BROOKS SISTERS?

The Scotsman needs a better fact-checker. Or I need to stop drinking. Or both!

Naturally, I have a google alert on my name. Imagine my surprise when I caught this piece from a UK business paper.


M&S reputation beaten with a club (singer)

BROOKS Brothers, the iconic American menswear store which clothed presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton, is set to reopen old hostilities when it opens its first Scottish branch this week.

The George Street shop will be just a few hundred yards from Marks & Spencer, the retailer which owned Brooks in the Nineties. And judging by the official Brooks company history, it was not a particularly happy time.

An otherwise anodyne volume, it devotes pages to the mistakes and oversights made by Marks & Spencer during the UK retailer’s short stewardship. M&S was a “parochial business”, even an “upscale version of Woolworths”, which “never fully understood” the deeply traditional Brooks. Brooks Brother adds that M&S “parachuted in” executives, and, horror of horrors, launched a new store with a drag queen called Lady Bunny and a dance-chart topper Ultra Naté, right, who the volume described as a “club singer”.

(Bunny note: Horror of horrors would be for your rag to print blatant falsehoods! I've never once appeared at or even set stillettoed foot in any Brooks Brothers dull-ass clothing emporium on either side of the Atlantic. I don't tend to frequent men's clothing stores, for obvious reasons.)

I have dj'ed in a London dpt. store, however. The upscale yet chic Harvey Nichols once played host to me and the rest of the Visionaire crew for a smashing shindig which included fun (not stuffy tweed-clad) guests like Boy George, Mario Testino and Grace Jones.

Referring to one of New York’s most exclusive social clubs, the volume dryly observes: “While the exact clubs where Ultra Naté plied her trade are unknown, one doubts her songs supplied post-luncheon merriment at the Union League.”

(Bunny note: Though it's been a few years since her biggest smash, FREE, Ultra topped not the club charts, but the pop charts with that record, all over Europe, Canada, and Australia. Don't diss the bitch because you're too square to know your own country's hits. Harumph!)

SCOTSMAN.COM