Fox is the definition of privilege – generating media coverage not because of his
music, but because he is the scion of an acting dynasty
It might be worth Laurence Fox considering his own career before he dismisses the concept of privilege. Specifically, his musical career. Fox has now released two albums: Holding Patterns in 2016, and A Grief Observed in 2019. The first of those peaked at No 89 in the chart, and spent two weeks in the top 100 before disappearing. The most popular track from Holding Patterns, Headlong, has had 150,000 plays on Spotify in the three and a bit years since its release: at the time of writing, that number wouldn’t get him into the Spotify Top 30 for today alone. Laurence Fox is not, by any metric of public interest, a successful singer-songwriter.
Yet when A Grief Observed was released, Fox had a promotional campaign you might normally associate with a major star. There were interviews in the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express. He featured in the Q&A slot in, ahem, this newspaper’s Weekend magazine. He was interviewed by Lorraine Kelly on TV, and he performed on
BBC Radio 5 Live. The result of all that publicity was that the album didn’t chart, and its most popular track, The Distance, has so far achieved 27,000 Spotify streams. A Grief Observed didn’t make a splash. It didn’t even make a ripple. It barely disturbed the surface.