ISSUE 102
WINTER 2019
EXPAND YOUR MIND, REFINE YOUR WARDROBE
Vic Reeves “If I were forced to have a musical accompaniment while I walked around town, I’d definitely have a tuba”
TONY PITTS
The actor and Vic Reeves rev up their motorcycles in Brighthelmstone
MARILYN MONROE
The dandyism that turned Norma Jean Baker into a 20th century icon
KEVIN ROWLAND
The Dexys frontman reveals the inner workings of his wardrobe 02>
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ISSUE 102
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As a slight change to Am I Chap? we offer some photographic reflections on The Chap’s weekend at this year’s Goodwood Revival The dress code at Goodwood Revival, based on the motor circuit’s original heyday of 1944-1966, is not a million miles from The Chap dress code; in fact the distance is approximately 2.3 miles. This does not mean that everyone is well dressed, of course; the outfits range from the sensationally Chappist to the disappointingly Chumpist. Here are a few of our favourites.
Womenswear at Goodwood Revival ranges from sharp 1940s twin sets to polyester horrors from the 1960s. This trio of ladies kept their stockinged feet firmly in the early 1940s and cut quite the dash wherever they went. We later found out their peculiarly punctuated ‘names’ to be (L-R) @Kitkat_Katiex, @Amysvintage and @Homemade. Hannah. No other women captured the mood of late summer/early autumn with quite so much aplomb.
The choice of Norfolk Jacket, plus fours and deerstalker in searing Indian Summer temperatures was a brave choice for this unnamed fellow, who stood out from many other lesser attempts at country attire.
This chap’s subtle assemblage of estate tweeds was offset by a rather eccentric smoking apparatus. We were only slightly concerned about the choice of a Windsor Knot, as it seemed to have curled his shirt collar, though that may have been the heat.
This chap’s lower half seemed to have spent so long in the sun that his trousers had faded to a different shade to his jacket. He was offered an ‘oily rag’ by the ladies, expecting a cigarette, but was handed an actual oily rag, which he somehow managed not to stain his suit with.
What Katie Did doyenne Katie Thomas with The Chap’s very own Olivia Bullock, taking some much-needed shade next to some vintage undergarments in the What Katie Did stand. In the mirror can be seen the ghostly apparition of Susan Coolidge.
Vic Reeves: Is that the question? TP: Yes, but Part B of that question is, who is your favourite African child? VR: My own African child. I’m quite like Paul Theroux in that respect. I’ve sired a lot of African children. But to answer Part A, the power of the sea throws me into despair and overwhelms me quite often. Shall I ask you one now? When you were young and you went to the hairdressers, did you get a square neck or a round neck? You know, at the back: the barber would say to you, square or round, sir? TP: I was taken to the hairdresser, an Italian bloke, who, when I was seven, always used to say, ‘You’re 27.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’m seven.’
“I must admit I’m much happier with the traditional flat beak of a Redshank or a Mallard”
Interview
KEVIN ROWLAND Chris Sullivan meets the Dexys Midnight Runners singer who has created more trends than Bryan Ferry and has the followers and lookalikes to prove it
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orn in Wolverhampton to Irish parents from Crossmolina area in County Mayo – his father a builder from farming stock and his mother a townie whose family were well versed in the arts – Kevin Rowland lived in Ireland aged one to four, spent his primary school years in Wolverhampton then moved to Harrow aged 11. A troublesome adolescent, he left school at 15, worked for a while in Moss Bros, had about 20 jobs (from apprentice printer to working in the building trade with his dad) and then trained as a hairdresser. It was only when he joined his brother Pete’s pop combo that he saw the light.
A few bands followed, such as the Roxy Music influenced Lucy and The Lovers, then punk act Killjoys, and then came Dexys Midnight Runners. Initially managed by Clash man Bernie Rhodes, they supported The Specials on tour, but with their distinctive New York longshoreman look and unique soul reggae inspired sound, Dexys soon created their own inimitable niche. After sacking Rhodes, they signed to EMI and released the landmark LP Searching For The Young Soul Rebels in 1980, from which the single Geno went to number one in the charts. Suddenly Dexys was the name on everyone’s lips, and further hits and radical changes in
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© Andre Csillag/Shutterstock
appearance followed. Come on Eileen, from the album Too-Rye-Ay, was number one in eight countries including the USA, and after selling 2.5 million copies was the best selling single in the UK of the eighties. The band adopted a hillbilly façade, replete with neckerchiefs and dungarees, which perfectly complimented the strings behind Kevin’s Celtic Soul sound. Don’t Stand me Down was the next album that saw the band revert back to Rowland’s roots as an Ivy League skinhead wearing Brooks Brothers buttondowns and business suits. The band split up in 1987 and Kevin recorded a solo album The Wanderer, which failed commercially and prompted his down-
ward spiral into cocaine addiction. He relocated to Brighton, sorted himself out, moved to Brick Lane in the 90s and began writing songs for the new Dexys Midnight Runners reformed in 2003. In 2012 he re-launched Dexys Midnight Runners as simply ‘Dexys’, with the album One Day I’m Going To Soar followed by a sell-out UK tour. In 2016 Dexys released Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul, which reached number 10 in the UK album charts. I met Kevin, a man of both undoubted style and substance, in his rather nice flat overlooking a canal in London’s East End, to chew the fat over his career and sartorial obsessions.
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Biography
TRUBSHAWE! Gustav Temple on the moustachioed eccentric who drifted in and out of David Niven’s life, from his early days in the army stationed on Malta
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“In Malta, where he was often confined to barracks for unseemly behaviour, he kept a grand piano in his room, upon which he played 16th-century folk music”
ichael Trubshawe’s entrance into the life of David Niven was as sensational as any of Niven’s stage or film entrances. Niven was stationed in Malta with the Highland Light Infantry between 1929 and 1931 as a very young officer. His reception by the other officers had been rather frosty – one refusing to speak to him all the way to Malta from Tilbury Docks. Once he’d acquitted himself on the cricket ground, things got slightly better, until one day: “Suddenly, an ear-splitting belch rent the air. I spun around and perceived a truly amazing sight. Trubshawe was
approaching. Six feet six, with legs that seemed to start at the navel, encased in drainpipe tight white flannels. He sported a blue blazer with so many brass buttons on it that he shone
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like a gypsy caravan on Derby Day; on his head a Panama hat with MCC ribbon; on his face the biggest moustache I had ever seen: a really huge growth which one could see from the back on a clear day. Part of it was trained to branch off and join the hair above his ears. It was in fact not so much a moustache as an almost total hirsute immersion.” Niven immediately became close friends with this eccentric apparition, who went on to be his best man at both his weddings, and also accidentally introduce him to the craft of acting, as well as eventually becoming an actor himself. Born Arthur Michael Temple Trubshawe on 7th December 1905 in Chichester, West Sussex, little is known about his early life. His exposure was entirely via Niven, once they’d become friends in Malta, and the interweaving of their subsequent lives is evidenced by the frequency with which Trubshawe enters Niven’s 1971 autobiography The Moon’s A Balloon. ‘This, old man,’ said Trubshawe, tapping a briefcase he was carrying, ‘is an invention of mine. It’s called “the dipsomaniac’s delight”.’ He flicked the lock and inside, set in
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green baize slots, I perceived a bottle of whisky, a soda water syphon and two glasses. ‘Come, let us drink to your most timely arrival with a glass of Scottish wine.’ Niven met many eccentrics throughout his career in the army and at Hollywood, but Trubshawe was always reserved for the top spot. In Malta, where he was often confined to barracks for unseemly behaviour, Trubshawe kept a grand piano in his room, upon which he played 16th-century folk music. He’d entered the officer corps not in the usual manner via Sandhurst, but via Cambridge University, already marking him out from his fellow officers. He compounded this distance on one occasion by fashioning a papier-mache helmet, to substitute for the heavy metal standard-issue helmet, unbearable to wear in the Mediterranean heat. “Can’t possibly wear the bloody thing, old man, it’s too heavy and red hot to boot, so I’ve had this little number run up for the occasion.” The occasion was a parade in front of a new sergeant major so fearsome that Niven only refers to him as ‘the Weasel’. At the end of the parade it
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© 20th Century Fox/Shutterstock
Dandizette
Marilyn Monroe Sunday Swift on how Norma Jean Baker’s creation of the persona of Marilyn Monroe became so convincing that she even fooled herself
“Dandyism is, above all, the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions” Charles Baudelaire
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dandyism. In Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Catherine Spooner argues that “Dandyism is not merely surface, but rather the managing of surface”. Norma Jean Baker certainly created an immaculate surface that the world knew as Marilyn Monroe, and she maintained that surface identity with complete dedication. Jack Lemmon, who worked with Monroe in Some Like It Hot, says that Monroe “developed a character – how much of that rubbed off on her, keeping that character so that it became ingrained when she was off-screen also, or how much of it truly was her that she just bent the part to, I don’t know. But they did become intertwined, you couldn’t tell where one left off and the other began.” “Often,” according to Catherine Spooner, “representations of the dandy seem to reproduce a Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism, whereby the public
ne of the biggest challenges in writing about someone like Marilyn Monroe is that people have been writing obsessively about her for almost a century. Books on her famous lovers, confirmed or rumoured, are generally the first thing one comes across. Another focus is her impact on fashion. There’s rather a lot on her reputation for being difficult on set, her tragic life and conspiracy theories about her death. The first problem with writing on such a complicated person is having to leave so much out – Marilyn’s work in the Civil Rights Movement; how she pressured one of Hollywood’s most famous venues, Mocambo, into changing their racist rules to allow Ella Fitzgerald to perform there. One could write an entire book on Monroe’s poetry, or talk about her library of over four hundred books. But here we’re interested in Monroe’s
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Smoking
NEW WORLD CIGARS Sophia Coningsby meets the UK’s foremost importer of New World cigars, to find out how they compare to the tried and trusted Cuban cigar
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“I have been smoking cigars for 20 years. I smoke every day and have smoked a great variety of cigars. Because I inhale and have a lot of experience I think I am a good judge of flavour and palatability”
nly a cad smokes a cigar with the band on,” said my grandma (or someone else who knew what was ‘right’ as well as she did). It is a glorious piece of inverted snobbery. You see, a gentleman shuns any sort of showiness or ostentation, whereas a cad loves the chance to show off and impress. There is a great deal of snobbery in the cigar world, but one of the greatest is that of always choosing a Cuban over a new world cigar, or even being in denial that nonCuban cigars are fit for consumption. So, what is a ‘new world cigar’? It is basically any non-Cuban cigar, whether that is Honduran, Nicaraguan, Dominican Republican or Mexican. We in the UK have always been the cigar-smoking giants, but that was Cuban cigars. Cigars fit into our history and culture rather like morris dancing and fox hunting (and all are subjects of contention). We produced the greatest cigar poster boy of all time, Winston Churchill! But we are still rather timid and suspicious of the non-Cubans. However, we shouldn’t be. That’s not to say that there aren’t some appalling new world cigars (flavour infused abominations, for example). But there are plenty of others that are truly splendid, and if I told you my top five favourite cigars, at least one would be non-Cuban. To talk over the topic of new world cigars,
I invited Scott Vines (the number one importer of new world cigars into Britain) to my Devon cottage. I asked Scott what he thought about the band/non band dilemma. “Well, they say that Cuban miners kept the bands on because it kept the cigars clean from their hands,” he says. That’s interesting of course but it doesn’t answer my gentleman/cad poser, because gentlemen don’t mine. The bands of new world cigars are sometimes a lot ‘jazzier’ than Cubans, which are often a lot more elegant. The cigars themselves can sometimes be quite outrageous looking and quite excitingly huge. So as a person of taste and elegance, you may be tempted to judge them as gewgaws or something not to be taken seriously,
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