My fiance and I have been together for a year, and we've always been clear about boundaries. And one of them is that flirty texts, emails and facebooking with others is a no. He has a female best friend, and I'm totally fine with that; I have a male best friend, granted he doesn't play for that team.Delicately cooked salmon in ginger with spring greens - a flavoursome Asian dish that only takes 15 minutes to make
I am fortunate enough to live in an area of London that has great Asian food. Viet Grill and Cay Tre, in the east of the city, are two of my favourite restaurants. Mark Hix introduced me to them and I have been a convert ever since. The meals are always so full of flavour. I would not be foolish enough to say that this dish is as good as any of theirs, but it's a start.
One of the pleasures of this particular dish is its adaptability. You can make it more spicy by adding chilli, replace the noodles with additional vegetables or meat, or substitute the salmon for tofu.
You don't need to live in London to source ingredients for Asian recipes easily. Most are now readily available in all large supermarkets.
Spring greens are in season and readily available, but you can use pak choi or spinach if you prefer. If you do opt for spinach, make sure you add it right at the end as it wilts within seconds.
The key is not to overcook this. A little bit of chopping, a quick bit of frying ? it should be ready within 15 minutes.
Ingredients
(Serves 4)
2 tbsp of sesame oil
1 tsp of garlic, chopped
2 tsp ginger, chopped
2 red onions, chopped
2 lemongrass stalks, cut in half and crushed with the back of a knife
500ml cold water
A shake of Tabasco sauce
2 tsp of soy sauce
5 tsp fish sauce
4 x 100g salmon fillets (skin removed)
2 spring onions, chopped
1 large handful of spring greens
4 chestnut mushrooms, sliced
1 nest of dried noodles
Juice of 1 lime and rind of �
1 tbsp of chopped coriander
Method Lightly heat the sesame oil in a large pan. Add the garlic, ginger, onions and lemongrass (to crush the lemongrass, use the back of a knife and bash the stalk so it splits). Saute for two minutes without browning. Add 500ml of cold water and bring to the boil. Then add the Tabasco, soy sauce and fish sauce. Gently lower the salmon fillets into the broth and turn down the heat. Simmer for four minutes until the salmon is cooked.
Remove the salmon and leave to one side. Add the vegetables and the noodles, and bring the broth back to the boil. Simmer until the noodles are cooked as per the packet instructions (normally about four minutes).
Finally, add the lime juice and the grated rind. Place the salmon in bowls and pour the broth and noodles over each dish. Finish with freshly chopped coriander.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/31/salmon-ginger-lemongrass-broth-recipe
This week newly single star Ren�e Zellweger revealed she planned to study up on relationships whenSource: http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/sex/a-tried-and-tested-postbreakup-reading-list-2469644/
Cameron Diaz Cameron Richardson Camilla Belle Carla Campbell
By Sarah Klein Getting that tattoo seemed like a good idea at the time. But now that blast from the past on your back or tribal band around your arm may seem like a bit of body?Source: http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/health/how-to-safely-get-a-tattoo-removed-2469905/
Charli Baltimore Charlies Angels Charlize Theron Chelsea Handler
Source: http://www.firstshowing.net/2011/teresa-palmer-will-partake-in-some-zombie-love-for-warm-bodies/
Are we all eating irradiated food? What went on underneath the arches? What's the population of heaven?
What happened to irradiated food? Are we all eating it without knowing?
A nuclear reactor blows up and everybody panics. The answer to this is almost certainly yes. But irradiating food does not make it radioactive. For this it must contain radioactive elements; the danger is far greater from eating food contaminated with such elements. Radioactive caesium 137, for instance, mimics potassium and thus can be taken up in plants that are later eaten and the radioactivity concentrated by grazing animals.
There has always been a natural level of radioactivity in certain soils ? those on a granite substrate for instance ? but the caesium 137 fallout from Chernobyl is still relatively high in some areas. Just as dangerous, and thought to be the cause of 21,000 lung cancer deaths annually in the US, is the radon gas that accumulates in confined spaces in houses. Tents, anyone?
Terence Hollingworth, Blagnac, France
Here in Germany, I remember reading about a full trainload of radioactive Turkish hazelnuts, found several years after Chernobyl on some far track of a Bundeswehr depot.
More seriously, I guess most low-contaminated food has been mixed up and processed in large-scale industrial food plants in order to keep below (rather high) tolerance levels. And don't forget the nuclear particles in the soil ? they simply follow the natural decay cycle of radioactive material. So, every now and then, you can find warnings about mushrooms collected in the local forests, or about game shot there. So the answer to the question is yes.
Roland Wittig, Freiberg, Germany
What was in the arches of inner-city railway bridges before they filled up with lock-up garages, bars and restaurants?
When London's first railway, the London and Greenwich was planned, the promoters envisaged using most of the 878 arches for dwellings and show houses were constructed at Deptford. Doubtless estate agents, or their equivalents of the time, tried their best to sell with euphemisms such as "handy for trains".
However, the public showed little enthusiasm and after the opening in 1836 most arches were let to commercial undertakings. As a forerunner of today's wine bars there was a public house reached from Rotherhithe New Road called the Halfway House. I don't know if it remains, but as the viaduct was successively widened, railway historian Edwin Course surmised it must be one of the longest pubs in England.
There was also a chapel in one arch, but unused arches created problems ? they were used for refuges and purposes described in contemporary accounts as "immoral", and provided convenient places to conceal bodies of newborn babies. The railway company then sealed off the arches in heavily populated districts.
In the 1970s and 80s, arches under the London Tilbury and Southend, and the Great Eastern, lines in Tower Hamlets were used for small engineering firms and car repairs, among other uses. Many arches were used for taxi maintenance.
When the London to Greenwich 150th anniversary was celebrated in 1986, the former British Rail Property Board promoted the use of arches for start-up businesses. I assume they were successful. As an example of linear commercial development railway arches have proved highly successful, and spared railway operators from the problems of endless level crossings.
Roger Backhouse, Ilford
What is the population of heaven?
Deluded?
David Stokes, Munich, Germany
Nobody is quite sure. But the census forms are even now winging their way back.
David Christmas, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwicks
I received an email last week saying that my message was undeliverable ? but I had sent the email in April 2006! Where has it been for the past five years? How many miles has it covered in cyberspace?
Since cyberspace works in light speed, your mail must have travelled about five light years, and this would have been enough to reach our closest neighbour-stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, if it wasn't trapped in our terrestrial internet-wires.
Li Post, Germany
How come there are no sea frogs or evolutionary equivalent?
Andrew Cooke, Marton, Warks
How can I allay my fear of death?
Steven Jones, Birmingham
A car burns fuel slower at 30mph than at 60mph, but on a given journey the engine is running for twice as long. So which is cheaper?
Scott FitzGerald, London SE18
Send questions and answers to nq@guardian.co.uk. Please include name, address and phone number.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/mar/30/notes-and-queries-irradiated-food
Chandra West Charisma Carpenter Charli Baltimore Charlies Angels
The aesthetic movement was more than William Morris wallpaper ? it turned Victorian values upside down. Jonathan Jones goes to Paris to seek out its dark side
In spring sunlight, art students rush through the grand courtyard of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Artists such as Matisse studied here. But I am looking for a British and Irish cultural hero. On the Rue des Beaux Arts, a narrow Left Bank street next to the famous art academy, an expensive hotel (simply called L'H�tel) is getting ready for the lunch hour. Only if you know this was once the run-down Hotel d'Alsace where Oscar Wilde died in 1900, disgraced, despised, penniless, his health broken by Reading jail, will you stop and notice the plaque that commemorates him.
My trip is a pilgrimage inspired by the new V&A exhibition The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900. Remembered today as a dramatist and wit, in his lifetime Wilde was notorious as the spokesman of this daring art movement and its bold declaration that art exists solely to create beauty with no moral purpose whatsoever. To follow this idea to the hotel where its persecuted hero died is to discover that the V&A's spring blockbuster is not just a delve into the drawing rooms of Victorian England, but a portal to the very origins of modern attitudes to art, sex and death.
In 1873, the students of Oxford were shaken by a very strange book. The Renaissance, by Walter Pater of Brasenose College, is a vision of life as pure sensual experience and a manifesto for hedonism. Writing in Victorian England, in that age of stern hypocrisy and repression, Pater gleefully expounds on the sexual adventures of the great Renaissance artists, openly praising gay desire. His febrile vision of art culminates in a bizarre description of the Mona Lisa: "Like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave."
Pater concludes that the purpose of life is to pursue sensual beauty and live in the moment. "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life," he declares. His students were enthralled ? one of them was expelled because of love letters Pater sent him. Another, Oscar Wilde, was inspired to become the high priest of the movement Pater launched and to defy the age until finally it destroyed him, convicting him for homosexual "crimes", imprisoning him, then leaving him to eke away his final years abroad.
Not far from L'H�tel is the Mus�e d'Orsay, where a painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrays Wilde at the moment of his fall (they had met in London when Wilde was awaiting trial). Toulouse-Lautrec pictures him in Paris, watching the wild dance of the Moulin Rouge star La Goulue. As she kicks and leaps, Wilde stands massive and melancholy, with an unhealthily red face and dry yellow-grey hair. He looks like a ruined man.
Wilde's portrait underlines that the aesthetic movement was not merely a Victorian taste for William Morris wallpapers and peacock-tail Liberty prints ? though it abounded in such beautiful creations. It was dangerous. This was the age of Gladstone, the British Empire, the pious bourgeoisie. The idea of "art for art's sake" turned Victorian values upside down. The aesthetic movement inspired an astonishing range of innovations in art and design that the V&A exhibition brings together, from Edward Burne-Jones's spectral, waxy paintings to "aesthetic" clothes for men and women. Wilde took the lead in dressing in knee-length velvet, while women wore simple dresses in blue or white, a reaction against the stuffy frocks of their forebears. In the best aesthetic movement designs, you see a simplicity that is beguilingly modern. As a young man, Morris was disgusted by the ugly exhibits piled up in the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition: he set out to reform taste and society. If Pater and Wilde advocated a liberation of the senses, Morris was a Marxist who believed the triumph of beauty would destroy capitalism. The repeated, interlocking patterns of his wallpapers and fabrics are not just lovely ? they are abstract art.
For all its rich creations, the real point of the aesthetic movement was rebellion. In France, modern art was already born ? aestheticism is contemporary with Manet, Monet and Renoir. While Britain was buttoned up, the French capital was hedonistic. The aesthetes set out to live as if they were in France, and it was in Paris that the most beautiful art of the movement was born. James Abbott McNeill Whistler was by far the greatest painter linked with the aesthetic movement. As a cosmopolitan art star, famous on both sides of the channel and across the Atlantic, he blended heady ideas from London with new techniques from Paris. While most aesthetic painters ? even Burne-Jones ? are hampered by their acceptance of very traditional ideas of the well-crafted depiction, Whistler's paintings fizz with impressionist suggestion. This makes their declaration of the supremacy of beauty all the more striking. If Pater's book The Renaissance is the literary manifesto of the aesthetic movement, its visual masterpiece is Whistler's 1871 painting Arrangement in Grey and Black, No 1 ? otherwise known as Whistler's Mother. She sits today in the Mus�e d'Orsay among the masterpieces of impressionism. But where Monet enjoys, Whistler argues. Greys and silvers, whites and blacks shimmer across the canvas with the restrained beauty of a Japanese screen. The message is provocative: Whistler pours scorn on the sentimentality and piety of his age. Whatever he felt for his mother, her portrait does not show it. In Whistler's eyes, art has no moral duty to convey any feeling except the sheer bliss of visual stimulation. His painting, its title and its formal purity, make that message explicit.
The aesthetic movement soon revealed its dark side. The hero of Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray destroys lives in his pursuit of beauty without limits. When Pater compared the Mona Lisa with a "vampire", he linked the cult of beauty with depravity and death. There is a close parallel between the heady prose of Pater and the art of his French contemporary Gustave Moreau, whose paintings reimagined Renaissance art as a decadent ecstasy of the senses. Moreau's beautifully preserved home in Paris is near the Moulin Rouge and the sleaze of Pigalle. Its walls are lined with his paintings of orgies, beheadings and cruel goddesses, but the bed he slept in is a single bed, austere and lonely. An eerily similar single bed can be seen in Leighton House in London, where the rich aesthetic painter Frederic Leighton created a fantastic realm of Arabic tiles, a delicate fountain, bronzes, flowers. Like Moreau, Leighton painted beauties, but seemingly slept alone. It was easier to dream than to act.
Today we visit Leighton House to glimpse the world of these sensuous dreamers, but an ideal aesthetic movement tour would include the long-vanished opium dens of London's docklands, where Dorian Gray attempts to fulfil the aesthetic ideal. Nothing modern was lost on these pioneers. But the supreme expression of the darkening mood of aestheticism in British art ? and in the V&A show ? is in the gorgeous macabre drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, ornate fantasmagoria of sin.
In the end, these adventurers were Victorians, and pure hedonism was never going to be simple for them. Thus, the culmination of the aesthetic movement in Britain was to be a golden age of horror fiction that began with Gray's portrait. The most famous Victorian aesthete, immortalised in a thousand screen bites of sex and death, may be Count Dracula, the connoisseur of young beauty in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel that popularised aesthetic decadence. The lingering morality of the Victorian age pushed imaginations inward ? in those single beds of the aesthetes ? to feast on macabre visions of sin.
It is the intensity of the aesthetic movement, dreaming of a hedonism just out of reach, that made it influential. Across Europe its passion for flowers and vampires, decor and desire can be glimpsed in Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Munch's macabre women, Klimt's Kiss. Its legacy weaves through modern times in the defiance of dandies from Salvador Dal� to David Bowie. In art, it is still provocative because champions of culture (and arts funding) still feel obliged to claim that art has a moral value, a political value. Today as the arts face cuts, such proclamations of usefulness seem all the more necessary. So it is salutary for us to read the aesthetic philosophy expressed in the preface to The Portrait of Dorian Gray. We can still be provoked by its Victorian modernist hauteur: "All art is quite useless."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/28/aesthetic-movement-v-and-a-museum
Two former lovers explain what went wrong
HER STORY Sophie Gate is 21, studying graphic design at Central Saint Martins. She is single at the moment.
Sion had massive hair, weird clothes and was really Welsh. I fancied him straightaway.
We tried to be all hippy and free love at the start, but it tainted the relationship. He thought I was a bit of a player, which I probably was at the time. We realised we really liked each other and stopped seeing other people. Sion wouldn't admit we were together for ages though.
I liked how he gave me the space to do whatever I wanted. I found it hard to do that for him. We never did anything just the two of us and I think he felt guilty about that. He said I deserved somebody better. Which is what they all say. But I think it's probably true.
The main reason we split up was because we moved in with our friends and started arguing about tiny things. We were on and off for a while. I started getting with other people first. The end was confirmed when Sion got with another girl. We were in a club and I'd never seen him kiss anyone. It was horrible.
It's really good now. He's my best friend, probably. We still fight, but it's about work. We're both excited about the design company we've set up. I'm not hoping for anything romantic. We need a decent break and to be with other people and then maybe, but I don't really see it working.
HIS STORY Sion Fletcher is also 21 and a graphic design student at Central Saint Martins. He, too, is single.
We met on the first day of college. I was wearing a waistcoat from Zimbabwe. I wanted to look like I'd travelled ? I hadn't. She invited me to a party.
Every Monday we used to all meet at this pub. One day it was only the two of us. I caught her eye and knew something was going to happen. We went to a dubstep night. There was a huge dance floor and no one dancing. We went to either side of the room and strutted up to each other. We had our first kiss that night.
We spent a whole month on a project together and by the end I was living in Sophie's bed. I was reluctant to say we were going out. I thought I should be seeing lots of people at uni and having this wild time. That was na�ve really, because what we had was really good. I blamed spending time with her when my work wasn't going well. It all came out in Nando's one evening. She said, "We never fucking do anything together." I'm not a very good boyfriend in terms of those typical things.
We still live in a shared house, are in the same class and have started a design company. It's even called Ex Lovers. I'm quite dependent on Soph. It's a bit weary right now ? we're still breaking up and don't know how distant we're going to get.
I would marry someone like her, but I don't think we're ready to settle down ? we'd both be thinking, "What else is there?"
Sion and Sophie's company is weareexlovers.com
If you'd like to appear in this column, email exfiles@observer.co.uk
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/20/ex-files-sophie-gate-sion-fletcher
The animated pig's new theme park has plenty to delight kids ? but don't forget to bring a towel
She's bright pink, bossy and her TV show is watched in more than 180 countries. Before you make any unflattering guesses, we're talking about Peppa Pig, whose animated adventures ? usually involving muddy puddles ? have splashed across our screens since 2004. The character is such a phenomenon among the under-fives that she's appeared in videogames and a live stage show. Now comes the ultimate accolade: Peppa Pig World, a �5m three-acre area of Paultons Family Theme Park in Hampshire.
We took our sons, aged three and five, along for a preview, expecting them to become restless within a couple of hours. But like the series itself, it's a charming and unworldly little place. There are huge plastic models of the cartoon's animal cast everywhere, and its simple catchy tunes play from speakers hidden in every flowerbed. Imagine the unsettlingly quaint Village from The Prisoner, but filled with children and giant dogs, rabbits and zebras, and you're on the right track.
The clear favourite among the seven rides was George's Dinosaur Adventure, inspired by Peppa's younger brother. There are lots of nice touches: when the dinosaur on which you're riding passes Grandpa Pig's beehives, you can hear a busy buzzing sound. However, my sons preferred the play areas, including a Muddy Puddles mini-water park complete with fountains to splash about in (bring a towel. Bring lots of towels).
I suspect there will be mammoth queues for the more popular rides in summer, which will be tough on younger kids. But my boys left tired and happy. The next day, my three-year-old told me he'd dreamed about Peppa Pig World; the sort of ringing endorsement that Paulton Park is no doubt hoping for.
? Peppa Pig World opens to the public on 9 April
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/28/peppa-pig-world-children-park
Giuliana DePandi Giulianna Ramirez Grace Park Gretha Cavazzoni
Being in a band is expensive, time-consuming and incompatible with marriage. God, I love it?
There are many small irritations inherent in being in a middle-aged man band. One is how little regard the contemporary live music scene has for sensible bedtimes. Another is chronic object attrition: in the rush to get out of a venue before midnight on a Sunday, possessions are inevitably mislaid or left behind. In the past month alone I've lost two coats, a harmonica (key of E), a quantity of cable and a pair of needle-nose pliers.
The band is off to Oxford for an engagement that has already given us several causes for concern: we've had to hire a lot of sound equipment one might normally expect a venue to supply; we're being made to play two 45-minute sets, even though experience shows that a longer single set is preferable; and, despite the distance, my wife is threatening to come.
As an audience member, my wife has a patchy history of support. At one gig she heckled so mercilessly that I threatened to ban her. At another she was seen chatting to a woman who subsequently tried to storm the stage with a broken bottle. "It was nothing to do with me," she said later. "She was just at my table. I was the one who stopped her!"
On arrival in Oxford, we are presented with a three-page contract, largely listing the conditions under which we might forfeit our fee: failure to start on time; failure to finish on time; failure to play two 45-minute sets; making too much noise. Clause 6 defines too much noise as a sound of such volume "that a solitary blackbird cannot be heard trilling outside the venue". We hand the contract to the fiddle player, because he has an understanding of such things ? he is a barrister.
My wife turns up at about 9pm. I greet her amiably but briefly. I don't want her to get the impression I regard her presence as a bad omen, like some lonely blackbird trilling by the bins out back, but I also see no reason to tempt fate.
"Good luck," she says.
"Yes," I say. "Thank you."
After the gig, several strangers congratulate me and ask when we are playing next. They all seem genuinely enthusiastic. I try to pause and enjoy the moment before I start thinking about packing up. My wife approaches, glass in hand.
"The sound was terrible," she says, smiling broadly.
"Really?" I say. "Because other people have come up and..."
"I'm not saying you were terrible. The sound was terrible."
"It's a challenging space," I say.
"Just awful," she says. "And playing two sets is a mistake."
"Well, we had a contractual obligation," I say. "Otherwise..."
"Lots of people left in between."
"Did they? It's funny, the feedback I'm getting is largely..."
"When are we leaving, by the way?"
In the car, my wife and the drummer get into a heated debate. It is the drummer's contention that human civilisation could not have evolved as quickly as it did without intervention from alien life forms.
"Bollocks," she says. She turns to me. "The sound was terrible tonight."
"You said," I say.
We get home after 1am. I go to bed but cannot sleep. I lie awake thinking about how thankless it is being in a band, and how expensive, and time-consuming, and incompatible with marriage. Then I think about how crushed I'd be if it all had to stop tomorrow. It is, I realise, secretly the most important thing in my life.
Next morning I go down to find my wife in the kitchen, looking a tad hung over. I feel a sudden dropping sensation in the pit of my stomach.
"What's that look for?" she says.
"I left my cardigan behind," I say.
"Rock and roll," she says.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/26/band-middle-aged-tim-dowling
Fill the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/28/sudoku-1832-easy
Here's what we're hoping for from the Rocky and Rambo star's menswear label
This autumn, Academy Award winner Sly Stallone faces his greatest challenge yet: the film legend is launching his very own clothing line. Stallone's menswear will be based on his two most iconic characters, Rambo and Rocky, and will feature ? in the words of the designer ? "looks for the rebel and the gentleman". Here are the key pieces we're desperately hoping for.
? A deluxe headband. Sly reckons that the line will be "premium", so we're holding out for something in six-ply cashmere that says "soldier-chic".
? An olive-green vest. Scoop-necked and a bit military. A menswear clich� perhaps, but the Stallone interpretation could be styled with a gold pendant. One for Cristiano Ronaldo this.
? Silk boxing shorts. As underwear for the more conservative consumer and as outerwear for the more open-minded fashionisto.
? A "cocktail" belt. Gold and heavy on the hardware, this would nod to Balboa's title belt. Men get a bum deal when it comes to statement accessories. Stallone could change this.
? A grey marl tracksuit. Forget American Apparel, Stallone's could be that bit more directional by featuring a high waistband. To be styled with the top tucked in to channel that memorable top-of-the-steps moment.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/27/sylvester-stallone-clothing-menswear
Filed under: Home, Consumer Ally
Do you live in a "slow house"? John Brown, founder of the Slow Home Movement (complementing the fast-moving Slow Food Movement), says there's a lot of greenwashing claims made for "eco-homes" that in reality are neither well-made, nor optimized for efficiency. They may be trying to be "slow," but in reality, they're fast.Continue reading A Real Eco-Friendly House Avoids Meaningless 'Environmental Bling'
A Real Eco-Friendly House Avoids Meaningless 'Environmental Bling' originally appeared on WalletPop on Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.walletpop.com/2011/03/25/a-real-eco-friendly-house-avoids-meaningless-environmental-blin/
'I feel that if I leave the ship for too long or go too far, it may sail without me, and that then I would be lost in the real world'
Redmond O'Hanlon ? naturalist, explorer, bestselling writer ? is travelling again. Last year he completed a long expedition that offered him particular intellectual pleasure: he was on board the Dutch clipper Stad Amsterdam as it retraced the route of HMS Beagle around the world, from Plymouth to Salvador de Bahia to the Gal�pagos and on ? "the most important voyage ever made," he insists, "far more so than man's journey to the moon".
He was recruited as one of the presenters of a documentary series made by the Dutch broadcaster VPRO to celebrate the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Not surprisingly, O'Hanlon, a figure of legendary bonhomie with a huge knowledge of natural history, became the star of the show. (Watch the YouTube footage entitled "Rough Cut: Redmond on Alfred Russel Wallace" for a display of his erudition.)
His enthusiasm is catching: he would, he jokes in one early episode, have done anything to be on board, even become a stowaway. As a schoolboy, he read On the Origin of Species in bed with a torch; his first published words were about Darwin; he even grew his side-whiskers in homage to him. "If I could choose a century to live in," he reflects, "I would certainly choose the 19th, the best of all times, when there was still a whole world to discover."
Yet O'Hanlon is celebrated most of all for his perilous jungle mountain treks and exhausting paddles through river swamps ? for sucking out monkey's eyes and dancing, drugged, for local tribes. In short, for having a really, comically terrible time. Isn't a trip among scientists on a well-equipped clipper a little tame? Rather, as perhaps befits a 64-year-old, he's delighted with the comforts of film-making, in contrast not only to the rigours of previous adventures, but as a way of circumventing the agonies of writing: "It's all done for you: no more privations, no more suffering, never being alone, no chance to get really depressed, a lot of drinking. Wonderful."
Sailing around the world is, after all, still boys' own stuff, and O'Hanlon, mischievous and laddish but very learned, became popular with the crew. The series shows him as something of an eccentric throwback, contentedly leafing through Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, consulting Lyell's Principles of Geology on the shores of Cape Verde and lying in a hammock turning the pages of other august volumes, which turn out to be deteriorating rapidly in the sea air. He isn't even irked that the wind blew off several pages from his precious first edition of On the Origin of Species: "It was worth ?40,000, and nothing now, but then again I got it for �5 in the 1970s, before Darwin had been rediscovered."
Each of the wonderfully recounted jungle adventures that made O'Hanlon's name is centred on a near-impossible quest ? to find a rare rhinoceros (Into the Heart of Borneo, 1984), to reach one of South America's highest peaks (In Trouble Again, 1988), and to catch sight of Lake Tele's mythical dinosaur (Congo Journey, 1996). For the Beagle series, he sets out on another quest, to Bacan Island, Indonesia, to spot the emerald-breasted bird of paradise known as Wallace's standardwing. Though hardly one of his sustained exercises in self-deprivation, the night-time journey has a familiar ring: "the hills are nothing but mud, you scramble your way up, and slip down again. I thought I was definitely going to die." But with dawn came the successful sighting of the plumed bird, and into the bargain O'Hanlon suffered the very direct sexual advances of a female orangutan ("her hair was so soft . . . I still dream about her now and then").
On previous expeditions, he contracted malaria and numerous other illnesses; this journey, too, was marked by a medical emergency. He is fond of sleep (his friend Ian McEwan likens him to Oblomov, Goncharov's character who refuses to leave his bed) and, travelling back on the plane, was exhausted after his Indonesian exploits: "I'm used to lying around all day with the cat." He slept for 17 hours straight and developed deep-vein thrombosis. In hospital he was visited by James Fenton, with whom he made the trip to Borneo in 1983. As O'Hanlon tells it, Fenton smuggled himself into the ward, breaking all the rules preventing visitors. The poet doesn't recall any infraction, but then "Redmond has a way of remembering these things, so . . ."
O'Hanlon has long had a public profile in the Netherlands, but was chosen as a presenter of the Beagle series in large part thanks to his Dutch publisher, Emile Brugman. Brugman has, over the years, heard hundreds of O'Hanlon's hair-raising anecdotes, but began to despair that he would ever read the autobiography for which he had long hoped. So he sent a Flemish journalist and travel writer, Rudi Rotthier, to tape hours of conversations with his author and write up a sort of ghosted memoir, with commentary. ("Emile said: well, if you're not going to write, we know you can certainly talk.") Published in 2009 as God, Darwin en natuur, it reminded the TV producers of O'Hanlon's extraordinary presence and assured him a passage on board the Stad Amsterdam. The book has now been translated and is published in Britain this month as The Fetish Room: The Education of a Naturalist.
It is definitively not an O'Hanlon production, but is notable for its sustained exploration of a different, more troubling side to the writer, who often appears a little unhinged in his books as he delves deeper into the discomforting unknown, but always for the sake of a telling the tale afterwards. For The Fetish Room, O'Hanlon undertakes another, differently traumatic, journey ? back to his childhood house, his school (Marlborough College) and Oxford. He's been recounting much of the book's substance for years to friends and interviewers: being beaten by his mother; his evangelical parents burning his books when he was a student (they considered them "vile, indecent, an absurd waste of time"); the self-immolation, aged 24, of his close friend Douglas Winchester (O'Hanlon keeps the remains of his charred foot in a Maxwell House coffee jar). But assembled together here, in a more pedestrian context, they bring into focus someone who admits having found it hard to keep, in his own phrase, "on an even keel".
He is candid about his depressive tendencies and lightly calls himself an "alcoholic". McEwan says O'Hanlon is "remarkably unchanged" since the mid-70s: "he has this wonderful carapace of comedy that protects a very serious spirit; there's all the mischief, fun and fizziness, but inside there's a darker quality." Julian Barnes, in his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of, relates his admission to his friend "R" that he thinks a great deal about death. The response came back: "Your death-thoughts seem HEALTHY . . . Mine are v. v. sicko. Always have been = DO IT NOW type. Shotgun-in-mouth. Much improved since the Thames Valley Police came and removed my twelve-bore because they'd heard me on Desert Island Discs. Now only have [his son's] airgun. No good. No blasto. So we WILL HAVE OLD AGE TOGETHER."
The environmentalist Tim Flannery, meanwhile, admits to being "a little scared of Redmond at times, especially of being in the bush with him. On our last adventure on the Hawkesbury River near Sydney, we were kayaking when we almost lost him to a quaking pit of bottomless mud, after he inexplicably upset his kayak. 'I'm sunk up to my failing penis,' he moaned over and over as I tried to haul him in."
O'Hanlon's house in Oxfordshire is notoriously messy and chaotic, with tilting piles of books and drifts of magazines: his attempts to tidy it up bring on panic attacks. When he moved to the house, he felt it necessary exactly to reproduce the look of his previous study; otherwise he felt unsafe. He likes to stack up around himself everything he has ever valued, as if he fears it'll all be taken away: stuffed animals, skulls, a giant pelican, a mummified frog, hundreds of photographs of pygmies, a pair of buffalo horns and lots of cabinets ? for beetles, butterflies, birds' eggs and an alarming spider. (Will Self included a description of the cottage in his novel Great Apes ? a "great simulacrum of his own mind".) And then there's the fetish room . . .
O'Hanlon's father was a believer in natural theology, and encouraged his son's interest in birds and entomology. The writer remembers the view from the vicarage study window, "the yew, the bushes where we played jungles, the huge copper beech, the conker tree, and . . . a stream where I'd catch minnows in Lucozade bottles baited with bread." When he was four, playing in the garden, a mistle thrush's egg fell to the ground in front of him. It was a magical, life-transforming moment. "I thought that God had given me a present . . . For the first time in my life I comprehended how wonderful birds were." It took On the Origin of Species to remove his thoughts of religion; it was another "revelation ? Darwin liberated me from God."
O'Hanlon was hopeless at maths, so didn't read science at university, taking English instead. He was rusticated from Oxford for writing a druggy, supposedly pornographic novel ("I didn't know enough for it to be properly pornographic"), but used his time away from college to get married to a fellow student, Belinda Harty ? they've now been together for 44 years and have two children. Belinda opened a successful clothes shop, which over four decades helped them pay the bills (in the 60s it was, according to rumour, used by Howard Marks to launder the money from his drug deals).
Having got a distinguished first, O'Hanlon was briefly a don, but was sacked after he taught his students literature from the wrong century. His doctorate on Conrad and Darwin took him seven years (Galen Strawson, a former friend, speaks of 36-hour sleep cycles and barbed wire on the stairs), but he was by then part of a remarkable group of writers which used to meet fortnightly at Fenton's house: it included Barnes, McEwan, Craig Raine, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and Timothy Garton-Ash. On one occasion O'Hanlon took along Bruce Chatwin, who was keen to impress. He "did everything he could to attract Fenton's attention. [In a high plaintive voice]: 'When I visited Somerset Maugham, we were standing by the pond. He took me from behind and fucked me on the spot.' Fenton opened a lazy eye. Then shut it again."
O'Hanlon recalls McEwan in hippier days, driving an MG with a "Give Peace a Chance" sticker on the back. They still go on walks together, the novelist in awe of the naturalist's ornithological prowess, the naturalist noting that the novelist is "disgustingly fit and extremely competitive". O'Hanlon told Rotthier that he is "happy that my friends are doing so well. Their value in the stock exchange of public esteem rises year by year. In that respect, I have made the best investment in friendship that you can imagine."
When his friend Jeremy Treglown took over the editorship of the TLS in 1981, O'Hanlon became natural history editor, a position he held for decades and clearly loved. He is still amazed that "EO Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould . . . would listen to me and be prepared to do what I asked". He seems eventually to have become a kind of Father Christmas figure in the office, distributing Crunchie bars and Flakes on his monthly visits, as well as proving an unparalleled source of gossip.
Fenton recalls that, around this time, when he first suggested an easy jungle-walking trip to the east, O'Hanlon wasn't sure he could do it. Having been convinced, however, he "really got the bit between this teeth", trained with the SAS and planned a journey that was, the poet says, "wildly illegal, physically impossible and incredibly expensive". The route they eventually followed ? up the Baleh River through a primary jungle unexplored by westerners since the 1920s ? was merely "foolhardy". They faced, among other delights, headhunters, wild boar ticks and a bowl of spaghetti that turned out to be parasitic fish worms. The poet suffered in another way, too ? from the fact, as McEwan puts it, that the comedy of O'Hanlon's books "derives from taking along a companion and watching him suffer". Fenton himself sums up the method as "it's not enough to succeed; somebody else must be seen to fail".
A few years after the Borneo trip, O'Hanlon asked Fenton to come with him on another expedition, this time to the Brazilian rainforest. The poet's reply to his friend is now renowned: "'Are you listening seriously?' 'Yes' 'Are you listening comfortably?' 'Yes.' 'Then I want you to know,' said James, shutting his eyes and pressing his palms over his face and the top of his bald head, 'that I would not come with you to High Wycombe.'" Instead, O'Hanlon asked along an old "boozing mate", Simon Stockton, a casino manager, who cracked halfway through the expedition and returned home.
A similar thing happened to the American zoologist Lary Shaffer, who accompanied O'Hanlon to the Congo. Undermined by bureaucrats, made ill by eating rancid elephant meat and attacked by armies of ants, Shaffer declined O'Hanlon's invitation to accompany him on the journey's final leg. Before they parted, he wrote a note that he asked O'Hanlon to sign: "I, Redmond, declare that I am going on the Lake Tele death trip of my own free will and hereby forgive Lary his escape." Forging ahead after Shaffer's departure, O'Hanlon enters his own heart of darkness and becomes dislocated from reality; he comes to depend on a magic talisman, a lump of string and monkey fur wrapped around the severed finger of a dead child.
O'Hanlon always speculated that his travels were connected to a Protestant notion of virtue in suffering. To write his next book, he set out to face "the ultimate fear" and so sailed on an Orkney trawler to Arctic fishing grounds in the depths of winter. Claustrophobia, anxiety and sleep deprivation turn the narrative of Trawler (2003) into another spellbinding but unnerving study of derangement. As the trawler's net brings up strange, monstrous beasts ? sea bats, snotfish, translucent giant octopuses, hideous hagfish ? traumas emerge from the depths of the fishermens' subconscious.
O'Hanlon had long been recognised as a great talker ("I did Wogan six times ? whenever somebody hadn't turned up. I was told only Joan Collins did more"), but writing became increasingly hard ? and hard, too, on his family. McEwan says that a page of one of O'Hanlon's books represents about a week of his writing life. He writes at night ? partly because this is when "books come off the shelves and speak to you directly", and partly for fear of interruption. "You are en route somewhere, on a journey, and in your imagination you experience it more intensely than when you were really there. If someone opens the door or asks a question at a moment like that, it's like being shot in the head."
In The Fetish Room, O'Hanlon tells Rotthier he has given up writing, yet he says now he "might have to" take up his pen again, because "they want me to write the official book of the clipper" (he has in fact already started it). And he is at work on a new TV series on naturalists, which requires much reading and research. Darwin is yet again proving a source of inspiration. "I love every second," he says in his cabin on the Stad Amsterdam. "I feel comfortable in my limited space and fear that if I leave the ship for too long or go too far, it may sail without me, and that then I would be lost in the real world that I have been trying to escape all my life. Here I can muse in my books, imagine myself to be in the 19th century and compliment myself daily that I am that fortunate child who sails the oceans of the world."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/mar/28/redmond-ohanlon-life-in-books
Ivana Bozilovic Ivanka Trump Izabella Miko Izabella Scorupco
As the London singer conquers both Britain and America with a smash-hit No 1 album, we meet a superstar in the making
It is a gusty Saturday in New York in late February, and Adele is not yet a very big deal. The 22-year-old singer from London, Adele Adkins in full, can drift into the lobby of a posh hotel in Manhattan and remain ignored, mostly, while other guests gather at the windows to watch the wind.
It's chaos outside. A doorman has had his hand crunched in the blown-shut door of a cab, and now a departing guest, trying to tip him a little extra, loses several unpocketed bills to the gale, staring sadly as they whip away uptown. "Windy," says Adele, approaching from behind, offering about the last instance of understatement I will hear from her over the next few days. It's a distinctive voice, hard cockney in Greenwich Village, but nobody turns from the window. It's that sort of hotel, accustomed to celebrity of varying degrees, and anyway Adele is not yet a very big deal in America because her new album, 21, isn't out for another week. Nobody's sure if it will make quite the same splash as her first, 19, so she has a week of hard promotion ahead: breakfast telly, radio interviews, an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, the country's most iconic talk show.
Wrapped warm in a camel-coloured jumper, red hair pulled back and pinned, she makes herself comfy on a lobby sofa and starts talking. Perhaps it's the apocalyptic weather outside, the occasional building shiver that suggests the hotel itself might blow away uptown, but Adele talks fast ? very, very fast ? rushing out stories as if the walls are falling in and she's still got another thing to say.
"?always trying to jazz it up in first class by putting it on a plate, but it don't work, just give us chicken tikka masala." This is her on airline food, the first thing my Dictaphone records after I've wrestled it from my pocket (missing entirely an opening gambit about her ongoing colonic struggle with IBS, then the correct way to cook steak, then "the way London smells"). She orders hot water and honey from a passing waiter, explaining: "My voice went recently, never happened before, off like a tap." She's been banned from all the good stuff since, like caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol in fun quantities. "I had to sit in silence for nine days, chalkboard around my neck. Like an old-school mime. Like a kid in the naughty corner. Like a Victorian mute."
She does this a lot: riffing, layering. Losing her voice must have been devastating. Watching EastEnders during the nine days' silence, there was an episode so good she ran out of chalkboard and filled up a notebook.
It's difficult not to be charmed, in a hurry, by someone as diverted by the pedestrian as Adele. In the background a hotel receptionist barks importantly into a radio, a request from one of the VIP suites upstairs: "30 glasses of water, over. Room temperature." In the foreground Adele is swearing like a squaddie, doing impressions, talking about? well, you're never quite sure where she'll go.
"I love a card. You know, cards? At birthdays? I collect them. There's this place in London, in Soho, does the best cards. Upstairs. My friend took me, she knows I love a card. Downstairs. A sex dungeon. Oh mah gawd, the toys. All my best mates are gay, they love it. I've seen things ? nuffink like this. My eyes were watering." My original question, way back, had been about the difficulties of getting up early to sing on breakfast TV.
At live shows, Adele's on-stage banter has become justifiably famous, and most of it is like this, generous and filthy, broken up by bawdy laughter and what-am-I-likes. It has helped distinguish her since she first emerged in 2007, when a combination of a hot performance on late-night TV and then a prize at the 2008 Brit Awards marked her out as important new singing stock. Fours years on and she can still catch you by surprise: that wartime-landlady chitchat, then suddenly the dreadnought vocal.
"I get so nervous on stage I can't help but talk. I try. I try telling my brain: stop sending words to the mouth. But I get nervous and turn into my grandma. Behind the eyes it's pure fear. I find it difficult to believe I'm going to be able to deliver."
A few days earlier, back in London, Adele had most definitely delivered. One of a handful of artists booked to sing live at the 2011 Brits, she took to the stage at the O2 Arena and sang the closing track from 21 (that album already out in the UK and sitting at No 1 in the charts). On the record the song, "Someone Like You", is a simple but affecting ballad about heartbreak: a solid 11th track. Sung live at the Brits, the only accompaniment a piano, it altered a career.
Whoops and shouts from 16,000 in the upper tiers stopped as soon as she got going; on the arena floor even the tables of fizzed-up music execs fell quiet as Adele ? now with sad and doleful eyes, now sneering, now fighting back tears ? hauled everybody through the mangle of a break-up. It was an astonishing performance, and at the song's end she turned away from the microphone, biting her thumb, trying not to cry in the face of a standing ovation. Glitter fell from the eaves, making her exposed shoulders sparkle. Thousands downloaded a live recording of the track when it was put up for sale after the show. More than 5.5 million watched a YouTube upload of the performance, links to it fired about over email for the rest of the week. I was one of those emailers. Subject line: Bloody hell.
"Shat myself," says Adele in the hotel lobby. "I was on in between Take That and Rihanna, the biggest productions of the night. All day I was thinking, this is gonna be a disaster."
By midweek the record was catching up with a Lady Gaga single at No 1. On our Saturday in the lobby, Gaga and Adele are roughly neck and neck. There are murmurs back home that the Brits was the night Adele's star was born.
But she is not there yet. As if to emphasise the fact, a bona fide superstar cuts through the lobby. I'm first aware of it when Adele widens her eyes and starts urgently whispering something that sounds like "porter, porter". It's Natalie Portman, a week before the Oscars and very pregnant, sweeping through the room and out into the blistering wind.
The lobby bristles in her wake. Adele looks quite star-struck. "Do you ever get that, the heart flutter? I turn into a wreck. Go all light-headed." She crosses her eyes and mimes wooziness, but quickly she is back. Portman, she reckons, owes her some nights' sleep: Adele saw Black Swan a few weeks ago and is still going to bed with the lights on. Tonight she plans to watch lighter fare, an action movie about an unstoppable train called Unstoppable. She might get her nails done. Otherwise she'll be catching up on sleep.
That won't happen. Before dawn she'll be woken by her manager who'll tell her that she's beaten Gaga and gone to No 1 in the UK for the first time in her career. She'll cry and call her mum. Then she'll find out that the Brits performance so jolted the public that her previous single, "Rolling in the Deep", has moved up to No 4; that her album, 21, has held fast at No 1 in the album chart, and that the album she released three years ago, 19, has reached No 4. She'll end the day with two albums and two singles in the top five, the first time such a thing has happened for 50 years.
Assume, by the way, that Adele is swearing at all times. Between words, between syllables, she effs as easily as she laughs, and it would not be easy putting Adele, as Adele speaks, into print.
There's been a lot of red pen, but on occasion she needs to be done proper justice. "Can somebody get me a facking screwdriver? I'm going for the facking wiring. Doing my facking 'ead in. Unbe-facking-lievable."
We are backstage at the Ed Sullivan theatre in Times Square, where The Late Show with David Letterman is filmed. Half a dozen people are crammed into Adele's small dressing room, and everyone is being driven to fury by a voice crackling out of a grille in the ceiling, calling members of cast or crew to the stage. "But you can't complain about your dressing room," sighs Adele, "or you look like Celine Dion."
When we'd spoken in the hotel she'd made repeated reference to her team, her gang. They were the ones who kept her sane, she said, who would tell her, one day, when it was time to pack it in. "Who'll facking tell me, babe, nobody cares." Here they all are: manager, UK and US publicists, hairdresser, make-up guy, someone they've started calling "Colonel Sanders" because he's the only one who knows how to mix hot water and honey the way Adele likes it.
"Unstoppable?" she's saying. "Unwatchable more like. I stopped it." It is two days after our interview in the lobby, a day after her chart triumph, and in the interim the chill wind has turned to snow and dumped a thick layer over New York. Like the weather-battered city, Adele's team seem rather dazed by the last 48 hours. One of her publicists is low in a chair, wrestling a hangover. "I know he was out 'til 6am," says Adele, "cos he facking Tweeted it."
Outside in the corridor, a sitcom actress ? due to be one of Letterman's guests on the same show ? passes by the open door. She's barefooted, gushing thanks to a lackey for cleaning some item of clothing. An earlier glimpse inside her dressing room revealed a scene of grave calm: dress neatly on its hanger, make-up artist poised with tools.
In Adele's dressing room a laptop sits in the corner showing an internet feed of West Ham versus Burnley. The gang are debating, at shouting volume, the size of a major Hollywood actor's penis. Everybody claims to know someone who's seen it. "Big!" "Small!" "Massive!" "Tiny!" Soon after this, one of the publicists approaches and asks me if I've got a delete button in my brain.
With half an eye on the football Adele's manager, Jonathan Dickins, an east Londoner with screwy black hair, explains what's been happening at home. "On Thursday we were 20,000 sales behind Gaga. Friday, 125 behind. You knew it was gonna be close." In the end, Adele won by 30,000 copies. As for the achievement of having two records in the top five of both the UK single and album charts, "the last act to do that were the Beatles", says Dickins. "Sometimes the stars just align for you."
It all started for Adele on TV, with a Beatle. Some of her early songs caught the attention of producers on Later? with Jools Holland in summer 2007, and without a release to her name she was plopped on an episode to sing next to Paul McCartney. Heart-flutters, light-headedness ? but Adele delivered and, not for the last time, charmed an audience meant for someone more famous.
A buzz picked up around her: killer voice, that cherubic face and unapologetic size-14-ness, her oozy sass. When it was announced that she'd won a newly minted Brit award in late 2007, something vaguely titled "the critics' choice award", her debut album was still weeks away. But she'd released a single, "Hometown Glory", the cover of which showed Adele looking soulful in a London caff and sharing foreground space with a bottle of Sarson's vinegar. A certain tone had been established.
She grew up in London (first north in Tottenham, then south in Lambeth) the only child of an 18-year-old mother, Penny. "She fell pregnant with me when she would have been applying for uni, but chose to have me instead. She never, ever reminds me of that. I try to remember it." Penny took Adele to her first gig at toddler age ? the Cure at Finsbury Park ? seeding an obsession with pop music that never went away.
As a pre-teen she queued for hours to get into recordings of Saturday morning show CD:UK, and listened keenly to the Top 40 while doing Sunday shifts at her auntie's Haringey cafe. At school she faked an eye injury to justify wearing a sequinned eye-patch in homage to popstrel Gabrielle. Later, "I was so in love with Mike Skinner I wrote him a letter, and when I told my friend about it she cussed me so I went and pretended to do the washing up and cried."
In the late 90s she was passing through a dog-collared American rock phase, trawling the local HMV for Korn and Slipknot CDs, a little forlorn in her baggy jeans and not quite sure it was the fad for her, when she noticed an Etta James record. She quite fancied a switch to James's glamorous haircut, and bought the record to show her hairdresser the picture. Somewhere between a few more obsessions (the Spice Girls, Jeff Buckley, Will Young) Adele popped Etta James in to the CD player, and thought: Oh, I can do that.
In 2003, aged 14, she enrolled at the Brit performing arts school the Croydon. As part of her course she recorded some demos, and a pal uploaded them to MySpace. Emails from record companies trickled in. "I made my guitarist, Ben, come along to my first meeting with XL Recordings. He's puny, Ben, looks like a dwarf, but I'd never heard of XL so I thought I might be on my way to meet an internet perv or summink." XL, they found out, had the White Stripes on their books, and wanted Adele too. "That was when we got facking excited."
Guitarist Ben is present today, tuning up on the Letterman set. Most of Adele's gang joined her early. She met one of the publicists as a teenager in a club ("You should 'ear me," she told him.) She signed with manager Dickins because he made her laugh, "literally stomach cramps the day after".
In the dressing room Adele is telling a story about David Letterman, how he can recognise his female guests by their perfume. Dickins interjects: "It's only because you wear Brut. He knows the classics." There seems to be a tacit understanding among the gang that the best way to counter Adele's rising nerves, performance hour approaching, is teasing. That, and gentle libel. They while away some time on the drinking habits of a TV personality, then a bit of who's-going-out-with-who.
For years Adele's been asked about who she's going out with, who her wounded love songs are about. "Who cares?" she says. "Nobody famous, just old boyfriends. I don't date celebrities. I ain't facking Taylor Swift, dyouknowhatImean?" She has a very unprintable way of describing a tabloid newspaper when I tell her it recently printed an appeal for information about any boyfriends. She's single, but "I'd double what the papers pay, anyway. Maybe have someone killed."
Boyfriends are a line of inquiry that seem rather beside the point with Adele. Just like past focus on her body shape, that hint of "Yay us!" triumphalism showing itself from time to time because even though this singer isn't typically thin, we like her anyway. The Brits gig has returned focus to what Adele was always really about. Those room-silencing pipes.
When I first saw her perform in 2007, in the sweaty and densely packed Scala in King's Cross, she was an appendage name on the bill, unknown ? performing a couple of songs after a rapper called Lethal Bizzle. The crowd were agitated and noisy and, truth be told, quite bored after 20 minutes of being exhorted to shout "Lethal" whenever Bizzle shouted "Bizzle". Then Adele walked on stage with an acoustic guitar and a beer and tamed the belligerent room in an instant. "I love hearing my audience breathe," says Adele ? but not many artists, you suppose, have.
At Adele's dressing-room door the sitcom actress knocks and enters, come to say hi. The actress's name, improbably, is Cobie Smulders, a star of US sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and she tells Adele she likes her music. Adele replies she likes Smulders's sitcom, and making small talk asks if Smulders has got any other interviews coming up. The actress stares smilingly for a moment (translating the accent) before replying that, yes, they've just started filming the next series.
When Adele appeared on a different American TV show, Saturday Night Live, back in 2008 to promote her first album, her dressing-room stablemate was no such benign presence. The celebrity who came knocking to declare herself a fan was Sarah Palin.
That was during the presidential election campaign, at the height of SNL's popular lampoons of the Alaskan governor, audience figures for the show unusually huge as comedian Tina Fey delighted the nation with her Palin impressions. Adele ended up performing in front of 17m viewers. "She wanted to go on stage wearing an Obama badge," recalls Dickins. "I told her I'd cut her hands off if she did." Within hours of broadcast, 19 sold an extra 10,000 copies. Two big US tours followed, and at the 2009 Grammys she was the surprise recipient of two awards: best new artist, and best female pop vocal. America had fallen for a girl who's Grammy win was so unexpected she'd removed her shoes and belt before her name was called.
But she never managed to get to No 1 in the American album chart, really lodge herself in cultural consciousness. In the fallow period after 19, Lady Gaga rose to rule pop; Katy Perry tricked a global public into believing she could sing; Florence Welch and La Roux crossed over as newer British redheads to win American hearts. Today's Letterman appearance is meant to remind a nation about that Grammy-worthy vocal.
No wonder she's nervous. "When I hear artists say, 'Performing is what I'm meant to do', I think, Whaaaat? This ain't what you're meant to do. It ain't normal." A crackle from the loudspeaker, and Adele is called to the set to perform (nobody ever did find her that screwdriver). Off she goes, tense and practising bits from tonight's song, "Rolling In The Deep".
Alarmingly for everybody left behind, the song features a swear word in the opening verse. "We always tell her, no cursing on air," says the US publicist, but Adele has forgotten before; in an interview with Fox in 2009 she managed to flash an illustrative middle finger as part of an answer to the very first question.
Everybody stares anxiously at the dressing-room TV as Adele, on screen, is introduced by David Letterman. "Don't say shit, Adele!" shouts Dickins. "Don't you say it!" The song starts. The danger lyric comes, goes. She doesn't say shit. Now Dickins is bouncing a knee to the music, concerns forgotten. "Force of nature, this girl," he says.
The song crescendoes, ends, and the cheers of the crowd suggest it went pretty well. Adele beams in relief as Letterman moves across the set. "He's going over to do the banter!" shouts the US publicist. "He only does the banter with people he likes."
"Oh yay-ah!" is Letterman's first offering, then: "Wo-hoh!" Not banter so much, more one-way noise of a demented sports fan, but it still seems like an endorsement. Adele smiles sheepishly as he waves around an oversized copy of her album. "Man," Letterman says, shaking his head. "If I could only sing like that."
Later, when Letterman and the audience have gone home, Adele plays a small gig in the Ed Sullivan theatre for local fans. She starts with "Hometown Glory", invoking a London of cracked pavements and familiar smells where her family and friends are waiting to give her a proper celebration. Both her single and her album hold fast at No 1 in the UK charts the following week, and then for a further month after that, indenturing Adele a new status in British music, prompting the chief of the Official Chart Company to gush, "We are witnessing a superstar in the making."
After "Hometown Glory" she sings "Lovesong", a cover of the Cure in tribute to her mum and a nod to that early gig they went to. Before singing "Someone Like You", she tells the audience: "This next one just became my first ever UK No 1. I've had a No 1 before but that was in Norway. Think it was 500 sales, don't take a lot. Still counts! Got a plaque on mah wall." She spins on guitarist Ben, eyes bright. "I dunno why you're laughing. We're starting our tour there next week."
Always a big deal in Norway; now a big deal in the UK; soon a big deal in the US. The following week her album will go straight in at No 1 in the American chart. Outside the Ed Sullivan theatre, camped in the snow, a two-tiered row of paparazzi wait to get a picture of her. Word about the Beatles link has spread.
But, at the tipping point, she is still a singer who will dedicate a song to her pet dog, as she does before a Bob Dylan cover. Still a singer who'll then keep talking without thinking until she's making a joke ? of all things ? about having sex with animals. There are gasps from the audience.
"Sorry," says Adele, "there are children in the room." She takes a flustered slug of honey and water, hoots nervously. "I can just see it in the papers tomorrow." Her band intercede with the song's opening chords, and Adele mimes zipping up her mouth with her fingers. No more talking. There's a way to win this lot back.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/27/adele-21-letterman-no1-interview
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