Ben Williams and Laurence Dodds overcome swine flu to file their first review of the year: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The pair also look back at the best films from the summer and unexpectedly travel to the future to see what zombies lie in wait.

Much has been written about London rapper Speech Debelle, the hip hop artist who recently won the Mercury Prize, beating off bookies’ favourites such as La Roux and well established acts like Kasabian to claim the prestigious £20,000 award.

Real name Corynne Elliot, she originally called herself Speech for over five years, but after being signed to her record label Big Dada, and discovering there was another rapper with the same name as her, she was forced to change it. Instead of changing it altogether however, she simply added Debelle to her name at the suggestion of her mother, as it was the name of her grandmother’s clothing line. Her debut album Speech Therapy, which had only sold 3,000 copies before winning the Mercury Prize (sales of which have now increased by 4000%), has been described as a South London hybrid of Lauryn Hill and Tracy Chapman, with its easy delivery of both lyrically nuanced and insightful material. On it she talks with refreshing honesty about her life experiences, particularly those gained in the turbulent years after the age of 19 when she moved out of home, and was forced to become more independent. “I was a spoilt brat so it was completely new to me to just, y’know, day to day looking after myself. I still had help, my mum didn’t stop helping me, but just to do things by myself… it was a different kind of experience from before”.

Speech was definitely one of the underdogs for the Mercury Prize – the odds of her winning started at 33/1 – and her win left many music fans disappointed that such a relative unknown had scooped the prize. When I ask her how confident she was of winning the Mercury Award, she answers matter-of-factly, “I was very confident I was going to win. The only thing I was confused about was why people seemed to be so shocked that I was confident I was going to win! That was the strangest thing for me, like why shouldn’t I be? It’s a competition and, y’know, if I was a runner doing the 100 metres and I was at the beginning of the line, then I’m gonna have to believe I’m going to win. Otherwise…what’s the point? You gotta get into that frame of mind and coming second or not winning wasn’t an option for me”.  And as for how she felt when she did win? “ Relief. Relief because now things can continue the way I envision them to. Without the Mercury things would have not gone in the direction I needed them to, so there was relief that the wheels were in motion”. She laughs though, when I ask her what she’s going to do with the money. “That’s just a little bit of money in London if you’ve got rent…and I’ve got so many expenditures – I’ve got stylists, make up artists. It doesn’t go very far”.

The recognition and fame that is part and parcel of winning such a prestigious award must inevitably have changed her day-to-day life, but she seems relaxed about it. Though she seems unlikely to seek out fame, she is well aware of the symbiotic relationship most musicians have with fame, which is, in her opinion a “necessary” part of the job. “I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with it at all – I think I should be more famous. I think I should be the equivalent of Lily Allen, and if not me then somebody like me. We need black stars”. As long as she remains famous for her music and not just for the sake of fame itself, she’s happy. She is clearly opinionated, though not in an annoyingly loudmouth way like the aforementioned Lily Allen; if she does achieve the same level of fame as Allen – and she should – it seems likely it will be for her music, and not her personal life.

Despite her relaxed demeanour, I wonder whether she feels having won the Mercury that there’s now a lot of pressure on her, or people waiting for her to trip up – bearing in mind the ‘curse’ of the Mercury Prize, which has seen most previous winners’ careers slow to a shuddering halt before they fade into obscurity. Speech may  be more likely than the others to escape such a fate, given that her music is stylistically, radically different from the last five Mercury Prize winners, all of whom have been white male indie outfits.
She listens to a wide range of music, and her  varied taste in music is evident on her album, with influences she cites as Tracy Chapman, DMX, Coldplay, and 2Pac. The majority of the lyrics on her album are very personal, but she says she’s willing to discuss all the subjects she talks about on the album because after all, as she puts it, “It’s the truth”. However, she seems to close up a little when I enquire about a specific song, Daddy’s Little Girl, the lyrics of which discuss her father abandoning her at the age of seven and are particularly raw. What, I ask, is her relationship with her dad like now. After a pause, she answers – “Same as it always was.” I get the feeling that this subject is too personal, and something that she’d rather not discuss with a complete stranger. Strangely enough, when I actually first met her, I was initially surprised – the frankness of her album lyrics is such that I’d somehow expected her to be just…bigger. Instead she’s wrapped up in a red tracksuit, sniffling because she’s got the flu as she gets ready to play the London date of her national tour.

She seems bemused by the media’s attempts to pigeonhole her, assigning her the role of a spokesperson for underprivileged black Londoners, or as Speech puts it portraying her as being “from down in the ‘ghetto’”- which, as she is eager to point out to me, “is just not my story at all. But I can understand people need to rationalise things”. She does, however, consider herself to be politically minded, saying the social commentary aspect of hip-hop is what she first found interesting about it. She is undecided about the state of British politics, initially saying change is good, before changing her mind, “Change just means a change. It doesn’t necessarily mean a change for the better, it just means things are slightly different”. She is however, completely certain as to what she would do if she were Prime Minister for a week – send out a national apology to everyone under the age of twenty for the recession, because she doesn’t think they’ve been in a position to contribute to it in any way. “Sometimes just apologising to people is good for people’s self esteem, it makes people feel better and I think that they deserve that’.

Speech is certainly self-assured, and in fact the only time she really seems to be at a loss for something to say is when I ask her who she admires in the public eye, outside of music. She thinks for some time, and I am not surprised that a woman who has spent the last 6 months in her life doing nothing but working on her career eventually answers: “Oprah Winfrey. Cos she’s rich”.

Festivals have become an ubiquitous feature of summer in the student lifestyle. From muddy pastoral affairs with no more a purpose than to provide the  youths of places like Devon with a venue for moshing, to such sprawling, national events as Glastonbury which still attracts 140,000 people a year.

But our return to University has not only hailed the end of the festival season, it has also meant saying goodbye to the festivals’ queer counterparts – the Prides. In the superficially equal world in which we live in many fail to see the significance, or are ignorant of the history of the Gay Pride. As a result, much attention is paid to the term ‘Pride’ itself. In the process of assimilation, minority communities often turn away from a reactionary, defiant attitude towards a more questioning stance. People ask, ‘Why should I be proud of a natural attribute?’, referring to their skin colour or sexual orientation. They remark that people would be sickened if there was a ‘Straight Pride’ event.

Indeed, many gay students I spoke to shared a quibbling over the idea of being ‘proud’. One pointed out, “Homosexuality isn’t entirely comparable with something like eye colour because it has a huge effect on one’s life – whether they like it or not. Gay Pride is only named thus as an antidote to Gay Shame.” This sentiment was reflected by another Oxford student who remarked, “Being gay just happens to be part of who I am, so in itself it’s obviously not that I am proud of being gay. But I am proud of belonging to a community that largely isn’t ashamed of being different.” So, homosexuality alone might not inspire pride, but the hardship the community has gone through and overcome certainly might. 

Many feel, however, that it is being different which is the undoing of the Gay Rights cause.  The more conservative LGB people argue that the sight of mincing fairies, oiled-up Muscle Marys and drag queens parading down a city’s high street to camp anthems will go none of the distance required to show that gays are not strange or frightening. Not everyone feels this way. One gay blogger writes, “the wider, straight community should be credited with the intelligence to work out that, in any field, outlandish, larger-than-life characters are more likely to be pushed to the forefront of the public eye, which accounts for the sorts of young people that typically populate Pride marches. For every half-nude, glitter-sprayed Pride marcher, there is a gay at home with their feet up and a cup of tea – but of course no one wants to see a parade of mundane people!” But is the party vibe yet another obstacle to the real message? At Brighton I asked if the Pride festival was becoming less political. One attendee said, “I think Pride events are important symbols of queer liberation. While they often end up as more of a summer party than a political event, the message they send out remains significant: we’re here, we’re queer and we’re proud.” Drag queen Jodie Harsh also argues that the fun and spectacle of the parades don’t undermine the purpose, “Homophobia is very slowly on the way out but there’s still so much of it that Pride is definitely still relevant. It’s also just a matter of visibility – however much Pride risks being a freak show, gays need to be made visible until they are respected.”

The three main Pride festivals are London, Brighton and Manchester. These three events are an umbrella for countless smaller parties and events run by clubs, pubs, businesses, and awareness groups. The Pride attracts thousands of visitors as well as high-profile performers. This year, Manchester featured performances from the likes of Little Boots, Frankmusic, Bananarama, the Freemasons…and Peter Andre.

Wandering through a sunny park in Brighton with dancers, colossal fairground rides, flashing lights and pumping music, you could be forgiven for asking if there is any cohesive message – how many of these people are just here to have a good time? One student described  how, at Brighton, he went to a ‘club’, which was a bus blearing out music that the revellers had to follow, dancing up and down the seafront as it drove along. Another student painted an image of Pride not only as a rollicking good time, but also an almost formative experience. “My favourite memory of Pride was London 2007. It was my first Pride and it was somewhat magical – all these gay people together and ‘out’. One of my favourite songs, ‘Yeah Yeah’ by Bodyrox was playing and me and my friends danced and danced.” Aside from Gay Pride staples such as the parade, the clubs and the fun fair, my own experience of Brighton Pride this year involved attending a house party where I got sufficiently drunk to lose my inhibitions of modesty and was happy to play the piano and do the requests of party guests (largely Britney, Cher and Spice Girls, as befitted the occasion) until four in the morning. Later,  I joined a mass pilgrimage to the grave of a recently-deceased budgie who was named after the Bee Gee, Barry Gibb. It was surprisingly poignant. At Brighton Pride, anything goes.  

Encouragingly, not everyone with high-minded political aims has abandoned Pride’s current guise as a hedonistic cluster of aimless parties.  For example, Sir Ian McKellen is noted as a founding member of Stonewall, the largest gay rights group in Europe, and he routinely appears in Pride occasions all over the world. “Whenever gay people gather publicly to celebrate their sense of community, there are two important results,” he explains. “First, onlookers can be impressed by our confidence and determination to be ourselves and second, gay people, of whatever age, can be comforted by the occasion to take first steps towards coming out and leaving the closet forever behind.” McKellen echoes the notion that the Pride for many is a rite of passage.

True though it may be to say that today’s Pride events are a far cry from those of the Stonewall Riots they loosely commemorate, queries about the necessity of Gay Pride might be quashed by recalling the number of violent hate crimes committed against homosexuals and reminding oneself that in many countries these crimes are treated as good as legal. And if gay- bashing incidences seem tragic but remote, you can always re-read an opinion voiced last week in the second-biggest newspaper in the UK about the “sordid reality” of Boyzone’s Stephen Gately’s death. It would seem that the death of one faded popstar in Mallorca constitutes “a blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.” Moir went on to explain, “the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately’s last night raise troubling questions about what happened.” Let us be clear – the only link between these men as far as the public is concerned is that they are gay and lead what the Daily Mail terms “a very different and more dangerous lifestyle.” Whilst not physically violent, this now notorious article represents one of the most poisonous public cases of gay-bashing. For those of you taken in by the column’s veneer of civilized rationality, it implies that gay relationships – especially those with the cheek to pose as real marriages – result in untimely and lonely death. 

In spite of writing this feature, I am truly not one to rant about gay rights (there are more immediate crises at hand in the world; plus, no one likes a whiner), but when people expect to get away with such brain-dead journalism, I have to admit to feeling a slight twinge of Gay Pride.