Editor's Letter

NEW TALENT? IT’S A BIT LIKE GARDENING INNIT
Look at me with my lovely pot of flowers. Actually, they’re not mine at all. The white slippers may have given away the fact that I’m sitting in a celebrity drugs rehabilitation unit. Ok, a gay hotel in Mykonos. But, as usual for this page, I’m going to make a dangerously tenuous link, and this time it’s between my fantasy flower pot and July’s issue theme, New Stars. You’ve probably realised from watching Xtra Factor with your eyebrow quizically arched that celebrity is all smoke and mirrors. And the more backstage access we get, the more showbiz seems a sad and freaky land of myth and delusion.
But even if they’re lost in illusion, don’t forget stars are people too. And that’s why we should nourish the glitzy little seedlings before we enjoy mercilessly tearing them out of the ground and stamping on them, like we do with all the other fully grown stars. In this issue we bring you a host of young talents who haven’t yet got so famous and full of themselves they need an entourage to carry their head through customs. You may even be meeting our cover boy Jesse McCartney for the first time, as the record company does its bit to ensure the hot New Yorker’s RnB career flourishes in the UK. It must be a strange feeling for Jesse to do a photoshoot with us in a Hoxton bar where no one recognised him. In the USA he’s mega famous as – like JT, Aguilera and Efron – he’s risen through the Disney ranks before breaking out into the big bad world. Yet despite the switch from celebrity to anonymity, and the zealous attentions of his media team, Jesse seemed alright.
Yet fame can play hideous tricks on lesser people’s minds. When it becomes acceptable to throw a phone at your slave, sorry, maid’s head – that kind of thing. In fact, you get the feeling that some super egos are itching to trample all over us underlings like the giant pant models in this month’s Boy Crush eye candy story. Creating that shoot with photographer Konrad Wyrebek was a skyscraper-sized buzz and, for me, doing things differently is what AXM should be famous for. After all, when the PR machine gets so powerful that all slebs are beginning to look and sound the same it’s up to us to sow the seeds of weird and wonderful new shapes in star.