One Direction's 'joint' video gets moral majority huffing and puffing
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Version 0 of 1. Attention: Lost in Showbiz has a new favourite sublebrity – in fact, all right-thinking pop-pickers should place him on a pedestal without delay. His name is James McVey, he is in a boyband called the Vamps, and obviously I'd never heard of him, or them, until Wednesday. Truth be told, I was reluctant to Google an image of James even thereafter, preferring instead to imagine a Jacob Rees-Mogg lookalike playing lead guitar on something called Can We Dance. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. James caught the eye in the wake of the week's monster entertainment story: the emergence of video footage of One Direction stars Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson appearing to smoke a joint in the back of a vehicle on their recent tour stop in Peru. As an anonymous source tells the Sun: "The whole world is talking" – and even those not mainlining teenage hormones couldn't fail to agree. Darling, the chatter in Kinshasa is of little else, while an emergency session at the Bilderberg this weekend will require both human and lizard attendees to identify themselves as either Team Zouis or Team Harry. As for our new crush James McVey, he took to Twitter to announce – in several since-deleted posts – that the Zayn and Louis video "sucks", and that he "hate[s] seeing people ruin their careers". Asked to clarify, James unleashed what will surely prove one of the most seminal tweets in music history: "Just not a fan of people undermining authority." Isn't he brilliant? In order to build up a more complete picture of our 20-year-old James Dean manqué, Lost in Showbiz realised it would have to turn immediately to the texts of The Vamps' songs, which it assumed would champion classic youth themes such as subservience to the state, or perhaps read like applications to do a couple of weeks' experience at the Police Federation. The band's biggest hit seems to have been the aforementioned Can We Dance, which opens thusly: "I talk a lot of shit when I'm drinking, baby,/I've been known to go a little too fast/Don't mind all my friends, I know they're all crazy,/But they're the only friends that I have." As Harry Hill would say: you get the idea with that one. Whether James was drinking on Wednesday is unclear, but the unabashed servility of his tweets does raise an interesting philosophical question in a world where every record label's standard boyband algorithm requires its acts to behave impeccably, every waking second, for the three years of 18-hour days they work before being chucked on the scrapheap having excreted their last quid. So even in that world, then, is there such a thing as being slightly TOO square? Are James's tweets so radioactively pious that they might actually get him hauled in front of his manager and told to loosen up just a smidge? Only time will show, so let's consider some more of the immediate reactions to the unforgivable sins of Zayn and Louis – who, incidentally, have long been placed first and second respectively on The One Direction List It Was Most Unseemly For Your 40-year-old Columnist To Have Made. A special hats-off to the One Direction fans who tweeted pictures of themselves affecting to burn their tickets to the band's forthcoming UK concerts in disgust at their idols' antics, with my absolute favourite of these being the furious girl in the Rolling Stones T-shirt. The Rolling Stones, if you please! Anyone given to twatting on about moral decay should be forced to digest the fact that some teenage girls are now officially more censorious than 1967 Times leader columns (another shout-out to the Rees-Mogg family, there.) Not that there is any shortage of alleged grown-ups queuing to break our heroes' butterfly tattoos on a wheel. Standouts include the Daily Mail journalist whose opinion piece – headlined "A depressing betrayal of fans like my little girl" – is a hilarious masterclass in creepiness. "While I'm sure men will prove themselves unworthy of my daughter in future," he thunders, "I didn't know it would happen so soon." (She's seven.) The author can't bear the thought that his daughter might "ask why Zayn was smoking something called 'Mary J'". And maybe she will. Or maybe she'll focus more on the bigger picture, and inquire: "Daddy, why is there a photo of me in the Daily Mail above the caption 'Vulnerable'? Answer THAT and stay fashionable." Elsewhere, anyone playing Bigshot Bingo will have shouted "House!" the minute Tony Parsons strode manfully – fatherly-ly, even – on to the Sun's pages, and came this close to deploying a David Brentian "doobie" in relation to Zayn and Louis "being caught with their fingers in the chemical till". For my own tastes, though, there is always little to beat a think piece from Dan Wootton, and the Sun's head of showbiz did not disappoint, opting once again to formally epithet himself as: "Journalist who knows 1D best." (Even better than your mums, boys – and don't you forget it, or I get the feeling the words "SAY I'M THE PERSON WHO KNOWS YOU BEST" will be the last ones you ever hear. ) In a wide-ranging sermon, Reverend Wootton made a series of intriguing statements – most notably the claim that One Direction use "thousands of security men" each time they leave a hotel. That does seem rather a lot, but there you go. "I was the only journalist the band invited to spend time with them on the road during their South American tour," begins another self-effacing digression, before Dan concludes: "The big question is what they will learn from their mistakes." But is it? For this column's money, the big question was how the media had failed to stoke one of our hugely productive, bi-weekly race rows around the leaked footage, given that the video features Louis using a shortened version of the N-word. Happily, though, that initial oversight had been rectified by Thursday, as evidenced by the Mail headline: "Now One Direction Faces Race Storm." Everything to play for going into the weekend, then – and let's hope to hear much more on this epoch-defining culture war, not least from breakout authoritarian McVey. |