Byron, Jagger or Joni: who’s best at barbs?
What is the world’s bitchiest profession? It’s a close-run thing. hairdressers have long had a poor reputation for camaraderie.
‘Not being rude or anything, but who on earth did your hair last?’ they always ask, pulling a face. Or does this say more about my hair than about them?
I’ve noticed, too, that pest control officers never lose a chance to put their competitors down, tut-tutting at the previous positioning of those little trays of poison. and plumbers love to stare aghast at leaky pipes before sighing: ‘Dear oh dear, you’ve had a cowboy in.’
Dentists and car mechanics can be almost as bad. I wonder if anyone has ever thought of opening a one-stop shop, combining dentistry and car repair? after all, the technique is much the same. Whether it’s your mouth or your bonnet, they ask you to open wide. then, before you can say knife, they reel backwards and demand to know who is to blame.
Of course, no one is entirely saintly in this regard. When two newspaper columnists meet, they tend to scoff at other columnists. I remember my dear father-in-law, Colin Welch, late of this parish, saying of one up-and-coming young columnist: ‘But why do they print her pieces? Someone must know. Surely it can’t just be to make her look foolish?’
Of all the professions, poets have earned a reputation for being gentle, quietly spoken types, far too sensitive and unworldly to badmouth their fellow poets.
the truth is strikingly different. In my experience, they seethe with envy, redeploying any skill with words to make withering remarks about rival poets who sell better, or win more awards. Some years ago, at the aldeburgh Poetry Festival in Suffolk, two poets got into a fist-fight in the street outside the hall, after one of them had heckled the other.
there is, of course, a long history of poet-on-poet thumpery. ‘here are Johnny Keats’ p***-a-bed poetry,’ said Keats’s fellow poet, Lord Byron, just over 200 years ago. ‘No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t, I must skin him myself. there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.’
But the two professions vying for the number-one spot of the world’s most vitriolic must surely be a) senior tory MPs and b) veteran rock stars.
Every few months, an ‘influential’ (ie, crusty) tory MP publishes diaries or memoirs full of rude remarks about his fellow tories. these create a stir for a week or two, before being swiftly remaindered. the last to do this was Sir alan Duncan, who called Mark Francois ‘a horrid little man’, Michael Gove ‘a wacky weirdo’, Dominic Raab ‘a self-important, humourless bore’, and so on.
But these Westminster insults have grown tired and hand-medown. Old rock stars are starting to exhibit much more oomph.
Recently, Sir Paul McCartney described the Beatles’ rivals, the Rolling Stones, as ‘a blues cover band’. In turn, Sir Mick Jagger pointed out that the Beatles never toured arenas, like the Stones. ‘they broke up before the touring business started for real . . . We started stadium gigs in the 1970s and are still doing them now. that’s the real difference between these two bands. One band is unbelievably luckily still playing in stadiums and then the other band doesn’t exist.’
Roger Daltrey of the Who has just weighed into the great debate, observing that the Stones were never up to much, even in their prime. ‘If you were outside a pub and you heard that music coming out of a pub some night, you’d think, “Well that’s a mediocre pub band.”’ In his autobiography, Daltrey also turned on his own band, accusing all three of them of spite and envy.
OthER rock stars have been equally snippety about each other. Robbie Williams once called Noel Gallagher ‘a mean-spirited dwarf’. In turn, Gallagher called Williams ‘the fat dancer from take that’. Likewise, Morrissey called Robert Smith of the Cure ‘a fat clown with make-up’, and Smith said of Morrissey: ‘If he says not to eat meat, then I’ll eat meat. that’s how much I hate Morrissey.’
Even gentler, more saintly singers can be surprisingly acidic. after Bob Dylan fell asleep when Joni Mitchell (above) sang him songs from her album Court and Spark, she got her revenge by telling the La times: ‘Bob is not authentic at all. he’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.’
Let this be a warning to hairdressers, plumbers and politicians: if you wish to regain your crowns, it’s time to look to your laurels.