Gabrielle #13 – Celebrity Skin

A salacious little story from a late night reading in Soho.

I know it’s uncool to say this since it’s long been a cultural wasteland, wiped clean of its sexual and occult history, but I love Soho. I love that the streets are so narrow that the rules of the road no longer apply, so you get thousands of people and vehicles all fighting for space like they’re made of the same materials. I love that everything reeks of garlic and piss. I love all the pointless corner shops with neon signs screaming OPEN and VAPES. I love that somewhere in the sterile shadow of Simmons bars and evil glass “co-working” buildings, you can still get a full table of Japanese food for under a tenner – if you know where to go. There is a non-zero percent chance that my life will be cut short by one of those gay little rickshaws, blasting “Bad Romance” while carrying four half-cut beauticians from Romford to see Wicked, and I love that as well.

It’s not without its faults (although, really, most of them are the Met’s), but I maintain that if you hate Soho you’re probably just friends with the wrong people. The right ones, obviously, are bouncers and bar staff. How else do you find out that increasing numbers of young men are asking for a teaspoon with their drinks order so they can shot Mezcal through their eyes? Or that snorting tobacco is about to come back in a big way? “No smell, no bad breath, no lung cancer!” – the words of a Spanish waiter, don’t hold me to them. You heard it here first I guess.

If you like bottled beer, toilet sex, and going out dressed like a femme fatale then you’re probably already aware of Trisha’s, which is one of old school Soho’s last remaining institutions. A title proven by the fact that when they held a lit reading there earlier this week, the regulars lining the bar groaned loudly throughout. As well they should.

The reading itself was great – but I would say that, because I was one of the people reading. It was for an event honouring Philippa Snow’s new book Trophy Lives, which is fucking brilliant. If you’re interested in celebrity, art, image-making and remaking, the forces of sex and marketing and mythology and the uncertain areas between all those things, then you will not find a sharper, more pleasurable book of criticism. Philippa packs more robust ideas into a single sentence than most people manage in an entire publication, plus it has one of the most beautiful cover’s I’ve ever seen (a painting of Whitney Houston singing the Star Spangled Banner, by Sam McKinniss). I genuinely can’t recommend it enough.

I was asked to speak alongside Philippa, Oliver Zarandi, and Christina Newland on the theme of “celebrity,” which was an intimidating prospect but a lot of fun in the end. Naturally I chose to interpret the subject deviously and wrote a gossipy sex story, which I’m publishing below for paid subscribers (with a few details removed… what happens in Trisha’s, stays in Trisha’s).

Thank you to Philippa for having me. Thank you to Paul Jonathan for hosting – keep an eye out for future ‘Deleted Scenes’ nights, they’re great craic. And thank you to everyone who came up to me afterwards to tell me about other, much worse, celebrity sex stories. I will think of the Tom Cruise one on my deathbed.