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CONTENTS 11/13

INKED UP p101 Ralph Steadman lets loose in the studio

ROCK STAR WIFE p170 Lily Aldridge a good advert for guitar lessons

01
FILM STAR p68 Canons E0S 70D: great pics, even better video

REGULARS
AA GILL
Our man with the missives smells something funny down there but dons a safari jacket and investigates

035

101

CULTURE

THREES A PARTY p116 Branson has a birthday bash (youre invited!)

043

STYLE
Sloppy is the new smart, so get a sweatshirt Fire up your new ecofriendly supercar Hit the City for a bite or ve Fashion lessons from the decade style forgot Head to Scotland for a wee dram Hang with some fun guys, er, fungi Rock your new Richard James wardrobe Look, a camera thats not in your smartphone Think you know how to shave? Get lucky in your new Moncler sunnies Tel Aviv: easyJet y there! Bag a waxed jacket and dress like a rockstar Why climbing is the new jogging Find your inner Bale in high-spec footie boots Matthew McConaugheys lone-star style The Breitling Evo pilots watch has landed Life is suite in the May Fair Hotel And for Gods sake get a haircut

ANDREW WOFFINDEN I GETTY

Ralph Steadman gets scribbling The internet trolls have it in for Beyond: Two Souls The truth about London transport with Douglas Coupland Wild women run amok Mischiefmaking art from Elmgreen and Dragset Captain Philips in one line British eccentricity captured Jim Broadbent dissected Armando Iannucci and Stephen Merchant: our men in LA Virgin territory: 40 years of out-there tunes Football apps that can do it away against Stoke on a cold Tuesday night Partridge pops up in a decidedly un-Partridge lm Michael Sheen, a room of attractive naked women and a giant light-up dildo

ODD FUTURE p45 VWs remarkable XL1 hybrid car

210

OBJECT OF DESIRE
The Jaeger LeCoultre Ultra Thin Jubilee: The leanest time-keeping machine on the market

17

CONTENTS 11/13

JUMPERS FOR GOALPOSTS p184 The Gunner wonder in knit kit

COVER

STEAKS IS HIGH p128 Gourmet burgers get a grilling

02
128 136 142

FEATURES
BUN FIGHT
The burger: 2013s hottest snack

144 148 154 164 170 178

THE 100 HAIRCUT

Giles Coren justies splurging a ton on his hair

IDRIS ELBA PHOTOGRAPHS Simon Emmett FASHION Catherine Hayward IDRIS ELBA WEARS Newsstand edition: navy wool coat; charcoal grey crew-neck sweater; navy denim jeans , all by Polo Ralph Lauren. Subscriber edition: navy wool coat; charcoal grey crew-neck sweater, both by Polo Ralph Lauren

ENGLAND 2, BEST TEAM EVER 1

Jimmy Greaves remembers the greatest match ever played

LOVER. FIGHTER. GAMBLER. MONSTER. GENIUS.

Lucian Freud was a dangerous man

THE HUSTLER
Idris Elba: from Hackney to Hollywood via Nelson Mandelas South Africa
Twitter twitter.com/ esquireuk Facebook facebook.com/ esquiremagazine Website esquire.co.uk
BEN HARRIES I TOM VAN SCHELVEN I DAN BURN-FORTI

WHAT IVE LEARNED

Bobby Gillespie tests his memory

HES A SCREAM p142 Bobby G dispenses rocknroll wisdom

THE RESURRECTION
Andrew OHagan on The Stone Roses Talks Game of Thrones in her pants Malcolm Gladwell races Esquire. Wins

LILY ALDRIDGE UP CLOSE

03
184 192
20

FASHION
PLAYING FOR THE JERSEY
Jack Wilshere in new seasons knitwear

SUBSCRIPTIONS
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NO FRILLS
Bill Nighy wears classic tailoring. No twist

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ISSUE 2 OUT NOW

EDITORS LETTER 11/13

L
ALEX BILMES EDITOR

Esquire Weekly, available to download every Thursday from Apple Newsstand

ife, we learn as we go along, is too short for bad books. Time is too precious to waste on OK TV, so-so music, middling movies. Or secondrate magazines, for that matter. When youre young and unencumbered when youre still playing at living youll think nothing, if youre lucky, of wasting hours, days, weeks doing nothing at all of great use to yourself or anyone else. This is good. Its important. Revel in it. Read run-of-the-mill novels. Get them out of the way, so youll have something to compare them to when it starts to matter. Listen to the rubbish the radio plays. Go and see hopeless bands playing underwhelming sets at also-ran festivals. Numb your arse watching emptyheaded blockbusters. Trudge vacantly around dreary galleries in the vain hope of sleeping with drippy girls. Read graphic novels, if you really must. Monitor the football transfer window. Follow closely the risible squabbles at Westminster. Give a shit about what online commentators think about anything. Lose yourself for days in violent video games. Porn out. Do a lot of it. Do all of it. Because one day, when you grow up and nd yourself in the thick of things of work, of home, of life youll discover that your patience for the average, the mediocre, the formulaic, has entirely run out. I just cant sit through mildly amusing sitcoms any more. I get twitchy and irritable. Unless the new band of the moment really does measure up to the old bands of the past, I cant bring myself to care. At the cinema, generic comedies, cloying romances, perfunctory thrillers: none of them can any longer justify the eort or the expense. Its like takeaway pizza. One day, not so long ago but quite out of the blue, having previously dedicated many happy hours to stung my face with it, I realised I just didnt want to eat it any more. Its appeal has gone. Pt. Sorry to come across like a dreadful old food bore but these days if I eat pizza and I do I want San Marzano tomatoes and bualo mozzarella on a sourdough crust, cooked in a pizza oven by a man trained in Naples, not an irradiated cardboard bio-hazard that arrives on the back of a kamikaze moped. But I digress, and you havent got time for that. My point is, as the culture accelerates and life gets fuller, so its harder than ever to separate the really great stu, the important things that will improve your life, from the raging torrent of bog-standard, the stu that slows you down. In The Guardian today, in the Film & Music section, nine albums have each been awarded four stars, out of a possible ve. Nine! Are we really supposed to buy all of them? Would it not be better to receive one recommendation? Isnt one of these records just a bit worthier of

Esquire Weekly is the only guide for men with no time to waste
26

attention than the others? Because really, lets face it, how often does a four-star album come along? And, after all, what are we: 14 years old? Thats just the pop. The pattern is repeated with the lm reviews, the book recommendations. The TV section picks ve things to watch each night! Its enough to drive a man to drink. Bottle of unprepossessing supermarket plonk, anyone? You may have noticed (I hope so) that at the beginning of September, we launched Esquire Weekly, a digital digest of style and culture for men with no time to waste, created specically for tablets initially iPad only. Now, admittedly, this might sound like were adding to the tottering pile of too-good-to-miss stu, rather than subtracting from it. But I like to think of Esquire Weekly as a sti corrective to all those other guides urging constant and total attention to every product on the market. And not only do we oer a rigorously tight edit, we also direct you straight to each recommendation. So, from Esquire Weekly you can shop for clothes, accessories, gadgets and grooming products. You can reserve tables and tickets, download books, music, movies, TV shows. Simple, really. Meanwhile, back in the world of print, a couple of weeks ago we published the second issue of our blockbuster luxury biannual, The Big Black Book. We try to avoid trumpet blowing at Esquire but as someone who is as much observer of as participant in the creation of that magazine, Im allowed, I think, to say that it really is by far and away the best mens seasonal style manual on the market, and getting better each time. And so to the magazine you hold in your hands, which this month tips its hat to men taking on the world on their own terms. In LA, Idris Elba shortly to be seen playing Nelson Mandela on the big screen tells Sanjiv Bhattacharya about his journey from Hackney to Hollywood, via the less than salubrious streets of New York. In London, Tim Lewis goes for a run (foolish decision) with the phenomenal Malcolm Gladwell; Paul Wilson talks to Jimmy Greaves, the greatest England striker of all time; Geordie Greig remembers his friend, the iconoclastic artist Lucian Freud; Esquires in-house mavericks, AA Gill and Giles Coren, are at their terrifying best; and Ben Mitchell meets rocknroll true believer Bobby Gillespie. The Primal Scream singer also gets an admiring mention in Andrew OHagans crystalline memoir of his own hedonistic Glaswegian youth, a memoir provoked by a recent Stone Roses gig in that city. I saw the Roses this past summer, too, in Finsbury Park, north London, not far from where Id seen them last, at Ally Pally in 1989, when I was 16. This time, as the sun went down and the crowd came up, we witnessed no, not just witnessed, we were an integral part of an astonishing celebration. A celebration of who they were then and who they are now old friends at last making good on their promise as well as who we were then, and how far wed come. Now that felt like time well spent.

CONTRIBUTORS 11/13

SIMON EMMETT
In his debut assignment for Esquire, the acclaimed British cover photographer shot Idris Elba, star of The Wire, Luther and the forthcoming Nelson Mandela biopic. It was great working with Idris, Emmett says. We shot him down by the River Medway at an old dockyard, and despite the cold, early start, the shoot went well largely thanks to his great charisma; he even brought the sun out in the end. Emmett has been widely published in the worlds best magazines, including Vanity Fair, French Vogue and Rolling Stone.

COLIN CRUMMY
Esquires acting features editor sampled the booming London gourmet burger scene for his piece on the foodie phenomenon of 2013. The burger is really having a moment, Crummy says, and its no surprise considering how consistently great they taste. It really is becoming impossible to get a bad burger in the new gourmet places. Cows be warned: we really cannot get enough of meat in a bun.

TIM LEWIS
Malcolm Gladwells new book, David & Goliath, explores how underdogs get ahead. Perhaps Esquires contributing editor should have read it a little more carefully before suggesting he and the eminent author go for a run. I imagined we would go out for a pleasant jog and a chat, Lewis says, but thats clearly not Gladwells idea of a run. After 100 metres, I knew I was in trouble. Lewis is a features writer for The Observer. His book Land of Second Chances (Yellow Jersey) is out now.

BEN HARRIES
For his rst Esquire shoot, the London-based photographer focused his lens on Arsenal and England midelder Jack Wilshere a natural in front of the camera, he says for a fashion story on autumns patterned knitwear. The shoot took place next to the Emirates the day after a big Arsenal win. When word got out, he was surrounded with fans. Harries also contributes to The Guardian and The Times.

ANDREW OHAGAN PAUL WILSON

Interviewing Jimmy Greaves had two unexpected consequences, Wilson says of his story on the strikers role in Englands 1963 win over the greatest football team ever assembled. It rekindled my relationship with football I wont let you down like that again, footie, I promise and led me to worry just a tiny bit less about growing old(er). An Esquire contributing editor, Wilson also contributes to The Big Black Book (new issue out now!) and has written for numerous magazines. Twenty-three years ago, I went to see The Stone Roses wearing thin Madchester clobber, says the Esquire editor-at-large, whose adventure in nostalgia rock appears on page 164. For the reunion, I spent 200 on wet-weather gear. When I saw that gure on my credit card statement, I knew my youth was over. But what larks. A contributing editor to the London Review of Books and The New York Times, and one of Britains leading writers of ction and non-ction, OHagans new novel, The Illuminations (Faber) will be published in the spring.

GEORDIE GREIG DAN DAVIES

Longtime Esquire writer and contributing editor Davies is the editor of Esquire Weekly, our brand-new launch for the iPad, available to download now at Apple Newsstand. Putting each issue together is an exciting challenge, says Davies, but we have a brilliant team on Esquire Weekly, as well as a crack squad of contributors, so how can it be anything other than great? Your essential digest of the seven days ahead, Esquire Weekly is published every Thursday afternoon. Writing about Lucian Freud for Esquire was a way of hot-wiring my thoughts on how he lived a life that was never dull, Greig says of his late friend. I have been obsessed by him and his art since I was 16. He behaved like few men dare, utterly selshly, his only master being his painting. Breakfast with Lucian (Jonathan Cape) is out now. A former editor of Tatler, Greig is editor of The Mail on Sunday, and a director of the London Evening Standard and The Independent. His previous book, The King Maker (Hodder & Stoughton), is out now.

28

- AR 1735

Uncle Dysfunctional
is Esquires

AA Gill

Do you hoot with derision at safari jackets? Youre so wrong. At last, youre in that perfect special relationship but so are all your mates. Plus, nding an upside in going down

Dearest Unc, Ive noticed a trend for safari jackets. I feel very uncomfortable with this. Do we really think its OK to wear a garment that has such strong and distasteful colonial overtones? Piers, by email Piers, Im just trying to imagine you. Yes, Im getting a picture. Youre wearing jeans. Not expensive, no recognisable logo, because you dont want to be implicated in the multinational fashion conspiracy. Some sort of non-hip-hop trainer. Your girlfriends (ex?) gym socklets. A T-shirt and a V-neck jumper in an inoensive primary colour from Marks & Spencer. All topped o with a handmade frown of universal humanitarian concern. Theres a name for people like you, Piers: chugger-bait. Dont concern yourself with the safari thing, because even if it were the traditional workwear of Durham miners, you wouldnt wear one. Clothes maketh the man. They dont make you some other man. If you wear an SS uniform it doesnt miraculously turn you into a Nazi. It almost certainly means youre a public schoolboy going to a fancy dress party. Do you really imagine that cowboy boots are emblematic of the genocide of Native Americans rather than the embarrassing pedal accessory of thrash metal air guitarists with balding ponytails? That Guernsey shermans sweater wont make you better at singing sea shanties. And do you think that perhaps a frock would turn you into a transvestite? It wouldnt. It would make you a pantomime dame. Because tranny, cowboy, sherman and SS ocer was what they were before they got dressed. In your case, youre not really anyone before you get dressed. You only know what youre not. You dont wear suits because theyre the uniform of authority, or

tweed because its county Tory, and heaven forbid fur. You dont need a look, Piers. What you need to get is a persona that isnt dened by who youre not. Until then, youre just going to have to look like everyone else on the Tube. For the rest of you, safari jackets are the business. Discover your inner Michael Winner. AA, Im really in love. Head over heels, brilliantly and amazingly, fantastically, transcendently besotted. And she loves me. She loves me, she loves me. We spend every moment we can together. Shes my rst real girlfriend. Obviously, I wasnt actually a virgin but Im naturally shy and not really a lad. I could just lie there listening to her breathe. She has the sweetest little blonde hairs on her stomach. And when she smiles, oh! when she smiles... [Ive cut the next page-and-a-half] and she says Im the most perfect boy shes ever met and that really means a lot to me because shes met lots of boys, lots and lots and lots. Shes a couple of years older than me and has had sex not made love with pretty much everyone I know, including my brother. Look, Im not

Safari jackets are the business. Discover your inner Michael Winner

ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID LAWRENCE

Agony

making judgments, shes not a slut or a slapper or any of those horrible names men abuse women with. And Im not jealous, really not at all. She says what we have is dierent, that its on another, purer plane. We have deeper respect and tenderness than shes ever experienced with other men. Its just that the guys tease me by asking if shes done that thing yet. Apparently, she has a special trick. A bedroom talent that she performs which blows your mind or something. And honestly, I dont know if shes done it or not. Our lovemaking is unspeakably warm and tender, like being one person. I dont want to ask her because it would be like admitting I was talking about her in a disrespectful way, but the boys just keep laughing and shouting in the street and saying, Have you had it yet? And I know its just banter but its spoiling my beautiful, perfect love aair. Frank, by email Frank, honestly, get a grip. Of course its just locker-room teasing. But are you really serious? She hasnt done that thing yet? Its denitely not tender oneness. Oh, my God. We were just talking about it in the oce. Never come across one with that sort of muscle control. Never come across one that had muscles there at all! And absolutely no gag reex. Its spectacular. One of the guys in the post room says hes got it on his iPhone. A bit shaky but well Snapchat it to you. Whens your birthday? Dear Uncle Dysfunctional, This is embarrassing but Im sure Im not the only bloke to have this problem. I want to be a good lover and I really like women. Im really caring. I want them to have as good a time in bed as I do. I know that sex isnt just in and out. And I know all about foreplay. But going down: does it have to taste that bad? If it were only I dont know a sloppy kiss, you could hold your breath and it would be bearable. But they expect you to go at it for bloody ages. Total immersion. And you know what thats like. It gets everywhere. The taste, the smell, the texture. Is there anything that can be done to improve it? You know, like blokes can eat pineapple. Im serious

about this. I feel bad about it and I think lots of blokes feel bad about it. But I also think I might throw up and never be any good in bed. Jamie, Didcot Jamie, Jamie, Jamie. Look, Im going to treat this not as a sexual problem but as a culinary one. You seem to have all the emotional stu covered. Or rather, not covered. We are not born with taste preferences. Were just hungry. And the rst thing we eat is sweet. So sweet becomes our rst favourite and is a universal pleasure. Every society likes sweet. All the rest we learn as we grow up. And its informed by culture, agriculture and your mothers cooking. You know how Japanese breakfast tastes disgusting? Trust me, it really is disgusting. Well, the Japanese think rice puddings an abomination. Its cultural. You have to learn to love oysters and anchovies, snails and trues, which is why we call them sophisticated tastes. And do you notice that coincidentally all those ingredients have been compared to the taste of sex? If God had made sperm alcoholic and it tasted like Baileys, no one would ever get pregnant and youd all be gay. Look, you dont like or are repelled by the taste, smell and feel of vaginas because you associate them with something that is unknown and frightening. Youre just not sophisticated enough yet. There isnt a Trebor Extra Strong pessary you can thumb up some girls trumpet before doing the business. You just have to train your appetite to associate cunnilingus with grown-up accomplishment, perhaps the greatest a man can achieve. You taste in your head more than in your mouth so you need to do more not less dining at the Y. The better you get the better itll taste. At the moment, you dont like the sensation because you dont think youre doing it right. And youre probably right. Get some help. Take some advice. And before the thighs enclose your ears, listen to instructions. Ask your mother for a training session. Only joking. Minge tastes as good or bad as you are at eating it. And all those sniggering, whats-the-worst-smellin-the-world-anchovy-cunt jokes are told by boys who are still spitting into their palms and calling them Mary. PS: how did Ford ever imagine that Cougar was a good name for a mums school-run car? Send in suggestions for contemporary names for modern motors. I fancy the Hyundai Twerk (hatchback with a big boot). The Lamborghini Sele. The VW Literally, a vast four-wheel-drive. And the Hadron White Van. Email questions for AA Gill to agonyuncle@esquire.co.uk

Trust me: Japanese breakfast really is disgusting

36

For more AA Gill, go to esquire.co.uk

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FASHION / GROOMING / TECH / FOOD / CARS Edited by Teo van den Broeke

Newmans own dressing: ride the laidback trend like a pro

ITS A CASUAL REVOLUTION: THE SWEATSHIRT RETURNS FOR A NEW STYLE WORKOUT

SWEAT IT OUT

1.Henri Lloyd, 75 2.Wolsey, 295 3.Kenzo, 165 4.Plectrum by Ben Sherman, 70 5.Sunspel, 180 6.APC, 110

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Perhaps it was the domination of Mad Men, or maybe

that odd moment when Pete Doherty was considered a style icon, or simply because we were fed up with looking a bit slovenly, but for the past few years the sharp suit and tie combo reigned supreme. No more. Now, an unstructured double-breasted jacket teamed with a good quality T-shirt and a pair of tapered trousers is about as smart as it need get: and what a relief. The star of this
For more style content, go to the Esquire UK Weekly iPad app, available to download from the Apple Newsstand

new era of laid-back dressing is the humble loop-back sweatshirt. Worn with smart chinos and sneakers, or with jeans and penny loafers, a slim, preppy sweatshirt sported in the style of a young Paul Newman can make as strong a style statement as a three-piece suit, so long as its worn in the right place. Opt for something plain in jersey marl for venturing out in public, or go for a fully-blown logoed sweat when lounging around at home.

Photograph by Sam Armstrong

43

Vintage Sport Heritage collection pays tribute to the falcons 50th anniversary Bell & Ross: +44 207 096 0878 e-Boutique: www.bellross.com

STYLE
CARS

02 / 25
Room in the boot for 120 litres of luggage (thats as much as a wheelie bin)

ESQUIRE APPROVES
Volkswagen XL1 volkswagen.co.uk

Plug-in hybrid 75hp electric/ diesel engine offers 313mpg

GAME CHANGER
FROM THE MAKERS OF THE BUGATTI VEYRON COMES A CAR THAT MIGHT JUST SAVE THE WORLD
Photograph by Xxxxx Xxxxx Words by Guy Bird Photographs by Peter Guenzel

45

STYLE
CARS

03/ 25

The XL1 is the realisation of VW chairman Ferdinand Pichs dream to build a car capable of travelling 100km using only a single litre of fuel (or about 285mpg). The XL1 does even better

A 50k VW without electric

windows or wing mirrors and with only two seats might seem a bit of a rip-off, but the XL1 isnt just another motor. Its a carbon fibre, eco-inspired aerodynamic masterpiece that could turn out to be one of the most important cars to launch this decade, let alone this year. Brought to you by the folks behind the 253mph Bugatti Veyron, the target of the XL1 isnt a top speed, its fuel efficiency: it offers 313mpg and can run for 31 miles on electricity alone. The 100mph spaceshiplike hybrid also boasts a high-tech, low-weight carbon-fibre chassis, rear-view cameras for wing mirrors and a boot that will still swallow 120 litres of weekend bag. All its technologies will shape the next generation of everyday VWs, but unlike a concept car, you can buy the XL1 in a limited edition of 250. The force is with VW.

The specs
ENGINE: 800cc TDI hybrid POWER: 75hp TOP SPEED: 100mph ECONOMY: 313mpg CO2 EMISSIONS: 21g/km PRICE: 50,000 (est) ON SALE: Now

Aero-tastic
The XL1s fantastic swoopy body has the best aerodynamic performance of any car you can buy today at 0.189 Cd. The next best model is the Mercedes CLA at 0.23Cd

Goodbye wing mirrors

The XL1 is the worlds first production car to come equipped with doormounted cameras in place of rearview mirrors

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For more high-tech gadgetry, go to esquire.co.uk

STYLE
04/ 25

E ATING OUT

LIVING THE HIGH LIFE

HOW THE SQUARE MILE BECAME THE MOST HAPPENING DISTRICT IN LONDON. REALLY
Londons Square Mile has a
history of being overrun with mobs of City boys downing Jgerbombs and relieving themselves on landmarks. Over the past year, however, a host of new restaurants and bars have altered the face of the capitals financial district and theyre open to all (in fact, the less pinstripey you are, the better). From Sushisambas South American/Japanese fusion food to inventive cocktails at the South Place Hotel, not to mention the Pinnacles rumoured new opening from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, youre now more likely to enjoy a world-class dining experience than you are to cross the road to avoid a bunch of lairy blokes in black tie. The City swings again.
Below, Bobby Gillespie at Sushisamba. Left, view of the Gherkin from the bar

Professor Green and Tinie Tempah at Sushisamba

01
SUSHISAMBA
At Heron Tower, food is served on the 38th and 39th floor of what is currently the Citys tallest building. Its an intriguing proposition a blend of Japanese, Brazilian and Peruvian cuisine. And the view is spectacular so ask for a window seat. sushisamba.com

WORDS BY TEO VAN DEN BROEKE

>
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STYLE
05/ 25

E ATING OUT

02
THE JUGGED HARE
Located behind Moorgate station, The Jugged Hare opened last year to rave reviews. A proper foodie pub in a sea of slightly shabby booze-only establishments, this winter the Hare is setting its sights on game. Head chef Richard OConnells Dude Food menu is the one to sample, with boneless grouse wings, wild boar and black pudding lollipops and venison scotch eggs among the highlights. That said, youll be equally as welcome if you just fancy a pint with the papers on a Sunday. thejuggedhare.com

03 04
HKK
The most recent opening from the Hakkasan group; the only thing you should be eating in the airy HKK situated just north of Liverpool Street station on Worship Street is the 15-course tasting menu. You may never look at a cow in the same way after you try the jasmine teasmoked Wagyu beef with water chestnuts. hkklondon.com

GALVIN LA CHAPELLE
The latest addition to the Galvin Brothers dining empire, La Chapelle is an altar to proper French cuisine. With more of a Mayfair hotel vibe than anything more traditionally City, it boasts spot-on service, opulent surroundings, a great atmosphere and exceedingly rich food. Whatever you order for starter and main, be sure to finish with the legendary tarte tatin. Its crispy, chewy, apple-y, buttery, its the best weve ever had hand on (flaky pastry-clogged) heart. galvinrestaurants.com

05

SOUTH PLACE HOTEL

50

For more restaurant recommendations, get the Esquire Weekly iPad app, available to download from Apple Newsstand

JOHN CAREY

The first purpose-built hotel opened in the Square Mile for 100 years, the trendy South Place is also the only independently-owned luxury hotel in the City. Of the three bars and two restaurants (including a rooftop terrace), Esquires favourite is the 3 South Place Bar & Grill. Be sure to try an amalfi sunset, made with lillet blanc, aperol, grapefruit, lemon and rhubarb bitters its the new negroni, dont you know? southplacehotel.com

STYLE
FASHION

06/ 25

JEREMY LANGMEAD
LETS DO LUNCH: THE EIGHTIES ARE RIGHT BACK IN FASHION
I had an American Psycho moment last week. I was enjoying a perfectly civilised breakfast with Jason Basmajian, the creative director of Gieves & Hawkes, when he handed me his new business card. I took it in my hand and stared at it enviously. It was a beautiful shade of grey (Farrow & Ball would call it Manor House Grey) with raised gold letters printed on lustrously thick card. As Patrick Bateman, the protagonist in Bret Easton Ellis novel, notes when handed a contemporarys new card, Im still tranced out on Montgomerys card the classy colouring, the thickness, the lettering, the print I felt the same looking at Basmajians. Fortunately, unlike Bateman, I didnt then scream across the table, No one wants the fucking red snapper pizza! This would, of course, have been inappropriate not only because we had already ordered scrambled eggs, but because it would also have been a tad unprofessional. An obsession with business cards, sushi (try getting a last-minute booking at Zuma, Umu or Nobu even though together they sound like Japanese Teletubbies), Eighties music (Daft Punk) and the found-again fashionability of Ermenegildo Zegna (now with Stefano Pilati at the helm) are all straight out of American Psycho. Although it was published in 1991, the novel is set in
Hip to be square (and dressed in pinstripes, windowpane checks etc): take styling cues from Patrick Bateman, as well as A/W13s Eighties-inspired catwalks, below

THE STYLE COLUMN

Wall Streets Eighties heyday and a lot of what it painstakingly details still has resonance today. In fact, so much so that this December you will be able to see a musical interpretation of American Psycho at the Almeida Theatre in north London. Music was as important to Bateman as food and labels, so this new incarnation of the story makes perfect sense especially when you sample some of the shows new lyrics: After all, if were having sake, its best to wear Issey Miyake. Nice. There are other Eighties throwbacks doing the rounds, too, and not all of them have associations with psychotic serial killers. The pinstriped suit is one (although admittedly that does have echoes of the equally unappetising Gordon Gekko), but I feel you should give it a try. Pinstripes got a bad press because of Thatchers wide boys. Today, however, these suits have been restyled in softer fabrics, subtler stripes and slimmer cuts (Richard James has some fine examples). A good pinstripe can add a point of interest to a navy or charcoal suit, streamline your silhouette with the stripes seeming to add length to your body and sit nicely with a pale blue contrast collar shirt (very Mohamed Al Fayed) and a paisley or striped tie (very Ralph Lauren). Just avoid teaming them with braces, or choosing jackets with wide lapels, so as not to appear too Tim Nice But Dim. Other Eighties mainstays making a reappearance include double-breasted blazers, oxford shoes and windowpane checks (Zara has a wide selection of the latter), Paul Smith has started reintroducing coloured business suits (he first did this in the Eighties), black is also popular once more (it was in 1980 that designer Rei Kawakubo introduced eight shades of black), the Versace label has returned to its flamboyantly

patterned silk shirts and tailored trousers with sporty cuffs for hems (see those by Neil Barrett) are a nod to the shell suit trend from the same decade. Our renewed interest in the Royals also has a faint smack of Eighties-dom. After all, not since we first fell in love with Diana early in that decade has it been faintly OK to express some interest in all things Windsor: the birth of boy George (named after another Eighties icon), or that Prince Harry looks as if he might be a bit of a laugh. I have to admit that numerous pictures of the Prince of Wales and progeny at society weddings over the summer finally persuaded me to invest in my own morning suit. Since I have three weddings to attend this autumn, I went to Favourbrook and bought the full monty: black Bedford cord morning coat, grey Westminster striped wool trousers and shawl-collar, wool/ gabardine, double-breasted camel waistcoat. Basically, I went in and asked for a Prince Charles (better than asking for a Prince Albert, I suppose). Even sadder is when I got home and checked the wedding invitations the dress codes were, respectively: lounge suit, black tie, lounge suit. Clearly, I need to hang out more with Isabella Amaryllis Charlotte Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe and family to get invited to more morning suitappropriate weddings. Hating to see it go to waste, I now wear mine to potter around the garden at the weekends. Its sometimes nice to add a touch of formality to a mundane pastime. Well, that trip down memory lane has been exhausting. Im now going to retire to bed with Patrick Batemans favourite track pouring out from my Sony MDP-700 multi-disc CD player. Cue Whitney Houstons Greatest Love of All. Who says the Eighties was all bad? Jeremy Langmead is the editor-in-chief of mrporter.com

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For more of Jeremy Langmeads sartorial tips, go to esquire.co.uk

HACKETT.COM

STYLE
DRINKS

07/ 25

SWEET DRAMS
FIVE SCOTCH WHISKIES THAT ARE OFF THE CHART
Despite being made from only three ingredients barley, yeast and water whisky is capable of infinite complexities. A bottle of Scotch could contain anything from a light,

honey-scented, easydrinking eau de vie through to a thunderous, peaty monster. Whisky becomes a voyage of discovery, says Malcolm Mullin, long-time proprietor of award-winning London whisky mecca The Vintage House. Theres always something new to try. We sell 1,500 malt whiskies here in the shop, and 300 upstairs in our members bar The Soho Whisky Club. Here, weve whittled that selection down to just five worthy additions to your drinks cabinet, with Mullins expert tasting notes. Slinte. sohowhisky.com

ISLAY THE PEATED WHISKY

Bowmore Tempest 10 year old (55.1 per cent abv) There are seven or eight distilleries on Islay, and theyre all unique, Mullin says. Its the home of whisky, for many, and Bowmore claims to be the first recorded distillery on the island. Released once a year, their 10-year-old cask strength is a really nice introduction to heavily peated, smoky Islay whisky. It sells out fast, so its quite hard to find. And it does need a health warning, due to the strength. 47, whisky-online.com

SKYE THE TREAT

Talisker 18 year old (45.8 per cent abv) Talisker is the only distillery on the Isle of Skye. Its a peated whisky, but not heavily peated. Most people have tried the 10-year-old Talisker, but the 18 year old is a different quality level. Its less pungent than the 10 year old, but the length goes on and on. You get notes of coffee, oak, and some wood smoke its a gorgeous whisky. Something you keep at the back of the cupboard when you want to give yourself a treat. 67, royalmilewhiskies.com

SPEYSIDE THE EASY DRINKER

Glendronach Allardice 18 year old (46 per cent abv) Speyside is a classic whisky-making area. Id suggest the Glendronach 18 year old, which is matured in oloroso sherry butts. Its very dark, rich, with a mahogany colour, smooth, intense wood flavours and a sweet finish. 52, thewhiskyexchange.com

ORKNEY THE BIG HITTER

Highland Park 25 year old (48.1 per cent abv) This has a little bit of smoke, and a very slight amount of peat. Its complex and flavoursome. Ask any distiller what their favourite whiskies are and theyll all include Highland Park in their top five. 160, highlandpark.co.uk

LOWLAND THE ENTRY POINT

Auchentoshan 18 year old (43 per cent abv) A beautifully light, triple-distilled Lowland whisky. Very, very easy to drink too easy, some might say. Its distilled on the outskirts of Glasgow a funny place to have a distillery. Its delicate, matured in American oak casks, and has a wonderfully fruity nose. 55, masterofmalt.com

56

For more drinks to imbibe, go to esquire.co.uk

WORDS BY MAX OLESKER

STYLE
FOOD

Ive been keen on foraging

since early in my career, when Italian waiters used to bring baskets of ceps, which they had collected on Wimbledon Common, into the Dorchester Hotel. It inspired me to invest in Roger Phillips invaluable book Mushrooms, an in-depth foraging guide I still use to this day. I liken foraging to fishing: sometimes you strike gold, often you dont. Theres an air of excitement on entering the woods, much like the moment

MARK HIX
TAKE YOUR PICK: TWO DELICIOUS MUSHROOM RECIPES FOR AUTUMN

MAN FOOD WITH

your lure hits the water. I also find mushrooms in quite unexpected places. For instance, in-between drives on a game shoot, Ill find myself scanning the ground as Im walking and chatting. This happened last year in Dorset when I came across some scarlet elf cups, which are bright red and tiny. There was initially some disbelief among the party, but after five minutes they were all scanning the ground in the woods for more.

08/ 25
Wild mushrooms are pricey if you buy them from a deli, so foraging your own is both a money-saving pursuit and good exercise. If you are new to foraging, make sure you go with someone who knows what theyre doing. There are many dangerous mushrooms that look very similar to delicious edibles and the last thing you want is to have to call a doctor for your dinner guests.

ROAST PARTRIDGE WITH WILD MUSHROOM RAGOUT

SERVES 4
The earthy taste of mushrooms makes them the ideal partner for game. Use the breast and legs of a partridge paired with a sauce made from cream, butter and shallots.

INGREDIENTS
4 oven-ready partridges 6070g butter 2 large shallots, peeled and finely chopped 1tsp flour 100ml white wine 400ml chicken stock

DIRECTIONS

1 | Preheat the oven to 220C/gas mark 7. Rub the partridges with a little of the butter, season and place in a roasting tray. Roast for about 15 mins, and turn the birds as they are cooking so that they colour evenly keeping them nice and pink. 2 | Meanwhile, melt a little

more of the butter in a pan, and gently cook the shallots for a couple of minutes. Stir in the flour, then gradually whisk in the wine and chicken stock to avoid lumps forming. 3 | Simmer for about 15 mins. Cut the legs from the birds and remove the feet. Cut the legs in half at the joint. Add

the cream to the sauce then simmer gently for 10 mins. Meanwhile, melt the remaining butter in a pan and cook the mushrooms on a medium heat for 23 mins. Add to the sauce and simmer for a few mins. 4 | The sauce should be about the consistency of

double cream. If its too thick add a little more stock; if its too thin, continue simmering until it thickens. Season to taste. To serve, remove the breasts from the partridge, spoon the sauce onto four plates with a thigh and drumstick on each and arrange the breasts on top.

200ml double cream 150200g wild mushrooms, cleaned and cut into even-sized pieces 2tbsps chopped parsley Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Photographs by Jason Lowe

59

STYLE
FOOD

09/ 25

INGREDIENTS
1kg good quality clean ceps or other seasonal wild mushrooms 90ml extra virgin olive oil 90g butter Salt and freshly ground black pepper 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed 10g parsley, stalks removed, washed and finely chopped

FOR THE POLENTA

700ml milk 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed 1 bay leaf Salt and freshly ground white pepper 7080g quick cooking polenta 100ml double cream 90g freshly grated Parmesan

CREAMED POLENTA WITH CEPS

SERVES 4

DIRECTIONS

Light and creamy polenta goes perfectly with simple, pan-fried wild mushrooms, served as a starter or even a main. If you cant get ceps, any other wild mushroom or a selection will do.

1 | Bring the milk to the boil in a thick-bottomed pan then add the garlic, bay leaf and seasoning. Simmer for another 5 mins then whisk in the polenta. Turn the heat down as low as it will go, and cook slowly for 10 mins, whisking every so often so that the mixture doesnt stick to the bottom of the pan. Add the cream and parmesan and cook for a

further 5 mins. Once cooked, put the polenta into a clean pan if necessary, cover, place to one side and keep warm. 2 | Avoid washing the ceps if possible, as they become like a sponge. If they are a bit sandy, scrape the stalks with a small knife then wash very briefly in a bowl of water, and dry immediately on some kitchen paper. Cut the ceps into quarters or 1cm slices.

3 | Heat the olive oil in a thick-bottomed frying pan, then cook the ceps, a couple of handfuls at a time, for 34 mins until nicely coloured. Add the butter, salt and pepper, garlic and continue to cook for another minute or so, then add the parsley at the last minute. Finally, put a good spoonful of polenta on a plate then spoon over the ceps.

60

For more Mark Hix recipes, go to esquire.co.uk

shop.swatch.co.uk

N EW AR R IVAL 2013

TIGEROFSWEDEN.COM

TIGER OF SWEDEN EST 1903

N E W F L A G S H I P S T O R E 2 1 0 P I C C A D I L LY, L O N D O N W 1 J 9 H L

STYLE
FASHION

10/ 25

THE KNITTED TIE 85

02

THE TOTE 735

03

ESQUIRE APPROVES
Navy two-piece wool suit, 865

THE WOOL SUIT

01

THE POLO 160

04

THE PERSONAL CONSULTATION (AND BESPOKE SUIT) 3,720

08

THE SCARF 225

07

THE TWEED JACKET 645

05

THE LOAFERS 345

06

21 FOREVER
Before Richard
James opened his shop at number 29 in 1992, Savile Row was a rather fusty thoroughfare trading on former glories. Today it is a vibrant, world-leading menswear shopping destination, where classic meets contemporary. We have a lot to thank James for, not least the trademark clean silhouette and the bright flashes of colour he brought to traditional mens clothes. To mark his 21 transformative years on the Row, weve selected 21 Richard James items that every man

HELP SAVILE ROWS FAVOURITE SON CELEBRATE AN IMPORTANT BIRTHDAY FOR HIS BRAND
should have in his life. From a classic blue suit to the ultimate holdall from his new luggage range to a proper pair of brogues. richardjames.co.uk

THE COAT 985

09

THE TROUSERS 245

10

65

STYLE
FASHION

11 / 25

THE POCKET SQUARE 55

13

THE SOCKS 17

11

THE CARDIGAN 795

12

THE JEANS 255

14

THE PATTERNED SHIRT 155

15

THE SLIPPERS 395

16

ESQUIRE APPROVES
Long-sleeved cotton T-shirt, 145

THE ALPACA COAT 1,200

17

THE WHITE SHIRT 125

19

THE LONG-SLEEVED T-SHIRT

18

THE CARD HOLDER 100

20

THE BROGUES 365

21

Read Richard James on the colour blue in The Big Black Book A/W13, available now in good newsagents

66

DONFEATURES I WEARESTUDIO33.COM

STYLE
TECH

12 / 25

THIS CAMERA THINKS ITS A CAMCORDER

THATS BECAUSE THE EOS 70D IS THE SMARTEST PIECE OF KIT IN THE ROOM

Canons new mid-range DSLR has been called the start of the next photograph revolution. Its new sensor, the Dual Pixel CMOS, is the thing thats got people excited. It powers a smooth autofocus that stays consistent and in place as the subject moves around and it can also track faces. In video mode that means it behaves like a high-end camcorder, allowing you to

create pull-focus effects the movie directors trick of shifting focal point from one part of the scene to another or keeping the subject in focus while blurring the background. The 70D replaces one of Canons most popular DSLRs: the 60D. That was released in 2010 light years ago in camera kit terms so there have been a few other upgrades, too.

The new camera packs seven frames per second continuous shooting, a 20.2 megapixel resolution and has wi-fi built in, which not only lets you download images wirelessly, but also means you can control the camera remotely via a smartphone good for wildlife shots, if thats your bag. Either way: youre looking at autumns best new camera. From 1,080

+
THE VERDICT
Great image quality, long-lasting battery life and weathersealed construction. This is the mid-range DSLR to beat

THE SPECS
The 70D has a 20.2 million pixel CMOS sensor coupled with a DIGIC 5 processor. It can shoot 7fps at full resolution for up to 65 JPEGS or 16 raw files great for shooting sport

ESQUIRE APPROVES
Canon EOS 70D, canon.com

+
THE TOUCHSCREEN
Canon was the first company to give a DSLR a touchscreen. The 70Ds responsive, articulated version is easy to view from a variety of angles, whether shooting landscape or portrait

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Photographs by Martha Pavlidou

WORDS BY JOHNNY DAVIS

henrilloyd.com

STYLE
GROOMING

13/ 25

Revitalising eye treatment 29

Soft shaving cream 23

Shaving oil 30

Revitalising face cream 37

Shaving brush and razor set 349 Shaving cream 37

Facial cleansing scrub 26

SHAVING: A CHORE NO MORE

ACQUA DI PARMAS LUXURIOUS NEW SHAVING KIT MAKES A GOOD MORNING GREAT
YOU KNOW THEY MAKE SCENTS BIG RED

If you dont know venerable Italian fragrance company Acqua di Parma for its musky, citrusy, grown-up scent favoured by David Niven and Cary Grant youll probably know its egg-yolk yellow packaging. Heres a curveball: the brands new shaving collection, Collezione Barbiere, actually

comes in a fetching shade of dark plum, but dont let that throw you. Consisting of a shaving cream, shaving oil, a refreshing moisturising balm, a revitalising eye treatment and a posh shaving brush and razor, the kit contains everything you need to take on the day and win. acquadiparma.com

LEATHER REPORT
Bottega Veneta unpack first-ever scent

Ralph Laurens fragrance for the fast lane

Almost as famous for his sports car collection as for his fashion brands, Ralph Lauren likes things that go fast. New fragrance Polo Red is testament to that fact: the bottles sports car crimson is a less-than-subtle nod to his passion. The red-blooded theme carries over into the bold scent with notes of red grapefruit, red saffron, red wood, red cranberry and red sage. 55 for 75ml

Italian luxury leather goods brand Bottega Veneta is known for making beautiful wallets, passport holders and holdalls in its signature woven leather. Now, the house adds its debut fragrance, Pour Homme, a distinctive and naturally leathery blend of fir balsam, bergamot and labdanum (which gives the leather accord), its discreet and elegant, invoking the smell of newly-oiled oak. 50 for 50ml

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Photograph by Sam Armstrong

WEARESTUDIO33.COM

STYLE
FASHION

14 / 25

GET SPECCY
Blurred lines: Moncler describes its new glasses as halfway between futurism and Fifties style

MONCLER, PHARRELL AND YOUR NEXT PAIR OF SUNGLASSES

ESQUIRE APPROVES
Pharrell x Moncler Lunettes, 340
Rapper, producer songwriter and now high-end sunglasses designer whatever next for Pharrell Williams?

Best known for producing superinsulating down jackets with contours curvaceous enough to shame the Michelin Man, 60-year-old Swiss outerwear brand Moncler has a bold history of branching out into unknown territories. From the labels high-fashion line Gamme Bleu, which is helmed by American designer Thom Browne (for autumn/ winter 13, Browne sent models wearing bright pink checked suits with built-up Herman Munster-

esque shoulders down the catwalk), to a more recent technical-wear collaboration with Comme des Garons, its all thought up by Monclers chairman Remo Ruffini. Back in 2010, Ruffini teamed up with Pharrell Williams to create a range of duvet jackets including one that resembled a bulletproof vest. For their second collaboration, out this month, Ruffini and the Daft Punk and Robin Thicke hitmaker have turned their attention

to high-spec sunglasses. Inspired by modern architecture, the three frames in the range are cast from super-light titanium. With durable nylon lenses, they are as innovative as youd expect from trailblazer Williams. The inspiration is Le Corbusier, Williams says. Classic glasses with a contemporary take. We wanted to celebrate the silhouette, rather than the branding of [the label] and thats the genius of Moncler. moncler.com

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Photographs by Martha Pavlidou

7forallmankind.com

STYLE
TR AVEL

15/ 25

THE BARBER DOSSIER

TEL AVIV
Illustration by Holly Wales

SUNSHINE, BEACHES, BARS, CULTURE ISRAELS SEASIDE CITY IS WORTH THE TREK

Shalom. The fickle nature of 21st-century travel is summed up neatly by Tel Aviv. Whod have thought five years ago that Israels most-populated city would be considered the safest place to visit in the whole of the Levant (thats the Eastern Mediterranean to you)? Sadly, since the Arab Spring proved no more than an unseasonal heatwave and Egypt, Turkey, Libya,

Lebanon and Syria have turned, or are turning ugly, Israel is thriving, if wary. Nowhere is this spirit of confidence and creativity more obvious than the beachfront bars, boutiques, hotels and galleries of a vibrant city that was barely considered a one-camel town a century ago. Tom Barber is a founding editor of award-winning travel company originaltravel.co.uk

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TR AVEL

16/ 25

STAY
In a city of buzzing boutique hotels, The Rothschild is the best of a very good bunch. Named after Baron Edmond de Rothschild, one of the early, extremely wealthy backers of the Zionist cause, the place oozes understated sophistication from the well-worn leather club armchairs in the lobby to the many contemporary art works on display. The Rothschild Restaurant is also one of the citys finest, specialising appropriately in Jewish dishes served with a distinctly French flair. rothschild-hotel.co.il

WHY NOW?
Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights, is in late November. Locals OD on doughnuts (its a fried food/oil/ lamps/Old Testament thing) and impromptu candle lighting.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art (here, and bottom left) celebrates photography, visual arts and architecture

WHEN IN...
All late-night roads lead down to the beach, so follow the crowd (and your nose) along the sand to Jaffa and refuel at Abulafia, a 24-hour Arabic bakery thats been churning out top-quality sesame buns, sambousek and pitta bread topped with zaatar (a delicious mix of herbs and spices) since 1879. Beats a kebab any day.

DO
Ask which way is the beach? OK, the Med might be a bit nippy in November, but its shores can still bask in the low twenties. Settle back to admire the locals a mighty attractive bunch strutting their stuff on surfboards and rollerblades, or just looking good in beach bars like Shalvata. shalvata.co.il

DINE
Neve Tzedek is the happening part of town, with cafes and boutiques popping up in the elegantly restored buildings. Popina is the new favourite eatery for TAs hipsters. At the bar, see your food cooked in the open kitchen and peer down through the Perspex floor panel to choose wine from the well stocked cellar. Order the gin and tonic tartar of amberjack fish with cubes of G&T flavoured jelly (really). popina.co.il

SEE
If (like your humble correspondent) the high-water mark of your architectural movement ID skills is Bauhaus, then Tel Aviv is the place for you: the White City has more buildings in that style than any other on Earth. They were designed in the Thirties by German Jewish architects who emigrated to the region to escape the rise of the Nazis. Theres a museum and guided walking tour if thats your thing, but the evidence really is all around.

LUNCH
Dont judge Sabich Tchernichovsky by its bland exterior, rather the queue of salivating locals snaking around the block come lunchtime. Sabich is the Israeli contribution to the litany of delicious Levantine dishes, and consists of fried aubergine, salad, hard-boiled eggs, potato and special sauces guarded more closely than the Coca-Cola recipe.

DRINK
Despite its proximity to the citys Great Synagogue, newly refurbished Port Said is the perfect launch pad for seeing in the Sabbath. Take one achingly cool crowd, stir in tunes chosen by said crowd, add draught Goldstar beer and enjoy what will likely be the beginning of an all-nighter.

PARTY
A short walk but a world away from the refined Rothschild Hotel, Radio EPGB (even the owners cant agree what it stands for) is a hot subterranean club with rock/punk roots. Its a favoured haunt of photographers, artists and others in Tel Avivs hip crowd.

SHOP
Tel Aviv is an urban spring chicken it was founded in April 1909 by several dozen families, with land plots assigned by lottery. But its relentless and rapid sprawl has seen it subsume the ancient (like 7,500-years ancient) port of Jaffa and its historic flea market. There is the strong risk of these atmospheric alleyways suffering from imminent Camden-isation, but for the time being enough fun antique shops remain. Bring your well-honed haggling skills.

AVOID
December. The massed ranks of Americans from the flyover states arrive in town to celebrate Christmas. Best hold off until the New Year when theyve gone.

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For more of Tom Barbers city guides, go to esquire.co.uk

REX

STYLE
NE WS

17/ 25

THE UPDATE

ROCK OF AGES

STYLE ICONS FROM 2,000BC, THE SEVENTIES AND TODAY

Want to dress like a rock superstar? John Varvatos book reveals all his greatest hits
Whether youre a Bowie man or more inclined to Jack White, you can bet at some point your hero was dressed by John Varvatos. Now, the self-styled head designer to rock

royalty marks his many years dressing the worlds coolest musicians in a coffee table book, Rock in Fashion. Inspired by his Detroit hometown of the Sixties and Seventies, it depicts the eclectic wardrobes of ZZ Top, Alice Cooper, Jimmy Page and Iggy Pop, among others. Our favourite chapter is Street Walking Cheetahs featuring rock gods in animal print. Look out for the spread of Keith Richards (far right) in a leopard shirt the definitive guide to wearing this seasons animal print trend from 30-odd years ago. Out 4 November (Harper Design

COUNTRY LIFE

Tackle outdoors in style with Aigles 160th anniversary collection

Think Hunter make the only wellies worth wearing? Think again. Founded by American Hiram Hutchinson back in 1853, French brand Aigle (pronounced eh-gleu) still produce all their vulcanised rubber boots in France, and theyre

about as stylish as shoes made entirely out of rubber can be. To celebrate their 160th anniversary this month, the brand has released a capsule heritage collection consisting of a pair of boots, a hunting jacket, a pea coat and a parka. Each item is limited to a run of 160 and our pick is the Bosquet hunting jacket. Cut from waxed cotton woven by English fabric manufacturer British Millerain, the jacket, complete with corduroy and leather detailing, is the ideal companion piece for your new Aigle wellington boots: all you need now is a cold, muddy field. aigle.com

Bosquet hunting jacket, 500, by Aigle

ETRO KEEP IT RETRO

The Italian label unleashes a bold new take on a very old pattern
First used by the Mesopotamians some 4,000 years ago, the paisley pattern has since come to represent the Indian subcontinent. An enthusiast of the historic pattern is Kean Etro, owner and creative director of the Italian fashion

house bearing his name. Every season, the pattern can be found on almost everything the brand produces, from shirts and scarves, to shoes and ties. For A/W 13, however, Etro has taken paisley back to its roots, teaming up with Indian artists Thukral & Tagra to create a digitally-inspired take on the classic print. The result is an undulating, kaleidoscopic feast, which the brand has used on bags, wallets and accessories. The Thukral & Tagra holdall, right, is our favourite. Pack with Nehru-collared shirts and set a course for the subcontinent. 700 etro.com

Photographs by Martha Pavlidou

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www.aigle.com
Available from selected stockists UK and Ireland tel.: 01608 813 860 uksales@aigle.com

paris . london . tokyo . nature

STYLE
FITNESS

FIRST AGAINST THE WALL

FOR THOSE ABOUT TO ROCK CLIMB, WE SALUTE YOU
1
Boot Bananas, 12 bootbananas.com

19/ 25

2
Pro Guide belay device, 24, by Wild Country wildcountry.co.uk

3
Corona VCR climbing shoes, 120, by Red Chili redchili.de/en

4
Chalk bag, 15, by Black Diamond blackdiamondequipment.com

5
Helix karabiner, 14, by Wild Country wildcountry.co.uk

The kit
1. Stick em in your shoes to stop them stinking 2. To belay a mate (so they dont fall), thread the rope through this 3. These boots arent made for walking should be tight but not too tight 4. Use chalk to stop your hands getting clammy 5. To keep your belay device on your harness, youll need a karabiner 6. Tie on your rope when climbing; clip on your karabiner when belaying 7. Karabiners are also great for carrying gear up with you

6
R300 harness, 100, by Arcteryx arcteryx.com

WORDS BY JIM MERRETT | THANKS TO BANANAFINGERS.CO.UK

7
Magnetron karabiner, 24, by Black Diamond blackdiamondequipment.com

Its cold out there, and the temptation to hole up indoors can be strong. Too strong even for outdoors types like rock climbers. Which is why, 50 years ago this winter, a PE lecturer at Leeds University called Don Robinson, noting how out of shape his climbers

got during the cold months, invented the indoor climbing wall. The first commercial version soon followed, in Sheffield, near the Peak District the spiritual home of the sport in the UK. These days, most major cities across the country have

Photograph by Sam Hofman

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STYLE
FITNESS

20/ 25

Where to do it
Indoor
The Edinburgh International Climbing Arena is where all the big competitions in the UK are held, McHaffie says.

what Arcteryx pro-climber James McHaffie calls exceptional climbing walls. But first, you need the kit. Unless youre bouldering climbing on lower heights without a rope, but with a crash mat a harness is essential. McHaffie says all the major brands are reliable, although admits, when you are dangling up there, theyre never that comfortable. Most climbing centres hire out harnesses. They also stock shoes, but unless you fancy climbing in someone elses sweaty footwear, you might want to think about investing in your own. Ive used both laced and Velcro climbing shoes over the years and I like both, McHaffie says. You want them tight, but comfortable. As soon as a bit of pain comes into the equation theyre probably too tight for you to enjoy yourself. The best training for climbing is more climbing. For people going from beginner to improving, I recommend going quite a bit to a couple of different walls. Once youre climbing indoors, its a very quick transfer from that into traditional climbing opening up outdoor climbs across Britain and Europe. You can take it anywhere in the world, all those beautiful destinations, McHaffie says. Something to think about during the frigid British winter, then. Heres Esquire s guide to the basic gear you need, and where in the UK to climb or boulder. thebmc.co.uk

Outdoor
Stanage Edge in the Peak District is a must. It has both easy and tricky climbs, with really nice views.

Indoor
Londoners are spoilt for choice: McHaffie approves The Castle (Stoke Newington, above) and Westway (Ladbroke Grove).

Indoor
There are Awesome Walls climbing centres in Liverpool, Sheffield, Stockport and Stoke.

Charlie dont surf (but does climb): the Prince of Wales gets to grips with bouldering

The exercise: Harry Jameson on how to shape up for climbing

Rock climbing is all about power-to-weight ratio and therefore the majority of climbers are light, yet incredibly strong for their size. The most obvious training exercise for climbing is the pull-up, although its also very important to have powerful legs as well. Here are my top three pull-up variations. These are not easy, so if you are starting out try using the assisted pull-up machine in the gym, and also the lat pull-down. Let me know how you get on @HarryJamesonPT
1. Chin to knuckles pull-ups

Take a wide grip, from a hanging start pull your body up to the left so your chin touches your left knuckles, slowly return to the start position and repeat on the right. Aim for 35 pulls on each side. Thats one set.

2. 1 sec up, 5-10 secs down

A personal favourite of Dwayne The Rock Johnson, this is a great strength builder, and makes you focus on your form. Pull yourself up as quickly as you can, and lower back down as slowly as you can. Sounds easy, right? Try it out.

3. Circular pull-ups

Pull your chin up to your right hand, then around in a circle until it gets to your left hand, and then slowly return your body to the hanging position. Repeat twice in each direction. Thats one set.

82

For more great outdoor climbs, go to esquire.co.uk

WELCOME TO THE WORLDS FASTEST-MOVING MENS MAGAZINE

The new Esquire Daily is your constantly updating guide to mens style and culture. esquire.co.uk

DAILY

The new Esquire Weekly iPad edition: the essential edit of the very best of the next seven days. DOWNLOAD, SWIPE, WATCH, BOOK, BUY

WEEKLY

Britains most sophisticated mens magazine, where style and substance meet. Great writing, sharp design

MONTHLY

(Thats twice a year, FYI.) The new Big Black Book is your seasonal guide to the very best in luxury for men

BIANNUALLY

for a free 30-day trial of the weekly edition, get the iPad app, available to download from apple newsstand

STYLE
TECH

MATCH OF THE DAY-GLO

UP YOUR GAME WITH THE BRIGHTEST IN FOOTBALL BOOT ENGINEERING
When choosing a pair of
football boots, its best to take it right back to basics. Ask yourself these questions: what conditions will you be playing in? (Astroturf, paddock, winter, summer?) What are the boots made of? (Some cheap synthetics have no breathability; whereas lightness and suppleness are usually good tests of quality.) Above all, are they comfortable to put on? If not, dont buy them. Every new pair of boots promises to do something different, and while we cant guarantee any will actually make you play better, this seasons colourways should at least dazzle the opposition.

21 / 25

Worn by: MAYA YOSHIDA (Southampton, Japan)

Worn by: RADAMEL FALCAO (AS Monaco, Colombia)

Worn by: CHRISTIAN MAGGIO (Naples, Italy)

Worn by: MICHAEL DAWSON (Tottenham Hotspur, England)

From top:
MIZUNO WAVE IGNITUS 3 Instep panels help generate dip, control curl and give unpredictable ball flight to throw keepers off. 120, mizuno.com PUMA EVOSPEED 1.2 Microfibre upper for excellent grip in wet conditions. A super-light boot for faster pitch footwork. 99, puma.com LOTTO SPORT SOLISTA TX Lotto Sport like to be different: the metallic upper glows at night. Shaped studs help landing and turning. 110, lottosport.com UNDER ARMOUR BLUR CARBON III Carbon fibre lateral wings help reduce roll when changing direction. A very stable and supportive boot. 165, underarmour.com ADIDAS ADIZERO F50 Gareth Bales high-scoring boot weighs only 165g thanks to a hollow frame: almost like running barefoot. 160, adidas.com NIKE HYPERVENOM SG-PRO Friction-promoting upper aims to give constant touch, even in the wet. Includes detachable studs for soft ground. 170, nike.com

Worn by: GARETH BALE (Real Madrid, Wales)

Worn by: NEYMAR (Barcelona, Brazil)

WORDS BY JOHNNY DAVIS

Photograph by Andy Barter

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STYLE
FASHION

22/ 25

STYLE
JEANS JKL (my own brand). Theyre cut neither slim nor baggy, lets call them fitted. SHOES Blue suede by Tods. SUIT Dolce & Gabbana with medium rise in the front. In blue to match my skin tone and eyes. BOXER SHORTS I wouldnt know. SOCKS We have a lot of fun with socks in our family; we have socks of every shape, colour and design. I like a thin dress sock more than a thick one. SUNGLASSES Dolce & Gabbana aviators SNEAKERS Nike Free Runs, 2011 edition. WALLET My brotherin-law gave me the wallet I have now. I like a very thin wallet. He found me a really nice leather one in Brazil.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY
With his laid-back drawl and defined pecs, youd be forgiven for regarding Matthew McConaughey as the all-American berjock of the film world. But thats not his whole story. Recent appearances in Killer Joe, Mud and Magic Mike

THE LIST

TECHNOLOGY
CAR 2010 GMC Denali. CAMERA iPhone 4S. LAPTOP MacBook Pro.

THE ACTOR AND FACE OF DOLCE & GABBANA FRAGRANCES ON HIS FAVOURITE STUFF
have garnered the Texan increasing critical acclaim. This November, his role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorseses The Wolf of Wall Street looks to extend that winning run. All well and good but what toothpaste does he use?

TRAVEL
SHOP I can spend a fun couple of hours in Whole Foods. DESTINATION Ive done a lot of travelling in Africa and South America. I pick a country and backpack through it. SUITCASE Kelty 4400 frame backpack. HOTEL The Greenwich Hotel, New York. CLUB Hyde Lounge, Los Angeles. Where I met my wife.

FOOD & DRINK

WINE Grosjean Fumin Vallee dAosta. BEER Cold Coors Light in a can, not a bottle. DISH Cheeseburger. SNACK Macadamia nuts, kale chips. SWEETS My morning tea with agave. And I like a chocolate pie with meringue. RESTAURANT My kitchen.

HOME
LAMP A flying-saucer lamp in the living room. The kids think its a spaceship. DESK A large drafting board in my music studio. CHAIR A barstool. BED LINEN Light, thin silk. SOFA Custommade. Im keen on ergonomics.

GROOMING
TOOTHPASTE Crest. SHAVING FOAM Mario Badescu Shaving Cream. MOISTURISER Jurlique Calendula Cream. FACE WASH Jurlique Foaming Cleanser. SHOWER GEL Cetaphil soap. I dont like the gels at all, Im a bar of soap guy. SHAMPOO Moroccan Oil Shampoo/ Conditioner mix. SERUM Liquid collagen. TOWELS Just make sure theyre soft and not stiff.

TOOLS
SUBSCRIPTIONS The Week, Time, Garden & Gun. MOTORCYCLE 2004 Triumph Thunderbird Sport (above, right). PEN Sharpie Fine Point. KNIFE A friend, Guy Fieri [Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives host], made me a bunch of about 20 large, wonderful chefs knives.
Jesus: blessed are the chic

PEOPLE
FICTIONAL STYLE ICON Jesus Christ was pretty cool. Hes not fictional, but he was smooth.

90

GRAHAM MACINDOE/NYT/REDUX/EYEVINE

0. ,&% !,&, &())& ,+, #/ 8

STYLE
WATCHES

23/ 25

THE NIGHT WATCH

THE BREITLING AEROSPACE EVO: HOW YOUR PILOT TELLS THE TIME (EVEN IN THE DARK)

Titanium Professional bracelet

Air Force blue dial with large hands, digital displays and easy to read numerals

There are plenty of watch brands making aviator watches. You know, those military-style timepieces adorned with black dials, extra buttons and oversized three-six-nine-12 numerals harking back nostalgically to the good old pioneering days of goggles-on, chocks-away, loop-theloop aerial adventure. Should you wish to contravene several Civil Aviation Authority regulations and run up to any real-life pilot as he exits the cockpit, youll likely find a Breitling Aerospace planted on his wrist. The new Evo version is literally that an evolution of the 1985 original. Very wise, as theres absolutely nothing broken in need of fixing. Encased in titanium for lightness and durability, it has everything a pilot

Breitling Aerospace Evo, 3,150

92

Photograph Photograph by by Dan Xxxxx McAlister Xxxxx

WORDS BY ALEX DOAK

could need: an instantly legible analogue time indication accurate to within about 10 seconds a year (most quartz watches manage 15 seconds a month), with all the extra detailed data displayed by a separate, dual-digital indication. Functions such as the 1/100th of a second chronograph, countdown, second timezone, alarm and audible time signal indications are all controlled by rotating, pressing or pulling the prominent crown. The Aerospace Evo is beefed up from 42mm to 43mm wide and the display is (finally) backlit. Meaning the majority of pilots are now slightly more fashionable, and a great deal more confident on night sorties. breitling.com

The 43mm titanium case is both sturdy and lightweight

ESQUIRE APPROVES

STYLE
HOTELS

24 / 25

THE BIG BOYS ROOM

CHECK IN TO CHECK OUT THE EBONY SUITE AT LONDONS MAY FAIR HOTEL
Tucked away off Londons Piccadilly, the May Fair Hotel is a well-appointed bolthole that attracts the solvent and celebrated. It even has a secret VIP entrance for when Matt Damon or Paris Hilton check in (he takes the Azure Suite; she prefers the Schiaparelli). The most recent addition to its rooms is the Ebony Suite: an ultimate man cave that comes complete with a terrace, 52in plasma TV, kitchenette and high-tech bathroom fittings, including an oversized, illuminated statement bath with built-in lighting effects to help you wind down. To wake you up, the shower pumps out pulsating, rotating jets of water to massage and invigorate. The basins are heat sensitive and even the loo has an integrated bidet, water temperature control and massage functions, all adjusted by remote control. With a total floor space of 143sq m and decorated in tones of dark wood and ivory with metal detailing, were pretty sure Mr Damon will soon be enticed over to the Ebony. Beat him to it. themayfairhotel.co.uk
A view of the room: (from top) the Ebony Suites sitting room; its bedroom; the 150 bar; the Ebony Suites terrace; the front of the hotel

The hotel is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the BBC TV series Hotel Babylon. So keep your eyes peeled

Meccas of Mayfair What to do when you re in residence

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAMES GRAHAM | WORDS BY RACHEL FELLOWS

EAT The areas range of restaurants is as staggering as it is pricey: go for eggs in The Wolseley; lunch on onion tart at La Petite Maison; or haul a steak off the charcoal parrilla at 34.

DRINK Cocktails? The bar in Mount Streets Connaught Hotel. Champagne? It has to be Claridges. For a fine London pint try Guy Ritchies pub The Punch Bowl on Farm Street.

SHOP For cutting-edge fashion, head to Dover Street Market or Wolf & Badger. Fulfil your tailoring requirements at Anderson & Sheppard and at Alexander McQueens new Savile Row store.

PARTY Mr Foggs Victorian decor may pay homage to the home where Phileas wrote Around the World, but excellent cocktails and live music means this popular post-work bar buzzes.

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The Entrepreneurs
UGGAUSTR A LI A .CO.UK/CR EATI VECO U N CIL

STYLE
GROOMING

25/ 25

If summer 2013 was

owned by the austere Scandinavian slick-back, then winter 2013 is about an altogether more comfortable haircut. Though summers sharply-shaved back and sides combined with a tautly combed, wet-look top (as worn by Becks and Gosling) can look boyishly neat. Its not easy to maintain and it has the potential to look

WINTERS HAIR
HOW TO GET FOUR HOLLYWOOD HAIRCUTS AT YOUR LOCAL BARBER
NEAT SWEEP

By Brent Pankhurst of Pankhurst London

WHAT TO ASK FOR: Ask for a classic short back and sides with a side parting, with the sides neat and square. Hair on top should be longer. WHO SHOULD HAVE IT: Its a very flattering cut so this one suits most men. WEAR IT WITH: Its versatile so looks as good with a suit as with vintage Levis. THE PRODUCT: Pankhurst styling conditioner, 15

1
Justin Timberlake

Jamie Dornan

forced. Whats more, the boys from Towie have done for the cut what Ritchie from 5ive did for curtains in the Nineties. Gentlemen: now is the time to embrace the understated. Be it a softer take on the crop, an elegant, slightly longer side sweep or a more tousled look, here are this seasons four best looking haircuts and how to get them.

NEO BED HEAD

By Carmelo Guastella, master barber at Dolce & Gabbana

WHAT TO ASK FOR: The key is to look natural. Its messy on the side and chopped in; imperfect. Keep the sides longer too short and theyll elongate your face. WHO SHOULD HAVE IT: Guys with straighter hair. With curly hair or a slight wave, this style wont work. Guys with a classic square shape to their jaw will suit it but slim faces should avoid; it will give you a big head. HOW TO WEAR IT: With a white shirt and blue jeans. THE PRODUCT: Bumble and Bumble Sumotech styling wax, 22

4
Tom Brady

SOFT CROP

By Brent Pankhurst

3
James Franco

DISHEVELLED SLICK-BACK

By Carmelo Guastella WHAT TO ASK FOR: This style is a step away from the very short-sides look a lot of guys go for at the moment. Leave some fullness but define the hair around the edges. WHO SHOULD HAVE IT: Men with naturally wavy or curly hair. Its a good style for guys who like no fuss.
WEAR IT WITH: A suit; its kind of relaxed-formal.

WHAT TO ASK FOR: A classic textbook crop. Very short on the back and sides. WHO SHOULD HAVE IT: Guys in their thirties whose hair is starting to thin out. Its a young cut and it flatters. HOW TO WEAR IT: Fits an active lifestyle. THE PRODUCT: Ultramatte by American Crew, 11

THE PRODUCT: Easy Rider by Kevin Murphy, 18

AND THE HAIRCUT TO AVOID

Looking like a cross between Dot Cotton and Gary Oldmans Dracula, Mario Falcone off Towie shows how not to wear your hair. Ever. Attempting to combine a short back and sides with a blow-dried slick-back is as fatal a follicular error as getting a perm or using Just for Men. Only worse.

GETTY | REX

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KHAKI X-PATROL
AUTOMATIC SWISS MADE - WWW.HAMILTONWATCH.COM

Edited by COLIN CRUMMY

Film / Music / Books / TV / Games

in goes th e r i i Esqu tudio w ist s n the rtoo an a c ic dm icon ph Stea Ral

RALPH STEADMAN

Watch Ralph draw the Esquire Culture cover at esquire.co.uk | Go behind the scenes in Ralphs studio in Esquire Weekly later this month

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Culture
a series on Berlin sees prostitutes come equipped with coin-slot vaginas; everywhere humanity is stripped of any dignity. Its a long way from the mild-mannered, gentle eccentric before us, who you could happily expect to see reading aloud Alices Adventures in Wonderland on Jackanory, one of the many books he has illustrated. Even Steadmans way of creating his art makes it look a leisurely pursuit. As he stands, theatrically poised, ready to illustrate the Esquire Culture section cover, he pivots on his heel, surveying the blank A2 sheet in front of him and then whisks the pen nib across it like a y sherman, setting out his line. The method is at odds with the madness it unleashes. His world view is depressing, even if he is not. I tend to think of the world as getting blacker. I think the computer has a lot to do with it. Its fucked up our brains. We dont think rationally anymore. When I was growing up, I wanted to change the world. I found that I have; its worse than when I started. Ill take the credit for the lousiness. Steadman can be a serious man, although is not always taken seriously as an artist even by himself. He shows us the urinal he was given from the Hackney Empire, when it was being renovated. He signed it R Mutt, a homage to Duchamps Fountain, one of his heroes. He was a very human person but he was an artist, Steadman says. He was the one who connected really common things with art. He pauses, chuckles. You think of the number of stand-up comics who must have pissed in that. Ralph Steadman: Proud Too Be Weirrd (125, Ammo Books), edited by Steve Crist, is out on 31 October

Nut and blots: Steadman in his Maidstone workshop

CHRIS FLOYD

alph Steadman digs out a mound of sheet music from between a stack of books in the main room of many in his Maidstone studio. Aha! he exclaims. Here it is! What it is, is Steadmans Blot Symphony: yellowing lined pages of sheet music splattered with the British artists iconic, signature style, as if Just William stole into the music room and went mad with Winsor & Newton inks. Its quintessential Steadman, now 77: mad, maverick, and riotously fun. But wait, theres method to this madness. Steadman straightens, holds a page out and begins convincingly to hum the unreadable notes. It always sounds like somebodys stomach rumbling, Steadman observes, a whi of the Mersey lingering on the tongue even though he left Wallasey, Cheshire, as a baby. Steadmans been at this kind of thing for over 50 years. Not the singing but the furious scribbling. He started out freelancing for Private Eye, Punch and The Daily Telegraph, but he famously found his groove and lifelong sparring partner when the political magazine Scanlans Monthly sent him to do a piece on the Kentucky Derby with renegade writer Hunter S Thompson in 1970. That adventure the rst of many has been well documented but bears repeating. Steadman remembers the call: How would I like to go to Kentucky to meet an ex-Hells Angel whos just shaved his head? At the time it sounded a bit weird. I said thats all right, Im looking for work. It took three days for Steadman to nd Thompson. When he did, Thompson exclaimed: Holy shit! They said I was looking for a matted-haired geek with

string warts and I guess Ive found him. That tone unforgiving, manic and spot on set the template for the assignment and their friendship. The piece The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved saw writer and illustrator immerse themselves in the debauchery they were sent to cover. They became part of the story; a way of operating that came to be known as gonzo journalism. Thompson gures heavily in Proud Too Be Weirrd, a new book of Steadmans work. But Steadmans righteous anger ranges far further than adventures with his famous companion. In his newspaper cartoons, politicians are shit talkers and arse lickers;
A Load of Bankers (2002); My God IMusta Missed ItsHell Down Here (2006), above

Wa l k o n t h e w i l d s i d e . . .

Walk into winter with tonal tans, heavy-duty boots and weekend styles

from your favourite footwear brands. Now available at dune.co.uk

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Culture

BEYOND: TWO SOULS (BY INTERNET TROLLS)

Soul sister: Jodie Holmes (voiced by Ellen Page) is the lead character in Beyond: Two Souls

: o nd ou t Bey is s l u o n S o Two n PS3 er o b cto O 11

Beyond: Two Souls makers say its the most cinematic game ever. We turned toYouTube to find out, from those below the line, what the fuss is about
Comments Steve M: Guess games and movies have finally merged this gen, which is not such a bad thing. Reply: Thanks Steve M, you are spot on there my friend. Beyond: Two Souls takes cinematic quality in gaming to a whole new level. Thescript is reportedly 2,000 pages long (100 is more typical for a video game). Thegame is so visually rich a 35-minute demoscreened at Tribeca Film Festival. Usul573 Apparently it gets psychological andsupernatural, I think Jodie isnt normal. Reply: Isnt normal is a bit of an understatement, Usul573. Ellen Page has played eerie outsider on the big screen inWhip It, Mouth to Mouth and Super. Now shes lending her likeness to the games leadcharacter, Jodie, a military recruit who communicates with a weird supernatural entity known as Aiden that nobody else can see. AmericanLawGaming: Did anyone else think of theGreen Goblin when they saw the beginning? Reply: Yes, we did, though we preferred him in Finding Nemo. Willem Dafoe, AKA Spider-Mans green-skinned nemesis in the 2002 film, voices the scientist Nathan Dawkins, who isstudying Jodies mysterious abilities. communistwoman:Another PS3 exclusive... FUCK ME! Reply: Unlike similar games Far Cry 3 and Assassins Creed, Two Souls is available exclusively on the PS3, and its one of the consoles last big releases before the PS4 comes along in time for Christmas. Still, noexcuse for expletives. Off to the swear boxwith you, communistwoman. brovitoa16: Lucas and Spielberg can go fuck themselves for saying video games cant tell stories and dont create characters that we cancare about. Reply: With a motion-capture technology similar to that in Avatar, the developers recorded the actors vocals, facial expressions and movements all at the same time, creating multi-faceted characters with a near-human depth to them. Scenes took one take. So yeah, fuck you legendary directors!

AN ASSESSMENT OF THE BRITISH CAPITAL S PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION NETWORK

TK

What is a bus but failure crystallized into the form of two storeys of metal, painted red, hurled out into the world to hoover up losers from the streets of London.
Raymond Gunt (@raymondgunt), narrator of Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland (William Heinemann), out now

104

WORST PERSON EVER WORDS BY JIM MERRETT I BEYOND: TWO SOULS WORDS BY CHRIS MANDLE

Yo u v e g o t s o l e . . .
From high-shine styles to tri-tone brogues, inject some winter into your wardrobe with your favourite footwear brands. Now available at dune.co.uk

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Culture

CAUTION: WILD WOMEN CROSSING

MACHETE KILLS

UNINHIBITED FEMALES COMING YOURWAY YOUR WAY THIS MONTH

Robert Rodriguezs sequel to 2010s Machete, itself a spinlm o of the 2007 Rodriguez/Tarantino lm Grindhouse, retains the services of Jessica Alba and Michelle Rodriguez with fresh support from Alexa Vega (right), Amber Heard and Modern Family s Sofa Vergara (below). The latter plays Madame Desdemona, whose cleavage doubles as an automatic weapon (above). Those women, always multitasking. Out 11 October

MORE WILD WOMEN

THE TO DO LIST
Aubrey Plaza from Parks & Recreation stars in this flick about Grade-A 1993 high-school graduate Brandy trying to lose the big V before college. Its a movie that puts the gynaecological in the gross-out genre as Brandy gets randy with the popcorn butter. Out 4 October

SAD MONSTERS
Weve all been there. You rock up and your date turns out to be a monster like Medusa, above. This book spares a thought for the other side. From Frank Lesser, writer on The Colbert Report and Google doodle creator Willie Real. Out 17 October (Souvenir Press)

KATY PERRY: PRISM

You dont need to know what a Katy Kat or a Little Monster is. But if you have to take a side in pops autumn showdown between Katy Perry and Lady Gaga, we say go with the former all Fifties pin-up, Cali curves and simple pop chemistry. Prism (Virgin EMI) is out 21 October

THINGS YOU JUST WONT GET THROUGH THIS MONTH

ARMCHAIR NATION by JOE MORAN One of several books on telly that once you start reading you just want to switch on the box. Doh. Out November (Profile)

106

For a gallery of Rodrigeuzs femmes fatales, go to esquire.co.uk

CONTACT: +44 (0) 20 77 20 97 25 UK@THOMASSABO.COM

WWW.THOMASSABO.COM
David Garrett

Culture

Contemporary artists Elmgreen and Dragset meddle with the V&A

HERE COMES TROUBLE

It was going swimmingly till these guys turned up

ELMAR BESTNER

Scandinavian art duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are seasoned mischief-makers. These are the men who presented art collectors at the Vienna Biennale with one of their own, face down in a swimming pool (The Collectors, 2009, pictured). This year, they let David Shrigley build a shrine to Bubbles the chimp (part of Munichs A Space Called Public, 2013), much to the ire of Michael Jackson fans who had a shrine to the singer nearby. Critics call Elmgreen and Dragsets work subversive interventions. You might want to call it monkey business. So when the Victoria & Albert Museum came a-knocking on their Berlin door, the British institution could expect rather more than to just play host. The piece, Tomorrow, does not disappoint on that score. It sees the V&As former textile galleries morphed into the apartment of a ctional, elderly architect, Norman Swan. Like The Collectors, Tomorrow creates a world from a combination of E&D art and, in this case, V&A collections and sourced antiques. When you enter the installation, youll be given a script and will be free to wander anywhere around the set, examine the old guys bed, rie through his unpaid bills, play Dr Diagnosis with his prescriptions all to read between the lines of the drama. Its built like a lm set for a movie that has never been made or will never be made, says

Elmgreen, right, and Dragset

t is a l rrow Tomo &A unti V 2014 the y r nua 2 Ja

the blond, gangly Dane Elmgreen. We wanted an environment that would be completely dierent from that at the V&A, where youre not allowed to touch anything. Norman Swan, we learn, is the last of his South Kensington dynasty, forced to sell his familys heritage to a former student of his, who has crushingly for Swan made his fortune as an interior designer for celebrities. The scene ruminates on failure, ageing, alienation and on a very British clash between old money and new, reective of wider, real-life new world orders. Swan had great vision, but he didnt get his shit together, Elmgreen says. He relied on a heritage which is ending. When the money is gone, the money is gone. That the drama takes place in the V&A, named after the monarch who presided over the heyday of the British Empire and home to plenty of old-money heirlooms, is not lost on its creators. Its a challenge for a museum with the historical heritage of the British Empire, laughs Dragset, the darker-haired of the two. We treat everything with a healthy amount of disrespect in a way they [the hosts] are probably not used to, Elmgreen says. I was bored to death aged seven on Christmas Eve. I had to be amazed by the same Christmas set-up every year. I was like, Fuck guys, it must be possible to do this in a dierent way. What about a surprise? Turn over for more of E&Ds projects

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Culture

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET CONTINUED

PAST TROUBLE SPOTS

ONE NIGHT AWAITS US ALL (2012)
Louis Vuittons London shop workers slept in the bed, overseen by a bronze vulture. We actually did it because we always thought the staff looked a bit exhausted there and needed a break, Elmgreen laughs. Exhausted and terrified

DONNA TARTT AND THE CAPTIVATING SPELL

The Secret History author is back with a spellbinding new opus
Theo Decker is a kid with problems. His beloved mothers dead, killed in an explosion in a Manhattan museum. His dads an ass who scarpered the year before, though that was no bad thing. Theres also this business with a painting Theo took with him from the wreckage of the blast and hasnt gotten around to telling anyone about. Also, Theo who is 13 has got the nickname Potter because of his resemblance to a certain overachieving wizard boy. But as much as Donna Tartts long-awaited third novel The Goldnch is concerned with the physical reality, it is also about more marvellous qualities. In the midst of devastating carnage, she gives New York a magic that makes you want to book a ight direct to JFK. In the fusty world of West Village art restoration, she invests Theos newfound friends with mystical old-world wonder. When our heros odyssey leads him west to the void of Vegas, he nds himself bewitched by a fresh friendship. But the real magic begins when the gradual sense of ownership youll feel for the books hero nally captures you so strongly youll wonder where it came from. The Goldnch by Donna Tartt (Little, Brown) is out on 22 October

Alternative poster tagline option for

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS
POWERLESS STRUCTURES FIG 101 (2012)
Their design for the fourth plinth was a riposte to the grandeur of war elsewhere in Trafalgar Square. An idea to put a giant Japanese good-luck cat up was sadly dismissed. It wouldve been funny to have it waving, Elmgreen notes.

PRADA MARFA (2005)

A permanent Prada shop in the Texan desert. Elmgreen explains: Our idea was how would a Prada boutique look in the middle of the desert, out of its normal context? We need to test it out. It gets shot at, Dragset adds.

This is the line uttered by Captain Phillips (Tom Hanks) in the new Paul Greengrassdirected thriller of the same name when Phillips realises theres a band of Somali pirates zoning in on his cargo ship bound for Kenya. Fishy or what? A shame, then, the line didnt make the cut for the accompanying promo posters. Instead of asking Esquire for our input, the lm company for its US poster went with the matter-of-fact: In 2009, Captain Phillips was taken hostage by Somali pirates. This is his incredible story of survival. Though the international poster does threaten to go overboard with the hyperbole on its tagline: Out here survival is everything. Thats more like it. Either way, the lm based on Phillips memoir of the Maersk Alabama hijacking, is tense, taut and thoroughly recommended viewing. Oh, and dont let Forrest Gump put you o. Hanks is on superb, Oscar-baiting form. Captain Phillips is out on 18 October

THINGS YOU JUST WONT GET THROUGH THIS MONTH

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GETTY

TRAXBOX 16 CDs of pioneering Chicago house. How many ears have you got? Out 6 October (Harmless)

Culture

English eccentricity depicted in a major exhibition of photos by Tony Ray-Jones

From 196669, photographer Tony Ray-Jones created a portfolio imbued with a British eccentricity, humour and romance. Sadly, he would succumb to leukemia in 1972, aged just 30, but his candid style had caught the attention of edgling snapper, Martin Parr.

THE EYES HAVE IT

Only i Phot n Engla o n Tony graphs d: by Rayand Jone Mar s the tin Pa Muse Scienc rr, um, e now London 16 M until , arch 2014

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BLACKPOOL, 1968; BEACHY HEAD BOAT TRIP, 1967; BRIGHTON BEACH, 1969; BEAUTY CONTEST SOUTHPORT, 1967; POSSIBLY MORECOMBE, 1967-69, ALL BY TONY RAY-JONES NATIONAL MEDIA MUSEUM

Two years after Ray-Jones death, Parr began The Non Conformists project in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, inuenced by the formers snapshots of quirky and now vanished aspects of British society in the throes of change in the late Sixties. The rst major London exhibition of Ray-Jones work will display 100 images from his prolic three-year period, with an

accompanying exhibition of 50 of Parrs rarely-seen early black and white shots. I think of myself as a quintessentially British photographer and irony is important in how I approach the subject matter, Parr says of the links between their work. We are a funny race. Everywhere is funny, but we are particularly, charmingly eccentric, if only we could see it.

THE JIM BROADBENT VENN DIAGRAM

CLOUD ATLAS FILTH BENEVOLENT MADMAN BRIDGET JONESS DIARY LONGFORD

THE IRON LADY

BENEVOLENT

MADMAN

MOULIN ROUGE

IRIS

BRAZIL

ANOTHER YEAR HARRY POTTER

TIME BANDITS

FILTH IS IN CINEMAS ON 4 OCTOBER

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Cult

I WAS HELPING HIM CLEAN HIS TEETH WITH CUBES FROM THE ICE TRAY
Whats it like to be a Brit working in LA? Esquire bashes together the heads of Armando Iannucci (In the Loop, Veep) and Stephen Merchant (The Office, Hello Ladies) to find out

Hell and o Ladie s t seri he seco nd es star of Vee p Atla t on Sk y ntic HD 16 O ctob on er

THE NETWORKS
Stephen Merchant: There are endless executives whose jobs I am never entirely clear on. They are all called vice-president and they all have interesting and important ideas on the one day they visit the set. On the American version of The Oce, Steve Carells hair changed between series one and two. I assume there were lengthy conversations about that. Armando Iannucci: I suspect there was a change of VP and he wanted to turn everything around.

HOLLYWEIRD
AI: I was going through the scanners at LA airport, and I had a poster for In the Loop and the guy on the scanning machine said, Youre involved in lm? And I said, Yes. He asked what the lm was and said, Oh, In the Loop! I went to your screenwriting event at the lm school last week. It turned out the guy who does the scanning machine at LA airport is a scriptwriter. SM: Once, a waiter brought me room service, and a script that hed written on the same tray. AI: Oh no! I overheard an agent in LA saying, Hey Gary, sorry to call you out of a funeral. Was it family or friend?

THE CREW
SM: Do you nd theres a lot more crew? Im sure its twice as large. It seemed to me that the people who make lunch are not the people who bring sandwiches in-between lunch. AI: Thats like the dierence between a manager and an agent.

THE TALENT
AI: The writers [on Veep] are English. So [US lead actress] Julia Dreyfuss, instead of saying, this feels a little too English, does this stereotype of an English buoon with wonky teeth. Thats become shorthand for script rewrites. SM: On network TV, they are obsessed with likeability. They have test dials where if people dont like a character they can turn the dial and that person is replaced by another actor. Which is brutal. Particularly as it seems to me, if you are given a dial, you will turn it.

THE GLAMOUR
SM: Armando, Im not going to lie to you, Im driving a convertible. I am. Im in Los Angeles, why wouldnt I? AI: I wouldnt want to drive. I get quite tense when I drive and not knowing where I am. SM: The other day, I pulled up at some lights and there was an attractive woman in the car next to me. I had the top down and I smiled at her. And I realised that instead of having hip-hop blaring from the speakers, I was actually listening to the In Our Time podcast with Melvyn Bragg. AI: What was that about? SM: I think it was something like Roman Britain.

AWARDS
AI: In the Loop got an adapted screenplay nomination at the Oscars. We were all laughing at being in a stretch limo, and then we realised we were doing what everyone in the world who hires a stretch limo is pretending to do go to the Oscars. SM: On the way to the Golden Globes, Ricky [Gervais] hadnt eaten and he forced the limousine to pull into a lling station where he bought a bag of US-style cheesy Wotsits. As we approached the Globes, he was covered in orange dust and I was helping him clean his teeth with ice from the ice tray. It was like a lottery winner.

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For Armando Iannuccis My Digital Life, go to esquire.co.uk More TV coverage in Esquire Weekly

CAROLYN DJANOGLY | GETTY

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Culture

s month. Esquire raises Virgin Records turns 40 thi ought you the Sex Pistols, a glass to the label that br i Halliwell MassiveAttack and, er, Ger
Virgin invented the hippy capitalist. Branson, a Stoweeducated son of a barrister, opened a beanbag-strewn record shop in 1971. To Branson, the counterculture was a market like any other, so he and his colleagues launched a record label to release the music they wanted to buy. Their rst album, Mike Oldelds Tubular Bells, set the blueprint for prog rock and ambient electronica, selling 2.6m copies in the UK alone. When punk broke, Virgin was the only major label that stood by the Sex Pistols. They released the Jubilee single God Save the Queen, funded stunts like the bands Thames boat trip, and defended Never Mind the Bollocks (against obscenity charges for using bollocks the band won). Virgin became the go-to label for the post-punk generation (bands such as Magazine, OMD and XTC all signed), and all the amboyant art-pop that followed. The Human League, Heaven 17 and early Simple Minds werent just on Virgin. They were Virgin bands: strange and unsettling, visually amazing, as likely to oend the NME as the Daily Mail and wildly ambitious. It all culminated in Culture Club, where a sharp-tongued gay man became the biggest pop star on the planet. In the years to come, Virgin took other chances. Few other labels saw any potential in the loose groupings of rappers, producers, grati artists and breakdancers that grew up in the late Eighties. From Soul II Soul, British rnbs biggest export in two decades, to Massive Attack, where everything from hip-hop to Jamaican sound systems and new wave came together. In 1988, Virgin released the rst compilation of Detroit techno. In the Nineties, as pop turned to dance and DJs became superstars, they started to sign people whod grown up listening to Virgin releases: Air, The Verve, The Chemical Brothers. Above all there was Daft Punk, who plugged the labels new dance direction into its head-music heritage. They were all dierent yet somehow all Virgin artists. Its impossible to admire all that Virgin did. For every Neneh Cherry theres a Geri Halliwell music is after all a business. But could any current label hope to repeat a Mike Oldeld, a Culture Club or even a Spice Girls? Probably not. If the Virgin story proves anything, its that Malcolm McLaren was right about one thing: cash does come from chaos. virgin40.com

NOT SO DAFT PUNK

t seems weird now that their name is on trains, cable TV, planes and even a bank but there was a time when the Virgin logo was something youd scribble on your schoolbook to give two ngers to The Man. It was everything countercultural a big label with the soul and swagger of an indie. Virgin Records turns 40 this year. There will be a series of birthday gigs from signings past and current, plus compilation CDs, a retrospective exhibition and an impressive coee-table book (full disclosure: I wrote the chapters on dance music). Its fair to say that Virgins identity is a little fuzzier than it was, after The Rolling Stones, The Spice Girls, Mariah Carey and near-extinction during nancier Guy Hands slapstick attempts to re-engineer its parent company EMI. But Virgin still did things for British music that no other label could.

Branson pickle: Sir Richard andfriends; above, with MalcolmMcLaren

IN G LIKE A V IRGIN? R I
01
Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells Part One (1973)

Nope, Madonnas not on there. Heres 12 of Virgins best singles from the past 40 years 04
Sparks Beat the Clock (1979)

07
Neneh Cherry Buffalo Stance (1988)

10
Daft Punk One More Time (2000)

02
Sex Pistols God Save the Queen (1977)

05
The Human League Love Action (1981)

08
Massive Attack Unfinished Sympathy (1991)

11
WORDS BY ANDREW HARRISON | GETTY

Kelis Milkshake (2003)

03
XTC Making Plans for Nigel (1979)

06
Inner City Good Life (1988)

09
The Verve Bitter Sweet Symphony (1997)

12
Professor Green I Need You Tonight (2010)

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For more on Virgin Records, go to esquire.co.uk

ESQUIRE PROMOTION

Happy hour
STRAIGHT UP OR IN A COCKTAIL, BOURBON IS ALWAYS AT ITS BEST WITH BUFFALO TRACE
It goes without saying that the best way to drink Bualo Trace Kentucky Straight Bourbon is straight up its the only way to fully appreciate the complex delicacy of this legendary whiskey. That said, if youre looking for something a little longer, why not channel your inner Don Draper and order a Bualo manhattan on the rocks? A skillful combination of Bualo Trace, sweet vermouth and bitters (seen here with an orange garnish rather than the more usual maraschino cherry), this twist on the classic is second to none. So why Bualo Trace? Well, as the agship bourbon of the Bualo Trace Distillery, it has a long and illustrious history. Some 220 years since it was founded, this perfectly rounded, uncompromising bourbon is a standard bearer to the distillerys quality the ultimate blend of sweet, spicy and smoky smoothness. It has proven credentials, too: the passion and dedication of its craftsmen has meant the Bualo Trace Distillery has won more awards than any other distillery in the world. And with one taste, you can see why.
Visit buffalotrace.co.uk

ESQUIRE READER EVENT

Join us at Honky Tonk in Clapham, London, on 7 November. The experts from Buffalo Trace will take you on a four-step tasting journey through their bourbon whiskeys during a delicious three-course dinner. Tickets are 30, but Esquire readers can attend for just 25 each, or 45 per pair. Find out more and register to secure your place at buffalotrace.co.uk/esquire

Culture

The best football apps to get your game on

Finger kickin good: John Barnes keeps it old-school

APPS ALL FOLKS

THE MOST

ALAN PARTRIDGE
MOMENT IN

STEVE COOGANS
PP E A O FRE IV E T S U L E XC Q U I R E ES S DER RE A

NOT VERY

ALAN PARTRIDGE
FLUID FOOTBALL PRO USUALLY 0.69 BUT EXCLUSIVELY FREE TO DOWNLOAD FOR ESQUIRE READERS ON iPHONE/iPAD. GO TO ESQUIRE.CO.UK/APPS FOR DETAILS

NEW FILM,

PHILOMENA
THE SCENE:
Coogans character former journalist and Labour government adviser, Martin Sixsmith has a medical.

Real-time tactical decisions are in the palm of your hand as you direct your team through on-eld situations. String together passes, out-pace defenders, set up crosses and the game is yours for the taking. And if you make a fatal error, Andy Gray and Richard Keys are there to point it out. Thanks guys.

DOCTOR:
You have an outstanding stool sample.

SIXSMITH:
FIFA 13 2.99
The big daddy of fantasy football runs across 30 leagues so you can follow Bale all the way to Real Madrid or keep it real with Bristol Rovers (Come on, The Pirates!). Theres instant replay for the pub bores.
Excellent.

DOCTOR:
No, it means you havent given me one.

CHAMP MAN FREE

Channel the continental cool of Jos Mourinho (a man can dream, cant he?) with this management strategy game. Youve got 21 leagues and 400 clubs to choose from and a whole season to get it right, a luxury your real life manager cant afford.

SCORE! WORLD GOALS FREE

Glory hunters come gather around the goalposts of Score! World Goals where you can recreate 400 goals from all over the world. How you celebrate is totally up to you but we draw the line at doing a dad dance. Someone has to.

FOOTBALL LEAGUE FREE

A no-nonsense guide to the season with fixtures, tables and scores across the npower Football League and Barclays Premier League, so youll never be caught out by that irksome pub bore on the stats front either.

Philomena, Stephen Frears true-life story about an elderly ladys [Judi Dench] search for the son she was forced to give up for adoption in Fifties Ireland, is out on 1 November.

THINGS YOU JUST WONT GET THROUGH THIS MONTH

THE BEATLES: ALL THESE YEARS First part of three 1,000-page biogs. This one ends before theyve even had a hit. Out 10 October (Little, Brown)

118

For more football apps, go to esquire.co.uk

For Alan Partridges What Ive Learned, go to esquire.co.uk

#
!

!/ !9 (|!!

ESQUIRE PROMOTION
The latest offering from revered whisky house The Macallan, The 1824 Series, may nod to the year in which the Speyside distillery was founded, but these releases are defined by colour, not age, highlighting The Macallans highly-skilled distillation and maturation process. Chief whisky-maker Bob Dalgarno is the man entrusted with creating the series. Gold, Amber, Sienna and Ruby are named after the natural colours formed during maturation in different sherry-seasoned oak cask types. The result is four very different expressions. Amber, with its floral nose and warm, fruity notes, is drinkable yet intensely complex. It deftly balances sweetness (vanilla, raisin and toffee apple) and gentle spice (ginger and cinnamon) with subtle oak. The result? A truly masterful spirit. For more information visit themacallan.com

Spirit of the times

EXPLORE A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF COLOUR WITH THE 1824 SERIES FROM THE MACALLAN

OAK TRAY, 24, BY LITTALA AT SKANDIUM I WATCH, 205, BY PAUL SMITH I TABLE, BY BETHAN GRAY

Culture

Even when there is a dildo in the room, as we discover in his new show, Masters of Sex
Masters of Sex is Showtimes new 12-part drama about pioneering sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson as they lead after-hours experiments into the mechanics of sex in smut-adverse Middle America. Which means lots of nudity, for the sake of science. Leading man Michael Sheen explains just how you keep it together in a room of 20 young, naked, attractive women. ESQUIRE: Youre best known for playing famous men like Tony Blair, David Frost and Brian Clough. Was playing a lesser-known real life person like William Masters any dierent? MICHAEL SHEEN: I did a bit of research. But its not like playing someone who is instantly recognisable and very familiar to millions of people like Blair or Frost. Its a dierent kind of pressure. The structure you have in place when you are playing someone who is better known can be useful. Whereas with someone you dont know, you dont have that template. ESQ: Is there a resemblance between the real William Masters and how you played him? MS: No, not really. From when he was quite young he was prematurely balding with white tufts of hair at the side. He had a very hawk-like face. He was quite an imposing and forbidding man. I did suggest [going bald] at rst, but they decided it wasnt a good idea.
How to make the missus light up

MICHAEL SHEEN IS A VERY SERIOUS ACTOR...

Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan star as William Masters and Virginia Johnson (thats right, Johnson)

ex of S rs e n t o Mas arts st nel 4 n Cha month s thi

have a glass dildo hanging around that you can light up and vibrate, thats always going to be good for a gag.

ESQ: Was it fun on set? MS: For all that we are so sophisticated about, you get a glass dildo out and grown men are giggling like kids. We havent come that far. ESQ: Anything else odd about lming? MS: There was a lot of standing around clothed while people are naked, partially naked, pretending to masturbate, pretending to have sex, pretending to have a gynaecological examination. Doing all kinds of things. Things that are fairly odd to do on a daily basis. ESQ: How did you get over that? MS: When I was doing the research, I found it quite dicult to understand how a heterosexual male could be in the situation that gynaecologists nd themselves in every day. Everyone said the same thing, which [is that] there is an area of your brain you just switch o. Then doing the show, you nd yourself in a room with about 20 almost completely naked, attractive young women doing various sexual things, and on some level your brain knows I will not be able to get through this day or any other day if I cant relate to this dierently. You just do.

ESQ: Was it tough making a Fifties piece on sex not appear quaint to a modern audience? MS: Our access to information about sex is [now] a polar opposite to what it was then. It seems that no matter how much information we have about sex, it doesnt translate to make it any easier to deal with a relationship. Because ultimately this story isnt about sex, its about intimacy. Were not trying to do a museum piece. Hopefully people will relate. ESQ: How do you stop it going a bit Carry On? MS: When you have characters and a culture where the sexuality is so repressed and taboo, and you have within that this incredibly explicit research, then naturally the clash between these things is going to potentially give rise to a surreality and absurd opportunities. Thats also a really useful way to deal with something that can be quite dicult. Obviously, when you

SOMETHING TO HELP YOU GET THROUGH THE MONTH

ESQUIRE WEEKLY Esquires new, exclusive to iPad, edit of the seven days ahead. Download it every Thursday from Apple Newsstand

For the full Michael Sheen interview, go to esquire.co.uk

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THE FA L L GUY
TIME TO RE-EVALUAT E YOU R WI NTE R WARD ROBE WITH KE NNET H C OLE . THE COLLECTION PAYS HOM AGE TO ITS C LASSIC FORM ALWE AR HE RITAGE WITH AN A / W RANGE DEDI CAT ED TO THE M ODERN ME TROP OLI TAN MAN PHOTO GRAPHS BY SI MON LI PMAN STYLING BY DAVI D NOLA N

A velvet jacket with a retro shawl collar is a slick alternative to standard black tie. Add an oversized knitted bow tie for impact. Velvet blazer, 250; shirt, 69; knitted bow tie, 40; slim-t suit trousers, 120, all by Kenneth Cole, available exclusively at House of Fraser and houseoraser.co.uk.

ESQUIRE PROMOTION

Channel your inner Steve McQueen with a formal navy doublebreasted raincoat, light enough to wear over your suit. Doublebreasted raincoat, 250; grey shirt, 69; navy striped tie, 40; Panama suit trousers, 120, all by Kenneth Cole, available exclusively at House of Fraser and houseoraser.co.uk.

ESQUIRE PROMOTION

The three-piece suit is back. In mohair wool, its durable and travelfriendly. Mix it up with a contrasting striped shirt and tie combo. Grey mohair wool jacket, 230; grey mohair wool waistcoat, 55; multi-striped shirt, 79; print tie, 40; grey mohair trousers, 120, all by Kenneth Cole, available exclusively at House of Fraser and houseoraser.co.uk.

ESQUIRE PROMOTION

The reign of the ubiquitous skinny suit has come to an end, although t is still key. Allow the simple lines of a navy two-piece to skim the body, rather than hug it, and keep accessories lowkey. Navy Bloomeld jacket, 230; multistriped shirt, 79; navy tie, 40; navy Bloomeld trousers, 120, all by Kenneth Cole, available exclusively at House of Fraser and houseoraser.co.uk.

Above: The Mad Men series continues to inuence mens tailoring. A simple grey two-piece is given a modern twist with the addition of tan tasselled loafers. Dark grey jacket , 230; white shirt, 85; multi-striped tie, 40; dark grey trousers, 120, all by Kenneth Cole, available exclusively at House of Fraser and houseoraser.co.uk. Brown tasselled loafers, 89, by Dune. Below: The subtle contrast between fabrics brings a degree of creativity to more sober outts. Here, the denim twill shirt and knitted tie increase the texture quota. Blue slim-t jacket, 230; denim shirt, 79; silk knit tie, 40; blue trousers, 120, all by Kenneth Cole, available exclusively at House of Fraser and houseoraser.co.uk.

READER EVENT AT HOUSE OF FRASER

Esquire is teaming up with Kenneth Cole for House of Fraser to host a reader event on 24 October in central London. Youll be privy to expert style advice, with drinks, canapes and an exclusive gift with any purchase on the evening. For your chance to join us, register at: esquire.co.uk/kennethcole


PAGE 128

HOW DID THE HUMBLE (GREASY, FATTENING, DELICIOUS) HAMBURGER BECOME 2013S FOODIE PHENOMENON?

[
By Colin Crummy

eve all been there. Youre working late in the oce. Youre hungry. Itll be too late to eat once you get home and if you nip out for a quick bite in a restaurant itll just mean staying longer. Might as well call out for takeaway. Wheres that burger menu? At around 10pm on Tuesday 25 June, in a central London conference room, one overworked 42-year-old executive took delivery of his evening meal: a hamburger and fries from the Waterloo branch of Byron, the fast mushrooming chain of burger restaurants. He ate it at the conference table, with his co-workers, the notes for a speech he was preparing to give the following day spread out before him, alongside the cardboard food containers. A-ha! A perfect opportunity to TwitPic himself, burning the midnight oil like any other middle-class striver while chomping away, man-of-the-peoplestyle, on unpretentious snack food. An indication to his followers, and the wider world, that he, like the rest of us, is diligent and dedicated, and that his tastes are typical, commonplace. The next morning, that photo appeared on the cover of The Sun, beneath the headline Shamburger. The speech, it turned out, contained details of a spending review, in which our man would shortly announce an 11.5bn cut in government spending. (Youve guessed by now that he is George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.) The burger, The Sun and every other national newspaper reported, would have cost a minimum of 6.75, the fries an extra 2.95. If cheese is added, The Daily Telegraph helpfully followed up, the price of the burger rises to 7.95. Well, fancy that. Clearly, the Chancellors latest attempt at appearing normal, one of us, had backred spectacularly. Instead of a typical middle-class white-collar worker he was being

PAGE 130

portrayed, not for the rst time, as posh, privileged and out of touch. I was working late on a speech and I had a hamburger, he told Radio 4s Today programme. Its perfectly reasonable to have a hamburger while working on a speech. Oh, but it wasnt just a hamburger. At least, not as the world once understood them and, in the case of The Sun et al, still understands them, as cheap and cheerful fast food. It was a gourmet burger: a cultural signier of the urbane, foodie, metropolitan elite. Why, wondered The Sun and others, hadnt Osborne got a takeaway from McDonalds, for example, which is far less expensive and closer to his Whitehall oce? How could the austerity Chancellor be so insensitive as to gorge on premium beef while making benets cuts? Osborne had a perfectly reasonable

Beef patties on the grill at Byron, one of Britains burgeoning gourmet burger chains

George Osborne tucks into his controversial Byron burger

answer, and he gave it to ITVs Daybreak McDonalds doesnt deliver (neither does Byron) but by then it was too late. He was a gourmet burger man. McDonalds wasnt good enough for the likes of him. The thing is hes not alone far from it. Chances are, youre a gourmet burger man, too. In 2013, we all are. (Depending on your political bent, you may be discomted at being bracketed with Osborne in this way. Dont worry; cool people eat at Byron, too.) Suddenly, burger restaurants are no longer democratically guilty pleasures or cheap substitutes for a nourishing meal. Theyre hip. Theyre hard to get into. Theyre patrolled by clipboard nazis and staed by tattooed mixologists. Theyre full of young, beautiful sophisticates obsessively

cataloguing their suppers on social media. They are, in short, where its at. In Londons West End, a dozen new gourmet burger restaurants have opened in the last year. Theres Patty & Bun, BRGR.CO, Burger and Shake, the American chains Shake Shack and Five Guys and Hawaiian burger eatery Kua Aina (President Obamas choice), Soho Diner, Jamie Olivers Diner, Tommis Burger Joint, Grillshack, Honest Burger and Lucky Chip at Slider. Instead of sating our cravings, these seem to have only heightened our hunger pangs. Established players like MEATliquor or Burger & Lobster continue to report lengthy

Right, Tom Byng, the founder of Byron, now has 29 restaurants

She still managed to nish it, mind. The market is booming and it is only going to get bigger says Tom Byng, the founder of Byron. We look at our stores in Covent Garden, the epicentre of the burger craze, and its actually grown more in the last number of months. Thats happened because the pie has become bigger. Now the question for everyone is: how big is the pie and whats my slice of it? Before we [Byron] had a big slice of a small pie. Now we want an even bigger slice of a much bigger pie.

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waiting times. Its not as if there arent other options. The same area teems with McDonalds and pub-grub burger options. But like the Chancellor, we are plumping for premium: impeccably sourced meat from rare breeds, ground on the spot, placed in an artisanal bun (oh, yes) or brioche, served with a special sauce somewhat more nuanced than that of the Golden Arches. Outside central London, Dirty Burger the Soho House groups foray into gourmet burgers, opened in Kentish Town in 2012 has spread to Vauxhall, with another two sites in the pipeline. Byron, the biggest player in the gourmet burger world, has 29 outlets in London and opened in Liverpool and Manchester this year. Those cities are also home to gourmet burger joint Almost Famous, which became Momentarily Famous in the summer when a woman eating its triple-patty burger dislocated her jaw.

Each Byron restaurant is both sitespecific, and exactly the same as all the others

ourmet burgers are not new to the UK, but the zeal for them is. New Zealand company GBK (Gourmet Burger Kitchen) opened their rst branch in London in 2001 in Battersea. There are now 58 branches across the country. It is owned by Capricorn Ventures, the company that also runs Nandos. GBK oers a better burger than most of the famous global fast food outlets but has never gone in for the fashionable positioning achieved by Byron. There was Hamburger Union, which opened in 2003 but sold its ve central London sites to Noble, the owners of Aberdeen Steak House in 2007, citing tough market conditions. After similar reports of a number of tough trading years, GBK announced in late 2012 plans for ve new sites in six months to capitalise on the rapidly expanding gourmet burger market. Whats happened is that a new generation of diners has entered the market during the economic downturn. These recessionista twentysomethings are driving the burger foodie phenomenon. They have a limited income but high expectations of a night out. Crucially, sitting in a restaurant is only part of that experience.

When young people go out now, fewer and fewer go out just to do one thing, says Esquire contributing editor and Sunday Times restaurant critic AA Gill. They will want to do two or three things: they may want to eat, go to a club, two clubs, a cocktail bar. Peoples idea of a night out is more grazing on a lot of things. Thats absolutely where a burger comes into it. This works for the restaurateur in a recession. A hamburger is an attractive proposition: it is cheap to produce with high margins and quick turnaround on the tables. Restaurants in London in 2013 are as much about property prices as they are about customers, says Gill, and you have got to make them earn their overheads. The cheapest food you can sell is pizza. Pizza is our and water with a smear of tomato, says Gill. It costs absolutely nothing. Burgers come close. If you are doing one simple thing and varying it by saying what you have put on top of it, you dont need to have highly qualied sta to make it. Byron is the PizzaExpress of the gourmet burger world: it oers an excellent product at an aordable price point with a patina of mainstream fashionability, to satisfy the middle class. It is owned by Gondola, which also runs PizzaExpress. You will nd it in many of the same locations as PizzaExpress, a sign of where exactly it wants to sit in terms of dining demographics. In PizzaExpress you wont nd anybody very horrible, cultural commentator Peter York grins. PizzaExpress is in all the nice places and not everywhere else. Byron is a package for the same middle-class demographic, but in their early twenties. Byng launched Byron in 2007 on Kensington High Street in Londons auent Kensington and Chelsea borough. The chain has since plotted a path through Londons more bourgeois suburbs from the Kings Road to Upper Street in Islington. This year, it went to Oxford and Cambridge, places youd expect to nd that metropolitan elite to which The Sun alluded. It is utterly dened by a locational demography, York says. Byrons Beak Street branch in Londons Soho is a slick diner homage >

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with oxblood seating booths, mismatched chairs, rustic lighting, Formica table tops and a staircase designed to look like those gated Manhattan elevators. The decor changes for every outlet but all share the same design tropes: chipped furniture, unvarnished oors, exposed brickwork. You can trace the design references back to Nineties New York, Friends and to Shoreditchs Noughties London version of SoHo loft living. These ideas hang around a long time, York says. So it is trendy but not alienatingly so, with plenty of signposts to make it appeal to as broad a base as possible. There is a mini menu and colouring books for children. There are courgette fries, salad and a wine list specically targeted at the kind of women and middle-class sophisticates whod never usually go near a burger joint. Byrons website gives a detailed breakdown of allergy information for each menu item. No vegetarian is going to have a burger joint as their rst dining choice, but if youre in a group and the demographic is the most likely to socialise in packs there are options to suit everyone. (And they do a mushroom burger Portobello mushroom with roasted red pepper, goat cheese and baby spinach, that is.) If you are going with a gang of people, three of whom are girls who perceive burgers as what fat people eat, giving them the option of eating something they perceive isnt going to make them fat is obviously much better, Gill says. The upgrade of the burger from fast food to gourmet experience starts well before the meat hits the mouth. Byron gives you reassuringly old-fashioned restaurant hooks. You are greeted at the door, given a knife and fork that you then dont use. Byrons look smart and expensive, but they also hand you a menu that says simple, good value, cows happily reared. It is a considered package, down to the brand name. Byron is very cultural, its romantic. Its not calling it Fast Eddies, Gill says. At the other end of the scale but equally considered is the ferociously hip MEATliquor operation. Yianni Papoutsis tiny, Greek, wearer of Hawaiian shirts set up Meatwagon, a gloried burger van, and dragged it about London, gaining a reputation on the wires for grilling the tastiest burger this side of the Atlantic. Scott

Collins, who ran a number of London bars, heard about him on a blog and visited the wagon when it was located in a car park in Peckham in May 2010. Collins picks up the tale: I found this shitty, industrial-estate car park, this midget ipping the odd burger in the rain, had a burger and thought, Fuck, this is good. He happened to tweet he was looking for somewhere to put the van that wasnt an industrial estate. We met, I took a punt and put it in a car park in one of my pubs. The punt worked. MEATliquor currently has a turnover of 10 million a year. Papoutsis can watch over all three operations from multi-screened CCTV on his iPhone. Apart from having the sluttiest burger on the block a big, greasy, satisfying aair MEATliquor gave the burger a loud personality to match. Their restaurants are ear-deafening, dark and decorated in grati. They play dingy garage rock and serve Brooklyn Brewery beer in a can and alcoholic Coke oats in homage to the hipper parts of the American experience. All of this went wild on the blogosphere; MEATliquor was one of the rst to teach that queuing for burgers was cool. Claudia Schier and Princess Beatrice have been in, a sure sign that the burger has come a long way from its origins in 19th-century New York.

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urgers started life as a lowerclass food with a bad reputation. A cheap street food developed in the US by German immigrants (hence Hamburg-er), burgers took o when meat grinders came into play in the 1880s and butchers could make a prot by throwing cheap ller like gristle, skin and excess fat into the mix. A 1933 book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics, called hamburgers about as safe as getting your meat out of a garbage can standing in the hot sun. In his bite-sized book Hamburger: A Global History, food historian Andrew F Smith illustrates there were decent burgers out there as far back as 1921 when Walter Anderson and Edgar Ingram founded White Castle, in Wichita, Kansas. They insisted on same-day beef delivery, on grinding it themselves and having windows into

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the kitchen so customers could see the preparation. The company grew, establishing its own meat-processing plant and bun-baking operations. A business plan evolved: cheap food, limited menu and big volume. By 1925, White Castle was selling more than 84,000 hamburgers. Subsequently, the hamburger went super-sized with a side order of controversy. The McDonald brothers opened their rst drive-in 60 miles east of Los Angeles, at San Bernardino, in 1940. The rise of the hamburger paralleled that of the automobile, as drivers looked for food they could eat behind the wheel. Taking their cue from the auto industry, the McDonald siblings implemented an industrial assembly line model popularised by Henry Ford. It meant faster food, cheaper prices and consistency in taste from Boston to Beirut. But a globalised,

standardised burger also meant sacricing freshness and quality. If you looked beyond the modern fast food giants, that original home-grown idyll envisioned by White Castle continued to ourish. Family businesses like In-N-Out, established in 1948 and now spread across California and the US Southwest, insisted on fresh ingredients and slow growth. Their burgers are still regularly voted the best in the US. The independent diner free of the demands of multinational corps thrived in the US: wherever you roamed in the Land of the Free, you were pretty much guaranteed to get a knockout burger, served by an authentic fat guy in ketchup-stained whites. It may not have had the modern day organic food stamp, but it was tasty. Over here? We got Wimpy.

A table setting at Byron, the PizzaExpress of the gourmet burger world

A Fifties McDonalds; today there are some 30,000 outlets worldwide

Hamburgers are the edible American dream, the European immigrant who made it into the big time in the US, says Esquire food editor and Mail on Sunday restaurant critic Tom Parker Bowles. But for many years, over here we had the choice between Wimpy and the gritty funfair beefburger. Even McDonalds seemed like manna compared to this pair of second-rate wretches. As a result, US food in general, says Parker Bowles, was dismissed as fast and cheap. In other words, for years we were missing out. The US wasnt just clogged with junk-food chains. There were great-tasting burgers sizzling away beside highways and byways. The men who were to become our new burger kings knew this. They were there sampling the real deal and wondering why we werent getting it here. MEATliquors Papoutsis worked for years backstage in the West End and took road trips in the US, dining out at red-leather-booth burger joints. Diner burgers in the US knock us out of the water, he says. Places just on these two-lane highways. It used to piss me o you couldnt get a decent burger back here. Byng, of Byron, also travelled in the US in his twenties and noticed that there was no equivalent back home to the delicious diner burgers he found on the road. In the UK, we had only fast-food monoliths serving up what he calls consistently mediocre fare. Byng was already an experienced restaurateur. Hed run the modern Italian restaurant Zucca, in south London, and Nineties celebrity haunt 192 in Notting Hill for nine years before that. Byng oated the idea of bringing an authentic American burger experience here to Gondola, which runs PizzaExpress, Zizzi and Ask, a portfolio that makes it the biggest for mid-priced or casual dining in the UK. The deal was theyd do it his way with their money. It was going to be a challenge. The burger had become synonymous with values that might put you o your dinner. Take your pick from corporate greed, employee exploitation, the dark side of globalisation, the destruction of the planet. There were plenty of associations to choose from, and none of them appetising. Wed swallowed Morgan Spurlocks gut-wrenching Super Size Me. Wed choked on Eric Schlossers Fast Food >

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Nation. This new breed of burger needed to wipe the palate clean of all that bad aftertaste. The US had already thought about this. In 2004, Danny Meyers Union Square Hospitality Group, owner of New York foodie institutions Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe, won a bid to open a permanent burger kiosk in Madison Square Park, part of eorts to revitalise the green space in midtown Manhattan. From this humble beginning, albeit one backed by a dining powerhouse, the US phenomenon Shake Shack was born. Danny Meyer is seen, by his disciples, as a gourmet burger visionary. The British burger guys speak of his manual on dining, Setting the Table, in reverential terms. Hes the kind of man who wins awards for Exemplary Service to New York City, like hes the Bruce Wayne of burgers. He speaks with nostalgia for the kind of roadside joints the US was built on. Shake Shack returned to this original ideal of the burger chain, as exemplied by White Castle or In-N-Out. He also shook it loose of any more recent fast food connotations. Firstly, it didnt act like a chain, taking its time to expand. It was four years before the second New York outlet opened. Second, it made having a burger a quality dining experience, selling upscale fast food without a major price increase. Its still under $5 for a cheeseburger. Meyer calls it ne casual, the quality youd expect from ne dining at the price and convenience of casual. To do this, Meyer utilised his connections in the supply chain. He secured meat from steak restaurants that had boomed in the Nineties and had decent o-cuts they threw away. The chain added wine to its menu in 2007; there are Pooch-ini dog biscuits, with peanut butter sauce and vanilla custard; corporate social responsibility and feel-good consumerism are twinned in their slogan Stand for Something Good. The American burger had gone up a class. Shake Shack is now a destination restaurant in the US, one for which people typically wait in line for as much as an hour. The hamburgers gourmet moment is now ebbing, says Josh Ozersky, Time magazine food columnist and author of 2008s The Hamburger: A History, leaving in its wake a few enlightened operators like Shake Shack who seek to make

[
BURGER BLOGGER [ ON WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR IN AN AUTHENTIC HAMBURGER THE TOMATO
Small bits of tomato sliding around in condiment (and probably right out of your burger) will never be as pleasing as one slice of beefsteak tomato thats the perfect size ie, the same diameter as the patty and bun.

Anatomy of a

THEBUN
Youre looking for the softest rolls possible here. The ideal burger bun can be squashed effortlessly to almost nothing and function as a delivery system for whats inside without being chewy or hard to actually fit in your mouth.

THEBEEF
Chuck steak has a good fat content that is brilliant in a burger. Fat is flavour and juiciness. Aim for a fat content of 15 to 20 per cent. Certain cuts offer more flavour and aged beef has a more intense umami flavour. It can make for a tastier burger if paired with suitably tasty ingredients such as a brioche bun, intensely tangy cheddar or a piquant sauce.

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THE LETTUCE
If theres a leaf of lettuce under the beef patty, the juices will collect on it and simply spill out when you pick it up, like a kind of beefy booby trap. However, if the lettuce is shredded then its huge surface area will actually hold said juice almost like a dressing.

Be willing to try out the more experimental offerings before deciding what exactly is for you. I never thought Id enjoy bacon and pineapple jam in a burger, but it turns out intense salty and intense sweet in a burger is pretty damn awesome. Embrace the learning curve!

THERESULT

THEMAYO
A cleverly-placed splat of mayo or oil-based condiment on the bottom bun will also help prevent burger juice destroying the bun before you finish eating the burger, too.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAMIEN WEIGHILL

real burgers as well as they can, rather than distorting and exploiting them with freakish and ludicrous toppings. Even with its slow growth, Shake Shack is set to triple in size by the end of 2013 with at least 33 outlets in six countries, the UK being the latest port of call. In July, another American chain, Five Guys opened the same weekend as Shake Shack in London. A take on the red-and-white-tiled diner experience but with transparent food sourcing and a 100-avour soda fountain (how about Peach Fanta?), there are plans by its British investor Charles Dunstone, founder of The Carphone Warehouse, to roll out Five Guys nationwide. There was only one snag to the Americans plan for burger domination: the British burger had got its act together. Shake Shack reckon they have been looking [in London] for three years, MEATliqours Collins says. If they had turned up three years ago, we wouldnt be sitting here now. Undoubtedly. They would have turned the market upside down, adds his business partner Papoutsis. Instead, by the time the Americans opened up this year, the British had already turned the market on its head themselves. The food critics and bloggers, grown fat on UK gourmet burgers, gave the new arrivals from the home of the hamburger a grilling. The irony is that when the much-lauded American chains arrived a few months back, they werent a patch on our home-grown versions, Parker Bowles says. In fact, soon the tables may turn to such an extent that, in an ice-toeskimos moment, we may be selling burgers back to the US. Scott Collins of MEATliquor says they might open in New York for shits and giggles. When asked, all Tom Byng will oer is a wry smile. Ozersky, who brought his Manhattan meat orgy Meatopia to London in September, welcomes the fact the Brits have nally got the burger right and concedes we could breach the home country. As an American I am appalled at the thought that a British chain could achieve success here in the hamburgers mother country. But our chains have done such a botch job over the years that a company like Byrons might well swoop in on us.

Founded in Kansas in 1921, White Castle pioneered the better burger

Shake Shack, now in Covent Garden, was started from a hot dog stand in Madison Square Garden. Bottom, the queue at MEATliquor

ike trains, burgers now attract enthusiasts. Guys like Gavin Lucas, a blogger who goes by the handle Burgerac. He also has a sister blog which reviews burgers outside London. That ones called Midsomer Burgers. He credits food television from Jamie Oliver to Gordon Ramsay for turning us into fanatics. People like Jamie Oliver have made food approachable, he says. Great cookbooks and TV personalities have made men vocal about food. Lucas is a case in point. He got the burger bug watching Heston Blumenthal try to build the best one on telly. Since then, hes been obsessed with the perfect burger: the beef, the bun, how the lettuce needs to be shredded and placed precisely beneath the meat so that the juice dresses the leaves and holds the avour. Theres all this architecture,

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if I can use such a lofty word, Lucas says, and all of that becomes massively important in the eating. Lucas and others like him also understand that we do not just want to eat food in 2013; we want to tweet about eating food and Instagram photos as we do it. No fast food has harnessed the power of social media in the way the endlessly photogenic hamburger has. Social media has forced the burger conversation, says Byrons Byng, and its down to that key demographic again. Theres a group of twentysomethings who have a voice where previously it was food critics in the broadsheets. Its food with integrity but its not food youd expect food critics to be talking about. Byron has an employee who runs its social media full time. In this way, an essentially mainstream, mid-market brand like Byron can seem hip, like MEATliquor, without feeling the need to ape the edgier, less palatable aspects: the crepuscular lighting, the wailing guitar music, the endless queuing. What both of them emphasise, of course, is their supposed authenticity. Byron doesnt just roll it out, Lucas says. What they exhibit is a desire not to just serve the burger but contextualise them in a wider culture with craft beer, bourbon, American dessert classics. Byron sells its craft beer in cans. So does MEATliquor. Its something they picked up on in Portland, Oregon, spiritual home of the American hipster. The burgers place at the table of US icons continues to drive burger sales. Theyve had huge publicity from lms and are perceived as cool, smart, Western. Its why McDonalds is so popular in India, AA Gill says, even though its relatively costly. The perception of burgers is they are completely, authentically American like blue jeans, he says. A touch of the West and that comes at a premium. Does it make the experience of eating at restaurants like Byron authentic? Its boss thinks so. The modern consumer responds to authenticity because they keep getting let down by sportsmen, by politicians, Byng says. Everywhere you look, who do you trust? They are looking for something thats real. Something for George Osborne to chew on next time he has a late night craving for burger and chips.

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FEATURE

Working at Night (2005)

136

FEATURE

Exclusively for Esquire, Lucian Freuds biographer remembers his hero, the most dangerous man in the world By Geordie Greig

A portrait of the artist as a young man: Lucian Freud in March 1958, aged 35

The Painter Surprised (2005)

can vividly remember the moment when I rst thought that Lucian Freud must be the most dangerous man in the world. I was 17 and on a school trip to a small gallery in Mayfair. His paintings were displayed in a claustrophobically small room that resonated with tension. There was a naked man with a rat on his thigh, in frightening proximity to his genitals. Who was he? Why was he naked? What the hell was a rat doing there? Equally gripping was a photograph of Freud in the catalogue. His heavy boots had no laces. The dishevelled shirt, checked trousers and scarf gave him a bovver-boy toughness; he looked halfway between a pastry chef and a bare-knuckle ghter, eyes startled, oozing a sense of raw power. This was 1978 and to me it made punk seem pallid. I was determined to nd out more about this rebel who had the secretiveness of a recluse but even then the reputation that no girl was safe with him. He had already fathered more children than anyone could guess at (the ocial count was eventually 15 acknowledged, some estimated there were as many

as 20 more unacknowledged) and he was mysterious, never giving press interviews, never commenting, never explaining, always in the shadows. He was hostile to any approaches. His nudes of women at that time were exposing, sexual and shocking. But what was unquestioned in my mind was that he was a genius. His pictures were compelling, obsessive and commanding. He seemed as dominant and outside of any rules or set of ethics as anyone since Jean Genet or Dylan Thomas. And yet exactly what he was like no one seemed to know. The Byronic clich mad, bad and dangerous to know was bandied about as a label. This grandson of Sigmund Freud was ferrety and wry in appearance, beguiling and yet unswerving in his dedication to his art. He also appeared to paint 24 hours a day. He yielded to no one. He never did anything he did not want to do. He was untameable. I was hooked. The search for Lucian became a leitmotif of my life. It was a long journey, slowly stalking him to nd out who exactly he was. It took me 25 years from that school trip to nally meet him. Later, I became part of a small circle who saw him regularly, for breakfast at Clarkes in Kensington. Hence the title of my new book, Breakfast with Lucian. He was ruthless, selsh and spellbindingly charismatic. He was also generous, funny, original and compelling. A brilliant gossip. An uncompromising critic. Always trying to create a new language in art, to reinvent his portraits. He remained resolute on his path to do what he wanted: his one consistent was to paint and never to be dull. The route to Lucian was not easy. I wrote dozens of letters and got no reply. These started when I was a teenager. It was a quest that sprang out of my obsession with his art. His pictures sent a chill down the spine. They grabbed life, his life, and yet he yielded not a single piece of information about who he was painting. The names of his sitters were almost never in the titles. The rumours and whispers were always beaten by the truth. He was fearless, even in his early eighties getting into a ght in his local Notting Hill supermarket. He hung out with gangsters in the Sixties, borrowing

DAVID DAWSON | BRIDGEMANART | GETTY | CAMERA PRESS | STARSTOCK | MAGNUM

money from the Krays. It was an oer he wished he had refused as they were not exactly willing to wait to get their cash back. He was occasionally on the run from the police. He had gambling debts running into the millions. And always he was on the hunt for women, to paint, to seduce, to be part of his life. In one year, 1963, three dierent women became pregnant by him. He was led by a legendary libido. He dated Greta Garbo. He married the most glamorous Guinness heiress. He sometimes had ve girlfriends at one time. It was not a question of not being safe in taxis. He was a man with no rules. He was never less than candid about his behaviour. He would brazenly say he was selsh. He made no apologies for it. In his view, all artists were and had to be selsh. He was not scared by anyone and could not be forced to do anything against his will. When he was 85, I went round Self-Portrait: to drop something o at his house in Reflection Notting Hill. A 12in blade was thrust (2002), by out in the narrow opening of the door. Lucian Freud He wanted to know who was there. I said it was me delivering him a paper. I said, For Gods sake dont stab me. It will make a terrible headline: Editor of London Evening Standard Stabbed by Artist. I laughed, then he laughed but we both experienced his feckless disregard for using violence yet also enjoyed the comic absurdity of our encounter. Lucian was never easily dened. He dressed like a scarecrow but he was also a dandy. He wore suits from Huntsman, the smartest tailor on Savile Row. He combined this with aggressive black leather boots

speckled with paint. He had a sort of messy chic. Just as Charlie Chaplin made the black suit his moniker, so Lucian invented scruy chic. It was all about being outside the rules but knowing the rules. He could be beyond rude to those he did not like. He could chill a room with a silence. But his charm was mesmerising. No one could be as persuasive, whether by threats or through simple charm. Why was he so dangerous? It was because he refused to bow to anyone. He gave virtually no one his telephone number. He would go out of his way to make sure no one second-guessed what he was doing. His life was juggled with a dangerous precision. One model suddenly saw a naked breast appear on another canvas in his studio and realised that he was seeing someone else. He never saw

Freud pictured at his home in Paddington, London, 1963

>

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it was anyone elses business who he Lucian Freud and David saw or when he saw them. Hockney (2002) In some ways, Lucian was the Forrest Gump of the 20th century. He was in a George Formby movie; he hung out with Francis Bacon and was painted 19 times by him; Noel Coward wrote verse about him; Picasso made more than a pass at his second wife. Born in 1922, his life was always an epic journey, leaving Nazi Germany in 1933, escaping certain death. He was immediately seen as a wunderkind by the cultural establishment. Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender were dazzled by his looks. He was taken up by social grandees and whirled into a dizzying world that he partly loved and partly rejected. He always lived a highlow life. He hung out with criminals in Paddington while spending the weekend at Badminton with the Duke

of Beaufort. He was never possible to pigeonhole. His life was sometimes that of a man on the run, dodging creditors, bookies who were owed hundreds of thousands of pounds. When he was in need of cash he painted Baron Heini ThyssenBornemisza, then the richest man in the world. He achieved the greatest price of any British living painter when Roman Abramovich paid 17.2m for his portrait of an extremely large, dole oce employee. He would be out dancing until 3am with Kate Moss. He knew Auden and Giacometti. He arrived in London a penniless refugee but left 96m in his will, the largest amount ever bequeathed by a British artist. He lived in a house with a mixture of beautiful 18th-century furniture but also had elements of gilded squalor with old rags and paint smears. He was a lone wolf who had one quarry: his art. When he died, his exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was the most popular show ever seen there. He even outshone his grandfather. When I rst met him in his studio in Holland Park, it was 7am and I had sent him a note saying I had a brilliant idea and that I could only tell him face to face. I relied upon his curiosity and he nally called me. This was after many years and dozens of letters. His gaze was eagle-like, his eyes boring with an intensity that I had only seen twice before, in Samuel Beckett and Ted Hughes. It had an animal sensitivity, as if he could see things

that no one else could. It was an eye taking aim. His voice was soft with a slight German lilt. He was polite, inviting and charming. The man of provocation and privacy seemed to evaporate but it was also like being with something wild. One wrong move and he would close the door or bolt or I would be shut out. We talked and somehow clicked. He was never without a strong view. He cursed Ian Fleming for thinking he had slept with Flemings wife (he hadnt). He berated Stephen Spender for stealing a picture. He talked of models and lovers no longer being part of his life when he moved on from them, ie, hed nished painting them. My quest took me all over Europe and to the US to interview girlfriends, muses, children, enemies, bookies, high society and low-lifers who all had extraordinary tales to tell of life with Lucian. They were always of a man who had one singular aim: to be with whom he wanted, to do what he wanted with them and always to paint. It was a dangerous path for those who got in the way but it was his way to greatness.

Lucian Shaving (2006)

Breakfast with Lucian (Jonathan Cape, 25) is out now. Geordie Greig is the editor of the Mail on Sunday

Lucian Freud and Kate Moss in Bed (2010)

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WHAT IVE LEARNED

MUSICIAN, 51
I dont celebrate my birthday. Never have, never will. Its for children, isnt it? Girls seem to like it, but I think its a bit odd for guys. Primal Scream was never a big groupie band. It was more about the drugs and the music. We always did the best drugs. Pharmaceutical stu. We did amphetamine sulphate a lot, but even then it was the crme de la crme.

BOBBY GILLESPIE

INTERVIEW BEN MITCHELL PORTRAIT TOM VAN SCHELVEN

My son Lux is a good drummer. Scott Asheton [the drummer] from The Stooges gave him a set of sticks. Thats not bad, is it? We did a gig for the National Union of Mineworkers in 1992, with The Orb in Sheeld. After the gig, I just did so much ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. Id never been so high in my life. I felt as if I was oating away backwards, like going out to sea or into space. I thought, Well, maybe Im going to die here but its alright. I quite like it. I only learned to drive in 2010. My licence is clean. I obey the rules of the road. Respect other drivers and, hopefully, theyll respect you. I was very sporty as a kid. I was good at football and long-distance running. I was actually in the Boys Brigade for a while and I did trampolining, gymnastics, volleyball and badminton. I love table tennis. We took a table tennis table on tour once in the mid-Nineties. Im not as good at normal tennis. Thats a bit too physical for me. This could be a fantastic country, but the current administration is dragging us back to the 19th century. The cuts are a class war. They might not be sending troops in with guns and bayonets, but theyre doing it as economic warfare. They know theyre hurting people. Ive worked all my life and paid a lot of tax. I want to see that tax go back into the community. Everybody should share in the wealth. Ecstasy wasnt good for performing. We tried that a couple of times. I dont know if amorphous is the word, but youre a bit squishy. You need to be sharper, more direct. For me, speed worked the best. I got married in 2006. I knew Id made the right decision, so I felt pretty condent. I was more nervous about not looking good walking down the aisle. We had a van crash on the way to a gig in Manchester in the Eighties. That was bad. We were sat in the back of a Transit with our amps, drum kit and a couch. The van went over onto its roof, and it was skidding down the motorway at 70mph. When it came to a halt there was silence just people moaning and groaning. All the stu was on top of us. Luckily, there wasnt a pile-up and everybody was alright. We borrowed some equipment, made the gig and were still here. Being exposed to a woman like Raquel Welch at a very young age denitely touches something in you. My mum used to take me to the Princes cinema [in Glasgow] on a Saturday morning. I saw One Million Years BC there. More than being Scottish, Im Glaswegian. Growing up in Glasgow shaped me. Its a hard city but its a good city. The people are friendly, and theyve got a lot of love and passion. Im proud to come from there. Im really happy when Im on the road. I love that forward motion. Primal Screams album More Light (1st International) is out now

Theres a side to me thats quite up and enthusiastic. Ive got a lot of ght in me, but Ive got a bit of sadness in me as well, so theres a kind of duality there. I dont want to give too much away about myself, but Im not a negative person. When did I last go up a waist size? I dont. Its been 29in all my life. There are no thieves in my family. No cheats. Just honest, workingclass people. My dad was a trade unionist. My mum worked as a secretary during the day and then sometimes, at night, she would work in a bar. She always had two jobs. I dont know if that was a nancial necessity, or her way of having some kind of social life. Youre in this perpetual adolescence until you have children, but then youve got to really become a man. It changes your relationship with your partner and it changes your relationship with the world. You cant be as disconnected as you maybe once had been. Ive got two boys. Its all good. Im glad Ive lived to experience that. Music transformed my life. It connected me with people. I think that I photograph well for some reason. It just depends what my hairs doing. If the hairs alright then Im alright. Everything that lives is a part of creation so maybe thats what God is. I havent really thought it through. Maybe were all connected. I do believe there is something greater than us, but I dont think that thing is a patriarchal gure. Its the energy the life force thats in us all. Its in the stars. Its everywhere. I believe in a respect for every living thing. A world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild ower. I think that was William Blake. That kind of sums it up. My backstage demands were never that bad because I used to sort myself out. I was quite professional about these matters. Id just want one bottle of vodka or two and Id be happy with that. How long have I been sober? Almost ve years. I dont touch anything now. The rst band I ever saw was Thin Lizzy. I was 14. The Boys are Back in Town had been a hit that summer and I was obsessed by it. They could really play. There was no twiddling. It was concise, high-energy rocknroll. Phil Lynott had a mirror on his bass that reected this spotlight out into the crowd like a laser. He denitely hit me a couple of times. I know he did.

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WISDOM

I THINK THAT I PHOTOGRAPH WELL IT JUST DEPENDS WHAT MY HAIR IS DOING

Bobby Gillespie, photographed at The Engineer pub, Primrose Hill, March 2013

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What are we doing today, sir? Id like a Coren please, barber

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here are three questions a gentleman never asks another gentleman: 1) How big is your cock? 2) Have you ever wanked over my wife? 3) Who does your hair? The rst two you dont ask because a gentleman never puts another gentleman in a position where he may be compelled to tell a lie, and the third you dont ask because you dont give a fuck. At a push, you might ask a man who makes his suits (very embarrassing when it turns out he buys o the peg like a homeless) or where he gets his shoes, wine, technology, nancial advice or drugs. For these are all areas in which one is forever looking to improve ones line of supply. But his hair? You like his hair? You have noticed the way he has arranged part of his body, you nd it attractive, and you want to copy him? You sicko! You lthy fucking prison daddy! You get your fucking face out of my hair or Ill drop you right here, right now. I dont talk like that, obviously. I would never threaten violence or use language verging dangerously on the homophobic to We didnt have to ask who did your hair; It is just what youre meant to say, to show we could see. you dont spend time thinking about your I stayed with Andy for a while and then, appearance. Although you do. Not as much like you, changed up to a local salon with a as women do. And not as much as David funny name (Hair Today/Mane Event/Curl Walliams does. But more than your father Up & Dye) where I stayed for maybe 10 years, did, and probably more than you ought to. and then moved out of home and went to The place you really go to get your hair a dierent place for another 10, and then cut is the unisex parlour round the corner moved across town and found another place. that once gave you an OK haircut when you Wherever I went, I took advice from were about 24 you got some half-serious Sheena or Charlene or Simone on how best praise for it from the girl behind the bar in to acquire the style of the moment. And so your local and the woman who did it had I went Caesar crop for a while when it was quite nice warm boobs when they pressed really only gays who were doing that, then briey against your arm as she trimmed bedhead probably four years after everyone round your ears, so youve been going back else had tidied up, but not really caring what ever since, sharing little jokes, irting a bit, it looked like as long as I didnt get my ear very gradually changing your hairstyle to snagged or look like a massive dick. reect passing fashion, but always about For years, I just hopped from three years behind the pace, one reasonably hot woman to paying the 25 and tipping the another through a succession spare ver because it makes you of suburban shops, saying, feel like a high roller, well aware Oh I dont know, whatever you that Stavros could be doing it think, not too short though, for 6 with the clippers, and Mane Event, etc: reckoning to get one good feeling a bit funny about going What you get for your 100 the haircut out of six, three average to the poncey salon, but consultation; wash ones, and a couple of shockers, reckoning youre probably and head massage; always making sure I had getting your moneys worth cut; extras; final approval... nowhere important to go within from the hair wash alone.

Before
demean anyone, whatever they asked me. But Id be fucking surprised. There are people out there who quite often say to each other, I love what youve done with your hair! and, OM Fucking G, that is a blow-dry! and, Who in the WORLD did your colour? I love it? No, no, no, I ADORE it! But they are women. That is what women do. Yes, this is 2013, and they may also run countries, they may boss massive international corporations, they may wear the trousers at home, they may even marry each other and have fatherless children through articial sperm made from their own snot, but they are still, exclusively, the half of humanity that asks its fellow members exactly who it was that recently cut o some of the keratinous excreta that hangs from their head and gave it that lovely uidity and bounce, and where she works, and whether shed be likely to have a spare slot before the weekend. But ask a man where he gets his hair cut and hell say: Greek bloke on the high street, hes got a proper selection of wank mags and all. Hell say that, but its probably not true. And thats ne. That is as it should be. I also went to the unisex for years. I certainly didnt let Stavros anywhere near it after the age of 12. Although in my case he was not called Stavros, but Andy. He cut hair at Andys in Swiss Cottage, and probably still does. Almost everybody from my primary school went to Andys. You always knew which ones, because twice a term theyd come to school with a plaster on one ear. He was loose with the scissors, was Andy, on those 1.50, ve-minute schoolboy jobs. Fag in one hand, eye on the row of mums in the mirror, wondering which one to besiege next with his nest chat-up lines, snip, snip, snip. nick, AAAAAARGHHH!!! Don a be a beeg a-baby! Andy would say. Ees only a leetle scratch! And so youd get a plaster on one ear, stuck on while you swivelled your eyes to cop a load of the cover of Mayfair or Penthouse on the coee table slightly saggy Seventies boobs, nips three-quarter covered, loads of eyeliner, big perm and then next morning in school, with a bloody Band-Aid on one lobe, you would be greeted with, Oh, so you go to Andys, too? a week of any haircut, as it might need time to grow out a bit. I even tried downstairs at Trumper once, because I was feeling chappish and thought it would be pukka, but the old cunt used a cut-throat razor on the back of my neck and it was red raw for a week. So I went back to Sheena. The thing was, I just didnt think hair mattered. Aesthetically, I have always been on the borderline. I am not such an ugly bastard that there is no point trying to look nice, but nor am I one of those handsome blokes who looks great whatever. I have a face that, if I have a tan, no hangover, am not more than a stone overweight and have a half-decent haircut (which is then styled up in the mirror with whatever branded sticky shit comes to hand) can be quite good-looking enough for the skanky milieu in which I move. But then I got old. Got slack, baggy, tired, sad. Got children. And now, even at my target weight, a couple of weeks sober and nicely tanned, I need help. So a sea of shit haircuts with the odd island of OK is not going to cut it. I have a tailor now, I have a

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OLLY BURN | ALAMY

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doctor, a wine merchant, a jeweller, a gardener, a cleaner, and a nanny. It was clearly ridiculous that I did not have a hairdresser. So I got one. Ask me who cuts my hair today and I will not tell you, Six-Quid Stavros down by the station. I will clear my throat a little nervously, and say, Nadia at John Frieda. What, John Frieda the shampoo bloke? Yes. But he is a hairdresser mainly. The products came later. Its a chain, is it? I think there are two. And a couple in the US. I go to the one in Mayfair, always to Nadia. And how much does that cost then? About a hundred quid. You fucking WHAT? Including the tip. Just for a haircut? Or is there something youre not telling me? Do NOT talk about Nadia that way! She cuts my hair absolutely perfectly every time, is what she does, so that I do not spend 11 months of every year looking like a child murderer hastily scrubbed up for a police interview, like you. And she does. It is a miracle. You pay 100 for a meal with wine, you pay 100 for engagements for at least a month, she suggested I go to Nadia, too. And I did. And that was that. She did a couple of choppy cuts rst, at my behest, designed to make me look young and sexy, which fooled absolutely nobody, and then we bit the bullet and went what I call Old Man, a style term that Nadia happily took up, and oers me each time I go: Hello Giles, we going Choppy or Old Man? It just means short back and sides, option for a parting, little bit longer on top because, lets face it, one is not a fucking soldier, but not too clear a contrast, not razored, no skin, no big stack on top, because one is not David Beckham, either. One is not a bleeding rent boy. One is past 40 and the time has simply come. There is no fancy stu with Nadia, no showing o. Just total consistency, total control. It is the dierence between a Michelin-starred chef and the sweaty pot-basher at your local gastropub. Your pub chef might knock out a corking meal one-in-ve, and feed you OK a couple of other times, but there will be some inedible stinkers, too, and a couple of times a year you will probably get poisoned. Meanwhile, your Michelin guy, like a good serial killer, Kiss, kiss, Hows Esther?, Choppy or Old Man? and then its hair wash time. I got a boy doing that once, and had to explain to Nadia about how infrequently, at my time of life, ones head is held in both hands by a young girl, and how I never, ever, ever want a young man anywhere near me when I am having my hair washed again. Which she grasped fully, thank the Lord, and sees to now every time. The girl washes your hair. After a couple of minutes she says, Would you like a head massage? I mean, like, duh. What do you think? OK, no. No, I dont want you to gently stroke the whole of my head with your young ngers while I doze here and dream of ancient Rome. Of course I fucking do! In fact, a head massage is only the rst of a long list of things Id like, but for now, for decencys sake, lets go with the head massage. Then we go to a chair upstairs, if possible, because I like the daylight as opposed to the stark, bunkered professionalism of the basement, and Nadia does snip, snip, snip, snicks no ears, maybe has someone get me a mint tea or a full, excellent, three-course meal (if I was having a perm or something, and in for the long haul, I might order the goats cheese salad

After
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a shirt, you pay 100 for a pair of football tickets (shit ones). You pay 100 to ll up your car, for fucks sake. So why would you expect change out of a tenner for a haircut? It was my wife who put me on to Nadia. Esther used to go to her after hours for student rates and always looked amazing. In fact, it was Nadia making Esther look so hot that led directly to my marrying her. So after one too many times watching me come home from a haircut and stare at myself in the mirror, looking like a hair-eating bear had raped me in my sleep, and saying, Were going to have to postpone all social will be achieving consistency. No nasty surprises. Everything just so, every time. Why ask any less of your hairdresser? You park up in a quiet residential Mayfair street (personally, I leave my 12-year-old Fiesta around the corner in case the rich lady customers see me getting out of it, clutch their handbags to their chest and shriek for the police), walk in through the door of a cream-coloured, unbranded, unmarked shop, hand over your jumper to the magnicently coied doyenne at the coat check, read Esquire for a couple of minutes, and then out comes Nadia. followed by the salmon, with a fruit salad platter to nish) and then its done, and I look awesome. And then its, I dont know, 85-odd, plus tips and Im o. The only thing is, to keep looking awesome, one really needs to go every six weeks. With Six-Quid Stavros, thats not a problem. Or even Twenty-Six-Quid Sheena. But with Nadia it means nearly a grand a year. So I try to stretch it to eight weeks, or even 10. But there comes a point, around the beginning of the ninth week, especially in hot weather, when my wife says, So, when are you next seeing Nadia? Why? I say. Because you have bolted, she says. Like an old lettuce. I thought I might go to Sheena, I reply. Just for the maintenance trim. Fine, says my wife. You do that. But were at the Massive Esquire Summer Party For Supermodels and Famous People next week, and you are going to look fucking silly in a bobble hat. So then I call Nadia, and everyone is happy.

Read more from Giles Coren at esquire.co.uk

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England striker Jimmy Greaves (right) scores the winning goal past the Rest of the World goalkeeper Milutin Soskic during the FA Centenary match at Londons Wembley Stadium, 23 October 1963

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E NG L AND B E S T T E AM E V E R
IN OC TOBER 1963, ALF R AMSE Y S ENGL AND BE AT THE REST OF THE WORLD IN A G AME BILLED AS THE MATCH OF THE CENTURY. IT WAS THE FIRST STEP ON THE ROAD TO WINNING THE WORLD CUP IN 1966. FIF T Y Y E ARS L ATER, ESQUIRE LOOKS BACK WITH MEN WHO WERE THERE INCLUDING THE WINNING GOAL SCORER

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BY PAUL WILSON

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immy Greaves is watching Jimmy Greaves play. I cant remember the last time I saw myself like this, says the man who scored 357 times in top-ight English football the all-time record. He has an iPad in his lap, on which he is watching the Path News highlights of the day when England beat the Rest of the World at Wembley, on 23 October 1963. Most people only remember the World Cup in 66, Greaves says, not taking his eyes o the newsreel. Thats what everybody talks about. It all paled into insignicance when 66 came along. Three years before England won the World Cup in 1966,

they played what was billed as the Match of the Century, and that was only partly hype. To mark its 100th anniversary, the Football Association had invited the Fdration Internationale de Football Associations to put together a team to provide the opposition in a centennial match. The FA versus FIFA was England vs the Rest of the World. It was a match that England won 21, in which Greaves, then 23, scored the winner and provided the assist for the rst goal (if assists were recorded in 1963). Now 73, he looks up from the match footage for a moment, with memories of the game swirling in his mind for the rst time in half a century. The thing I do recall the most was the goal I scored that the referee disallowed, he adds. Funny how your mind works like that. The Technicolor Path footage is exactly what you are imagining in your minds eye: the clipped tones of the commentary; the disjointed action that often stretches the denition of the word highlights; many shots of smiling, clapping fans, mostly men and boys in collar and tie. The best forward on the eld is

A programme from the match, held on a misty Wednesday afternoon in late October 1963

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Rest of the World team: (back row) Djalma Santos, Svatopluk Pluskal, Lev Yashin, Jn Popluhr, Karl-Heinz Schnellinger, Milutin Soskic, Ferenc Pusks; (not shown) Josef Masopust, Luis Eyzaguirre, Jim Baxter; (front row) Raymond Kopa, Denis Law, Alfredo Di Stfano (captain), Eusbio, Francisco Gento

Jimmy Greaves, says the voice-over, and after 53 minutes he leaves no doubt about it. We slowed the motion down to show a wonder move. Hes fouled but keeps going. This is it, says the Greaves of 2013, as the Greaves of 1963 has his heels clipped on the edge of the penalty area evading two tackles, rounds the keeper and smashes the ball into the roof of the net from a tight angle with his left foot before his celebrations are cut short. Greaves had given an accurate, blow-by-blow account of the disallowed goal before watching the newsreel. As he sees it in slow-mo, he gives a little wry exhalation through his nose. The ref said he blew, but I didnt hear him and I dont think anyone else did. The referee was Bob Davidson of Scotland. I dont remember him personally at all which probably means he was a good referee! A couple of minutes later, he oers no comment as he watches himself score the winner: a tap-in, three minutes from time, after the substitute keeper Milutin oki of Yugoslavia fumbled the ball. The one that got away was far more memorable than the one that didnt. Englands rst goal was equally quotidian: a tap-in by Terry Paine, following up a saved Greaves shot. Im in the mists of time here, he says, handing over the iPad when the footage ends. I havent kicked a ball for 40-odd years. I only know, through knowledge of my own history, that I have been a professional footballer. I worked in TV for 17 years, which was longer than my career in football. People come up to me and say, Are you the footballer? and sometimes I say no. I am what people want me to be, I suppose.

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ames Peter Greaves is the greatest goalscorer in English football history. Arthur Rowley and Dixie Dean scored more goals than him, but their totals include goals in lower division football. Greaves scored all of his 357 league goals in the old First Division, in 516 games over 14 seasons, playing for Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United between 1957 and 1971. He also scored nine goals in 14 games for AC Milan in 1961. If you consider cup games for club and caps for England 44 goals in 57 full internationals and 13 in 12 games for the Under-23 side, which was the forerunner of the current Under-21 team then the nal reckoning is 477 goals in 674 games. Thats an average of 0.71 goals per game. Do a similar goals-per-seniorgame calculation, and, before the start of the current football season, Lionel Messis average is 0.75 (350 goals in 466 games) and Cristiano Ronaldo gets 0.57 (365 in 635 games in his four full seasons for Real Madrid, he scored 201 goals in 199 games). Football does not really have an accepted method of historical comparison because, so it is said, the game has changed so much too much for the juxtaposition of players from dierent generations to be valid. But comparing the ratio of goals per game in particular eras is no less fair and valid as comparing crickets bowling and batting averages, or comparing golf course records, or performance in the tennis Grand Slams over time. In the case of Messi and Ronaldo, they are spoken of as footballers out of their time, scoring goals at freakishly high rates: their goalscoring eorts are somehow extra-special, on another level, one-os. In England, Jimmy Greaves was performing similarly back in the Sixties. I tell youngsters who wonder how Jimmy played the game to watch Messi, says the sports historian Norman Giller. He is like a mirror reection of Greavsie in action, the same low gravity and perfect balance, the close control, the sudden acceleration and ability to shoot with either foot. One major dierence is Messi does not have to suer the violent

England team: (back row) Terry Paine, Gordon Milne, Maurice Norman, Gordon Banks, Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore; (front row) Jimmy Greaves, George Eastham, Jimmy Armfield, Bobby Smith, Ray Wilson

interruptions from assassin defenders like Ron Chopper Harris, Norman Bites Yer Legs Hunter, and Aneld Iron Tommy Smith. Another dierence: Messi works much harder than Jimmy, who could disappear from games for long passages and then suddenly pop up with a goal. You rarely mentioned work rate and Greavsie in the same sentence.

MOST PEOPLE ONLY REMEMBER THE WORLD CUP IN 66, SAYS GREAVES. THATS WHAT THEY TALK ABOUT
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Giller was the chief football writer of the Daily Express from 196474, after which he left journalism to write scripts for This Is Your Life and the majority of the 94 books he has authored. He has every intention to write six more to make a round hundred; the 94th, Bobby Moore The Master, was published last year. When England played the Rest of the World, he was at the match on behalf of the Daily Herald, the newspaper that a year later would become The Sun, and ve years after that be bought by Rupert Murdoch. The press box was like a cattery, says Giller, who is 73, like Greaves, with choruses of purring as each player in the Rest of the World team was named. For a young sportswriter like me, it was as if I was hearing a roll call of the footballing gods. The Rest of the World team that day was: Lev Yashin (Soviet Union); Djalma Santos (Brazil); Karl-Heinz Schnellinger (West Germany); Svatopluk Pluskal, Jn Popluhr, Josef Masopust (all Czechoslovakia); Raymond Kopa (France); Denis Law (Scotland); Alfredo Di Stfano (Spain, formerly Argentina, captain); Eusbio (Portugal) and Francisco Gento (Spain). Five substitutes

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were announced as second-half replacements: Jim Baxter (Scotland); Milutin oki (Yugoslavia); Uwe Seeler (West Germany); Luis Eyzaguirre (Chile) and Ferenc Pusks (Hungary). The three Czechs had been runners-up to Brazil at the 1962 World Cup. At the time of England vs the Rest of the World, Masopust was the reigning European Footballer of the Year. A Frank Lampard with bells on, Giller says of the midelder, [he was] a box-to-box powerhouse who could win the ball with tigerish tackles and then use it with skill and accuracy. Yashin, commonly regarded as the greatest goalkeeper of all-time, succeeded Masopust as European Footballer of the Year, the only time a player in his position has won the award. His excellent display for the Rest of the World will have helped him win that 1963 award. Santos, who died in July of this year, won the World Cup with Brazil in 1958 and 1962. Schnellinger was voted into the team of the World Cup in 1962, and would go on to play in two more tournaments (becoming one of the few players in history to play in four dierent World Cups). Kopa, Gento and Di Stfano all won multiple European Cups for the great Real Madrid side of the late Fifties and early Sixties, with the latter still considered one of the greatest creative mideld players. (Earlier this year, World Soccer magazine did a poll of national coaches and journalists to pick an all-time Greatest XI: Yashin and Di Stfano were in it, as was the England left half they faced playing for the Rest of the World, a 22-year-old Bobby Moore, winning his 14th cap.) Eusbio had led Benca to the previous two European Cup nals, winning in 1962, while Denis Law scored for the Rest of the World. [The Scotsman was] at his electric,

The England vs the Rest of the World FA Centenary Match was played before a 100,000-strong crowd in a refurbished Wembley Stadium, complete with a new roof over the stands and electric scoreboard

darting best and thoroughly deserved his goal, Giller says. Surrounded by the best players in the world, Denis looked as good as any of them. What stands out in my memory, apart from Greaves vs Yashin in the rst-half, is the performance of Denis Law. Of the subs, Pusks was 10 years past Hungarys famous wins over England, but in the two seasons prior to this match had scored 71 goals in 79 games for Real Madrid. His career goals-to-games ratio, after scoring 700 in 709, would be 0.99. The best team ever assembled? It needed just one more player to make that a statement beyond dispute, Giller says. Pel was unable to make it, although invited [his club Santos declined Fifas invitation]. If there has been a better selection it can only have been in heaven. England winning underlined that Alf was on the right track and condence in the team soared. Alf was so sure he was getting a winning combination together at this time that he made that out-of-character boast: We will win the World Cup. Jimmy Greaves is more down to earth. Its a dreadful thing, because looking at that, he says, of his exploits of 1963, I dont get any

sense of feeling or emotion about it. Its just a heap of players, of which Im one, I know that. Its a dreadful thing to admit. I loved playing football, but I never really planned to be a footballer. I never watched football; I was never interested in football. I was useless at everything else to do with the game apart from playing it. He is in the green room of the Gordon Craig Theatre in Stevenage, on the afternoon before an evening performance of his one-man show Jimmy Greaves Live. Parts of the walls, those visible behind posters for pantomimes and cover band shows, are indeed painted green. Greaves is mainly blue and brown: a button-down pale blue shirt, over cement-coloured slacks, and an excellent tan, which he says he got from walking the dog every day near his home in Suolk. He walks the dog daily for exercise after suering a stroke last year. He watches football on TV occasionally, and still refers to himself as a recovering alcoholic, despite having not had a drink since 1978. I dont feel old at all, he says, as a pile of white T-shirts, each one with a blue number eight on the back, steadily becomes signed Jimmy

Read our list of 10 football matches that changed the world at esquire.co.uk

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Greaves memorabilia. I feel better now than I have done for a long time, mainly because I had a stroke and got away with it. You just think, Christ, suddenly youve found a new way of life. Like when you stop drinking. You look at the life you had, and to be honest, it doesnt become meaningless, but you think, Thats not going to help me over the next few years. But Im not looking for meaning thats why I cant nd it! reaves ability with a one-liner is given its full airing later on stage in Stevenage. The Gordon Craig Theatre has a capacity of 501. Tonight there are about 120 in the crowd, mainly middle-aged men, each paying 20. This is the last one were going to do in a theatre, says Greaves, a few minutes before he goes on. The audience is dying literally. The welcoming applause is warm, and Greaves explains that there is an addition to the programme: Ron Chopper Harris. Dear old Ron, one of Gillers assassin defenders, will be doing a bit, too. Harris played 795 games for Chelsea, the club

IF THERE HAS BEEN A BETTER TEAM SELECTION IT MUST HAVE BEEN IN HEAVEN
record (Frank Lampard is third on that list, and would need to play four more full seasons of 50 games each to top it). What people dont know about Ron is, Greaves tells the audience, leaning on the microphone stand with the ease of a stand-up comic, which tonight he eectively is, that he got a blue at Cambridge. Pause. If some silly bastard hadnt have jogged his elbow, he would have got the pink and the black as well. Laughter. A camera phone goes o. Who took a picture then? I dont mind, but

Jimmy Greaves with the England team and match officials leaving the pitch. Between 1959 and 1967, he earned 57 England caps, scoring 44 goals. He was finally awarded a 1966 World Cup medal in 2009

not too many for security reasons. The good vibe in the room drops a couple of notches. Social security reasons. Long and loud laughter. Seven minutes in: I was speaking to a bloke before this for an interview, for Esquire magazine, and he said What do you do now? and I said I was working for Sky last winter but I got fed up and quit. Bloody freezing putting those dishes up. Laughter. Answering that question beforehand, he had said: Id like to do a decent job again, but its not likely to happen at my age. Its not going to happen, being realistic. Im not going to go back into television, because Im too old. Im not going to go back into football, because Im too old. I havent got the qualications to go back into football anyway. So you live with what youve got. Im in the calmest phase of my life, and I enjoy it. The show comprises a 40-minute stand-up set and 15 minutes of amusing stories from Harris before the interval, followed by 20 more minutes solo and a 20-minute joint Q&A with Harris. Greaves the raconteur is as natural as Greaves the footballer. His ow only stops twice. Early in the rst half, glancing at his sheet of prompts which is on a low table next to the microphone and also has a bottle of water on it he sees the word Gazza. Dear old Gazza. Hes in trouble again. I usually tell a couple of gags about him but I dont think its opportune. In the audience, 120 heads nod in silent unison. I wish him well. Things are pretty poor. I dont know what he does. Something might turn him around, but its a dicult situation. So lets move on. Then, about 10 minutes before the interval, he loses his train of thought for a moment telling a joke about being stretchered o after an injury. Where was I? he asks, and a man in the audience shouts Stretcher! Greaves, with a grin, mimics him by shouting the word in the same way, then immediately starts to retell a joke he told earlier about doing his show at an Alzheimers association dinner. Exactly the same wording, but this time with a vacant stare on his face. As a planned ad-lib, its very good; as a genuine one, its brilliant. It earns a round of applause, and the biggest laugh of the night.

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Hes the Hackney-born actor who hit the Hollywood jackpot. But Idris Elba spent years as a small-timer DJ, doorman, drug dealer before the bright lights beckoned. In an extraordinarily candid interview, the star of The Wire, Luther and the forthcoming Nelson Mandela biopic reflects on his remarkable journey from London to LA, via the mean streets of New York. Ive got my flaws, he says. Ive had my ups and downs. This is who I am
Interview by SANJIV

BHATTACHARYA Photographs by SIMON EMMETT Fashion by CATHERINE HAYWARD

ell get to Mandela in a minute. And Luther. And Stringer Bell. And the Bond rumours. But rst, let the man sit back and reminisce about a more innocent time, before Idris Elba was the rst name on the billboard; a time in the late Nineties in New York, which you might call the struggling actor portion of the memoirs. Because those are the years he treasures most, the years of hope and striving for a shot at the big time, the reason he came to the US in the rst place. And then of course, it happened, all on one day 4 January 2002 the day that changed his life. It was just another audition, he says, sipping his Jack and Coke, at a discreet table o to the side of upscale Chinese restaurant Mr Chow in Beverly Hills. You got to remember, I was hustling back then. And I mean huss-ell-ing. I was working the door at Carolines comedy club. Selling weed, 10 spots, everything, just to make money because the acting werent coming in fast enough. Every year hed go up for pilot season and every year he came up short. But this year, there was one show that kept calling him back, for four auditions in all. A new project called The Wire. I remember [creator] David Simon asked me on the last one, Where in the US are you from? this whole time Ive been talking in an American accent. And I was like, If I fucking lie right now, Im going to lose this shit.

So I said, Listen guys, Im English. David was like, Get the fuck out of here! I thought Id pissed him o! But he said, Listen you got a good accent but we cant oer you [kingpin] Avon Barksdale. What about Stringer? I said, Who? Elba ips through an invisible script. Stringer had like 10 lines. I thought, Just give me a job, I dont give a fuck. Its a pilot. I knew I was going to get a cheque, as long as I was a season regular. He said, You got it. But he couldnt celebrate just yet. His wife had just gone into labour. He rushed her to hospital, dropped her o and then headed out to DJ at a club called Sliver. At the time, DJing was how he stayed aoat. So, I played the gig. I told everyone, Yo, I booked a pilot! And everyone was celebrating. My boss, Danny bought a bottle of champagne, and he gave me a bit of extra money on top of my usual. So I had nearly $300 when I was driving home in my Astro van it was a good night! But man, I was so liquored-up. There was this half-drunk bottle of Hennessy in the back, and Im like this, going through the Holland Tunnel He holds his hand out on an imaginary steering wheel, his eyes peering ahead, bleary drunk. And just as I came out, just when I saw the Christ Hospital up ahead, thats when I heard it whup whup! The cops were right behind him, pulling him over. Heres what saved me, he says. As I pressed my brakes, the Henny bottle rolled o the back and under the seat. And when the guy knocked on the window and said, licence and registration, he saw the band on my wrist. He said, You been to hospital? I said, No sir, thats for my wife whos

about to give birth any minute. Im a DJ, Im just coming back from a gig It worked. The cop let him o, and he was there when his daughter Isan was born at 4.49am. He pulls up his sleeve and shows me the tattoo on his forearm. Ive never told anyone that story before. e doesnt mean anyone, just journalists. Elba doesnt typically enjoy interviews, but this is dierent. It was meant to be just the two of us for dinner, the usual scenario, but instead, he showed up with a crew. Theres Brett, his barber, who looks a bit like Smokey Robinson, his teenage godson Riaz, who doesnt, and his genial manager Oronde. They all go back at least 10 years, all of them American. Mate, I just got o a plane, so I didnt want to do an ordinary thing, Elba explains, as we sit down to eat. Because Im never as honest as I could be, and I get bored talking about myself. Right now I feel like Im catching up with a mate. You still need to talk about yourself, though, I say. Yeah, but journalists always take what I say and do whatever with it. At least this way, I know that whatever happens, we were all here, we had a good laugh and I told the truth. He has that look weve seen before: the furrowed brow, the narrow eyes, quiet and thoughtful, an expression that might contain a multitude of emotions. It could be Russell Stringer Bell calculating whos the traitor in the camp, or John Luther pondering a killers next move. Or maybe its just jet lag. Part of Elbas gift as an actor is that he communicates such depth in his stillness and there always seems to be so much going on behind those eyes. The great Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro likens him to a Rodin sculpture, which was why he cast him as the lead in his robot war extravaganza Pacic Rim. Rodin sculptures have these oversized hands and they seem incredibly weighted by their own humanity, Del Toro says. Idris is

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sort of like that. Hes over-human. And he has the most amazing eyes. Some actors have the gift of empathy with the audience. And it is a gift its not technique or training. There are just actors you care for. And to be fair, there is a lot going on with Elba right now. It has all come rather quickly, too. Over this last few years, the game has changed for the big man from Hackney. Hes been propelled from one peak to the next, as he crosses from one side of 40 to the other. Now, its possible hes not sure but maybe this is as high as it gets. First, The Wire became one of the most acclaimed shows on TV. Then Elba made the perfect transition from Stringer Bell to Luther, gangster to cop, the US to the UK. The Golden Globe was well deserved. Meanwhile, the movies kept knocking, looking to harness his brand of sympathetic machismo. They need heroes in Hollywood: men rather than boys, the kind you can follow into battle and who can make a girl swoon. And Elba has become a go-to guy. Hes Heimdall in the Thor lms (the second one is out later this month), the superhuman sentry for the realm of Asgard. Then he was Captain Janek in Ridley Scotts Prometheus (2012), and General Stacker Pentecost in this years Pacic Rim both broadshouldered leaders of men. And now, Mandela, a real life leader and hero, the biggest deal of all. Its not just that hes a venerated, global gure, nor that this movie is based on his 1994 autobiography Long Walk to Freedom and the script was even approved by the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Its that to play him now, to make this project at this particular time especially when his health is so fragile that he might pass away with the movie still in cinemas (or by the time you read this article) isnt just to portray history, but to become a part of it. And Elba can sense it. The airs dierent up there. Thats why Im telling you these stories, he says. I dont have to protect some image I have as an actor I just bared my soul in that movie. He gave it everything, knowing that his everything was nothing

compared to what Mandela gave. He recognises that the honour of playing Mandela is matched by the pressure to pull it o, but when youve lmed in the very prison cell that Mandela was held in, your pressures look like tries. So, like Mandela, he feels liberated now. People are going to judge me for this role. I dont look like Mandela, some say I dont deserve it. Whatever. For me, its important I am who I am, as I present this piece to the world. Im 40 and Ive had a great career. Im alright to be myself at this point. He shrugs. Look, if I never work again, I dont care. I did my bit, you know? Brett chimes in. You put your hand in! Yeah, I was all right! What was your last album? Mandela. Oh, I loved that album! Its like if Nas never made another album outside Gods Son. This lm, for me, how can I top it? So yeah, I can tell you the truth about me. Its easy to be honest now. Ive got my aws, Ive had my ups and my downs. This is who I am. He catches the eye of the waiter. Can I get another Jack and Coke? Plenty of lime. f all the British actors doing big things in Hollywood these days, Elbas story might be the most remarkable. Because he didnt make it there as an Englishman, he made it as an American. David Simon wasnt the only one to fall o his chair at the news that Elba was English. Del Toro did, too. As did most of Elbas US fans. Is there any better vindication of an actor? It makes sense though, with hindsight. As English as Elba is, he was always enamoured with American culture, especially hip-hop. The only child of a Sierra Leonean father, Winston, a shop steward at the Ford Dagenham plant in Essex, and a Ghanaian mother, Eve, he grew up in Hackney and Canning Town, where he was a teenager during hip-hops golden age, the era of Snoop, Pac, Biggie and Dre. He started DJ-ing at 14: at rst helping his uncle out with weddings but soon hosting his own show on Climax FM, a local pirate

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station, as Mr Kipling, because of my exceedingly good tunes! And he devoured every issue of Vibe magazine for all the fashion, beats and lingo of black America. New York was a Mecca for young Idris, where his heroes lived. It was a place he craved. So he went. I used to go and pick up vinyl at Fulton Street Mall in Brooklyn, he says. Fresh records, ones you couldnt get in London. At the time his friend, Marsha, was the assistant to a VP of Bad Boy Records [Sean Combs seminal label], so Elba would work there as a wide-eyed intern, more than a little star-struck by the experience. When Pu Daddy came to speak at a music seminar in Islington, Elba waited for three hours to get a good seat. This was when Bad Boy was like BAD BOY, he says. This guy was killing the game. And when he nished his speech, he walked straight down the middle of the aisle, dapping people. I remember I put my hand out and he dapped me. I was like, Yo! Puy Combs dapped me! Now, of course, you could say he and Diddy nd themselves peers in the top tier of global celebrity. It tickles him that Diddy remembers him from back then as Marshas English friend, tall cat. He was acting then, too, but progress was slow. Hed gone from doing Crimewatch re-enactments to guest spots on The Bill and Ruth Rendell Mysteries. And even then, the US looked like the future. I wanted to be on a bigger stage, he says. In England, theres only so much work for actors, period, never mind if youre black. So I was like, nah man, I want to be with Denz and them. Wesley and them. Those were my idols. Denz, Wesley and Taye Diggs. When he nally made the move to New York in 1998, it wasnt a whim but a mission. He and his then-wife sold their house, making a clean 60,000, and they headed west to Brooklyn. But within a year or so, that money was gone. Elbas acting career was oundering. What would later be his greatest asset was now his Achilles heel he just couldnt do a convincing American accent. So he hustled. He

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had no choice: his visa didnt let him do any other work besides acting. He would pop back to the UK periodically for small parts, and when he returned, hed hit the streets again, looking for cash work. The pivotal moment came in a club called the Ludlow. There was an East Village DJ called Greg Paul, who was playing all this UK garage. I was like, What do you know about all that? And hes like, Man, I love So Solid Crew Im talking back then. So I said, You got a mic back there? He holds his fork like a mic and starts nodding his head, doing a pastiche of a garage MC. Im like, Bidda-bidda-bop to the ones and the twos Im not saying anything, but this guy thinks Im spitting o the top like Jay Z! So he goes, Hey, do you DJ? And boom I was in. Thats how I survived in New York. It wasnt easy. His wife was on his case, and as far as the auditions went, he couldnt catch a cold. But Elbas condence is reproof, his optimism American. He knew hed get there in the end. After all, his accent was improving. And not because hed hired some fancy dialect coach either. All Elba did was go to the barbers. I was living in Flatbush remember the Ace of Spades barbershop? They used to call me English. Yo waddup, English! I was like, Im trying to get this accent down, do you mind if I just sit in the barbershop and talk? And that was it, man. When you got niggers snapping on you and shit, you cant come back with the rebuttals in an English accent. Its not quick enough. Theyd be like, What you say, nigger? The Queen aint up in here. Aint nobody can understand you. So you know, Id just have to get into it. There was one time when hed bought his new AV his black Avirex jacket from Mister Joes on 33rd everyone was wearing them, back then. It wasnt cheap a good $700 but looking sharp has always been important for Elba. I had a proper black-on-black AV, a fresh pair of Tims and, because Im from London, I had the Levis, straight cut, he says. But when I walked into Ace of Spades, these niggers clowned the fuck out of me because of my jeans. Avirex jackets make you look really big, thats the thing. So they were like, Nigger, what the fuck? We got Avirex on toothpicks in this motherfucker! The table roars laughing. Often when English stars come to the US,

they preserve their Englishness as a point of dierence. But Elba is almost seamlessly transatlantic. The way he slides into US idiom, throwing the N-word around, he is clearly as comfortable in Brooklyn as he is in Hackney, playing footie on a Sunday. Its funny because New York remembers me, before I do what I do now, he says. Its like going back to east London. I meet people all the time who say, Yo man, werent you that DJ, though? For now, however, he lives somewhere in between. No xed abode, but plenty of air miles. He once lived in Atlanta with his ex-wife and daughter, but now he just keeps an oce there. So he dashes between London and New York and LA, a life of suitcases and hotel robes. I have no base. I go from one job to another. Im going to Barcelona next to do a lm [thriller The Gunman from District 13 director Pierre Morel] with Sean Penn, he says. As an actor, you have to sell out where youre from because youre playing other people.

Stringer theory: after making his name in The Wire (200204), Elba has since starred in Luther (2010), Prometheus (2012) and Thor (2011)

Thats why I DJ, because at least for one night, Im me. Hence the house set at the Flying Lotus club here in LA in a few days, then some dates in Ibiza. But Britain doesnt see Elba as this semi-American hybrid. We think of him as ours. I suggest to him, that when he was selected to read the Edgar Guest poem, It Couldnt Be Done for Team Great Britain, at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 2012, that he is becoming something of a national treasure. And he cracks up laughing. Me! The way I live my life, Im two drinks from being in the tabloids every day. Im no national treasure. Im a fucking dutty rude boy! But still, he feels his Englishness like a conscience sometimes. His interview on Jimmy Kimmel the other week is a case in point. I was saying about Prince Charles that hes smooth, you know, hes got the ring, the suit, the slick-back hair hes a gangster! But as soon as I said it, in my head Im thinking, Aaargh! Bang goes your OBE. Yeah! Werent you ambassador to the Princes Trust? What happened to that? This feels like a good moment to bring up another national treasure: James Bond. But as soon as I mention it, Elba gives his manager a look. Theres this article on the internet, Five Questions You Should Never Ask Idris Elba, Elba says. And one is, Dont ask him about being the black James Bond. Its the black part that bothers him. A reporter recently asked him about Pacic Rim, how he felt as a black man at the centre of a sci-, and he bristled: If youre thinking in the middle of the movie, Oh hes black and in a sci-, youre not watching the same movie as me. Its the same with Luther yes, hes a black lead, and yes, its a rst. But still. If Luther is refreshing because hes a nigger that dont give a fuck, then OK! But hes still a detective. Who cares if hes black? So for the record, no, hes had no ocial conversations about James Bond. And no, he didnt pay Daniel Craig a tenner to say he thinks Elba would be a good candidate. But that doesnt mean it wont happen. If it fucking happens, its the will of the nation, he says. Its not because of me. Everywhere I go, people are saying, Youd be a great Bond. And I want to ask them, Are you saying that because its trendy or because you mean it? But you can tell by looking in their eyes. They mean it!

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He looks up for a moment, distracted by a table across the way. Some fans, it looks like. Look at this naughty girl here, Elba says. Im going to wave at her. Hi baby! How are you? Brett, tell her to say hi. Shes trying to take my picture, but she cant see that I can see her. Shes not your standard LA stunner; more your Friday night Milf with a bit of meat on the bones, a couple of glasses of ros in her. But Elbas alive to the possibilities. As she gets up to leave and walks past the table, he grins. Woah, that mami got a nice piece at the back there. Id smash it down. I see what you mean about not being a national treasure, I tell him. You wouldnt hear that kind of thing from Stephen Fry. But women rather like Elba. Ask your girlfriend. Look, you probably think that Im shagging bitches all the time, he laughs. But theres no way! Theyre all fans. I miss the days when me and my boys could go to a barbecue, and go, Whos that shorty over there? Now Im that shorty! If I see someone

whos like damn! shes already on me and she wants an autograph. hat impact Mandela will have on his Friday night game at Mr Chow is hard to tell. But it certainly wont hurt. As biopics go, its one of the better ones authentically African, surging with drama and conict, a reminder of what was, in every sense, an epic life. Were familiar with the elder Mandela since his release, but the younger ladies man and revolutionary feels new. And Elbas performance is strong and masculine, his accent so uncanny that nominations seem inevitable. Hes already talking about the importance of staying grounded: You cant believe your own bullshit. The key to that is surrounding yourself with people that dont gas you up. But the gassing, if thats the word, is already underway. The lms director Justin Chadwick describes Elba as brave, instinctive hes got great truth. And producer Anant

Elbas starring role in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom comes with the official endorsement of the Nelson Mandela Foundation

Singh speaks of Elbas resemblance to Mandela, in spirit as well as in person: You go into a room with Idris and its the same presence that I felt with Mandela, in dierent ways. And Singh would know. A friend of Mandela, he started writing to him 25 years ago when he was in prison. Singh used to make anti-apartheid lms, he was part of the struggle, too. So once Mandela was released, and his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom came out 1994, he granted Singh the rights, and that was when the long walk to the multiplex began. The script went through 50-odd drafts, rst focusing on his later life, then his early life, then as a whole. For years, Denzel Washington was in the frame, until he wasnt. Hes a friend, Singh says. But at a certain point he wanted us to wait and it was a timing issue. It wasnt until Chadwick was on board in early 2011 that the script was nalised and Elbas name was thrown into the mix. A casting director had suggested him to Chadwick who mentioned him to Singh. And so it was that at the very last, Elba was cast.

REX | STAR STOCK

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As soon as we told Winnie [Mandela] and the daughters Zindzi and Zenani, they all said, Thats perfect, says Singh. They knew The Wire. Zindzi even knew he was a DJ. This is partly why the experience is so strange for Elba, the way it just landed in his lap, out of the clear blue sky, complete with the blessing of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. My agent Rogers a white South African, he says. And he was in tears on the phone when he called me. Do you remember when they did the lottery commercials, and the clouds opened and this hand came out of the sky and pointed? Thats how it felt. So, he did his actorly work. He watched interviews and speeches. He sought out things he could work with. I might not look like Mandela, but look, he says, and shows me a picture of his father on his phone. And its true, they have a passing resemblance. Your rst reference of him is with grey hair but before that, he was a fucking young rock star girls everywhere, boom boom boom! He was one of the rst black educated lawyers. Thats like Idris Elba walking into Harlem Apollo when I was Stringer Bell. Standing ovation, wouldnt have to say nothing. Mandela went through that every day. Still, it took some doing. As our plates get cleared away, Elba recalls one scene in particular, in which he had to march into a movie theatre in Soweto and call the crowd to arms. It was a real crowd, a real theatre, full of 600 real Sowetans, most of whom had seen Mandela speak in person many times. Chadwick had them all red up. Were going to shoot this scene now he told them. Mandelas coming soon. Be ready. Meanwhile, Idris waited outside the doors for the green light. We did our nal checks, and then me and my troops walked in. ANC boom! I had the haircut. Pa-pow! Young Mandela at his prime! I was fucking nervous, because this was Soweto thats like someone playing Jay Z going into Brooklyn, and hes not even from

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Brooklyn! But Im telling you, man people were crying. First take, Im not even joking. First they were like, Its Idris Elba. Then, Its Idris Elba playing Madiba [Mandelas clan name]. Then its like, Shit its Madiba! It was so layered. What about when you did that speech in the town square! Brett says. Yeah, I had to fucking prepare those speeches, man, says Elba. These werent just lines. This man did this shit! For some people, that was their Constitution, man, Brett says. Remember the South African actors were all like this. He puts his hands together in a gesture of prayer. Bretts like Drew (Bundini) Brown in Muhammad Alis camp the guy who came up with oats like a buttery a classic cheerleader. The waiters whispering to Oronde: there are paparazzi outside, so theyd best leave through the back. But wait, Elbas not nished. I got to tell you something, man, as arrogant as this might sound, I actually dont care what the press think. Because as a memoir to Mr Mandela, this lm is one of the greatest gifts I think we can give to the Mandela family. Has he seen it? I ask. Hes seen parts. One of the scenes is a long shot of me walking up this hill and giving a speech. Anant showed him on an iPad. And he thought it was him walking up the hill. Are you serious, dude? Brett says, open-mouthed. Yeah, hes hearing the speech and hes like And for a glimmer, Elba does the accent, the gravelly South African brogue. Is that me? Bretts clapping his hands now. Woooah! Man, this dude channels him. This cat, I dont know if I want to be arrround this motherfucker when this movie drops! Idris is beaming. For me, thats it. Game over. Take your potshots. Im happy, no matter what. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is out 3 January 2014
For more Idris Elba, go to esquire.co.uk

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They bang the drums: fans of the Stone Roses at Glasgow Green, June 1990

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O N S AT U R DAY 9 J U N E 1 9 9 0 T H E S TO N E R O S E S P L AY E D G L A S G O W G R E E N . O N S AT U R DAY 1 6 J U N E 2 0 1 3 T H E Y P L AY E D G L A S G O W G R E E N A G A I N . O N B OT H O C C A S I O N S , A N D R E W O H AG A N W A S T H E R E . O N B OT H O C C A S I O N S , HE WAS AMONG FRIENDS 16 5

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t was my last summer in Glasgow. I was about to graduate and living at a at in Kent Road; a at that became a notorious after-party venue for wide-eyed denizens of the Sub Club. The poor neighbours must still hear 808 State and The Stone Roses in their sleep, see taxis rolling up at 2am, and pairs of kids in dungarees hugging their way down to the basement. It seemed so pure and so ordinary at the time: vodka and coke, ecstasy and splis, baggy jeans and Adidas Gazelles. Your musics shite, it keeps me up all night, was a chant in my at a year or so before Oasis was even born, and Kent Road was a puddle of happy fools who didnt yet know what life would cost. One or two of them wouldnt make it beyond their thirties, while others would go on to make it in the great wide world, but at the time you could barely tell them apart. Ecstasy seemed like equality in 1990 when all the walls came down. When youre in a gang, you think life is always going to be about the gang. One of the reasons The Stone Roses were so appealing to us then (Id just turned 22) was that they were an absolute mirror of who we were. They wore the same clothes, took the same drugs, and talked the same shite. All over the North, young men and women spotted an attitude developing into a soundtrack and they possessed it instantly. So, I remember exactly where I was on Saturday 9 June that year. I started the day in a telephone box in Finnieston with a heap of coins, ringing the gang to get them organised. Sorted was that years word: I had to check the tickets were sorted, get the drugs sorted, and then I had to sort out what I was wearing. I can still remember the exact outt: Chevignon jeans, a Joe Bloggs black-and-white striped top that I stole from a girl called Leanne, and the aforementioned Gazelles. I didnt have a smiley top, a pair of Caterpillar boots, Rizlas down my sock, or an anorak, but everybody else did and we met at the Rock Garden at 2pm to get drunk. The day sings out to me. New Order were at Number One with World in Motion. (That was quite unimaginable to those of us who remembered Ian Curtis.) Monica Seles beat Ste Graf in the French Open and Michael Jackson went into hospital. Glasgow Green was buzzing that Saturday: half the kids were wearing Stone Roses T-shirts that said Spike IslandGlasgow Green. The now-notorious Spike Island gig had happened 12 days before in front of 27,000 people: Glasgows gig was in a tent a green and yellow big top that could be seen from the head of the

A GREAT GIG IS LIKE A GREAT BOOK, A PERFECT LOVE AFFAIR, AN AMAZING WINE: IT EXUDES LIFE AND CONNECTION TO A BRILLIANT DEGREE

Saltmarket with 7,500 kids half-pissed and totally wired. Every young life requires an opening onto adulthood. It used to be marriage or the army, an apprenticeship or a coming out, but for my generation it was often a rock concert: a night when your own sense of personal freedom and possibility is charged with sound. Glasgow was my city. There are photos of my family in the fetid back courts of the Saltmarket in 1880, and my mother worked in Templetons Carpet Factory that overlooks the Green. That night, I felt the future right at the end of my ngertips. I was about to leave the old place behind and The Stone Roses melodic brouhaha was the perfect storm to lift you over the rainbow. The night ended with us all sitting in the corner of the Sub Club with the Roses, everybody o their tits, and the club pulsing with our own exact heartbeat. The band was the element and the element was us. We were too young to know that only happened once. We had no idea at all, but it was our trip to The Cavern Club, our sail down the Thames with the Sex Pistols, our last night at Hammersmith Odeon with Ziggy, our Stones in Hyde Park, our meeting with Elvis on the stoop at Sun Records. Rock music, for those who care about it, is never a pastime or an amusement: it is a calling that can seem, in the core essence of youth, to be made especially for you and about you. It turns so quickly to nostalgia because it was ripe with it in the rst place. We didnt have the nose for it ours were too busy sning speed but by the end of The Stone Roses night in Glasgow in 1990, I didnt say it but I knew categorically my youth was over. It slipped away in a brilliant miasma of fun, sweat, articial highs and swelling guitars. Writers with a big interest in the past cant fail to get the point of pop music. If Marcel Proust had heard The Undertones Teenage Kicks, it might have given him another 40 years worth of material for his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. I have a photograph beside me as I write. It is from the late Seventies and was taken at the Glasgow Apollo during a gig by somebody or other. It sits on my desk to remind me what aming youth is all about, just in case, in middle age, I ever fool myself into thinking its about understanding trigonometry and caring about carbon emissions. The photograph shows a group of boys wigging out to the band, knees bent, air-guitars aloft, some opting for the two-gure salute, eyes clamped shut, the moment of youth as xed and delicate as a woodcut. From my prejudiced point of view, the band they are listening to is probably shite

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no fan of good bands ever played air guitar but that doesnt matter because the scene is perfect. The picture is a novel to me and a symphony, too: we cant aord, dear reader, to miss vitality in its fullest throes, because so much of life is killing, oblivion and distraction. A great gig is like a great book, a perfect love aair, an amazing wine, a terric magazine: it exudes life and connection to a brilliant degree. And so we get to the millions of people who hanker after that gig, the ultimate moment with their perfect band. I look at that photograph and know it is gone into the turmoil of air, and yet everywhere we look, people are chasing that same moment. It has become an industry: the Comeback Tour, the Anniversary Release, the passionate hunt for the Big Dj Vu and the spirit of who you were before Calpol and sub-prime mortgages. Every band is at it, the new vitality, the bid for the resurrection and the life. When tickets for this years Stone Roses gig in Glasgow Green went on sale 50,000 tickets, seven times more than when the band were big they sold out in less than 30 minutes. Four complimentary tickets arrived by courier. (I could just stop the essay right here. You want to know what times done to this hardcore fan? Those six words carry it. Give him 20 years, give him a nanosecond on The New York Times bestseller list, give him a few airs and graces, a tted oce, a part-time professorship and a dozen fan letters a year, and hell produce the sentence Four complimentary tickets arrived by courier.

One of 7,500 tickets for the 1990 Glasgow Green show; The Stone Roses frontman Ian Brown at the 1990 gig (bottom)

What a cunt. But lets press on.) I bought another four (and then another two on top of that) and began contacting members of the original gang. A pattern quickly established itself among the mates. They would, in each case, immediately fall into one of the following categories of response. he Having it Harry. To say these individuals bit my hand o would be to oer too little respect to their rapier speed. You just have to say the words free tickets to these geezers and theyve booked their train and got high in preparation for the event. As it happens, there was only three in this grouping. Alan, who grew up in the same town, would go to a party up

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a yaks arse. He took the rst ticket and wanted one for his wife. Shes better fun than anybody on the planet, but, after initial acceptance, I later said no to wives for journalistic reasons. I wanted to recreate a time when wives were mere mythical threats on a far, uncertain horizon. Paul is my girlfriends uncle steady now and up for it. And the third in this category was my younger friend Harry, who never saw the Roses but likes a night out. He also comes from Manchester and I thought he might bring a reverse perspective on this excellent festival of nostalgia. Too right. This involved individuals who already had tickets but wanted to blag a free one anyway, who think media ponces like me get everything for free. Peter took one and came with his wife. We didnt see him for the rest of the day. Beat you to it, mate. This is a nice category: people who never miss an important gig and get tickets early. They spend their lunch hours on the phone to Ticketmaster. They proudly declined my tickets and made arrangements for the pub. OMG. Are you serious? Having collected the main participants in the original 1990 outing, I thought Id spread the love a bit by inviting my teenage stepsons. Theyre into music but in a very dierent way from us. They dont buy records. They dont tape things o the radio. (What! Is this the Paleolithic Age or what? Havent you heard of Spotify?) Theyre into the charts, and they dont know any bands before theyre famous. But theyre nice guys and they kept saying, Oh my God, this

The second Second Coming: The Stone Roses 2013 return, better than they were all those years ago

writer is an oddity, really. If youre a professional writer, you really just gave your inner child a job. For most punters, the rock nostalgia industry is just a chance to tap the last of their old energy and revisit a subject. Theres really no dierence between lipstick thirtysomethings ganging up to go and see Robbie Williams, Deadhead grandfathers making the trip to see The Grateful Dead, and fortysomethings who once assumed themselves to be the core of Cool Britannia entering a park to

is so amazing every time the subject came up, but they didnt organise themselves properly and they missed the gig. Note the middle-aged tone of mild complaint in the above: kids today, in my day we would have marched from London to Glasgow through a million bogs of slime to get a free ticket for a concert, etc. Aw, all right, then. In the nal hours, with all bets in and no-shows accounted for, we turn with pleasure to the people who never cared about The Stone Roses and who are really more interested in a few beers than they are in bands. My brothers. And then we bumped into a pal in the pub whod been having a shit time in his personal life, and we gave him a ticket. The posse was complete, and it was lled less with the sound of old bells than the peel of new ones. Even those who were there the rst time round were totally and properly preoccupied with the responsibilities of now.

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drink warm cider and mouth along to songs theyve known half their lives. The past is a foreign country: they do things dierently there, wrote LP Hartley at the opening of The Go-Between. And writers are people who feel they have a passport to that country. We dont want to live there, but we see it fresh every day, the weather, the people, the sounds of that time. As it happens, I feel more alive at 45, more alert and better prepared, than I was at 22, but the years ow forwards and backwards to an incredible degree, and the nostalgia rock element grabs me by the throat. Are you still angry? it says. Still ghting the power? Probably not. But for a stful of hours, 50,000 men and women on Glasgow Green felt they might. And that is the glory of it. We can make trips to the moon, any minute now. We can fathom the depths of the ocean. But can we take a holiday in the realms of our own potential? Thats what the comeback tour is all about for the fans, even if its all about dosh for the acts. The fans want to revisit themselves, and, on Glasgow Green, 50,000 of them want to sign up for an opportunity they missed 20 years ago. As soon as we got in there, it was the usual ght for the bar and the usual jumble of sachets so people could have a dab or a tab or whatever was going. It has to be said, in the interests of true reporting, that everybody at the gig was wasted. And theres something dierent about older people on drugs from their younger counterparts. The very young often dont know where theyll end up when they take drugs; older people tend to know exactly, and they know how theyll feel the next day, too. It was raining and the crowd just melted into one another. The great thing about those Manchester bands was that, for a short time, everybody seemed to know how everybody else felt. We were all fucked and nobody needed to explain that. Jake Bugg was on. Hes 19. In some ways, though, he was more invested in the past than anybody. He sounded so like Dylan I wondered if the present would ever touch him, never mind the future. Ill tell you what, big man, said the guy next to me. (Only in Glasgow is it possible for me to be called big man: I live in what Martin Amis has described as that much disputed territory between 5ft 7 and 5ft 7-and-a-half.) Im telling you, big man: oor boys [he meant The Stone Roses] could knock seven shades of shite oot ae him. Primal Scream were up next and the crowd went up a gear. Bobby Gillespie is a brilliant

frontman for our generation: he always, always seems more fucked than anybody watching him. Hes like a lightning-rod of fuckedness, a tottering tower of meltedness and his attitude is eversprightly with rocknroll erontery and posturing. Just looking at him makes you want to pack in your job or throw your homework in the re. In 1990, we all managed to stay together. We were in a tent, after all, and could see each other. But this year, it was all about mobile phones and getting lost. Trips for beer could take hours and climbing gear was required for taking a piss or going to buy a T-shirt. And the technology means you end up with a record youd never have had before: not of the gig, but of the people missing in action and the rising tide of their drunkenness. Keith is one of my oldest friends. Here are his texts: We are left hand side next to toilet at mr whippet ice cream van. X Where us cuntsz. At mr whiPpy van left side. Get u at that VAn. Left hand side up from front ya cunt!

FOR A SHORT TIME, EVERYBODY SEEMED TO KNOW HOW EVERYBODY ELSE FELT. WE WERE ALL FUCKED AND NOBODY NEEDED TO EXPLAIN THAT

y the time The Stone Roses hit the stage, Ian Brown is in the kind of yellow mac we would all wear, in this rain, if only we had one, but hes doing it for us. They broke into I Wanna Be Adored and the crowd could forget about its mates because everybody was its mate. I noticed the band was better than they were all those years ago: the singing was better, the guitar work was clearer and the production more solid. But it didnt matter because the crowd was the vocal. They were drowning out the band because that was the sound they wanted, not the band, really, but the moment the band conducted. In celebration of a past event we created a present one, and that, too, would be remembered, and thats what happens now, up and down the country, as people gather to mark the journey of their own joy. At one point, with all the mates gathered in one place to share their wares and leap up to the sound of I Am the Resurrection, I looked down the slope over all the heads to see the sun going down over the park. Im sure I saw a young man down there in a Joe Bloggs shirt, head down, dancing to himself, not knowing the future. In the early hours of the morning, Keith, an English teacher who was looking forward to the end of term, sent me a nal text. Ave got not of hangover! it said.

WATTIE CHEUNG

To read more about The Stone Roses, go to esquire.co.uk

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If you were a rock star, this is what your wife would look like
Lily Aldridge has been examined for imperfections. None have been found. (Female readers can skip this bit)
Photographs by ANDREW WOFFINDEN Styling by JANE TAYLORLHAYHURST

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Black briefs, by Dolce&Gabbana. Black studded stilettos, by SaintLaurent Opposite: Black blazer, by Christian Dior. Blackpush-up bra; black briefs, both byVictorias Secret. Yellow diamond ringset, by Gra

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Blackbra, by Damaris. Black briefs, by FiChachnil

t is not lazy to describe a beautiful woman as an angel if that happens to be her actual job title. And for the last three years, Lily Aldridge has been just that a Victorias Secret Angel, one of that elite band of prepossessing supergirls who represent the ultimate in bombshell beauty, as dened by an American mass-market lingerie brand. As the photos on these pages demonstrate, it doesnt take a model scout like the one who spotted Aldridge when she was 14 to see that shes got Angel potential. In person, the 27-year-old California native is equally stunning. When Esquire meets her at the bar in an upscale Mayfair hotel, Aldridge also turns out to be disarmingly polite. I absolutely love London, she twinkles. I consider it my second home after Nashville. My dad lives here, and we come whenever my husbands touring Europe. Her husband of two years is Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill (hence the residence in Tennessee), with whom she has a one-year-old daughter, Dixie. Lily and Caleb make quite the showbiz power couple, but the union of sex symbol and rocknroller is in Aldridges blood: her father, the British artist Alan Aldridge, is a Sixties mover and shaker who designed album covers for Elton John and The Who, and had illustrations commissioned by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones; her mother, Laura Lyons, was a Seventies Playboy Playmate. Yeah! Its a funny story, beams Aldridge. When I was like 10 or 11, I found a copy of Playboy in my dads studio, and I ran to tell my mom! I thought it meant hed had an aair or something! But my mom was amazing about it she sat me down and explained that she was one of the Playmates. And I thought it was the coolest thing! Aldridge is an unickering beacon of allAmerican positivity. Her international travel schedule is ridiculous, but she never complains, I couldnt. Ive got my dream job. Her hours are gruelling, though she manages to ensure her diary meshes with her husbands: I made sure I could work from the UK while he was touring here. And she still nds the time to be maternal Sorry if I kept you, I was putting Dixie down for her nap! is her opening gambit today. Sex symbol, wife, mother: Aldridge makes this having-it-all business we hear so much about from our own womenfolk look eortless. I do feel very feminine, she says, with a smile that could make grown men weep (and women rend their garments). So, there it is. If Aldridge has a aw, its in her glossy, inaccessible perfection. And then, unbidden, she announces her deep love of Game of Thrones. I love it Im totally into fantasy and sci-. The TV show is great, but the books are incredible. Frankly, Im sceptical. This is just one of those things beautiful women are told to say, so it seems like they can relate to the rest of us. Fine, if youre such a big fan, whats your favourite House? She pauses for a millisecond before condently ring back, The Starks. Denitely. The Lannisters are, like, meh, but the Starks theyre the ballers of Game of Thrones. Oh, Lily. You angel. Max Olesker

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Black blazer, by Christian Dior. Black push-up bra; black briefs, both by Victorias Secret. Blackstilettos, by Rupert Sanderson. Yellow diamond ringset, by Gra Opposite: Blackbra, by Damaris. Black briefs, by Fi Chachnil. Diamond earring set, by Gra
MAKE-UP: MICHELLE CAMPBELL AT SAINT LUKE USING MAC PRO HAIR: MARCIA LEE NAIL TECHNICIAN: JOANNA WEBB

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To watch a video of our Lily Aldridge photo shoot, go to esquire.co.uk

CLOSE
(AND FROM A DISTANCE)
TIM LEWIS
BY PHOTOGRAPHS BY

DAN BURN-FORTI

The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers made him famous for finding intriguing new ways of explaining the world. Now with his new book, David & Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell explains himself. Its quite a story

Malcolm Gladwell photographed for Esquire in London, July 2013

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he soles of Malcolm Gladwells running shoes have black pads that are spaced out like an animal paw. Some footwear designer in Oregon or Bavaria presumably came up with that when he was researching the hoof of an impala or something. This not especially illuminating insight occurs to me as I become slowly hypnotised by his whirring feet, attempting to keep pace with the 50-year-old author on a lap of three London parks: St Jamess, Green and then Hyde. Id pitched the idea of a jog, but I had clearly underestimated Gladwell, who as a teenager was the best miler for his age in all of Canada. The only time Ive run this fast was when I was about to miss an aeroplane. I managed to sustain the pace on that occasion for around 200 metres. Today were due to cover seven miles. Slowly, inexorably, Gladwells black, corkscrew ringlets start to bob o into the distance. It is one of those murderously hot days we had this summer, and my mouth has gone from parched to metallic until Im sure I can taste blood. Hes oblivious, not sweating, barely breathing. Malcolm! I nally gasp. He turns around, his legs in perpetual motion. Im. Done. Ill. Meet. You. Back. At. The. Park. Exit. He nods his assent and then he is gone. This, in case you were wondering, is colour: what features writers look for to help bring their subjects to life. On previous assignments, colour has involved spending a morning at a disused cycle track on the Isle of Man with Mark Cavendish, an afternoon driving a BMW Z4 with Scarlett Johansson and an evening at a Turkish bathhouse in LA with Colin Farrell. The hope is that a relevant yet unexpected location or activity will jolt the interview in an unforeseen

direction. Perhaps Im not doing it right, but my adventures in colour have typically been odd, sometimes awkward and not especially revealing with the exception of the Turkish bathhouse, where nothing much of anything was left to the imagination. With Gladwell, the intention was that the running would oer a dierent perspective on his new book, David & Goliath, his fth. Since 2000, when The Tipping Point was released, it is hard to think of a writer whose work has been so inuential and agenda-dening. Even if you have not read The Tipping Point billed, on release, as an intellectual adventure story you will doubtless be familiar with the ubiquitous term it spawned, which was trotted out by politicians, business leaders and, in a particularly gratifying moment for Gladwell, inspired an ITV quiz show presented by Ben Shephard. His follow-ups, specically Blink in 2005 and three years later Outliers, have been even more popular. The impact of these books can be measured in all manner of unanticipated ways. Thanks largely to Gladwell, redshirting has become a thing: parents delay their childs entrance into nursery so that they can benet from the academic and sporting advantages that typically ensue from being the eldest in a schools intake. All of Gladwells books touch on success in some form, and David & Goliath is no dierent. Subtitled Underdogs, Mists and the Art of Battling Giants, it oers case studies and strategies for how to defy your disadvantages. Gladwell is famous for the esoteric examples that he weaves coherently and compellingly into his narrative, but, as his legend has grown, it has become too tempting not to analyse his own life and career by the theories he puts down. When he wrote Outliers an examination of individuals whose achievements lie outside normal experience an inevitable question was: how did Gladwell himself become an outlier? Now with David & Goliath, there is a similarly obvious gambit: what can a man who is said to earn 2.5m per book tell us about being an underdog? Gladwell, in the nicest possible way, is not especially helpful in settling these queries. Before we set o on the run, I ask if his professional success has changed him personally. Im just doing the same thing Ive done my entire life, he says, which is basically sit in coee shops and write.

Quick thinking: a 14-year-old Gladwell, right, beats Dave Reid in their 1978 1500m race in Ontario. Reid would go on to become a revered Canadian athlete

Im much more caeinated than Id have been otherwise, but no, nothings changed. Is he aware of the power that his books have? That people make huge decisions about their childrens education and in some cases schedule pregnancies because of theories he has expounded? Theres no way to measure that stu, he says simply, so you cant dwell on it. What about the impact of his background on his work? Gladwell was brought up in rural Canada by an English father and Jamaican mother and now lives in New York. Does he feel he has an outsiders perspective? Thats a good question, he deects. But I have no way of knowing, so I dont really think about that. So, that was why we went running. As colour goes it was painful and a little embarrassing but once my heart rate had returned to normal parameters, I realised it had not been a waste of time. One conclusion was

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to the invention of the Aeron chair, suicide rates in Micronesia and a drop in crime in New York in the Nineties. Reading The Tipping Point was like listening to an iPod shue as it curated an eclectic but inspired selection of tracks. David & Goliath, meanwhile, is most denitely an album. Partly this must be down to Gladwells age and experience, but I wonder if its also an implicit response to his critics? As his literary career took o, he was followed around by a line from the American business magazine Fast Company that described him as a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud. Despite his day job as a sta writer for The New Yorker the most desirable gig in journalism one question kept cropping up with each new book: was Gladwell a serious author or merely a guru? David & Goliath is an attempt to settle the matter. I wrote my rst book when I was in my late thirties, he says. I could not have written this book in my late thirties. I just wasnt capable of doing the things I do now. In those early days, Gladwell adopted the stance of an intellectual mercenary: he was attracted, it appeared, not to an ideology or a moral code, but to any argument guaranteed to surprise. The last time I interviewed him, in 2008, I asked if he would prefer to be interesting or right. He practically snorted. Oh! Interesting, he replied. I dont even know why thats a question! If I was President of the United States, Id rather be right than interesting. If I was CEO of a company, Id rather be right than interesting. But Im a journalist what journalist would rather be right than interesting? Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues Im someone who changes his mind all the time. Five years on, Gladwell doesnt remember saying that and he is keen to qualify the sentiment. I said that only because I dont believe you can be right. A better way of putting it is that Id rather provoke you into thinking about your position than recruit you to my side, which is slightly dierent. At the top of my list is not making you agree with me, it is capturing your interest and forcing you to re-examine your position. If you do that, Im satised. Still, if you know that your book is going to be sitting on the bedside tables of Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, it might encourage you to write less about shoes and more about, say, schools or social policy. David & Goliath starts with a prototypical Gladwellian retelling of that famous afternoon in the Valley of Elah in the 11th century BC: Goliath, he contends, likely suered from acromegaly, a syndrome that results in an excess of growth hormone, which would account for his size, but might also have resulted in an eye defect that left him vulnerable to Davids eet-footed attacks. His point is that what we interpret as disadvantages (in this case, Davids slight build) can often be overcome by astute tactics, radical thinking and ghting the battle on your terms. Gladwell applies this theory to dyslexics who, despite their diculties with reading and processing written language, are disproportionately likely to enjoy success as entrepreneurs. He also cites a study revealing that creatives innovators, artists and the like are much more likely to have lost a parent in childhood. In one particularly powerful chapter, he dissects one of the dening episodes of the civil rights movement in the US: an image of a black teenage boy being set upon by a snarling German shepherd police dog during a protest in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963. It turns out that the photograph, which appeared on the front pages of newspapers, appalled President John F Kennedy and was debated in Congress, was strategically incited by a small band of activists led by Martin Luther King. They triumphed, Gladwell concludes, because of the >

obvious: Malcolm Gladwell runs really, really fast; not unlike an impala, in fact. But its just possible that a couple of other aspects of his personality were revealed, too.

hile David & Goliath has a clear family resemblance to Gladwells previous work, it also presents a less familiar side to the writer. It is more personal and heartfelt; sometimes his words bristle with passion, even anger. Gladwell has been moving in this direction perceptibly for a while now. When The Tipping Point landed, it was a product of its time: the turn of the century, the dotcom boom, lowbrow subjects given the highbrow treatment. His debut started with an analysis of the strange reinvention of Hush Puppies shoes and then dazzlingly linked that phenomenon

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expressions: mavens and connectors, thin slicing or the 10,000-hour rule have all been popularised by him. This book is harder to reduce to a buzzword, perhaps because subjects such as the Blitz, the Troubles and the American civil rights movement do not lend themselves to glib reductions. I didnt want the book to be too dark, but all great stories have some hint of tragedy in them, Gladwell says. Id rather make people cry than laugh, so this book is about trying to make people cry. Does this signify a change in Gladwell himself? Nah, he replies. Ive always been morbid. In one chapter, Gladwell contrasts the experiences of two parents who each lost a child to a violent, unprovoked assault. Mike Reynolds whose 18-year-old daughter was shot during a mugging set o with retributive fervour and wound up creating Californias three-strikes law, which entailed anyone convicted of two serious oences and a third crime, of any level, being set a jail term of 25 years to life. Meanwhile, Wilma Derksen, a Canadian Old Order Mennonite, responded to the killing of her daughter by oering forgiveness to the perpetrator. Gladwell relates the twin tales like an expert litigator manipulating a jury: it is artful, contrarian storytelling but ultimately he leaves no one in any doubt which approach he favours. Its very plain in the book how disturbed I am by Mike Reynolds and how moved I am by Wilma Derksen, Gladwell says. The book is quite religious in theme: forgiveness, turning your back on material possessions, the sins of the wealthy theres a lot of religiosity. The Mennonite world is quite familiar to me, theres a reason why its portrayed so sympathetically. Its the world of my family. It is not the only personal aspect, either. Gladwell has a recurring interest in the book and elsewhere in what he calls the big sh, little pond eect. He makes a powerful case for steering clear of the big pond and this, he cheerfully acknowledges, is partly his own prejudice or, as he once described to me, a chip on my shoulder. Gladwell is not a product of a private education that led inexorably to Harvard, Yale or one of the vaunted American universities. Instead, he went to the local school, with the Mennonite farm kids, and then he became the rst of its pupils ever to make it to the University of Toronto, where he studied history. His new book is very explicit here: the best schools simply create a legion of Goliaths ready to be taken down by leaner, hungrier Davids.

unexpected freedom of having nothing to lose. Its inspiring stu. While the stars of Outliers were often well-known The Beatles, Mozart, the aforementioned Bill Gates Gladwell primarily focuses on unheralded individuals in his new book. Vivek Ranadiv is the coach of an under-12s girls basketball team. Rosemary Lawlor is a young Catholic mother living in Belfast in the early years of the Troubles. Caroline Sacks is a woman who might have gone to the University of Maryland, but chose instead to attend the more prestigious Brown University. These subjects might not sound obviously gripping, but Gladwell relates their tales with a compelling empathy. Im a lot more interested in people than I used to be, he says. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas and people were an afterthought, but thats changed a bit. My writing has become more subtle. The qualities of underdogs are universal and, to prove his point, Gladwell examines the Blitz, when southern England was bombed by the Luftwae for 57 consecutive nights in 1940, resulting in 40,000 deaths and the damage or destruction of one million London homes. Few events have been so important in shaping the self-identity of the British: a narrative that covers everything from our sti upper lips to our ability to organise a successful Olympic Games. Gladwell, however, is not buying it. There was nothing specic about the way that Londoners responded to the Blitz; all groups, he contends, react to adversity in a broadly similar way. Who better to come up with a powerful national myth than the Brits, he says with a twinkle. Thats what British people do better than anyone else: spin stories about themselves and lost greatness. David & Goliath has bite. In the past, Gladwell has been known for coining archetypes and pithy

Snap decision: Birmingham, Alabama, 1963 the image that tilted the balance in favour of the civil rights movement

ladwell was raised in a small farming town in Ontario called Elmira. His parents left England at the end of the Sixties in search of a bigger plot of land and, as a mixed-race couple, a more accepting community. (Not long before Gladwell was born, his parents were evicted from a London at after one day. You didnt tell me your wife was coloured, the landlady told his father.) They found both in Elmira, which is in the heart of Canadas Old Order Mennonite country. Mennonites are a Christian sect known for their pacism, and Gladwell has compared his home town to the Amish settlements in Pennsylvania. His parents were Presbyterian, but one time the family helped with a local Mennonite barn raising. There were probably 200 people there that day, Gladwell once wrote. They came from the surrounding farms in black horse-drawn buggies, the women in gauzy caps and gingham dresses, the men in white shirts and black pants. The family would get a few sheep every spring and slaughter them in the autumn, Gladwell would do Bible study every night and it was not until he was 23 that he had regular access to a television. The tolerance of Mennonites is a feature of David & Goliath.

all great stories have some hint of tragedy in them. Id rather make people cry than laugh this book is about trying to make people cry

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BOOKS
I was a big sh in a little pond, Gladwell says. I hadnt put it together before, but growing up in this very, very rural community, I had a feeling of academic invincibility my entire childhood. Wholly undeserved, but it turned out to be very useful. I remember having a friend in college who went to an elite private school in Toronto. I thought she had the greatest advantages in the world; Im sure she had an IQ of 160, but she had nothing but academic insecurities. I was baed in college: why is she this way? And then I realised I had the advantage and she got screwed! hen it came to athletics, however, Gladwell was a Goliath. He started taking running seriously aged 13 and soon after he won the county cross-country championships. He pushed himself so hard that day he almost lost consciousness when he crossed the nish line. Still, he had learned the most important lesson of athletics: physical barriers dont exist, only psychological ones. (After ducking out of our run in Hyde Park, this is evidently something I have still to grasp.) The following year, at the 1978 Ontario championships, he was the 1,500 metres champion for Midget Boys a category, one suspects, that has since been renamed clocking a seriously impressive four minutes ve seconds. A photograph from this race still exists and Gladwell strains for the line like his life depends on it. The boy hes beating, Dave Reid, would go on to become a legend of Canadian middle-distance running. Gladwell has since supplied the caption, My greatest triumph!, which led to an online debate on just how much faster he would have gone without his afro. But little more than a year later, Gladwell retired from competitive running. Why? Injuries played a part, but mostly it was the fact that he was no longer the best. In 1979, aged 15, he returned to the Ontario championships and actually ran a faster time (4:03.3) but only nished in fourth place. I never thought I was going to go to the Olympics or anything grand, says Gladwell now. So thats why I stopped racing. There was no future in it. Gladwell may not have competed seriously anymore, but he never forgot the lessons of his nascent athletics career. After pushing himself to exhaustion to win those rst two races, he had started to question why someone with his advantages a healthy and normal teenager from a well-adjusted family should have to endure such discomfort in order to prevail. This dilemma is presented in a more extreme form in David & Goliath: giants get toppled either because they become complacent or they learn what it takes to sustain their excellence and that knowledge becomes paralysing. My fear of the experience grew too overwhelming, is how Gladwell explains his own athletic downfall. In other words, the hard part of success is often not getting to the top but staying there. Gladwell sees parallels between running and writing. As a runner, he is obsessed with the grace and elegance of his movements; now he is equally interested in the ow and cadence of his sentences. To him, they are both aesthetic endeavours. But hed be happy for the comparisons to end there. Gladwell is a literary Goliath if ever there was one, but he would prefer not to think about himself in those terms. Every chance he gets, he takes pains to normalise what he does. Im not a thinker, a philosopher or any sort of visionary. No, he says. Im a storyteller, a translator of academic research and a journalist. Its very familiar, prosaic: I call up people, I interview people and I read the stu I write. Remember, he goes on, in most cases, Im writing about pre-existing ideas. Theres often an intellectual movement, so Im maybe pouring some accelerant on it, but Im rarely inventing a cause. Im a publicist for a lot of this stu and a packager. Thats not humble; its fact. Id be lying if I told you otherwise. Its true, but also not. By the age of 14, Gladwell knew the dierence between being great and merely good at an activity. Perhaps running helped him devise a coping strategy: if you want to become the best and stay there it helps to convince yourself that what you are doing is not remotely exceptional. At the end of our run we me, a wheezing, broken man; him, not a curl out of place walk back towards his hotel in Covent Garden. Would he, I wonder, prefer to have been an Olympic athlete instead of what he is doing now? No, he says. Winning races is nice, but it was never transformative. The pleasure doesnt come from running the fastest youve ever run, it comes from just the experience of very moderately testing yourself. I nd that kinda nice. David & Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell (Allen Lane) is out now

Expect big things: David & Goliath, with The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, Gladwells previous books

WEARESTUDIO33.COM | BILL HUDSON/PA

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Burberry

Toffee/white/black chevron brushed stretch-wool/cashmere sweater, 795, by Burberry Prorsum. Black wool trousers, 195, by Burberry London

Photographs by Ben Harries Fashion by Lee Holden

Playing for the jersey

This season, patterned sweaters take knitwear in new directions. For Esquire, Arsenal and Englands cultured midfielder Jack Wilshere swaps goalposts for jumpers

FASHION
November 2013 184 /

185

Dior Homme

Grey/navy wool sweater with white trigonometric motif, 600; navy narrow trousers; navy belted trench coat, 1,550, all by Dior Homme

November 2013

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FASHION

Dolce & Gabbana

Suede/wool knit jacket, 1,445; silk scarf, 180; white cotton T-shirt, 130; grey wool trousers, 465, all by Dolce & Gabbana

m probably the worst fantasy league player ever, says Jack Wilshere, Arsenal and Englands bright young hope. I dont really score that often and I get booked quite a lot as well when you get booked you lose points. In case you ever wondered: yes, even professional football players play fantasy football. At the Emirates Stadium, theres an in-house league, and the competition is fierce. Last year, sny, the goalkeeper, won it, Wojciech Szcze Wilshere reveals. Theo [Walcott] came second. I think Theos up there again this year. Im about halfway at the moment. So, while Wilshere wont pick himself, hes happy to select former colleagues Robin van Persie he says is so prolific that hes worth splurging on. However, hes having less success with his current teammates. Ive picked Theo, the midfielder says. Ive told him to score a few more, but its not working. Unlike fantasy football managers, their real-world counterparts have long seen Wilshere as a central cog in their teams. Rising through Arsenals youth academy, in 2008 he was made the senior teams youngest ever debutant at the age of 16 years and 256 days. And since 2006, hes always played in the England set-up above his age band, against bigger boys. (Its worth noting that the father of one, with another due imminently as we went to press, is still only 21.) The game of two halves is ever-hungry for stats, and Wilshere has the pass completion rate that fans of both club and country pray will end their respective years of hurt. Another big number: 42.5m. Chatting to Esquire the day after transfer deadline day, Wilshere also has something to say about Arsenals recent record signing, Mesut zil. We know what he brings were lucky to sign him. He plays the Arsenal way, you know. He plays our style of playing. Is playing with style also important when fitting into the Emirates dressing room? On the subject of his own sartorial stance, Wilshere says he likes to change it up a bit, but during the season hes rarely out of his football kit. He admits Esquire s edit of new seasons knitwear isnt what he normally goes for, but, to be honest with you, I started to like them on the shoot. One of the jackets I wore, Ive ordered it online. Bequiffed and tattooed, David Beckham is an obvious style icon. Hes tried some audacious things, Wilshere says. Alex Song was always the best-dressed Arsenal player, Wilshere imparts. But with him long-gone to Barcelona, theres an opening, and youve got to think that Wilshere is up there. At the moment, Bacary Sagna is quite stylish, he says. But what of Theo Walcott, one of the core of English Gunners whom Wilshere calls his best mates? Theo sometimes looks nice, he dryly notes. Sometimes? Yeah, sometimes. Jim Merrett

To watch a video of our Jack Wilshere photo shoot, go to esquire.co.uk

Tommy Hilfiger
Beige wool roll-neck with Prince of Wales check and leather panel insert, 195; burgundy Prince of Wales check trousers, 205, both by Tommy Hilfiger

November 2013

FASHION

188 /

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Paul Smith < Ben Sherman

Brick knitted wool bomber jacket, 795; khaki slim trousers, 290; purple leather belt, 95; burgundy shoes, 310, all by Paul Smith. Knitted crew-neck short-sleeved sweater, 80, by Ben Sherman

November 2013

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PHOTOGRAPHERS ASSISTANT: CHRIS GIBSON | GROOMING: SIMON MAYNARD | DIGITAL ASSISTANT: HAZEL GASKIN | FASHION ASSISTANT: LOUISE HALL-STRUTT | THANKS TO CLASSIC CAR CLUB FOR USE OF THE 1963 JENSEN CV8; CLASSICCARCLUB.CO.UK

Stone Island
Forest green felted wool cardigan, 525, by Stone Island

Photographs by David Titlow / Fashion by Catherine Hayward

No frills
This seasons tailoring is sleek, subtle and sophisticated. A bit like the incredibly urbane Bill Nighy

November 2013

Fashion 192 / 193

I
Charcoal wool double-breasted coat, 1,795, by Ralph Lauren Black Label. Navy merino wool polo shirt, 130, by John Smedley. Charcoal wool pinstripe trousers, 1,195, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Black leather shoes, 465, by JM Weston

November 2013

Fashion 194 / 195

II
pale blue cotton shirt, 230, both by Ermenegildo Zegna Grey wool suit, 1,690;

III
Grey wool coat, 1,662; grey wool suit, 1,759; white cotton shirt, 336; navy silk knitted tie, 115, all by Dolce & Gabbana. Black calf leather

loafers, 335, by Churchs

November 2013

Fashion 196 / 197

IV
Grey wool double-breasted coat, 445; grey wool houndstooth

trousers, 95, both by PS by Paul Smith. Grey wool knitted polo shirt, 170, by Paul Smith London

V
white cotton shirt, 385; grey checked Vuitton. Oxblood calf leather loafers, 335, by Churchs wool trousers, 430, all by Louis Grey textured wool coat, 1,800;

November 2013

Fashion 198 / 199

VI
Grey wool coat, 1,820; blue cotton shirt, 225, both by Giorgio Armani

VII
Grey wool coat, 3,165; blue cotton shirt, 280, both by Prada

PHOTOGRAPHERS ASSISTANT: KEITH BECKLES | FASHION ASSISTANTS: STEPHANIE CRAIN, CHARLOTTE MESSENGER | DIGITAL OPERATOR: ROB JARVIS | PRODUCTION MANAGER: CARLA BAXTER AT SKINNY DIP | GROOMING: JENNIE ROBERTS AT STELLA CREATIVE USING HANZ DE FUKO AND DERMALOGICA SKINCARE SEE STOCKISTS PAGE FOR DETAILS

November 2013

Fashion 200/ 201

For more fashion see Esquires brand new style biannual The Big Black Book A/W 13

VIII

75, all by Jigsaw. Oxblood calf

Grey wool jacket, 265; grey wool trousers, 130; white cotton shirt, leather loafers, 335, by Churchs

The lm About Time is out now

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You need to get out more. Got the city break or weekend in the country booked? Good work. Now, whether youre hiking up Scafell Pike or La Rambla, youre going to have to dress accordingly

01

01 | Tan Gore-Tex coat with fleece collar, 260, by Aigle 02 | Grey canvas/brown leather rucksack, 60, by French Connection 03 | Stainless steel 1882 chronograph, 4,600, by Cuervo Y Sobrinos 04 | Brown checked cotton shirt, 50, by French Connection 05 | Navy cotton trousers, 80, by Henri Lloyd 06 | Black/brown leather boots, 175, by Ugg

02

03

04

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05

06
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DIRECTORY

01

02

03

04

01 | Navy wool cardigan, 345, by Kent & Curwen 02 | Tan/khaki leather boots, 160, by Ugg 03 | Grey cashmere sweater, 329, by Kent & Curwen 04 | Brown tweed/leather rucksack, 395, by Cherchbi

05 | Navy denim jeans, 120, by Victorinox 06 | Red Silverstone Stowe chronograph, 4,820, by Graham 07 | Grey quilted jacket, 160, by Bosideng

07

05 06

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THIS MONTH ON...

DAILY
Each day on the all-new esquire.co.uk , our up-to-the-minute edit of the very best in style, gear, food, drink, culture (and funny lists, naturally)
EVERY D AY
Sharp Opinion From our team of writers Style Advice How to look your best Want List The smarter way to shop online

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YOUR WINTER STYLE SORTED

The latest advice and recommendations from our team of fashion exper ts

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Advertisement Feature

Christmas list
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Swiss jewelled watch movements from the Twenties to Fifties, backed with vintage leather and mounted as cuinks. Presented in a vintage inspired box, priced at 50. Visit: prettyeccentric.co.uk or call +44 78 7060 7925

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STYLE SWEATSHIRTS
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LILY ALDRIDGE
PAGE 170 Christian Dior +44 20 7245 1330 dior.com Damaris damaris.co.uk Dolce & Gabbana +44 20 7659 9000 dolcegabbana.com Gra gradiamonds.com Fi Chachnil +44 20 7225 2226 Jimmy Choo jimmychoo.com Rupert Sanderson rupertsanderson.com Saint Laurent ysl.com Stella McCartney +44 20 7518 3100 Victorias Secret victoriassecret.com

Paul Smith +44 800 023 4006 paulsmith.co.uk Stone Island +44 20 7287 7734 stoneisland.co.uk Tommy Hilger +44 20 3144 0900 tommy.com

Prada +44 20 7647 5000 prada.com Ralph Lauren +44 20 7535 4600 ralphlauren.com

DIRECTORY
PAGE 203 Aigle +44 1608 813860 aigle.com Bosideng +44 20 7290 3170 bosidenglondon.com Cherchbi +44 20 7683 8332 cherchbi.co.uk Cuervo Y Sobrinos +44 116 234 4656 cuervoysobrinos.com French Connection +44 20 7036 7200 frenchconnection.com Graham London Available at Harrods harrods.com Henri Lloyd +44 20 7253 2983 henrilloyd.com Kent & Curwen +44 20 7432 6425 kentandcurwen.co.uk Victorinox +44 20 7647 9070 victorinox.com Ugg +44 20 7949 1114 uggaustralia.co.uk

BILL NIGHY
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IDRIS ELBA
PAGE 154 Diesel +44 20 7318 2437 diesel.com Dior Homme +44 20 7172 0172 dior.com Grenson +44 20 7377 8099 grenson.co.uk G-Star +44 20 749 444 18 g-star.com Hunter Gather +44 20 7487 4440 huntergather.com Oliver Spencer +44 20 7269 6444 oliverspencer.co.uk Paul Smith +44 800 023 4006 paulsmith.co.uk

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IDRIS IT? p154 Navy wool jumper, 120 by G-star Raw. Red cotton knit jumper, 129, by Oliver Spencer

Photograph by Simon Emmett

209

OBJECT OF DESIRE

No. 29 ULTRA THIN JUBILEE

BY JAEGER-LECOULTRE 11,900

meaty juggernaut of a timepiece is all well and good if you live on an oil rig or fly Typhoon jets for a living, but in the real world these days, less is definitely more. Take Jaeger LeCoultres new Ultra Thin Jubilee. As classic as it is contemporary, the Ultra Thin boasts the slimmest case (4.05mm) of any mechanical, manually wound watch ever made. Inspired by Jaeger-LeCoultres Calibre 145 pocket watch from 1907 (also the thinnest of its day), the Ultra Thin Jubilee comes housed in an elegant extra-white platinum case and is finished with an alligator leather strap. jaeger-lecoultre.com

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Photograph by Luke Kirwan

WORDS BY TEO VAN DEN BROEKE