‘It was basically to do with business. She basically tried to sabotage an entire arena tour. She tried to hire a bunch of people out from under me.” Has there ever been a more corporate musical feud than that between Taylor Swift and Katy Perry? Almost certainly. Perhaps asset stripper behaviour is the tab you pick up for high art. All Saints split up over who got to wear a particular jacket to the Capital FM Christmas party – but I guess we all got to keep the music.
Even so, it could almost send you into a decline to think that not only is Taylor’s song Bad Blood literally about Katy’s poaching of precisely three backing dancers – but that Taylor was willing to volunteer this information to Rolling Stone even at the peak of her pop-cool and megastardom.
I mean … just say it’s about kicking a baroque drug addiction or being compromised as a CIA asset. Have some self-respect. Failing that, at least do the music journalist’s work for him and explain that in the turbo-commercialised, 18-hour-day pop Wall Street that you dominate, backing dancers are just a way of keeping score.
Anyway, that’s all water under one of Taylor’s famous bridges now. By way of a recap: the backing-jacking took place in 2012, and ever since, Taylor and Katy have been engaged in remote sniping. There have been disparaging interviews, there have been lyrical swipes – but as time went on, Katy began to modulate the attacks into professions of hope that the pair could one day be friends again. She was going to keep trying, she said, because it was important. “None of this petty shit,” she explained, “women together will heal the world.” Or at the very least, release a duet together at the point in the future at which both could use a career jolt.
And so to the major breakthrough development in world peace this week. On the eve of Taylor’s latest tour, Katy sent Baroness Swift a real, physical olive branch and a letter. We know this because Taylor took the immediate decision to Instagram herself opening it. “So I just got to my dressing room,” she explained in a video captioned Thank You Katy, “and found this actual olive branch. This means so much to me.” Taylor also posted a picture of the branch, showing the partially readable note, which began: “Hey Old Friend – I’ve been doing some reflecting on past miscommunications and hurt feelings between us”, and in which the phrase “deeply sorry” was also visible.
Hmmm. I know Taylor only revealed this private communication to 107 million of her closest followers … but was that quite the way to go? Or was it the most hilariously destructive use of a branch since Basil Fawlty took one to his Austin 1100 Countryman on Gourmet Night?
If we were being charitable, perhaps we’d say that this is just how celebrities are. When Victoria Beckham posts love messages and pictures of their children to David Beckham on Instagram, it is not our place to wonder: “Can’t you just go down to the kitchen and tell him?” A certain amount of performance is part of the brand. None of which is to suggest such marriages are all a show, but clearly a wider audience is deemed to help, or they wouldn’t choose it.
The great sadness, of course, is that social media’s tightening grip on human interaction has yet to evolve to a stage where arguing celebrities spend as much time crafting post putdowns of each other on social media. For the followers they are seeking to engage, this would obviously be much more diverting. Stars themselves would be encouraged to raise their dialogue game, and disport themselves as if they were sparring in an Instagram version of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, as opposed to the bit of the Hallmark cards factory where rejected Valentine slogans go to die. As for Taylor and Katy, though, do imagine your lack of surprise to learn that Katy is reportedly “puzzled” by the decision to publicise her gesture. It may be that the note’s apology is more nuanced than its first few lines suggest; it may be a certain lack of grace on Taylor’s part. Would it really have hurt so much to react with a “soz for being a bit of a monster too”?
Either way, the suggestion is that this froideur isn’t quite as over as it might be, and is still making its interminable progress to iteration 18 of Ryan Murphy’s Feud series.
As for how to inject new life into the peace process, what about the backing dancers? Surely the three of them should be produced whence they have been rendered, and given the chance to tell their stories in this most intractable conflict of the modern era. Someone – perhaps Archbishop Desmond Tutu – should take the testimonies of what happened back when they stopped grinning through ball changes behind Taylor, and defected to grinning through ball changes behind Katy. However painful this might be, the chance for reconciliation is surely worth paying the price.
But who to instigate it all? If only there was someone in the news who had just succeeded in conjuring hopes of a lasting peace with the showy production of three other individuals who had essentially been treated as pawns in a much larger and more dangerous game. Should any such diplomatic titan come to mind, do suggest them to the relevant authorities at your very earliest convenience.
Don’t push it: Rambo steps back from the brink
Thrilling news from Cannes, where Sylvester Stallone’s senior years are to stress-test another of his action franchises. Not content with getting back in the ring aged 60 for Rocky Balboa, he will now reprise his John Rambo at the age of 71. A reminder that you’re only as old as the Mexican sex traffickers you garotte.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It’s fair to say that Rambo V has seemed uncertain at times. I like a Burmese jungle Christian missionary rescue as much as the next person who’ll wait to watch it on Channel 5 in due course – but Rambo IV was regarded as a bit of a franchise-killer. That said, Sly credited its message with encouraging the Myanmar people to overthrow the military junta. A verdict which turned out to be almost as much of a hostage to future events as the final shot of Rambo III, set in Afghanistan, which dedicates the movie “to the brave mujahideen fighters”.
Anyway, the last time Stallone was talking about Rambo V, its plot sounded like something our hero might have hallucinated in First Blood. It was going to happen in the Pacific Northwest, Sly explained, and involve the hunting of A Creature.
But over to him: “It’s not a Universal Soldier … it’s not me fighting a super soldier … it’s actually a feral beast. It’s a … thing.” Go on. “It’s this amalgamation of fury and intelligence and pure, unadulterated rage. It’s before men became … hu-men.” I’m sensing the funding wasn’t what we’d call “in place” as this point. “This is when they were still inhuman. And so, what [Rambo] confronts is something that is everyone’s nightmare … And that’s what makes it uniquely different … man’s conscience fighting his dark, dangerous, uncontrollable subconscious. Very similar to the plot in Forbidden Planet … when the doctor couldn’t control his mind and his subconscious took over, and became a savage killing machine. It’s your worst nightmare. You’re battling your primitive self.”
Mm. As it turns out, you’ll be battling some Mexican sex traffickers across the Arizona border. But I’m very much here for the pre-hum-en creature come the inevitable Rambo VI.
