Joe Lycett and Robbie Williams were brought together by Instagram. Last August, Williams posted a painting of a small, saintly looking child (not him), and captioned it with an account of how he had once made the mistake of reading the comments below a Mail Online piece. “It was hellish,” he wrote. “The person (me) they were describing was the most horrendous person that ever walked the planet. I was crestfallen.” At this point, Williams thought the best plan would be to read some comments about people who “are good, salt-of-the-earth folk”. So he looked up a piece about Ant and Dec. “Surely to God no one can hate Ant and Dec,” he thought to himself. But no. “The second comment said: ‘I hate these two almost as much as I hate that fat c*** Robbie Williams.’”
Hello,
When I was asked to be the guest editor for this edition of the New Review magazine I was astonished and sickened. “What is that?” I said to my PR manager while pouring Black Tower Pinot Noir into empty Châteauneuf-du-Pape bottles.
“It’s a prestigious publication inserted into the Observer with features and pictures,” he replied.
I couldn’t believe the cheek of the man. He well knows that I don’t believe in editing. Like all rightwing commentators, I believe that any form of editing is an assault on freedom of speech. I prefer things to be “unfiltered”, “unleashed”, and “uncensored” (and, if you’re interested, “uncut”). Deleting an erroneous semicolon is just how Stalin began his decades of terror.;
After much back and forth, the leftists at the New Review said that my insistence on not editing this issue made the task of me editing this issue “impossible” and “frankly, ridiculous”. Exactly what you’d expect from those lazy liberal comrade snowbastards.
“How about, Joe, you write a thoughtless stream of consciousness piece and send it to go behind a paywall at Mail+,” they said, “and in addition we will dedicate this issue of the New Review to your home city of Birmingham?” My high-intensity prescription antihistamines had kicked in by that point, and I agreed.
So, against my better judgment, this issue is all about Birmingham. Inside you’ll find a piece about allotments by Rebecca Nicholson, writing about the state of the city from Brummies Nathalie Olah and Kirsty Bosley, a conversation I had with Robbie Williams about art, and other contributions from Kofi Stone, Claire Douglass, Munya Chawawa, Katherine Ryan, Janice Connolly, Matt Arnold, Matt Nation, and an exclusive cover painted by me. If that’s not your thing then I’ve written the Mail+ piece and they assure me they’ll run it on one of the weeks Boris forgets to submit his copy (ie next week).
