BBC Radio 5 Live

Tonight, I will be on the Tony Livesey show with Ranvir Singh at 11.45pm talking about Bill Bryson and British manners... Please tune in if you're still up!

The Brute

Excuse the blog silence, I have been furiously researching and writing a Cult V.I.P for Dazed&Confused on the writer Anna Kavan which has taken up all my time this week. Also a 3000 word essay for The Brute, forthcoming... If anyone has any work they would like to publish which is sharp and satirical in intent -please do get in touch. The mag will be launched this summer featuring our favourite Canadian, Douglas Haddow, Brendan O'Neill's interview with Adam Curtis, Vogue talent finalist Jenny Munro and illustration by the amazing Hannah Bagshaw.

The Brute: A brawl in every issue.

Money, money, money... it isn't funny

Last season, the BBC’s drama output seemed to have wandered straight out of commissioning to get hopelessly lost amongst the crinolines of the costume department.

An execrable, ninety-fifth rethink of Jane Austen’s Emma was succeeded by yet another trip to Cranford, followed by a new series of Lark Rise to Candleford. So far, so many bonnets. But now BBC2 has gone in quite another direction. The latest literary adaptation to hit the small screen comes straight out of the twentieth century – with the fags and booze and porn sleaze-a-thon that is Martin Amis’s brilliant 1984 novel, Money.

Set in 1981, when greed was good and Princess Di was still a virgin, Money is the ‘suicide note’ of John Self, an overweight, chauvinistic, chain-smoking director of risqué commercials who goes to New York to shoot his first feature film with a producer called Fielding Goodney. He doesn’t sleep, he blacks out. He doesn’t eat, he gorges. He is Amis’s ‘Loadsa Money’ yob, and he could be just a revolting caricature of the new-moneyed working classes by a thoroughly middle-class writer, if it wasn’t for the fact that his thoughts are so beautifully written, the language is so artfully crafted, and that the reader ends up actually loving John Self.

Self thinks: ‘You hate me, don’t you. Yes you do. Because I’m the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness. To which I say: You never let us in, not really. You might have thought you let us in, but you never did. You just gave us some money.’
Aside from adapting, say, Finnegans Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow, the BBC really couldn’t have chosen a trickier prospect. Not only is Amis’s postmodernist masterpiece so in love with its own language that the plot isn’t really the point – it also features Martin Amis himself as a key character. In Money, Mart has to be drafted in to explain the giant con enacted on Self, to make clear all the literary allusions. ‘“I’ve been thinking about your little adventure in New York”, [Martin] said, as his knight scuttled back to the second rank. “I think I’ve got it all worked out. Do you want to hear my theory?”’ The text plays around with Roland Barthes’s notion of the ‘Death of the Author’ to the extent that the denouement partly hinges on the use of a semi-colon.
Unfortunately, in the first part of BBC2’s Money – which kicks off this weekend – Amis has not so far shambled on set to make a cameo, replete with a 1980s rug (Mart-slang for hairdo), the same old roll-up still stapled to his bottom lip, and drawling his lines in that inimitable way he has, like a drunk gargling ash. So far, Money is a disappointment – because it doesn’t bear a great deal of relation to the book, even though it ticks off the main setpieces. Self fails at tennis. Self struggles to deal with movie stars. Self watches porn whilst eating junk food in his underpants. But it isn’t these things that make the book worth adapting.

You would need an intimate eye for the real details to make an adaptation of Money work – and a big, big budget. The fact that Self drinks in a pub called The Shakespeare (not The Queen’s Head, as in this BBC version), that he drives a Fiasco while Mart himself has an Iago, and that New York cabbies career about in Tomahawks – all of this is part of the zing of the text. Amis created a whole, fast, satirical world a beat off our own, through his web of allusions. The story isn’t that funny if you just transcribe the events of the novel – as this adaptation does. Nick Frost makes a completely unappealing John Self. He’s fat and he looks funny when he runs.
So the BBC’s Money isn’t worth a great deal but big dues must be given to the Beeb for trying out a modern adaptation. Perhaps it could dust off a few new novels with a less intricate texture, a little less complicated to translate from text to screen. Reading Money may be eye-opening. Watching it, on this evidence, seems about as revelatory of modern literature as having another airing of Cranford.

Mysterious verses

"First of all," said the announcer to San Francisco's Poet's Follies six months before its star performer, Weldon Kees, jumped – or did not jump – off the Golden Gate bridge in 1955, "I want to introduce Mr. Weldon Kees, poet, painter, artist, etcetera, composer, critic, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinatum". With a Howard Hughes moustache, a precision tailored get-up of Oxford button-downs and waistcoats, a Dexedrine diet that made him look almost bodiless inside his clothes and a social manner that introduced him to some of the brightest figures of his day – Mark Rothko, Truman Capote and Elizabeth Bishop – Kees was a man as striking as the poetry that came out of him was bitter and bleak. But in a punchline that would have been in tone with his poems, his success as a poet and the origin of the cult riding up around him - was the death of him.

On 19th July 1955 two cars were found abandoned on the approach to San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, leaving the police to divine which was the eighty-eighth suicide, and which was the eighty-ninth, recorded suicide. One car belonged to a washed-up 59-year-old salesman named Joseph R. Eppler. The other car had keys in the ignition, a lab coat folded neatly on the rear seat, and no note. It belonged to an obscure poet who had tried to jump off the week before, but hadn't been able to force his foot over the barrier. Just the day before he had been discussing leaving for a new life in Mexico - but for the man who gloried in his Five Villanelles how not to evade disaster - "The crack is moving down the wall./Defective plaster isn't all the cause./We must remain until the roof falls in." – it did not seem very likely.

Right now, the poet who did or did not plummet off the Golden Gate Bridge, is ripe cult material. As the world economy nose-dives, we are in a Keesian brand of slump, at home with the bard of banking crises and economic turmoil and his credit crunched soul: "I have noticed distinct waves in Kees's cult and they follow the economy strangely enough." James Weidel, the author of Vanished Act, The Life and Art of Weldon Kees tells me. "Kees's world view was formed during the Depression and whenever interest in Kees takes off again, he comes back, like some Cassandra to 'comfort' us in our despair because he seemingly could live inside it with a kind of serenity. The very success of the American dream - the post-war chocolate malts, the fat cars, the highways flattening everything out for everyone - made Kees's work really on the outside."

Born in Beatrice, Nebraska, on February 24th 1914, son of a prosperous manufacturing family, Harry Weldon Kees seemed destined to take over the family trade. A tendency he resisted – but never quite escaped the shadow of, always dressing like a sharp-suited professional, rather than the often-struggling bohemian he frequently was. After graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1935, he married Ann Swan, who would support him, on and off, for the next sixteen years as he tried his hand (generally with alacrity) at being a novelist, an artist, art critic, film reviewer, jazz pianist, composer, filmmaker, photographer, academic, librarian, and co-author of a study on non-verbal communication.

As the poet Michael Hofmann said, "I had not realized how 'nearly' Kees was, and how far he came, in so many fields of artistic endeavor. Here was someone who dined at the home of William Carlos Williams… who helped edit Paramount's historic newsreel footage for 'To the Shores of Iwo Jima and as late as 1955 was awarding a poetry prize to Robert Fitzgerald." Although Kees' poems are always punctuated with sadness - if they are not already pumped with downright sardonic despair - in person he was an engaging figure who always seemed to find his way to the centre of whatever cultural buzz he happened to encounter. His collages were displayed at one time alongside Picasso and at another beside Jackson Pollack. Kees found his voice early. In Subtitle, the opening poem of his first collection, The Last Man, he begins where he intends to take us, to a world where the worst has already happened where the ordinary All-American experience is seedy and sinister, in, where movie-going is nightmarish:

"We request these things only:
All gum must be placed beneath the seats
Or swallowed quickly, all popcorn sacks
Must be left in the foyer. The doors
Will remain closed throughout
The performance. Kindly consult
Your programs: observe that
There are no exits. This is
A necessary precaution."

Kees was the master of the innocuous detail twisted into a threat, the consumer of pulp-culture tracing the stain that the juice of the pulp left. And as a private depressive – and the husband of a wife who breakfasted, lunched and dined on gin - he is an expert at delineating the cracks of the mind, with a darkened wit and a humouring cackle:

"Only a suburban house with the front door open
And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing. The corpse quite dead. The wife in Florida.

Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,
The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,
Scattered with check stubs in the hall;
The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
The note: 'To be killed this way is quite all right with me.'

Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,
Or that the sleuth, Le Roux, is now incurably insane,
And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming that all the world is mad…"

Some of his most celebrated poems, are the poems on Robinson. These chart an outline of a "Cold War everyman", as the poet Donald Justice explains it. In them, Kees appears to map out the conventional life he almost led, transcribed with a peculiar lilt of satire mingled with pity, in which the poetry trips out like prose. In Aspects of Robinson he puts his hero in reels of poses:

"Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson
Saying, 'Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I'd love to. Pretty well. And you?'
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall."

Although Weldon is not Robinson, Robinson shares his creator's untidy unhappiness beneath the polite exterior, sharing, too, his natty dress:

"Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol?"…

"Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down……
covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf."

Kees himself, Reidel suggests, knew the quality of the poems that he was producing: "Robinson is a kind of finishing touch to his poetry—he produced the last Robinson poem and then within a year told his mother he was finished as a poet, complete." But during his lifetime, Kees struggled to find a wider audience. His collection of poems "A Breaking and a Death" gathered twenty rejections in a row. With his mastery of the poetic forms sestina and villanelle, harking back to the Twenties rather than forward to the Sixties, Kees' output was neither Surrealist, Beat nor Confessional, he was out of step with his time.

Truman Capote, bewildered by Kees' talent combined with his utter lack of single-minded focus once demanded of Kees, "Why don't you want to be a success? I can tell from the way you act you don't want to be a success… Why, you're a much better poet than that old Robert Lowell." Before adding, of himself, "I just feel terrible. Nobody likes my novel that I want to have like it. All the wrong people are praising it." James Reidel, suggests that this might be precisely what Kees wanted - the "grey area between neglect and fame where all the right people could find him":

"He loved his B-listness the way he loved B-movies. But he knew this came at a price. His poem, 'The Musician's Wife,' reveals that he knew he played chicken with being chronically and then fatally disappointed, 'self-sabotage' as you say:

"I used to get out the records you made
The year before all your terrible trouble,
The records the critics praised and nobody bought
That are almost worn out now."

The cult attraction to Kees lies in this secret quality that the A-list missed, it's the other secret knowledge, the Keesian mysteries."

In 1954, things started to spiral downwards for Kees. His wife, Ann, was drinking – he explained to a friend - "more than you me, Malcolm Lowry and Tallulah Bankhead put together". She was also hallucinating and he helped her check in to a clinic. "She improved greatly there but left against advice after three weeks. We are now separated and she has agreed to a divorce, and I hope she will be all right. We were married for sixteen years and a lot of it was not so good." A year later, the critic Pauline Kael recalled, "All of us – the 30 or 40 people – who saw Weldon frequently & who were used to being yanked out of bed by his fantastically early telephone calls – knew that he was miserable, he had been telling us all how slack and lethargic and miserable he was… It was as if a dynamo had suddenly run down – and we couldn't think of any way to help start it up." Noting his failure to get his book of poems published he wrote, "If the situation of poets continues to worsen at the same galloping rate it has been in recent years let's go down into the abyss. It won't be a really awful abyss: there'll be a lot of charming & good things in it: just no poets, that's all."

At the time of his disappearance in '55, he was writing the book on suicide, provisionally titled - How-Not-To-and-Why-Not-To-Do-It. The likelihood of a suicide – he had studied – was multiplied in the summer months and exacerbated by a bad diet. In July, on a diet of speed - Kees fitted his own bill. What did not, was his pre-suicide behaviour: leaving his red socks soaking in the bowl, paying off the final instalment on his car; his passport, sleeping bag, cheque book all gone. His ex-wife, Ann, was adamant that he had not jumped. Since 1955, there have been numerous sightings of "Weldon Kees" once in Mexico - where he had spoken of going - with a blonde.

If he were alive today, a dapper, moustachioed 94 year old will no doubt be enjoying reports of his poetic lionisation, a half century on, mainly by his fellow poets. In the year of his death, he could not get into print. Five years after Donald Justice brought out the Complete Works – for years impossible to get hold of, now available in your local bookstore. The cult of Kees is growing by the year, devotion ramped up in elegies, readings, borrowings and homages. "Perhaps cult is the wrong word for Kees' appeal", Reidel adds: "Perhaps religious order would be better for those bitten by Kees?" If Kate Moss's t-shirt is to be believed: Ginsberg is God. If so, then Kees is Christ – his Golden Gate jump the symbolic, sacrificial death for the resurrection of the poetic soul.

A Cut Above the Rest

Javier Bardem may have come away from No Country For Old Men drenched in praise and clutching an Oscar but he still couldn't shake that sociopathic haircut out of his mind: "You see yourself, you see the haircut. You don't realise that it's affecting you in a very delicate way, through your own psyche… It's the worst haircut I've ever had. [The Coen Brothers] owe me another movie."

It's a sentiment anyone whose mother gave them a bowl cut will sympathise with, but few people understand the impact of hair on an individual's sense of themselves in this way quite so well as Leonard Lewis. As London's barber of choice for three decades, Leonard revolutionised the way hair was thought of. Trained in the Fifties, when hair was permed, primped and tonged into stiff waves a la Doris Day or dressed up into a Marie Antoninette-style bouffant for special occasions, Leonard came into his own in the Sixties, when he was at the forefront of offering hair that was free to move, free to shock, could be coloured every shade on the chart and was pdrsonally tailored to the individual.

"What would you like done to your hair, for instance?" Leonard demands, when I first meet him, and ask how he persuaded an unknown, whippet thin 15 year old named Lesley Hornby to allow him to cut off all her long blonde hair - in favour of the Eton Crop that made her Twiggy. " We'd discuss it. We'd discuss how you felt, what you wanted to be. And then we would achieve it, together. It was a radical step for Twiggs, because like most girls she was fond of her long hair, and at one point she seemed close to tears. But I knew it would show off her boyish looks – and no boy had eyes or a neck quite like hers. And so we persuaded her. Later she said, 'Looking in the mirror at the back, I saw all these faces staring at me, in a way that no one had ever done before.'"

Just as the hair madeth the psychopath for Bardem, the hair madeth the star for Twiggs. Barry Lategan took Twiggy's photograph, Leonard mounted it on the wall of his salon, which caught the attention of a regular customer, fashion editor, Deirdre McSharry, who hunted down and interviewed the ingénue, running a feature in the Express, 'I Name This Girl The Face of '66.' Bam. The Swinging Sixties had arrived. Leonard's Mayfair salon became not just a magnet for the high society ladies who could afford him, but the hundred or so top models of the day. American President John F. Kennedy came in, filmstars – from Grace Kelly to Liza Minelli –, notorious East End gangsters including Reggie Kray – whose bride Leonard styled on their wedding day -, and rock royalty – as Mick and Bianca Jagger played out their huge marital rows across the salon floor.

There is no underestimating just how radical was Leonard's approach to hair. One of his most important contributions was the crossover into shoots, fashion shows and film - his role in the defining generation. Most hairdressers had neither the time nor the inclination to do all this and hairdressing – focussing on their franchise or their products sometimes at the expense of pure, wild experimentation. Leonard, as he freely admits, "never had a head for the business side". His most creative transition, perhaps, was to the world of film, where he was recruited by infamous auteur, Stanley Kubrick on 2001: Space Odyssey - for which Leonard offered to make the ape suits with the help of his wig-maker. And he went on to collaborate with Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, a forerunner if any to Bardem's hair = psycho equation as Kubrick "didn't want wigs – he wanted the cut. An intense, painful haircut." Next, he created all the lavish period wigs for Barry Lyndon – so precious, Leonard found himself flying to the set with a jet booked solely for him and the wigs, which had been allocated one seat each. "When he died everyone started saying how difficult Kubrick was to work with. But he was lovely. He did tear out the pages of the beautiful books I had bought to research the hair – but that was just Stanley. He let me cut his hair too, but then immediately made it scruffy again – that was just how he wanted to look. Sometimes people like their own look. Margaret Thatcher's advisors once brought her to me, before she was elected. They wanted her to soften her image, and I tried to persuade her to let me help her free up her hair. But she wouldn't let me touch a strand. She was perfectly nice. But that was her hair, and that was how she would keep it."

Today Leonard's circumstances are a far cry from the glory years when such figures were daily acquaintances and he was the owner and star of Leonard of Mayfair, the opulent, three-tiered townhouse on Upper Grosvenor Street that catered to them all. In 1988, trying to balance the constant demands of his creativity against a growing struggle with alcohol and the trauma of a divorce, everything came to a halt as he found himself hospitalised with a brain tumour. Unable to work, and then severely afflicted with epilepsy, Leonard's debts mounted and he lost everything. Leonard, who had started at the bottom, as a barrow boy born on a Shepherd's Bush estate, running about with "villains", went back to where he started, - living for a time with his adored older sister, Rene, who had never moved from their parents' council house.

He had gone full circle. "The last thing my mother wanted was another child when she fell pregnant with me – Rene was nearly twenty years old. And my family were not well off. So my mother she did everything she could to get rid of me, took hot baths, drank gin and poisons - which made her go blind. I was obviously a stubborn foetus, perhaps I knew all the excitements I was going to have… But since then I was always determined to do something different with my life. I couldn't help thinking there must be something better to do than the traditional options." For a working class boy whose Dad mixed with gangsters like Billy Hill and Jack Spot in his job in the used car market, hairdressing was, at best, an irregular career choice. And it perhaps would not have occurred even to Leonard, had he not first been seduced from selling fruit and veg from a Roehampton barrow by the glamour of the Curzon Cinema in the West End. One night, sitting out a subtitled French film he'd elected to see just so he could sit in the plush atmosphere, he had his epiphany: "An Artist with Ladies" starred an actor called Fernandel and the images flickering on the film showed exactly the life that the young Leonard wanted. "This was the world I wanted to join." And it was exactly the world he got. Paying his way through an apprenticeship at Evansky's and then through a cutting traineeship at Vidal Sassoon, Leonard's talents for hairdressing were rapidly noticed, and by his early twenties he was a superstar in his own right – cutting all day and partying all night.

Now confined to a wheelchair and living modestly in South London, his handsome dark eyes still alive with charm, his talent for friendship is very much in evidence – and he still cuts Jack Nicholson's hair when he comes to London. When he was in hospital with the tumour "I really found who my friends were. Stanley [Kubrick] came to visit me, and Jack… And John Frieda and the others started an award in my name." A new range of haircare products, based on those he had developed to keep Liz Taylor's hair luscious, is just about to be launched at Harrods. "It has sold out twice in Fenwicks already," Leonard assures me as we rattle down the side streets on the way to Mimmo's, another one of his old haunts, driven by his friend and cabby, Barry. "I'm determined to walk again," Leonard informs me as we later taxi back towards High Street Kensington. "Yeah, the ladies had better watch out" shouts Barry, "Cos you'll be running after 'em!"

But while Leonard might not yet be running, his innovations still reign today. Amongst those that worked at his Mayfair salon were all the names now ubiquitous in hairdressing. John Frieda met Lulu when he she was a starlet and he was Leonard's personal assistant. Daniel Galvin, the famous colourist, was Leonard's right hand man, and they developed an approach to women's hair that was, at the time, revolutionary – determined to get all the women in the salon to come in for colour as well as cut, as a routine. During his twenty years of experimentation he helped make possible everything from Zandra Rhode's silk painted, shock pink helmet of hair to the invention of gels that would make punk's Mohican possible. "When kids first started to wear the spiky punk hairstyles they used to make them stand up stiffly with sugared water." Leonard explained. "It worked fine but when the sugar dried out it would attract flies and bees – which we didn't want in the salon. So we had to think of a better way to achieve the effect."

If there was a legend for hairdressing as there was for the blues, it might well focus on a young West End barrow boy named Leonard, who met the devil at a crossroads somewhere around Roehampton and sold his soul for a pair of scissors. For, to everyone who knew him, his skill with the silver blades, was nothing short of magic.

Paint it black

As Minister of Culture for the Black Panthers, Emory Douglas' revolutionary art was a key part of the push towards black empowerment in America. His legacy has been unduly forgotten – until now.

In the late 1960s, America was not a place to be black. After centuries of slavery and then segregation, with the gunshots that killed prominent black spokesmen, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, still echoing throughout its walls, the ghettoes, in the words of the poet Derek Walcott, had 'the strong clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of the unseen, before plunging into the abyss.' Repressed, denied or pushed to one side by the government, the ghetto's unemployed masses were subject to constant surveillance, harassment and patrol. It seemed that nothing short of a revolution could redress the rank imbalance. Juxtaposing the cultural symbols of white America with a new black empowerment, Gil Scott Heron promised, that the revolution 'will put you in the driver's seat' that 'black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day'. As Heron promised, the revolution was never televised, but in the work of Emory Douglas, Cultural Minister and Revolutionary Artist for the Black Panther Party, it was visualized. And did give, as the Panthers promised, 'all power to the people.'

Until recently, the work of Emory Douglas lay largely forgotten. With not even a Wiki to his name, Emory's work was not taught in art schools, and it was not displayed, framed and catalogued, in art galleries across America. But the art gallery was never Emory's domain even when his creativity was at its most fecund point - the ghetto, not the gallery was where people viewed his work. It was pasted on the walls, in storefront windows, on fences, doorways, telephone poles and booths, passing buses, alleyways, gas stations, barber shops, beauty parlours, laundromats, liquor stores, and the very huts of the ghetto itself. It was art of the people and for the people. It was there, like James Baldwin claimed all good art should be, 'to disturb the peace' – to trigger a new consciousness, a new anger at the situation in America and a new hope in the minds of the community. For the first time, it showed poor black people as proud and empowered, ready to carve out a better future for themselves. Then, the ideas he articulated – like equal opportunities for all – were seen as extreme. His task was to make such 'radical' ideas, articulated in the Black Panther's 10-point programme, seem normal and possible. And crucially addressed himself to the oppressed – not the oppressor. He did not illustrate slogans that made requests like 'jobs for all now!' but defiant, self-determining lines like 'They bled your mama, they bled your papa, but he won't bleed me.'

As a 'kid growing up in the early 60s' Emory told me on the phone from his home in California, 'you're seeing a lot of civil rights movements and African Americans having dogs set on them, water hoses, beatings. All these things played into my awareness of wanting to do something – which was highly frustrated.' In the mid sixties, riots had sparked in Detroit, Watts, Harlem, Rochester, New York, Jersey City and Philadelphia, in which mainly black people died. In order to maintain 'law and order' the police had come into the ghettoes, but their methods – which often ignored basic civil rights, and could be little short of brutal - meant they were seen 'just like an occupying force… a military operation. The police came into our community in military formation. They didn't come in to investigate or to help. They came in for information to make sure that they can control and dictate how and what we do.' It was in this context that Emory came to hear 'of some brothers who were in the community patrolling the police - but I didn't know who they were. I'd just heard of them.'

At the time, Emory was a 22-year-old student involved in the Black Arts Movement, who had trained in printing and commercial art. It was when he went to a meeting to discuss bringing Malcolm X's widow to address the community in the Bay Area, that he found out about the involvement of the Black Panthers and recognised the extent of what Huey P. Newton and Bobby Cleaver, the founders of the Black Panther Party, were envisioning for the black community. Not merely self-defence – by any means necessary- but serving 'the interests of the community. They informed and educated the people around the issues… articulating them in a way that even a child knew what we were talking about… survival programmes, alternative education programmes', free breakfast programmes for the children, setting up arts events, clinics 'and dealing with progressive politics.'

His involvement with the Black Panther Party – and its newspaper - quickly followed. 'There was a place called the Black House - a big Victorian house,' Emory recalls, 'Eldridge Cleaver [the acclaimed writer and the Minister of Information of the Black Panthers] used to live upstairs and Marvin X, the poet and playwright, had cultural activity that went on downstairs. People like Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullen, - all kinds of folk - used to come through there. One evening I came by and there was no activity. Eldridge and Huey and Bobby were downstairs at a table… trying to put together the first issue of the Black Panther, trying to design the masthead and artwork.' Emory said he could improve the paper with some materials he had. 'So I left and came back - it took me about an hour – and they were surprised when I came back.' Deciding to set up the paper as an ongoing concern, the Panthers wanted Emory to direct it and use it to work out the vision of their 10 point programme: 'they wanted a revolutionary art and I would be the revolutionary artist'.

Emory did not disappoint. At its peak in 1970, The Black Panther had a weekly circulation of 139,000 (although some estimate it was, in fact, as high as 400,000) – and Emory's work was reprinted and pasted up across the African American community; his colour, back page posters were everywhere, raising the new consciousness. But with the success of The Black Panther there came ever-escalating attempts by the government to shut it down. Also in 1970, J Edgar Hoover, then the director of the FBI, declared the Panthers 'the greatest threat to U.S. security.' In his role as revolutionary artist, the Cointelpro [Counter Intelligence Programme] kept Emory under constant surveillance. The FBI contaminated print facilities, 'enlisted Teamsters to refuse shipments' and even convinced United Airlines to cancel the paper's bulk mail rate discounts. Emory, like the other Panthers, was often subject to government harassment and search without warrant. In 1969 alone, 27 Black Panthers were killed by police and at least 749 arrested.

Perhaps Emory's most enduring legacy to American culture is how he drove home the association between 'policemen' and 'pigs'. As the poet Sonia Sanchez wrote – in a poem which Emory was to illustrate - 'A policeman/ is a pig… and/ until he stops/killing blk/people/ cracking open their heads/ remember. The policeman/is a pig. (oink/oink).' 'Huey and Bobby had defined police as pigs.' Emory recalls, and his job, as revolutionary artist, was to make this flesh. Starting out illustrating a simple pig, which would bear the badge number of whichever policemen were 'harassing and intimidating the people', Emory developed it into a pig stood up on two hooves, dressed in police uniform with his badge, his gun, his snout and his tail: 'And so it was thereafter that it began to take off as a symbol in the community – symbolic of the oppression – and it transcended the community itself and it went national.'

Always internationalist in outlook, the Panthers provoked yet more controversy, when they stood united against the Vietnam war –even offering to send Panthers to fight for the Vietcong: 'We were opposed to the war in Vietnam just like many people today are opposed to the war in Iraq.' Emory explains, 'The Vietnamese never called us nigger. They never put waterhose on us. They never had dogs bite us. They weren't the ones who… denied us all the privileges of the white American … so they weren't the enemy. The enemy was within the country itself.'

After its early successes in the late 60s and early 70s, the Black Panther Party went into a decline. With Eldridge Cleaver and other Panthers in exile, and Huey P. Newton and yet more Panthers in jail or f`cing trial, Cointelpro did its best to exploit the 'internal contradictions' within the party. As Emory explains, 'You have to understand that we were very young and you could say sometimes we were very arrogant – but also [we] had the insight and ability' to adapt. But as time went on, with increasing sabotage, infiltration and the spread of misinformation, the Cointelpro whose 'primary dynamic' was to destroy the Black Panther Party was 'exploiting our weaknesses'. The Black Panther Party and its paper was finally disbanded in 1979/80. Since that time, not all the Panthers have gone on to as happy an afterlife as Emory – who has two grown up children and is now becoming much sought after in art circles, to talk about and exhibit his work. 'Huey', (who was shot dead, apparently by a drug dealer, in 1989), he sighs, 'Is the symbol of tragedy and is demonised… [But] it's a disease when you talk about addiction to drugs. At the same time the Black Panthers came about… it was a time in this country when there was experimentation going on with drugs. LSD, marijuana - you had all those things going on during that period. And at the same time you had a lot of ideas. So it was a recreation but at the same time it was an addiction – and addiction can create chaos and turmoil.'

When I ask if he has any nostalgia for the times he lived through – for the time when he made a real difference – he replies, 'No, not nostalgia -because you have to deal with the now. It wouldn't do anything but frustrate you to get caught up in what was. What was, is just a memory.' But in his art, the power of his drawings provokes more than a memory – they hit you with a blunt thud even now. For those who were never there, they can communicate pure pride and joy. The Black Panther party may have disbanded, its newspaper may have ceased to print – but for 13 years Emory's work really did give 'All power to the people'.

Don't you Nomi?

In the early 80s,operatic singer Klaus Nomi was at the crest of the New York's club scene. However, his untimely death from the Aids in 1983 cut him off in his prime, just before the world truly had the chance to appreciate his vibrant and bizarre performance art.

It’s probably makes sense to begin with someone who witnessed it, because it has to be one of the definitive "you had to be there" moments. For an all too brief time at the dawn of the 1980s, a peculiar phenomenon had New York under its spell. At its focal point was a small thin man who would stand in a pool of light, attired in anything from a painted wooden ball-gown on wheels, to a cellophane cape which twinkled under the half light, or to an out-sized, triangular tuxedo cut out in vinyl by Bowie’s American tailor. And out of this figure’s mouth there was the blistering sound of a soprano, or a short-circuited tenor, backed by synths, ambient noise, delivering, quite perfectly, anything from a mockery of the disco hit ‘I Feel Love’ (I Feel Sick), to an aria from Samson and Delila, to ‘Ding Dong (the Witch is Dead)’ from The Wizard of Oz. The audience had to be reminded that this extraordinary voice was not recorded. Despite its artificiality, lip-synching was not part of the act: the Indian-demi-god arm choreography, the twirling hypnotic umbrellas, the robot dancers twitching in cling-film, the thunderclaps and smoke bombs, were just the unreal accoutrements. The head and the voice were the one constant: the black lips painted and the sharp brows plucked into a Dietrich-style of glamour gone wrong, the hair wrenched up at three points above a white, elfin face. As Alan Platt described for 80s cult magazine Adix: “It would take many visits to the downtown venues on the punk circuit to grasp how utterly bizarre is the sight of hundreds of snotty little drunks standing around in silence listening to this classic piece of High Romance delivered by someone from last week’s Star Trek. It’s the skill of the illusionist. Hypnotism by pure weirdness, out-bluffing their sense of the bizarre, and yet singing so beautifully with the recorded sound of a fifty piece orchestra swelling around the room, that few are not moved by the pure musical experience. It’s Nomi’s big coup. Set them up with weirdness, knock them down with art.”

These epic performances started out in New York’s East Village, where an old Polish wedding hall had been converted into the New Wave Vaudeville theatre. Where everyone else was having a joke and throwing together the most obscenely bad-taste acts they could possibly conceive, it was pretty clear right from the start, there was something much more important going on in Nomi’s performances. Like everything else, it was thrown together from clip lights, grease paint, plastic wrap, bed sheets, tat and bric-a-brac, but Nomi’s full sense of theatrical illusion transcended what might otherwise have been just high-jinks camp. His influences were as stark as they were wide-ranging, from Bauhaus, expressionism, comic books and 50s sci-fi films. The name Nomi was an anagram of the sci-fi magazine OMNI, and the idea of Nomi’s being an alien who had ‘descended from outer space/ to save the human race’ was central to his persona. He would arrive at shows, perform and then leave immediately, maintaining the allure of a visitor arriving and disappearing into outer space. He had arrived in America an outsider; he left America a steroid growth of the bizarre.

Born Klaus Sperber in 1944, Nomi grew up in the Bavarian Alps, the only child of a single-mother. His peculiar blend of pop, rock and opera can be traced to this point, when he stole money from his mother to buy Elvis’ King Creole, only for his mother to discover the album, march it back to the shop and exchange it for Maria Callas. Each equally pleased the young Klaus. After studying at the Berlin Music School and working for some years as an usher at the Opera house, Klaus emigrated to New York in 1972 where he worked a succession of badly paid jobs for five years, eventually honing quite a talent as a pastry chef, and hosting a small cookery slot on a cable network. He developed the tenor and soprano potential of his voice with vocal coach Ira Siff and in 1977, he appeared in Charles Ludlum’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company Wagner-offshoot.

This, and his electric stage performances led to his appearance in Anders Grafstrom’s influential underground film, The Long Island Four, which caught the attention of David Bowie, whom Nomi subsequently met at one of his New York gigs. An invitation to appear with Bowie on Saturday Night Live in December 1979 followed, Nomi appearing as a backing dancer, trundling about a stuffed poodle on wheels and singing accompaniment on The Man Who Sold the World. Such was the pull of Bowie at the time that fame looked certain, as Nomi’s gigs in New York and across America gained momentum and a dedicated following. Nomi’s own backing acts included such New Wave luminaries as Kenny Scharf, Jean-Micheal Basquiat, Joey Arias and, as legend would have it, Madonna. His stark fashion sense and peculiarly eclectic musical fusion almost made it inevitable that France would adore him. And the French duly obliged, his records selling out within days of issue.

But there was a darker, personal side to Nomi’s early isolation in America, and it seems that his astonishing creativity was in part a compensation for an intense inner loneliness. Without long-term lovers or boyfriends, Nomi sought sexual companionship in the most hazardous places; eventually contracting an illness so rare, that at the time it did not even have a name. The last track on his last album contains Dido’s death aria from Dido and Aeneas, 'Remember me, but ah forget my fate' but a few years ago RCA’s London press office could provide no more information about their star than that he was one of the first celebrity casualties of the AIDs virus. At the beginning of 1983, Nomi had begun to look very ill. Joey Arias, his close friend since the opening of the New Wave Vaudeville, describes the sad progression. "He was always thin but I remember him walking into a party looking like a skeleton. He was complaining of flu and exhaustion, and the doctors couldn't diagnose what was wrong with him. Later he had breathing difficulties and collapsed, and he was taken into hospital. He'd sit in his apartment watching videos and photos of himself, saying 'Look at this, this is what I did - now it's all gone. He went on a macrobiotic diet. He went on Interferon, which puffed him up like a rat, but nothing helped." Klaus died that August, at the height of his powers, and just before the boom in music television, which must have made his idiosyncratic synth-drenched avant-garde opera-pop a worldwide force to be reckoned with.

So today, as in the early 80s, Nomi’s fame resides in small collectives of music lovers going wild over him. JP Bommel, head of RCA in France explained on first hearing Klaus’ work, “We listened to that tape and we were all looking at each other, you know, thinking: “this is wild”, we had never heard anything like that… The record company didn’t have a clue.” The success he achieved in France wasn’t “the media-machine working, it was not the star-system. It was just a bunch of music-lovers, saying we pull out all the stops and make it happen.” Once a music lover falls under the spell of Nomi the results can be radical. Another fan, the artist, Pat Keck, built a life-size, fully articulated doll of Klaus out of wood. His body is laid out on a sarcophagus decorated with lyrics from The Cold Song and when a pedal is pushed, Nomi eerily rises from the dead, jerking his body to one side, moving his arms. It’s a pattern mirrored in his posthumous reputation. He rises up slowly, gaining a steady momentum, and suddenly when a receptive soul is introduced to him, they jerk about, they start going wild, they tell all their friends, and another Klaus colony gets a residence.

Nomi’s resurrection gean when Klaus’ contribution to the cult, bad-taste, new-wave classic ‘Urgh! A Music War’ became essential underground viewing during the late 80s. At the beginning of the 1990s, flyers began appearing once again, all over the East Village, with Nomi’s face upon them, with captions reading ‘Do You Nomi?’ and ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, here’s Klaus’. Klaus homage sites began to spring up over the internet, his albums were re-released, the new interest in him culminating in a documentary by Andrew Horn, ‘The Nomi Song’, which is quickly becoming somewhat of a cult classic itself. Now closet Nomi fans are emerging from the woodwork, and in the strangest places. He has his own corner of mySpace, where musicians as diverse as Italian lounge acts, New York indie bands, New Wave acts, to countless electronic outfits, hip hop kids and yukele players all testify to his enduring influence on the underground scene, his angular originality transcending all traditional boundaries. Morrissey plays Nomi songs before his gigs and made Nomi’s Death the concluding track to his Under the Influence compilation and Antony and the Johnsons are also acknowledged devotees. The effect of Nomi’s music, Antony explains, lies not in just the strange fusion of pop and opera, the weird disco component or the high camp artistry, “but the other element –the almost apocalyptic element to it… it was like he was able to predict the future,” which, it seems likely, is precisely how a man who claimed to have “descended from outer space/to save the human race” would have liked to be remembered: ahead of his time, and relished after.

The Atlantic picks Naomi as a Top 5 column

Thanks to Douglas Haddow (chief co-conspirator on The Brute) for pointing out that my Guardian piece on crazy celebrity diets was picked by The Atlantic as one of its Top 5 columns of the day.

God bless America.

Naomi Campbell's maple madness

At last, the mystery of why superlative supermodel Naomi Campbell throws such filthy tantrums has been solved.

Campbell may insist (as she told Oprah this week) that she has a "type of emotional disorder … an abandonment issue", which leads her to lash out, but by the sounds of things she's so goddamned hungry all the time she'd have to be a saint to keep her composure – an empty tummy could make the best of us kick a pigeon or shoulderbarge a pensioner.

Three times a year, Campbell revealed, she goes on the maple syrup diet – which isn't so much a diet as self-flagellation minus the scourge. It involves drinking nothing but said syrup mixed with cayenne pepper, lemon juice and water. When Beyoncé did it, losing the equivalent of a small child in body weight for the film Dreamgirls, she also drank laxative tea every night and a draught of lukewarm sea-salt water in the morning. "The most I've ever done it for is 18 days," quoth La Campbell. "So I started on Sunday. This is my sixth day." Oprah was lucky. Day nine and merely raising the issue of her tantrums might have led things to get ugly.

Yes, it all suddenly makes sense. Campbell, who was once accused of hitting her assistant in the face with a BlackBerry phone, and was arrested by police after she allegedly spat at a police officer at Heathrow, was probably on one of her mad diets. If only she had stood up at her trial and confessed that her boyfriend commands her to forgo carbs, any lady who's got through to lunch on the Atkins' diet would have let her off with a voucher to Pizza Hut.

"If there is bread on the table, he's like, 'don't eat bread,' she said, gazing at [oligarch Vladimir] Doronin, who smiled from the front row of the audience during the interview."

Campbell is a strong, powerful woman. Bread or no bread, she'd still be breathtaking. But she's not the only celebrity engaging in increasingly crazed regiles. Cheryl Cole eats according to her blood-type – it's called the Eat Right 4 Your Type diet — which can only lead one to the conclusion that the pop princess's gullibility cells are as active as her thyroid. Actress Kirsten Dunst apparently follows a diet that consists 70% alkaline foods and 30% acid. Jennifer Aniston allegedly downed a glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice first thing every morning but has now embarked on a new baby food diet. Liz Hurley famously lived on a bowl of cabbage soup a day. Hollywood starlet Megan Fox guzzles a cider vinegar cocktail, while popstar Fergie does it in shots.

I've just been reading Janusz Bardach's Man is Wolf to Man, and am considering becoming a diet guru myself – proposing the gulag diet (1 x head of salted herring, 12 x hours of sawing down trees. No water. 500g of bread at the end of it = red-carpet-ready bone visibility guaranteed within one week).

The awful thing about these diets is the joylessness of them. The sheer, sapping unhappiness they must involve. And it's not just lady starlets who follow these horrifying mantras. Art collector Charles Saatchi lost four stone in 2008. "It took me 10 months of eating only eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner to shift it. I am still not much to look at, but I have become cringingly vain and hold the world record for the highest level of cholesterol ever seen in anyone still with a pulse." One chef suggested that though he was a fan of all kinds of eggs, Saatchi must either have been joking or require a psychiatrist immediately.

"It has to be a sort of punishment," reads the preface to a book detailing fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld's diet tips. (Lagerfeld, having dropped pounds upon pounds on a diet of horsemeat, diet cola, and disgusting recipes like calf's liver with wild strawberries). "You are a general and you have a single soldier in your army. You must give him instructions and he must carry them out. It may annoy him but he has no choice."

Campbell needs to put the syrup away and embrace the bread basket. And for the rest of us, just thinking about not having to eat strawberry flavoured calf's liver must lead to a greater love of the nation's bingo wings and muffin tops – for they speak eloquently of cake and cream and all good things, of a life lived free of body fascism and the sort of self-hate that leads one to subsist on eggs alone.

BBC Radio 5 Live

Listen here!

Tony Livesey

Tonight I will be on Radio 5 Live talking about the election.

You can't blame Brown for everything

As excitement over the General Election reaches a pitch so feverish that only dogs can hear it, and the polls race round and round, chasing their own tails, it’s all very uncertain what is going to happen on Thursday. The only thing anyone can agree on is that the prime minister is a total loser.

Gordon Brown, son of the Manse, newly champion gurner, with his moral compass and his clunking fist… for months he’s been traduced as a bully, has been dusted up by the tabloids for his poor spelling, his colleagues have ganged up on him, and before that it was suggested that he was mentally ill. Now he can’t even remember to detach a microphone from his lapel before letting rip about some perfectly nice northern pensioner who is concerned about too many Ukrainians coming over here. GB may have been the PM who thought ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ was a good slogan, but when he gets a real person expressing something like a similar idea she’s a ‘bigoted woman’. As soon as he got in the back of his car, the fight was over, according to the press. Gillian Duffy had finished him.

‘It is hard not to think that an alternative Labour leader would have done better in this election than Brown’, claims the Spectator’s James Forsyth. ‘Indeed, the return of Blair to the campaign trail has reminded the Labour machine of how much better their previous leader was. On his return to Labour HQ yesterday, Blair was – I’m told – greeted with a massive ovation. He then greeted and thanked every member of staff.’

But take away the personality quirks, the spectacularly bad luck of that back-of-the-car conversation being picked up (you’re saying David Cameron doesn’t say similar things? You’re saying Nick Clegg is a friend of the working man?), and look at the bigger picture. Blair was hated when he left No.10. And Gordon was hailed by some as ‘The Saviour’. As for Brown bringing about the death of Labour, what about David Miliband, currently on the campaign trail doing his flexy-faced Thunderbirds act, or Alan Milburn, the world’s most boring postman, or the minister for children, schools and families, Ed Balls, aka Blinky, who can’t stop flickering his eyelashes at a rate that any body-language expert would chalk up as the behavioural tic of a congenital liar, or Harriet Harman, the thickest woman in Britain, or any other person in the former cabinet whom the public are even less familiar with than they were with Nick Clegg before ‘Cleggmania’ hit and made for the most ludicrous media-driven political phenomenon of this century?

It’s not just Brown who thinks Northern Woman is a racist Neanderthal. It’s all of them. And people aren’t as easily suckered in as spindoctors like to think. Clegg may have a 79 per cent personal opinion rating, but the same voters overwhelmingly dislike his key policies, which makes Cleggmania look less and less like anything that’s going to translate into votes.

Am I the only one starting to feel a little bit sorry for Brown? It is New Labour that is useless, that is completely exhausted, not Gordon specifically. It’s the whole oleaginous tribe of them. The whiners and the windbags, the endless screed of Newspeak spilling out of their mouths as if from a re-programmed Speak Your Weight machine. The prime engineers of the politics of personality, Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, are suddenly complaining that no one concentrates on policy. But all their ‘policy’ has been tinkering and finessing and meddling in private lives – there’s been no grand vision, no policy writ large that anyone could really get behind.

And the idea that New Labour has been in any way much of a democratic institution is exposed by the very people most instrumental in trying to prop it up in its darkest hour. Mandelson, so beloved of the media class for being a cross between Dame Widow Twinky and Iago, recently took offence at Sky News’ Adam Boulton, who suggested that Mandelson is only interested in the politics of personality. Disliking this, the panto-baron hissed back that neither the Financial Times nor the IFS (the sponsors of the event at which Boulton asked his question) is ‘standing in this election’. ‘You are not standing for election either’, Mandelson said to Boulton. It took another journalist in the audience to remind Mandelson: ‘Neither are you.’

Try as I might, I can’t get excited about this election. As much as any liberty-lover in the land must want children to be able to eat cheese sandwiches with impunity, for young mothers not to be fined when their toddler drops a piece of fruit on the pavement, for the education system to be liberated from the crudities of Balls and all the balls he propagates, for free speech to be upheld, and adults to be presumed not to be paedophiles, just like the innocent are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty… the future just doesn’t seem so bright, it doesn’t seem so orange.

The media are concentrating on any colour they can squeeze out of this ditchwater beige race. On whether ‘Gillian Duffy’s postal ballot paper may become one of the great political souvenirs of all time. Something to rival Neville Chamberlain’s air ticket to Munich and back.’ (Thank you Michael Crick.) Or on the state of Gordon’s nails: ‘By this stage in the campaign, you’d have thought that Gordon Brown’s nails would be chewed to the quick. But as this picture from the Observer shows, they are longer than ever.’ (Thank you, Financial Times.) You might get as much insight on the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary: ‘Alastair Campbell is still defiantly spinning away. “Don’t care what phoney polls say tonight. GB has won this [TV debate] hands down”, he tweets. “GB wins debate whatever polls say”, he tweets again. As Norma Desmond said in Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”’ Okay, perhaps not….

It’s not Gillian Duffy who finished off Gordon Brown, or Gordon Brown who finished off the Labour Party. Rather an implosion, internally generated, is finishing off this sulphurous political creed.