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And Finally Beef Of The Week
CMU Beef Of The Week #223: The Enemy’s Tom Clarke v “morons with little pens”
By Aly Barchi and Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 12 September 2014
So, this one starts out like the sort of amusing spat you’d expect to make the Beef Of The Week column, but then turns into something of a more serious debate. I’m just warning you because there’s no punchline, and I’d hate for you all to be disappointed.
Things got pretty tense this week in the ‘bands v mediasphere’ domain when Time Out took a not-so-sophisticated jab at Coventry indie types The Enemy, calling them “hobbits” in a preview of a show the band are co-headlining with The Twang at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 19 Dec. Or, as wrote the London culture mag, a date on the “landfill indie package tour of the year”.
Whilst if pressed, I think I’d say that the “landfill” remark was actually the nastier of the two, The Enemy’s lead singer Tom Clarke instead took offence at the “hobbit” part of the jibe, presumably because while the former was aimed at his art, the latter seemed much more personal. The frontman interpreted it as a slight against his height, or perceived lack thereof. Clearly riled, Clarke then took to Twitter to ask “if @TimeOutLondon would like to justify their personal attack on my height and explain why it’s relevant to everybody now? Well?”.
Well? WELL? Well, Time Out replied saying it was “sorry” if it had caused offence, adding that by “hobbits” it’d meant the comment as a dig at Clarke and his band’s long hair. Because hobbits are hairy, in addition to being small, see. Then the mag ‘cheekily’ linked to a page on its site listing ‘London’s best barbers’. Which was so funny, ha ha ha blah.
Anyway, Clarke still wasn’t at all happy about his ribbing, not least because by this point the “hobbit” thing had spread, with Vice’s side-site Noisey announcing it now had an office ‘hobbit jar’ and declared “We Will Give Tom From The Enemy £1 Every Time Someone Calls Him A Hobbit”.
I don’t know if Tom read to the end of the Noisey ‘piece’, but if he had, he’d have found out that the Vice site wasn’t actually having a go at his height or his hair. No, its target was more every fibre of his being. So that, while justifiably, perhaps, trying to distinguish jokey journalism from actual bigotry, Team Noisey simply threw more fuel onto the fire. “Tom Clarke’s so short” it said, “that he confuses being in one of Britain’s most grotesquely uninspiring bands – loathed by journalists and the public so much that they lash out with jokes about his stature – with the actual abuse that is sometimes afforded to the vertically challenged”.
By this point Clarke was well pissed off, and set off on a “right old rant”, before declaring he was “taking a break” from Twitter, though only after adding: “This industry should be ashamed of its complete tolerance of bullying”. So, the story so far: journalist takes cheap shot at popstar, popstar lashes out. Classic ‘and finally’ fodder.
Except that, having calmed down somewhat, Clarke returned with a much longer, more considered post about the whole episode, in which he discussed his experiences of being bullied, the bouts of depression he has had to deal with since the age of sixteen, and the medication he took to help with that depression in his 20s.
He wrote: “At many times during my adulthood I’ve battled with the overwhelming urge to take my own life. As recently as a few years ago I felt in control enough to stop taking anti depressants daily, which for most people who suffer from depression is both a huge risk, and a huge milestone. As I write this I’m not really sure how realistic it is to think that I’ll be able to continue to do so, at least for a while. In part that’s because depression is a very dynamic illness and impossible to predict, and in part because of the torrent of personal abuse I’ve been subjected to this week by so called professionals”.
Now, you might be thinking at this point, “hang on, isn’t Tom Clarke off of The Enemy the one who was always ‘having a pop’ back in the day, taking ‘lamppost’ digs at that The Horrors’ Faris Badwan (who is quite tall) and announcing that ‘all music is shit’? Kind of like the Jake Bugg of yesteryear? Well?”
Well yeah, it is the same Tom Clarke. But he acknowledged this fact in the post, writing: “In my very early twenties (better part of a decade ago) when the music industry welcomed my band with open arms, it immediately taught me, and encouraged me to have a go at other bands. I won’t name names but there were people in our team who actively incentivised me to have a pop. I now understand that was because it’s a very effective way of getting press coverage”.
“I wish I’d been just a bit more mature or just a bit more savvy and seen it for what it was, because it’s not the way I was bought up. Suffice to say you have to go back quite a long way to find an example of me personally attacking somebody for their physicality. I think probably The Horrors hair in 2006? Juvenile and regrettable. I might as well take this opportunity to apologise to them wholeheartedly”.
Regrets for past remarks expressed, Clarke concluded: “I hope this makes at least one person think again before they insult somebody who they’ve totally forgotten is a fellow human being, no matter how weird or different they look”.
It’s definitely worth taking a few minutes to read Clarke’s latter post. It’s hard for any of us “morons with little pens”, to use The Enemy man’s vernacular, to take issue with his arguments. Though at the same time, I’m wary of laying into Team Time Out and Team Noisey, in case you go digging into the CMU archives and find something similarly hurtful that we’ve published in pop days past.
A music journalist’s job is to entertain as much as it is inform, and the truth is, personal digs at the rich and famous are part of that. But there’s still plenty of food for thought in Clarke’s remarks as to how you go about such things. Meanwhile, with past tensions between The Enemy and The Horrors now officially resolved, let’s just mark this one down as an anti-beef of the week.
