Off The Fence: We Make Several Apologies
Off The Fence: We Make Several Apologies
And a butter magnate brings on a Blavatnik.
Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once again, and welcome once again, to Off The Fence: a newsletter from The Fence which arrives but once a week – how novel! Yellowing leaves may still be cleft to tree branches, but autumn is already in our rear-view mirror as we step into Christmas with a rip-roaring Issue 22, sent to our art team last Wednesday. Details to follow as ever, but it’s a cracker. Not literally.
Our last edition, Issue 21, has continued to make glamorous cameos all over the place, popping up with Nick Morgan at Dungeness Point; amid the pigeons of Belgrade; in the wilds of Mullingar, courtesy of Susan Adair Farrelly; scaring the glossies at the Victoria station WHSmith; dredged from the sea by Sarah Maddox; looming over the deputy editor’s very handsome cat; and relaxing outside the UK’s only desert – the deracinated landscape of a decommissioned nuclear site.
Competition is FIERCE for the bottle of Bolly this time around: if you want to be chugging fizz like peak-era Gazza this November, send us a picture from the strangest place you can possibly get to. You don’t even have to drink it, if you don’t want to – the last winner was teetotal.
On to the good stuff. From the back of our medicine cabinet this week, we have grovelling retractions, world-bending romance, a real doozy of a story on the shady universe of influencer marketing, and a spectacular clip of Charli XCX losing her cool at a crowd full of Germans. But first, a word about this game we find ourselves in.
From Soho to SoHo
If you’re interested in how the world works, then you really have to read this astonishing piece in New York magazine, in which they survey 57 boardroom tycoons about the state of the American media. Featuring appearances from Joanna Coles, Graydon Carter and many more, it is fabulously bitchy, but also provides a book’s worth of information in a longish but digestible read.
It is interesting to observe that despite the Cassandra-style ululations, the States are still minting new publications who are operating at a significant scale from the off. Among the well-merited praise for Puck and AirMail it is fascinating, at least to us, to see the smaller operations that aren’t featured within the piece.
Why is American media so much more buoyant and exciting? Well, there are a few reasons, but the principal cause is that people are willing to pay for the product in the States. For a London-based publication with minimal American coverage, it has always shocked and delighted us that we have hundreds of paying subscribers in the US of A.
Anyway, this is all a very circuitous way of saying: if you like The Fence, and you’d like to see it grow, support us today.
Two in Two
Congratulations to Charlie Baker, who has been nominated for the BSME editor’s editor of the year for the second year in a row. Charlie, who is very happy to write about himself in the third person, is up against a more deserving array of candidates, including Bryan Glick of Computer Weekly, the first publication to break the Post Office scandal. Members of the BSME can vote at the link above.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Jacob
Deep in the heart of the pando, when the rest of us were getting fat off half-baked banana bread and trying not to kill each other for the crime of breathing too loudly or too close, Ella Fox-Martens was flying not halfway, but fullway across the entire world to meet a man she had fallen in love with without actually ever seeing in real life. They moved in together in their early twenties and, miraculously, they are still very much in love.
It’s a heartwarming and terrifying story, depending on how you look at it. For Issue 21, Ella wrote about relocating from Perth to London and email-based romance. A lot of people have read and fallen in love with the article – a little more on that below, but for now, read it here.
Tomorrow’s Writers, Today
There are few things that delight us more than when a feature gets the level of extraordinary feedback that Ella Fox-Martens received. To Sarah Haque, of this parish, it was ‘fantastic, by the way’; Joe Williams garlanded it as ‘an absolute banger’; for Jamie Fewery, ‘terrific’; and both Andrew Furlow & Federico Perelmuter went for ‘this is delightful’.
Most fulsomely of all, author and columnist Sophie Heawood reposted the feature twice in ten minutes, redoubling her praise by saying ‘I know some publishers and agents follow me on here. If I were you I’d be meeting Ella Fox-Martens for a coffee and sounding her out. I don’t know who she is but she’s got it and I’m jealous.’ If you want to get the first glimpse of the next big piece that has everyone falling over themselves, you will find it in our pages – guaranteed. Smash that button below and subscribe today.
MAD fer It
It’s not that we like sending all of our writers to places that feel precision-engineered to depress them; sometimes we let them go and write about a pub or something. No such luck in this latest issue for Clive Martin, who received the invidious assignment of visiting MAD//Fest, an invite-only ‘marketing, advertising + disruption’ festival on Brick Lane. If you’d like to read about what a jolly good time Clive had – in a mass breathwork session with Ferne McCann; or watching industry leaders ‘talk about KSI like he’s Stanley Kubrick’ – then read right here.
[REDACTED]
In last week’s newsletter, we wrote that Thomas Straker was portrayed as the ‘baddie’ at last year’s Portobello Panto, a traditional community pantomime in Notting Hill. This was an error. He was actually portrayed as the ‘scarecrow who has no brains’.
We are happy to correct the record.
A Hidden Camera? Why No, I’m Just Happy to See You!
Last night Channel 4 aired a two hour investigation into the sinister vestiges of the far right. For the film, anti-extremism charity Hope Not Hate sent Harry Shukman undercover for a year and a half. As ‘Chris’, he embedded himself with the natalists, the eugenicists and the Nazis, armed with a hidden camera and a diet of pure cortisol. A few years back, Harry went on another undercover mission, investigating the shadowy world of conversion therapy in Britain. We published his exposé, ‘Pray not to be Gay’, all the way back in Issue 6 – read it here.
She Walks in Beauty
Supposed editorial seer, Charlie Baker, put in the wrong link for the Instagram link to our most popular post ever, the majestic ‘Small Plates-o-Matic’ from Issue 21. Incredibly, said wrong link was our most clicked link last week, leading over six hundred of you to another beautifully appointed yet considerably less popular post of ours. Here is the correct link, anyway, and do join us on our more beautiful social media account, as there are lots of exciting things happening there.
Wait, They Don’t Love Vogues Like We Love Vogues
Our contribution to public service journalism in Issue 21 was the Soho Map Of Vogues, a definitive breakdown of chic cigarette pricing in the environs of our office that was definitely not inspired by our contributing editor sneaking off to take several smoke breaks a day.
The demand was high, the addicts assembled, and we answered the call, creating a limited edition run of the maps in print format. These maps have now arrived in our office, where they are safe from smoke damage we can assure you. And they are looking very beautiful indeed. If you haven’t yet, you can pick up your print from our online shop. Then you can hang it on your wall as a pre-Rachel Reeves relic of when pricing was semi-normal.
All Things Banter
One final thing about Thomas Straker. His origin story is quite well-known, that he was working for a secretive billionaire in New York when he started making his butter videos on TikTok and became an overnight celebrity (in relative terms).
We can reveal that this secretive billionaire is an old friend of the newsletter, Sir Leonard Blavatnik, one of the richest residents in Britain and someone who doesn’t take kindly to being labelled an ‘oligarch’.
We are told that Straker worked for the family for a number of years. Interestingly, Blavatnik’s son, young Valentin, has just joined one of Straker’s companies as a director. The Blavatniks are a family of lavish wealth but excellent taste – modern-day Medicis, you might say.
The Rose-Red Empire
These days, lots of television programmes strive to be ‘art’, to have ‘themes’ and ‘protagonists’ that people can talk about to make themselves feel clever. So it’s good to see a return to brass tacks with shows like Rivals, the new Jilly Cooper adaptation that clings to the source material winningly. Everyone’s watching it and giving it the big five stars, but we should also commend to you the outstanding BBC version of Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman, another wonderful book, faithfully adapted, and available for you to watch on iPlayer.
In Case You Missed It
A 12,000-word New Yorker article on a controversial rare book dealer? You better believe it, baby.
Fergal Kinney goes deep into the heart of middle England to discover the country’s seshiest village for The Face.
Peerless sport sartorialist Sam Diss has a great podcast series on football hooliganism, The English Disease, out now. Catch up on the first four episodes, and await the final two, wherever you get your podcasts.
Why weak men love George Orwell: Naoise Dolan writes for the FT on the world’s worst blokes.
The journalist’s journalist: Neal Ascherson on Claud Cockburn, the forefather of guerrilla reporting, for the LRB.
And Finally
Nowadays, Charli XCX is the apex predator of pop girlies. She leads and her bratties follow. But it’s been a long road to the top for darling Charlotte. She first leapt onto the scene back in 2012, rising to prominence with Swedish pop duo Icona Pop and maximising their joint slay with I Love It.
But it wasn’t all sweat tours and oiled-up Troye Sivans in the halcyon days of the 2010s. When Charli performed the hit at Lollapalooza Festival the year it came out she was shocked and appalled to encounter the low energy of the German audience.
Channelling early Brat energy, here’s a clip of Charli berating the audience because she ‘thought this fucking song was big in Germany’. To hammer home the point, she proceeds to begin singing it in a German accent.
Perhaps she does, in fact, care very much.
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Will you look at that… another newsletter in the bag. Watch us go. Quick reminder that if you have any issues that we can remedy, light up our inboxes at support@the-fence.com, and we’ll do whatever it takes to solve your problem. Don’t forget: send us your weirdest snaps of the magazine, and a big bottle of champers could be yours. Catch you next week.
All the best,
TF