More Rosebud - Dylan Jones

Dylan Jones was for 22 years the editor of the UK edition of GQ Magazine, and turned that men's style glossy into essential reading for those interested in the culture, fashion and cool of the 00s. Prior to that he worked on i-D Magazine and Arena. At GQ, Dylan also turned the GQ Man of the Year Awards into one of the big events of the London social calendar, and after GQ Jones went on to edit the Evening Standard. Dylan and Gyles talk about all this in today's fascinating conversation. And they also talk about Dylan's childhood. Born into a military family - Dylan's dad was in the RAF - Dylan moved around a great deal and was subject to his father's physical violence on a regular basis. He describes living in this "chaos" and talks about the lasting impact this difficult childhood has had on his character. This is a really important, powerful and intimate conversation, which doesn't wallow in difficulty or pain, but discusses it openly, calmly, and with real candour. (This episode does contain discussion of serious sexual assault and domestic violence). Dylan's new book, Table Hopping: The Secret History of London's Restaurants, from Langan's Brasserie to The Wolseley is highly recommended. It's available here https://dauntbooks.co.uk/shop/books/table-hopping/. Our deep thanks to Dylan for being our guest, and for sharing his wisdom, wit, and brilliant conversation with us on Rosebud. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:58Speaker 01

  Talking about guns with others might not always feel comfortable, but it could save a life. Here's a way to start a conversation. Your family is going over to your neighbor's home for dinner for the first time. How would you ask if there are any unlocked guns in the home?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Hey, we're so excited for tonight. Before we come over, though, may I ask if there are any unlocked guns in your home?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Our guns are stored securely, locked in a safe that the kids can't access.

• 1:22Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Learn how to have the conversation at agree to agree.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  This is Rosebud. My name is Giles Brandreth, and I'm not in the room alone. I've got with me my producer and friend, Harriet Jane. How are you today, Harriet?

• 1:59Speaker 05

  I'm fine, thank you, Giles.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  I am in quite a state of excitement because at the weekend, I went into the basement looking for a box of bits and pieces and came across a box I hadn't opened in years, and I opened it. And I found inside it a stash of comics and magazines from the 1950s and 1960s.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:22Speaker 04

  When I was a little boy, I had magazines every Thursday. I looked forward to Thursday like nobody's business. I had comics, not just The Beano and The Dandy, which were the kids' comics of my generation and a preceding generation, but also The Beaser, Topper, other magazines, larger format than The Dandy and The Beano. And I discovered all these than that. And then I discovered a magazine called The Eagle. Have you heard of that magazine?

• 2:54Speaker 05

  I think some guests have mentioned it.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there was a girl's equivalent called Girl.

• 2:58Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. I never really got into Eagle. There was the Green Micon, it was sci-fi. Dandair was a hero.

• 3:07Speaker 05

  So it's comic, it's cartoon strips, comic strips?

• 3:10Speaker 04

  No, it isn't. Cartoons, cartoonish, Dandy, Beano are cartoonish. Eagle was more illustrated adventures.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  Oh, that sounds fun.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  So they were more realistic. They weren't jokey and cartoonish. I remember, what was the magazine that had Let Us Leave, the greenest girl in the school? Quite bizarre. She may have been in Girl magazine, and I rather fancied her. And she was a cartoon character with sort of funny little glasses.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can fancy cartoon characters.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Did you ever fancy a cartoon character?

• 3:42Speaker 05

  Well, no, but I remember thinking on TV, you know, Penelope Pitstop was really attractive. And, you know, definitely there are female cartoon characters that are pretty, aren't they? Or sexy?

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Yes. Curiously, Popeye's Olive Oil.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  She was, I thought she was attractive.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  She was attractive, and I was really confused. I'm still confused about the relationship between Olive Oil and Popeye because I think they had a child called Sweet Pea.

• 4:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:12Speaker 04

  But I don't think they were married.

• 4:13Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  I mean, no, but this all began.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  That's the kind of thing Popeye got up to, you know? All that spinach.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  Spinach, just for you, boing, boing.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  Absolutely, you don't even need to do it. You just, children just appear.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 4:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  What, for you, before we get on to magazines? Did you have comics before you had magazines?

• 4:29Speaker 05

  Well, I read The Beano. Yeah, I used to really like The Beano, Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx. Yeah, loved The Beano. And then I did get into magazines when I was quite young. I used to love buying a magazine that was called Smash Hit.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  I used to, you know, they'd put the lyrics of the top 10 singles of the week, whatever, in there, and I would learn them off by heart and read all this trivia about pop bands. And you could get a poster, there'd be a poster in the middle. You could rip that out, put that on your wall. I used to write into them. I mean, I don't know what about, but letters I thought were funny that I thought they'd pick out. And then I used to buy a magazine when I was a bit older called Miz Magazine. That was kind of a young teenage.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Was that spelled M S or M I double Z?

• 5:14Speaker 05

  M I double Z. It was a, it was a sort of proto-women's magazine, but for sort of 15-year-olds or 14, 15-year-olds. So that was fun, that makeup and fashion and.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  And boys, did they feature all of them?

• 5:27Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, all that sort of thing. There'd be, you know, things about the sexy men of the time and interviews. And yeah, it was to make you feel grown up. It was really good. I think they're a really important part of growing up for girls my generation. And then, yeah, we were talking about Jackie.

• 5:43Speaker 04

  Of course, because we had as a guest last week, Jacqueline Wilson. And if you haven't heard that episode, it's very interesting, isn't it?

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, because she says.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  She went to work for DC Thompson.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Who made a lot of these magazines, including Dandy, Beano, and others.

• 5:58Speaker 05

  And Jackie.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  And Jackie, and Jackie was named after her, apparently.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Well, she said she was told by the people that ran DC Thompson, what would they call, two old men, old Dundee men, very serious. They told her that they'd named Jackie magazine after her because she was the youngest employee. Which is amazing, but I loved that because I loved photo stories.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  Do you remember them?

• 6:23Speaker 04

  I do.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  They would sort of tell usually a sort of moral dilemma, often about a relationship, often a tiny bit.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  A little bit near the knuckle.

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, there was a bit of sort of sex education in there, which.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  There's a boy and a girl photograph.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 04

  And they moved from the kitchen, they may be in the corridor, maybe they were about to kiss.

• 6:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, and there was something was happening, some drama.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  A mum from upstairs calling down.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  And if you were sort of 13, 14, it was quite exciting somehow. And I loved these photo stories. And you learned things about relationships and, yeah, what you should do in certain situations. It was very clever. So I loved Jackie magazine. But Dylan Jones, our guest today, was the editor of GQ, which is an altogether more sophisticated and grown-up affair than what we're talking about.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Yes, and there was a kind of, well, hill that one went over. From your Jackie magazine, I then, as you know, worked for, when I was still a teenager, certainly my early twenties, for a magazine called 19.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Oh, well, that's a bit like Miz. Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  And for a magazine called Honey.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  Honey, yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  And I think they were for slightly older girls.

• 7:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, they're kind of bridge to kind of Elle and Vogue.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  They were a bridge.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  The women's magazine.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  To the women's magazines.

• 7:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  And as you will remember, I was engaged, when I was still at university, by Gillian Cook, who went on to be the editor of a magazine called Nova, which was a pioneering, a cool pioneering magazine. She was then the editor of Honey. And she came to see me, to ask me to take on a column that was called Luke Jarvis.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  Oh, I remember you got, you got the sack.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Well, because I didn't really, I wasn't really good enough.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  Man about town, you weren't about town enough.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  I wasn't sufficiently about town. It was supposed to be, and I do remember that we were, they were allowed to kiss. And there were certain words that were allowed and certain, breast was allowed, but nipple wasn't.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  Why were you, what? Why were you writing about breasts?

• 8:20Speaker 04

  Because it was that sort of a magazine, Honey. It was, you were on the edge.

• 8:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  There was nothing happening, you could think about it. But none, there was, he had a fast car. He had a little sports car, Luke Jarvis.

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Fictional character.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  And I wrote his diary.

• 8:36Speaker 05

  Oh, I see.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  And I was given a list of things that you could talk about and couldn't talk about, words you could use and couldn't use. And I do remember that nipple was one of the banned words.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Fair enough. I don't know, no one wants to bandy the word nipple around, not even nowadays.

• 8:49Speaker 04

  Certainly not. And also, given that you know me now, imagine what I was like at 20. I would have been a ludicrous figure writing this. I didn't know what the swinging sixties scene was. And then I was supposed to be writing about it.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  But actually, that's, I think that's what's interesting in today's chat with Dylan Jones. I mean, this is such a fascinating interview that you're about to hear. Not just the magazine bit of the chat, which is fascinating, but Dylan's childhood is so interesting.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  So in a nutshell, for people who are just thinking, oh, Dylan Jones, Dylan Jones, who is Dylan Jones?

• 9:23Speaker 05

  I was going to say that one of the things he says is that. He was at the forefront. So Swinging Sixties is what you're talking about, Honey, Nova, these magazines. Dylan Jones was at the heart of what he called the second wave of London cool, or maybe the third.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  This is the nineties?

• 9:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, the eighties and nineties. Yeah. And at the heart of that was magazine, was music, was fashion, and magazines were very, very important, spreading and disseminating this culture. And he talks about other magazines which people will have heard of, like Face ID. And GQ was a sort of heir to those amazingly cool arena, which Dylan worked on. That's how he started out. And then he went on to edit GQ, which was a big Conde Nast men's magazine. And he really made that into, you know, we had Graydon Carter and we were saying, he made Vanity Fair into the magazine to read. Well, Dylan Jones made GQ into the men's magazine.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  And when in the seventies and eighties, I was working as a young journalist, I'd remember going into the Conde Nast building, which I seem to think was in Barclay Square. It was a huge building and it was like going into a fantasy world.

• 10:38Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  Because the power of these magazines.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  The power of the editors.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  The power of the picture editors. The whole thing was a huge cultural phenomenon.

• 10:49Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, it's easy to forget that now because it doesn't exist.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  And to be a cover girl on a magazine like that, or to have a feature in it,

• 10:56Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  was big bananas.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  And if you're the editor, which Dylan was, you're a kingmaker. You know, you're, I mean, he talks about becoming David Bowie's journalist of choice. And he's getting personal 20 minute long phone calls from David Bowie, because Bowie knew, oh, I get in with this guy and I get my name out there. So, you know,

• 11:18Speaker 04

  This is a bit of a

• 11:19Speaker 05

  You're at the, you're at the centre of the culture.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  This is social history that we're going to listen to.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  But it's also personal history, and I think quite a painful kind, isn't it?

• 11:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  I mean, is this, should there be trigger warnings today? Because some of the issues touched on are difficult and uncomfortable.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yes, trigger warnings because unfortunately Dylan experienced a serious sexual assault or rape. So that is discussed, not in graphic detail, obviously, but it's mentioned. So please bear that in mind if you're listening with children or anything like that. And, but, you know, I think this is just so interesting.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  This, this isn't, when I was a child, I used to love the, there was a thing called the Radio Fun in my day. And then there was a TV comic I called every week. Radio Fun, the cover story was always, the cover cartoon was about Arthur Askey. This is a world away from that.

• 12:12Speaker 05

  No, but the thing is actually, I don't

• 12:14Speaker 04

  It evokes an era in a different way.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  Well, no, but also, I don't, I don't think it is just misery. You know, I actually

• 12:21Speaker 04

  Oh no, our conversation isn't at all.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's so interesting. Oh yeah. And it's also got mentions of domestic violence as well. So yeah, so yeah, there are serious things discussed in the first half of the interview.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  Don't let that put you off.

• 12:33Speaker 05

  No, absolutely not.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  It is a human story and then a social story, a publishing story. Well, it's the story of our times.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. And we should say too, that Dylan has a really interesting book out about the London restaurant scene in the nineties.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Oh, and he and I

• 12:52Speaker 05

  Called Table Hopping.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  I remember this because we talk about several restaurants that I knew first time round.

• 12:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  That he came to explore later.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, like Langham.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 13:01Speaker 05

  And Lescais Go. And yeah, the golden age of London restaurants. So that's discussed in this episode too. So it's a fascinating episode.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  I wanted to mention in passing and, but people will think, oh, well, come on, let's get on with Dylan Jones. But I will just say to people that Christmas is coming.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  And we've just confirmed that we're going to be having a Christmas party for members of the Rosebud family.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Crumbs, this is a big announcement we're making here, guys.

• 13:27Speaker 04

  Have we not shared it with people before?

• 13:28Speaker 05

  No, we've shared it with the Rosebud family

• 13:31Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  on Sundays, but we haven't told everybody else. Hello, everyone.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Well, hello, everyone else. As you know, Rosebud is here for everybody, free at the point of delivery, and on a Tuesday and on a Friday. On a Tuesday, often, we have my diaries, which I read with Harriet. And then we also have interviews, like the one today with Dylan Jones, and the one we had last week with the great Don Black. I loved that.

• 13:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, his show is so good at the Garrick Theatre. Anyway, that's by the by. But we have also for people who, who want to listen without ads.

• 14:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  And I think most podcasts do this. We have a service where you don't have to listen to the ads.

• 14:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, a club.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  A club. And we call it the Rosebud family. And there are little add-ons as well.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it is like a family, isn't it?

• 14:19Speaker 04

  It's so like a family. We do an episode every Sunday, and it's become much more, much more and more family-like every Sunday, isn't it?

• 14:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's quite intimate, I would say. Giles and I chat and we share sort of indiscretions and secrets.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Well, one of the episodes is called Family Secrets. And I think we have actually, there've been some family secrets.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  Giles came out on there three weeks ago, didn't you Giles?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Okay. And there are trips down memory lane and we do

• 14:44Speaker 05

  LOL.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  We, we, we read from some of our favourite books. Anyway, we thought, we can't have, because we're very lucky. We are very lucky indeed. I will mention this to you, Harriet, on air. We have had on YouTube, which we only just joined recently, wait for it, 11 million views.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  We've gone up a million.

• 15:10Speaker 05

  Gosh, you have been watching a lot of YouTube, Giles.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  In a fortnight.

• 15:14Speaker 05

  Woo.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  The fastest growing YouTube channel there.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  What?

• 15:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:21Speaker 05

  In the world or in?

• 15:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:23Speaker 05

  In SW?

• 15:24Speaker 04

  No, in the world.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  What?

• 15:26Speaker 04

  In a particular week. And they couldn't believe that we grew by 10% in a week.

• 15:29Speaker 05

  That's crazy.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  Do you remember we were at 10 million only a week ago, two weeks ago?

• 15:32Speaker 05

  Blimey, that's the Jeffrey Archer effect, Giles.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Oh, maybe it is.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think so.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  Because we, we, that last conversation I had with Jeffrey.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  God rest, God rest his soul.

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Anyway, that's quite exciting. So the point is, we can't have millions of people to the party. So

• 15:49Speaker 05

  Right. Sorry, this, we're, we're taking a rambly way to say, yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  We're taking a rambly way to say.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  We're having a party.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  We're having a party on the 5th of December at Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane.

• 16:01Speaker 05

  But.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  But because we can't have a million people, or even a hundred thousand people, or even a thousand people, we're already going to have a hundred or 200 people, we're going to invite first of all, members of the Rosebud family.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  So if you are a member of the Rosebud family, please send us an email. If you're not and would like to join, it's very easy to join. You simply go to Patreon, P A T R E O N dot com forward slash Rosebud, patreon dot com Rosebud. And you can find out about joining the club.

• 16:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  For ad-free listening and for some extras, including an invitation to the party for free.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, essentially, the party's free to Rosebud family members. So yes, if you'd love to come and meet Giles and me and hear some carols and have a mint pie and a hot chocolate or a mulled wine and see Giles' Christmas jumper and go to Grosvenor House, which is a lovely place to be, near Oxford Street, so you can do some Christmas shopping too. If you want to do that, it'll be a really lovely event. You need to be a member of the Rosebud family, which is $4.99 plus VAT a month.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Fine.

• 17:09Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah. So that's so exciting, isn't it? We're having our first party.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  So we're having our first party. Please, what, if you like watching, Dylan Jones will be on our YouTube channel as well, won't he?

• 17:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 04

  With, at the moment, it's just the, the interviews that go onto YouTube. You just go to YouTube and you put on the Rosebud Podcast Channel or Giles Brandreth Rosebud and it'll find us.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  And there are lots and lots of our conversations to, to watch.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  Um, which is fun.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can see all Giles' different jumpers.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And all, but more to the point, you can see our guests in conversation.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  Because I find watching it is slightly different to listening to it. But I still want to listen first.

• 17:47Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  I listen first, I watch later. And I think listening to Dylan Jones is moving and funny. And it's a portrait of a time that is quite gripping. I think we've created a bit of social history with this episode.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  Agreed.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  Good. Okay. That's enough from Harriet Jane and from me, Giles Brandreth, except I'm staying with you because I'm moving from what I am now. But I'm going to say something. And then after I've said it, you'll hear some music. And then you'll hear me with Dylan Jones. Cue the music.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  Dylan Jones, born on the 18th of January 1960.

• 18:38Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Good. I've got the right person, the right date of birth. What is your very first memory?

• 18:46Speaker 06

  I'm not, I have a variety of first memories, but my strongest memory is coming back home when I was five and my mother had just had my brother. And I was really out of sorts because she looked like my mother, but she was a lot thinner. So I sort of didn't trust her for a while. And then I went outside in the back garden and saw this creature in a pram, which obviously I didn't like because he was getting all the attention. That's my strongest memory from childhood.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  Do I probably have memories of, I had a metal car as a toy, quite an extravagant toy, when we were in Anglesey in our forces house. I don't know how old I was there, probably around the same time, probably five.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 19:41Speaker 06

  Is that, is that late?

• 19:42Speaker 04

  That's quite late, three to five is about right. Yeah. Let's begin to unpack that. Where is this home, the first home where your brother comes? Who is the mother, who is the brother?

• 19:53Speaker 06

  The thing is, I was, I was conceived in London, but I was born in a RAF hospital somewhere on the outskirts of Ely, because my father was in the air force. My mother was a WAF and they met, I think, when they were in Egypt, just after the war. Yeah, so we moved around a lot when I was a boy.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  So conceived in London.

• 20:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  You are the first born?

• 20:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, my brother Dan is five years younger than me.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  So tell me a little bit more about these parents of yours. They met in the RAF?

• 20:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, my mother, working class from Neesden, father was a greengrocer.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Her father was a greengrocer?

• 20:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's that thing, that generation who wouldn't talk about the war because the war was so important to them and so transformative. But when she did talk about the war, it all, it all came out.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  What came out?

• 20:50Speaker 06

  Well, just her impressions of it, how awful it had been. Yeah, it, and how it had just changed everyone's life. She, she became a WAF, I can't remember in precise what circumstances, but she did it to travel the world because she had no prospects. And I've got these amazing pictures of her when she was younger, surrounded by men, just happy. And it was an odd thing for a person like that to do at the time.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  1950s girl?

• 21:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, late 40s, yeah. Just after the war, so I think 46, 47. And then my father, his father was a farmer, sort of lower middle class. And yeah, they met in Egypt and they, and they married in Egypt.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  So they met, they were serving in Egypt?

• 21:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Married in Egypt?

• 21:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  And what is your first recollection of them together as a couple?

• 21:46Speaker 06

  There are instances when I was young, when the RAF life was quite, it felt quite glamorous. Because we'd be in these, these quarters in different places around the world.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  What rank was your father?

• 22:01Speaker 06

  He was Flight Lieutenant, then Squadron Leader.

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Was that senior?

• 22:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, until he came out in the early 70s and tried to become Lovejoy for a while and then went back into the forces. It did seem quite glamorous, but most of my recollections of them as parents was of them fighting. And that's, that was a very strong narrative of my childhood.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Let's just describe each of them. What did your mother look like? And what was her name?

• 22:41Speaker 06

  She was called Audrey, Audrey Wilshire. I thought she was very glamorous. I look at pictures of her today, when she was in her late teens, twenties and early thirties, quite glamorous. And my father, I mean, I've got one picture, which I love of them, which is when they were sort of in their pomp, there at a cocktail party. It's very 1950s, which is a very evocative period. Anyway, he's in a mess suit, she's dressed up, they're both smoking, they've got cocktails. That's how I like to remember them, although that, it seemed to be one of, one of few sort of isolated memories that I have.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  What was his name?

• 23:24Speaker 06

  Michael.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  And what did he look like?

• 23:27Speaker 06

  He was tall, he was strapping, quite athletic, became very fat in, in old age, but yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  And do you have a moustache? Because they were allowed to wear moustaches, weren't they?

• 23:40Speaker 06

  I think he, I think he probably experimented like they all did because they could, as you say. But like a lot of things back then, the forces was respected enormously, as you know. And being in the RAF was a, was a smart thing. It was a, it felt glamorous, because it felt like important work.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  But your early recollections of them, are them fighting? Have you any idea why they were fighting?

• 24:07Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah. I think there were, there were, yeah, there were lots of indiscretions on, on both sides. And I think that led to...

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Marital indiscretions, running off with other people?

• 24:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Having affairs?

• 24:22Speaker 06

  Very well put.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  But just nailing it properly?

• 24:25Speaker 06

  And lots of domestic violence. My, my father was very violent, very violent.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  From an early stage with your mother or with you?

• 24:33Speaker 06

  Uh, no, with, with my mother and, and then me, yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  And were you aware of that as a little boy?

• 24:39Speaker 06

  What do you mean?

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Did you, well, you can't, not, obviously when it was happening to you, you were, but in relation to your mother?

• 24:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  The first recollection is you, aged five, your mother is thin, she's come home.

• 24:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think...

• 24:51Speaker 04

  A brother has arrived.

• 24:53Speaker 06

  I, I mean, I was beaten a lot as a child, a lot. And I think a lot of it happened before I was five.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Before you were even conscious of remembering it?

• 25:03Speaker 06

  Because my brother didn't really suffer the same things that I did. I mean, I was, yeah, it was pretty horrible.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  And when you say you were beaten, what was, what do you remember happening to you?

• 25:14Speaker 06

  Being punched, being hit, being kicked.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  Being punched in the head, in the face? And you are five years of age or younger?

• 25:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  And your dad, is he a drinker?

• 25:24Speaker 06

  Not really.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  So what?

• 25:26Speaker 06

  I think it was frustration, I think. Yeah, I think that's where most of these things could come, come from, whether it was economic, sexual, to do with status, I, I don't know. I mean, I've had a fair amount of therapy in my, in my time, but I did the Hoffman once.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  And what's that?

• 25:48Speaker 06

  It's a, it's a course you go on to go deep, which I didn't want to go on, but my wife told me I ought to, and it was a fascinating thing. And I did remember things I hadn't remembered before, but it's...

• 25:59Speaker 04

  Can you give me an example of what you remember?

• 26:01Speaker 06

  Uh, being locked under the stairs for an afternoon and...

• 26:04Speaker 04

  And this is, how old are you at this time?

• 26:06Speaker 06

  Probably around five, five or six, yeah, maybe smaller.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  So from the time of your memory existing onwards, one of the recollections is your dad, did you call him dad or?

• 26:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, nothing else.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  Your dad punching you?

• 26:23Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Hitting you in the back of his hand as well?

• 26:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  Uh, kicking you?

• 26:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, occasionally, yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  And then locking you in a cupboard under the stairs?

• 26:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Among other things?

• 26:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  Is this done in anger?

• 26:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  And where does the anger come from?

• 26:38Speaker 06

  Like, like I say, I don't, I don't know, I assume it's, it's frustration.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  But what is triggering it on the, on the days it happens? Because you might be trying to avoid it.

• 26:47Speaker 06

  Well, I think my, I think my life has always been about avoidance, actually. I'm a very careful person, I try to be, not always successfully, but...

• 26:59Speaker 04

  I can get where you might be now, thinking back on it, but what I'm trying to get at is what it must be like if you can remember being five or six or seven.

• 27:07Speaker 06

  You're in, you're in a state of chaos all the time, potential chaos. And voices would be raised, things would be thrown, arguments would ensue. And then your collateral damage, because you're, because you're in the way. And you've done something that wasn't right and you're, you're, you're stupid or you've... Yeah, I mean, I don't want to sound like a misery memoir, because I think lots of people had this, you know, and it's a generational thing, but it's, I mean, I had a terrible, I still stammer, it's, it's obviously a lot less pronounced than it was, but I, yeah, I stammered when I was young.

• 27:51Speaker 06

  I couldn't, and I found it very difficult to say my name and introduce myself because D is literally the worst thing to pronounce if you have a stammer. Because I did a lot of work on this as an adult, journalistically as well. Yeah, I mean, this, this sounds really boring, but it's, yeah, it was, there were elements of my childhood which were very challenging.

• 28:13Speaker 04

  So these incidents occur, from what an impression you're giving me, there's a row between them, the tension is between them, and you are getting in the way.

• 28:22Speaker 06

  Kind of.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  And it's, oh God, Dylan, get out of the way. And in his fury, he is, he's hitting you. Are you fighting back? You defending yourself?

• 28:29Speaker 06

  No.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  You run into your bedroom, locking the door?

• 28:32Speaker 06

  I only did it once and it was the last time, I was 16. And he, I mean, he'd become a lot less violent as I'd got older. And like I say, my brother wasn't really subject to this at all. But yeah, it still wasn't an easy relationship. But yeah, he got, he tried to get physical with me when I was 16 and I pushed him up against a wall and that was it, that was the, that was the...

• 29:00Speaker 04

  He never did it again?

• 29:01Speaker 06

  No.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  And when this was happening, when you were younger, what was your mother's attitude? Did she intervene?

• 29:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm... Yeah, she did.

• 29:15Speaker 06

  I think as I got older, I perhaps began to think that she hadn't intervened.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  Enough.

• 29:21Speaker 06

  Enough, yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  And when you were small, did you share this with anyone? Your brother was five years younger, so he was too young, but did you have friends outside the home? Who would you remember your first friend?

• 29:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I wouldn't have shared something like that. I mean, I didn't. I never shared it. I don't think I shared it.

• 29:39Speaker 06

  I probably with with with, yeah, when when you start having girlfriends, you start having partners. And the thing that always surprised me was I'd say this almost in passing and it it people would be quite shocked. Whereas for me, it was that was what happened when I was younger and um, your character is formed because of it and you develop mechanisms and shells and ways of coping with things. God, it sounds real.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  No, can I say?

• 30:11Speaker 06

  Really indulgent. I don't want to sound indulgent.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  It isn't indulgent because I'm asking you the questions because I want answers. B, can I say I am shocked? I'm shocked and I'm distressed for you, even though we're going back sixty years.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  I'm distressed for you. And I think it is worth talking about because it really happened.

• 30:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  Was it happening on a daily basis, a weekly basis, once a month? Obviously, less as the years went by, but when you were a little boy.

• 30:38Speaker 06

  It felt like it was constant.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 06

  It felt like it was constant.

• 30:44Speaker 06

  And I've written about it and the older I became, um, when obviously being a journalist for forty years, you where everything is copy, you do start to write about it. And I've written about it in in in memoirs and um, I sometimes feel a bit guilty about sharing it and thinking, was it really that bad? But I think I think it was actually that bad. It was, yeah, it was pretty awful.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  And was there a safe space at all at home? What was your bedroom like? Describe your bedroom.

• 31:14Speaker 06

  Well, we had so many because we moved around. We'd moved, we'd move every year or every fifteen months or or or something. And when I was younger, um, I mean, almost always sharing with my brother. I mean, you know, they weren't grand houses. Um, so, yeah, I probably, I think every bedroom I had until I was sort of eleven or twelve, thirteen, fourteen, maybe, um, was was shared with my brother.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Give me the best memory of your childhood before you're eleven or twelve.

• 31:42Speaker 06

  Christmas, because Christmas is always a safe space. It's a place where they obviously went out of their way not to argue. And Christmas has always been very important to me. As an adult, as a parent, as a as a family person, Christmas to me is sacrosanct. I, because when I was younger, I tried to make Christmas laugh for as long as possible. Because they didn't seem to fight and I didn't seem to get hit. So the run up to Christmas was always very exciting and

• 32:14Speaker 06

  I tried to encourage my father not to go back to work for as long as possible because um, yeah, because that was a, Christmas was a very important period. So that was the, that was the the safe space, I suppose.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  And did they stay together?

• 32:33Speaker 06

  Um, they they split up many times. So you would, there would be a sense of abandonment as well.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  And when they split up, did you stay with your mum or the aunties that you went to stay with or grandparents?

• 32:45Speaker 06

  I would spend time with both of them. And then my mother had, um, she would have uh, she was bisexual. I think my, I I always thought my father was bisexual too, but I've never got any proof of it. Um, but yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  So she had girlfriends, did she?

• 33:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Um, and were were you aware of that as a child?

• 33:07Speaker 06

  Not really.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  No, because one isn't. One doesn't know about one's parents' sex life, really.

• 33:12Speaker 06

  Auntie Rita was very prevalent.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Ah, she she was a family friend.

• 33:17Speaker 06

  Family friend, yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Who was often there.

• 33:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  Um, wearing a tweed jacket possibly.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think she probably was. Actually, I think she worked in the Scotch house.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  Oh, well, literally, a Scottish tweed jacket. Bingo, I got it in one there.

• 33:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, staff discount.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  And she was just your mum's special friend?

• 33:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think so, yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  And so, but eventually, it was clearly just, it wasn't going to work for them. And but were you grown up by the time they properly split up?

• 33:42Speaker 06

  No, it was, um, I, I think they properly split up. The thing is, my father would travel a lot because he was in the forces and he would be in South America or Kenya or, I don't know, I mean, all over the place. We travelled a lot and he was not often home, which was a a blessing, obviously.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  From the moment you backed him up against the wall.

• 34:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  The violence ceased. Did you, in later years, ever talk to him about it? Do you ever address him on this issue?

• 34:13Speaker 06

  Not really. My wife always said that I should confront him because she said I would regret it and I I'm not sure I'd regret it, but it possibly would have been easier. He, I mean, we had a a a pretty good relationship when he was older. He'd calm down, he was slurry, he was full of regret and he'd be talked about it occasionally, he would apologize, but there was certainly no, there wasn't a narrative that I could take out of that to excuse the behaviour. And I probably didn't prod enough. I'd, um, I, yeah, I I didn't, um.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  You don't excuse it, but do you forgive it? Do you forgive him in your head?

• 34:56Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, I suppose so. I I I try not to dwell on it because it.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  When did he die?

• 35:02Speaker 06

  Um, about ten years ago.

• 35:05Speaker 06

  They died like always happens. My mother died and then he died quite quickly afterwards, so.

• 35:10Speaker 04

  Oh, because they were still in some ways codependent, you think?

• 35:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, they were living in, um, um,

• 35:16Speaker 06

  in a sort of RAF retirement community behind GS, GCHQ in Cheltenham. And it it turned into a Beckett play in the end. I mean, because lives shrink. There's always guard against downsizing. Because you downsize and you downsize and you downsize and you end up in a Beckett play.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  Like two dustbins on stage, a man in one and a woman in the other. That's the entire play.

• 35:40Speaker 06

  I hate you. I've always hated you. And I think the the dynamic changes because I think that my, and as my mother towards the end of her life became very ill and immobile and racked with illnesses and malfunctions. And she took it out on my father and my father basically became her carer and she she she didn't treat him very well because she obviously felt that she hadn't been treated well herself.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  There's a Noel Card song that begins, "We are a dear old couple and we loathe one another and we've loathed one another for a very long time."

• 36:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  And then the other passengers go by and they're smiling, waving at them.

• 36:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Were people outside of the family aware of this?

• 36:24Speaker 06

  I would imagine so because I'm a, I'm, I like to think I'm a quite gregarious person now and I love, love people. I love meeting people. I love big families and I like, I just, yeah, um, even though I can be very solitary, but I but I like that. And I think it's because we didn't have, my my my my parents didn't appear to have family friends. Which I I always thought was quite odd. And I would have liked that. I would have liked a bigger family. I would have liked my parents to be more social because also if you, if if your parents are not social, you don't really learn up knowing how to behave. And I always think that's, you know, when you, when you grow up and you become a teenager and then

• 37:09Speaker 06

  you go to college and university, I mean, going to art school for me was, in many respects, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was an obsession I'd had since I was sort of eleven or twelve.

• 37:23Speaker 06

  And the added benefit of going to St. Chelsea and then St. Martin's in those day, in in the days when people didn't do that, when it was an odd thing to do and you felt very special doing it, not like now, um, you'd meet people from backgrounds. You had no inclination, you had no understanding that these backgrounds existed. All these people could be like this from these backgrounds. Fascinating. Rich, poor, this one, that one. Amazing.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Well, before we get to that stage, that glorious stage from your life.

• 37:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 04

  Let's just finish with your childhood. At home, there is all this going on. We have a bisexual mother, a violent father. We have a boy with a stammer because of the way he's constantly beaten, living in a world of chaos. The younger brother who escapes this because you are the focus because you're in the way. You go to school. How are you at school? You're obviously not sharing this with anyone at school. Your first, your primary school, did you do okay?

• 38:23Speaker 06

  I took, years later, about ten years ago, we were doing some work supporting Nick Jones at Soho House because he he is famously dyslexic. And I had a meeting in my office in Conde Nast, in Vogue House, with a very nice woman who ran the National Dyslexia Organisation. And we had all these chats about what we were going to do to support and, you know, charitable events and this one and that one. And then she said, um, "You're dyslexic." I said, "Thank you very much, but I'm not." And then she gave me a test to do and I did all this. And I, so I think when I was, I know everyone blames everything on everything now. You become alphabet people. Um, but I think I was dyslexic. I definitely had learning difficulties. I didn't do very well academically.

• 39:09Speaker 06

  And I found it very difficult to retain information. So I I went to a, I went to a primary school and then then I I failed my eleven plus and went to a various secondary moderns. Um, so I didn't have a a a great education and I'd become a classic autodidact, I suppose, like lots of people.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  You were moving from different schools because you were in different parts of the country.

• 39:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, and and and the world, yeah.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  And the world.

• 39:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  And what, but were you quite sociable at school? Did you get, manage to get on reasonably well with the other boys and girls?

• 39:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I think there was a period when I became a joker because that was the easiest thing to do as people do. Yeah, because every twelve or fifteen months, you're in a completely different social environment and you have to start again.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Were you still having the stammer at this stage?

• 39:52Speaker 06

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  That went on until you were an adult, did it?

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, until I was.

• 40:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's um, public speaking really helped. I used to hate public speaking. And now I, I quite enjoy it. Fun. And I have to, I've had to do so much with work.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  And it was entirely the stammer. There weren't other things. There wasn't bed wetting. There wasn't nightmares.

• 40:17Speaker 06

  No.

• 40:19Speaker 04

  Oh, something. So here you are at school and in your head, what's happening? You want to go to art school. You've decided that in your head? How did you discover this?

• 40:28Speaker 06

  I was very precocious, I think. And I loved the creative world. And I loved art. And I thought I was good at art. Probably wasn't. I wasn't a great reader. I'm a huge reader now, but I couldn't um, I didn't really read at all. Until I was ten or eleven, twelve maybe. But I, I, I drew. I was really into art, really into it. And then I discovered at a very precocious age, eleven, twelve, probably ten, I became obsessed with the world surrounding people like Andy Warhol and Tom Wolfe. I mean, and I'm reading Tom Wolfe books at the age of twelve.

• 41:10Speaker 06

  I'm not sure I really understood them. But I understood it a little bit. And I, I was incredibly curious.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  And you understood there was a world out there.

• 41:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, and it's, it's such a cliché, such a classic thing.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  There was abroad, of course. It was New York. It was.

• 41:25Speaker 06

  It's, it was kind of everything. London was big. I mean, lots of very eloquent artists and creative people have expresses, particularly musicians. Paul Weller's very good on it. Because I always felt in my heart that I was a Londoner, even though I sort of wasn't. But if you live on the outskirts of London, or if you live in the suburbs, you are obsessed with London. It's all that matters. It, all you care about is coming to London. And I used to love coming to London.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  What's your first best exciting London moment?

• 41:55Speaker 06

  As a kid, coming up at Christmas or to see film premieres, or not, probably wasn't a premiere, but you know.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  A film in London.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  A film in London.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  In Leicester Square.

• 42:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, I remember being in um, being in Oxford Street or Regent Street and seeing the chitty chitty bang bang car in a window, thinking, that's amazing. That's amazing. And then later, I would come up by myself. I'd go to Kensington Market and I'd seek out places I'd read about where David Bowie had been photographed on the cover of Zicky Stardust. And then I'd come up to gigs when I was sort of fourteen or fifteen and um, so it was always about London. Obsessive about London.

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• 43:39Speaker 01

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• 43:52Speaker 02

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• 43:53Speaker 03

  Hey, we're so excited for tonight. Before we come over, though, may I ask if there are any unlocked guns in your home?

• 43:59Speaker 02

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• 44:03Speaker 03

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• 44:05Speaker 01

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• 44:43Speaker 04

  Tell me about the first girl in your life, your first romantic encounter. Because clearly, she's the person you first began to tell your, your secrets to.

• 44:54Speaker 06

  The woman who broke my, broke my heart is a woman called Linda Shearsby, who I followed to St. Martin's School of Art when I was eighteen, seventeen, eighteen.

• 45:02Speaker 04

  And why was she so special? From what, something was said.

• 45:06Speaker 06

  To be callous, because she was first. And I think also, if you're my, if you're me, you don't share. And you've, and you're with someone that you started sharing and then that person is no longer there, you think you've been massively betrayed. So everything was heightened and exacerbated and it was so dramatic. And I look back upon it now. It's just a stupid adolescent affair. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you, you have, I always think you can have your heart broken once, but probably not twice or any more than that.

• 45:41Speaker 04

  Please don't dismiss it, because I think it's fundamentally important to you. Almost the first thing you said was that you kept it to yourself until you began to have a girlfriend. And you found somebody with whom you could share.

• 45:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  This terrible, terrible secret that had, was manifested in a stammer, but had ruined medical article early years. And this girl listened. You had someone to listen.

• 46:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  And that was lovely. So she did you a great service.

• 46:10Speaker 06

  This probably did.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  But then she lost interest.

• 46:12Speaker 06

  No, I stupidly got rid of her and then regretted it. I know, classic. I ticked all the boxes.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  Now, this is a memory I want to hear. How, when, when was the day? How did you get rid of her? What did you say? What happened?

• 46:24Speaker 06

  I can't remember. I, I think I found her.

• 46:26Speaker 04

  Try to remember.

• 46:28Speaker 06

  You're tough, aren't you?

• 46:29Speaker 04

  No, well, I know, because this is.

• 46:30Speaker 06

  I think I was nineteen and, I don't know, I think

• 46:37Speaker 06

  when you're young, unsophisticated people, you don't have the ability, you don't learn the ability or attempt to have the ability to compromise and understand other people's issues and to, and to be har, try to be harmonious. I think we all think that we're individual people and you're sort of looking for someone to dovetail perfectly. And of course, that doesn't happen. And you grow up, you mature, and you understand that you have to adapt your behavior, I suppose. That's, yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  So you just gave up on her? Do you remember if you told her, oh, you wrote, people used to write notes in those days?

• 47:16Speaker 06

  Oh, no, we would have had a row on that and that would have been it.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  A slam door and you left and that was it.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  And one, one of us got on the nineteen bus back to Chelsea and the other one probably mooched around Soho for a while. Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  In your teenage years, you'd also had an attack, physical, sexual attack? What was that?

• 47:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  In the cuttings I've got.

• 47:39Speaker 06

  That, well, it's true, yeah.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Rape age seventeen.

• 47:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was, yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Unpack that a little bit.

• 47:44Speaker 06

  Um, being drunk at someone's house, having had a lift, drinking too much, passing out, waking up, being raped.

• 47:53Speaker 04

  By a man?

• 47:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:55Speaker 04

  An older man?

• 47:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. But again, I think throughout my life, I've been very good at minimizing things.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  Did you complain about it at the time? No?

• 48:08Speaker 06

  No.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  Just happened?

• 48:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't enjoy it. I, I fleetingly, I've written about it. I fleetingly thought, you know, for seconds, am I enjoying this? And then realized immediately that I wasn't. But it's um, I didn't, the reason I, I very rarely spoke about it was not because I was embarrassed. And the reason I only wrote about it recently, when it became so un, I thought so unimportant in my life, was the same reason. I didn't want to talk about it or write about it because I didn't want to minimize the experience for other people. And I know a fair number of people who've been raped and it's awful and it's traumatic and it had leaves, shooed scars.

• 48:53Speaker 06

  That wasn't my experience. And so

• 48:59Speaker 06

  and even when I was more, when, when I was callow and young, and you sort of have things in your life that you have as, have as badges to kind of impress upon people that you've had a tough time and oh, I didn't talk about it then. But, but I think I was sophisticated enough to know that it was so awful as a, as an act for most people, that for me to, to talk about it would have been to min, to have minimized it for other people.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Can you remember the moment you began to be able to trust people? Given that your mother, you felt, let you down, your father was violent to you, you were violated, age seventeen. Can you remember the first moment of being with somebody and thinking, this is okay, I can trust now?

• 49:50Speaker 06

  Uh, probably when I met my wife.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Gosh, when was that?

• 49:55Speaker 06

  I was thirty-four.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  Wow. So it's a long time to be mistrustful of the world.

• 50:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  How did it manifest itself in your behavior generally?

• 50:13Speaker 06

  I think I became a shapeshifter. You fit in, you learn to fit in. You have your own agenda, but you keep things very, you know, you clam up. You don't, you don't share in that way.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  No.

• 50:28Speaker 06

  That's, that's a pretty banal way of looking at it, but I'd say that's pretty, pretty, pretty true, I think.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  So you control, you control yourself.

• 50:36Speaker 06

  It's all about control. Everything is about control.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  And you guard against being hurt by not being empathetic yourself.

• 50:44Speaker 06

  Well, I'm not empathetic.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Still to this day.

• 50:47Speaker 06

  I think I've become a little bit better. I mean, my, my wife has been very good at encouraging me and trying to develop me to be more empathetic. But I'm probably the least empathetic person I know. And I don't say that in a kind of, I don't think it's cool, but I think I generally am, yeah. I don't, I'm not overburdened with empathy.

• 51:07Speaker 04

  And what does that mean? You can't feel?

• 51:12Speaker 06

  Well, I can feel, yeah.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you do feel, you're a person of feelings, I can see that.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  Um.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  You don't feel for other people, you don't.

• 51:19Speaker 06

  Not really. My, my, my family and my friends, but I do remember thinking, I wrote about this once and I felt guilty for writing about it, about disasters and terrible things that happen in the world. And I think, well, there's just less people in the world now. It's awful, isn't it?

• 51:37Speaker 04

  Hmm. So you leave school.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  And you think, what am I going to do? What do you do?

• 51:44Speaker 06

  Um.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Do you get A levels? Do you do that?

• 51:48Speaker 06

  No. I had, I would, I had a very poor academic career. But I loved going to art school. That was literally the only thing. I didn't know, I've never had a plan, I never had a.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  These are good art schools you got into, the Chelsea Art School and St. Martin's. These are top, these are first division. So you had gift, you had a stat, you did, you got in.

• 52:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think I obviously had enough of a gift or I was lucky enough to get into Chelsea. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm so lucky.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  And why is it the best thing? Define in practical terms, why it made a difference.

• 52:21Speaker 06

  Because I moved to Chelsea in the summer of nineteen seventy seven. The world of punk rock is exploding and not only am I in Chelsea School of Art, which is a brilliant place to be, and I'm meeting all these amazing people and kind of doing what I want to do, which is make stuff and be creative and learn and travel and get on buses and go to places and go to nightclubs and gigs and shops and stare at restaurants. And it was amazing. I just loved it. But also I was in a place called the Routhwest Halls of Residence, which is no longer there, which was on Albert Bridge Road, which is where one went if one had been accepted

• 53:04Speaker 06

  at a central London art school and you didn't live in London. I lived right at the end of a corridor, I can't remember what floor, what floor I was on. But it's that time when everyone is so passionate about music. And walking along the corridor, you'd hear the Sex Pistols coming out of one room, Genesis coming out of another one, reggae here, soul, all of this stuff. It was, it was fantastic. It was like a, like a jukebox. And also, as I said before, because you're meeting people from, you know, I'd never met a Liverpudlian before, I'd never met someone who was insanely posh before. In some respects, I had a very narrow life, even though I look back upon it, it seemed to be quite exotic. But it's, and suddenly you're exposed to all this, all this stuff.

• 53:49Speaker 06

  And it's, yeah, it's fascinating.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  And how did you get from that? You're, what, you're at art school, what are you going to be? What's your object?

• 53:56Speaker 06

  Well, I didn't have a Heseltine plan. I wish I had have done.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  Because Michael Heseltine wrote it on the, we had him on the podcast, on the back of an envelope.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, brilliant.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  It actually got him from where he was to be Prime Minister. It almost worked.

• 54:09Speaker 06

  I know, fantastic. I didn't have that. All I wanted to do from the age of eleven or twelve was go to art school. So when I went to art school, I had no, I had no ambitions.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 06

  And then I became very good at going to nightclubs. But even I realized that that was a pretty dissolute and narrow thing. I, I knew I had to get out of it. And so I was skirting around the worlds of media. And then I was lucky enough to be plucked out of nowhere. And I think, and this is very important to me. I lived in a housing association flat in Peckham. My life consisted of getting up as late as possible, going out for fast food, coming back, watching Channel Four and then going to a nightclub. And that's pretty much what I did on the days that I wasn't a film extra.

• 55:02Speaker 06

  And I was a film extra and I was in two films. I shoot down Roger Moore's plane in Octopussy, You're Welcome. And I was also in a nightclub scene, which was filmed at Heaven in the David Bowie, Catherine de Nerve movie, The Hunger, where Bauhaus are playing Bela Lugosi's death. And I had to walk up and down this stainless steel staircase in front of Bowie and Catherine de Nerve, which at the age of twenty is quite, was quite exciting. And then I got a call from a photographer friend of mine called Mark Bailey. He said, what are you doing tomorrow? And I said, well, I'm probably getting up very late, going blah, blah, blah. And he said, well, I need someone to interview these people I'm shooting for ID Magazine.

• 55:47Speaker 06

  I said, I'll do that. So I went up to a photographic studio, I think in Holborn, and I interviewed all these people. And I think my questions were the level of sophistication and sort of, where did you buy your clothes and how much do you hate Margaret Thatcher? That kind of thing. And I came back and my father had given me this old red Remington typewriter. And I typed it up, put it in an envelope, got a second class stamp, posted it. And then off to Terry Jones, who ran ID Magazine and had been a very prominent art director of Vogue. And then I was a friend of mine in St. Charles Square in Notting Hill, Abbot Grove. Couple of weeks later, because I didn't have a telephone, said, we're looking for Dylan, you know, reason.

• 56:32Speaker 06

  And I, and I was there and he offered me a job. And, and I look at all these interviews and I read all these reams of people talking about how brilliant they are and all this stuff. Someone gave them all a break. And people don't talk about the people who gave them breaks. And if it hadn't been for Terry Jones, I don't know what I would have done. But he saw something in me that I didn't see. I think he saw enthusiasm. I couldn't write to save my life. I mean, I look back at some of that stuff now, I literally grew up in public. Because some of this stuff was published, it was gibberish. But it didn't matter, it was enthusiastic. And yeah, and then I threw myself into it. And as soon as I went into that room, I realized that I didn't want to do anything else and I just loved it so much.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  And that's how you spent your life?

• 57:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  And I think it probably suited you then because you are, as a journalist, you're an observer.

• 57:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  You can legitimately stay a little bit outside.

• 57:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Forming any intimacy.

• 57:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  And yet you can see it all and they have to give you what they've got to give you.

• 57:35Speaker 06

  Correct. Yeah, you're always, it's liminal. Yeah, you're always on the edge. And because I was never a great joiner. I met a lot of people and I'd been involved in a lot of worlds, but I never had both feet in. I had one foot out.

• 57:50Speaker 04

  I mean, looking through the cuttings, there's nobody of that era, and indeed later because of your twenty-two years on GQ, that you haven't met or known. So give me your favorite stories. Give me, give me the ones, give me the ones that stand out still, that if you, when your head hits the pillow, you think, oh yeah, actually, I'm glad, I'm glad I've spent my life doing that.

• 58:12Speaker 06

  Oh, I've, I've been lucky enough to meet some extraordinary people. And after a while, you learn that you can manufacture this meeting and say, I want to interview so and so. And.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  And it happens.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  But at the, at the same time, when I was working on ID and then went to work for Nick Logan, who had the face and arena, we knew very arrogantly and conceitedly, we were writing about the third iteration of Swinging London. So you had the sixties and the ad lib and David Bailey. Then you had the seventies with Ritz and punk and boulevard and all those wonderful things. And then in the eighties, we knew that we were the bees knees and we were arrogant and cocky and conceited. And we knew that as well as writing about this world, that we were part of it.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  Give me an example of one of the people that you encountered or wrote about that, where you actually think you got below the surface or even got to know them. I'm thinking of years ago being sent to interview Naomi Campbell, which I was. And it was a very interesting experience.

• 59:19Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Uh, but I came away with nothing. I wrote a perfectly serviceable piece, but I couldn't, I couldn't really tell you anything about the encounter. Whereas the same period, I was sent to interview Roman Polanski, had the same amount of time with him and came away having known someone and we stayed in touch.

• 59:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  So I'm looking for people like that in your experience.

• 59:40Speaker 06

  I think that you can, I, I mean, I can mirror that. If you, if you go and interview, if you have dinner, say with Mick Jagger, who's charming and funny and vibrant, et cetera, et cetera. You often come away, you're thinking, oh, that was amazing. And you can't remember much. Then you meet Keith and Keith mumbles and, you know, slurs and goes off on tangents. You, you play the tape back and you've got gold.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 06

  It's all there on the floor. All you've got to do is pick it up and sort of put it, put it together. Um, I was lucky enough to have a, a quite a good relationship with David Bowie. And.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  What does that mean? I mean, how, how would?

• 1:00:27Speaker 06

  I'll tell you, I'll tell you exactly. Bowie was someone, and he was criticized for this personality trait. Bowie was someone who latched on to people.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:00:40Speaker 06

  And it's writ large with musicians because he'd be with a musician and he'd suck everything out of that person and use it up and, and, and move on. And some people think that's very expedient. I think it's just clever collaboration. And like, like a few people, like a few bold faced names, he would go through periods of having a sort of a pet journalist. In the seventies, it might be someone like Charles Sharp Murray. But then it may have been someone like Tony Parsons in the eighties. And then in the nineties, I was one of those people, so.

• 1:01:22Speaker 06

  And which for me was such a joy because he had been like many people of my generation, such a formative influence because I was obsessed with David Bowie, like many of us were, just completely obsessed. Now I think that obsession has turned into an industry and it's actually rather tiresome. But then perhaps I would say that because I think I've done it. But yeah, we did have a very good relationship.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  Give me an example of a moment in that relationship that is special in your memory.

• 1:01:53Speaker 06

  I've got a funny one. I remember I was at the Sunday Times and the phone rang. And we were in a part of the Sunday Times that was on the highway. It was awful. And our office was right up against the highways. You had like a motorway. And it was middle of winter, terrible thunderstorms outside. I think it was mid morning, the phone rang. And he had, his mother's name was either Peggy or Margaret, and he had a nickname. And he used the nickname. He said, is that, say, Margaret? And I said, no, is that David Bowie? And he said, yes, is that Dylan? And we'd done a phone interview like a week beforehand.

• 1:02:36Speaker 06

  It was the third or fourth time I'd interviewed him. I think he was doing, he was involved in a big project with Bosnia at the time. It was either that or the Laura Ashley wallpaper. It was one of the two. And he stayed on the phone for 20 minutes.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  All of this stuff.

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  I was never under the illusion that it was real. And I was never less than flattered. But would I trade that for not having it at all? Of course I wouldn't because it was brilliant. And he was a genuinely brilliant person. I also found it fascinating, knowing someone at close quarters, how they operated and how they charmed. And I think there are people, you can meet someone, George Martin, I don't know if you knew.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  I did know him, the producer.

• 1:03:30Speaker 06

  George Martin had an ability to, you can meet them for the first time. In a minute and a half, you think you've bonded with this person and you are soulmates. And he was brilliant at that.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  That's very interesting because I think, I now realise, I only met him three or four times. He was the guy who produced The Beatles. That was his first claim to fame. But I would put him on a list of my friends.

• 1:03:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, there you are.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  And I now have discovered.

• 1:03:55Speaker 06

  You're questioning that.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:03:57Speaker 06

  Some people have that innate ability. In some people, you think it's expedient and a bit not very nice. And other times you think, well, actually, go with it. It's nice.

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• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  What was the achievement of your 22 GQ years for you? Was it there that you started the man of the year? Was it?

• 1:06:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. That is probably the thing I'm most proud of because that was created out of a biscuit tin, basically.

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  Explain.

• 1:06:36Speaker 06

  I inherited, lucky enough to inherit this fantastic title at Conde Nast, got a lot of freedom. And we hired a lot of great writers and a lot of great photographers and produced something which was a very good, a very good product and very successful. And we made Conde Nast a lot of money. But one of the things that I inherited with this thing called Men of the Year, which is an award show that's been created for sort of marketing reasons. And it wasn't very good. And no one had any enthusiasm for it. And they kind of wanted to bin it, but they had a commercial relationship, which meant that we had to deliver another one. So we did it. It wasn't very good. And then my old

• 1:07:20Speaker 06

  publishing director said, I think we should, this year, we should, we should do a sit down. Like, okay. And we did it at the Royal Opera House. And we got two celebrities. We got Chris Tarrant and we got Paul McCartney. Oh, we had got Jamie Oliver as well. And I thought to myself, there might be something in this. And then we started taking it really seriously. And it became, apart from the Brits and the BAFTAs, it was the biggest thing in the entertainment industry. It was huge. And my, I had many doctrines and many policies, but I always wanted the person giving the award to be more famous than the

• 1:08:01Speaker 06

  person receiving. So you would have Martin Scorsese giving to Giorgio Armani, or Michael Caine giving to Madonna, or things like that. And it was, yeah, it was, it was, it was a big deal. It was a big deal. And then the following morning, quite early, I didn't care what, what time people, I said, if you can't come in, you can't go out. You can go out to six o'clock in the morning, but we've got an 8:30 meeting. We have a meeting the next day, post-mortem, where we'd be rigorous in all the things that weren't good enough. And then we wouldn't touch it for three months. We'd come back after Christmas and just work like stink. Six people, no more. And it was, yeah, it was, I'm really proud of that because it was really good and it was really fun.

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  And the proudest or most fun moment of those years?

• 1:08:50Speaker 06

  So many. The reason people came is because it was fun. And my ambition was always, when you're in the car leaving the event or the after-party, which tended to be at Matthew Freud's house, I wanted the talent to say to their hairdresser, girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, minder, PR, I'm really glad we did that. That's all you wanted. And it became something that people lobbied to get their talent involved with because they knew, A, it was a really good night, and it would get press. In the days when getting press

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  from something in print was a big, big deal. Anyway, I'm wanging on about that. But I was very, yeah, I'm very proud of that. It was, it was, it was a good thing.

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  Well, it's why you're here. It's, it's one of the great journalistic triumphs of our time.

• 1:09:46Speaker 06

  Well, you're very kind.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  No, and you did it. You did it. You made the magazine famous. You made that event famous. So congratulations. Tell me about the moment you first saw your wife. You literally first saw her, said Eisner. Where were you?

• 1:09:58Speaker 06

  I was at the Sunday Times, working with a friend of mine, and we'd just been invited to go on this leg. And when we were at the Sunday Times, he didn't do many legs.

• 1:10:07Speaker 04

  What's a leg?

• 1:10:08Speaker 06

  Like a freebie. Because we were working too hard. And also, Andrew, Andrew Neale was kind of frowned upon. You didn't just bug her off for a day to do a jolly.

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  Quite right.

• 1:10:19Speaker 06

  And, no, he was quite, he's quite right.

• 1:10:21Speaker 04

  He was the editor at the time.

• 1:10:24Speaker 06

  Tag Heuer were launching a watch. And it was in a stately home somewhere in the Midlands. And they'd hired Jonathan Palmer to do a race day where you went and you competitively drove half a dozen different types of cars, go-karts, Caterham sevens, four by fours, little sports cars, Formula Three, all this stuff. And we thought, we're doing this. And we, there was, there was a coach taking all these fashion people off to, and journalists off to the Midlands. And I got on and I saw her sitting, she was sitting with, she was working with Vogue at the time.

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  What was her name? What is her name?

• 1:11:02Speaker 06

  Sarah Walter.

• 1:11:03Speaker 04

  Sarah, Sarah Walter.

• 1:11:05Speaker 06

  Sarah with an H. And she was sitting, I think she was working at Harper's Bazaar, when there was Harper's Bazaar. And she was sitting next to a friend of hers called Kate Phelan, who worked for Vogue. And I clocked her and I thought, okay. And so we went up there, did all these races. Sarah, who'd just come back from living in Africa for four years, she won every race.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  Which was very impressive. And she was also awarded the driver of the day. Anyway, there was a dinner that evening and I'm sitting next to her. She had no interest in me. Anyway, after dinner, I get talking to her and we work out quite quickly that we own the same car. We drive the same car. It was a silver 1984 320i BMW. And we arranged to have a race around the M25. Okay?

• 1:11:55Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 1:11:57Speaker 06

  Silly, we're drunk. Anyway, I think two days later, or maybe the following day or two days later, I send her a note saying, Dear Sarah, to her work address, lovely to meet you. I capitulate, but would you like to have dinner? I send that. The very same day, she calls me up basically to say the same thing.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:12:24Speaker 06

  And then we had dinner. And the rest is history.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  Thirty-three years of history.

• 1:12:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:30Speaker 04

  And what was it in her, because she changed you, she's made you a normal person?

• 1:12:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, she has.

• 1:12:36Speaker 04

  How did she do that?

• 1:12:38Speaker 06

  By perseverance.

• 1:12:45Speaker 04

  I mean, she was taking on, not realising it, damaged goods.

• 1:12:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think she didn't, she had no idea how damaged, um, or what poor, what poor condition the goods were in. No, she's been amazing and she's stood by me through a hell of a lot. But she was pretty and sexy and funny and smart and, and probably quite normal, I think.

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  Can you give me an example of how in the early days she helped you?

• 1:13:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. And al- also, our fathers did exactly the same thing, exactly the same rank.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Oh, she had a father in the RAF who was also ended up as a whatever wing commander.

• 1:13:26Speaker 06

  Same rank, sort of really, yeah.

• 1:13:28Speaker 04

  Squadron leader.

• 1:13:29Speaker 06

  And, um, apart from herself and her being her, I think it was her family. She had a very strong family and, and I used to spend a lot of time with her family.

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  So she gave you the family you'd never had, to put it in a bit of a cliche. No, yes, yes?

• 1:13:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 06

  And I loved her parents. I really loved them.

• 1:13:57Speaker 04

  And how quickly did you have children?

• 1:13:59Speaker 06

  Oh, we had a huge row about that because I didn't want kids, probably because I thought.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  I put them through what I'd been through.

• 1:14:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I didn't, I suppose I didn't trust myself. I wasn't, I, I think I was very selfish. And yeah, the blueprint that I had, I didn't want to replicate.

• 1:14:19Speaker 04

  And she suggested you go to therapy, did she? Was she the one?

• 1:14:22Speaker 06

  No, I was, I, I, um, I started going to therapy, I don't really know why, in my early thirties.

• 1:14:30Speaker 06

  And my therapist, who I still very infrequently speak to,

• 1:14:36Speaker 06

  she, she said what therapists don't say and I loved her for it. She was the second therapist. I saw, I saw one who was just like my dad. He looked exactly like my father, sat in the corner, just wrote things and kind of grunted and I thought, waste of time, sorry. Um, and then I met Josephine and she was fantastic. And, and she said, so this works for you, putting things in boxes, does it? I said, yeah. She said, well, keep doing it.

• 1:15:06Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 1:15:07Speaker 06

  And I have.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  By that she meant compartmentalising?

• 1:15:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, compartmentalising.

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  Put that there, this is my work, this is my anger, this is my joy, does it work like that?

• 1:15:17Speaker 06

  This is the thing that causes me incredible anxiety. This, you know, quite a few of those. And yeah, put them in boxes, which traditionally is something that, oh, you can't do that.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  Ah, what causes you anxiety?

• 1:15:30Speaker 06

  Lots of things.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  Give me an example.

• 1:15:33Speaker 06

  Uh, macro, micro. Um, I don't like being outside my comfort zone at all, phys- physically or mentally. I'm, I always sit in the cinema, I always sit on the edge. Um, I'm very, very particular about where I sit in restaurants, not necessarily for kind of status reasons, I just, I like having my back to the wall. I, yeah, I'm very careful about where I, which roads I drive down. I don't like, I, I, when I try to, I try to eradicate surprise from my life.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  And this, we assume, goes all back to this childhood thing of trying to bring order to the chaos, so you know where you are. And when you put the things in the boxes, does that help?

• 1:16:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  If you put the anxiety in the box, we can forget.

• 1:16:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, occasionally, they, there, there's an overspill, but, um, yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 06

  I mean, I don't want to be overly dramatic, but, but, but, but yeah, it's a, it's a system and it works.

• 1:16:30Speaker 04

  You're in a good place now. Yeah.

• 1:16:32Speaker 06

  Generally, yes, I am.

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  And your work now, because GQ came to an end at your volition, you'd done enough? You wanted to move on?

• 1:16:39Speaker 06

  Not really. It was after Covid, the company went through a, a, a very swift transformation and basically reappointed itself so that everything is run out of New York. So there are satellite operations around the world, but it's basically a New York run company now. And then, uh, I did various bits and pieces and edited Evening Standard for two years, which I absolutely loved, even though I had to fire a lot of people, but as an experience. And, um, yeah, it was wonderful. I had a, a, a big thing for my book last night and lots of people from the Standard came and I loved them. They were fantastic, great group of people.

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  The book, this is your new book?

• 1:17:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 04

  And what is this called?

• 1:17:21Speaker 06

  It's called Table Hopping and it's the history of the London restaurant, basically since the war, but it, it really kicks off with Langon's, which is fifty years old.

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  Oh, I love it.

• 1:17:31Speaker 06

  Fifty years old, this, um.

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  I, I knew Peter Langon back in the Odins day.

• 1:17:35Speaker 06

  Did you? Good God.

• 1:17:36Speaker 04

  Yes, in Devonshire Street.

• 1:17:37Speaker 06

  I should have interviewed you. I wish I had have done.

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  And what the nightmare it was, uh, but the art in that restaurant.

• 1:17:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  Was colossal.

• 1:17:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, it was Odins who gave him the template for, for, for Langon's and which, which is something that everyone who is involved in that particular world has done since, which is you, you give, you donate and then you earn it down, don't you?

• 1:18:02Speaker 04

  And the mushroom brioche at Odins, I was one of the first customers at Odins.

• 1:18:07Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  Still features in my dreams.

• 1:18:10Speaker 06

  Really? I love that.

• 1:18:11Speaker 04

  As does Peter, interestingly, both in those early days.

• 1:18:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 04

  When he was attractive.

• 1:18:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Speaker 04

  Uh, and it was an honour.

• 1:18:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 04

  You felt, this is his restaurant, he came and sat at your table, all others stood over you and attended you. And even towards the end, I felt a kind of sentimental gratitude.

• 1:18:33Speaker 06

  Good. Cause he'd been important in your life.

• 1:18:36Speaker 04

  He'd been important.

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:37Speaker 04

  And I would go to Sotheby's where he'd be buying pictures.

• 1:18:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  And would see him shambling about.

• 1:18:41Speaker 06

  How wonderful.

• 1:18:42Speaker 04

  Oh, I can't wait to read this book. What's it called?

• 1:18:44Speaker 06

  It's called Table Hopping.

• 1:18:45Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:18:46Speaker 06

  Uh, the, the, um, the secrets of the London restaurant from Langan, Brasry to the Walsall League. And it's not really a book about food, it's about, it's a social history of London, it's those places we convened. One of the things that surprised me

• 1:19:03Speaker 06

  is the way in which the nineties is now perceived to be the golden period of the London restaurant. Not just for people who were there, but also for people who weren't there. And I, people now look upon the nineties in the way that I looked upon the sixties.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  Three more quick questions. Before I ask those, have you got a secret in your head?

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  Don't you tell it to me?

• 1:19:29Speaker 06

  I'm not going to. Um.

• 1:19:31Speaker 04

  But is there something?

• 1:19:32Speaker 06

  Not a big secret, no. I, I think I've had a, quite a public life. I think that I haven't shied away from talking about the, the problematic parts of my life. Um, we, I think everyone has secrets to a certain extent, but I don't have a big secret, no.

• 1:19:49Speaker 04

  I meant, do you have a secret that you haven't told Sarah?

• 1:19:53Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  Fine. That's good. So we get to our final three questions.

• 1:19:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Speaker 04

  Um, and I really have enjoyed your company.

• 1:20:02Speaker 06

  Me too.

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  And I'm really looking forward to your book. Um, I'm going to ask you three quick questions. One is for a moment in your life of joy. Suddenly, what comes into your head? A moment of joy, particularly, well, from your early years, because we talked a lot about childhood, but actually from any time in your life, just joy as it comes into your head right now.

• 1:20:22Speaker 06

  The penultimate day on the Hoffman course.

• 1:20:26Speaker 04

  How long does this last, this course?

• 1:20:27Speaker 06

  A week.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  A week. And it's residential?

• 1:20:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  And you go to get deep down into whatever is down there?

• 1:20:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:36Speaker 04

  What happened?

• 1:20:37Speaker 06

  Uh, the, the, the penultimate day is a day of euphoria. And I can't really describe it and I shouldn't describe it. You should, if you want to do it, you should go and do it yourself, but it's, um, uh, it was a good course, it's a correction, it's quite traumatic, but the, the penultimate, the final day is wrapping stuff up, but the, the, the final sort of operational day is a, is a day of great joy. And you're on this sort of metaphorical magic, magic carpet ride. It was, it was great. As an adult, I think that's, yeah.

• 1:21:10Speaker 04

  And how old were you when you did this?

• 1:21:13Speaker 06

  Maybe ten years ago.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  So you're fifty, in your fifties.

• 1:21:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  And you've decided, this is the moment, I've got to.

• 1:21:20Speaker 06

  I didn't decide, my wife decided. She said, you're going on this course.

• 1:21:23Speaker 04

  Because we have to exorcise these demons from your childhood.

• 1:21:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, because, uh, less that, more the manifestation of me as an adult, because I, being difficult and being obsessive and, yeah.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  And it worked, did it?

• 1:21:39Speaker 06

  Uh, not conclusively. I think it was a good correction. It was a good, I, I would, um, uh, ad- advocate it as a, as a, as something to do if, if you're in a dark place. Yeah, it was, it was very helpful.

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  Good. Well, I'm glad you're in a sunnier place now.

• 1:21:57Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:21:58Speaker 04

  And a moment of sadness.

• 1:22:09Speaker 06

  I, I tend not to, I, um, I don't know. I think that

• 1:22:17Speaker 06

  I'm always looking for the sun. I'm always looking for the sun and I think if you've had a bit of sadness in your life, you don't go looking for it. And I think the older one becomes, you, you avoid, you, you, you avoid the dark, you avoid darkness. I think, I think your taste, my taste culturally has certainly become warmer, um, perhaps more centrist, less spiky. I think that's because you, you age, you, you mature, but also because

• 1:22:51Speaker 06

  if you run towards the dark when you're younger, you, you, you kind of, if you're lucky, you stop before you get to the cliff.

• 1:23:01Speaker 04

  With your father, you were reconciled at the end, but it was like a door closing. There wasn't sadness in that sense.

• 1:23:06Speaker 06

  Not really.

• 1:23:07Speaker 04

  But with your mother, was there sadness?

• 1:23:12Speaker 06

  Possibly. I think there were some unresolved issues there. I think I knew her less well when she was older. I think she became very bitter and she became a less nice person. I do have great memories of her when I was younger and she had a great, a sunny disposition, which I think my father literally and metaphorically beat out of her. That's a sadness, I think.

• 1:23:42Speaker 04

  What has your extraordinary life taught you, Dylan?

• 1:23:47Speaker 06

  Uh, how lucky I am to have my family.

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I feel we'd be very lucky having you young, Rosebud.

• 1:23:52Speaker 06

  You're very kind.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  Dylan, thank you so much.

• 1:23:54Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:24:51Speaker 07

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