One of the Evening Standard’s most distinctive, witty and stylish writers from the 1990s to the 2010s, Pete Clark, has died aged 71. Initially a pop critic his brief expanded to cover TV, food, drink, travel, sport and cars, not to mention an infamous column in praise of smoking in ES magazine.
By his own, and some others’ estimation he was “the best f***ing writer on the paper” at a time when the Standard produced up to six editions a day. Deadlines were ferociously tight, lunches long and liquid and expense accounts generous. When I first started working for the paper in 1993 it was a massive, hectic, churning operation through which Pete sauntered like an amused lord of misrule.
He was born in St Bartholomew’s Hospital within the sound of Bow Bells in 1953 – making him a proper cockney – and brought up in Kennington, his father a rent control officer. From the top floor of his grammar school, Archbishop Tenison’s, he could see into the Oval, fostering an early love of cricket. He dropped out of two universities before settling at Warwick, where he met his wife, Jane Charteris, though they did not become a couple until 1978 and married in 1984.
After a brief and improbable stint working for the Royal Ocean Racing Club, Pete began his journalism career in the trade press, notably writing a column titled Clark in Clerkenwell for Printing World, before going on to edit Tower Records’ in-house publication Top Magazine. He was hired in the late Eighties as a pop critic for the Mail on Sunday under editor Stewart Steven, penning legendary interviews with Keith Richards, Elvis Costello and PJ Proby, who toyed with a revolver during their conversation.
When Steven took over the editorship of the Standard (which was then a stablemate of the Mail titles) in 1992 Pete came with him, as did features editor Adam Edwards, who relaunched ES magazine and commissioned the smoking column as “a rebellious joke”. Pete found himself on London’s daily paper at a time when the city was full of new swagger, its food culture, pop music, art and fashion burgeoning and confident.
Under Stewart Steven and, from 1995, Max Hastings, the guiding spirit of the paper’s features pages featured outrageous stunts and rapid, witty responses to cultural trends or breaking stories. If a new dish or drink was launched Pete would be pictured sampling it in the day’s final edition. When Channel 4 announced a series in which a man would be transformed into a woman, and vice versa, over several weeks, Pete was got up in a frock and falsies, and Emily Sheffield (then a fellow feature writer) into a beard within 24 hours.
His writing was wonderfully clear and elegant. In one piece he evoked a vast and expensive tasting menu served to him by Marco Pierre White, along with fine wines and rare spirits. Feeling obliged to repay the generosity with some token, Pete proffered a roll of mints to the chef, ending his article with the words “Polo, Marco?” He remained an acerbic critic and was successfully but outrageously sued for libel by John Cleese after an unkind review in 2002.
After the Standard’s final edition of the week had “gone to bed” on Friday morning, work was effectively over. Pete instituted a regular, Martini-fuelled Friday lunch at Rowley Leigh’s restaurant Kensington Place, a short stagger from the office. He was a generous friend if he liked the cut of your jib, but his dislikes were also vivid.
He regularly went to gigs, plays and films throughout the week and retained vinegary opinions about pop (he loved Keith Richards and Charlie Watts, didn’t get on with Mick Jagger and hated Paul McCartney). A member of the MCC and a dedicated West Ham fan, he also had a fondness for Alfa Romeo cars, John Pearse suits and terriers.
Pete was made redundant in the late Noughties as newspaper budgets contracted but continued to contribute peppery TV and sports reviews and occasional features to the Standard until 2012. Used to the patronage of editors who appreciated his talents, he found it undignified to sell himself as a freelancer.
In 2019 he was diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, or PSP, a form of Parkinson’s disease. Shortly before his death, his wife Jane reports, they listened to Blue Oyster Cult together, the first band he took her to see.
Donations in Pete’s name to the PSPA or Brain Bank are welcome
