Julie Burchill

‘Wild’ used to be one of my favourite words. It was in all the songs I loved best — ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Wild Thing’, ‘Born to Be Wild’. How times have changed. Wild — once meaning brave, bold, reckless — is now yet another sanctimonious nag. Everyone seems to want to get in touch with their wild side. Dark green is the new black. Even vulgar Channel 5 has given us Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, in which he ‘travels to remote corners of the globe to experience extreme lifestyles with those who have left modern-day amenities behind’. If you can’t persuade a TV company to bankroll you flying around the world, for as little as £450 you can enjoy two nights of ‘trails and day programmes’ in Essex — or ‘wilderness therapy’, as walking about outside is now branded.

I have many fine qualities – but being a good judge of character is not one of them. Put me in a room with six saints and a psychopath and we all know who I’m going to be swearing blood-brotherhood with by the end of the evening. Interestingly, this hasn’t left me feeling like a victim; as I’m extremely tough, reckless and self-mocking, I bounce from one inappropriate friendship to the next with no loss of enthusiasm. But most of these relationships are by their nature not conducted in the public eye. When a journalist makes a fool of themselves drooling over a famous figure who later turns out to be an ocean-going rotter, it’s a different matter. However I may as well do a mea culpa on this matter – anything for a cheap laugh, even if that involves dragging my own name through the dirt.

I don’t care for Elton John. A cross between Violet Elizabeth Bott and Princess Margaret, his temper tantrums are legendary, whether asking fans on to the stage to dance and then screaming at them not to get so close, or demanding that an employee do something about the blustery weather keeping him awake. They say you get the face you deserve after 50, and he looks every inch the bitter old busybody who divides his time between twitching the curtains and gossiping over the fence about the behaviour of those younger and prettier than himself. He has now become drearily bound into the liberal establishment — see his recent puffed-up pronouncement about Brexit: ‘I’m ashamed of my country… I am sick to death of Brexit.

I am that rare thing, a vice-signaller; a breed defined by the fact that unlike our virtue-signalling opposites, we delight in presenting ourselves as somewhat worse than we are. Reasons vary; sometimes we were Bad People in the past and changed but (like teenage wallflowers who grew into table-dancing divas and still describe themselves as ‘shy’) we keep an image in our mind of the way we were. Sometimes we choose to present in this way because we are repelled by people who consider themselves good but behave in a manner which we see as substandard; for example, regard the hardcore hypocrisy of racist, misogynist Corbynites who believe that they can never do wrong because they have ticked the box marked Brotherhood Of Man.

My admiration for Deborah Harry goes back a long way and — fittingly for a woman who even as a septuagenarian has an air of juvenile delinquency about her — got me into trouble as a teenage writer on the music press. Sent to review the hot new American group Talking Heads, who were in London for the first time, I raved instead about the unknown support band, Blondie, in effect ending up: ‘And then these really boring preppies came on and spoilt everything.’ I was subsequently sent to review Gilbert O’Sullivan in Croydon as punishment. I normally skip the start of showbiz memoirs (childhood is so common), but I was hooked from the moment Harry — in the dreamy yet deft tone reminiscent of Blondie’s best lyrics — starts recalling her origins as the illegitimate Angela Trimble, soon to be adopted by the Harry family and renamed Deborah.

There’s a line in Desperately Seeking Susan where Madonna (Susan) reads aloud the diary of Roberta, the bored housewife she has swapped places with: ‘Couldn’t sleep. Went into kitchen. Gary came in, turn off light. Gary left. Finished birthday cake.’ Then she exclaims: ‘Pages of it; it’s got to be a cover — nobody’s life could be this boring!’ A related naughty thought often comes to mind when I see my chums worrying on Facebook about The Man stealing photos of their cat wearing rabbit ears or their own preferences in caffeinated beverages. If there is a stealthy cabal of shadowy figures seeking to make puppets out of us — mere paper dolls capering powerlessly at the whim of our faceless masters! — why do people with such dull lives believe they are in any way of interest to would-be Dr Evils? Or are cats-in-rabbit-ears fascinating code for something intriguing that only I haven’t been let in on? It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve found myself in a minority.

There’s a line in Desperately Seeking Susan where Madonna (Susan) reads aloud the diary of Roberta, the bored housewife she has swapped places with: ‘Couldn’t sleep. Went into kitchen. Gary came in, turn off light. Gary left. Finished birthday cake.’ Then she exclaims: ‘Pages of it; it’s got to be a cover — nobody’s life could be this boring!’ A related naughty thought often comes to mind when I see my chums worrying on Facebook about The Man stealing photos of their cat wearing rabbit ears or their own preferences in caffeinated beverages. If there is a stealthy cabal of shadowy figures seeking to make puppets out of us — mere paper dolls capering powerlessly at the whim of our faceless masters! — why do people with such dull lives believe they are in any way of interest to would-be Dr Evils? Or are cats-in-rabbit-ears fascinating code for something intriguing that only I haven’t been let in on? It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve found myself in a minority.

On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a fortune from persuading a generation of women that brunch with a bunch of broads was something to aspire to. The second scrapped his way through Spain, eventually establishing an independent principality. But the thing film fans recall about the latter is that immediately after his death he was propped up on his noble mount one more time to inspire his weary troops into battle. The story may be apocryphal, but while reading Is There Still Sex in the City? I couldn’t get the image out of my head. It isn’t salubrious to see a fine writer strapped to the same old over-flogged horse and sent out once again as the standard-bearer for sexy sexagenarians.

I nearly choked on my Krispy Kreme when I read that the journalist Michael Buerk had announced that fat people (I’m not going to use his word, obese; fat is perfectly serviceable and doesn’t have the same judgemental, almost parasexual feel) should be allowed to drop dead and no longer trouble the NHS with their chubby troubles. All those years I listened to The Moral Maze thinking of him as a cross between Solomon The Wise and Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid and he turns out to be some superannuated playground bully! It’s a bit rich that Buerk himself is a whopping 73 years old; there are a lot of nutters out there who think that everyone over the age of 60 is ready for the knacker’s yard. Doesn’t it occur to him that once the fat are written off as time-wasting bed-blockers the old will be next on the list? But of course when the metropolitan elite make pronouncements about unworthy groups of people, they never include themselves or their Great And Good cronies.

I’ve never voted Conservative and I never will. Having been raised in a working-class home, I can’t get past the fact that had the Labour party not come into being, the Tories would have kept my people serfs for as long as inhumanly possible. But I’m also an extreme Brexiteer; far from the past three years being boring (anyone who says this reveals themselves as such a monumental dullard that we should remove their right to vote), I consider that this nation spent the four decades up to 23 June 2016 sleepwalking into the shadowlands of EU dreariness — and disaster. Only a halfwit could fail to comprehend that the whole repulsive gravy--train is set to run into the buffers very soon and that it makes sense for us to pull the communication cord and hop off ASAP.

I’ve never voted Conservative and I never will. Having been raised in a working-class home, I can’t get past the fact that had the Labour party not come into being, the Tories would have kept my people serfs for as long as inhumanly possible. But I’m also an extreme Brexiteer; far from the past three years being boring (anyone who says this reveals themselves as such a monumental dullard that we should remove their right to vote), I consider that this nation spent the four decades up to 23 June 2016 sleepwalking into the shadowlands of EU dreariness — and disaster. Only a halfwit could fail to comprehend that the whole repulsive gravy-train is set to run into the buffers very soon and that it makes sense for us to pull the communication cord and hop off ASAP.

After hearing about the massacre in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, I went to church, happily sang the word God and stuffed £20 in the collection plate. I’m a believer and am lucky to have a lovely church on the corner of the square where I live. I attend irregularly, but on my frequent walks to my volunteer job I always enjoy disapproving as I read the list of activities going on at the community centre which is in ‘the award-winning conversion’ (the sin of pride, for starters) of the nave of the church — bridge (gambling), astrology circle (false prophets), kung-fu (violence) and pilates (vanity), all in one week! Tutting happily, I go on my merry way. It makes sense when we consider the strange and splendid fact that there are now more churches than pubs in our notoriously thirsty and libertine country, the temperance movement scoring a somewhat posthumous victory.

Thumbing avidly through Heat magazine recently in a fevered search for the latest on the Cheryl/Liam/Naomi infernal triangle, I was startled to find a pull-out preview of a new true-crime magazine called Crime Monthly. It was aimed at an audience that is presumably satiated with seeing celebrities tormented and now wants to read about ordinary people being tortured. Heat magazine — once a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon — is often now found on free magazine stands, so the publishers, Bauer, are chasing the money. The self-important actress Kristen Stewart once compared being papped to being raped, but there’s obviously more profit now in flogging the real thing. The preview was so crass — the words GRISLY, AGONY and SHOCKING leaping out amongst the smiling faces of young female victims — that at first I thought it might be the sort of tasteless joke that has got Heat into hot water before.

There’s quite a few writers who are sensitive souls, and the worst are those who like to dish it out but reach for the smelling salts and swoon when anyone so much as gives them a funny look. Luckily I was born with the Sensitivity Gene missing, especially when it comes to dissing, and I find that like with gifts, I’d just as soon receive than give. Say nasty things behind my back, to my face – or both ways in bed – and not only will I not get upset but I’ll derive a mild kick from it. Just a little one, mind you – I’m not kinky! I’ve had a bunch of feuds - Tony Parsons (‘Looks like a dying rhesus monkey’), Martin Amis (‘A little man in every way it is possible for a man to be little’), and Camille Paglia (‘F*** off you crazy old dyke!’) The last one was admittedly a low blow, but I like to think I was cut down to size by afterwards becoming – however briefly – a crazy old dyke myself.

There’s quite a few writers who are sensitive souls, and the worst are those who like to dish it out but reach for the smelling salts and swoon when anyone so much as gives them a funny look. Luckily I was born with the Sensitivity Gene missing, especially when it comes to dissing, and I find that like with gifts, I’d just as soon receive than give. Say nasty things behind my back, to my face – or both ways in bed – and not only will I not get upset but I’ll derive a mild kick from it. Just a little one, mind you – I’m not kinky! I’ve had a bunch of feuds - Tony Parsons (‘Looks like a dying rhesus monkey’), Martin Amis (‘A little man in every way it is possible for a man to be little’), and Camille Paglia (‘F*** off you crazy old dyke!’) The last one was admittedly a low blow, but I like to think I was cut down to size by afterwards becoming – however briefly – a crazy old dyke myself.

It’s unusual for musicians to become writers. The trajectory of yearning is meant to be the other way around. When I was a teenager working at the New Musical Express I was bemused by the number of men there who had won the greatest prize on earth — being paid to write — but nevertheless dreamt only of being crooning cretins, singing the same songs over and over again. The fact that Chrissie Hynde (who once, pre-Pretenders, tried to recruit me to a biker-themed girl group, telling me that my stage name would be Kicks Tart) had once been their colleague only served to fuel the poor suckers’ self-delusion as they banged away cluelessly, ignoring the somewhat pertinent facts that — unlike them — their erstwhile office mate happened to be a brilliant singer, songwriter and sex bomb.

On reading recently that Italian is the fastest disappearing language in America, my thoughts were mixed. I felt fleeting sorrow that such a beautiful lingo would be heard less. Between 2001 and 2017, there has been a reduction of 38 per cent — and this during a period when the proportion of Americans who speak a second language at home actually rose from 11 per cent to 22 per cent. But on the bright side, it demonstrates the assimilation of Italian-Americans, always an excellent thing for immigrants. Groups who cling to the Old Ways and then complain of not making progress in their chosen home are as ridiculous as a man who ties his feet together and then complains that outside forces are making him hop. There was, however, no silver lining when I read that in the UK, Pizza Express is in peril, having to pay off a whopping £650 million over the next three years to a Chinese private equity firm, with total debts of £1 billion.

It always amuses me at this time of year to observe the fuss people make about quitting booze for a month. Because three years ago, after three decades of taking cocaine on a daily basis, I gave it up overnight. Over-eating, gambling, shopping, pornography — there’s no cheap thrill that can’t be mastered with a little self-control. I first took cocaine as a teenager working at the New Musical Express. As someone who had presented herself as a fearless punk when she was actually a shy virgin, I was already a big fan of the amphetamine sulphate, so when a man from a major record label said ‘May I?’ and starting racking out lines on my desk one day I was anticipating the familiar burn of baby laxative with the merest soupçon of speed.

Until last week I believed that Unesco – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – existed solely to protect and promote remarkable aspects of the material world, such as my beloved Bauhaus buildings in Tel Aviv. But of course I should have known that it would be beyond the wit of the UN to do anything as sensible as taking on a simple task and sticking to it.  Since 2008 they’ve also set themselves the frankly ludicrous job of upholding something called the 'Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage', featuring hundreds of customs from French cooking (understandable if dull) through 'Mongolian coaxing ritual for camels' (getting freaky) to 'Cambodian tugging rituals' (nurse! The screens!) Have a look – it’s fascinating.

Upon discovering that Sinéad O’Connor has converted to Islam, I was about as shocked as a Yuletide shopper hearing the opening bars of Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ while picking up last-minute stocking-fillers. It had to happen, didn’t it? Douglas Murray attributes home-grown Islamic conversion to the retreat of the secular West from spiritual life — the Search For Meaning — but I don’t give the clowns that much credit. A vast amount of male Islamic conversion takes place in prison — suddenly thugs have the blessing of a higher power to torture, rape and kill — and with women I think it’s often a combination of grieving for fading physical attractiveness and attention-seeking: ‘Look at me in my lovely special modest costume, you sluts!’ What I find particularly offensive are those perfectly sane women who voluntarily hijab-up — the Swedish politicians visiting Iran, the American feminists on the Women’s March — while all across the Muslim world heartbreakingly brave women are paying with their liberty and lives in order to break free of the shroud of submission.

The last time I saw a copy of the New Musical Express — the ferociously influential 1970s pop paper which plucked me from working-class provincial obscurity at the age of 17 and set me on the radiant way to fame, fortune and utter fabulousness — it was in a rain-lashed Shaftesbury Avenue, its humble bin pleading PLEASE TAKE ONE. As I stared at my tattered alma mater in appalled fascination, as one would a long-lost grand passion who had been vandalised by Old Father Time and then done over by Mother Nature for good measure, I reflected rather smugly that we had both come a long way, though thankfully in rather different directions. Though my story is unusual, it is not unique. Caitlin Moran, currently the most famous feminist since Germaine Greer (for some reason this strikes me as hilarious, though I’m not sure why), came up through the pop press in the 1990s.

I was amused to read recently that supermarkets were mystified as to the sudden passion for the humble carrot sweeping the nation; more specifically, swiping the screens of supermarket self-checkouts, to the extent that Britons allegedly bought 800 million more of the orange denture-denters last year than they did in 2013. Perhaps shoppers had finally heard the Medieval rumours about them being a cure for sexually transmitted diseases, and with syphilis up 20 percent year on year considered it a convenient and crunchy way to swerve embarrassment at the doctors. But no, the merch in question wasn’t humble carrots at all, but a flighty fruit much loved by the airheads of Instagram - they were expensive avocados, which wily thieves have been scanning as the cheapest loose vegetable by weight.

Paige Bond is an attractive blonde lady of a certain age - thrillingly, the Evening Standard claimed that she was both 48 and 57 in the same report. As far as one can judge from photographs, she looks lively and confident, so I imagine she was irked to say the least when after applying for a job with an organic grocers, Forest Whole Foods of Hampshire, she mistakenly received an email from one employee of the company to another summing her up in terms which are all too typical of the sort of snoot who believes that espousing over-priced organic food is yet another handy way of looking down on one’s fellow humans - like being a ‘traveller’ rather than a tourist, or voting Remain rather than Leave. One ‘Josie Bickle’ had a look at Miss Bond’s Facebook page and concluded that ‘She is probably worth interviewing if you think you can cope with having someone like her around…would lift spirits in the packing room…slightly irritating…I bet her voice is REALLY irritating…chavvy.

For months now, since I first read about the plans for the Steven Spielberg/Tony Kushner remake of West Side Story, I’ve been musing on how the heavy hand of political correctness may well crush this most sumptuously subtle of musicals. And now, as an overture, the singer Sierra Boggess, after being judged too pallid for the role of the Puerto Rican heroine Maria (played unforgettably in the 1961 film by the Russian immigrant actress Natalie Wood) has not just given up the role at the imminent BBC Proms after social-media cry-bullying - ‘Step back. This is not your story to tell’ - but has recanted in a positively Orwellian fashion: ‘It is crucial to not perpetuate the miscasting of this show. I apologise for not coming to this realisation sooner and as an artist, I must ask myself how I can best serve the world, and in this case my choice is clearer than ever: To step aside and allow an opportunity to correct a wrong that has been done for years with this show in particular.

Time flies when you’re being shunned! A whole five years have passed since a piece I wrote about male to female transsexuals (typically temperate sample: ‘A bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’) was published by the Observer – and then pulled. And what a lot of water has flown under the bridge - under the bed, even - since then. It has now become a fashionable political cause, one taken up by both Mumsnet and the Guardian – thanks in part to Jeremy Corbyn's brosocialist Labour Party and its decision to allow trans-women onto all-women shortlists. But it wasn’t always the case. I was one of the first feminists in this country to talk about the trans lobby, and for my trouble I got reported to the police, denounced by politicians and blacklisted by liberal broadsheets.

There are two sorts of people: those who can’t wait to grow up, and those who wish they never had to. It’s fair to say that women figure predominantly in the first group and men in the second, hence the preponderance of male fans of science fiction and fantasy — and dewy-eyed reminiscence about children’s television. I’ve been in many female friendship groups and can’t remember a single occasion on which we’ve sat around thinking about past puppets. On the contrary, the childish things we typically recall are our awful choices of make-up and clothes, and our adoration of the pretty-boy pin-ups in our teenage bedrooms: that is, the things we used to hasten the arrival of longed-for adult life. The internet helps those reluctant to put away childish things just as much as it helps those too shy to have sex with real people.

It’s no secret that my career isn’t quite what it was (lucky I’m rich!) so imagine my feeling of glee when I opened up my email account last Wednesday to find messages galore from all over the mainstream media. TV news programmes, radio shows, newspapers - even the Guardian! - were keen to have my views on…the end of the print edition of the New Musical Express. What a cheek! I started work there in 1976 when I was 17; I left when I was 19 as, hilariously, I thought that people in their twenties who still wrote about music were ‘sad old men'. Since then I’ve had number one best-selling novels, won an Emmy and been condemned in the House of Commons for tranny-baiting. I’m now 58, in glorious decline but still a cracking little scribbler – and apparently all I’m good for is writing about something I stopped doing nearly forty years ago.