OK, I admit it, Company Magazine is growing on me. They’ve got that new, compact, sexy-textured thing going on, and this issue was filled with ice cream shades and aztec prints and bomber jackets and high-tops. I love bomber jackets and high-tops! I can even overlook the implication that wearing a bum bag and/or visor for the purposes of fashion would ever be a good idea and almost – almost – admit to liking this rag. But… no, I can’t; there’s just too much lol-ing and heart-ing and ridiculous non-words like ‘fashpiration’. Say it with me folks, sound it out: fash-pi-ray-shun. It’s a lexical nightmare. No one’s having fun here, even if you do get turned on by speech impediments (what? It’s a thing, just ask interwardisco). Lazy, thoughtless use of language is an unforgivable sin in my book, and there’s a lot of it here: see their feature ‘Meet the YHTs’ profiling Young, Handsome and Talented actors. On the surface it’s a good feature – these guys certainly are Young, Handsome and Talented so no complaints there, but I take umbrage with their all-too-frequent employ of J-Lo and R-Patz inspired nicknames. Alright, I’ll let you have D-Bo for Douglas Booth; I doubt it’ll catch on, but at least it makes sense (although if I were unleashing my full pedantic potential, I’d say it should, technically, be D-Boo). Jeremy Irvine, however, is not and will never be known as J-Ir because it is linguistical nonsense. How are you even supposed to pronounce that: jay-err? Jerr? That’s not a moniker, it’s a pause filler – you might as well call him ‘Umm… what’s-his-name… you know, that guy’, which lends a level of irony to this feature so spectacular it would make Alanis Morissette’s head spin.
Still, at least they’ve had the good grace to pick Kate Bush as this month’s Awesome Lady of Tunes. Oh Kate. I love you, Kate! Your slumberous eyes and wailing falsetto make everything brilliant.
Women Who REALLY Rock
#5 Joan Jett
Well, come on, she’s the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll - this is a done deal. It’s just a shame Kristen Stewart had to get involved.
Hey, everybody’s got an opinion! Facebook and Twitter are awash with rallies against consumerism, woe-is-me tales of singledom and smug posts containing far too much information about couples’ private lives. So here’s what I think:
Couples? Back. The Fuck. Away.
This day is not for you. I know it’s confusing. I know your television and all the magazines and shops and restaurants and EVERY MEDIA OUTLET IN THE FUCKING WORLD are telling you to spend money on your beloved, because set menu earlybird dinner specials and heart-shaped gifts are the best way to show your affection on this, the most romantic of all holidays. That what you desperately need in your life on this sacred day is some red lingerie - after all, this is the one day of the year you’re allowed to have sex! DON’T LISTEN TO THEM. You already have each other - you can have sex whenever you want. And you can gorge yourself forever on earlybird dinner specials if that’s what does it for you, but why bother on the day all the prices go up and you’re surrounded by dickheads photographing their love and uploading it to Facebook? No, not for you. Step down.
If, however, your Object of Desire (OOD) hasn’t noticed your existence and Vally D’s gives you the courage to make a move, then go for it, and may your fear of rejection be eased by knowing that you aren’t the only lovesick fool putting themselves on the line today. And I suppose that is romantic, in a masochistic sort of way. It’s the one day of the year you’re bullied into taking that chance: potential lifetime gazing into each other’s eyes, Hollywood movie-esque happiness versus crippling embarrassment followed by perpetual loneliness and eventual death at the hands of several thousand household pets. WHO WILL BE THE ULTIMATE CHAMPION? You just don’t know. Maybe you’ll wake up tomorrow in somebody else’s bed, all shiny-eyed and happy, or maybe you’ll still be under your ironic single person’s cartoon-printed duvet cover with nothing a hangover and your salty, sorrowful tears to keep you warm. But at least something will have changed, if not your Facebook relationship status. So you guys can keep Valentine’s Day - I’ll allow it. But if you’ve already made that move, managed to convince your OOD that having a relationship with you would be somehow worthwhile, and you STILL need today to force you into action then you’re doing something wrong. Just be nice to each other, every bloody day. Isn’t that the point?
Company’s had a makeover, and it’s a pretty good one. They’ve ditched the standard ‘glossy magazine’ paper of choice and Company 2.0 has a finger-pleasing matte texture. In addition, the smaller ‘handbag size’, pioneered by (whisper it) Glamour, works very well - each page is colourful and attractive and made me want to leap off the tube and into the nearest Topshop (who cares about getting to work when I could be buying jeans made from recycled deckchairs, right?). They’re definitely onto a winner. They even went with a totally reasonable Woman Who Rocks and put the spotlight on Dusty Springfield. Not much to complain about here - everybody loves Dusty! What could they possibly say to ruin this one? Well, possibly they could include this stellar quote from Company editor, Victoria White: “Her music still sounds great today, more than 40 years after she recorded it… Amazing!” Yes, I suppose that is amazing… oh wait, my mistake, no it isn’t because THAT IS THE POINT OF GOOD MUSIC. If 40 years later it sounds like an unholy racket then chances are it was always an unholy racket and your ears just weren’t working properly the first time round. And of course, let’s not forget their handy ‘Get Dusty’s Look’ tutorial, in which it turns out Dusty’s look is pretty similar to Duffy’s - who knew? With five entries to go and a virtual guarantee that Adele will be shoehorned in somewhere, you have to wonder how many times they’re going to plug the beehive during the course of this countdown. Do they have shares in Elnett?
Women Who REALLY Rock
#6 Bessie Smith
Often titled the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 30s and the highest paid black entertainer of her day. She has been cited as an influence on many subsequent vocalists, including Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin - the latter paid for a tombstone to be erected on her unmarked grave in 1970, more than thirty years after her death.
In what is fast becoming one of the most bizarre groupings of people since the advent of Come Dine With Me, number 7 on Company’s list of musical females is Sade. Well… fair enough, Company – she didn’t make my shortlist but I can’t really argue with her presence on yours. Although I would absolutely question your logic of rating her musical importance a mere three steps away from Victoria Beckham’s.
Still, this flash of… um, whatever this brief respite from lunacy indicates, had to be balanced out somehow. So to compensate for Sade’s appearance, Company readers must also suffer Christina Perri fanning the lukewarm flames of the New Boring by harping on about “humility and realness” and a rage-inducing article entitled ‘I heart God and Louboutins!’, bemoaning Christianity’s lack of street cred. Personally I’d say a lack of cool-factor was the least of any fact-denying, ignorance-promoting organised religion’s problems, especially when faced with propaganda pieces like this one, which sacks off any justification or even explanation of what her beliefs actually are in favour of Justin Bieber quips. But, y’know. Whatevs.
Women Who REALLY Rock
#7 Kate Bush
Even if Kate had only recorded 1978’s The Kick Inside and given up on music then and there, she would probably still have made this list on the strength of Wuthering Heights alone. But thankfully she didn’t, and her eclectic back catalogue showcases such a wide range of musical styles that every female solo artist since can expect to be compared to her at some point in their career. What a babe.
Failing to get my hands on tickets for Jerusalem is bothering me a great deal more than it probably should. By all accounts it’s an incredible show: one of my colleagues has seen it five times (five times! FIVE! No small feat when you consider the £50 price tag on a standard ticket) and another claimed it was “the most watchable thing [she’d] ever seen”. Pfft. Whatever. Are you trying to tell me it’s more watchable than Sir Ian McKellen explaining the art of acting to a stunned Ricky Gervais in Extras? Exactly – nothing is. I rest my case.
The most distressing element of this tragic tale isn’t that I’m missing out on some brilliant theatre, or even that, despite the apparent scarcity tickets, I seem to be the only person in London who hasn’t managed to get hold of one. It’s the overwhelming sense that this is a Zeitgeist moment that I am not part of. I briefly entertained the notion of a last-ditch attempt – spending the night partying in Soho then heading straight for the theatre at 4am to queue for the day tickets released six hours later. I was perhaps more excited about the plan than its actual objectives: surely as a twenty-something arts graduate living in London these are exactly the sort of adventures I should be having? My inner monologue was yelling “OF COURSE I should be pulling all-nighters in pursuit of culture! I can’t wait! It’ll be just like Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist but with more theatre-based lols and fewer awkward orgasms!” But this plan was quickly abandoned upon discovering that queues for day tickets begin forming 24 hours in advance: my sofa-loving backside wouldn’t be up for sitting on a January pavement for that long a stretch even if I didn’t have a job to go to. So there it is – see you later, Zeitgeist. I have visions of watching BBC4 documentaries in ten or twenty years time interviewing excited, misty-eyed theatre-goers, and sadly reflecting that I was probably at home eating soup and watching Spaced for the billionth time.
New Year’s Resolution: Be a better Londoner, stop watching boxsets in your pants*.
*Obviously still do this, just not at the expense of participating in uber-cool cultural phenomenons.
Brace yourselves. In at number 8 of Company magazine’s baffling countdown of influential female musicians is… Duffy. That’s right – DUFFY. Yes, her debut album adorned coffee tables the world over in 2008, but come on people! This is the woman who destroyed her career with one horribly misjudged Diet Coke advert! Watch it here and find the entertainment factor by seeing the bicycle as a handy metaphor for her future record sales, gliding through the supermarket discount aisles then abandoned entirely. And let’s not forget that Duffy’s response to poor sales of her Difficult Second Album was to sulk and quit the music industry. “Gosh, the non-record-buying public are so MEAN! You meanies! No more dreary blue-eyed soul for YOU. Yah boo sucks!” Good for you, Duffy. I mean, if musicians were always deterred by lack of commercial success in the early stages of their career we’d be living in a world without Pulp’s His ‘n’ Hers, but whatever. You’re so inspiring; you totally deserve your place on this list! (Note: she does not deserve her place on this list.)
Somehow I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Company magazine has a long-standing working relationship with Diet Coke. They ran this campaign back in 2009, and the brand crops up a mere four pages after Duffy’s overly-bronzed face in the current issue as a sponsor of the 2011 High Street Fashion Awards. I can’t help but wonder if this entire countdown feature was hashed together purely as an excuse to force her back into the public eye, announce that she’s working on a third album (a fact shockingly overlooked by every other publication in existence) and credit her for the recent boom in beehives and flicky eyeliner while they’re at it (I’m sure Amy Winehouse would have had something to say about that – “Cat AIDS” springs to mind). But wouldn’t it be easier for Diet Coke to simply find a new muse? There’s a wealth of gullible young popstars out there waiting to be taken for a ride (for a ride, geddit? Like on a BICYCLE!) and surely they should be doing everything they can to distance themselves from this horrendous piece of PR. Either they’re suffering from levels of guilt hitherto unheard of in large corporations, or Duffy’s legal team have got them over a barrel. Step away from the contract, folks: no good can come of this.
Women Who REALLY Rock
#8 Patsy Cline
A celebrated vocalist, Patsy was the first female country star to achieve pop music crossover success in the early 60s. Since her death in a plane crash aged just 30, she has sold millions of records and became the first female solo artist to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
As I write, my fridge is full of yoghurt: there is, in fact, an entire shelf devoted to it. Each day I sit at my desk in the office, scrolling though my Twitter timeline and eating yoghurt. It’s a fairly recent habit; I don’t have any overly strong feelings about yoghurt and having a fridge full of the stuff is a new experience for me. At first, I maintained this new-found obsession had developed due to a number of factors, namely that (a) it’s always on offer and therefore it would be foolish not to buy loads and (b) it stops me buying other, more-fattening treats instead. Without my trusty pots of bacterially fermented milk, who knows how much Ben & Jerry’s I’d be getting through? If it weren’t for Yeo Valley, I could easily fall off the wagon and resume my Nutella Hobnob habit (literally a Hobnob dipped in Nutella – impossibly tasty but dangerously addictive and responsible for my gaining a dress size in 2006). So buying all this yoghurt was definitely a really good idea, I’m so smart. Well done me.
The thing is, it’s bullshit. I know this now. The reason there is no room for non-dairy products in my fridge is because I watch X Factor, which inexplicably devotes a large chunk of its £8,000 per second advertising space to – yes, you guessed it – yoghurt. I am a slave to consumerism and, while I make no apologies for being thus afflicted, I am ashamed it took me so long to realise I was being manipulated.
Advertising is A Big Deal. It’s impossible to get away from and, like it or not, it informs many different areas of our lives: where we shop and what we buy is just the tip of the iceberg. For many people, Christmas officially “starts” when the Coca Cola trucks grace their TV screen (I understand, but would appreciate one year not having to read a million and one irritating Facebook updates all making the same point) and simply observing the Twitter storm that followed the debut of the John Lewis Christmas advert gave an indication of just how much adverts have become an important part of our culture. While I’m sure many would disagree with my sentiment (for those people, I highly recommend reading Charlie Brooker’s recent article on the subject), I don’t see this as a bad thing. It’s true there is a lot of shit out there, and yes this is disappointing given the amount of money and talent that the industry possesses: surely a well-educated, successful industry insider would know that a disembodied female voice telling me to “have a happy period” was only ever going to make me angry? And yet that slogan made it onto our screens. No, Always, I won’t. AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU AND YOUR MAGICAL FANNY PADS CAN DO ABOUT IT. But despite the multitudinous atrocities we bear witness to every day, there’s no reason why an advert can’t be a showcase for the work of a brilliant creative team. Here are my favourite campaigns du jour, which demonstrate just that.
1) Skittles
Basically, I love this. It has comedy, pathos, a silky smooth-voiced leading man and the ‘objects turning into Skittles’ bits are really well done. While researching this I discovered this advert first appeared four years ago – perhaps this shows a certain degree of laziness on their part, but I don’t really give one: it makes me laugh every time I see it, and I’m glad it’s been resurrected.
2) Muller
Mutley makes an appearance in this once, which is enough to catapult it straight into this list regardless of what’s going on the rest of time. Fortunately, the other 85 seconds are filled with excellent animation and bright colours, and at the end they all have an awesome party underneath a rainbow. And whaddya know, it’s for yoghurt! How about that.
3) V05
This one made the list largely because it’s an excellent example of how a well-chosen soundtrack can make all the difference. Plus, the styling is excellent and that girl has really great hair.
4) American Music Awards on Viva
Sadly I couldn’t find a link to this one, which is a shame because this probably won’t have as much impact unless you’ve seen it already or are willing to sit in front of Viva until you do (personally I spend a lot of time watching Viva anyway, they’re always showing that Gaga vs Beyonce vs Riri video stream which is pretty much a perfect night in). Anyway, the advert in question pays homage to my favourite dramatic music video cliché: rain. We’re treated to an excellent montage of soaking wet musicians with various degrees of pout as Peter Dickson, Voiceover Man, gleefully categorises them – “Sexy rain! Electrical rain! There’s a bucket just out of shot rain!” My only gripe is that it doesn’t feature Stronger by Britney Spears, clearly the best ‘popstar dances in inexplicable shower looking better than any normal person could ever hope to when caught without a brolly’ moment since Take That’s Back For Good (Mark’s floopy car antics at 3:37 are truly something special). Yes, it’s a good advert, nice one Viva.
5) Nando’s
THIS IS AMAZING. It’s topical! And funny! And liable to spark uninformed debates by humourless people online! In truth, I don’t usually need any extra motivation to go to Nando’s but this would do it. I want to eat half a chicken in Piri Piri sauce and I want to eat it NOW.
Best thing I’ve ever seen
I’ve been laughing at this all day. Completely brilliant!
It was with a sense of trepidation that I opened the November edition of Company to see who was up next in their list of influential female musicians. Where do you go from Victoria Beckham, Holly Valance? Melanie Blatt? I mean, really, what kind of precedent are you setting here? I certainly wasn’t expecting to see Toyah Wilcox gracing their pages as number nine. I was pleasantly surprised that they’d opted for someone with genuine musical talent, although I confess that Toyah didn’t even make my shortlist let alone my top ten. However, after reading the profile they’d written I was mostly just confused: it doesn’t even mention her music career except to say she “found her niche in the pop charts … and established [herself] as Britain’s edgier female popstar”. With the exception of that one vague sentence, they talk solely about her hair and make-up – they were great, yes, but did they really have that much an effect on music? I suspect this entire feature is suffering from poor editing; if it was only ever intended to discuss the personal fashions of female musicians then their use of the phrase “changed music forever” is somewhat misleading. And if it is purely a style feature, then WHY is it purely a style feature? The whole publication is full of them, would a bit of variety not be a good thing? Women like music, don’t they? It would be nice to read something more insightful than their ‘Sound of the Underground’ reviews page (summary: ‘there are some albums out this month and they’re ALL ACE!’). I’m holding out for next month, Company. Don’t let me down.
Women Who REALLY Rock
#9 Debbie Harry
Most famous for fronting Blondie, Debbie Harry is one of the most recognisable female faces in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Throughout their career their ever-developing musical style covered punk, new wave, reggae, disco and rock and she established herself as one of the most influential people in popular culture.
