Thursday 30 July 2009

Harry Potter hottie: Does Freddie Stroma put you in a coma?

Freddie Stroma, the latest edition to the 'Hogwarts set' is the perfect fit for the part of Cormac McLaggen. An outspoken, self assured and dreamy Gryffindor, McLaggen, is the breakthrough star of the most current Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. In the film, Stroma plays the Quidditch rival to adorable ginger, Ron Weasley, and simultaneously poses a threat to the budding romance between the show's protagonists. According to Stroma, McLaggen is “a bit arroganct” but thanks to his public school upbringing at the prestigious Radley College, the actor found it “not too difficult” to channel his inner nob as “the accent and energy were really easy to slip into.”

It came as a bit of a shock to avid fans, myself included, that when quizzed on his Potter knowledge, Stroma decidedly came up short. The actor does not claim to be an expert on the infamous series, having impressively won the casting directors after only read three of the books: “When I heard about the audition I bought the book and researched the character so I’ve only read the first two books as a child and more recently, the sixth.”

When asked whether his fellow actors had exhibited any diva behaviour on set, Stroma thoroughly denied any real life rivalry, describing the cast as “incredibly friendly and supportive”. However, Stroma’s memories of filming are bittersweet and marked with tragedy. Shortly after production ended, Rob Knox, who played a minor part in the film, was stabbed to death in London when he attempted to protect his brother from a knifeman. As a result, Stroma has stayed in touch with many of the cast and crew members who attended the memorial and funeral together: “it was really awful and we were all really good mates with him so we’ve kept quite close. We try to make time for each other. “

The female student body at Stroma’s alma mater, University College London, were well aware of his budding fame and impressive abs for a number of years prior to the film’s release. They can rightfully claim to be his first fans, having set up the popular Facebook group, ‘Freddie Stroma puts me in a coma’, which fortunately refers to the actors' chiselled good looks rather than his acting ability. Stroma seemed humbled and flattered by the amount of attention he has already received but has already experienced some of the more worrying drawbacks of fame: “it’s quite weird, I was expecting something like this because of the fame that comes with being part of the Harry Potter films but I really wasn’t expecting to have facebook fan groups or ‘MySpace’ pages claiming to be me."

With the scripts flowing in and hot wizards looking set to trump unfashionably pale vampires as this summer's most eligable British exports, Stroma has good reason to be optimistic for the future. His studies, however, were clearly important to him and he managed to make time for his Neuroscience degree during gaps in filming.
And ladies, he’s not single, so please don't spend a better portion of the year hanging around UCL's neuroscience building. He's graduated.

Our thoughts: Stalking is for losers but there's nothing wrong with a good old fashioned bit of idol worship. We express our sincere regrets for insinuating that Rob Pattinson's current title as 'hottest cinematic mythological creature' looks set to crumble before his gold...but no, brown...but no, gold eyes.

CF

Alex Zane on Student Life: "Gosh! This is going to be terrible. All my stories are going to be about masturbation!"



Some people are too cool for school. Two-time drop out Alex Zane tells us how to befriend Welsh weirdos, give back-chat to lecturers and generally laugh in the face of higher education.


ON UNI HALLS:"Honesty exists on a multitude of levels"

Jethro, Alex’s welsh friend from Max Rayne Hall at UCL back in 1998 created a big bang. “He used to throw things out the window that shouldn’t be thrown out of windows. We had a lovely garden gnome in the kitchen that was thrown out the window. Someone had a beautiful pot plant that they’d been growing for years – Jethro threw that.” His needs to launch gardening accessories out the sixth floor window stemmed from his deep-rooted rage issues following a traumatic freshers experience that would confuse even Freud: “We were all playing a game where you tell stories in which we felt we created a very safe zone in which honesty was the policy . Sadly many of us were aware that dealing in the currency of honesty only leads to trouble so you always deal in a certain kind of lower honesty- a degree of honesty but not honesty in its purest form and Jethro, however, was new to the idea of honesty existing on a multitude of levels and consequently told us a story about how he personally chose to masturbate on his side while laying out a toilet roll in front of him to catch material exiting his body, the matter if you will, and we called it the Jethro Sidewank.” Don’t worry. We can assure you that Jethro hasn’t been smuggled into a Welsh mental hospital; Alex Zane still facebooks him.


ON MIND-ALTERING SUBSTANCES: "The nice man in Camden was in fact a drug dealer who made the girls cry."

Jethro wasn’t the only one to be lulled into a false sense of security and then regret a freshers transgression. “The thing is we were all so green and you think you’ve got life experience as a fresher. I walked in with this kind of cocky arrogance: ‘seen it all, done it all nothing shocks me, I’m a world weary traveller!’” Alex recalls in true freshers spirit chatting to a random stranger in a “well dancy” club in Camden, taking him back home to flat full of friends only to discover that the nice man in Camden was in fact a drug dealer who made the girls cry.


ON SEX: "must be done in groups..."

Alex is quick to remind us that if you are going to do something bad, it is best to do it in a group. “Thanks to the unfortunate horseshoe shape of Max Rayne (a UCL uni hall), fifteen of us watched a girl’s Italian boyfriend… masturbate into the sink in [her] room through a window. He kept bringing himself to the climax and then stopping for about 30 seconds and doing the whole things again. I was intrigued! Granted, if I had been alone granted with condensation forming on the glass with every breath I took that would have been weird but there was a group of people so there was that kind of acceptable comaradery.”


ON MAKING FRIENDS: "We have nothing but the fact we live together in common."

We’ve all had our Jethro’s and Italian wankers, so just how do you cope with being thrust into a corridor with such weirdoes? Alex advises “It’s important to make friends with the people in your halls or at least be on talking terms because no matter how weird they are you are stuck with them for at least 7 months… You can always go ‘we have nothing but the fact we live together in common. Aren’t these tiles nice in the kitchen? Ooo the windows are slightly cleaner today.’” But remember, this is the guy who befriended a drug dealer and went home with him…


ON CLEANLINESS:"I put a mop through the kitchen wall and then moved a poster over it so noone ever knew.”

We point out that it doesn’t take a fresher version of Magnus Magnerson to smash the paper-thin walls of UCL Halls. A defensive Alex agrees, “That’s what I said to the dean of students as I was being chucked out."


ON EXTRA-CURRICULAR LIFE:"Alright lets do something a little bit proactive"

He spent most of his time starting comedy nights, student radio shows and starring in the only instalment of a UCL Film & TV soc. series imaginatively called ‘The College.’ “Freshers week for me was half getting blind drunk and sleeping with the wrong people and half actually going ‘alright lets do something a little bit proactive’ as a step towards what you might want to do in life…like going on to do Xfm.Potentially!”


ON URBANIA: plug,plug,plug...

But there is more to London than career prospects in the media and my can Alex wax-lyrical about that. “Freshers week in London is ten times the freshers week anywhere else….London is always good. Go check out some comedy. And then there is always First Friday of course- the best indie disco in London at Islington Academy courtesy of Xfm.”


So there you have it: the Freshers Gospel according to Alex Zane. The first commandment: join more societies than there is time in the day. The second: remember drug dealers are not your friends. The third: be honest but not Sidewank honest. for.


Elishka Flint and MK

Tuesday 28 July 2009

Shaun Bailey: Cool, young, tough...and Tory!?

Politician and youth worker Shaun Bailey, a British Afro-Caribbean under 40 who grew up in a council house in North Kensington asks the question that matters: “Why should someone like me have to stay close to the street?”

The Notting Hill Carnival exemplifies both the best and worst aspects of London life. Thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds flock there every summer, drawn in by the cultural diversity and the music that pumps through the streets of Ladbroke Grove in a festival of colour and movement. There is a darker side, however, with hundreds of armed police attempting in vain to prevent the inevitable violence – usually gang-related – that occurs year after year. While street violence never fails to attract the attention of the newscasters, the story that remains untold is of the poor, young Afro-Caribbean dancers who sashay through the streets which were once their homes. They cannot afford to live in affluent West London anymore.

Those who’d like to sweep under the rug London’s “seedy” underbelly can rest assured that Shaun Bailey, whose politics were shaped on those very streets, has experienced this poverty and has seen this crime. As a result, he is one of few politicians not afraid to confront the social problems that need to be addressed: poverty, education and housing, to name a few. In fact, as a youth worker, it was his relationships with both the criminally-involved and the dispossessed at his centre, MyGeneration, in Ladbroke Grove that convinced Bailey that he would no longer be a man of words but of action, starting in West London and reverberating throughout the country. His political awakening came from the kind of honesty that you can only find on the streets when he was informed just after he had just picked up a friend’s boyfriend from jail that he was not doing enough: “She said to me, Shaun, you should be showing our boys, not just telling them.”

It’s at MyGeneration where I met Bailey to discuss the next item on his agenda, his campaign to be elected the Conservative MP for Hammersmith. Facing stiff competition, Bailey is used to having to defend himself. And that includes against Jeremy Paxman on “Newsnight” who jokingly described Bailey as “easy to deal with compared with the residents of Hammersmith.”

His clear message to his opponents is that no amount of intimidation will make him shut up and he will not give in without a fight. One such example of criticism was when Bailey was bluntly told recently that he would never be successful in politics due to his unrelenting honesty. He responded with his usual toughness: “I’m not dying to be an MP. I will get over it.”

If Bailey was confronted with the choice of being politically successful or losing his integrity, there’s no contest; he both jokes and threatens that he will continue to be “honest to the point of trouble.” However, when he speaks with immense pride of the Hammersmith residents, the politically active, tough-talking citizens with whom he has been involved in various successful campaigns, including banning a strip club from the local area and revoking licensing laws on cheap liquor, he takes on a different tone and admits: “I have to confess I do want to be an MP. I want to have conversations and make a lot of noise.”

Bailey’s version of politics is very much based on the needs of the people he represents and he seems utterly adverse to the dirty politics and the PR machines. He sees himself as answerable and accountable only to his own conscience and when it appears to fail, to his community. And this is the way Bailey wants it: “I have nowhere to hide. I try not to do things unless I’m prepared to answer for them.”

I personally experienced a small fraction of this honesty when I questioned Bailey on why a young, 21-year-old like myself should become politically involved. He incited me to action and informed me that my age was absolutely no excuse: “If you were a councillor today, you would just about be our youngest one. Does it make a difference? Not a shadow of a doubt.” I don’t hear such frankness every day and this is apparently because the best politicians, according to Bailey, are either “elderly or full of integrity.” This is why he so admires Ken Clarke who could retire tomorrow and is subsequently “telling it the way he believes it. That kind of honesty is refreshing.”

Bailey is the latter – full of integrity, the antithesis to the suave, charming and dishonest career politician who is associated with the highest levels of partisan politics. Bailey believes it is these men who are a big part of the wider problem of lack of trust between politicians and the public; they are unconvincing as “they don’t have something in their life that ties them to reality. Tony Blair, for example, is a convincing statesmen but he’s shallow.” According to Bailey, this is because many of these career politicians lose themselves once they gain notoriety and they adopt the obvious line in the hopes that they might swiftly move up the party ladder. On the surface, his straight-talking approach appears at odds with the rest of his party, the Conservative Party, many of whom appear to be the perfect examples of these career politicians, conventionally conceived of as being backwards and out of touch with reality. However, Bailey is eager to dispel this stereotype, which he believes originates from the New Labour propaganda machine. “Most of the progressive policies come from the Conservative Party,” he said, “and half of our councillors are women.”

As an example of a politician who forms his own ideas, Barack Obama is a figure Bailey often praises and he clarifies that Obama should be seen not as a “black politician, but a politician who happens to be black.” However, Obama is just one man – important as he is – and, for Bailey, it is nowhere near enough. He believes that it is necessary for a healthy, ethnically diverse society to see more non-white men and women becoming school teachers, lawyers or doctors who will lead by example, bringing today’s youth out of poverty and dependency. Bailey’s aspirations rest on the next generation. He hopes they will surpass the achievements of his own and, in the future, “it will become the norm for black children to see black people doing well. Eventually, it will be just people doing well, but we’re not there yet.”

As for the question on everyone’s lips, will there be an equivalent to Obama here in the UK? Bailey responded with conviction that the political system in this country was designed to be slow, “a war of attrition”, but he remains hopeful that it will not be too many years before much needed change will occur. “Greater numbers and new types of people will make a change,” he said. “I hope that will be the case at the next election, but the system is bigger than any one man. It will take time.”

When asked to describe his kind of politics in a nutshell, he immediately responded: “I’m straight talking and from the street. If it needs to be said, then I’ll say it.” This is his forte and his legacy; like Barack Obama and other hard-working black men and women achieving their dreams, Bailey hopes his success will send a message both to his community and, eventually, the country as a whole. He said: “I want to go on a bit further and show young white, black and poor people – everybody – that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.”

After watching the brilliant Step Up 2: The Streets we were under the impression that all social problems in 'da ghetto' could be alleviated through the power of dance. Now we think otherwise.

CF

Scouting for Girls on 'Rockstardom'


No longer do Scouting For Girls have to scout for girls. Backstage prior to their gig there are plenty of trendy looking women lounging about on Koko’s Gonzo-style brown sofas. It wasn’t always like this. ‘I used to have a goatee ginger beard,’ confesses bassist, Greg. To make matters worse whilst filming the video for Elvis Ain’t Dead, ‘they ran out of Elvis wigs’ so Greg ‘just had some kind of regular woman’s wig.’

Now that they are real rockstars though Scouting For Girls have contracted a few unhealthy addictions: ‘ Pete, he just…he just couldn’t stop eating,’ Greg looks concerned, ‘you know the big share bags, to him, that was just like a normal personal bag for him. He’s been very good though. For the last three months he’s been totally clean of Doritos.’ Unfortunately, ‘the other day he lapsed and fell off the wagon.’

Speaking of nasty habits, Scouting For Girls happened to meet Pete Doherty when they filmed Transmission in Glasgow. ‘He seemed really lovely. I said ‘hello, he said ‘hello’ back. He was a lot taller than I expected,’ remembers Greg quite excitedly, though of his own admission he is not The Libertines’ biggest fan (that job is reserved for documentary-maker Max Carlish, both in terms of weight and depth of obsession.)

At the moment Greg would much rather listen to The Wombats and The Pigeon Detectives, though singer Roy is allegedly a Take That fanatic. While Roy would probably prefer to duet with Gary Barlow, Greg thinks that if Scouting For Girls did collaborate with someone ‘it would have to be a girl. Probably Kylie Minogue.’ The band has recently covered Kylie’s latest hit 2 hearts.

Sadly Miss. Minogue did not feature on Scouting For Girls’ album, which Greg describes as a ‘coming of age album.’ The culmination of ten years worth of demos, Greg feels that it combines their live energy with the ‘good groove’ of their recorded material.

While to most people Scouting for Girls’ fame has come pretty quickly, Greg explains that him and Roy have actually been playing together since they were thirteen, terming them ‘a ten year overnight success’. At this point, I must admit, I was not entirely sure whether he meant guitar-playing or school-boy playing. Afterall, the band were school mates and fellow boy scouts. ‘Roy and Pete were in the Scouts, I was an air-cadet,’ clarifies Greg.

Though its taken a while to make it to the top ( by ‘top’ I mean Capital’s exclusive ‘must-play-every-fifteen-minutes’ playlist), Scouting For Girls are not bitter about bands competing on shows like Mobile Act Unsigned getting it easy.’ Anything that kind of gets new decent music out there, I think is always going to be a good idea… I think its really nice that people who actually write their own music are getting the same opportunities as people on X Factor.’


Being in a band called Scouting For Girls has always ‘been a double-edged sword. Some people get the name, that it came from scouting for boys, whereas other people think we are just a bunch of perverts.’ Now that more people than ever have heard of Scouting For Girls, Greg decides to settle the situation once and for all: ‘we’re not.’

MK

Monday 27 July 2009

Gigi Gaunt is cooler than peaches. She keeps her pants on.

17 year old Gigi Gaunt began her film and TV career at young age, starring in short film Straight the summer before Secondary School, and later the Harry Potter films as Patsy Parkinson, scoring the role despite not being an “ethnic girl with sticky-out ears” which the part required. However, the part of Trudi in Hippie Hippie Shake (the must see film of 2009) will propel her into the public eye, where she plays a small role, co-starring alongside Cillian Murphy, Sienna Miller and Matthew Beard.
You may also recognize her from the small screen as she has recently starred in the TV shows Heartbeat and Lost in Austen.

While chatting with her over a Gingerbread Latte, I realized pretty quickly that Gigi Gaunt is far from following the path of her London based contemporaries, whose primary ambitions seem to amount to making it into the London Lite’s gossip pages for their Vegas-weddings and nipple-tassel-wearing antics . She is among a new legion of girls including Lily Cole, who believe that education comes first. Gigi recently turned down the part of Susan in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe trilogy as it would have meant 10 months in New Zealand. “I could do a part here and there, but I wouldn’t take that much time out of school.” Currently she’s in her final year studying the IB at a West London girls’ school, and she hopes to study English Literature at University. Her love of reading has helped her choose acting roles, “I played Georgiana Darcy (in Lost in Austen) having read Pride and Prejudice like 400 times.”

In the upcoming Hippie Hippie Shake, she plays a student in the swinging sixties of London where these neo-revolutionists start a wild, semi-pornographic magazine called Oz, “school kids are recruited to the magazine, and I’m one of them.” She also loved worked alongside Sienna Miller and Cillian Murphy as well as fellow school kid Matthew Beard, whom she admires “we’d been in one room together, and to begin with, it was daunting sitting next to them but I watched and learned.” Harry Potter, on the other hand left Gigi with some long-lasting friendships, “there were quite a few kids so we used to hang out a lot.” She describes working in the third Harry Potter film as “a bit like the army, a lot of nothing and then all action, all go.”

With UCL student Freddie Stroma who plays Cormac McLaggen in the Harry Potter films (who Pi recently interviewed) experiencing a barrage of girls setting up facebook groups entitled ‘Freddie Stroma puts me in a coma’, I wondered whether Gigi had begun to experience similar attention. “I got facebook a long time ago and I was introduced through American friends. I wasn’t aware of the dangers. Fans took all my photos and made a website about how they loved Patsy Parkinson, which I find a little crazy but a huge compliment. You expect adoration sites for Daniel Radcliffe, but not for me.”

Gigi is ridiculously multi-talented as well as surprisingly modest, having recently won second prize in the Telegraph’s poetry competition. Thus she is keeping her eye out for any opportunities that come her way, “acting is a fickle business, and you have no idea what’s around the corner.” However, she is also having fun just being seventeen, “I’m just trying to get my license and at the moment I’m just hoping not to drive my examiner into a lake.” With big dreams for the future, she hopes to “be intellectually stimulated, act, write and be happy” and it’ll be surprising not to see more of her in the future. The good news for our male readers is that despite being enviably stunning, she’s also single and keeping her options open. She turns 18 next month but wouldn’t date a guy her own age, “I like older guys, 17 year old boys bore me to pieces. The perfect guy is 20, is fun, charming and has something interesting to say!”

CF

Anthony Painter and why Obama is not 'so last season'!

Politeness and stiff upper lips aside, Brits are far from immune from the wave of ‘Obama-rama’ that has been perpetuated in recent months. With the swearing in of America’s 44th President, here in Britain we breathed a collective sigh of relief with the coming of the man who in Anthony Painter’s words, “made it okay to love America again.” Painter, with his self professed fascination with all things American, is a London based politician/journalist/ex-PR guy who has recently published a book on the man himself. Aptly entitled A Movement for Change, Painter assigns Obama great historical significance, firmly placing him within the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement through his connection to progressive figures such as Martin Luther King, Harold Washington and Lyndon B. Johnson. He is keen to emphasize that “this book is different because it gives people a broader perspective of American history and politics.”

Having been one of the first Britons to publicly root for Obama despite those around him, “calling me naive for supporting Barack over Hillary,” it’s no wonder that Painter was approached to write this story. The experience that first converted Painter was back in February, 2008 when he witnessed one of Obama’s speeches in Virginia: “I was in the press pack having blagged my way in. Obama came in and just sort of said “yo” and I thought if anyone else tried to do that they’d never get away with it.” Despite George W. Bush and Sarah Palin’s references to their identities as “hockey moms” and “ordinary guys”, it was Barack’s easy confidence and charisma epitomized by this casual “yo”, that won him a new legion of voters, who felt that, here was a man they could finally relate to. Painter noticed this early on, “I sat in MacDonalds, watched the TV and I saw these three kids, in Britain we call them ‘hoodies’, they were talking about the primaries, and I could sense their excitement with the race itself. There will be Hollywood movies made about this campaign.”

It didn’t hurt that Obama’s campaign thoroughly utilized new media, displaying its potential at reaching out to previously neglected voting groups. Having footnoted ‘youtube’ in his book, as well being a regular blogger, Painter knows firsthand that “it’s a very powerful tool. Obama couldn’t have built a nationwide movement in a few months, out of nowhere, without it. New media isn’t a political cause in itself, but it helps spread the message that persuades people to vote.” Unlike in Britain, where youth participation is alarmingly low, young Americans of the elusive 18-24 bracket quickly became fascinated with the Presidential race, their new found belief that they could make a difference was evident through the uproarious chanting of the slogan of “yes we can!”

Painter is often asked whether he believes that this kind of social movement could happen in the U.K. “I always argue that absolutely, it could. There have been times in our history where popular movements have encouraged major change with the Labour movement, or the Suffragettes for example. However, you need the right figure.” Thus, Painter was horrified with Trevor Phillips’ misguided statement that Britain would never elect a black Prime Minister, “Yes Obama is the first African American to be President but he’s also Barack Obama. Do we have someone with that charisma, that ability to communicate, and that self confidence?” When asked whether he believed that this young enigma could take the form of David Cameron, Painter was thoroughly sceptical, “I’m being Partisan here, but David Cameron is no Barack. He doesn’t have that authenticity. Obama has had to come to terms with his own self identity, through working in those poor local communities in Chicago, and he has internalized those conflicts.” In his book, Painter has written extensively on these districts, most notably Altgeld Gardens where he spent some time: “Obama had some formative experiences there, especially through the influence of the first black mayor, Harold Washington. That’s an element of the story that hasn’t been told. I’ve met the people who worked for both men, and what they did for Harold, was what they did for Barack at the Iowa Caucus and ever since then.”

The overly high expectations surrounding Barack Obama’s presidency are a cause for concern for Painter, and he has some staunch words of warning. Like Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), who he describes as a “tragic figure” for his permanent ties to the controversy of the Vietnam War despite his important role in the passing of the Civil Rights Act, there are fears that Barack will not deliver, “Barack Obama is a politician who will have to make choices. In Chicago they all said that all he needs to do is govern wisely, and they are being pragmatic. People have to be patient and give him a chance.”

Ultimately Painter’s message is a highly optimistic one, and he believes that Obama will undoubtedly do a better job than his predecessor: “With George W. Bush, you have to be extremely critical. With every conceivable area including the environment and world affairs, what exactly is better now?” However, with the advent of this new President, he hopes that future generations will enjoy a society where ethnicity “will no longer mean a difference in life opportunities.” History is being made, and this sense of pride was purveyed on the 20th January when millions saw themselves as being part of a movement that Obama himself so identified with, “there is this historical journey that we’ve undertaken towards greater social equality. Obama is connected to that journey, and is moving it forward.”

CF

Miss Jerramy Fine: a society queen and 'almost princess'


At the age of six, Miss Jerramy Fine of Colorado USA, determined that it was her destiny to meet and marry Peter Phillips, the dashing grandson of the Queen of England. The only catch was that her parents were hippies, or ‘naturists’, as they referred to themselves, who adamantly refused to let her escape from rural isolation to attend a proper boarding school in England.

It would only take two decades, two plane tickets to London and a mountain of debt before Jerramy, now an elegant blonde with Jackie O style, would catch the attention of the man of her childhood dreams across a crowded press reception. To her utter delight, they talked easily for over an hour, photos were snapped and cards exchanged. He never called.

Ever the modern heroine, Jerramy knew she had a story to tell, pouring her energies into writing her memoir, Some Day My Prince Will Come: Adventures of a Wannabe Princess, a hilarious tale of one woman’s unstoppable mission to move to England and fall in love. We met to discuss her royal ambitions over a cappuccino in her favourite local spot in Hammersmith, the Plum Cafe. She describes her first book as a contemporary version of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist with its ‘against all odds’ message of hope, “people had always told me it was impossible and that I was crazy. I wanted to show that nothing was impossible if you believe.”

After meeting Phillips in the flesh, in a very ‘Carrie Bradshaw’ moment of clarity, Jerramy traded in the fantasy of the perfect man, “for me to think any one man is more magical than any other is silly”, for independence in her beloved city: “London nurtured me and I knew instantly that I was meant to be here.”

No doubt, Jerramy’s first years in London were a true test of faith, with a disastrous cycle of events leaving her constantly on the verge of being homeless, or worse, deported. She escaped her university residence, a glorified “bomb shelter”, moved in with a female stalker and then became the token American flatmate to two crazy male models with a penchant for drugs and strippers, but “who could have resisted an Adonis greeting me at the door in a towel?”

Unsurprisingly, for a princess-in-training, it was sitting in the shadows of Buckingham Palace at the base of the statue of Queen Victoria, which always provided Jerramy with renewed sense of purpose during these troubled times. A spiritual consultation in East London enlightened the author to the best explanation for her lifelong obsession…her former life as a love-struck English noblewoman, “I’m sure many people would like to believe that they’ve lived a past life in the Tudor Court, but I really have!”

If there is a sudden influx of young, impressionable American girls on Prince Harry’s doorstep, he’ll know exactly who to blame. Some Day My Prince Will Come is a ‘can’t-put-it-down’ gem of a first book, which has already attracted a major following of young ladies professing to nurse similar infatuations with the current lot of handsome princes.

Ever vigilant to her fans, Jerramy’s next book will be full of useful tips on mixing with the upper echelons, including buying the perfect hat for Henley and her musings on signet rings. Not bad for a girl whose father expressed delight that this first book might be good publicity for his new cannabis ministry.

CF

Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong on NOT being indie


“If I thought that I was in an indie band,” declares Joe Lean while smoking out of the window in Brixton Academy dressing room, “I’d probably kill myself.” Looking down, Vicarious begins to regret agreeing to conduct the interview on a third-floor window-ledge. “We regard ourselves as a pop band,” clarifies the ringleader of the Jing Jang Jong, who have been ‘rather preposterously nominated’ for NME’s Best New Band Award. “Labels in themselves are kind of detrimental anyway; they’re just for the CD shop. The only label that sits alright with me is pop-band. It’s got the kind of ethos that it’s constantly changing, progressing. It fearless, it’s not confined by anything. It’s the idea of creating something so bombastically.”

So upon signing the band, the head of their label flew Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong to Stockholm, to “hang out, buy jeans, drink drinks” and err…create, bombastically. This was not Joe Lean’s first visit to the land of Ikea and Ulrika Jonsson. “The band I used to be in, The Pipettes” he explains, “were really popular in Sweden.” There, in a forty-five year-old EMI studio, Joe Lean and his posse aimed to capture the sound of “more primitive recording, say from late 50s early 60s.” “We love that old sound,” says Joe Lean, glowing, “the recording of the sound was so much simpler so when someone opened the song with a chord, you could really feel it there, all the frequency there, and nowadays guitars are compressed and thinner-sounding.”

While Joe Lean may not be ‘thinner-sounding,’ he certainly is ‘thinner-looking,’ dressed in pencil jeans and a top and necklace that will probably only find its way into Topman in two seasons time. Nevertheless, Joe Lean maintains that they’ve all “been wearing the same clothes for about three years, the EXACT same clothes.” “Having released so few tunes, quite a lot of people have tended to talk about our clothes. People in the media feel that they need to write something about us despite knowing so little about us at the moment” he comments, softly-spoken as ever.

However, whatever the verdict of the press or the public, Joe Lean and The Jing Jang Jong are keen to stress that they make music for themselves. “So often since we’ve started a band we’ve had to justify what we’re doing. Why should I? I’m trying to do something that I’ve never done before and we’re writing songs that people have never heard before and we’re just doing it to satisfy us really.”

Indeed, despite having toured as a drummer for The Pipettes before, this is all new to Joe Lean. “My ex-girlfriend was in the Pipettes and it’s just a different existence. Also they are less busy.” “Everything that’s happened with this band has been so romantic, electric,” Joe Lean relates in an airy voice, “and we formed this band as an excuse for us to hang out and now we’ve had to opportunity to make a record.”

In fact, Joe Lean formed it without having heard the other members play a note. “I almost kind of formed a band out of embarrassment. I kind of created this idea of a band in my head about a year before I started it and my oldest friend turned round to me and said, ‘You are going to actually do this band aren’t you? Because everyone thinks you’re doing it’ and I was like ‘yeeeah….’” Joe Lean grins uncertainly. “I just feel so grateful to be here,” he gushes ‘I-want-to-thank-my-mum, -my-dad-and-God’ style. “It matters to us, we’re doing everything for the first time so everything matters so much.”

While many things are a novelty to Jing Jang Jong front man, Joe Lean, (he’s never been to Japan, for instance, where the band are heading next), performing is something he’s been doing all his life. “I acted professionally for a few years…I like acting but I don’t like camera acting because its really boring. It’s so stilted. I’ve been in some really cool shows- Peep Show, Nathan Barley, made a film with John Malkovich. But I’m really thoroughly concentrating on this now.”

Nowadays, Joe Lean dances to his own tune. For him there is “no dichotomy between us performing it to people and us performing to ourselves… we behave the same on stage as we do in the studio. It’s just how it comes out. There’s a spontaneity because were still a bit ramshackled and we’ll always be that way because were messheads.”

‘Messheads’ they may be but they don’t go as far as the singer from Oxbow, one of Joe Lean’s favourite performers. “He’s really intense. I saw them at SXSW last year. Really monstrous- he takes his clothes off and has these kinds of sexual instances.” Joe Lean won’t be doing any of that tonight- for a start his trousers are too tight to pull off in any situation, let alone in front of an audience. “Incredible. He performs really well its just like much more interesting than having someone go ‘love love me, love love me.’"Like stripping off is really going to solve the problem with Mika….

He sips his beer nervously, anticipating tonight’s performance before scuttling off to get ready. Later that night he swaggers confidently on to the stage and shimmies around energetically to the band’s single ‘Lonely Buoy’ like a pre-wrinkled Mick Jagger. One thing is for sure, Joe Lean won’t ‘Relax’ and ‘ Take it E-e-easy.’ It’s just like Joe Lean says, “if you’re a front man, you can’t just stand there: you’ve got to perform.”

MK

The Thirst Interview


Forget East London and its Hoxton attention whores; time to move south, Brixton-wards, where The Thirst originally formed. So what does it take to create the best band to come out of Brixton since The Clash? A thirteenth birthday present, a spare bedroom, a Cash Converters-cheap drum kit and five GCSEs, not to mention mum and dad’s CDs. Yes, you heard right folks, not that this means you should go pulling out mum’s Best of Cliff Richard collection any time soon. Vocalist Mensah and bassist Kwame were lucky enough to have parents who listened to The Who, Jimmy Hendrix and of course Bob Marley, their father having been a member of reggae band Out of Darkness.

Yet despite the heavy reggae influence brothers Mensah and Kwame chose not to follow in dad’s footsteps. Instead that night at Koko The Thirst play an energetic set of fast, electric “indie, rock, punk, soul, everything, man” tunes, first written and practiced in Mensah and Kwame’s dad’s spare room using a guitar given to Mensah for his birthday (when he actually wanted some trainers) and a drum kit Marcus purchased from a shop down the road. Well, after all the brothers are not straying too far from the influence of their father, explains Mensah “the first record my dad ever bought was The Rolling Stones.”

Little did he know back then that the band his sons were to form would be personally chosen by Ronnie Wood and offered a deal by Wooden Records. Being signed “felt like what we’ve been doing all this time had not gone unnoticed,” says drummer Marcus. “We’d been going about two and a half years, just, like, gigging gigging gigging non-stop. Brixton, Camden, anywhere” adds Mensah. So much gigging in fact, that it was probably due to tonight’s scheduled gig that The Thirst were missing Ronnie Wood’s 60th birthday party.

However, constant live shows and time in recording studios have not come at great social cost to the assured and unruffled members of The Thirst. The band, first brought together at school, from which they emerged with only five GCSEs but a whole load of friends, vouch that their garage-listening posse have all been very supportive “once they’d come down to a show and seen what we’re actually about, that there’s a heavy drum’n’bass influence in there, garage and all that” despite the fact that originally “a lot of them were like ‘you lot are nuts, man’” laughs Mensah. For now the band are happy to go with the flow “keep[ing] out of every box” and exploring different genres.

Though their friends might not be so keen on indie, the band maintain that there’s a lot of good to be gained from the bands they’ve recorded alongside of at Olympic Studios: “The Natives-a good band. Libertines, obviously. Heavily influenced by the whole Libertines movement and, like, so yeah man, its just an honour. Pete Doherty- good songwriter, Carl Barat-good song-writer.” Coincidentally, later that evening, a bare-chested Marcus shows he has every bit the rhythm and style of Libertines drummer Gary Powell.

So apart from fellow musicians like The Libertines or Talk Taxis, friends of The Thirst, what else inspires a great Brixton band like The Thirst? “ Tell Lie Vision on the EP,” answers Mensah “is just inspired by where we’re from, what goes on…we just sing about everything we see, going out raving, going down the pub, having a drink with friends. Sing about stuff we see- we don’t sing about the clouds!”

Having already toured with the Rolling Stones and with a single (‘Ready to Move’) out on 29th October, no doubt that in the days to come The Thirst will be seeing a lot more of the world. “It’s gonna be amazing” says Mensah, smiling a little, eyes twinkling, guitarist Mark nodding: “ Its good to see other countries.” “Its all good man,” concludes Mensah, “We enjoy it. We enjoy it all man. Just like, man we’re happy. Happy to be with people, going to different cities.”

And despite the lyrics of ‘All These Places’ ( all these places look the same to me/but I’ve changed), the band say they’ll never change. Later that night, the band has to stop briefly and Mensah cheekily informs the audience that Marcus is fixing his drums…you’d think they’d at least have changed the Cash Converters kit by now.

MK

Going wild with the Medicine Men


Dr. Chris van Tulleken is no ordinary doctor. He has taken part in a televised race to the magnetic North Pole, led expeditions to the Himalayas and most recently, stuck an 8 inch needle through both his cheeks in an experiment with his twin brother for their Channel 4 master-piece ‘Medicine Men Go Wild’. Vicarious speaks to him about how life in London compares to life amongst indigenous healers, tribal people and alcoholic wife beaters.

Chris and his twin brother, Xand, set off on a journey to the most challenging environments on the planet to investigate how people survive without modern medicine, ready and unafraid to try out local remedies for disease in the name of good television. In the process of making ‘Medicine Men’ Chris van Tulleken has tried the Congo brand of Viagra provided by the Bayaka pygmies, experimented with halluconigenics with the Shamen, used the power of his mind to conquer pain with religious men in Kuala Lumpur and eaten walrus in Chukotka. As difficult as these experiences were, Chris was determined to embrace every minute of it: “I remember my first few trips into the wilderness into northern Canada or in northern Vietnam with indigenous people and having a very very bad time indeed and being very unhappy about a lot of it and being extremely cold and tired and wet and hungry and desperately wanting to get back. However, I also remember the sense of getting back and immediately wanting to leave again and I promised myself after those first trips that I would make a very conscious effort to enjoy even the worst times of being away.” Chris’ piece of advice to travellers is to embrace and “enjoy it even when you are having endless bouts of diarrhea and vomiting.”

Yet while Chris embraced his time living in the remotest corners of the earth, he is keen to stress that life away from the hub of the city is not as romantic as it sounds: “you will notice I’ve come back to live in a two bed flat in London- I haven’t got eating to nuts and grubs and berries and nor would I need to.” Indeed, apart from the physical discomforts like “sleeping on the floor and being eaten by ants,” there are more serious negatives to tribal life in remote, often endangered places. “What I really hate,” Chris complains, “is that sometimes I sound rather glib and simple and rather saccharin about tribal people and the romance of tribal people. A lot of what being a modern indigenous hunter-gatherer is all about being displaced, depressed, repressed, oppressed, raped, killed, having your land taken away and being the most marginalised people on earth.”

“You appreciate London an awful lot more when you go and live in a slightly challenging environment for a time,” says Chris is in his polite English manner (though he is half-Canadian). “By any unit of measure people in London are the healthiest people in the world. By the things that are easy to measure, we live longer, we live better, we have a high quality of life. We are not as unhappy as everyone says we are.” Despite the fact that the people of Chukotka, who featured on ‘Medicine Men’ had healthier hearts than Londoners, Chris reveals that on the television programme he was unable to convey just how unhealthy the rest of the population of Chukotka were: “We couldn’t say that there were high levels of alcoholism and that domestic violence levels were appallingly high, that quite a lot of the village didn’t eat whale (a diet known to maintain a healthy heart) and just ate processed food… in television you are forced to tell limited truths, which is that those of them that eat whales have very healthy hearts. We don’t say that the rest of them might be alcoholic wife beaters!”

Regardless of the relative merits of big city life, Chris concludes that his experiences have shown him “what people have known for a very long time that very complicated, sophisticated Western life is unhealthy in a lot of ways that may be psychologically or physically.” Indeed, when Vicarious mentions that student halls in London are some of the most uninhabitable places on earth and that students get ill very often, Chris responds that “in a way you are going through your own sort of Middle Ages there, with over-crowding, poor diet, poor hygiene and a lot of drinking. But then you come out the other end get a job and buy a flat and get married and have some kids and life evens out when you stop swapping saliva with 5 people per week you become healthier.”

In short, “ours isn’t the only way of doing things.” In fact, Chris has a lot of respect for indigenous healers. “With all this indigenous healing,” he says, “when it gets exported to the west via anthropologists and hippies and travellers, a lot of pseudo-spirituality is added that simply isn’t, in my experience, present when you are in a rainforest with a sick child who needs treating. The Shamans in Peru or the Ngaga healers in the Congo were very practical, pragmatic and sensible people. They were happy to use any medicine we had that might work in the same way we were happy to use any they had that might work.” Being away from western medicine and its hospitals, “you realise there are more subtleties to being a doctor than just turning up with a bag full of drugs.”

MK