The Second Serve // Spaghetti Scissors

WELCOME TO THE CLUB! This is the new Club Popbitch email, a Monday evening companion to the weekly Thursday mailout. We aren’t sure exactly what shape this whole thing will take quite yet, but we figured that you might as well watch what happens as we try to work it out. If you have feedback, or suggestions of the types of things you’d like to see in this, get in touch with us – club@popbitch.com

“Will Ferrell? He ruined my life” – Christopher Walken

A second serving of slander and scandal Subscribe

* The ‘Fruit And Flower’ budget returns

* The Popbitch cutting room floor

* PLUS: Music quizzes and playlists

>> Bad Handlin III <<

The Sony sleaze spillover

Ever since the Four Corners documentary on Sony Australia was broadcast, we’ve been hearing from all sorts of former employees who have memories to share of their disgraced, dictatorial boss, Denis Handlin.
* Denis had a regular booth at his favourite Italian restaurant in East Sydney: Beppi’s. His team would call ahead of his arrival, demanding his spaghetti bolognese be cut with scissors to make shorter strands, so that he didn’t have any slurping/sauce related mishaps.
* He point-blank refused to do any business with one leading UK lawyer because that lawyer had worn a brown suit to their meeting – and it enraged him.
* He had a policy that no women were allowed to operate any sort of musical/hi-fi/PA equipment in meetings he attended because he insisted they would only fuck it up.
* Several Sony staff got a bit loud after some hospitality at the weekend rugby in the Sony corporate box which was next to Murdoch’s box. A member of the Murdoch family complained, so all the staff present were sacked.
* Another assistant was sacked the morning after she was seen having a conversation with a different label exec during a Sony gig. (Bad that she was seen talking to an industry competitor; unforgivable in Denis’s eyes that they talk when a Sony act was on stage…)

The Kristen Stewart Diana movie is released next week. We didn’t think anything could top the dreadful Naomi Watts biopic, but apparently this has Kristen/Diana shouting at one of the servants, “Leave me, I want to masturbate!”

>> Funny money <<

Hands in the till

With so much focus on the inner-workings of the music industry at the moment, former EMI chairman Guy Hands’ new book, The Dealmaker, ought to make for a fascinating (if a little self-serving) read.
A profile in The Times this weekend touched on a few of the juicy details, including that, “[Hands found] on the books an EMI-owned £5.6 million shag pad in Mayfair and a £20 million a year bill for ‘Fruit and Flowers’, which he learnt was shorthand for coke and call girls.”
You may have seen in Popbitch a couple of weeks back that we mentioned a former label exec who spent millions on apartments in Shanghai for the girls he liked to visit there. He’s the same one who had that Mayfair shag pad.
As for the amount spunked on ‘Fruit and Flowers’? When details of EMI’s F&F budget first became public, it really shocked a senior exec at one of the other major labels. He was heard in a team meeting exclaiming, “…is that all?”

It’s strange that when the EMI ‘Fruit And Flowers’ budget story emerged in 2007, the annual amount was £200,000. Now there’s a tell-all book to plug, it’s being reported as £20 million. No wonder the whole enterprise went belly up if they can’t keep figures like that straight.

>> Popbits <<

From the cutting room floor

Sometimes there are details we end up having to snip out of the Thursday Popbitch mailout. Not because we can’t run them, just because they don’t always quite fit. It seems a shame to let them gather dust in our draft files, so we’ll occasionally collect them here.
As for last Thursday’s issue…

* Chris Martin: As well as taking a private jet from LA to London to perform a single song at this year’s Brit Awards (despite his vow not to tour the world until he could limit the band’s carbon footprint) we’re told he also skipped his quarantine.
* GB News: Regarding the two anchors who ended up spontaneously shagging in the Hilton near their studio, one detail we couldn’t quite cram in was that their debauched afternoon ended at a weirdly respectable hour. They wolfed down their pizzas, sank two bottles of wine, shagged – and she still managed to make it home for 6pm.

Cousin Greg from Succession’s dad (Craig Braun) designed the cover for the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers.

>> Filthy habits <<

Question of the week

By now it’s likely that you will have seen the video of Paul Scholes chewing the toenails of his 20-year old daughter on Instagram. If you haven’t (and you don’t intend to know a moment’s peace for the rest of your days) then you can see it here.
We’ll have more to say on the matter on Thursday, but in the meantime we’re curious to know: What are the worst habits you’ve seen a celebrity indulge in?
Email club@popbitch.com and tell us all…

The album might not be dead, but this week’s UK Top 4 are: Coldplay, The Beatles’ Let It Be, Adele’s six year old last record, and Daniel O’Donnell. So it can’t be long now…

>> Strange Times <<

Reviewing the life/art interface

You don’t need to have been reading Popbitch with a close eye to have spotted that we’ve had a number of stories about the backroom shenanigans at NewsUK this year. The Sun, TalkRadio, The Times – it really could be the world’s leakiest company right now.
One exec described working there to us as “Negotiating a super-weird family business: trying to stay in favour of those who are most in favour” earlier this year. The description came flooding back to us when reading Camilla Long’s review of Succession this weekend – an interesting piece for any NewsUK Kremlinologist.
How did one of Murdoch’s flagship columnists enjoy the thinly veiled Murdoch allegory? “The people who are given the most jokes are, of course, the weaklings, the court jesters, the hangers-on, of whom there are possibly, now, too many: the show is an embarrassment of losers. How do they run that huge company being so inept and stupid?”
Sounds like she’s been working from home for too long…

Nominative Determinism of the Day: The ‘Life in Brief’ obituary of Leslie Briscusse in today’s i was written by… Tim Grieving!

>> Popquiz <<

A ten song stitch-up

Like we did over the pandemic, we’ll be setting Club Popbitch subscribers a short audio quiz each weekday. For the most part, they’ll be made up of ten songs (though we reserve the right to occasionally piss around with the format) and all you need to do is identify them.
This week’s quizzes…

Mon/ Welcome To The Clubs

Tue/ Surprising Covers

Wed/ Politicians’ Desert Island Discs

Thu/ The iPod’s 20th Birthday

Fri/ A Monster Mash-Up
[Play them here]

Each month we’ll also be putting together one of our downloadable Play-At-Home Popbitch Popquizzes for Club Popbitch members. We’ll send you download details for the Halloween one on Friday.

>> Big bad Wolff <<

The slightly longer version

In Thursday’s issue, we mentioned that Michael Wolff has been plugging his latest book by making explosive claims about Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein’s attempts to control their stories in the media around the time of their respective downfalls (presumably hoping people wouldn’t remember he is the same Michael Wolff who once tried to go into business with the pair of them to help him buy up New York Magazine; which had run critical profiles of both Epstein and Weinstein months previously.)
There’s a longer and much more interesting story behind all of that, that we didn’t have the space to go into. However, now that you’re a member of Club Popbitch, you get free, unlimited access to our archive of longer articles – including the four-part series we ran about Radar Magazine, and Epstein, Weinstein and Wolff’s various attempts to collaborate.
If you want to do the full 12,000 words on it, the four-part story starts [here]
If you just want to marvel at the absolute brass neck of Michael Wolff, he joins the story in Part Three [here]

Michael Wolff’s UK partner in the proposed Popbitch buy-out? Toby Young.

>> Radio Popbitch <<

What’s been on the office stereo

Try This: Swedish House Mafia and The Weeknd’s Moth To A Flame. As direct a 80s synth-pop copy as it’s possible to imagine – and heading into Top 10…

[Listen on Spotify]
Why This? Abba: Just A Notion. Their huge new album is out next week, but this inexplicably popular track just sounds like the kind of bad schlager pop Sweden gave up sending to Eurovision years ago

[Listen on Spotify]
Playlist We’ve Had On Repeat: D’Petra Y Corazon. This is from a restaurant in Mexico’s wine region, Casa Frida in Valle de Guadelupe, and is a nice blast of warm sunny vibes for these grim chilly days.

[Listen on Spotify]
Trick Or Treat: Halloween Obscura

If you’re sick of all the standard Monster Mash stuff for Halloween, the Vintage Obscura Halloween playlists have a bunch of rare deep cuts

[Play on YouTube]

THANKS TO: All of you for signing up for this new mailout. If you have any thoughts, questions, queries or gossip for us, send it to club@popbitch.com

Old Jokes Home

After the success of Diana The Musical, Prince Andrew has offered up the rights to a Netflix musical of his own life. His only proviso is that they put his part in A Minor.

Fancy Another?