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The soldiers that war forgot:
how British forces returning from the Iraq conflict are being failed
The symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder include nightmares,
flashbacks and the vivid re-experiencing of traumatic events. The
symptoms also include hypervigilance and avoidance of situations
likely to cause stress. If a car backfires on the high street or
cutlery crashes around the kitchen, sufferers can find themselves
diving to the ground into “contact positions”...
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Respect, gun crime and murder:
London’s secret teenage war
It often feels like London is, as John Berger wrote, “a teenager,
an urchin.” The city is piratical, rebellious and creative,
but also prone to compulsions, low self-esteem and self-destruction.
In 2007, the teenage city turned in on itself in dark and ugly
ways.
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Boulevard of Broken Dreams: the
2005 Paris Riots
When France erupted in a two-week flambée of rioting, pyromania
and police confrontations last autumn, the places that went up
weren’t the manicured boulevards known to tourists. Instead
it flared in places like Clichy-Sous-Bois - suburban ‘banlieue’ zones
home to sink estates...
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Triathlon training for the aquaphobic
amateur
Friends respond in a variety of ways when you tell them you're
training for a triathlon: ‘you’re a brave man’; ‘rather
you than me mate’; ‘best of luck’.
With good
reason. All triathletes have a weak discipline, and I discovered
mine 100 yards from the shoreline during a swim-to-bike ‘brick’ training
session at the annual Adidas Eyewear Triathlon training camp in
Sivota, Greece.
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Maximum
jersey: the enduring cool of cycling apparel
You'd have to be an unbendingly Bond Street or seriously tweedy
kind of person if sportswear doesn’t form a component of your
wardrobe. In the past 20 years sports apparel of all kinds has made
the transition from the field of dreams to the kickabout of the everyday.
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In
conversation with Lance Armstrong
There is conceivably no fitter human being on the planet than
Lance Armstrong. There has perhaps neverbeen. Both his Christian
name and surname have the ring of classical heroism, which
is fitting because between 1999 and 2005 the World Champion
cyclist totally dominated the Tour De France...
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Justin Timberlake's pop dream
- Do you ever wake up in the morning and feel depressed that you
will never make a greater impact than Michael Jackson?
Sometimes,
when he’s thinking, Justin Timberlake locks his
fingers together, rotates his torso and the vertebrae crack audibly.
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Jamie
Bell: women want to mother him, and men want to mother him too.
Emerging music scenes traditionally generate exposure through their
own DIY media formats. The mixtape remains the key vehicle for breaking
hip hop artists, and underground indie continues the punk protocol
of self-promoting through fanzines.
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Flirting
in the age of the Smoking Ban
“Hi - do you smoke here often?” The diminutive Brunette
on the pavement outside The Old Crown on New Oxford Street looks
at me with suspicion, but her redhead companion in the cropped
trousers is more receptive. She giggles. I offer her a token
of my affection – a box of Swan Vesta matches worth a whole
50p – as she pulls out a Camel Light.
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The
Superhuman cult of Ultradistance running
What is the limit of human endurance – taking gold in the
Klagenfurt Ironman, climbing all 14 of the world’s 8,000m
mountains or persevering through an entire series of I’m
A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here?
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Lego: thinking outside of the box
...none of what gets conceived and built in Second Life has anything
on what's currently happening back in the real world on this side
of the LCD screen with a certain Danish “creative material” anyone
who’s ever been preschooler will be familiar with...
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Notes
on the Jaguar XKR as against the Marques De Riscal hotel
While the new XKR, Jaguar’s XK model “plus 30 percent”,
symbolises the pure containment of dynamic energy, Frank O. Gehry’s
Marques De Riscal hotel, deep in the undulations of Rioja near
Bilboa, is the opposite: a building spilling out of itself in
an jumble of architectural explosions frozen in time.
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Brand New Heavy: How Akala
became himself through hip hop
Kingslee MacLean-Davies, 21, hammers a football across an empty soccer pitch
in Market Road in north London, and then fires off in hot pursuit. His red
Arsenal shirt flashes against the drizzled green astroturf. Under a flat grey
sky he plays keep-up, grins a broad, self-possessed smile and loses himself
in his skills. He used to train here, but this is no longer his field of dreams.
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Disco Makeovers: how recycled
Eighties pop make dance music fun again
Who says dance music is dead? Not only is it alive and thriving, but the charts
are awash with a new strain of gloriously superficial ‘makeover music’ with
a deep affection for the worst of Eighties pop and soft rock. It is fun. It
is now. It easy to make, dance to and dispose of. Hurrah!
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The Shape Of Things To Hum: How
the history of formats has shaped the way we listen to music
It probably began in Africa, like the Chemical Brothers suggested, and it
probably involved wailing souls giving primitive voice to what we now call
The Song - an emotional glue that holds communities and articulates the feelings
of the mass-subconscious. At other end of the history, it exists as revolving
seven-inch, 12-inch or 12-cm plastic discs, or as bits and bytes etched into
the circuitry of an iPod, mobile phone or laptop.
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The Cruel Jerk: Vice magazine
and no things nice
A decade is a long time in popular culture, even when the refreshment rate
of Nike’s colourways and time itself seem to be accelerating faster than
ever. Just over 10 years ago, political correctness was the dominant cultural
force. You could hardly shop, think, dance or rock without a feminist or Marxist
critique hindering your satisfaction. Today, you’d easily imagine the
opposite to be true.
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Lunch is For Wimps: Talking work
with the Futureheads
"...It’s difficult to keep in touch with friends and family back
home. It’s
almost like your life has stood still and nothing’s happened apart from
a glut of gigs in the middle, and everyone else’s life has moved on..."
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Raw Power: The Gastro Generation
and New Foodie Entrepreneurs
Since British men started paying serious attention in the kitchen, epicurean
ambition no longer stops at cooking and consuming. The Gastro Generation’s
appetite for tracing, sourcing and producing organic food has become a national
obsession
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Freestyle
Babynaming: why are new parents giving their babies daft names?
It’s common knowledge that Kevin is Britain’s least glamorous
name. And though I don’t resent my parents for giving me the ultimate
Chav signifier – how were they to know, back in dim 1972?
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Alex
Amosu is Britain’s First Ringtone Millionaire
Thirty-year-old Alex Amosu’s life story isn’t so much rags-to-riches
as bleeps-to-bundles of cash. He is making money to the tune of millions – and
to the sound of technological change.
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Killing
time with Geoff Dyer
"
...When people talked about the Eighties, it was always this booming scene in
the city and people doing cocaine. But there was the alternative counterculture,
the fag end of the hippy movement, that was still very much alive and thriving..."
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Grime
DVDs and Street Media: how the urban entrepreneurs are making
money through music
Emerging music scenes traditionally generate exposure through their own DIY
media formats. The mixtape remains the key vehicle for breaking hip hop artists,
and underground indie continues the punk protocol of self-promoting through
fanzines.
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Richard
Reed’s Innocent vision for the British Food Industry
It’s a safe bet many entrepreneurs would give their right arm for the
bank balance, strategic vision or consumer loyalty that belong Richard Reed,
the lean, charismatic 32-year-old founder of Innocent Smoothies.
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Salvatore
Calabrese is the World’s Best Barman
What Salvatore Calabrese can’t tell you about the lore, practice and
protocol of cocktail mixing just isn’t worth knowing.
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The
DIY Generation
On the average day visitors to the Gamble Room of the Victoria & Albert’s
Museum in Knightsbridge can marvel at the glories of Britain’s nineteenth-century
expansionism, and wonder if the nation will ever again live up to the greatness
of its past.
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Heeeere’s
Juggy!
Juggy D is the new face of Anglo-Asian Britain.
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Britney,
Shakira and the Diwali mania: Western Pop’s New Orientalism
The visionary musician Brian Eno long ago predicted that pop will eat itself
- that the relentless appetite for new expressions of the old emotional themes
demand that pop will regurgitate every sound, signature and hook in its 50-year-old
repertoire.
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Bill Drummond: How (Not) To
Be An Artist
At the age of 50 Bill Drummond may come across like the universal man in the
shed, but if Britain is serious about considering itself a thrusting nexus
of 21st-century creativity and artistic endeavour, his likeness should already
be on a plinth in the middle of Hoxton Square bearing the inscription ‘Everything
Is Possible’.
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Leo Houlding: Britain’s
greatest new rock climber.
Leo Houlding uses the email moniker ‘Fierce Warrior’ for a very good
reason. Rock climbing is, he says, ‘a totally insatiable desire’.
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How To Go Bald
A bedhead, mullet or fin and any kind of fringe, parting or highlight may now
be totally out of the question for me and many other men, but the primary advantage
of ruthlessly clippered No.1 grade on a cranium under siege by Male Pattern
Baldness is that women frequently wish to touch my head.
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The Guggenheim Motorcycle Club
If you’re rich, starry and feel the need for speed, the Guggenheim Motorcycle
Club is the fastest place to socialize on earth.
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Dizzee Rascal presents ‘Showtime’
Dizzee Rascal, on the whole, doesn’t answer his phone. He doesn’t
really need to when the world wants him more than he wants the world.
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Air
Robot voices. Jokes. The ‘Greek’ element. Beck. How Air built ‘10,000hz
Legend’ – the world’s first concept album without a concept
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Two Cultute Clash: London Meets
Jamaica on the dancefloor
The legends walk the streets in Jamaica, and they do so slowly. They move in
the purposeful but nonchalant amble, as only Jamaicans can.
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The Fash 'Tache
Moustaches: outmoded facial furniture or essential fashion adornment? Kevin
Braddock give up shaving and finds out
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Teenagers 2000
Teen 2000: There are 5,250,000 teenegars in Britain. On Saturday 15 January
2000, the Face travelled the country and spoke to 1,000 of them
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Married Men
Can't Dance
The season’s festivities will again prove that lads are hopeless at dancing,
but, say Kevin Braddock, married men are the worst
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How The iPod
Killed The CD
It’s hard to believe, but the cigarette-packet-shaped gadget on the left
can store the tracks from all 800 CDs on the right. The iPod has arrived, and
we may never listen to music in the same way again.
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Revenge Of
The Hairy Chest
Style-savvy men are bearing their chest hair this season. But
will it send women running to the woods. Kevin Braddock puts
his pelt to the test.
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New Pop Dirt
Chazbaps, threes-up and champagne enemas. Gossip’s got a whole lot grubbier
since it started travelleing at 56,000 kilobytes per minute. So how come Madonna’s
giving it up for popbitch.com
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Something
Like A Phenomenon
In March
2001 THE FACE interviewed 1,000 teenagers and twentysomethings
in ten cities across the UK about their cocaine use, and the results
were astonishing.
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The Revenge
Of The Rugby Girl
Rugger: a sport played by men with funny-shaped balls, who pull, mate with
and eventually marry a particular kind of girl
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The King Of
The No
Pedro Winter is the visionary Parisian
at the helm of the good ship Daft Punk. Meet the man behind Headbangers,
Cassius and an inspirational business outlook based on skate philosophy
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The DIY Bedroom
Music Revolution
The poster boy of a new generation of bedroom music producers, Dizzee Rascal ’s
Number debut single ‘I Luv U’ was written and recorded on a PC
in half an hour.
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Ant & Dec
They’ve been Tyneside Tykes on Byker Grove, Saturday saviours on SM:TV;
they console Pop Idol rejects and are the perfect recipe for ITV’s Takeaway.
Give it up for this year’s hosts with the most.
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The Trouble
With Lisa Maffia
Whenever there’s a gangland shooting, the tabloids point the finger at
So Solid Crew siren Lisa Maffia. Is she really caught in the crossfire, or
a scapegoat for the UK’s gun crime apocalypse?
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24 Hour Party
People
What are you doing on Election day? Chances are you won’t be voting.
So spare a thought for the people with the toughest job in Britain. New the ‘kids’ from
Conservative Future
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UK Garage
1999
If 27-year-old Jason "Wookie" Chue is the future of British black
music, the building in which he's spent seven years marshalling renegade snares
and throbbing basslines is the monument to its past.
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Brand Theft
What can a business do when its name is ‘criminalised’. Kevin
Braddock at cases such as Audi, Mitsubishi and Ben Sherman
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Basement Jaxx
Attack!
Listen to Rooty. Become a Bongoloid. Get Get down. Basement Jaxx: British house
champions leading the disco nation into a whole new summer of Love. Can you
feel the force?
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Fashion Photographers
Secret
Photography's killer application comes in one size these days:
small. The Contax T2 is a dinky, titanium-bodied camera developed
by
Kyocera in 1984.
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Daft Punk
One More Time
Bienvenue, wilkommen, and welcome to the 2001 leg of Daft Punk's global disco
pantomime which, like last time it came to town, is about to save house music
and teach the world a fresh dance move.
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Let Leah Betts
Die
When it comes to mainstream reporting of club and drug culture
in the UK today, there are myths and there are facts, and somewhere
in between roams the ghost of Leah Betts.
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How To Wear
Women's Jeans
Fashion-forward men are wearing women’s jeans. But squeezing into them
can be tricky, discovers Kevin Braddock
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Is Thailand
The New Ibiza?
Thailand is the world’s ultimate chill-out zone. but now they’ve
banned music after 2am, cops patrol the beach and a weed bust will cost you £800.
What now for the ultimate smoker’s paradise?
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Now We're
Living In Ekstacy
Welcome to Stankonia: a parallel universe where the mood is cosmic, the mushrooms
are magic and the melodies are Prince in his prime. Your guiodes? Loon-panted
hip hop magicians Outkast.
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Survive
A School Reunion
All back to school with the website that’s made class reunions the hottest
social event of the season
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What Blu Cantrell
Did Next
Rhode Island R&B sex-banshee Blu Cantrell, 28 and making more money, fun
and love than ever, likes to do things her own way.
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Sean Paul
Takes Over The World
Sean Paul has take dancehall to the charts, hearts and dancefloors of the world.
All hail the dutty conqueror
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