingly demented Republican Party – but he remains juicy. He is, in a way perhaps no other president ever has been, what we in the trade call “good copy”. And that’s the problem. I said he was “Shakespearian” and I did not mean it idly. Could you imagine Biden being, as Trump was, the inspiration for a controversial New York production of Julius Caesar? Trump’s rise, Trump’s pomp, Trump’s fall and Trump’s sputtering attempts to create himself a fourth act amid circling legal problems, rumours of family betrayal and the ongoing insanity of QAnon... these things are not the stuff of regular Beltway reporting but of grippingly vulgar melodrama. Succession and Game Of Thrones are the comparators for which people reach. Ordinarily, a reheated account of a year-old period of political history – a few fresh quotes here, a few extra details there – appeals to only a tiny minority of political obsessives. But the reading public clearly remains agog for new accounts of the last days of Trump and they are agog essentially for literary reasons rather than political ones. It’s all about the narrative. That may seem to be to one side of politics, but narrative can have more impact on a nation’s fate than politics ever can. Storytelling feeds politics. It was, after all, Trump’s narrative charisma that got us here in the first place. If he hadn’t been so damn interesting, well, nobody would have been interested in him. And it’s damnably difficult to pull the spotlight away from him now by saying, “Look at me, over here, fellas! I’m soberly and sensibly getting on with the important stuff!” Ironic, given all the evidence suggesting that he’s never read even his own books all the way through, that Trump has become a literary figure of sorts. He is something more dangerous and compelling than a politician, now: he’s a myth.
Tr a n s f o r m t h e w o r l d y o u w a l k i n
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Autumn Winter 2021 triumphmotorcycles.co.uk/GQ
Triumph Motorcycles Lifestyle Collection does not include body armour as does not provide the same CE protection as rider wear
Menswear Lifestyle Collection
Chef Niklas Ekstedt (bottom) brings his open-flame cooking concept to London
The Restaurant
A song of ice and fire Niklas Ekstedt brings the heat and a taste of Scandi noir to Great Scotland Yard Hotel Story by Millicia West
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his month sees Swedish chef Niklas Ekstedt bring his signature old Nordic style to one of London’s most historic buildings, Great Scotland Yard. But how can Ekstedt, whose Stockholm restaurant famously swerves conventional (and convenient) gas and electricity in favour of fire in all its forms, make the leap to a multiservice hotel restaurant? “That’s the challenge,” he says, laughing, “but it’s all part of the fun.” Whether three-pin plugs will feature on Ekstedt At The Yard’s floor plan remains to be seen, but it’s clear that the chef’s steadfast commitment to using “natural heat, soot, ash, smoke and fire” will carry forward to the capital. “They are my DNA, my philosophy,” he explains. “I’ve been researching techniques brought over by the Vikings in 1066, so I’m excited to see how we can explore and evolve those ideas.” As is Scandi-standard, pickles, ferments and cultures, alongside freshly churned butter and bread, will all be made in-house. Though Ekstedt is keen for the London restaurant to forge a distinct identity from his flagship’s Michelin-starred formula, he has spent Sweden’s long lockdown revisiting menus and will use the most popular dishes of the past decade as a launchpad for his latest project. The dish he is most excited to debut? It’s a tie between oyster flambadou with smoked apple and beurre blanc nasturtium and the cep soufflé with birch ice cream and blueberries. As for the drinks offering, expect a curated lineup of low-intervention organic wines and a focus on foraged cocktails, which will nod to childhood memories of roaming the forests and fields of Järpen... just with a higher ABV. 3-5 GREAT SCOTLAND YARD, LONDON SW1. 020 7925 4700. EKSTEDTATTHEYARD.COM
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D E TA I L S – TA S T E The Bar
The Roundup
Lakes superior Three essential Cumbrian destinations
All night long Nocturne is bringing back Prohibition, but in a good way
“Prohibition” bars might be well covered on the London scene, but Nocturne in South Kensington – a collaboration between barman Steve Pineau and sommelier Xavier Rousset – proves there’s life in the old theme yet. Where Pineau has created a killer cocktail list of “Vintage”, “Pre-Prohibition” and “Prohibition” serves, Rousset’s section of the menu champions winemakers from France and Italy, with wines at affordable price points and served by the glass. GQ recommends kick-starting your evening with the Leeds 1920s (a lemon- and lime-infused tequila cocktail topped with Champagne), before moving on to wine with nibbles. As with the venue upstairs, artisan cheese and British charcuterie are the order of the day, with a rotating selection covering the likes of Cornish chorizo, venison, Golden Cross goats’ cheese and Montgomery cheddar. If you have a dinner reservation afterwards, do keep your eye on the time, because it’s easy to get lost in the glamour of this sophisticated, dimly lit spot. The interiors are, of course, in keeping with the era, from charmingly mismatched furniture and antique mirrors to a piano and a bookable blackjack and poker room. At any given point, it feels like a gaggle of glittering flappers might just foxtrot right past your table. Kathleen Johnston 158 OLD BROMPTON ROAD, LONDON SW5. 020 7373 1367. NOCTURNEBAR.CO.UK
Rothay Manor
The Ro
Storrs Hall
Rothay Bridge, Ambleside, Cumbria LA22 0EH. rothaymanor.co.uk
Helm Road, Bowness-On-Windermere, Windermere LA23 3BA. therohotel.com
Storrs Park, Bowness-On-Windermere, Windermere LA23 3LG. storrshall.com
Fresh from a major refurb, this old manor house has been tastefully developed by new owners Jenna and Jamie Shail into an unmissable 21st-century boutique hotel with an award-winning restaurant.
The hotel formerly known as The Hydro has lost a few letters but gained a brand-spanking-new look thanks to an £8 million makeover, transforming it from uninspiring old school to 87-room style academy (with a pool and spa coming next year).
This adults-only Grade II-listed hotel sits right by Lake Windermere and is a quiet retreat for guests looking for impeccable service, surroundings and the chance to live out those William Wordsworth fantasies.
Eat: Head chef Dan McGeorge won this year’s Great British Menu, so order his locally sourced fivecourse tasting menu (£90) of the same name while you can. Drink: By all means opt for a local G&T and then wine-pair your way through the menu, but we recommend a pot of Earl Grey (as part of the essential afternoon tea, £24.50).
Eat: Manned by the talented Marc Sanders, Lacu restaurant specialises in Tom Kerridge-style comfort food done very well. Think bao buns with duck (£7.50) and pork belly with savoy cabbage (£19). Drink: Head for the glass-fronted bar and try the Ro signature cocktail (Lakes rhubarb rosehip, elderflower syrup, prosecco gin, £14.95).
Eat: The views from the lakeside restaurant are good, but the menu is worth paying attention to. Locally caught crab cakes (£12.50) are good, the pan-fried Chalkstream trout (£24.95) even better. Drink: The Tower Bar is perfect for pre-dinner drinks. Try the local Lakes whisky (The Whiskymaker’s Reserve No 1, £22) created by master blender Dhavall Gandhi. Paul Henderson
The Bottle
We predict a Champagne riot Because Telmont’s Réserve Brut is one to shout about The Champagne Riots of 1911 might not have been in your school syllabus, but they were formative for France’s most famous sparkling wine region. Along with the key quality and classification systems of Champagne, their aftermath also saw the birth of another piece of history: the estate of Champagne Telmont. This fourth-generation family producer is still a true pioneer, aiming to convert all the estate vineyards to organic by 2025 and dedicating itself to biodiversity and renewable energy. Its range is impressively diverse, from organic and low-sulphur editions to multiple vintage expressions, but the Réserve Brut is the perfect place to start. The large proportion of reserve wines at its heart (up to 40 per cent) lends a depth of fruit and rounded vanilla and the harmony Telmont pursues in the vineyard is echoed in this perfectly balanced Champagne. Sustainability has never tasted so good. Natasha Britton £50. AT SELFRIDGES. SELFRIDGES.COM
OCTOBER 2021 GQ.C O.UK 73
D E TA I L S – TA S T E The Book
Small Bites
The campaign for democratic luxury
Where GQ has been eating this month Top tips for hot bits...
Essential by Ollie Dabbous is a home-cooking manifesto for all Lobster thermidor macaroni cheese, from Ollie Dabbous’ new book
Ave Mario The Big Mamma Group serves up another OTT temple to Insta-friendly Italian food, this time in London’s Covent Garden, and it most certainly does not disappoint. Like. Standout dish: Try a “biga” Alici In Wonderland pizza with ricotta, courgette flowers and anchovies.
15 Henrietta Street, London WC2. bigmammagroup.com
E
ffortlessly down-to-earth and easy-going, Ollie Dabbous (above) might be a warm interviewee but he remains a powerhouse in the kitchen. As executive chef of Hide in London’s Piccadilly, he won a Michelin star within six months of opening and his CV is peppered with culinary showstoppers such as Hibiscus and Noma. However, the recipes in the pages of his new book, Essential, are very much for home use. “Restaurant dishes have to be exciting, theatrical and sexy,” he says. “The delight of home cooking often lies in the gentle, nuanced and subtle melding of flavours.” Inside his new book you’ll find his perfect croque monsieur (adorned with garlic truffle butter) and family-friendly recipes for meatballs, iced watermelon gazpacho and a simple but spectacular crispy coleslaw with caraway.
The recipe Lobster thermidor macaroni cheese Posh comfort food best served with a glass of chilled champagne...
Ingredients 4 dressed lobsters, shelled
500g whole milk
50g olive oil
plus 50g for the top
150g cheddar, grated,
50g cognac or whisky
60g parmesan, grated,
1 garlic clove, crushed
plus 30g for the top
300g macaroni
½ tsp ground mace
40g salted butter
1 tbsp Dijon mustard
40g plain flour
Pinch of fine sea salt
74 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Nothing complicated. That said, there are some dishes in there that would definitely impress if served up at a dinner party, including a lobster thermidor macaroni cheese (below). Dabbous admits to being a dessert lover, so there is a hefty section dedicated to after-dinner treats. “The raspberry ripple and vanilla rice pudding is delicious and really not hard at all to make,” he enthuses. Dabbous’ love of food is evident, his relaxed approach infectious, but, more than anything, he wants readers to enjoy the whole process. “Good cooking,” he writes in Essential, “can be enjoyed by all, irrespective of income: it’s a true democratic luxury.” Cass Farrar
Seoul Bird Chef/restaurateur/TV personality/ force-of-nature Judy Joo’s new Korean fried chicken concept is a fantastic street-food franchise coming to a flavour town near you. Standout dish: The fried chicken combo with tater tots and kimchi mac and cheese.
45 Bank Street, Jubilee Place, London E14. seoul-bird.co.uk
ESSENTIAL BY OLLIE DABBOUS (BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING, £30) IS OUT ON 16 SEPTEMBER.
Method Cut lobsters into large pieces. Heat oil in a frying pan over a high heat, salt lobsters lightly, then fry for 30 seconds. Deglaze pan with cognac or whisky, then transfer lobsters to plate. Fry garlic lightly in a little oil, then pour over lobster. Boil macaroni for 8-10 minutes in a saucepan of boiling salted water (10g salt for each litre of water). Drain. Heat grill to its hottest setting. Melt butter in a saucepan and add flour, whisking to combine. Gradually add milk, whisking until the sauce is smooth, making sure it comes to the boil. Add cheeses, mace and mustard and stir until melted, then mix in macaroni and lobster, reserving a few lobster pieces to scatter on top. Transfer to gratin dish and top with reserved lobster and extra cheese. Place under a hot grill to glaze.
Tandoor At The Chambers Co-owners Vipan and Manisha Bagga, along with chef Vijay Singh Panwar, have turned this former bank into a superb Punjabi restaurant, where authenticity is spruced up with topnotch ingredients and modern flair. Standout dish: Kale chaat (with chickpeas, pomegranate and mint) is a house speciality.
188 Queen’s Road, Buckhurst Hill IG9 5BD. tandooratthechambers.co.uk
Jacket by Barbour, £549. barbour.com
Coats of armour Join actor Sam Claflin in styling out the incoming cool weather with Barbour Gold Standard’s new Autumn/Winter collection
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hen it launched its new premium luxury subbrand Barbour Gold Standard for Autumn/ Winter 2020, the British brand’s musthave collection wasn’t just eminently desirable, it quickly set a new benchmark for outerwear craftsmanship and quality. This should have come as no surprise, of course. It’s well known Barbour has been leading the way and setting new standards for top-of-the-line coats and jackets ever since it first started dressing fishermen in the North East of England all the way back in 1894. Its iconic wax jackets, meanwhile, have become staples of British cool that regularly receive the royal stamp of approval and are worn with pride by everyone from David Beckham to James Bond. Needless to say, then, an air of eager anticipation surrounded the arrival of Barbour Gold Standard’s second Autumn/Winter collection this September. Naturally, the extensive new range more than lives up to the hype. Informed and inspired by the brand’s own historic archive, which contains original items dating back to 1910, the new Barbour Gold Standard Autumn/Winter collection is the stunning result of more than a
The Urban Pack is made for modern living
76 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
century’s worth of coat-making expertise, now updated and given a fresh modern edge. These are intelligently designed and engineered ergonomic pieces that speak volumes about Barbour’s painstaking attention to detail and look good doing it. The new collection is split into two halves. The first, the Heritage Pack, deploys an olive and sage colour scheme and takes inspiration from Barbour’s rich military heritage, with its premium corozo button detailing and leather trims. The second half, the Urban Pack, is the more contemporary part of the collection. As the name suggests, it is specifically designed for the needs of modern city living and features insulated coats presented in a timelessly stylish monochromatic black. These pieces are rugged and hard-wearing, yet sophisticated and refined at the same time.
internationally renowned star of stage and screen. The Moe also features luxurious leatherbound cuffs, classic hand warmer pockets and two spacious bellows pockets, which means there’s always plenty of useful places to carry belongings. Another standout from the new collection is the Barbour Gold Standard Hooke, which features an oversized baffle-quilted outer for a chunkier, urban look. It also comes with a detachable hood, making the jacket a versatile option for colder days, along with a cotton collar and Lycra-bound cuffs. Unbelievably comfortable to wear, it also features more modern detailing such as Velcro-fastened pockets and a stylish shine finish. Such attention to detail runs through the entirety of the new Autumn/Winter collection. Whether you find yourself tempted by the traditional colour schemes and vintage detailing of the Heritage Pack or are drawn to the modern cuts and understated style of the all-black Urban Pack, you can feel confident that when purchasing a Barbour Gold Standard piece you’re investing in the finest craftsmanship and quality available. So don’t sleep on it: the whole Barbour Gold Standard Autumn/Winter 2021 range is available now at leading luxury retailer Flannels and directly from barbour.com, as well as at Selfridges, Mr Porter and Harvey Nichols. It has been 127 years since Barbour first got into the coat business and in that time it’s consistently proved that nobody else takes craftsmanship and quality more seriously. Take the fact, for example, that this year it’s celebrating its centenary of re-waxing, the brand’s longrunning sustainable service, which has helped customers extend the life of their wax jackets for the last 100 years. Today, Barbour marries heritage with innovation and with the new Barbour Gold Standard Autumn/Winter collection it’s raised the bar yet again. That’s no easy feat after a centuryand-a-quarter in the game. Consider yourself lucky that all you have to do is wear it. G BARBOUR.COM
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t’s hard to pick out favourites, but the Barbour Gold Standard Moe certainly catches the eye. The jacket is modelled here (far right) by Peaky Blinders actor Sam Claflin, who, before becoming the international face of Barbour Gold Standard, learned a thing or two about the sort of insulation needed for British winters while exploring the countryside around his family home in Norfolk. The Moe, which features a baffle-quilted outer and detachable faux fur hood, is the perfect choice to keep him warm and cosy while still looking like an
Jacket by Barbour, £219. barbour.com
GQ Partnership
The Heritage Pack takes inspiration from Barbour’s military heritage
Coat by Barbour, £399. barbour.com
OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 77
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D E TA I L S Ð T R E N D S
Hot wheels! Bring a little joy to your feet with a bright, block-colour sneaker. Dreamcoat optional Story by Teo van den Broeke Photographs by Elliott Morgan Styling by
Angelo Mitakos
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f you’re thinking about buying yourself a SAD lamp for the forthcoming misery months, don’t bother: they aren’t effective and they cost a bomb. You’d be far better off, in our humble opinion, investing in a pair of the brightest, boldest, block-colour trainers to hit the runways for the AW21 season. Perhaps it was a reaction to the greyscale desolation of the pandemic or maybe the designers were feeling for colour this season (if you don’t get this reference to 2009’s seminal The September Issue then we’re not friends any more), but either way, fully saturated technicolour hues are our call for fall. From Dior and Louis Vuitton’s punchy-hued skate shoes through to Christian Louboutin and Dolce & Gabbana’s coloured-in takes on classic shapes, there’s something to suit every palette.
Dior Trainers, £1,050. dior.com. Trousers by 120% Lino, £228. At matchesfashion.com
Dolce & Gabbana
Kim Jones unveiled a new line of blockcolour skate-cum-basketball shoes for Dior this year, no doubt inspired by his own enormous collection of Air Jordans and Nike Air Force 1 trainers. Taking a lace out of his shoes, you’ll want to collect the set.
Trainers, £695. Jumper, £1,550. Trousers, £895. dolcegabbana.com A souped-up take on a classic 1990s shape, this “Industry Baby”pink sneaker will prove surprisingly easy to wear if your wardrobe is dominated by blue, which, be honest, it probably is.
Louis Vuitton Trainers, £875. Trousers, £695. louisvuitton.com
Socks by Falke, £13. falke.com. Model Del W at AMCK Models
Under Virgil Abloh’s aegis Louis Vuitton has moved in a more bold and sporty direction. Prime example: this pair of Tango-orange skate shoes, which feature coordinated laces and outsoles for a full-on, hell-for-leather colour-blocked-to-the-blockiest look.
Christian Louboutin Trainers, £575. christianlouboutin.com. Trousers by Alexander McQueen, £620. At matchesfashion.com Chartreuse shoes, is it? Well, yes, if the king of fun fashion footwear has anything to do with it. Keep the rest of your outfit muted or you’ll look like a children’s TV presenter. OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 79
The many faces of Andy Gotts In a new exhibition at London’s Maddox Gallery, ‘One Shot Gotts’ shows how to crack facades by cracking wise with the stars Story by
Charlie Burton
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t was Paul Newman who gave Andy Gotts his nickname. Newman had flown the photographer out to Connecticut to take his portrait, but within a few minutes of their session beginning, Gotts declared he had everything he needed and drew proceedings to a close. Newman was incredulous. Gotts explained that he had been planning the shoot in his head for months and the fifth picture he had taken was precisely the photo he had been imagining. “You’re ‘One Shot Gotts’!” quipped Newman. The moniker stuck. The Newman shoot was no anomaly. Having cut his teeth at press junkets, Gotts had become used to working to a 15-minute time slot – and to this day he never allows a shoot to run any longer. Unlike many celebrity photographers, he doesn’t work with stylists, groomers or assistants either. No matter if he’s shooting Michael Caine, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro or Kate Moss, it’s just Gotts, a couple of lights and his subject – an approach that explains the candid mood of the portraits. “I try to capture the essence of what makes people ‘them’, not try to make them look beautiful or iconic. That’s not my job,” says Gotts, who is 50 years old and based in London’s Mayfair. “My job isn’t to show George Clooney as Danny Ocean or Harrison Ford as Han Solo. It’s to see what they’re like as human beings when they’re not in front of the camera.” He has honed two methods for bringing out his subjects’ real selves. The first is simple: he invites them to embrace their inner child. “Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the time they want to be silly and pull faces,” he says. Walk around his new show, Icons, at London’s Maddox Gallery, and you’ll see what a signature this has become. Gotts’ second strategy is to tell “the walrus joke” right at the end of the shoot: “What is the similarity between a walrus and Tupperware? They both like a tight seal.” Whether it prompts confusion, shock or laughter, he’s ready with his finger on the shutter release. The Maddox show will give you a sense of just how many people have heard that joke. When Stephen Fry wrote the foreword to the exhibition’s accompanying book, he calculated that Gotts has shot more famous people than Annie Leibovitz, David Bailey and Lord Snowdon combined. Gotts’ first book, Degrees, granted
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George Clooney (2003)
him access into those rarefied circles because of its premise: inspired by the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” theory (the idea that everyone in Hollywood can be linked to Kevin Bacon via their film roles in just six steps), every person he shot would arrange for Gotts to shoot one of their friends – Dustin Hoffman introduced him to Brad Pitt, who introduced him to George Clooney and so on. There was just one rule: if anyone recommended Kevin Bacon the project would be over. “I waited for years,” says Gotts. “One day I got Christian Slater, who was in London doing a play. He said, ‘Who do you need?’ and I said, ‘Do you know Kevin Bacon?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Please just say Kevin Bacon,’ and he did.” Gotts doesn’t draw on the entertainment industry just for subject matter – it has also informed his style. “I’m a movie buff,” he says. “Even from a really young age I was an avid movie watcher. We had a black-and-white television and on Sundays we’d sit down and watch a Western or a Hitchcock. Watching how black-and-white movies were lit inspired the way I do photography.” His portraits are characterised by shadow, contrast and, with that, a cinematic sense of drama.
‘My job isn’t to show George Clooney as Danny Ocean’
Andy Gotts and Harrison Ford (2014)
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or Gotts, photographing celebrities is not just about making art, though, it’s also about the adventures. Take, for instance, the time he went to shoot Clooney at his villa on Lake Como. While Clooney was looking for a suitable room to shoot in, Gotts was unloading his equipment and accidentally knocked an encyclopaedia off a bookshelf. Unfortunately, it fell on a duck that had wandered in from the lake. “I had this corpse of a duck under a very heavy encyclopaedia and I was thinking, ‘What the hell do I do?’ So I squashed it behind the sofa and I put a cushion on top of it. Clooney then appeared at the top of the staircase and at that moment there was a muffled quack and a very dazed duck waddled out from behind the sofa. George said, ‘How the hell did that get behind there?’ I told him I had no idea.” The core frequency of Gotts’ work might be levity, but not all his shots are like that. His favourite of his own pictures, a portrait of Tony Curtis, has an inherent poignance that is amplified by the tale behind it. The day before the shoot in Las Vegas, Curtis phoned to say he wasn’t feeling well but would honour the commitment. The actor just had one request: “Will you make me look like an icon one more time?” Gotts came up with an idea: painting the flag of America across the actor’s face. Curtis loved it. Once Gotts got home to London after the shoot, he selected a frame and emailed it to Curtis’ wife, Jill. “She emailed back straight away to say, ‘Andy, Tony collapsed this morning. Is there any way you can send over a high-res version so I can print it out and show him in the hospital tomorrow to cheer him up?’ I said, ‘Of course,’ and emailed it over. And Jill tells this story where, the next day, she went to the hospital with this A4 picture of my photograph and gave it to Tony. Tony took it in his hands and his eyes were fixated on it for about two minutes nonstop. And he turned to her and said, ‘Jilly, this is the best photograph ever taken of me.’ And he died that afternoon. The last photograph ever taken of him. And it was his favourite.”
ICONS IS AT MADDOX GALLERY UNTIL 19 SEPTEMBER. 9 MADDOX STREET, LONDON W1S. MADDOXGALLERY.COM
D E TA I L S – A R T
Robert De Niro (2015)
OCTOBER 2021 GQ.C O.UK 81
D E TA I L S Ð P O L I T I C S to bring about structural change – to challenge inequality, for example – is minimal. Support for Labour, which won 62 per cent of 18- to 24-year-old voters in 2019, seems predicated, for the most part, on an endorsement of Labour’s “values” and a protest against the perceived “values” of the Tories, rather than on economic programmes. There are no signs young people are flocking to the revolution. “What a lot of young people are saying is not ‘We want to push over these structures’ but ‘We want a bit of them’,” says O’Hara. Anything can be co-opted by the establishment, including social liberalism. Although right-wing politicians and the media that support them know not to alienate their base, they have time to evolve with the turning of society’s wheel. The market economy is forever tweaking its appearance so that its inner workings are protected. Car adverts are particularly useful in revealing the myths of a society. Marketing is remarkably nimble (though not always subtle) in its appropriation of attitudes their clients have previously either
A ‘youthquake’ can’t save the left But it could redefine what ‘left’ really means Story by
Marcus Rashford after missing his penalty at Euro 2020, 11 July
82 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
George Chesterton
ignored or hindered up to the point when it became commercially expedient for them to change tack. In the 1980s car adverts sold aspiration and wealth; in the 1990s it was freedom and adventure. After the 2008 crash, safety and protection were fetishised, while now adverts reflect our obsessions with identity and self-determination. Who would have believed even five years ago that a campaign for Renault would include the sweeping narrative of a 30-year same-sex love story? If the young want to opt in, not drop out, the biggest single threat to the status quo is the lack of affordable housing. “Anthony Eden and Margaret Thatcher were right,” says O’Hara. “You’ve got to have a property-owning democracy. Well, we’re not going to have one.”
youth turnout but to an increase in support across all ages, including the over-65s. It is the recurring dream of the old left that rickety Tories will keep dying off to be replaced by young progressives who will stay true to their beliefs as they age. That’s not how politics works. Tony Blair simply won Tory voters – not the young or the old, but Tories in Tory seats. To a lesser extent that happened again in 2017. That was a matter of persuasion, not demographics. So if not socialism, then what for our young idealists? “It’s a cliché, but the green agenda will become increasingly important,” says O’Hara. “Look at Germany. Now you look at the Greens in the UK and they are polling over five per cent. And that’s a problem for Labour, because now their left flank is turned.” We are clinging to a Whiggish teleolog y of national selfimprovement. The footballers have seen to that. There is a presupposition Britain will become a better place. Germany may be a green paradise in the making, but there are other indications that enabling the youth vote is not a panacea for the left, with the right-wing AfD the largest party for the under-30s in 2019 state elections in Thuringia. Whatever political landscape emerges for today’s millennials and gen Z, it will not be socialism or even social democracy as we have understood it. Never having known the pre-Thatcher nanny state, Britain’s young voters are as individualist and materialist as they are avowedly open on race, gender, mental health and sexuality. “I think Labour will drop a lot of their more controlling elements,” says O’Hara. “We are seeing the last cry of that kind of very collectivist centralisation. I think a free-trade Britain will appeal to a lot of young people. Alongside that there are ideas such as tougher carbon taxes, community land-owning – but it’ll be local and regional, because it’ll be about their identity and where they live. We’re going to be surprised.” The old left has lost its monopoly on morality and its claim to be the only alternative to capitalism. If there is to be a new left – something unknown to us now – it will need to be driven by the young but welcomed by the old. That is the only coalition that really works.
Britain’s young want to opt in, not drop out
T
he other obvious source of dissatisfaction among the young is the electoral system, which denies the parties and policies they favour and rewards those of their parents and grandparents. In the 2019 general election, 45.3 per cent of all votes were unrepresented (not for the winning candidate). “First past the post” means there are too many safe seats, breeding more apathy. Younger voters live either in safe Labour urban seats, where their votes don’t change anything, or with their parents in less urban, safe Tory seats, where, you guessed it, their votes don’t change anything. Young people are also a smaller demographic – yet another structural advantage for the Conservatives. Excluding the over-65s, there are fewer 18and 19-year-olds than any other age in the UK. That will change, but when you factor in low turnout in general elections (47 per cent for 18- to 24-year-olds, compared to 66 per cent for 55 to 64 and 74 per cent for over-65s) you can see why politics appears a game for the stale, if less so the male and pale. “We’ve got these fuddy-duddy parties who don’t have a clue how to appeal to young people,” says O’Hara. The most common projection for escaping this bind is a progressive coalition standing on electoral reform, but it is just talk for now. Research into the 2017 general election has shown that Labour’s decent performance (they still lost, after all) was due not to greater
Photograph Getty Images
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uly 2021 may have been the most solipsistic month in England’s history. Gareth Southgate and his team were hailed by applause-hungry journalists as the embodiment of a previously elusive progressive patriotism and the footballers positioned themselves at the vanguard of a campaign for a militantly tolerant society. Amid all the self-congratulation there was something odd about how England turned in on itself. Although it felt like a “moment”, it also felt apolitical and not just because everyone was on the same side. It may seem counterintuitive, but a more tolerant culture does not mean a more left-wing politics. When it comes to young voters, identity politics is a red herring. “Young people are very liberal, but they’re libertarian,” says Professor Glen O’Hara of Oxford Brookes University. “They’re not particularly collectivist on economic and social policy, their politics don’t sit neatly on the traditional left/ right spectrum and they’re not very attached to the state.” If young progressive politics is cultural, not economic, its capacity
GQ Partnership
Welcome to Britain’s most perfectly positioned hotel Set on the banks of glorious Loch Lomond, Cameron House has reopened after a sumptuous restoration. Now, this majestic 17th-century baronial mansion has an interior to match its setting
After a four-year renovation, the 17th-century mansion is now home to modern luxury
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cotland has its share of iconic panoramas: the view over the Torridon Hills from the summit of Ben Nevis, Glencoe shrouded in the morning mist, Edinburgh from the top of Arthur’s Seat. None, though, can compete with Loch Lomond on a summer morning, its gorgeous blue waters ringed by the forest of The Trossachs, the area’s many Munros lined up moodily in the distance. You almost have to pinch yourself that it’s possible to wake up to such a stunning view, yet there it is, outside the window of your room at the five-star Cameron House, arguably the most perfectly positioned hotel in the whole of the UK.
Housed in a majestic 17th-century baronial mansion, the hotel has been closed for four years, during which it has undergone a root and branch overhaul, elevating everything from its suites to its leisure centre such that the interior now truly matches its incredible setting. The hotel sits barely 100 metres from the water’s edge at the southern tip of the loch, in the heart of The Trossachs National Park, with its wild Highland romance. And it’s this romantic sensibility that’s been brought to the hotel’s redesign. The place is shot through with a very Caledonian kind of cool: paisley wallpapers, big, bold colours and tartan flourishes. Scottish artisans are very much at the fore, with throws from Johnstons Of Elgin and luxurious headboards made in collaboration with the hip Glasgowbased designers Timorous Beasties. There are 140 rooms, including 24 suites in the Auld House. Our favourites are the Cameron and Tower Suites, both of which have grand views over the water, luxurious bathrooms and enormous spaces for entertaining guests. Gorgeous as these suites are, we’d still spend most of our time working our way through the hotel’s six restaurants and five bars. The flagship fine-dining restaurant Tamburrini & Wishart is helmed by Paul Tamburrini and Martin Wishart, whose Restaurant Martin Wishart in Edinburgh holds a Michelin star. They’ll be serving a fivecourse tasting menu that will change every two
weeks with an emphasis on seasonality and the abundant natural larder on their doorstep. Other dining options include the seriously smart Cameron Grill, serving a menu of contemporary fine dining, and The Boat House, on the shore of Loch Lomond, where you can order heaving plates of Scottish seafood. A grand afternoon tea is served in The Lobby Bar and the hotel even has its own pub, The Tavern, for big-screen sports and big, ballsy Scottish cooking. After dinner, whisky-lovers can beat a path to Great Scots Bar, which has more than 300 different drams on offer. When it comes to activities, the hotel is blessed with abundant options. Jet- and water-skiing, paddleboarding and kayaking on the loch can all be organised and there are more sedate champagne cruises on the hotel’s handsome boat, moored at the 234-berth marina. The dramatic countryside around the hotel makes for thrilling mountain biking and off-road driving and there’s clay pigeon shooting and brilliant local hiking. Inside, a comfy 29-seat cinema is perfect for winding down at the end of the day. The hotel also has its own 18-hole championship course, The Carrick, designed by the award-winning Doug Carrick, with glorious views across the water. Created in the traditional Scottish heathland style, it straddles the line between Highlands and Lowlands. Within the hotel, the family-friendly Leisure Club is centred around a new 18-metre pool and water slide, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking The Trossachs. As well as a steam room and sauna, there are 50 fitness classes every week and a brand new gym. Guests can also make use of the Cameron Spa, a tranquil oasis three miles up the road, serviced by a regular shuttle. The spa has abundant treatment rooms, a couples suite, Rasul mud chamber and the Hydro & Thermal experience, with its famous rooftop infinity pool with views of Ben Lomond. Sitting in the pool, staring out at this astonishing natural splendour, it’s like being in the middle of nowhere, which is something to be said of a hotel just 20 miles from Glasgow Airport. Thrillingly, you can make this last leg of your journey in a seaplane, which touches down on the loch for a fittingly James Bond-style entrance. G
The hotel has a very Caledonian kind of cool
LOCH LOMOND, WEST DUNBARTONSHIRE, G83 8QZ. 01389 310 777. CAMERONHOUSE.CO.UK
OCTOBER 2021 GQ.C O.UK 83
D E TA I L S Ð S T Y L E
Years after Del Boy and co drove their Robin Reliant into the sunset, the lewks have swung back into style Story by
Teo van den Broeke
Coat by Loro Piana, £6,205. At mrporter.com
T
he final series episode of Only Fools And Horses, the Peckham-based sitcom charting the wheelings and dealings of the Trotter family and friends, aired on BBC One in February 1991 (though there were numerous specials thereafter). And although much has changed in the 30 years since (the average price of a flat in Peckham has increased by 800 per cent, for one thing), today pieces we associate with Del Boy, Rodney, Grandad, Uncle Albert et al look weirdly modish. From the lead character’s penchant for shearling coats and gold medallions (very AW21) to the elder’s penchant for sweater vests and duffle coats, the clothes are so on point that we like to think the show’s original costume designer, Robin Stubbs, would be proud. Here are the cushiest OFAH style lessons you should apply to your own wardrobe right now. And if you don’t then, well, you’re a plonker.
Blazer by Etro, £1,000. etro.com
1. Invest in a shearling overcoat
2. Buy a statement blazer now
Del Boy knew where it was at when it came to outerwear. A classic shearling coat, which not even the most highfalutin football pundit would snub, will form the centrepiece of your winter wardrobe for, well, the rest of your winters to come, which means you needn’t be a millionaire for it to be a worthy investment.
No one wore a statement blazer better than Peckham’s favourite halfwit, Trigger. From expanded check numbers, which wouldn’t look out of place on a Prada runway, to electric-blue suits and well-cut tweed jackets, Trigger is a surprise style superstar.
Vest by Polo Ralph Lauren, £219. ralphlauren.co.uk
Coat by Celine, £1,650. celine.com
3. A sweater vest is your best friend
4. You can’t go wrong with camo
We’ve been banging on about sweater vests for a while now and no one wore the style better than Uncle Albert. Team yours with a duffle coat and baker boy hat for full vintage effect. We’ll leave the beard and pipe to your discretion.
Rodney Trotter was rarely seen out of his trademark camo field jacket and neither should you be. Pick one up from an army surplus store or opt for an elevated take on the style from Celine, Aspesi, Polo Ralph Lauren or Saint Laurent.
84 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Photographs Alamy; BBC; Getty Images
Why the Only Fools And Horses crew are your unlikely 2021 fashion spirit animals
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D E TA I L S Ð E X P O S U R E
Jessica Tomson and Daniel Bailey
Life in the fast lane Last month we finally got to celebrate the GQ Car Awards and we partied like it was Freedom Day 2021...
Paul Henderon, Ed Byrne and Jason Barlow
Five months after we revealed the winners of this year’s GQ Car Awards, the easing of Covid-19 restrictions meant we finally got the chance to hand out some trophies in person at The Berkeley and catch up on half a year’s celebrating (don’t worry, we weren’t driving). With guests from Maserati to Mercedes, Volvo to Veloce Racing, a huge range of motoring manufacturers were represented and their award-winning creations – be they stone-cold classics, modern masterpieces or state-of-the-art concepts – comprised one of the most exciting line-ups of vehicles ever assembled. So, with thanks to headline sponsor Michelin, as well as The Berkeley, Laurent-Perrier, Daou and Savile Row Gin, allow us to present the GQ Car Awards 2021 winners in all their finery...
Ian Callum Stephen Lui and Steve Thornton
Photographs by James Mason SEE MORE PHOTOS FROM THE GQ CAR AWARDS 2021 AT BIT.LY/GQCARAWARDS21
Fred Atkins, Alex Babington and Tom Howarth
Thomas Reinhold
86 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Aston Martin and Brough Superior AMB 001
Mazin and Nabil Naamo
Simon Cundey, Ginny Buckley and Marek Reichman
Matt Dunnakey Margareta Mahlstedt
David Green and Richard Agnew
Porsche 911 Carrera S
Jeremy Townsend and Eurig Druce Ben Roth, Daniel Brennan and Graham Kilby
Nicki Shields and Michelle Roberts Paul Henderson, Richard Agnew and Jason Barlow
Mateo Notsuke and Charlie Jukes
The winner of
79
major awards
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D E TA I L S Ð M U S I C
The new wave of emo-rap sounds nothing like you would expect Exhibit A: Lil Tjay, who gives grim nihilism the veneer of tween pop
Story by
Thomas Barrie
T
ime was, a rapper might not have taken well to being nicknamed “the Bronx Justin Bieber”. But times have changed and Tione Jayden Merritt, AKA Lil Tjay, is one of the baby-faced rappers who have helped change them. The 20-year-old has spent the last three years redefining how hip-hop could – and should – sound, making it more emotive and melodic. So why wouldn’t he own the comparison? The New Yorker grew up listening to the likes of Bieber and a young Ariana Grande on Nickelodeon. Along with Usher and R Kelly, they inspired Tjay to write verses and by 15 he was recording and uploading music to SoundCloud. Lil Tjay earned his nickname when he sampled Bieber’s “Baby” on “None Of Your Love”, but if his earliest idols were sugary and innocent, his lyrics are the opposite; in 2018 he released “Brothers”, a perfect three minutes of melodic nihilism (“Bodies drop all the time I don’t feel nothing / Swear to God y’all gon’ make me go kill something”). This was definitively still trap music from the Bronx, written by a kid who did a year in juvie for robbery, it just sounded like Bieber’s tween pop, because Tjay sang like him. Audiences, and critics, liked it: the video for “Brothers” quickly racked up 100 million views on YouTube, 179m plays on Spotify and led to Tjay signing with Columbia Records. His first album, True 2 Myself, peaked at No5 in the US in 2019, while his follow-up, Destined 2 Win, featuring Tyga, 6lack, Offset and others, dropped in April. Now, he’s embarking on a tour that visits London’s O2 Academy Brixton in November. Lil Tjay is just one of a class of young rappers reshaping the confessional hip-hop sub-genre “emo-rap”. This new generation is defined by how deeply they commit to singing lyrics and you might call their gospel- and pop-informed style of autotune vocal delivery “sing-rap”. Rappers have sung their lyrics before (Drake’s Take Care; Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak), but Tjay and co’s style of sing-rap is different: it is wise beyond the years of its young creators, slightly sad for no definable reason and from the heart. The demand for authenticity extends to admitting complexity, hence Tjay’s openness about watching Nickelodeon as a kid, even as he singraps about doing time. The result is a heady mix of R&B vulnerability and trap defiance unique to his cohort. On second thoughts, maybe that Bieber comparison was a little reductive...
Photograph Getty Images
Lil Tjay’s sing-rap is wise beyond his years
Lil Tjay bridges the gap between melody and traditional trap lyricism
OCTOBER 2021 GQ.CO .UK 89
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GQ Partnership No two flacons of Bvlgari Man Terrae Essence look the same
Step into nature with Bvlgari With its latest fragrance, Man Terrae Essence, Bvlgari bottles our world and delivers the new jewel in the crown of its lively collection of scents
F
ounded in Rome in 1884 by the Greek silversmith Sotirio Bulgari, the luxury brand that still bears his name is best known for its fine jewellery and watches. However, since 1992, when it introduced its first scent, Eau Parfumée Au Thé Vert, it has also been at the forefront of the fragrance industry. And as in its jewellery empire, where Bvlgari prides itself on finding unique and natural beauty in its gems, the same approach is found in its fragrances. Whether through the Le Gemme range, which harnesses raw materials such as saffron and
aventurine, or the Man line-up, each olfactory offering has become a synonym for the brand’s affiliation with nature. Bvlgari’s latest precious fragrance, Man Terrae Essence, is no different – an embodiment of the ground on which we walk. Beginning with fire and representing the origins of man, Bvlgari unleashed its sensual power with Bvlgari Man In Black in 2014 and the brand has since released other variants inspired by the elements of wood and air: Man Wood Essence and Man Glacial Essence. The latest scent celebrates Mother Earth, paying tribute to the power of our planet’s richness and diverse fertility through a warm and effortlessly elegant signature. The Latin term terrae translates to “of the Earth” and one spritz will take you back to your roots. Many mythologies claimed humanity was created from mud or clay and, today, the woody fragrance of Man Terrae Essence fuses ingredients including earthy geonol, masculine vetiver, subtle carrot essence, patchouli and oak moss. Combined with wood leather, this raw blend represents the vitality of life. This unique and confident accord ebulliently evokes the secrecy and intrigue of the ferny undergrowths and towering canopies of ancient forests the world over, in turn leaving you feeling grounded – as well as smelling exceptionally good.
The master perfumer behind the LVMHowned house’s hearty scent is the award-winning Alberto Morillas, who has worked with Bvlgari since 2000. As he explained to GQ, he wanted “to go back to the essential, to the true value to which the Bvlgari man aspires. It’s a tribute to the richness right under our feet.” Accordingly, the fragrance is bottled in one of Bvlgari’s most sustainable flacons. Designed to improve our relationship with the natural world, it’s crafted from recyclable glass. Furthermore, it has a collar made of 95 per cent recycled plastic that carries a pattern that’s unique to every bottle. Thanks to a technique in which two colours are freely injected into the main material, each collar is a depiction of the power of nature to create inimitable beauty. Alongside the launch, Bvlgari is partnering with John Lewis to donate to the World Land Trust. For each fragrance sold over a set period of time one tree will be planted through WLT’s Plant A Tree programme that supports projects to restore tropical forests in Brazil, Borneo, Kenya and India. After more than a year of being cooped up indoors, consider this a worthy way to reconnect with the outdoors. G
Man Terrae Essence pays tribute to our planet
£92 FOR 100ML. AT JOHN LEWIS. JOHNLEWIS.COM
OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 93
Enjoy the vineyards and sample the regional cuisines in Spain’s gastronomic heartland
RAISE A GLASS TO RIOJA
If you know wine, you’ll already be aware Rioja is having a moment. If you don’t know wine, even better... because there is just so much to discover Story by
94 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Paul Henderson
GQ Partnership
I
f all you knew about Rioja is that it is a region in northern Spain that produces great red wine, that would probably be enough. However, as discerning drinkers and travellers can testify, there is far more to the story. And with October being Rioja Wine Month – celebrated by retailers and restaurants across the UK with tastings, offers and events – we have the perfect excuse. For a start, Rioja doesn’t just mean red wine. As Spain’s premier wine-producing region – and the first to acquire the country’s leading Designation Of Origin status (DOCa) – it is a wonderfully rich and vibrant area with more than 65,000 hectares of vineyards, 14,800 grape growers and 567 wineries. Of course they don’t limit themselves to red! Their expertise extends to whites (Rioja blanco is usually made from the local viura grape and can be fresh and zesty or rich and full-bodied), dry and fruity rosés (their increasingly popular rosados feature tempranillo and garnacha grapes and deliver intense, ripe berry flavours) and even sparkling varieties (the exciting and decidedly modern Espumoso De Calidad De Rioja), offering some delicious alternatives to the more familiar traditional and hugely popular tinto. And yet despite this diversity, the one thing they all have in common is that every bottle conforms to the quality and craftsmanship that makes Rioja such a special region. The wine also has a fascinating history. Early Phoenician settlers first experimented with rudimentary winemaking here in the eleventh century BC, before the Romans conquered the region and wasted little time realising Rioja’s rich potential; archaeologists have discovered the remains of presses and wineries dating back more than 2000 years. Winemaking continued through the monasteries in the Middle Ages and by the 19th century, following the French Revolution, Rioja was so well developed it was considered to be a producer of some of the finest wines in the world – a reputation it continues to enjoy to this day. The wines of Rioja are well known for their aptitude for ageing and the Consejo Regulador DOCa Rioja has a classification system that ensures the quality of the wines, all of which leave the winery perfectly aged and ready to drink. Starting with “Generico” (Generic), this category does not have any specific ageing requirements and the wines are usually joven (young) and tend to be fruity and bold. Next is “Crianza”, which are aged for a couple of years, with at least one of those in an oak barrel for red wine (six months for white and rosé), the rest in bottle. These wines are more complex, fresh and juicy, often with a subtle note of spice. “Reserva” is where Rioja gets serious. With an ageing requirement of at least three years before release, this produces a balance of fruit and body, with layered flavours from spending longer in oak. “Gran Reserva” is the top of the line and wines must be aged for at least five years, with at least two in oak barrels. These are some of Rioja’s most spectacular wines. And as a consequence of its enviable reputation, Rioja is also becoming a popular tourist destination for oenophiles looking to
‘Few wine regions have such a hold on the global palate as Rioja’
explore the area for themselves. Visitors are starting to explore the three zones – Rioja Alta in the mountainous west, Rioja Alavesa to the north, and the Mediterranean-influenced Rioja Oriental (formerly Rioja Baja) – to not only enjoy the vineyards, but also to sample the regional cuisines in Spain’s gastronomic heartland that pair so well with the local wines. If there is a more joyous experience than sampling a selection of vibrant, world-class wines alongside plates of croquettes, pan tumaca and chuletillas al sarmiento (lamb cutlets roasted on vine cuttings) with family and friends, we don’t know about it. But don’t just take our word for it. Committed Rioja enthusiasts though we are, we will leave the last word on the subject to GQ Food & Drink Awards judge and one of the UK’s top sommeliers, Honey Spencer. Not only is she a fan of the region, she has also been blown away by the new breed of producers who are taking that most famous of wines to new heights. “Few wine regions can claim to have such a hold on the global palate as the titanic Rioja,” Spencer says. “A new generation of winemakers are producing diverse styles that can now be found in many top restaurants and wine bars throughout the UK. It’s an exciting time for the region and opportunities to taste interesting wines from Rioja have never been better.” For those about to Rioja, we salute you. G OCTOBER IS RIOJA WINE MONTH. BUYRIOJA.CO.UK
Rioja enjoyed alongside the lamb dish chuletillas al sarmiento; (left) a winery in Rioja Alavesa
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D E TA I L S – A R T
Clockwise from main: The artist Xenz at work in London; ‘Bottled At Source’ (2010); ‘Inflorescence’ (2021); ‘Light Beams’ (2020)
‘We didn’t have to do it like they did in New York’
X
enz’s street art has never looked like “street art”. When he started out, painting walls in Hull as a teenager, his crew delighted in coming up with experimental ideas: abstract compositions made of splashed paint, say, or lettering that looked like folded origami. “We didn’t have a massive audience – it wasn’t like we were in London – so we felt we had a lot of creative freedom,” he says. “We didn’t have to go and try to do it like they were doing it in New York.” Crucially, he rejected the aggressive, hip-hop edge he saw in so much graffiti. “I thought that to stand out from that, I’m going to do the complete opposite and make something really ethereal that appeals to my enemies’ mothers and grandmothers and girlfriends.” Back then, he called himself Sense – he liked drawing the letters S and E and there were two of each in that word. Today, the 46-year-old artist goes by Xenz (real name: Graeme Brusby), but that impulse to conjure beauty remains strong.
He often paints landscapes or trees, on top of which he typically adds birds or butterflies. These creatures don’t merely look delicate; their inclusion brings a literal vulnerability to the artwork. “There’s something about painting over an almost finished piece. Because I do it with spray paint, I could damage it and make a complete mess of it. Or I could make it absolutely superb,” he says. “I quite like painting hummingbirds because they’re so small. I like the idea of going against the norm, which is usually to make things as big as possible.” His genre-defying style has captured imaginations. His work has been exhibited everywhere from Basel to Miami, from Ibiza to New Delhi and from Sydney to New York. It caught the eye of Banksy’s former gallerist, Steve Lazarides – himself a keen bird watcher – who hosted a major show of Xenz’s work at the Outsiders gallery in London. And this month you can see his most recent creations in Paradise at Nelly Duff gallery on London’s Columbia Road.
‘I wanted to appeal to my enemies’ girlfriends’
96 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
As climate change has rapidly moved from the fringes to the centre of public discourse, there’s an increasing temptation to read Xenz’s work as political. Does he see it that way? “Even though the idea of painting a wall is talking about freedom, so there is that political element, I try not to be too political,” he says. Still, just occasionally, he does feel compelled to flex that muscle. “I did a painting called ‘Bottled At Source’ [above], because I was looking at the labels of bottled water, where they show the volcanic rock where the water comes from, and I found it to be kind of strange that they’re showing this perfect world but it’s on a plastic bottle. That inspired me to paint a mountain scene made of plastic bottles and then all the butterflies were made from the labels. So I learned I have the power as an artist to create something that can tell a message, but generally it’s just about trying to create a paradise.” PARADISE IS AT NELLY DUFF FROM 30 SEPTEMBER TO 5 OCTOBER. 156 COLUMBIA ROAD, LONDON E2. NELLYDUFF.COM
Photograph Ian Cox
Forget slogans and stencils. The butterflies and hummingbirds of this Hull-born graffiti star tag in for a new London show Story by Charlie Burton
GQ Partnership Jacket, £70. T-shirt, £16. Trousers, £45. All by River Island. riverisland.com
Stuck in a style rut? Look no further River Island has dropped a 20-piece collection that makes choosing your everyday looks a lot easier
O
ver the past year, your wardrobe probably hasn’t ventured further than hoodie and sweats. Jeans, shirts and suit-and-tie combos were all out. Now things are opening up, you might be struggling to actually put some thought into what to wear each day. Enter River Island’s latest drop. The British high street label has long been a go-to for easyto-wear essentials and it has now created a line of clothing that takes into account this newly remembered struggle. RI Studio is a collection of wardrobe staples with a smart edge, essentially a garment guide to getting dressed in the morning.
Consisting of 20 pieces, the largely monochrome line-up (although subtle hints of amber and rust also feature, for those who desire some colour) is shaped by classic design codes, rather than catwalk trends. Thus, nothing in the drop is dictated by a specific season and therefore can be worn on repeat, whenever you like. Knee-skimming overcoats in checkerboard prints and dove-grey hues, oversized car coats with colour-contrast back panels, boxy denim jackets and thick, sharply cut bomber jackets make up the outerwear on offer, designed to layer up or simply be thrown over a white tee.
Meanwhile shirts cut to within an inch of their lives come with graphic prints to add a refreshing edge to your suiting. Or perhaps you can team one with the hard-wearing, yet super-soft wide-leg utility trousers. In addition, knitwear comes in heavyweight fabrics, while T-shirts have been given chic high necks. Designed for men with little time on their hands, the collection is a functional, budgetfriendly set of uniforms to see you through the rest of this year (and the next). G RIVERISLAND.COM
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D E TA I L S Ð A D V I C E designer’s line of monochromatic overcoats with oversized shoulders have a witchy aesthetic all their own and will very quickly make the public realise that something wicked is, in fact, their way coming.
Dear Style Shrink,
Style Shrink By
Dear Style Shrink,
Teo van den Broeke
The best of these batshit boots – let’s I’m still wearing a face mask most of the time call them “Move!” boots – can be found at when I’m out, but I also want to dress in a way Bottega Veneta. Last year, the brand released that keeps the public at bay. People have a habit the crowbar-toed Lean boot, which would of getting up close and personal, which not only have been challenging to wear even for the increases my Covid-related anxiety but also aforementioned bad seed. Now, Bottega has makes me want to punch them. Any and all unveiled a slightly easier-wearing take on recommendations gratefully received. the style. Titled, appropriately enough, Amol, Harlesden Chisel, the boots have all the “Stay away Personally speaking, I have found from me or I’ll eat your cat for breakfast” wearing shoes or boots finished aggressiveness you could possibly want, but with aggressively pointed or the shape of the toe is rounder, meaning chiselled-off toes works wonders they’ll work as well with a suit as they will to make people think I’m some with your black PVC chaps. Boots by Bottega Veneta, £1,045. kind of latter-day Nick Cave Bottega’s boots don’t come cheap, bottegaveneta.com and that I may just follow them however, so for something a little more home and cough through their affordable look to Swedish brands Our letterbox if they don’t stay far Legacy and Eytys. Clothing-wise, look no enough away. further than Rick Owens. The American
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Dear Style Shrink, Which fragrances are your favourites at the moment and why? Daytime, evening, holiday and winter scent recommendations, please. Mark, Seaton My favourite evening scent right now is Creed’s Spice And Wood. A dense mix of cedar, clove and apple, it’s one of the most grown-up scents I own. For daytime, Chanel’s Paris-Édimbourg contains notes of juniper berry and cedar (are you sensing a theme?) and is so light that it won’t overpower a space, which is important if you plan on wearing it to an office, on a plane or in a public loo. For holidays, my all-time favourite is Tom Ford’s orange leaf-laced Neroli Portofino, which smells as good when I wear it in London’s Burgess Park as it would, I imagine, on the Italian Riviera. And for winter Fragrance by Creed, £800 it’s all about Leather by Acqua for 250ml. Di Parma, primarily because creedfragrances. it’s what I imagine Santa Claus co.uk would wear. SEND YOUR MENSWEAR-RELATED STYLE QUESTIONS TO STYLESHRINK@CONDENAST.CO.UK
Illustration Joe McKendry
For the most coveted invite of the year, wear the most coveted DJ of the season
I need some recommendations for dinner suits. I’ve not been lucky enough to find myself invited to the GQ Men Of The Year Awards, Suit by but I have got a couple of Suitsupply, black-tie dos coming up £399. suitsupply.com and I need some options. Robin, Little Haven At the more affordable end of the black-tie spectrum I would recommend giving Suitsupply a try. Dinner suits come in at around the £400 mark and a staggeringly broad array of sizes are available, so it’s easy to find something that will fit you properly. At the mid-level, Boss is a natural choice. A full suit comes in at between £700 and £800 and the block is narrow. At the higher end of the spectrum, I would recommend heading to either Brunello Cucinelli, for something with a bit of personality, or Gieves & Hawkes, for a classic option that will last a lifetime. The ultimate choice, however, would be a bespoke dinner suit from Anderson & Sheppard. Located on Savile Row, the storied house has produced exemplary suits for a more erudite breed of customer for decades. AA Gill was a fan and Fran Lebowitz wears A&S, so you know you’re in good company. Oh, and soz about the MOTY invite. If I can wangle you one I’ll let you know.
British GQ. Winner of 79 major awards. The world’s leading men’s magazine.
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Dave, August 2021
Nicholas Braun, July 2021
Burna Boy, June 2021
The Biden supremacy Inside the mission to rebuild America Story by Michael Wolff Joe Biden photographed by Christopher Anderson
MARCH 2021
Seth Rogen, May 2021
Tom Holland, April 2021
Joe Biden, March 2021
Captain Sir Tom Moore, Jan/Feb 2021
Rami Malek, December 2020
Michaela Coel, November 2020
John Boyega, October 2020
Paul McCartney, September 2020
Billie Eilish, July/August 2020
Autumnal heroes From a stripy jumper and a scent for on-the-go to a louder than life beanie, consider this edit a seasonal checklist for your next wardrobe upgrade Edited by Sophie
Clark
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1. Watch by Longines, £2,170. longines.co.uk 2. Jumper by Paul Smith, £395. At matchesfashion.com 3. Jacket by Saint Laurent, £1,740. matchesfashion.com 4. Coat by Aubin & Wills, £495. aubinandwills.com 5. Basilico & Fellini fragrance by Vilhelm Parfumerie, £68 for 20ml. vilhelmparfumerie.com 6. Boots by Grenson, £305. At matchesfashion.com 7. Gilet by Nobis, £545. nobis.com 8. Hat by Boss x Russell Athletic, £55. boss.com 9. Jacket by Bottega Veneta, £2,090. At matchesfashion.comm
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GQ Ð PREVIEW Suitcase by Herm•s, £6,740. hermes.com
Keep on
ROLLINÕ Pack to perfection and glide your prized possessions around in style with Hermès’ RMS suitcase Sophie Clark Photograph by Colin Ross Story by
ight now, I’m sure you need little to no encouragement when it comes to getting away. Most of us have spent the past year (at least) stuck inside dreaming of escapism. Whether it be a staycation or jetting off somewhere – anywhere! – chances are you’re more than ready for it. And with the launch of the RMS suitcase, so is Hermès. Sure, a suitcase needs to be functional, helping you navigate airport queues with ease and being small enough to squeeze into overhead lockers while still comfortably housing your expertly edited holiday wardrobe. But these days suitcases are a reflection of your personal style too and this contemporary piece is the perfect example.
Designed with the keen traveller in mind, the RMS is constructed from a Rilsan shell, a biosourced, recyclable and regenerable material that is both lightweight and shock resistant. In addition to the telescopic handle and curved zip, the luggage pays homage to Hermès’ traditional design codes, with leather-reinforced corners and wheels borrowed from the Hermès skateboard design of 2017. Choose from leather and canvas or all leather across a multitude of colour and print possibilities, as well as customisable wheels. And, when marked with the final touch of your initials, the Hermès RMS suitcase has your name written all over it. OCTOBER 2021 GQ. CO.UK 103
GQ Ð PREVIEW
Good vibes only Step to a new beat and a fresh attitude this autumn with Etro’s launch of the Earthbeat sneaker Story by
Sophie Clark
I
t’s happened: autumn is here. And with a new season comes new opportunities, a chance to set new goals. And, boy, are we ready. Aren’t we? Well, if you need a little added push (you’re only human) look to Etro’s Earthbeat sneakers for inspiration. Named to embody the spirit of life, they aim to offer more than just functionality: “The name of the shoe was created to evoke the heartbeat of the Earth and invites you to follow the rhythm while running, dancing and celebrating life,” explains creative director Kean Etro. Crafted from a patchwork of suede, paisley, jacquard and printed fabrics and embellished with fringing, neon laces, turquoise studs and zigzag stitching, these trainers are guaranteed to have you smiling inside and out. Whether you’re a sneakerhead or a creature of comfort, trust in the Etro Earthbeats to get you off the sofa and laced into a positive, can-do mindset. They’ll put more than a spring in your step this autumn. G
104 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Trainers by Etro, £475. etro.com
D E TA I L S Ð M U S I C
Do we REALLY need yet another Bob Dylan box set? You’re damn right we do
Off-White noise King of the collab Virgil Abloh has given a set of Pioneer DJ decks the Off-White treatment
Photograph Getty Images; Fabien Montique
Story by
Thomas Barrie
Successful streetwear labels live or die by their collaborations and nobody realises this better than Virgil Abloh (above) of Off-White. Abloh’s brand has worked with everyone from Kanye West to homeware behemoth Ikea and the designer seems to be on a personal quest to apply his distinctive graphic style to every object he can think of. In that spirit, Abloh has announced a collaboration with AlphaTheta Corporation – the company that makes Pioneer DJ equipment – to produce a limited-edition DJ controller that you’re sure to see at every nightspot worth its Ace Of Spades Nebuchadnezzars. The DDJ-1000-OW is a technically identical version of Pioneer’s DDJ-1000 controller decked out in Abloh’s trademark block colours. (For the uninitiated, a controller is what you plug into a laptop, allowing you to control the mixing of multiple tracks, as well as distorting them in various ways.) AlphaTheta, which until last year was known as Pioneer DJ and whose equipment is still branded with that name, collaborated with Abloh before, on two sets of transparent “skeleton” decks. This time, though, Abloh has created an accompanying capsule collection, called Sound Engineering, which he says was “inspired by the technical files that describe the internal structure of the DJ controller”. OK, Virgil. We’re sold. Now, can someone teach us how to mix? £1,549. AT SELFRIDGES. SELFRIDGES.COM
Story by
Patrick Humphries
Light bulbs pop on listening to Springtime In New York. Few would have argued on their initial release that the albums of that era – Shot Of Love, Infidels and Empire Burlesque – would stack up alongside masterpieces such as Highway 61 Revisited or Blood On The Tracks. But this glittering collection of outtakes, reworkings, even rehearsals, is as substantial as anything he has released in his extraordinary career. Here are centuries-old ballads (“Mary Of The Wild Moor”) and country classics (“Cold, Cold Heart”) and Dylan energetically revisiting his own past (“To Ramona”). There’s swaggering punk of “Julius And Ethel” and “Straight A’s In Love”, while “Tell Me” would be ideal for Adele. Then, of course, there’s the baffling exclusions at the time – “Blind Willie McTell”, “New Danville Girl” and “Angelina” – found here in new, majestic versions. Or how about the only ever performance of the rambunctious “Borrowed alf-empty venues, every Time”? Part of the appeal of the entire Bootleg Series, which began in 1991, is it offers the opporLP greeted with grudging reviews... Bob Dylan’s standing tunity to get inside that inscrutable Dylan head. in the 1980s was, at best, kneeA new “I And I” sparks memories of Leonard high. His trio of late 1970s and Cohen, after admitting he’d slaved for years over early 1980s religious LPs (Slow “Hallelujah”, asking Bob how long that one had Train Coming; Saved; Shot Of Love) taken him. “Oh, 15 minutes...” left fans baffled. As he approached For nearly 60 There are cover versions to marvel at, such as a poignant “Green, 50, Dylan was in danger of being years, Dylan seen as a rather quaint 1960s relic. Green Grass Of Home” and the one has sparred How different today: sailing past with his legend that, once again, displays Dylan’s 80, Nobel Prize winner, every new perspicacity: “Sweet Caroline”. Move over, Gareth Southgate, and tell Neil Diamond the collection greeted rapturously, every sold-out news. After this avalanche, roll on The Bootleg show buoyed by ecstatic reviews. Part of the Series, Vol 17. reason for that revival has been the ongoing Bootleg Series, his period-specific collections of “unofficial” recordings. It’s the Tutankhamun’s BOB DYLAN – SPRINGTIME IN NEW YORK: THE BOOTLEG SERIES, VOL 16 (1980-1985) IS OUT ON 17 SEPTEMBER. tomb of rock’n’roll: some of Dylan’s best ever material is only now making its official debut. What is remarkable is that we are up to volume 16 of The Bootleg Series, on top of Dylan’s 39 official studio albums. That 16th volume is titled Springtime In New York and covers 1980 to 1985, the very period, most would concur, that was the nadir of Dylan’s career (and, boy, there have been a few of those). It bulges with nearly 60 tracks, 54 of them previously unreleased in any format. What is so attractive about Dylan today – in an age when celebrity mystique is stripped away even before it happens – is that he remains an enigma. For nearly 60 years, Dylan has sparred with his legend (“My real message? Keep a good head and always carry a light bulb,” was his advice in 1965).
H
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D E TA I L S Ð H O R O L O G Y
On the wrist:
SUPER ICONS A personal safari through the big beasts of horology
Following the release of the Tudor Black Bay Fifty-Eight Bronze, Nick Foulkes asks how a relatively affordable watch became so covetable...
W
hen the history of the watch industry during the teens of our century comes to be written, at least one chapter will be devoted to the rebirth of Rolex’s sibling brand, Tudor. Hans Wilsdorf, the far-sighted founder of Rolex, had the Tudor brand registered in 1926, but the marque only took off in the years after the Second World War, when Wilsdorf decided to democratise the self-winding, Oyster-cased construction of the famous Rolex and sell to the bluecollar worker. “Jarred beyond belief” read the strapline of an advertisement showing builders fixing rivets into the frame of a skyscraper. “Punished without mercy!” was the slogan of an advert that depicted a Tudor being worn by a flat-capped pneumatic drill operator. During the early 1970s, the brand even offered a sort of poor man’s Paul Newman: a two-subdial chrono called the Tudor Oysterdate “Montecarlo” with an even funkier dial design than its crown-wearing sibling. But by the end of the last century the Tudor lustre was dimming and the brand was only really available in the Far East, where it ticked over (if you’ll excuse the pun) at a time before the PRC started flexing its shopping muscles. Elsewhere the brand was largely forgotten and until about 2009 the only Tudors I saw were in auction catalogues, but then – anticipating the retro-mania of the heritage watch boom – Tudor released the Heritage Chrono, which borrowed styling cues from its early 1970s models and applied them to robust watches with near-Rolex levels of build quality but using bought-in movements. It was a hit. Then in 2012 came the highly successful Tudor Heritage Black Bay: a steel diving watch with red bezel, high-vis, square-ended “snowflake” hands, black dial, gilt lettering and the Tudor rose motif. The watch recalled the early Tudor diving watches, which appeared in 1954 right after the Rolex Submariner and Blancpain 50 Fathoms. But the Black Bay
106 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Tudor Black Bay
was not a slavish copy of any particular model from its past (the snowflake hands did not make their first appearance until 1969). A few geeks – sorry, purists – delighted in pointing out what they saw as historical inconsistencies. The rest of us just couldn’t wait to get one on the wrist – it was drop-dead gorgeous and, for a watch of this quality and style, affordable (under £3,000 on bracelet and even less on a butch leather strap). The brand had stepped out of the shadow of the crown.
A
lmost overnight the internet was full of vintage Tudor experts ready to dilate on the use of milspec dive watches in the armed forces of Argentina, Canada, France, South Africa, Israel and the US. And, to use another pun, there is plenty of opportunity for deep diving into serial numbers, production dates, calibre changes and strap rub. There’s an entire subculture devoted to French Navy spec “MN” (Marine Nationale) Tudors, with collectors willing to trade their internal organs for examples with discharge papers – when retired from active service these pieces were sold by the French government along with documentation confirming their entry into civilian life. The Black Bay has since developed into a brand within a brand, ransacking its own past for design inspiration on the one hand and embracing new materials (this spring saw the arrival of the Black Bay Ceramic) on the other. It has also uprated its calibres: the Manufacture MT5400 and MT5402 are sturdy, 70-hour power reserve tractors that claim higher than COSC levels of precision. This year Tudor released its first watch with METAS certification, prompting comparisons with Omega. The genius of the Black Bay is that it conjures seemingly infinite variety from one model. One of the biggest steps came in 2018 with the launch of Black Bay FiftyEight. As the name suggests, this iteration brings it closer in feel to its midcentury antecedents and the introduction of riveted bracelets enhances the period feel. But it avoids descending into pastiche,
The Black Bay has since developed into a brand within a brand
Strap
Bronze bracelet with “T-fit” clasp for rapid adjustment. Also comes with a fabric strap.
Case
The 39mm satin-brushed bronze case will patinate over time.
Movement
The COSC-certified Calibre MT5400 has a 70-hour power reserve.
because in looking backwards Tudor is moving ever forwards, as demonstrated by this year’s Black Bay Fifty-Eight Bronze (available exclusively at Tudor boutiques). Bronze is more than just a chic – and, let’s face it, affordable – alternative to gold: it offers “character” inasmuch as it assumes a unique patina depending on the habits and habitat of each individual wearer. Moreover, it is the first Tudor to feature a bracelet entirely made from bronze. And with the sort of attention to detail one has come to expect from Tudor, its satinbrushed riveted links have been developed to patinate at the same pace as the case. For nearly a decade the Black Bay and its numerous declensions has powered Tudor to the upper tiers of desirability. We are not quite talking “Patek 5711 five times retail”, but anecdotally I know people with collections containing everything from Richard Milles to Paul Newmans who go to considerable effort to get the latest Tudor. Nor is it just a fashion thing; I have served on the jury of the Grand Prix of watchmaking for a number of years and I have lost count of the trophies that Tudor has won. It all neatly demonstrates that if designed with care, attention to detail and respect for the customer, a watch can be both affordable and covetable. £3,390. TUDORWATCH.COM David Beckham at Wimbledon, wearing a Tudor Black Bay Chronograph, 9 July
Photograph Getty Images Illustration Oriana Fenwick
No2
OFF GRID
russellandbromley.co.uk
T H E G Q AWA R D S 2 0 2 1
Welcome to the 24th annual GQ Men Of The Year Awards
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T H E G Q AWA R D S 2 0 2 1
LIFE IS NO O BACK TO AND WE DON’T YET KNOW WHAT
110 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
YET
O OT NORMAL. THE NEW NORMAL WILL LOOK LIKE.
SOMETHING IS TRUE: throughout all the struggles and hardship that everyone has been through these past 18 months, we’ll only get there if we make it happen ourselves. And so, for the 24th annual GQ Men Of The Year Awards, we celebrate both the people who are helping us reclaim the world we knew and those who have helped us along the way – because it’s just as important to celebrate what brings us joy as what brings us hope. The joy, for instance, of one of the bestselling music artists in the world, back with a brilliant new album. The hope of the fashion designer who rode out the worst of the pandemic while refusing to lay off a single member of staff. The joy of the actor who became an instant superstar as we all watched him break down barriers in the steamiest Netflix show of the year. The hope of the manager and team that made us believe. The joy of celebrating a living legend who became the oldest actor to win an Oscar. The hope of the group of athletes that flew halfway across the world to lift up an entire nation back home. The joy of an iconic director’s stunning debut novel, of an artist who broke new digital ground, of a man who is interested in one thing and one thing only and that’s catching bent coppers. And the hope, of course, of the two women and the team behind them who worked tirelessly in a lab to create a life-saving serum that would ensure a future for us all.
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T H E G Q AWA R D S 2 0 2 1
QUENTIN TARANTINO WRITER
Story by John Phipps
Photographs by Eric Ray Davidson
Styling by Andrew Vottero
For one of cinema’s most distinguished directors, it started not with the silver screen but the written word. Specifically: pulp fiction. Here, as the great American auteur turned author revisits a youthful obsession with spinner-rack paperbacks so intense it actually ended in arrest, we laud his debut novel – an adaptation of his own Oscar-winning hit Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood – and ask how he opened a new chapter on a long and celebrated career
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‘I had a ball writing this book. I love writing. I write all the time’
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Q
Quentin Tarantino knows when he likes something. He always has done. At 15, for instance, in the local Kmart, his eye came to light on a copy of a novel called The Switch. The book was about two ex-cons botching a kidnapping; the author’s name was Elmore Leonard. The young Tarantino thought, “Hey, that looks like it would make a pretty cool movie.” So he stole it. It was with books such as this one, pulp paperbacks and movie novelisations, that Tarantino’s adult reading life began. As a young teen, he found a paperback called Badge Of Honour, by Dallas Barnes, lying on the family coffee table. He read it and he liked it and he decided he wanted more. He remembers going to the drug store where there would be a spinner rack with comic books in it and, next to that, a rack full of pulp paperbacks. “I think the first time I actually bought one of those paperbacks from the spinner rack,” he says, “it was a movie novelisation.” Legal tender wasn’t always exchanged. On this occasion – after he’d been arrested, processed and released by the Torrance Police Department – Tarantino had to face the parental music. His mother grounded him for the whole summer. He spent it inside, thinking about movies and making plans for what he would do when he was free. Namely: get that Elmore Leonard book. “I was gonna be damned if I was gonna get into all this trouble and not get the book. So I went back to the same Kmart and I stole the book successfully.” He says he still has the copy somewhere. There must have been some instinct at work there, some fellowship of insight and serendipity, because Leonard’s sequel to The Switch was a book called Rum Punch – the book that, five years later, became Tarantino’s richly conceived gangster epic Jackie Brown. Then, a few years ago, he found himself digging out his old collection of movie novelisations from the back of a cupboard and going through them. “I thought, ‘Wow, these are really fun!’” He was right about that. They are fun. And they are also the reason GQ is talking to him today. It’s lunchtime on another gorgeous day in Los Angeles. Tarantino is sitting on a swing chair outside his house, sipping iced tea and looking out over his pool. He’s delighted with his life. He’s delighted with his career. He’s got a young son, Leo, whom he has spent the past 18 months taking care of, sitting out the pandemic the way 114 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
he would have been spending time anyway, with his family. And today, GQ’s Writer Of The Year is delighted with his latest project. After 34 years in movies – and you know all about that, so let’s not dwell too long on the nerdy twenties spent working in a video store, selling the scripts for True Romance and Natural Born Killers, the stylistic supernova of Reservoir Dogs, the triumphant Palme D’Or win at Cannes for Pulp Fiction, then Jackie Brown, Inglourious Basterds and all the rest of it, including two Oscar wins for Best Screenplay – 58-year-old Quentin Tarantino has put out his first novel, a pulpy adaptation of his last enormous hit, Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood. The movie was a smash: an ultraviolent hippy noir about the movie business that starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. Not satisfied with the film’s ten Oscar nominations (including two wins), he’s written the book and, by all accounts, it feels pretty good. “I had a fucking ball writing this book,” he says. “I’m happy that people are reading it. And they seem to like it.” In fact, they more than like it. One of the big surprises of the year, in literary circles, has been the enthusiastic reaction to Tarantino’s first novel, a self-conscious and clever piece of work that operates in what just might be the most sneered-at genre in literature. This isn’t just a novel, it’s a novelisation and it comes dressed like a trashy airport thriller, complete
Tarantino’s novel is a rude, unexpected, swaggering underdog, whose real twist is its sincere sweetness with technicolour stills from the motion picture on the front and a winking series of adverts for 1970s movies on the back – exactly the kind of book a young Tarantino might have stolen. What’s more, the critics love it. “Entirely outrageous and addictively readable,” said the Guardian. “A bold, nimble, piquant, informative, often joyous piece of storytelling in the metahistorical tradition of Doctorow and DeLillo and James Elroy,” was the verdict of the New Statesman. To this august body of opinion GQ will add that it’s a rude, unexpected, swaggering underdog of a novel, one whose real twist is the sincere sweetness at its core. If Tarantino played with history in the film, letting the Manson Family get, variously, cut to ribbons, pummelled into oblivion and straightforwardly barbecued, then in the book he’s taken another turn again, dispensing with the bloody theatrics and unearthing the big-hearted redemption story that was hiding in among the bodies. The move to fiction seems almost obvious, in retrospect. His films have always had literary flourishes: the two “volumes” of Kill Bill; The Hateful Eight, originally conceived as a novel, is divided into “chapters”. Tarantino’s inspiration comes from genre flicks and B-movies, but his ambitions have always been marked by a very
literary elevation. Giving the script for True Romance to friends, he would tell them to read it like a novel. (He has called it his “first novel” in interviews for years now.) And, of course, there’s that film: the one everyone has seen, whose poster everyone bought, whose soundtrack everyone played at parties and which everyone quoted and copied and ripped off to such an extent that it eventually became actively unhip to do this – that is, to make a big deal out of liking it or quote it or own the poster or play the soundtrack at parties – but which, before that, changed GQ’s life like it changed basically everyone else’s and whose title, it suddenly occurs to us, is Pulp Fiction.
I
n conversation, Tarantino is busy, excitable, stuffed with information. When not talking in references, Tarantino talks in italics. Sometimes he does both at once. “It’s a blast,” he responds when asked if he finds writing to be an agonising, doubt-ridden process. “I love writing. I write all the time.” If he’s not working on a project, most days find him notebook in hand, doodling, jotting, diagramming “some sort of fucking thing”. Whenever he reads a book, he says, he finds himself adapting it in his head, arranging shots and blocking scenes, casting the central characters (“All directors do that. You can’t help it”). He was like that at 15, reading The Switch, and he’s still like that now. If his career has now brought him to adapt his own work, then his time as a writer began in a similar way. Tarantino started his creative life as a young guy going to acting class. Only, he wasn’t the kind of guy who’d bring in a scene from Hamlet. Working from memory, he would transcribe his favourite movie scenes onto paper to run through them with a friend. “And if I thought it needed anything,” says Tarantino, “I’d add it.” This became his working method: take something you like, set it down, get inside it, find the rhythm of a scene, then follow the dictates of intuition. A few years in, he was having a beer with his roommate, Ronnie. “I was saying, ‘Oh, you know, I actually think this process, it’s kind of making me not bad at dialogue writing. I think I’m getting better and better.’ And Ronnie goes, ‘What are you talking about? You’re better than Paddy Chayefsky.’” The two had recently been doing a scene from the famous screenwriter’s Oscar-winning film Marty. Tarantino had written out the script and given it to Ronnie to run the dialogue. As it happened, though, Ronnie actually had the original to hand. So he’d read Chayefsky’s script and he liked it. Then he’d read his roommate’s version and he liked it more. “After he said that, I started thinking to myself, ‘Well, maybe I should take this writing thing a little more seriously.’” In Tarantino’s younger days he would write all day in cafés and restaurants, before pulling marathon all-nighters. In recent years, it’s been closer to regular working hours. He starts at about 10.30am and writes through to close. After finishing, he meditates on what he’s written in his pool, before towelling off and making notes for the next day’s work. Does that sound just a >>
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‘[My roommate] goes “You’re better than Paddy Chayefsky...” After that I started thinking I should take writing seriously’
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Time In... Hollywood, learning his lines in a floaty chair? “That might be a little bit where I got it from.” Does he have the floaty chair? “I don’t sit in the floaty chair.” He giggles. “I sit in the water up to my neck.” The first draft is a mountain of paper and ink, “ridiculously overwritten”, close to a stream of consciousness: “I’m just letting it rip.” It really is a mountain too: a screenplay is normally 95 to 125 minutes long, with the general rule being that each page is a minute of screen time. The first draft of Pulp Fiction was 500 pages; True Romance was the same length before Tarantino begun writing the third act. The spelling is atrocious, the handwriting too. It’s basically illegible, but that doesn’t matter: he’s the only one reading. That disorganised, baggy monster gets stripped down at the next stage. Despite three decades writing movies, Tarantino has never learned to type. He used to ask people to type up his scripts for him, but these days he does it himself. Because all his drafts are inputted with just his right index finger, it’s a highly labourintensive process that helps clarify narrative priorities. “You’re thinking, ‘OK, I’m not gonna do this unless it’s good.’” From there, the movie gets worked over and hewn down over a long period of time. The final edit becomes the working script. Sometimes there is no working script. With Kill Bill, Tarantino had blocked out the fight scenes beat for beat, but he directed from a composite document, half-screenplay, half-novel. “It was like going onto a set with a novel and adapting it every single solitary day.” That instinct to mentally adapt the pulp books he loved as a child became the daily alchemy of moviemaking. With the novel, that process was reversed. He already had the visual language, the cadence of the characters’ voices. More than that, he knew exactly what they looked like. “When I wrote the book I saw Brad Pitt doing everything,” he says. “I saw Leonardo DiCaprio doing everything.” The film’s powerful visual aura has a hold on its own creator. When he wrote the screenplay, he was imagining Sharon Tate’s character as the real-life Sharon Tate; when he wrote the book, he was picturing Margot Robbie. The end result is quite simply the year’s most unexpected literary pleasure. It’s playful, opinionated, inventive and, above all, far more character-driven than you might anticipate. The two leads are the same as in the movie. First, Rick Dalton, “an Eisenhower actor in a Dennis Hopper Hollywood”, subsiding into alcoholism and bitparts on network Westerns. Playing opposite Dalton is his stunt double, Cliff Booth. Booth is a former war hero-cum-wife murderer, sometime stuntman and present-day chauffeur whose damaged, impulsive, no-shit persona may be the book’s most compelling centre of consciousness. In one bravura passage, the reader gets a 20-page rundown of Booth’s first experiences with foreign films after he comes back from fighting the Second World War to live in America and finds that foreign cinema has a reality he just can’t find in Hollywood movies. “When Paul Newman played a bastard, like in Hud,” writes 116 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Tarantino, channelling Booth’s POV, “he was still an enjoyable bastard. But the guy in Breathless wasn’t just a sexy stud prick. He was a little creep, petty thief, piece of shit.” Does Tarantino agree with Booth? Does he also think that Seven Samurai is magnificent but with Red Beard Kurosawa started to fall off? That Fellini got dull when he decided that life is a circus? That Bergman is too boring, Truffaut mostly sucks, Antonioni is a fraud and Hiroshima Mon Amour is, frankly, “a piece of crap”? A brief pause. “Well, OK, here’s the thing: I more or less agree with a lot of the things Cliff says, but I agree with him for different reasons.” Spoken like a true obsessive. In fact, Tarantino can marshal a raft of citations for any occasion, including, for instance, when GQ asks: um, what do you make of people thinking you have a thing about feet? A pause. A sigh of disappointment that we would even think to ask such a thing. “I don’t take it seriously. There’s a lot of feet in a lot of good directors’ movies. That’s just good direction. Like, before me, the person foot fetishism was defined by was Luis Buñuel, another film director. And Hitchcock was accused of it and Sofia Coppola has been accused of it.” There are plenty of bare feet in the novelisation of Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood too, but perhaps it’s best not to dwell. Feet are, as the man himself says, for the screen, whereas the novel is richer in backstory and interiority. It
‘There’s a lot of feet in a lot of good directors’ movies... Luis Buñuel, Hitchcock, Sofia Coppola’ goes deeper into the sadness of actors, the career paths of walk-on parts and the tangled contingencies of life in Hollywood. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is, at its heart, a book about the sadness and excitement of expectation: Sharon Tate, the next-big-thing actor with her unborn child; Aldo Ray, a washed-up alcoholic with his own kind of dignity; even Manson feels more like a relatable kind of loser, trying to make it big as a hippie folk singer, than the electromagnetic pulse powering a murderous sex-and-bullshit cult. At one point the book quotes the film critic Pauline Kael: “In Hollywood you can die of encouragement.” It’s the losers, I think, who have Tarantino’s heart. Maybe that’s why Booth’s education in cinema feels so real. “I think it’s the solitary experience he ends up liking,” says Tarantino, turning ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD: A NOVEL BY QUENTIN TARANTINO (ORION PUBLISHING, £8.99) IS OUT NOW.
reflective. “Which, actually, is kind of interesting. I hadn’t thought about it before – but that was, for the most part, you know, me. From, like, 14 to 22 or 23, I saw so many movies. But it was rare, unless the movie was a huge hit, that I saw something other kids in school saw or my family saw. For the most part, I’m seeing a whole lot of movies and I’ve never talked to anybody about them.”
T
he man GQ is speaking to today sounds blissfully happy, revelling in the joys of new parenthood. (He says he does bath time, but not nappies.) It’s been a slow growth towards contentment from the “piss and vinegar”. “I think that’s the goal,” he says, laughing, “and most of us more or less achieve it.” But the young Tarantino was alone in his obsession. “It was a completely solitary experience. Whatever I felt about it, and however much I liked it, it was unexpressed.” After that electric loneliness in the dark theatre, Tarantino would cut out magazine clips from his favourite music and movie critics and stick them into organised scrapbooks. “So I’d have my Pauline Kael books, my Stanley Kauffmann book, my Michael Ventura book.” Kael remains a guiding light. He not only owns all her books, but he also buys every different edition he sees. Fans have long wondered if Tarantino would ever get round to some of the projects he’s teased: a movie about the Vega brothers; a Silver Surfer film; a third Kill Bill. There are a few ideas today – the most surprising being that he’d like to write a novelisation of someone else’s movie – but the great forthcoming Tarantino work, for my money, will be a book of film reviews, slated for release in the next few years. Who wouldn’t want to read that? Beyond that, there are big books of essays that he has been adding to for decades and which he can never seem to finish, on the work of filmmakers such as Brian De Palma, Sergio Corbucci, Don Siegel and Robert Aldrich. “I don’t think I’ll finish them,” he says, laughing. “They’re sitting un-typed in a drawer.” He has other plans – not settled yet, but vague, floating enticements that might grab him. He says he can see himself doing a novelisation of True Romance or Reservoir Dogs. What about – it seems so obvious – making Pulp Fiction into pulp fiction? A pause. “Nah, that doesn’t interest me.” The answer is immediate. Because he knows instinctively, by this point, how to listen to his instincts, the ones that took him to where he is today. Before the mountain of paper, the one-handed typing, the rewrites and edits and inevitable accommodations with practicality, every project starts with an idea, an interior excitement, something he’s wanted to do for a long time, something that sparks the same sense of momentum he felt as a young guy adding dialogue to other people’s movies – that pregnant sense of direction and certainty. So he sits down to write. Very quickly, almost immediately, he knows if he’s on to something. “I know within the first couple of scenes: I’m gonna finish this. This is it. This is the next one I’m doing. I started doing it and I was right.”
Production Alicia Zumback at CAMP Grooming Simone at Exclusive Artists using Sisley Paris and Kevin Murphy Digital technician Jules Bates Photography assistants Jack Shelton; Ben Thomas Styling assistant Michael Vasquez
>> bit like DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in Once Upon A
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‘From 14 to 23 I saw so many movies and I’ve never talked to anybody about them’
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OU TSTA NDING CON TR IBU TION
BOBBY GILLESPIE From his rocking 1991 album that shaped the decade’s party scene to a hip, contemplative collab record and memoir 20 years on, we salute the Primal Scream frontman, whose contributions to alternative music, politics and states of consciousness have already entered legend
Story by Dylan Jones Photographs by Sarah Piantadosi Styling by Katy England
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T H E G Q AWA R D S 2 0 2 1 Reputations come easy in rock’n’roll. Tell someone you ate a live bat on stage and you’ll be forever called the prince of darkness. Turn your amp all the way up to eleven and you’ll be labelled the king of feedback. Stay up a bit late on a Thursday night and you’ll be pigeonholed as a drug fiend. Well, it’s fair to say that Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie has stayed up late on a Thursday quite a lot. In fact, his (former) reputation as one of rock’s wild men wasn’t won easily: Bobby certainly put the hours in. He isn’t so much a stereotype as an archetype, because when Gillespie came along they broke the mould. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the mould broke itself. Gillespie has had an insanely productive lockdown, finishing a critically acclaimed album of rootsy ballads (Utopian Ashes) in the style of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris with former Savages frontwoman Jehnny Beth and penning the first part of his autobiography, Tenement Kid, for White Rabbit Books (which his editor had to cut down from 240,000 words). The book is Gillespie’s story up to the recording and release of the album many credit with “starting the 1990s”, Screamadelica, which contained such classic songs as “Movin’ On Up”, “Come Together” and “Loaded”. These were the songs that, along with “Velocity Girl”, “(I’m Gonna) Cry Myself Blind”, “Kowalski”, “Darklands” and “Accelerator”, gave Primal Scream an undercurrent of potency almost unrivalled in their field. They went from baggy to punk-grunge and then, most successfully, to the dance floor, before melding it all into an unmistakably rich mix full of sonic petulance. Born into a working-class Glaswegian family in the summer of 1962, Gillespie’s memoir begins in the district of Springburn, soon to be evacuated in brutal slum clearances. Leaving school at 16 and going to work as a printers’ apprentice, Gillespie soon has his head turned by first Thin Lizzy and then the Sex Pistols, causing him to drop everything and turn his attention to embroiling himself in the music industry. Soon he was a rock star par excellence, a curious mixture of John Lydon and Mick Jagger, a frontman who took to drugs as enthusiastically as he took to rock’n’roll. He quit drugs in 2008, although his passion for music remains undiminished. Which is one of the many reasons GQ decided to celebrate him this year. Did you write the book because you had the opportunity to or did it just feel like the right time?
At the beginning of last year, before the whole Covid hysteria, I went into the studio and I thought about what I wanted to do in 2020. I didn’t want to write another rock’n’roll record, because I knew we had the Jehnny Beth record ready to go. I wanted to challenge myself creatively and I decided I would try to write a book. Lee Brackstone had been after me to write a memoir when he was at Faber & Faber and I’d always rebuffed his advances. But I just felt the seed had been planted and decided to give it a go. Lee started White Rabbit and it seemed like a natural fit. So what was the process of writing Tenement Kid like?
I wrote a few pages of themes I want us to discuss, like family, class, education, work, violence and depression. Depression is actually too strong a word, but the effects of early childhood on my personality and how it has affected my relationships and just the way I am with the world. I wanted to write about the journey of a workingclass person and the journey to becoming an 120 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
artist. I wanted to write about Glasgow, about the areas I grew up in and some of the characters I met when I was at school and even preschool, because my memory is quite good. I wanted to write about politics, as I come from quite a political background. I wanted to write about how class and place and environment affected me, so hopefully other people might read the book and relate to that. Music and art were a portal to another world for me and became the true way I was educated, as the education I received at school was lacking. I got an education through my interest in pop culture that I never received at school. Did you enjoy writing the book?
Oh, yeah. It was very cathartic. I couldn’t wait to go back in the next morning and start working again, get the computer out and just see where it took me. It was a bit like therapy and the stuff I did when I cleaned up from drugs and alcohol. I actually think I had a nice time as a kid. Glasgow is a violent city, a sectarian city. It’s a hard city. It’s a very working-class city. But it’s also a very humorous and soulful and fantastic city. So I’m very much a proud Glaswegian and hopefully that comes across in the book. I am
seen in a particular kind of way by the media and I wanted everyone to know where I came from. How do you think you and Primal Scream came to be seen by the media?
I think we were seen as a bunch of crazy drug addicts who just loved to party and get wasted and I think we were underestimated because of that. I think we’ve made a lot of really good artistic choices and there’s a lot of intelligence behind what we did, but maybe we didn’t help ourselves, because the image we gave out in the 1990s was very much hedonistic. The band prided itself on being able to take more drugs and harder drugs than any other bands. We just saw everybody else as lightweights. It was very, very macho; that’s very “West Coast of Scotland”, very working-class macho: “I can drink everybody under the table.” I was never a good drinker – I get drunk very easily – but I liked powders and pills. That was my poison. [Previously,] people really had to hide their addictions, because there was a very high risk of going to prison. But somehow, throughout the 1990s, it became safe for people to talk openly in magazines and on TV about drugs. It was seen as a badge of honour, to the point where people like Robbie Williams were boasting about taking coke. Back in the day – jazz musicians in the 1940s, rock’n’rollers in the 1950s, psychedelic rockers in the 1960s and 1970s – drugs were for outsider hip people and in the 1990s they became normalised and, I guess, unhip. Suddenly there were just rivers of coke and ecstasy. Ecstasy that used to cost £25 a hit was suddenly a tenner and a gram of coke went from £100 to £50. I started to believe that maybe the authorities had seen how the acid house revolution, which at first they hated, was a way of keeping people together. You know, if everybody’s in a field off their heads with loads of drugs for three days, maybe that’s where we should keep them. Just like they did in the US, pumping cheap heroin into the big American cities. You came to prominence in the 1990s. How do you look back on the decade? With fondness?
By the 1990s, the United Kingdom was a one-party state. [However,] I saw there was excitement about John Smith. My dad was still in the Labour Party and he was excited by him. Then he died and I remember reading about this guy Tony Blair, the new leader, and I asked my dad, “Who is this guy?” My dad says, “No one really knows where he’s come from and what he stands for,” which is quite prescient when you know what came later. And, of course, I voted for Tony Blair. I voted Labour every time, [although] I didn’t really show too much interest in what was going on. I was just thinking, “It’s great: we got a Labour government.” I didn’t really understand they were really in many ways a continuation of Thatcherism, that they never broke the neoliberal consensus. You didn’t embrace New Labour like others did?
I remember Alan McGee telling me he was going to go to Number Ten with Noel [Gallagher]. He said, “What do you think?” as he was really >>
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‘Primal Scream prided itself on being able to take more drugs and harder drugs than any other bands’
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‘[New Labour] were a continuation of Thatcherism, they never broke the neoliberal consensus’
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T H E G Q AWA R D S 2 0 2 1 >> pleased and I think he thought I’d be pleased. I said, “I’m not sure. I don’t know what it is, but I’m just not sure it’s the right thing to do.” I said, “It’s up to you, but I don’t think I would do it.” If we learned anything from New Labour, it’s that third-way politics don’t work, because society is just too unequal and they never levelled up. You know, they kept the Thatcher neoliberal consensus going. Britain is more unequal now than it’s ever been and that is a failure of New Labour. I think if you radically want to transform society, third-way politics don’t work. You know, just like Bill Clinton in America and Tony Blair in Britain. It doesn’t work. How do you look back upon Britpop?
At the beginning of the 1990s, the electronic music we were hearing coming from Detroit and Chicago sounded futuristic and you had this huge explosion of creativity, of black kids in South London and white kids in Sheffield making techno and jungle, making this music that was uniquely British but had been influenced by the energy flash of acid house and Detroit and Chicago techno and house, and that was something to be proud of. Then when the Britpop thing happened, it was very retro and then the Union Jacks came out and I was like, “Wow. This is not for me.” I knew the value of Oasis, and we were friends with Noel and Liam, but we kind of just stayed in the margins and did our own thing. You can’t discount that, because it was this explosion of guitar bands. I think we were just too old for it. As an artist, how have your ambitions changed from when you started?
The ambition for me at the moment is to become a better songwriter and better lyricist and express myself in better ways than I’ve ever done and, hopefully, still have something to say, writing serious songs that feel or capture the moment and that are age-appropriate. And I hope that doesn’t sound horribly age-appropriate, but I just want to be a good artist. I’ve got a clarity in the last couple of years that I never had before and a lot of that is to do with experimentation and exploring things outside my comfort zone. If you stay in your zone then you’re trapped. Why did you want to make a record with Beth?
Because of the arrangements of the songs, the pace of the songs, the amount of space in the songs and the instrumentation we used, it allowed me, as a lyricist and a singer, to breathe and express myself in a clear, open, raw, honest manner, as I was able to fictionalise events. I’m doing things I couldn’t have done in Primal Scream, because in the past we’ve sometimes been guilty of making kind of high-energy rock’n’roll or high-energy electronic rock records that are quite claustrophobic and angry sounding. This record gave me the freedom to do something different. Which, as an artist, is basically all you want to do. You need to fly, to challenge yourself and do something different. TENEMENT KID (WHITE RABBIT BOOKS, £16) IS OUT ON 14 OCTOBER.
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‘I’ve got a clarity in the last couple of years and a lot of that is to do with exploring outside my comfort zone’
Suit by Edward Sexton, £6,500. edwardsexton. co.uk. Shirt by Burberry, £1,050. burberry.com. Boots, Bobby’s own. Opposite: Coat by Burberry, £3,690. burberry.com. Shirt by JW Anderson, £535. jwanderson.com. Trousers, £690. Boots, £790. Both by Celine Homme By Hedi Slimane. celine.com Hair Andrea Martinelli at LGA Management Make-up Laura Dominique at Streeters Digital technician Alex Cornes Photography assistants Stefan Ebelewicz; Jack Storer Styling assistant Lydia Simpson
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PROFESSOR DAME SARAH GILBERT, DR CATHERINE GREEN AND THE TEAM BEHIND THE OXFORD/ASTRAZENECA VACCINE HEROES
Story by Sirin Kale Photographs by Jooney Woodward Styling by Angelo Mitakos
Thanks to the foresight of an academic lab in Oxford, the race to develop a world-changing response to Covid-19 began weeks before the virus’ full devastation was unleashed. What’s more, that race was won astonishingly quickly and when the lead scientists announced their life-saving vaccine in November last year, it offered hope to every corner of the globe. They say not all heroes wear capes... These ones wear lab coats
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ugust 2020. The UK is eating out to help out, cocksure in the misguided certainty that the terrible travails of the Covid-19 pandemic are a thing of the past. Dr Catherine Green is on a camping holiday with her daughter, Ellie, and friends. Here, in a rural idyll beside a trickling stream, the Oxford University biologist hoped to get a respite from her punishing work developing a Covid-19 vaccine. There was no phone signal or electricity. There were scarcely 20 people in the campsite. And then, in a queue for a pizza van, Green overheard a fellow camper talking about the Covid-19 vaccine. The woman had valid concerns, but she was illinformed. “She was saying she didn’t know what was in it and she didn’t trust it.” For a moment, Green considered leaving her to it: she was on holiday, after all. But she couldn’t walk away. She took a breath, before introducing herself to the holidaymaker. “I can tell you what’s in it,” she said, “because my team made it.” The two women spoke amicably about how the vaccine was designed, before parting ways. Because when you’re creating a vaccine to literally save the world from a brand-new deadly disease, there’s no campsite in the world where you can get away from it all. In just over a year, Green, 46, and her colleague, Professor Dame Sarah Gilbert, 59, have become two of the most recognisable scientists in the world. (It is fair to say that Gilbert, with her distinctive red hair and trademark squarerimmed glasses, is the more widely known – not that Green seems the slightest bit envious.) The memoir they coauthored of the year they spent developing the vaccine, Vaxxers, is a bestseller. Inevitably, there will be a movie adaptation down the line and inevitably Kate Winslet will be involved. There is already a Barbie doll. You sense they want to slough off the celebrity. At this year’s Wimbledon Championships, Gilbert
received a standing ovation, much to her visible mortification. “I didn’t know it was going to happen,” she says of the applause, “and would rather not have been filmed when it suddenly, unexpectedly did.” There are endless interview requests, unsolicited emails, constant encounters in the street. “‘Ooh, I know who you are,’” says Gilbert, mimicking one such interaction. “‘I want you to write a blog post for me!” She flinches. “Don’t give me another job.” We are speaking via Zoom, Green from home, where she has worked throughout the pandemic, and Gilbert from her office. (The office – utterly drab and institutional – is instantly recognisable to me as the backdrop for the many media interviews Gilbert gave throughout 2020. When I observe this, Gilbert responds, “Because I’m always here.”) In person, Gilbert is more amiable than her slightly dour public image suggests, while Green is a wisecracking, exuberant presence – you sense she’d be good fun on a night out. The week we speak, Boris Johnson has removed all Covid-19 restrictions in England. Mask-wearing is voluntary. But her fame, Gilbert observes drily, is a good reason to “keep the mask on. Tie my hair up. Then I’m a bit less recognisable.” Gilbert and Green began working on their Covid-19 vaccine in January 2020, in those last days of blissful complacency before the country was upturned like an empty flask on a lab bench. Gilbert was the one to get the ball rolling, having read about a “pneumonia of unknown origin” on an obscure medical news site on New Year’s Day. A few days later, it became apparent that these deaths were linked to a new Sars-like virus. Gilbert had previously worked to develop a vaccine for Mers-Cov, which is, like Sars, also a coronavirus. In theory, a vaccine for Covid-19 could be developed in much the same way as the Mers vaccine, meaning Gilbert was one of very few people in the world who, at that time, might actually be able to help. Gilbert enlisted Green to help make a prototype vaccine, using an ultra-rapid technology Gilbert had been developing for years. Within a year, the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine would achieve regulatory approval. Given that vaccines normally take years, even decades, to develop, this was an unprecedented feat. Gilbert was made a Dame, Green given an OBE. But what is clear from speaking to both women is that none of this, at any point, was a given. Throughout 2020, both women prepared themselves for the possibility that their Covid-19 vaccine would be a dud. “The scientific process [means] failing quite a lot,” says Green. “You have to get things wrong and learn from them. So there was always the possibility that, for some reason, the coronavirus spike protein wasn’t the right target to use for a coronavirus vaccine... It’s biology. It’s complicated. It wasn’t guaranteed to work.” Gilbert interjects: “I’ve always said there should be multiple vaccines in development... You don’t know what is going to go wrong.” Everyone who interviews them, Gilbert says, asks whether there was an “a-ha” moment, when things fell into place. “There wasn’t one,” she says crisply. “It’s all general development and lots of hard work.” What she is saying is that the >>
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‘The scientific process [means] failing quite a lot... [The Covid-19 vaccine] wasn’t guaranteed to work’
From left: Sarah wears blazer, £199. Trousers, £119. Both by Ted Baker. tedbaker.com. Blouse by Phase Eight, £69. phase-eight.com. Shoes by Jimmy Choo, £675. jimmychoo.com. Catherine wears jacket, £369. Blouse, £189. Trousers, £189. All by Boss. boss.com. Shoes by Russell & Bromley, £225. russellandbromley.co.uk
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hat becomes apparent from speaking to Gilbert and Green is that possibly we do not deserve the scientists that rescued us from the calamity of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this country, as in many developed nations, we treat our academics shabbily, pay them poorly and force them to perform a minstrel dance every year or so, begging for funding for their critical research. “People don’t necessarily understand what a scientific career really looks like,” says Green. “It’s lots of short-term fixed contracts. You might have a job for two years and then a job for three years and then you have to reapply for your job or move around between institutions. And that’s very challenging, especially when you’re in your thirties and trying to have a family.” Gilbert is nodding furiously. It is the most animated I have seen the impeccably self-contained academic in our entire interview. “I got my PhD when I was 24 and I didn’t have a permanent job until I was 58,” Gilbert says. But surely, I say, people must be throwing money at the great Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green now? I envisage them texting a government minister, who immediately disburses funds. “No, no,” says Gilbert, faintly exasperated. Her implacable mien slips for a second. “There’s no money. I don’t know what is going to happen after next March. Because the big picture is science-funding councils get their money from the government and the government hasn’t told them what money is going to be available next year.” “We don’t know what we’re doing next year,” Green adds. Both women worry constantly about how they will secure funding for their projects and pay the people who work for them. Covid has not changed that. “That’s a huge stress,” says Green. “You’re constantly having to find money to pay your team.” Did she ever consider leaving to work in the private sector? “It’s always in the back of one’s mind,” Green says, laughing. Gilbert did leave the academic world, working for a private biotech company, Delta Biotechnology, for four years. “We were doing interesting science,” she says. But, by chance, the parent company of the firm sold it and Gilbert was left with not much to do, so she rejoined academia. Only through chance did the academic world regain one of its greatest minds. All of which is to say that the life of a vaccine researcher in the Covid-19 pandemic was not necessarily that much more stressful than the life of a vaccine researcher in non-pandemic times. More 128 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
meals from vending machines certainly (“Thank God the vending machine saga is over,” jokes Green. “No more Bounty bars. I’ve got to lose all of those pandemic pounds!”) and more pressure, of course: the eyes of the world were upon them. But at least during Covid, Gilbert and Green had the money they needed. “There were no international flights between the UK and Rome,” recalls Green, “so we had to charter a private jet to fly 500 doses from Rome to London. Madness!” Now things are approaching normality, both women are back where they started: scrounging together money to continue their research. As we speak, Green is desperately trying to get funding to expand her manufacturing facility, where the vaccine prototype was first made. You would think after a year in which scientists literally saved the world from a deadly virus, our government would finally recognise the importance of investment in research to protect us from other emerging pathogens, especially as most experts agree that a deadly influenza pandemic is basically inevitable. But apparently not. “There’s always going to be another pandemic,” says Gilbert. “Everyone who works in pandemic preparedness has been saying this for years... I hope there will be better preparedness but, as we were talking about, it costs money – and we need the money to invest. And there are a lot of demands for money at the moment.”
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he pandemic is not over yet – far from it. The week we speak, cases are rising as the Delta variant runs amok. Hundreds of thousands of people are self-isolating, having been pinged by the NHS app. “It’s only a ‘pingdemic’ because cases are really high,” Green says irritably. “It’s not the app that’s doing it. It’s the fact that there are a lot of cases in the country.” Many believe that booster shots will be necessary as immunity wanes. Gilbert is not generally in favour of booster doses in developed countries, when so many people around the world have yet to receive a first dose. (She makes an exception for those in older age groups with waning immunity, if the evidence showed it was useful.) “The most impact from the vaccine is with the first dose,” she says. “We get really high protection with the first dose, then it improves with the second. So if you want to think about getting the most protection across the world, vaccinate everybody once, rather than some people three times.” Both women are concerned about the potential for further new variants to emerge, of course.
The Oxford vaccine in profile, the day after it was approved for use in the UK
“We do know that there is a lot of spread of transmission in many countries where people are not vaccinated yet,” says Gilbert. “And as that continues to happen, there’s always the risk that new variants will arise and that’s what we need to try to prevent from happening.” AstraZeneca has pledged to make the vaccine available to the developing world at cost in perpetuity. “The details of the deal with AZ,” says Gilbert, “is something neither of us had anything to do with... [but] as a university and as a charity, we were always working for public health and public good and not for profit. The university was never going to just sell it to the highest bidder and try to make the most money.” Both women lobbied internally to ensure the vaccine would be affordable to low-income nations. Working with the pharmaceutical giant led to a few surreal moments. “I make 1,000 doses maximum in my research team... and then people [from AZ] on the other side of the world are starting to say, ‘We’ll manufacture this and put it on this continent and there will be a billion doses,’” explains Green. “That was a penny-drop moment.”
‘There were no flights. We had to charter a jet to fly 500 doses from Rome to London. Madness!’ A billion doses of a vaccine you manufactured in your lab, going into arms around the world – it is a remarkable, almost unimaginable achievement. Green permitted herself a moment of prideful self-satisfaction, taking a selfie when she received her first dose. “It was an emotional moment for me,” she says, “because I’m there along with other people receiving the AstraZeneca jab. And that meant a lot, because it was the culmination for us of the project that started back in January the year before.” She thinks about the lives that have been saved due to the vaccine. “It’s now above 30,000,” says Green. “That’s real people, relatives that have been saved, 30,000 grandmas that wouldn’t be with us. That’s a humbling thing to have been even a small part of. And we are only a small part of it. But that’s something really important.” Characteristically, Gilbert has not allowed herself such a feeling of accomplishment. “We’re still working,” she explains. Their work to re-engineer the vaccine against new variants is ongoing and both are attending to the vaccine research they neglected in order to prioritise the Covid vaccine. (Gilbert is also trying to improve vaccine manufacturing capabilities around the world, particularly in Africa, where there is currently no local Covid vaccine manufacturing taking place.) Because when you’re a vaccine researcher, there is always a new clinical trial to evaluate or a paper to publish. Gilbert and Green cannot afford to rest on their laurels, because emerging deadly pathogens don’t take time out either. “It’s not over yet,” Gilbert says briskly. “We still have lots of different things to do.”
Hair and make-up Lucie Pemberton using Armani Beauty With thanks to Old Bank Hotel, Oxford
>> Covid-19 vaccine wouldn’t have been possible without the work that had been done to develop an ultra-rapid manufacturing technique prior to Covid and her work on Mers. The Covid-19 vaccine was the culmination of a lifetime’s work: endless papers, interminable grant proposals, tedious conferences in anonymous hotels. Professor Gilbert has an h-index (the score used to assess the productivity and citation impact of a scholar) of 91, which is higher than many Nobel Laureates. Theirs was a steady, slow trudge uphill, not a steep sprint to the top.
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‘The universe has expanded... I’m no longer in [the Bridgerton WhatsApp group]’ 130 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
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REGÉ-JEAN PAGE STA NDOU T PER FOR M A NCE
Story by Stuart McGurk
Photographs by Jason Hetherington
Styling by Luke Day
In case you and 82 million others have forgotten how we spent last year’s festive break, a one-word reminder: Bridgerton. As Netflix crowns the Regency romp its most-watched series, GQ bows to the man behind its dashing Duke Of Hastings, who rises next to meets the Russo brothers in the streamer’s biggest-budget blockbuster yet
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Regé-Jean Page talks like the spacebar is yet to be invented. He is mildly hungover – we both are; it was England vs Denmark the night before – and he. Is. Excited! England won, of course, in extra time, and the match saw England playmaker Jack Grealish subbed on only to be subbed off. Page doesn’t so much have thoughts on this as a one-man radio play. It’s about England’s tactics, naturally, but also a cultural shift. It’s about the demise of lad culture. And the rise of feminism. And the fact that Gareth Southgate isn’t just a football manger, but also a cultural touchstone for... It’s best to let him explain. “So-this-is-exactly-what-you-do-we-allgo-to-a-flat-back-five-we-all-agree-on-that? Yes-OK.” (To be clear, he is answering himself here, presumably because I’d just slow the whole process down.) “We-want-to-bemore-defensive-we’re-not-looking-to-attackwithout-defensive-discipline? Yes-right. So-who-do-we-take-off? Well-obviously-Jack-thejob-he-has-come-on-to-do-has-been-done-andthat’s-real-maturity-which-is-unusual-isn’t-it?” I nod. “We-do-passion-and-blood-and-gutsbut-this-kind-of-quiet-maturity-it’s-an-alienlanguage. So-this-is-why-I-like-the-way-thesethings-intersect-with-the-culture-becauseif-we’re-talking-about-Euro-96-and-thatkind-of-lad-culture” – which we now are – “that-came-out-of-the-1990s-it-feels-likeSouthgate’s-brand-of-quiet-maturity-if-that’swhat-we’re-branding-it” – which we also now are – “would-be-viewed-as-suspiciously-continentialnigh-on-feminist-and-there’s-something-aboutall-having-grown-into-being-open-and-takingabout-your-feelings-that...” The point he’s making – and it’s no less a point for being delivered in the style of someone telling you that a child has fallen down a well – is one of a broader shift in the culture. One in which, just maybe, we are learning to take a step back, Southgate-style, clear-eyed, and are no longer doing things just because that’s how they’ve always been done. Especially if how it’s always been done never make much sense anyway. Which is how I knew we were really talking about Bridgerton before we’d even started talking about Bridgerton. To say it was a smash for Netflix barely hints at it. The Regency-era drama, in which Page 132 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
Regé-Jean Page as the Duke Of Hastings in Bridgerton, Netflix’s most-watched original series to date
agency that they’ve not been afforded before. That’s what’s ridiculous. That we are not creative enough in the creative industries – that’s the failure. But the second you start doing that? It’s like, ‘This is so easy!’ Yes, it is, so keep doing that.” He tells me a story, which his publicist later sends a link regarding, to ensure I’ve got it, about when Paris was recaptured during the Second World War. The French, he points out, were fighting with mostly black soldiers. But they didn’t want that imagery in the history books so shipped in white soldiers for the victory march. His point is this: when people complain about political correctness when they see a black actor in, say, Dunkirk, they have it the wrong way around: “The reason you think history is white is because you’ve been lied to. It’s not that we’re being politically correct. It’s that we’ve been, very deliberately, politically incorrect.”
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ll of the above is true. But while it accounts for Bridgerton’s cultural resonance and undoubted zeitgeist appeal, it doesn’t quite explain – how can one put this? – the eight-episode thirst-trap sex-plosion the show would reveal itself to be. Page remembers visiting the production offices when everyone was still reading the book due to how racy it was. When he arrived for the first conversation about the role, the security guard had his head buried in it. When he checked in with the receptionist, she had to look up from it. A Slack channel in the offices was alive with nothing but chatter about it (“Girl, turn to page 38!”). When he went in for a chemistry read with Phoebe Dynevor – his costar and partner in thirst trapping – he remembers the receptionists blushing when they asked what bit they’d got to in it. I tell him that I was a little shocked myself upon watching it to realise the plot for entire the series (spoiler alert) essentially revolved around if he, as the duke who had married Phoebe’s demure debutante, would either ejaculate inside her or pull out just before he came. (Her preference, as someone who wanted children, was pro ejaculation; his preference, for reasons too complicated to go into here, was pro pull-out.) “Yes! That right there! And you’re blushing talking about it” – this can neither be confirmed nor denied – “Because we don’t write that!” Predictably, the thing he got asked about in every junket interview was, “How did you watch it with your parents?” The response he never exactly gave but gives now to me is, “Mate, how do you think we got here? Everyone’s done it.” The intimate scenes, he says, were not dissimilar to stunts in terms of how they shot them: “‘Like, if I move here, in what way? Does that shift our weight? What’s dangerous about here? Is it OK if we move in this direction?’” They had a three-layer system: “So there’s a yoga mat, a little yoga ball and whatever else between you and the other person.” Being labelled a heart-throb, he says, is “like a side dish really... The meal remains the same... and sometimes the side might complement it and sometimes you might over-dress the salad... and it’s just about knowing what the side >>
Photograph Netflix
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played the dashing Duke Of Hastings, was the streaming service’s biggest series ever. Launched last December, 82 million households worldwide tuned into the show in its first 28 days online, almost half of Netflix’s entire subscriber base. And it catapulted the 31-year-old from the guy you might have seen in the 2016 remake of Roots (in which he played the fast-talking – naturally – Chicken George) or the BBC school drama Waterloo Road (in which he played the smouldering – naturally – teacher Guy Braxton) into an instant A-list leading man, with an Emmy nomination to boot. But more important than the figures were the faces. It may have been based on Julia Quinn’s novels and centred around the world of debutantes and dances, but this was no by-the-book Austen adaption: it was snappy, snarky and don’t-watch-with-older-relatives sexy. During the initial table read of the scripts, Page remembers someone saying, “How do you read this? This isn’t what an Austen adaption looks like.” As he puts it to me now, “And it’s like, ‘No, it’s not an Austen adaption. That’s the point.’ It’s triple the speed!” He clicks his fingers. “The whole thing is a bit less precious and a bit more fun.” But just as crucially, it was diverse. The very first shot of Page – essentially the show’s Darcy – saw him arrive on horseback. Finally, a period drama that showed black people with status. To moan about historical accuracy misses the point. As Page says, “I think it becomes very obvious who was excluded from the game previously. It just became vaguely ludicrous that it was such an issue before. You know, ‘How will this work?’ Um, we’ll do the acting!” While some black actors, he says, may have not even asked their agents about those period roles, believing they wouldn’t be considered anyway, Page looks at it the other way around: “I’d be twice as hard on my agent to get on the case. Because I think that’s the only way you end up with Bridgerton. You don’t get there unless you’re knocking on the door.” Hence the entrance on the horse mattered: “Being on a horse is literally lifting people into a position of aspiration, power, possibility and
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sauces you allow in the meal... and what quantity of...”. He stops. “I have a theory that I’m always hungry when I do interviews, as I always talk about food.”
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o meet Regé-Jean Page is to meet a man who is living life with the volume turned up. He is delighted by everything. Mischief, naturally, is fun (“Mischief is fun!”). The lady who looked after stage directions on Bridgerton is a genius (“Betsy, she lifts a table read like no one else in the world! I’ve never seen anyone else do a table read like she does”). He talks about scheduling, when discussing his forthcoming blockbuster, spy thriller The Gray Man, like other people talk about their wives giving birth (“And so we’re aligning the schedules of Chris Pine, Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Michelle Rodriguez. And the second you’re putting that together, and you didn’t make the day here, we have a scene that we owe. It’s like you spend the summer doing a giant sudoku puzzle”). More than once he will say, “Which I think was the question ten minutes ago, sorry.” He’s incredibly endearing, a little bit dorky, and all the more likeable for that. He grew up in Zimbabwe, the son of a preacher father and a mother who was a nurse. He remembers, when he came to London for secondary school, being most confused when the sun was out: he’d never seen a sunny day that was cold before. He always felt like an outsider, was always the weird kid from another country. Classmates would ask, “Do you have telephones in Zimbabwe?” (“Yes!”) or “Are there lions wandering down the high street?” (“Yes!”) “Really?” (“No!”) To be clear, there were streets and phones and TVs, but only two TV stations, “So we had whatever cheap TV we could afford from the rest of the world”. The result: Red Dwarf, but also Santa Barbara (a lurid American soap opera) and weird
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European football roundup shows from which he would learn “about the academy system in Yugoslavia from Gillette World Sport Special”. Yet, he says, “It was very valuable as an artist to grow up outside one of the centres of the world.” Being an outsider, he says, was key to making him an actor. He’d always had to think who he’d need to be in order to fit in. “You know,” he says, “I was a loud kid” – this is not hard to believe – “so I’ve always been expressive and I would think to myself, ‘Why am I weird once I’ve come to the UK? What’s different about me?’” And so he realised, “If I was this guy, I’d get access here; if I was this guy, people will accept me in this way... It’s code-switching, but then taken into subcultures.” He joined a punk band for similar reasons. For him, a self-confessed nerd and good boy, punk was socially acceptable rebellion, a way to play someone else, he says, one set at a time. Well, that and “it was the desire to yell at people. Like, you’re a teenager, you’re going to be irresponsible and unreasonable, and I was like, ‘What’s an acceptable way to slam the bedroom door that won’t get me into trouble? Ah, that’s what people do in rock bands! Excellent.’ So I joined a rock band instead of slamming doors. I jumped around on stage and yelled at people while I tried to figure out how the world worked for a while.” When he lived in Los Angeles, in his twenties, he was an outsider again and so wanted to know the difference in language. Between Brentwood and Inglewood, say, or what Van Nuys meant, or the difference between the Eastside and the Westside. When he took LA Ubers he’d take different accents out for a spin with every ride. “Generally I’ll stay undercover and put on a New York accent or a West Coast accent.” It is, he says, “like scales in the morning, if you’re a pianist. In the rehearsal room, actors give each other a lot of slack. But if you’re not confident ordering a coffee in that accent, in the place that accent is from, then that’s not good enough to go on screen.”
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t was in LA that Regé-Jean Page would land the role of heart-throb assistant US attorney Leonard Knox on ABC legal drama For The People, produced by ubershowrunner Shonda Rhimes, the brains behind such American TV smashes as Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. It was cancelled after the second series, but by that time Rhimes had signed a $100 million deal to make TV for Netflix and knew exactly who she wanted to play the lead of a new period adaption she was planning. “And just as that show [For The People] wrapped up,” he says, “just as I was walking out the door, they were like, ‘Nope. You, hold on. Wait. We’ve got something. And now you’re not busy here would you take a look? It’s British and we need something like the energy you brought here.’” To sum up: “We did the thing, people watched the thing and I’m talking to you now about the thing, many months later.” Which, it goes without saying, is a very good thing. It also goes without saying that as soon as Bridgerton aired the offers came pouring in.
‘It was very valuable as an artist to grow up outside one of the centres of the world’ When I ask about this, Page mentions a YouTube video he once watched: it’s a Crufts-like dog show and the task at hand is essentially a discipline test. It’s a straight track, no jumps, but scattered along the way are various treats and sausages and squeezy toys to tempt them. The first dog: no problem. The second dog: easy. The third dog, a golden retriever, to the accompaniment of Benny Hill music on the clip, “thinks it’s Christmas and just hits every single plate. The owner is so embarrassed.” The point being: don’t be that dog. “The meals will come. Don’t grab at everything you didn’t have two years ago.” The two projects he did sign up for aren’t bad at all: first up is The Gray Man from the Russo brothers, the directing duo behind Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, which will be Netflix’s most expensive film to date and which costars the aforementioned Ryan Gosling, Chris Pine and Chris Evans. After that, an adaption of Dungeons & Dragons, “which I’m very much still in the trenches with” and which, well, it’s Dungeons & Dragons: people are going to watch. For both, he says, the meetings went roughly the same way: “The conversation was, ‘So my wife saw this [Bridgerton] and told me that I need to see it.’” There is, he thinks, “something super interesting [in] that powerful men had me recommended by the women in their lives, which I think says something about where the power actually lies”. He has been linked, somewhat inevitably, to the role of Bond. And so, as I suspect it’s in my GQ contract, I ask what he makes of the speculation. “Well, of all the things you’ll read about yourself on the internet, it’s one of the more pleasant and more flattering. But I take it and leave it at that, personally.” The less pleasant things on the internet mostly came when it was officially announced that Page would not be returning for Bridgerton’s second series. Kim Kardashian summed up the public mood when she commented on Instagram, “Wait!!! What????” He is not, he says, in the Bridgerton WhatsApp group any more: “No, the universe has expanded. So I’m no longer in it.” Did they... kick you out? He laughs. “No, I respectfully exited. I didn’t want to put them in an awkward situation where they had to kick me out.” But Page doesn’t quite rule out a cameo or a guest appearance when I mention the possibility to him. At first he is adamant: “You know I couldn’t tell you!” But after some light prodding he allows the following, a statement that could be as much about himself as about any possible return. He says, “Isn’t there’s something wonderful about being surprised by what you weren’t suspecting?”
Grooming Carlos Ferraz at Carol Hayes Management using Dior Backstage and Dior Capture Totale Super Potent Serum Photography assistants Gabor Herczegfalvi; Andrew Mayfield Styling assistant Poppy Norton Intern Maryia Bhard
>> dish is... and you have to be wise about what
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Story by Tim Jonze Photographs by Neil Gavin Styling by Angelo Mitakos
From left: Joel wears Jacket, £545. Vest, £39. Both by Boss. boss.com. Trousers by Emporio Armani, £370. armani. com. Shoes, stylist’s own. Necklaces and rings, Joel’s own.
Joff wears Jacket, £545. Rollneck, £149. Trousers, £209. Shoes, £189. All by Boss. boss.com. Watch, Joff’s own.
Ellie wears Jacket by Givenchy, £2,190. givenchy.com. Tights by Falke, £20. falke.com. Shoes by Saint Laurent By Anthony Vaccarello, £660. ysl.com. Necklace by Bulgari, £33,400. bulgari.com
Theo wears Jacket, £2,200. Trousers, £785. Both by Gucci. gucci. com. T-shirt by Boss, £39. boss.com. Shoes by Russell & Bromley, £195. russellandbromley.co.uk. Socks by Falke, £13. falke.com. Necklaces, from £80 each. Bracelet (bottom), £180. All by Tilly Sveaas. tillysveaas.co.uk. Bracelet (top), Theo’s own.
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WOLF ALICE
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As critics, fans and the Mercury Prize pile praise on their defining No1 album, it’s fair to say the four-piece pack have found their voice... and they’re not afraid to use it
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When Wolf Alice started work on their third album, Blue Weekend, lead singer Ellie Rowsell realised she had a problem. Maybe it was the pressure of following up 2017’s Visions Of A Life, which had won the 2018 Mercury Prize, a feat no guitar band had achieved for six years. Or maybe it was the fact a relentless touring schedule had left her out of practice with making new music. But the songs she’d written and was about to share with her three band members, well, they just weren’t very good... were they?
Wolf Alice won their first Mercury Prize for sophomore album Visions Of A Life, 20 September 2018
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“There was a bit of pressure,” Rowsell recalls. “They weren’t fully formed at that stage, so when you show them to people you just hope they can see a song in the shit demo.” It’s fair to say they could. Blue Weekend was released in June to a bombardment of five-star reviews and lavish praise for the way it deftly intertwined its intimate lyrics with a widescreen indie-rock sound. It became the band’s first No1 album in the UK and earned them a third Mercury Prize nomination, all of which made crowning them as GQ’s band of the year a somewhat easy task. As for the songs being no good? Perhaps such worries were to be expected from a band who have always swerved rock star swagger for an endearing combination of selfdoubt and social awkwardness, documenting instead the inner turmoil of growing up through your teens and twenties. Rowsell, after all, is a singer who once found it difficult to shout along to her own songs while recording early demos. “I remember saying, ‘But it’s just not me!’” she says today, making use of a comedic squeaky voice. But Blue Weekend is the work of a band who have located their deep inner reserves of confidence. Ethereal and expansive, it breezes through folk, punk and indie stylings with a touch of the Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush for good measure. It sounds perfectly engineered for festival headline slots – although, when we meet, the pandemic has prevented the band playing a single festival. Instead their current live show is confined to a windowless rehearsal space in East London, where the band are beating their back catalogue into shape for a headline set at Latitude. The room is dotted with signs of their recent success: a glossy magazine with them gracing the cover lies on the sofa (“Oh, how did that get there?” says guitarist Joff Oddie with a touch of embarrassment), while a gigantic bottle of WKD Blue lurks in the corner (“That says it all... We’re fucking big time!” says a grinning Theo Ellis). But in person Wolf Alice don’t act like the megastars they’re becoming: they’re low-key, self-deprecating, slightly tentative at times. Even “Delicious Things”, Blue Weekend’s tale of popping pills in Los Angeles, is delivered with a sense of hesitancy: “The vibes are kinda wrong here / Scared to know just what goes on here,” sings Rowsell, who won’t be breaking any of Happy Mondays’ hedonism records any time soon. Yet if they share a certain unstarriness, they’re remarkably different as people – four musicians you might not place in the same band. Oddie is the designated grown-up (carries the keys to the studio, dresses sensibly, volunteered at a food bank during time off ), while Ellis is the band’s joker, louder than the others both in volume and style (bleached-blond hair; a Justin and Britney T-shirt). Drummer Joel Amey is the band’s biggest musical obsessive and also the quietest. And then there’s the paradox that is Rowsell – shy yet steely, serious but with a dry sense of humour. She’s as likely to play live in a gothic ankle-length dress as grungy boots and jeans – today she’s in the latter, tugging at the denim while answering questions. This album marks a turning point for the 29-year-old singer, in that she’s allowed herself to open up lyrically and share more. There are lyrics
about answering her critics (and fiercely: “Don’t call me mad / There’s a difference, I’m angry” is one choice line from “Smile”), but also crying in the bath to Amy Winehouse records (the stunning Fleetwood Mac-esque “No Hard Feelings”). The latter reference is a pointed one. “[Winehouse] was always unashamed about writing so many love songs, whereas I always used to feel, ‘Oh, God, not another one,’” says Rowsell. “But if I go through something personal, whether it’s good or a tragedy or whatever, I often become obsessed with music, art, literature about that thing. So if it’s a break-up I just wanna watch films about break-ups. It’s trying to make sense of something.” Perhaps Blue Weekend’s most striking track is “Feeling Myself”, which critics bashfully described as “an ode to self-love”. Perhaps that’s because they’re not used to a woman writing openly about masturbation as an alternative to disappointing sex (“He’s had so many lovers / Don’t mean he’s been pleasing anyone”). “I didn’t mean it to be scathing of men,” says Rowsell, “but perhaps it is being scathing of how, as a woman, you grow up to not understand sex. Because no one really talks about it. Nobody at school goes there.” That the London four-piece have become comfortable enough with each other to explore such themes is an unlikely triumph. Rowsell grew up in Archway, London, without friends who shared her various musical obsessions. To find someone like-minded she scoured internet forums with her father, looking at sites where musicians demonstrated their chops to potential bandmates. In 2010, they landed on Oddie, who was at teachertraining college in South West London at the time. The duo’s initial acoustic leanings grew into something heavier when Ellis and Amey joined. But as befits a band who formed without any shared history, their music bounced around genres, making them hard to pigeonhole. Were they grunge, Britpop revivalists, indie shoegazers or something else? The A&Rs they met in those early days often had the same question, with some telling them they had to focus on a particular sound. “You need to decide if you want to be Patti Smith or Florence Welch,” was one depressing response. Did they ever think they might have to pick? “Not collectively. Like, ‘Guys, I think we should be a punk band,’” says Rowsell. “But, in your head, of course you do think about it.” “There was that feeling of ‘What am I?’” says Ellis. “But you do that in your life too. It’s easier if you define yourselves within certain parameters, because then you know how to fit in with the world, but one of the beautiful things about watching this generation that is 16 generations below me – or, at least, it feels like that – is that they cross-pollinate with all these ideas and the onus is on being an individual. I’m jealous of that.” It was far from the only time Wolf Alice have struggled to convince the music industry of their worth. “One A&R man was like, ‘You don’t look like a band. You need a thing, like The Horrors have their thing,’” says Rowsell. “We weren’t all wearing black and we didn’t all share the same drug addiction,” says Ellis. It’s funny now, but it must have been demoralising at the time. >>
Photograph Getty Images
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‘One A&R said, “You don’t look like a band.” We weren’t all in black and didn’t all share the same drug addiction’
Ellie wears Jacket by Givenchy, £2,190. givenchy.com. Tights by Falke, £20. falke.com. Necklace, £33,400. Ring, £10,500. Both by Bulgari. bulgari.com
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Joff wears
Theo wears
Joel wears
Jacket, £545. Rollneck, £149. Trousers, £209. Shoes, £189. All by Boss. boss.com. Watch, Joff’s own.
Jacket by Gucci, £2,200. gucci.com. T-shirt by Boss, £39. boss.com. Necklaces, from £80 each. Bracelet (bottom), £180. All by Tilly Sveaas. tillysveaas.co.uk. Rings by Pawnshop, from £115 each. pawnlondon.com. Bracelet (top), Theo’s own.
Jacket, £545. Vest, £39. Both by Boss. boss.com. Trousers by Emporio Armani, £370. armani.com. Necklaces, Joel’s own.
>> “It was really horrible!” says Rowsell. “Because,
‘One of the beautiful things about this generation is that the onus is on being an individual’
“That’s one of my favourite aspects of this whole thing,” says Oddie. “Seeing friendship groups that have formed because of us.” “There’s a group of kids who keep tweeting me from Battersea Park,” says Ellis. “They keep getting smashed and listening to Blue Weekend in the park. I might go down and see them one day.” They’re hoping to reconnect properly if scheduled US, UK and EU tours go ahead, but, even as one of the biggest bands in Britain, everything remains in flux, with changing coronavirus restrictions and the avalanche of paperwork involved post-Brexit. “It will put a chokehold on bands at a lower level than us, who have to pay triple the costs to tour,” says Ellis. “Normally we’d be giddy with excitement right now, caning it at festivals and European shows, but we’re going to have to put our heads together to figure out how to do it.” “We’re actually looking into playing weddings,” says Rowsell. “Yeah,” echoes Ellis. “If anyone’s got a wedding, shout us!” Why weddings? “Free booze,” says Rowsell. “Plus, they seem to be allowed even though shows aren’t.” “If we can’t tour Europe then they’re the next best thing,” decides Amey. Regardless of how many shows they play, Blue Weekend has already propelled Wolf Alice into a bigger league. It must have been strange for this modest group to see the rave reviews pouring in? “It’s been mad,” admits Amey. “And a shock, for me,” adds Oddie. “Because when you spend four years writing 40 minutes of music, you do lose all sense of perspective on how good that 40 minutes is. There was a point when we finished it when I was like, ‘I have no idea about this. It might be rubbish.’ And I thought that for quite a long time.” Crippling self-doubt again? With Wolf Alice, that’s how you know you’re on to a winner.
on one hand, those things make you stronger. Like, ‘I’ll prove to you that I don’t need this “thing”.’ But, on the other hand, you still go home and start thinking, ‘What can my “thing” be?’”
Y
et not being like a “typical band”, it turned out, was exactly what young indie fans were looking for at a time when guitar music had been declared dead by most critics. “It was that period when rock star culture was going through a transition,” says Ellis. “That option of being wayward and cool and trendy suddenly started to look... very not cool. There was a lot that wouldn’t go down well in the current climate.” Earlier this year Rowsell found herself caught in a story that captures these rapidly changing attitudes around “rock star” behaviour: after Marilyn Manson had been accused of abuse, grooming and manipulation by several women, she decided to step forward with her own story. She had been backstage at a festival when Manson approached her, singing the band’s praises. But, as his words became more and more effusive, she noticed he’d been recording upskirt footage of her on a GoPro (astonishingly, this seems to have been completely legal at the time). In a series of tweets, Rowsell wrote, “There were no repercussions for his behaviour. His tour manager simply said, ‘He does this kind of thing all the time...’ When will we stop enabling misogynists on the account of their success?” (Manson and his tour manager have yet to respond.) What made her decide to speak out? “For me, personally, if you feel like you have something to add that could be in any way beneficial then it might be worth it,” she says. “But I don’t treat those things casually.” Is this type of behaviour a common experience for women in bands? “There’s no one woman who has a collective experience, so I don’t know. What I will say is a lot of 142 GQ.CO.UK OCTOBER 2021
my experiences, in a similar vein to that one, happened before I was ever in the music industry.” “Society needs a reckoning, not just the music industry,” adds Oddie. “The music industry is just reflective of what’s going on in wider society.” It’s not the only time Wolf Alice have made a statement. In 2019 they called for a boycott of Eurovision in Tel Aviv, accusing Israel of “weaponising culture” and of being “serial human rights abusers”. This band once afraid of shouting their own lyrics have certainly found their voice. Now it’s a question of being able to share it again with their fans. Normally when writing material they road test it with smaller shows – that way they work out which songs work and where the peaks and troughs of a set are. This time they’ve been locked indoors. The pandemic struck while they were recording the album in Belgium, something they think might have helped them accentuate the finer sonic details. “Other than nipping out for a walk or run, there was no way to escape the record,” says Oddie with a grin. But while the record itself didn’t suffer, the band have thought about how to maintain that close relationship with their fans. “There’s people you start to miss,” says Ellis. “When they come to shows all the time you get to know them, in a way, and see them grow up.” The other day he bumped into a longtime fan who is now the singer in her own band, Lemondaze, and he beams with a sense of paternal pride.
Hair Roxane Attard using Daimon Barber Make-up Jenny Glynn Styling assistant Mariya Bhad Hair assistant Karen Bradshaw
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