Monday, May 12, 2025
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Cherwell Music presents Mixer: Cover Me

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The cover version is a notoriously fine art. It’s easy to play someone else’s song, but it’s very, very difficult to do it well – any artist trying to cover a song, especially something well-known, runs a very real risk of it sounding, as Pulp sang on 2002’s ‘Bad Cover Version’, ‘like a later Tom & Jerry when the two of them could talk… like an own-brand box of cornflakes’. The general consensus seems to be that making the song your own by changing it substantially is the key to a good cover, but this doesn’t always work. The world’s ears have been affronted by some truly awful covers over the years, but we won’t be too negative: here are fourteen pretty great ones. (Incidentally, we’ve edited this list down from a three-hour version for pretty much arbitrary reasons. Any shocking omissions? Add them to our collaborative Spotify playlist.)



The Slits – I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Where better to start than this? The Slits reclaim the soul classic (most famously performed by Marvin Gaye) by cheerfully ignoring the original gender dynamic and slapping funky, dub-steeped bass and scratchy post-punk guitars all over it, but best of all are the late Ari Up’s manic vocals.

Kokolo – Girls on Film

The Kokolo Afrobeat Orchestra are from New York, but do a very convincing impression of the jazz-funk-Yoruba style pioneered by Fela Kuti in the 1970s. Here they take the straight-outta-Birmingham original and make it sound as tropical as Duran Duran clearly always wanted to be. Best bit: the ebullient multilinguial chorus.

TV on the Radio – Heroes

David Bowie casts a long shadow over his songs and that makes it dangerous to take on virtually any, let alone the scorchingly brilliant ‘Heroes’. Staying true to the epic simplicity of the 1977 recording, TV on the Radio start off their version small and then build it up to a flickering splendour.

The Dead Weather – Are Friends Electric?

Gary Numan’s Tubeway Army must have sounded like the future in 1979, but the sawtooth synths of ‘Are Friends Electric?’ were coming across a little rusty by the time The Dead Weather included this cover on their debut single. It’s sort of appropriate, then, that the supergroup’s psychedelic blues-rock has backdated ‘Are Friends Electric?’ even further. When Numan sang ‘it’s cold outside, and the paint’s peeling off of my walls,’ he sounded like he was in a dystopian tower-block; Jack White makes it sound more like a shack in the Louisiana swamps.

The xx – Teardrops

‘Hey, have you heard of this really great new band?’ The xx crept onto everyone’s ‘cool new music’ playlists in early 2010, and can now be found in the usual haunts of underground bands made good(?): soundtracking Channel 4 comedies, Gossip Girl, and trips to Debenham’s. So it’s refreshing to hear something not included on their astonishing yet overplayed debut album, especially since this melancholy cover of Womack & Womack’s 1988 R&B floor-filler packs a weighty emotional punch alongside its intricate guitar work.

The Big Pink – Sweet Dreams

They shot to fame with the Nicki Minaj-sampled indie anthem ‘Dominoes’, but this cover of Beyoncé’s 2009 hit shows The Big Pink on the same introspective form as their early hit ‘Velvet’. Over eerie vocal samples, Robbie Furze takes naturally to Beyoncé’s lyrics and reveals them as some of the darkest in recent pop history. 

KASMs – Killer (Scentless)

Although they’ve been dormant since guitarist Rory Attwell’s departure last year to form his own project Warm Brains, KASMs were always set apart from their East London contemporaries by virtue of having a sense of humour about themselves. After all, you don’t get too many Shoreditch bands covering Seal (and it doesn’t even sound like they’re doing it ‘ironically’). The grinding guitars, string samples, and gasped vocals are all great, but while in Seal’s original ‘it’s the loneliness that’s the killer’, here it’s the bassline.

Grizzly Bear – He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)

Phil Spector was creepy a long time before he was imprisoned for murder in 2009: he oversaw the recording of The Crystals’ original version in 1962, which casts singer Little Eva’s experience of domestic abuse as a tender gesture. The song was (rightly) forced off the radio by public outcry. Grizzly Bear’s haunting and subtle 2007 version rewires the song as an internal drama, and the music’s rise and fall from barely-there to all-conquering, and back, suggests there’s far more to the story than the lyrics are letting on.

Fever Ray – Mercy Street

In which Karin Dreijer Andersson takes Peter Gabriel’s original and makes it sound like she wrote it. Fever Ray’s 2009 debut album was a sparse and spectral extension of the weird synthpop of Andersson’s band The Knife, and this single from last year (the first, apparently, in a series of different artists’ takes on Gabriel’s music) fits perfectly alongside tracks like ‘If I Had a Heart’. If you’re looking for another fix after this, check out her collaborative version of Nick Cave’s ‘Stranger than Kindness’, which is equally brilliant.

The Associates – Heart of Glass

This shimmering version of the Blondie classic lends the original a bitter, prickly resignation which the slightly saccharine original lacked, without sacrificing its dancefloor credentials. ‘I’m the one you’re using, please don’t push me aside’ never sounded so poignant, while the wordless female backing vocals seem to mock Billy Mackenzie’s pleading.

Chet Faker – No Diggity

From Melbourne and sporting an impressive ginger beard, Chet Faker’s sound falls in the same soul-meets-downtempo-electronica template as James Blake. While Faker’s own songs come highly recommended, this cover of Blackstreet’s mid-90s R&B anthem takes the original into drifting, dreaming bliss, and although he wisely avoids any attempts at Dr Dre’s rap verse, Faker is more than qualified to be ‘giving ‘em eargasms with my mellow accent’.

Easy Star All-Stars feat. Toots & The Maytals – Let Down

As Little Roy’s Nirvana covers album demonstrated this year, reggae version of alternative rock songs are an unlikely but fruitful source of original sounds. Perhaps it’s the fact that reggae is at heart an intensely melancholic genre, but Radiohead’s ‘Let Down’ translates perfectly into the new medium. Bringing in ska heavyweights the Maytals for this rendition was an inspired move by Easy Star All-Stars, who have so far released reggae versions of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as Radiohead’s OK Computer.

Low – Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me

Morrissey’s lyrics for The Smiths have a reputation for being gloomy, but they always tended to cloak themselves in irony, melodrama, and details of the mundane. In this cover from 2001, Low strip all of that away and reveal the lyrics’ bleak potential for true despair, and Alan Sparhawk’s plaintive vocals sound truly desperate. A wonderfully depressing reinterpretation.

The Sundays – Wild Horses

The best cover version ever? Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer may be familiar with this one (the prom episode, remember?), but it remains starkly beautiful almost twenty years after its release. Totally ignoring the sickly, lilting blues bravado of the Rolling Stones’ original version, Harriet Wheeler’s lighter-than-air vocals turn it into a heartfelt story of abandonment and survival. Ten times better than the original.

Mixer: Cover Me is also available (in an abridged version) on Spotify – click here to load the playlist, and add your own favourite cover versions.

Frieze!

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Every October, Frieze Art Fair graces Regent’s Park with its presence.

First launched in 2003, the fair features work from more than 150 of the world’s trendiest contemporary art galleries. No old masters to be found here: the Fair boasts work only by living artists.   

As well as providing the possibility to wander through Regent’s Park marvelling at contemporary creations, the Fair offers the opportunity to take part in an interactive programme of talks, conferences, film projects and events put on by artists themselves. This makes the art seem less intimidating, as the punters themselves can interact with the art. 

You can even get a makeover; but don’t expect it to make you look any younger. The project features the work of A Gentil Carioca, a Brazilian artist whose ‘makeover’ is designed to make you look older. Surprisingly, it seemed to have attracted great interest. All in the name of art. 

Highlights of the contemporary creations include the parody of Rodin’s Le Penseur, with a slightly bemused-looking goat sitting in the position of the thinker, and a strange sea-creature installation by Pierre Huyghe.  Ugo Rondinone created a chic flock of bronze birds pecking at an expanse of bright white, while a series of captivating black-and-white photos from Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu was also a piece not to be missed. 

Contemporary Italian artists Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni jostle alongside English, German and Chinese talents. Drawing dealers from around the world, Sotheby’s and Christie’s were at the Fair, auctioning pieces of astronomically-priced art including a piece by Lucian Freud. 

At nearly £30 for entry into the Fair (£20 for concessions), the price is aimed at chic London art types and dealers and could be prohibitive for the cash-strapped student. Nonetheless, the Fair is well worth a visit if you happen to be wandering past the park the next time Frieze makes its brief appearance in London. 

Scattered around Regent’s Park itself during the Fair are sculptures to admire, and this part of the Fair is free. Undoubtedly one of the most exciting parts of the Fair is seeing contemporary pieces of sculpture like Anish Kapoor’s metallic, spaceship-like discs coming into land in the open air of a crisp October afternoon, rather than viewing these sculptures in the more artificial atmosphere of a gallery.      

Another venture to look out for from the Frieze Art Project is the new Frieze Masters Fair, planned as a complement to the Project’s current offering of contemporary art. Frieze Masters will feature art from antiquity up to the turn of the last millennium. 

Crossbar Challenge-Week 2

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Will Keble fare any better than St Anne’s in the second week of the CherwellTV Crossbar Challenge? 

Teenage hobo junkie vampires

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Cormac McCarthy wrote us the great post-nuclear apocalypse. The Road’s ironic hopelessness spreads dull pain, with the mysteriousness of an unknown illness, through the paper-thin incantations of secular faith: you have to keep going, you carry the light. McCarthy made atom bombs look utopian. It really was better to burn out than to fade away.

 

If The Road is the dying sigh of an old generation with only the bitter shadow of a hope, then The Orange Eats Creeps is one of its feral prodigy. Shortlisted for the Independent Bookseller’s Choice award, Grace Krilanovich’s debut novel has been held up as if it is some sort of light in the distance. ‘If a new literature is at hand, then it might well begin here,’ slathers Steve Erickson in the introduction. ‘Here is a book that insists on its glorious disarray, that finds in disorder a ravishing path to truth.’

 

Such praise is so exaggerated, it pretty much dooms the reader to be disappointed in the book itself. But more intriguingly, as I read, it started to seem like maybe this was all part of the game. The Orange Eats Creeps is a litany of teenage hyperbole. For the self-deceiving, self-aggrandising narrator, taboo-defying extremes are common, if clumsily forged, currency.

 

‘What would happen if you harnessed the sexual energy of hobo junkie teens? The world would explode and settle on the surface of another planet in a brown paste, is what. Cockroaches would lick it up and a new wave of narcissistic gypsy-slut shitheads would hatch out of tiny pores on their backs.’

 

The whimsical, sado-masochistic fantasy of her narration, the particular attention she pays to each new obscenity, jars with the utter blankness of her world. It is a blankness that fits easily into the post-apocalyptic aesthetic. But the wasteland through which her gang slouches is – she sometimes hints – none other than the contemporary US, complete with ‘half-blown-out signs for supermarket chains in strip malls featuring exactly one nail place, one juice-slash-coffee place, and one freshmex-type grill chain restaurant.’

 

Krilanovich’s eschatology comes via George Romero: her vampires, her ‘blood-hungry teenagers’ are the mutant spawn of his consumerist zombies. Her post-apocalypse need not be set anywhere but in the real world. What  could be bleaker? The marxist theorist Evan Calder Williams writes of a ‘combined and uneven apocalypse.’ We can no longer expect the world to end in a bang. It ends like this, in a perpetual kaleidoscope of crisis, disaster, exploitation and resistance.

 

The Orange Eats Creeps throws its clichéd socio-sexual rebellion around exuberantly, but with an ambivalence central, I think, to the teenage experience. 

 

Krilanovich achieves a scalpel-cold parody of romantic nihilism, that matches McCarthy’s immolation of spirituality, ‘My jaw unhinged, my throat was thrown open and made to replicate exactly the form of a glass bottle with a rubber seal. Love poured inside. My heart got bigger and bigger until it threatened to explode.’

 

This is a novel about loss and yearning as much as it is about oblivious anarchy. Krilanovich does manage to add something to the vampire metaphor, by asking questions that we have all asked: what does it mean to be alive? Am I living yet? Is this it? Undeadness is an apt concept for people dispossessed and disappointed by life; and growing up can feel a lot like the end of the world.

Cult Books – American Psycho

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American Psycho is not a comfortable read. As the protagonist and narrator, investment banker Patrick Bateman, horrifically tortures and murders seemingly at random throughout the book, it isn’t hard to see why Bret Easton Ellis’ third novel caused such outrage on its publication twenty years ago. But despite the unflinchingly graphic nature of American Psycho’s murder scenes, it would be a great disservice to label this book as torture porn. 

 

At the centre of the novel is Ellis’ chilling depiction of American society during the Wall Street boom of the late 80s: a world of designer labels, chic restaurants and top of the range hi-fi systems. For the cast of American Psycho a man is defined by what he owns, and Ellis leaves intentionally ambiguous the question of whether Bateman’s compulsion to precisely describe every aspect of his AV systems, his record collection, his colleagues’ outfits (just about anything that carries a price tag) is a result of some psycholgical need on his part, or has been forced upon him by the consumer-centric nature of his environment. 

 

This destructive obsession with material possessions and social status is at the heart of Patrick Bateman’s descent into madness, memorably stating that he has ‘not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.’

 

Bateman’s resulting alienation from the outside world is explored masterfully by Ellis without ever resorting to emotional pathos; a theme of mistaken identity runs throughout American Psycho as Bateman and his colleagues struggle to distinguish between any two people with a similar taste in Valentino suits, and the starkly clinical, unfeeling nature of the narrative is reflected in the awkwardly robotic interactions that take place between the characters. 

 

This all lends a curiously comical feeling to the book; Bateman’s narrative exists in a sort of exaggerated reality, a surrealist dream world where everything feels slightly out of proportion. 

 

The reliability of Bateman as a narrator is still a fiercely debated topic amongst critics, and it is tempting to say that many of the reported events are simply fantasy but, when faced with the entirety of Ellis’ disturbing vision, this point seems rather moot. Never does Ellis portray Bateman as external to his environment or wildly different from those around him; rather his grotesque murderous desires exist as a logical extrapolation of the grotesque selfishness of the society in which he is trapped. Perhaps this is the most pertinent, and lasting, message of this bold and terrifying cult classic.

Google: art on the line?

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The invention of the internet has brought books, maps and even our friends to the tips of our fingers. At the click of a button, encyclopaedias of information can be accessed, online shops browsed and now museums visited virtually. Yet with the juxtaposition of paintings by ancient masters and twenty first century technology, perhaps the Google Art Project has gone one step too far in its quest to bring the wealth of the world’s cultural prowess to our living rooms. Launched in February, the collaboration between some of the world’s most prestigious art museums and the internet giant Google allows everyone to become armchair curators, visiting museums and galleries across the world without moving and creating their own collections of their favourite works.

The project widens access to art to everyone. People who may not have the means or ability to travel in person to the world’s premier museums and collections can now see works from New York, Madrid and London in one place.

The danger, however, is that people will become complacent and neglect to visit museums on their doorstep, content to view the work online through the pixellation of a computer screen. They mayno longer feel the need to go and see the work in its original form, and the numbers of those frequenting museums could dwindle. With funding cuts already eroding resources given to  the  arts, galleries cannot afford to suffer any further losses.

While the Google Art Project allows you to zoom in and stare closely at the brushstrokes, the digitalised image is no substitute for the naked eye. The texture of the paint cannot be truly appreciated, and it is difficult to stand back and admire the work from a distance. Navigating virtually through the rooms of the museum is awkward. The atmosphere of reverence and awe inspired by seeing great art in its original form is lost by touring the museums virtually.

The architecture and layout of the physical museum often also contributes – deliberately or otherwise – to the way in which the paintings and sculptures are viewed. The industrial façade of the Tate Modern helps create the effect produced by the abstract paintings displayed within, while the National Gallery’s imposing columns fill one with a suitable sense of awe before any paintings have been viewed. The moment of standing in an empty room in the Courtauld Gallery, with Manet ‘s original Un bar aux Folies Bergère all to oneself is one that cannot be replicated online.

Nonetheless, admiring works of art online is surely better than not seeing them at all. For some it may serve as an introduction to great works of art, thereby increasing entrance to museums in the long run. If this does happen, maybe the Google Art Project should be viewed as a complement to museums, rather than their replacement.

Where fashion meets pop art

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A 20-year old socialite and emerging contemporary artist, Mo Kiddo stepped into the Belgian art scene at the age of 13 with an avant-garde vision: “fashion in Pop Art”. Mo Kiddo discovered his talent out of the blue: he was surprised by an urgent desire to rip up, cut down, sew up then glue back disparate objects to create abstract collages. Kiddo has never considered polishing his talent – he does not believe in formal artistic education. Kiddo likes it raw. His art is bold and blunt, frenetic and chaotic – Antwerp loves it.

For his first creation Kiddo dug into his siblings’ closets, stole a few items and gave birth to a flamboyant color-bursting collage of prêt à porter garments featuring international brands such as Fiorucci, Plein Sud, Miss Sixty and Voyage Passion. Shortly afterwards Kiddo fashioned a futuristic-inspired piece featuring an electric green Balenciaga bag, which was followed by a relatively sober 3D painting influenced by a pair of mahogany Yves St Laurent heels. As he matured, his taste grew more expensive and haute couture is now the chief focus of his art.

In 2008 Kiddo launched the Mo Kiddo Contemporary Art Gallery, exhibiting his most personal work. Every piece displays a delightfully unique combination of vintage material, rare acrylic colors, random accessories and bits and pieces from exorbitant garments found in his mother’s extensive wardrobe. Mo Kiddo claims: “As a kid, I could already identify Missoni by the fabric of a garment, Yves Saint Laurent by the wooden handle of a purse, a pair of black Prada varnished shoes by their smell and my mother’s Christian Dior lemon-green silk cocktail dress by its touch.”

Kiddo’s latest work is a series of Chanel-inspired paintings and collages. Fox fur, tin foil, cufflinks, Swarovski crystals, syringes and needles – he blends it all to create an entire collection dedicated to Karl Lagerfeld’s fashion house.

Alongside other sponsors such as Mercedes-Benz, Bang and Olufsen and Belgian artist Hannes D’Haese, Kiddo’s work will be exhibited on the 27th of October at the RINGS & THINGS event organized by Kablo and Partners. We caught up with him recently to get an insight into his work.

Fashion is at the heart of your work. Your canvases display women’s fashion exclusively – is there any particular reason for neglecting men’s fashion in your work?

Women’s fashion consumes me. When I work, I am in touch with my feminine side. Life without women’s fashion is like a toast of bread without Nutella. It’s just unimaginable. Let’s face it, men’s clothes are so boring: they’re monotonous and repetitive. My style is constantly evolving – and so is women’s fashion. It is just exuberant for the eyes and for my pair of scissors!

Could you tell us about the thought process behind your work?

My paintings contain a layer of memories; they are self-dictating and materialize into beauty. There really is no thought process behind it, no preparations or sketching. I just go to my atelier to channel a bundle of emotions. It’s as if I was in a trance. The result of my random cutting and gluing is always a surprise: when I start a piece, my vision is still blurry. I transfer bits of me into abstract patterns, layers of colors and fabrics. The fruit of my work, only I can understand.

If you could verbalize your genre as an artist, in one word, what would it be?

Experimental.

What triggered you to create a Chanel-inspired collection?

Fashion is slowly being recognised as a form of art, but there is by no means a consensus that fashion is art; this is what triggered my amalgamation of both worlds. I just love incorporating fashion into art. Chanel is extremely elegant, precise and sober compared to other haute couture brands which generally say “opposites attract!”. You know Chanel – it’s Paris. I love Paris! Anything could inspire me: there are no rules for inspiration. Chanel randomly came to mind! 

For more information on Mo Kiddo visit www.mokiddo.com

First night review: The Picture of Dorian Gray

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**** Four stars

 

It is all too easy to lavish praise upon an ambitious production that manages really rather well to transfer Wilde’s keenly critical social view, reflections on the role of art and the artist, and complex relationships and language to the stage. Yet while an admirable adaptation – with a really quite powerful script at times – it was not perfect.

 

Jordan Waller delivers a show-stealing performance as Lord Henry “Harry” Wotton. His initial entrance and earlier exchanges with Basil Hallward (Henry Faber) threatened disappointment as he came across as far too believable a married chap, not at all predatory, and meandered pointlessly across the stage – but he soon warmed up and his every movement took on purpose, his wrists limp as lettuce. Epigrams slid free with all spontaneity from his enticing lips and he owned the stage with each entrance.

 

Dorian Gray, as Jamie MacDonagh plays him, is at his most effective in the second act – commanding and persuasive; however, it is the flaw in his portrayal of the character in the opening scenes that presents the production’s greatest drawback: Dorian is never likeable. In a tale that depicts the corrupting influence of fickle values on either normal or especially virtuous people, there is no blank canvas, no great height from which to fall (to think in tragedic terms). MacDonagh’s Dorian is cocky and arrogant, and far too authoritative from the start for my liking.

 

The scenes with him and Sybil Vane (Nouran Koriem) are fantastic; her suffering at his hands is exactly how you imagine it. It’s Dorian at what we think is his vilest (before we discover that he is actively capable of murder); again, the only issue is that it’s nowhere near as far from the opening Dorian as it might be. “You were the most unspoilt creature in the whole world” Basil tells Dorian in arguably the best-presented monologue of the play, and we want this to be true.

 

Henry Faber as the erstwhile painter, Basil, was certainly the most consistently superb character on stage. From his first appearance he was simply spot-on – earnest, plaintive and then imploring. His death had real meaning and provoked real feeling (as obscured and devoid of passionate as it was).

 

The chorus. Special mention goes to the actor and actress playing Alan and Mrs Vane respectively. The chorus seemed to be the ‘risk’ element – an innovation entirely of the directors’ own, it was the main area in which directorial liberties were taken. Sometimes it worked – and certainly provided much comic relief – but it often felt as though Lucinda Dawkins and Adam Scott Taylor were simply giving them things to do. The device of Sybil’s suicide letter, for example, seemed unnecessary, being related twice before enacted. Some of the synchronised speech seemed pointless, which reduced its effectiveness when used cleverly, and synchronisation in flourishes (e.g. with chairs) was a little off – often the chorus members looked unsure of their cues.

 

Anna Lewis has designed a wonderfully conceived, magnificently multi-purpose set. Yet it feels unfinished, bare and, consequently, a little bland – there’s nothing of the excess we might expect. The only suggestion of decadence is in the paltry chaise longue, hiding coyly beneath a raggedy sheet for the majority. The same goes for some of the costumes, notably Wotton’s. None of his florid outward nature is reflected in the bright, simple clothes he wears. It felt very Americans-doing-Shakespeare and lacked warmth or character.

  

Pace throughout the drama was hit-and-miss. The domestic scenes with the Vane family were agonisingly slow and I became almost intolerably aware of the litany of coughing and ill noises in the theatre.

 

There also were a few problems with projection and with the shrieking violins overpowering the chorus, and the lighting was often questionable, although whether this was inherent in the design or simply due to technical difficulties, I can’t be sure: large patches of unfathomable darkness swallowed characters when they were speaking, and not ominously. A wonderful patch of darkness enveloped MacDonagh as he sat, despairing, on the chaise longue for Hallward’s ill-fated final visit, only to be vanquished seconds later by bright, inappropriate spot.

 

To pass judgement on this show is difficult, since it is one heck of a feat to accomplish. For a student Playhouse production, it was impressive. The direction is clever and individual performances make a lasting impression.

 

 

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Cut-throat Cutrone talks strict business

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Kelly Cutrone is sitting in front of me, all black hair and black clothes. She’s just finished giving a speech at the TEDxOxford conference about how a girl from a small village in New York State where the kids used to go cowtipping ended up as a well-known tarot card reader on Venice Beach, then began training as a nurse until her very first patient died on her, only to become one of the most influential fashion publicists, setting up the renowned fashion PR firm People’s Revolution in 1996.  With a capricious career path following a marriage at 24 to pop artist Ronnie Cutrone, and a recording contract thrown in somewhere along the way, Cutrone’s life experience has paved the way for a high-flying career in the fashion industry, and on a personal front, her own reality show and best-selling books.  

Cutrone first snuck onto our screens as Lauren Conrad’s boss in The Hills, an appearance that made her a household name with her cutting, straight talking, no bullshit attitude. Her stinging remark, ‘If you have to cry, go outside’ became the title for her first book which Cutrone previously described as a ‘pop culture fourth wave of feminism’, a book for women who want to achieve but don’t know how. Her ‘Kellyisms’ have earned their own blog and her books have achieved worldwide popularity. Where else are you going to find a woman who discusses a former drug addiction with such candour, while at the same time throwing out such barbed truths as ‘Where do nice people end up? On welfare,’ and, ‘If you’re sensitive and someone hurts your feelings, I don’t give a fuck. This isn’t group therapy.’

While she’s termed as a ‘power bitch’, her book makes it obvious that Cutrone is simply dishing out the brutal but honest truth of being a woman in business today.  Putting her company on television was a huge risk considering its clientele has included Vivienne Westwood, Bulgari, Longchamp, Paco Rabbane and Valentino, but breaking down stereotypes and bringing brands straight to the clients has also been central to Cutrone’s philosophy. ‘At the time, with the brands I was working with, it was considered naff to be on TV. If you were in fashion you didn’t speak to other people, so you certainly wouldn’t go on TV and let the public in. But then I started feeling like that model wasn’t serving the brands so I decided that there was something new in distributing the message straight to the consumer’s home, basically eliminating the middle man, so I did the first season  of The Hills.  I’ve been on TV now five or six years and I make millions of dollars on TV and writing books; it’s been an amazing brand enhancer for myself as a person and a woman, and its been a great way to communicate with young people.’ With her popularity leading to a reality show, Kell on Earth, a position as a contributor on Dr. Phil, and her newly announced role as judge on America’s Next Top Model, Cutrone has set herself up as a guru for young women today. So why does she believe her words have resonated so loudly with our generation?

‘There aren’t that many women who come from the middle of nowhere that have built the kind of company I’ve built, that are available to talk to young women and show them that it’s certainly doable for them whatever their economic or educational background. Oprah’s not doing it. Suze Orman’s not doing it. Who’s really talking to the young people today that aren’t using music or acting to communicate? I’m in that position and it’s something I enjoy because I feel women need to be encouraged and empowered to make money their own way so they can be with who they want, not who they think is going to take good care of them because they’re incapable of doing it themselves. This generation had the post-hippy parents who are like, ‘you can do everything’ and ‘you can be anything’ and my message is, not so quick honey, you might go to Oxford but you don’t know how to take a phone message.‘We need to do a reality check. Young people listen because I’m the antithesis of what my industry represents: I don’t wear makeup, I’ve got black hair, I’m kinda punky and I swear, I’m kind of immature. Maybe that’s why kids like me, because I’m still connected to my child-like self.’

And her Kellyisms, are those reality checks preplanned? ‘No, they’d be a lot better if they were preplanned. Sometimes the things I say make no sense at all. One of the things I said in The Hills was, “The truth isn’t some happy little bluebird sitting on your shoulder, sometimes the truth hurts”. One day when the show was starting to get really big, I walked into a bankers type restaurant, and these banker guys were like, “Sometimes the truth isn’t…” and I was like, “what the hell are you doing watching the show?! You’re not a gay guy or a young girl.” But I do cringe sometimes when I hear them back.’

Having started her TV career on two reality shows, The Hills and its spin-off The City, that undoubtedly glamourised the fashion world and its inhabitants, Cutrone’s antithetical look is interesting. It’s as unique as her and her varied career path, something which has made her strive to always be her own boss. ‘I just don’t work well with others. I don’t like the idea that someone could fire me any day, that I could lose my house and whole career at the whim of someone else. When you’re an employee you’re always thinking you’re going to get nixed or something and I just wanted to do my own thing. I’m not a corporate girl – I’ve been offered ridiculously huge jobs for millions and millions of dollars, great opportunities with companies that are going to give you two thousand shares worth of stock and are about to go public, and you know the company’s going to blow up and you’ll be the girl who’s in the middle.’ But if it’s not money that has been driving her all this time, what has? It’s easy to look at the successful business woman today and forget the years Cutrone has spent sweating away in a ‘packed and intense industry’. For Cutrone, fashion is ‘the new rock’n’roll, in the sense that years ago everybody wanted to be in a band and now everyone wants to work in fashion. I just really like creating things, and I like the truth, and I like making noise, and I like getting attention for things I believe in and things I think are cool.  I still get off on the fact that if I turn you onto something and you love it, then that message is going somewhere and I can share things that are interesting with people.  And I also really love being able to see deep, deep inside a brand, maybe where the owner or the people who are creating it haven’t been able to see, and really pull out those threads, the DNA of the brand that are going to help it sell. I love watching a company I’m working with succeed.’

Cutrone’s second book, Normal Gets You Nowhere, is another no-holds-barred look at the world of business and what it means to be unique, to hold true to your individuality and make a difference to the world in the process. It’s been quite a journey for Cutrone herself, one that separates her from other self-styled mentors today – through homelessness, drugs and broken marriages, Cutrone’s made that enviable transaction from a small town girl with big city dreams to the lucrative reality.  However harsh her truth might be, that’s a role model.