It's always fun to witness a colleague letting off a bit of steam, and Mr Agreeable is one of our treasured geysers (geezers), old reliable innnit. The other day he was taking out controller of BBC2, a Jane Root, for daring to suggest that one of her great regrets was that she failed to secure Jamie Oliver for another TV series. Scoff!
Everyone hates Jamie Oliver don't they. He just stands for everything crap about yoofTV, all that's empty and godforsaken about safe middle-class culture's meaningless obsessions, he's practically the antithesis of everything that alt culture stands for, made worse by his co-opting of drab super-bland shite like Jamiroquai, The Doves and Toploader. He's just a bit too far right of that invisible line which exists just to the right of the Mercury Awards.
But of course he's OK isn't he? He's alright! Cheeky bloke! A cut off the mockney block, it's not like he's pretending to be less classy than he is (like Guy Ritchie for instance). He's done some quite good things I reckon, that restaurant '15' he set up is still training unemployable dufuses, setting them up with careers for life. While he'll not quite make it into the >heronbone< canon of people so awful they're magically exhilaratingly wonderful (like Tim Westwood and Brian Sewell),he's still OK. I've even bumped into him myself on a couple of occasions and he was polite, courteous, friendly even. His crime, is of course, that he's a celebrity chef.
But why are celebrity chefs reviled, and celebrity DJs revered? OK, let me rephrase that, why does alt culture despise celebrity chefs and laud it's DJs? I think the chefs, on the whole are much more worthy recipients of adulation. They know a lot of recipes, they're often staggeringly kinetic charismatic figures in their kitchens inspiring awe and trepidation in their workers, they actually produce something of enormous sophistication, something of sensual power. Whereas the DJs (straw man I know) just spin a few records their mates gave them, often too lazy to reach beyond the narrow circuit of record companies who pump them material.
Over the years I've become something of an expert on celebrity chefs and it's struck me that there are a lot of parallels between theirs and the world of music. Robert Carrier, now he's the don. He's like The Beatles. I don't know why I'm finding myself in this position always defending The Beatles at the moment. I think it must be because, essentially, they represent a music that is an undeniable source of power. I get tired, and a bit bored, always reading about such and such obscure musician with their seminal influence on culture. Yawn. Gimme beef and spuds! The Beatles mate! Yeah! The Beatles weren't some sideline to the main cultural spectacle, they ate the whole culture alive, ingested it. They were HUGE! Isn't that fascinating? How could that not be fascinating? Also, you can't knock The White Album...
The thing about The Beatles was that they changed everything. Before them it was Alma Coogan and Frank Sinatra, shit in other words, old school pantomime, and after them it was in your head, coursing through your veins, waking you up at night. Do you really think Reggae would have changed music had it not been for The Beatles? Just like Robert Carrier. Robert Carrier sold French cuisine to the Brits like The Beatles sold electric Rock'n'Roll to the world. He was the don dada.
Then you have Keith Floyd. Keith Floyd is I reckon like Neil Young. Well maybe he was like The Rolling Stones in the seventies and then in the nineties he became like Neil Young. I always thought that his kicking alcohol and doing that series on Indian food and vegetarianism was like, booyackashak, Neil Young twinning up with Sonic Youth and Arc-weld. Radical reinvention that you just couldn't have predicted. Delia Smith she's like Bob Dylan (no she's NOT like Siouxsie Sioux), she had the archive shit going full on, Delia studied those ancient English recipes like Dylan absorbed the Appalachian ballads. She would be someone like Shirley Collins (yeah the Alan Lomax connection would have served me well) but for the fact that she ripped it all up with her Summer Collection in the 80s, that was radical noggins. That was like Blood On The Tracks baby, the master is here, step back all imitators: "We deliver the ku."
Of course Delia's football team makes her look a little like Elton John, but her Christianity, ah you gotta hand it to me, that makes her look like Bob Dylan again. And of course her retiring to a state of nun-hood like she did for a few years, well that makes her look like Bob Dylan too.
Rick Stein! The man! There's a big place in my heart for Rick Stein. He's like second-rank isn't he. When it comes to fish Rick is the daddy. The things he can do with scallops! Rick's big thing is sourcing the ingredients proper, and in that sense he's quite like my man Kirk Degiorgio and his synths, equally he could be like Harry Partch, cos he was an instruments man. Actually Harry Partch is probably more like Hugh Fernley-Whittinstall (a friend of the family, I saw his lovely Mum just the other day), cos Hugh actually grows his own stuff in that little Kitchen garden of his. If he spliced a few genes together and made a carrot that tasted like a courgette then he'd REALLY be like Harry Partch.
Nigella Lawson. Oh dear, don't start me. She's a total interloper, very shallow talent, rode into the limelight on Nigel Slater's coat-tails. Slater, who reacts to tungsten lighting like a Yorkshire pudding, and is better as a journalist. Slater is like Lester Bangs when he was playing in The Delinquents. Him on TV, it's like a hack's jolly. Nigella is like Peaches, she's pathetically pimping her not-quite good looks in an arena overstuffed with so many unattractive male specimens. It's almost as if you see the competition spluttering, "But it's not fair!" The way she provocatively nuzzles strawberries is like Peaches snogging audience members. The cooking, like the music, is totally superfluous, a botched together make-do snapshot of stolen gestures and ideas.
Gary Rhodes, aah I had plans for Gary! He started off so promisingly in the eighties, somewhere betwixt Tom Robinson and Nigel Kennedy. I have an image of him eating cockles in his mohican at an East End Café indelibly burnt in my memory. This was punk cuisine! But, regrettably he's become yet more and more anally retentive. The way he strokes pork joints and gently handles cauliflower, yikes. Maybe he's like Phillip Glass, starts off brash and iconoclastic but becomes gradually homogenized and incorporated into the dominant culture at an imperceptibly slow pace. You never saw it happening.
The super-cool, behind-the-scenes, indisputable rulers of the current crop of celebrity chefs are of course Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers of The River Cafe. They're like Lou Reed and John Cale those birds. It's definitely a case of psychological domination of the field. They may have performed the same trick with Italian cuisine over here, that Carrier did with French cooking. Everyone nicks their stuff like the 80s saw every band in the UK nick The Velvet's.
Anthony Worrall-Thomson, I dunno I give up, he's like Aerosmith. Aynsley Harriott, Harry Belafonte of course! What does strike me as somewhat curious is that British Cuisine has failed to have a dance music revolution. British Cuisine is indelibly Rock. Jamie Oliver you see, he's just another chapter of Rock'n'Roll. If Gary Rhodes was New Wave, Jamie is like Nirvana. Likewise the excellent Giorgio Locatelli, you can smell the leather trousers in his closet. Where are all the disco chefs? Most worrying I think it may suggest that Dance music failed. Dance music failed to radicalize the mainstream. Dance music failed to ring the changes, it was like a dream in the way conversely The Beatles singlehandedly DID signal something new.
Posted by Woebot at July 3, 2004 10:45 AM