Nicholas Ponsonby Haslam, aged 86, is making himself laugh. Great fag-smoker’s guffaws and rattly-cough chuckles as he lights up another industrial-strength gasper and recounts the tale of a recent lunch at a Cotswolds country pile: “All 6ft 6in blonde women who couldn’t stop talking about ‘wellness’.”
Suddenly, he says, halfway through lunch and a couple of glasses in, an especially amusing notion had occurred to him — that one of the tall blonde ladies might die from an epileptic fit caused by the sound waves of a particularly intense “gong bath”.
He grins, making a mental note. “Wouldn’t that be just perfect?”
You can bet “wellness” and “gong bath” will make it on to next year’s instalment of his now world-famous “Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common” tea towel, the 2025 edition of which — what with this being November — is now on sale.
We’re at his handsome, maximalist, wedding cake of a gate house on the Bamford family’s Daylesford estate. There are linens (his own), cushions, bas reliefs and fringes, and books piled everywhere, many of them written by his friends, waiting to be reviewed in The Spectator.
In the loo (actually Nicky — ever the contrapuntist — prefers that you call it the “lavvy”) is a wall of framed letters from the royal family, one from Queen Elizabeth II personally, apologising for not being able to attend his 70th birthday party. (Never mind — he got Paris Hilton instead.) The fridge is stocked full of own-brand booze from the local Co-op. The room temperature is hot and smoky, like a nightclub — “Just how I like it.”
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As it’s a rainy, unsocial weekend, he’s dressed for the slouch sofa: a purple embroidered “vintage” cowboy shirt (“Vintage Topman, that is”) and baggy Primark pants, his sartorial style now several years into its East European proletarian on Oxford Street period. These days it’s either plain Primark duds (he likes the bargain-priced apparel behemoth’s anonymity and simplicity — “And so well made!”) or the easy athleisure of Sports Direct tracksuits and logo’d hoodies. I call him “Nicky Adidaslam”, which he seems to like. He won’t be doing “festive” dressing.
Like the Regent Street lights celebrity switch-on, the premiere of the John Lewis telly ad, mince pies appearing prematurely on supermarket shelves and the first ice rinks in the shopping malls, the unfurling of Nicky’s tea towel has become something of a Christmas diary moment. It’s the interior designer’s very own Christmas Dishonours list and he sees it in the grand tradition of other highfalutin seasonal markers such as the BBC’s Reith Lectures. Or John Julius Norwich’s annual “commonplace” miscellany, which the writer and historian would give to his friends every year during the Sixties and beyond. “John Julius Norwich being the son of Diana Cooper, Viscountess Norwich,” Nicky adds helpfully.
With Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall at the time, in 2021. “The royal family need to be grander”
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This time around, the tea towel is full of jarring, overused phrases — “What’s not to like?”; “I’m a hugger” — that have grinched his draining board. Elsewhere there is some genteel middle-class baiting material in the form of “Kilner jars”, “clapping the chef” and “sunblock”. Other targets seem to be more personal: Stephen Fry (“A royal suck-up. No need to drill for oil in Scotland when you have Stephen Fry”), Dan Snow and “Anne McElvoy’s opinions”. (The executive editor at Politico is said to be delighted at her inclusion.)
It’s not all Nicky’s own work; his wicked pal Rupert Everett contributed “death threats” and last year Jeremy Clarkson offered the poor man’s dilemma of “needing house keys”. The royal family, with the exception of Camilla, are in danger of being common too. “Too parochial. They need to be grander,” He thinks Meghan Markle is wonderful. He fan-girls for Melania Trump and Victoria Beckham.
With the deliciously contrary tea towels established as a significant revenue stream (on the Selfridges website you can find a whole “archive” of Nicky tea towels available), how will he be spending his Christmas?
With Ringo Starr, for whom he designed a home, in 2014
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Haslam and Lady Victoria Hervey in 2001
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“Alone. Asleep. Doing nothing,” he says. “Wonderful.”
Modern Christmas Days, Nicky says, being ever so common. “I hate saying ‘Happy Christmas’ to everyone. I can’t bear to sit down to a lunch that lasts from midday to 8pm and is far too much food anyway.
“The problem is because people are out of town for most of it. In London everyone used to stay around for Christmas and new year and there would be great parties all over town during that period. Even on Christmas Day itself. Now, because everyone is skiing or in the Caribbean, there’s no sense of celebration. One’s friends just aren’t around and that ruins the whole point of present-giving.” (Which happens on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day, “obviously”. Presents, if given, must be wrapped meticulously “with silk or velvet ribbon”.)
Ergo, there will be no decorations chez Haslam. “Although I do like a fake tree.”
For the rest of us? He stipulates garlands of hand-harvested ivy, draped across picture frames, mantelpiece, windowsills etc.
Not holly. “The red berries are too showy. I always picked them off. You don’t need colour at Christmas.”
White lights? “Not flashing either.”
Baubles? “On trees only. And they must come from Russia — the Russians make the best Christmas decorations.”
Haslam in Central Park, New York, in 1978…
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… and with Andy Warhol at Regine’s nightclub two years later
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Being theologically correct is essential also — it is v common to make an incorrect allusion to the “immaculate conception”. “I am very moved by the Christmas story and idea of Mary being ‘immaculate’,” Nicky says. “It’s not about the birth of Jesus. It actually refers to the conception of Mary in the womb of her own mother, St Anne. Mary was born ‘immaculate’, as a perfect person, so she could give birth to Jesus. Diana Cooper told me that.”
If he’s going to pray on Christmas morning, Nicky will be opting for a Catholic service in a South Kensington “high” church. He loves liturgy, sacraments, priestly authority, the whole “bells and smells” thing. Does he sing hymns? Only the grim ones and the joyous, soaring ones.
So Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and In the Bleak Midwinter. “Can’t bear God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, which sounds like something you might sing in a pub.”
‘Nicky croons like nobody else has for decades’
Actually, Nicky is more a crooner than a chorister. He has a new album coming out and, in the grand tradition of Cliff Richard and Slade, has his sights now on the Christmas No 1 in the hit parade as well as the top slot in the tea towel charts.
Bryan Ferry and Nicky Haslam, London, 2014
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His last record, Midnight Matinee, released in 2013 and produced by his pal David Ogilvy, was a dream dinner party of an album featuring songs with Bryan Ferry, Bob Geldof, Helena Bonham Carter (her first — and very possibly last — musical venture), Tracey Emin and Cilla Black.
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The new one is solo Nicky: stripped back, simple and heartfelt — piano, violin and voice — songs and show tunes by Kurt Weill, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter. Intimate, elegiac, elegantly phrased and hitting the high Cs when needed (“Very few people can, you know”), it is the music of a man who grew up — in style — in America and England during the Fifties, whose mother, Diamond Ponsonby, wore Dior couture (and had Queen Victoria as a godmother). Who listened to US imports of original soundtracks — recordings on shellac long players brought back from the US by his diplomat father, a man who would change into a dinner jacket every night on his return home from the office. You may well have a little weep listening to Nicky sing I Got Lost in His Arms from Annie Get Your Gun. I know I did.
This is no vanity project. Recently Nicky played the raw cabaret-performance recordings to his Cotswolds neighbour Michael Haas, a Grammy-winning record producer, author and classical musician who studied piano at the Conservatory in Vienna. Haas called the collection “a work of genius”, urging the singer to mix and produce the album professionally. Nicky “croons in the old-fashioned sense. Like nobody else has for decades,” Haas says.
‘I try very much not to be Noël Coward’
Robbie Williams’ songwriter and producer Guy Chambers (a fan and collaborator) gave up his west London studio for the mixing and Nicky’s boogie-woogie friend Jools Holland provided approval. “Nicky delivers a song with is own uniquely English flavour,” Holland says. “His singing exudes the charm of Noël Coward and the glamour of Rex Harrison.”
“Actually, I try very much not to be Noël Coward,” Nicky says. “I prefer the slushy sound of Vic Damone. Much better than Frank Sinatra.” Who would bet against his rendition of Cole Porter’s Make It Another Old Fashioned, Please taking over from the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York as the nation’s favourite yuletide drinking song?
With Queen Elizabeth II in 2012
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Nicky Haslam has been around popular music since popular music began. “I saw it coming in for the first time. Girls screaming at Johnnie Ray. The voices of Edd Byrnes, Bobby Short, Fabian and Sam Cooke. Divine singers.” He vividly remembers the first time he heard Bobby Vinton singing Blue Velvet — blaring from the car radio of a borrowed Rolls-Royce soft top while cruising down Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, “on my way to a really wonderful leather bar”.
At home, his ballerina aunt taught him the foxtrot and the cha-cha-cha. He learnt the Madison and the Watusi in nightclubs. At Eton, he heard Bill Haley & his Comets and was shown how to twist by the girls from Chubby Checker’s band. Later, Nicky would pass on the hip-shaking moves to Brigitte Bardot on a sandy-floored boîte in St Tropez.
Haslam introduced Mick Jagger to America
After leaving school he worked for the photographer John French and met his young assistant David Bailey. Bailey introduced Nicky to Mick Jagger; Nicky, following Bailey and his girlfriend Jean Shrimpton to New York, introduced Jagger to America.
“As well as being in the band, Mick was working for [Jean’s sister] Chrissie Shrimpton as her cleaner,” he recalls. (Mick Jagger — housemaid!) “The Stones had already toured America once but had been a complete flop. When they came back six months later in 1964, [Warhol superstar] ‘Baby’ Jane Holzer and I threw a party for them at photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s studio on East 25th Street. All the papers picked up the story and Tom Wolfe wrote an Esquire story about it called Girl of the Year. [The essay was later published in Wolfe’s nonfiction compendium, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.]
At the Evening Standard Film Awards with Mick Jagger, 2002. “Mick is so… quixotic. Keith is the loveliest Rolling Stone”
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“The Stones were everywhere after that,” he says. But only gentleman drummer Charlie Watts was kind enough to remember it and acknowledge the favour, writing, “Thanks, Nicky,” in his autobiography. Six decades on, he is still friends with Jagger. “But it can be difficult. Mick is so… quixotic. Keith is the loveliest Rolling Stone.”
In America, Haslam became known as an art director, magazine editor, scenester and trend setter. He introduced Yves Saint Laurent (“A boy I had met in Paris”) to fashion editor Diana Vreeland. Vreeland called Nicky “Rembrandt” and once threw a party to celebrate his new suede suit, later commissioning her young British art director to travel back to England to photograph a promising group called the Beatles.
“We went up to Northampton to see them. Girls were throwing flowers at them. I picked them all up off the floor and handed them back to the boys. I made them carry them like Victorian posies. The picture was published in Vogue. It was the first time anyone in America had seen what they looked like.” Nicky would keep in touch with Paul McCartney during his romance with Jane Asher — “who is my cousin”, he says, acknowledging that pretty much all posh people are related to one another in some way. “Jane Asher is a Ponsonby.” (And, it turns out, also a descendent of King James I.)
‘I don’t like sex’
Turning to interior design, Nicky created homes for Sir Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry in England and, in America, for Ringo Starr, his transatlantic social life now moving to a heady 4/4 backbeat. In high and low places.
He was Elizabeth Taylor’s red carpet date for the London premiere of Cleopatra in 1963. He appeared in Andy Warhol’s Soap Opera and started to enjoy the company of other young men. “The first man to ever pick me up was Hugh Paddick [who played Julian to Kenneth Williams’ Sandy in the BBC radio show Round the Horne]. Being homosexual was so much more fun when it was illegal.” It wasn’t about sex. “I don’t like sex,” he says. “I am attracted to boys but I don’t need to touch them.” As he partied with politicians, royalty and rock stars, Antony Armstrong-Jones — later Lord Snowdon and husband to Princess Margaret — was another famous Nicky conquest.
In his London home
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Did he meet any US presidents? He pauses and counts on his fingers. So far, he’s encountered seven: Truman, Nixon, JFK, Johnson, Bush Sr and Bush Jr. “Donald Trump had a party at Claridge’s one year, just after he’d married Marla Maples [in 1993]. He was still a ridiculous joke back then, but she was ravishing.” In the Eighties, while Trump was still married to his first wife, Ivana, Nicky attended a dinner for the Queen Mother, given by Maureen Constance Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (née Guinness). The future president’s wife was placed next to the disgraced Tory MP John Profumo, who promptly made a crude pass at her. “Have you ever been f***ed by a 70-year-old? You should try it. It’s fun.”
Of course, Jeffrey Epstein too. Many times. “I met Epstein through Ghislaine Maxwell. I went to one of those parties at her father’s terrible house in Oxfordshire [Headington Hill Hall].” Epstein was “very attractive and great fun. Tarty and camp.”
I take a sharp intake of the room’s hot smoky air as he relays some more scurrilous detail about Epstein, Trump, Trump’s lawyer Roy Cohn and a famous interior designer. There are more Co-op cocktails, more cigarettes. Lots more rattly laughs. In this pretty Oxfordshire grotto, I am an innocent at Bad Santa’s knee, listening to stories of decadence, hilarity and celebrity that link aristocrats, criminals, musicians, designers, oligarchs and plutocrats. Nicky Haslam their immaculate connection.
Nicky Haslam’s tea towels are on sale at selfridges.com and nickyhaslamstudio.com. His new album, One Night (Live at the Pheasantry, London), is available to stream on Spotify