More from: James Medd
Icons August 2022
Let there be light (and shade)
James Wong Howe overcame ignorance, complacency and racism to become one of the most important figures in the history of cinema. But if you’re not familiar with his work — well, may we offer this as a remedy…
Style May 2022
The Axe Factor
For nearly a century the guitar has enabled modern music to exist in a permanent state of change. And from Stevie Ray Vaughan and Duane Allman to Hendrix and Marr, there has been no shortage of revolutionaries.
Style April 2022
RUNNING WITH WOLF
The music of the Chicago bluesman Chester Burnett retains its magnetism and vitality nearly 50 years after his death. You might know him better as Howlin’ Wolf.
Icons April 2022
The Fire in His Belly
Billy Joel’s best songs are an intriguing, genre-defying mixture of melody, musicality and lyrical brimstone. What’s with the attitude? Is he a great-but-flawed entertainer or forever just a Bronx Joe made good.
Style April 2022
HYMNS OF THE REPUBLIC
His classic songs might try to gauge the ‘distance between American reality and the American Dream’, but Bruce Springsteen’s belief in the U.S., and his attraction to its totemic power, has been the consuming force of his life.
Style March 2022
BRICKS AND DAUGHTER
You might think Grace Kelly, princess and Hollywood star, was the embodiment of the American dream — but you’d be wrong. That honour goes to her father. John B. ‘Jack’ Kelly, one of 10 children of Irish immigrants, built his legend from scratch in business and Olympic rowing. By the end, he was a self-made millionaire, influential politician, and the classic American patriarch.
Style March 2022
REEL BRITANNIA
Tea parties in the Hills, the sound of leather on willow by Sunset Boulevard … British actors might be en vogue in the U.S. right now, but it’s nothing compared with the glory days of the twenties, when Hollywood fell hard for Blighty and an army of ex-pat thespians — with their tweeds and servants and smoking pipes — turned a corner of California into a rather overwrought version of the raj.
Style January 2022
BLOND AMBITION
Christophe Lambert, the New York-born French actor with a ‘timeless quality’ in his eyes, was synonymous with the style and cachet of the eighties. So much so, in fact, that when the nineties dawned, Lambert’s star was left looking a little worse for wear.
Style December 2021
THE ORIGINAL MODFATHER
Charlie Watts was unpretentious, self-deprecating, romantic and faithful. It meant that it took some time — decades, in fact — for this stylish Rolling Stone to stand out in a band full of rockers. But when the end came, Watts had earned the reverence that was his due.
Style December 2021
CLASSROOM PRIVILEGE
Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland has been the school of choice for royalty, captains of industry and the 1 per cent of the 1 per cent for more than a century. Yet globalisation has sent new money across old borders and antiquated societies, and the immense changes have left this great academic institution under pressure to move with the times, writes James Medd.
Style October 2021
SWING TIME
Artie Shaw was the king of jazz in the interwar years, a slick and suave performer who raked in the big bucks every time he picked up a clarinet. Unfortunately for Artie, the control he enjoyed on stage was lost when it came to his restless and torturous life.
Icons September 2021
The Director's Cut: John Huston
John Huston — director, screenwriter, ‘compulsive satyr’ — was a legend in his own picaresque lifetime, as much for his high jinks away from the camera as for his achievements…
