Zoë Martlew

 “I remember after a concert me and some other girls stayed at his house. He gave us all so much alcohol that one girl was sick. That night, he came into my room and tried to make me have sex with him, but I lay still and pretended to be asleep. He left the room and I heard him try the same with other pupils and then he got into his double bed with one girl. Suddenly it dawned on me that I wasn’t the only one. He had always implied that he was only interested in me, but suddenly it became completely clear to me what he was doing. Some of these girls were much younger than me.”

“He was so brazen about it. It was so out in the open. It was as though he didn’t see that he was doing anything wrong. He seemed to think it was one of the perks of the job to take advantage of these naïve girls shut up in this hot-house environment. It seemed to be open season for him. Now I think: how dare he do that to me? How dare he do that to my friends? How did the school not ask what was going on? I was always crying upstairs and yet my housemistress never asked what was wrong with me”. Read the rest of this entry »

My first tongueless snog was on a clear moonlit night in the back of the cricket pavilion at Radley College in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. The ecstatic intensity of these fleeting minutes was accompanied by the voice of my deeply religious upbringing, insisting God would smite me down for such a terrible sin. But I didn’t care. I was prepared to risk the worst for this hair-gelled and fringe-highlighted mortal along with his taste in Nick Kershaw, Drakkar Noir and guyliner.

In the 2 hours that followed I spun the pinkest, fluffiest dreams of love, knowing we would be married before long and wondering already what kind of present I could buy such a paragon of style. A thin leather piano keyboard tie perhaps? Name bracelet? An alternative to the Drakkar? Read the rest of this entry »

There’s less than a fortnight left until the end of the world. It’s official. It’s curtains for planet Earth on December 21^st 2012. The Mayans said so and their clocks have been accurate to within seconds for thousands of years. They run out in a matter of days.

If you don’t believe me, google Maya 2012 and marvel.

Some say that Earth is to be sucked into a black hole at the centre of the galaxy on the winter solstice. Others, that we’re on a collision course with a planet called Nibiru. If you’ve made it through Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia you’ll know what to do. And avoid the Tristan sound track. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh my God I’m in love! Desperately in love! And not with one, not two but a whole stage full of hot young men grooving their shirts off, making an unbelievable amount of noise.

I’m in the Purcell Room at the (THE – note use of forbidden definite article) Southbank Centre. Yes, you heard me, the Purcell Room, a venue I’d not seen and frankly tried to forget since the early 90s when playing in a concert of Brian Ferneyhough’s lesser known chamber works to an audience of 5 beardy weirdies with plastic bags and bad jumpers. Read the rest of this entry »