Phil heads to Borders Books for an encounter with Jackie Collins and comes over all romantic.
The young and brave and handsome stand-up comedian Phil Kane was looking earth- shatteringly good and he knew it. Maybe he wasn’t God's gift to every woman, but he knew he would be to her. Jacqueline Kolenz was ripe for him; a highly successful international novelist millionairess with a travelling entourage whose make-up girl, Raven Hide, drove a silver Porsche-a with the license plate MAZ KARA and who once had sex with an older guy in Miami who had all the toys, but he knew he had that certain something that she wanted. Needed. Craved.
Besides she had been on the road for weeks now, publicising her latest page- turner, Legal Reduction. Come on, all those empty hotel-room nights and tasteless power breakfasts; it was just her style to wait and wait and then take it no more and demand a younger lover.
At 31 he was technically still eligible to qualify as a younger lover, as a toy boy, as a youthful bedroom gymnast in her stadium-sized bed. And he knew it.
Oh jeez, that smile. The smile that had held itself by a thousand LA poolsides, that had shone back at presidents and changed to a smirk after knocking back another millionaire playboy who believed her to be just like a character from one of her multi-million selling sexy hardbound sizzlers. And he knew it.
No, he was not so naive - as he left his house and his young family and dashed out into the sheet rain and biting chill of a harsh, unforgiving grey Glasgow day, his modern fabric pants glimmering in the light, stealing the last of the silver from the puddles - to think that he and her would run off together, but surely he could mean something to her. Cut through the phoney fan shit and look her in the eyes.
Be the thing that that smile was aimed at.
And he knew it.
He knew the streets and even though he only had eleven minutes he was standing reading a copy of the new Lewed Endeavours coolly off to one side, while
6 THE LIST ‘.9 Oct 2 2000
HE FELT HIS PULSE RACE, IT HAD NOTHING TO RACE AGAINST SO lT ROIVIPED HOME TO VICTORY AND DIDA LAP OF HONOUR AROUND HIS BODY.
the others queued around and down the stairs, with time to spare.
Some damn Lunchtime News team spotted him and he had to answer their obvious questions and there she was behind them. He felt his pulse race, it had nothing to race against so it romped home to victory and did a lap of honour round his body. She was there, basically as he has always imagined her: sheek, beautiful and with that indefinable-but- l'll-try-to look of someone who has sold hundreds of millions of books and has millions of dollars and does the things she chooses with tons of gold around, wearing mostly gold all over the world, by pools, beds so large.
People rush to buy them, await their publishing. Whenever I read them in second-hand shops I laugh at the hilarity of the tanned cardboard people doing and saying things we are so familiar with, yet are so unreal, it's amazing. Then I turn to page 85 with the big paragraphs for some corny laminated californication.
Everyone goes 'it's crap’ - and it is — yet you can dig her enjoying her life can't you? Yes.
And the names. The names are uncanny they are genius, they are a summary nutshellisation of it all, you can not do more than to list them, they are the maddest of it all: Silver Anderson Lucky Santangelo Fontaine Khaled Costa Zennocotti Vitos Felicitade Francesca Fern Manon Cable Jack Python Zachary K.Khngen
Fucks Akes, she writes and people feel good reading it.
Finally I joined the very end of the queue, for that is their nature, and I drew closer to where she was signing and asked an attendant how long we had with her and he spoke the words: 'Oh you can have her as long as you want’. So I caught her eye and walked
confidently forward and asked her
if she had any spare names to sign this book to. I said: ’My name's too dull can you glamorise it up a bit?’ I touched her hand and told her she looked great, ‘ she looked up at me. After I left the table the publicist came up to me and asked if I would like to interview Jackie back at her hotel later, I said yes and met her in her four-roomed suite, we talked, we drank and we ended up having wild sex and honey, my young hard keen oiled body seemingly inexhaustable that night by the
fireside, on that rug, as l
worshipped at the altar of her sex
and wisdom and success.
The achingly earth-shattering man walked out into the wet rain and did a tiny slip sort of like a stumble, where the pavement was slightly uneven.
‘.‘!(1()SKEY
"KIS
FR I NT LINES
Famespotting Mount Florida
Where's that then? Not where who7
OK, who are they? They are Glasgow-based dance music duo Twitch and MP Lancaster. They met at an ambient experimental music night and ’just kind of hit it off' and after a few months formed Mount Florida. They are now set to release their first album Arrived Phoenix after several well received 12m and they recently played their first live show as support for Lee 'Scratch’ Perry.
Their first ever gig was before the dub legend that is Lee 'Scratch' Perry? Twitch says 'It was brave, it was arrogant but we thought “what the fuck let’s give it a try". He’s eccentric but a very nice, gentle man, although he was a little hard to understand half the time, it was a priVilege and an honour.’
I recognise that name, it's Twitch from the famous techno club Pure isn't it? That's right 'Dling is the best hobby I’ve ever had and it's something I don’t want to ever give up so I’d like to do both Simultaneously'
So the album must be banging techno then? No not really, in fact, 'it takes elements from dub and rock, based around musicians being recorded and then restructured, I don't know how you w0uld describe it. If you think of anything please tell me’ And it has vocals, and even quotes from Noam Chomsky.
What, Noam Chomsky the forward thinking critic of modern culture? ’I had been watching a vrdeo called Manufacturing Consent and it really hit home and that extract, I thought, was really important, Three Quarters of the peOple who listen to it Will think it’s just someone rambling on in the background but maybe someone wrll listen to it and explore it a bit further.’
50 what's next for this leftfield dance duo? There's a launch party for the album in October, they head over to America in January and then on to the next album. (Henry Northmorel
H Arrived Phoenix is released Mon 23 Oct on Matador and Mount Florida play live at Opt/mo at Substitute Venue (Planet Peach), Glasgow on Sun 22 Oct.