Wanted: Rights for Boybands

The website for No. 33 Portland Place, one of London’s grandest eighteenth century townhouses, has a section dedicated to the music videos which have been filmed there.

There’s Amy Winehouse’s Rehab and Orson with their one hit wonder No Tomorrow. There’s also Kate Moss dancing in stockings and suspenders for upmarket lingerie label Agent Provocateur.

But, there’s one music video the website haven’t listed. Gold Forever, this year’s Comic Relief charity single from boyband The Wanted, has been written out of Portland Place history.

It would take a devoted boyband fan with a passion for eighteenth century architectural mouldings to ever connect the two.

It took this stucco and boyband fan a morning of sleuthing to match the Robert Adam mouldings in the opening shots of the video with those of the Portland Place staircase.

Built by Robert Adam in 1775, No. 33 Portland Place is one of London’s few surviving Adam townhouses. The website proudly inventories those bits of the original Adam design which still survive and advises that the Adam interiors offer ‘a unique backdrop opportunity for shoots.’ You can take your pick from:

2 x Robert Adam Drawing Rooms

1 x Robert Adam Ballroom

1 x Robert Adam Music Room

1 x Robert Adam Dining Room

1 x Robert Adam Entrance Hall

1 x Robert Adam Inner Hall and Sweeping Staircase

If you are very keen-eyed you might have spotted Portland Place’s starring role in the King’s Speech. Lionel Logue’s Harley Street consulting room is really the top-lit ‘Distressed Room’ at Portland Place and the upper-landing of the Portland Place staircase moon-lighted as the King’s Piccadilly apartments.



Boybands are much maligned. Not as sexy as Kate Moss, not as rebellious as Amy Winehouse, boybands suffer the music industry's greatest indignities: fronting the 'Make Mine a Milk' campaign, sporting rubber noses for Comic Relief, representing their country at Eurovision, and being denied their rightful place in the Portland Place pantheon.

Wills and Kate: Part Two

Five months ago I wrote a post about William and Kate's dubious choice of Sir Martin Archer Shee's portrait of William IV as the backdrop to their engagement photocall. I suggested that William IV - who fathered ten illegitmate children with his mistress,  but failed to produce a legitimate  heir with his wife - was a poor role model for a couple planning marriage and children.

But here they are again, posing at the feet of another equally unsuitable sitter. This time it's Richard, Marquess Wellesley who enjoyed a ten year affair with the French actress Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland, only agreeing to marry her after the birth of three sons and two daughters. He later married Marianne Patterson but they had no children. 

With the marriage-shy, heirless spectres of William IV and Richard Wellesley hovering over their engagement and wedding day, I hope that Hugo Burnand's photograph of the bride and groom with their six bridesmaids and pageboys, more accurately predicts the couple's future.

The bridesmaids in their puffed silk are sweet, but the pageboys in Regency frock coats and frogging steal the shot.

The boys' distinctive poses come with excellent historical pedigrees. Tom Pettifer's insouciant sideways lounge recalls the pose adopted by Colonel Banastre Tarleton in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portait of 1782. 

Painted to mark Tarleton’s return from the American War of Independence, Reynolds imagines the cavalry officer in the smoke and heat of battle. Fires blaze in the distance and Tarleton's horses rear in panic. Tarleton is unflustered and unfazed. He stands directly in the line of fire of a British canon and rests his left leg on a barrel of powder.

He has every right to look confident. Horace Walpole observed that Tarleton had 'butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army.' But the colonel didn't return from battle unscathed. Reynolds shows Tarleton missing two fingers on his right hand – an American battle wound.

Also adopting the pose of a battle-scarred hero, is second pageboy William Lowther-Pinkerton. With his right heel raised off the floor and his steady, direct gaze, he echoes John Hoppner's Horatio Nelson, painted in  1801 to mark the British victory at the Battle of Copenhagan. The vice-admiral’s empty sleeve is shown neatly pinned to his coat and he leans his good arm nonchalantly against a rock as the battle rages in the distance.

William Lowther-Pinkerton’s pose isn't a coincidence. Hoppner’s Nelson doesn’t languish in the collection of some provincial museum or stately home. He hangs immediately to the right of Shee’s William IV in the state rooms of St James’s Palace, right heel raised on the beach at Denmark.