The Second Serve // Sweeney Fraud

All anyone is talking about today is Will Smith twatting Chris Rock at the Oscars. Which is understandable. You throws hands at someone in the middle of one of the biggest shows of the year, in front of the cameras, as it’s broadcast to millions, then people will talk. But this might not be the first time Will has thrown punches at the Oscars.

Will and Jada left the Academy Awards ceremony early in 2002 citing a “family emergency” but the rumour in the theatre at the time was that Will had had a punch-up in the bogs with Ethan Hawke. A noticeable red mark appeared on Ethan’s cheek during the ceremony (visible on camera at one point) but the redness had always been ascribed to smeared lipstick from a kiss.

Lipstick offers a plausible explanation as to why the mark had cleared by the time Ethan was circulating at the Vanity Fair afterparty. But now we’ve all seen for ourselves that Will prefers an open-handed slap to a punch, maybe that would also explain why the ‘bruise’ disappeared so quickly…

If you learn nothing else from Popbitch, let it be this: never, ever, EVER try to get between a famous 90s/00s radio-friendly rapper and his woman.

Chris Rock isn’t the only one who found this out the hard way. Calum Best was once invited to join P Diddy aboard a yacht in St Tropez, back when Calum Best was the sort of person you might realistically expect to turn up aboard a yacht in St Tropez.

The night ended in calamity though as Puffy punched Calum in the face, twice, and had five minders escort him off the boat because the ever incorrigible Best had been trying to put the moves on one of Puffy’s ladies.

Once again, Katie Price’s relationship with her fiancé has ended up caught in a miserable tailspin of abuse accusations, threats, cheating and all sorts of mysterious, cryptic gossip.

The two appear to have split up in recent days and Carl Woods’ profound social media post commenting on the situation was a photo of him and his dog, with the simple caption: “Loyalty looks like this”.

It’s a powerful statement. Made all the more powerful when you learn that Carl is so loyal to that dog he personally wipes its cock and arse for it every time it goes to the loo.

You may have pulled a slightly confused – even possibly disgusted – face when you read the words “erotic thriller” and “snail” in such close succession in Thursday’s mailout, but snails play an important part in Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas’s latest flick, Deep Water.

For that, you can thank Patricia Highsmith. We’ve already mentioned her habit of bringing dozens of pet snails along to literary parties in her handbag to keep her company – but she had another, even more unusual habit.

Patricia used to travel internationally with snails too. According to her editor, Larry Ashmead, she told him that she used to smuggle live snails into France by placing six to ten of them under her breasts as she went through customs.

And she didn’t just do this once. She did it every time she went. There and back.

X writes:
“My main memory of Barbara Charone is how much she used Madonna as a human carrot to get coverage for all of her other clients. I had to sit through Claire Sweeney in Chicago THREE TIMES on the understanding it would eventually lead to an audience with Madonna. That interview obviously never materialised, but it did mean I spent more time hanging out with Claire Sweeney than my own family.”

Have you dealt with Barbara Charone, or been subject to similar publicist tricks? Tell us: club@popbitch.com

We’ve had loads of readers clue us into some great industry jargon across music, movies, TV and more, which we’ll share in due course. But by far the story we’ve been told the most about is the legendary DFA Knob. If you are unaware of the DFA Knob, it stands for ‘Does Fuck All’ and is a dial or fader on a sound engineer’s desk that gives them something to fiddle with whenever they need to be seen to be doing something (but is never actually plugged in).

According to old roadie tales, Lemmy’s bass was the most DFA’d instrument of all time, with Motorhead’s sound techs constantly fiddling with the useless knob to make sure he was completely happy with his DFA levels.

There’s a slightly more family-friendly version used in the pop world too: the “Tone” fader.

Sinitta always had a lot to say to the techies in the recording studio and was constantly pleading for more “tone”. Nothing the engineers tried satisfied her, until one of them got a big label, marked it “TONE”, and put it next to one of the faders on the mixing desk. Whenever Sinitta started requesting “more tone”, they’d let her come up to the desk herself and fiddle about with the dummy knob – knowing it wasn’t connected to anything – until she was happy she’d found exactly the right level.

Last week, we started a voyage through the hits of the 1980s, making up audio rounds from some of the biggest songs of the years from 1980-1984.

This week, we finish up the decade, taking ten of the Top 50 best-selers of each year and mushing them all up into quick three-minute mixes. All you have to do is pull ten song titles and ten artist names out of the resultant mess.

Monday’s Theme: 1985

[Play it here]

The uncensored clip of Will Smith and Chris Rock
[Slapping and swearing]

The history of sexy Yugoslavian computer magazines
[Read on Mel Magazine]

Can Kyle Rittenhouse sue the people who called him a murderer?
[A lawyer gives his thoughts]