Russell, Robert and Ed too...

So, another thing I meant to write about sooner. I'm pretty sure most of you must have seen Russell Brand's interview with Jeremy Paxman but just in case you haven't, here it is,

Truth be told, I'm really not sure what to think about this. I agree with a lot of what Russell's saying but I've always thought that the whole "we shouldn't vote, none of them deserve it" always sounds like a bit of a cop-out to me. Trust me, I'm as fed up of the current political situation as anyone but sitting on the fence isn't gonna get us out of the hole that our leaders have been digging for the last 35 odd years. Being up north to visit my family this weekend has really reinforced what a mess this country's in at the moment regardless of David Cameron and George Osborne's feeble attempts to persuade us that the worst is over and the country's recovering. Might I suggest that they pay a visit to Middlesbrough or Hartlepool where about 80% of the shops seem to be boarded up. Or Bradford where half the city centre was demolished back in 2006 to make way for a Westfield shopping centre only for the money to run out before a single brick had been laid. Seven years on and all that's left is an empty building site where shops should be and even then the shops that are left are hardly fighting each other for space given the number of closed ones around town. However you look at it, that doesn't seem much like a recovery to me.

Russell's right about one thing - politicians these days are horrifically out of touch with the man in the street. They aren't the ones faced with soaring energy bills and, for those of us who have to commute to work, public transport prices that are going up faster than our wages are. They aren't the ones with friends on the dole who would actually quite like to have a job rather than having to sit at home bored out of their skulls all day but there aren't any jobs available and all the government seems to want to do is demonise them as workshy shirkers who are leeching benefits out of the system. Meanwhile, these corporate crooks in the financial industry continue to brazenly swindle the country out of millions and we're told it's no big deal by the people at the Daily Mail and the Sun while they continue their dodgy ethical practices and whine on about how the place is turning into Communist Russia as soon as anyone mentions press regulations to maybe make sure that people stop getting hurt by their irresponsibility and general lack of morals.

But sitting on the fence waiting around for a revolution isn't gonna change that. I'm sorry but somehow I can't see David Cameron really giving a toss about a few hundred people gathering in parliament square wearing "V For Vendetta" masks. To me, the demo before the second Gulf War started proved that that method of protest is dead in the water. Thousands of people went on that, a public opinion poll showed that 91% of people were against the war and what did Tony Blair do? Went to war anyway. Politicians aren't scared of people marching anymore - they can just look at Blair's example and think "well, if he can get away with that and stay in power for another six years then why can't I get away with this?"

If you want to change the political system then you have to infiltrate it - protesting just doesn't work I'm afraid. Start up a movement, get some like-minded souls together and get a party of your own started. The three-party model in the UK is already starting to look shaky and my thoughts are that coalition governments are going to become the norm from hereon in. To use a musical analogy, it's not a million miles away from how punk rock started in Britain in the '70s - people were sick of the twin evils of ten-minute prog operas from Yes and Genesis and extended guitar solos and blues jams from the likes of Led Zeppelin and wanted something different so they went out and made it happen. Admittedly, it's a lot more difficult to change politics than it is to change music but it can be done and there've been a couple of attempts in recent years such as the original version of the Respect coalition before it got swamped by the nutcase wing of Islam (ie the sort of people who are really no better than the BNP or EDL). And it's also, lest we forget, how the original version of the Labour party started about 100 years ago - the voice of the working classes who felt completely ignored and betrayed by the politicians. Ring any bells?

Which brings me neatly on to Robert Webb's rather bizarre response to Brand a few days later where he stated the best way out was to join the Labour party as they were the only ones saying anything different. Again, Webb is right about one thing, if you do vote you can at least say that you tried to make your voice count in changing things. But, and it saddens me to say this as someone who grew up in a fiercely partisan Labour family, I really don't see that things would be any different under Ed Miliband. He strikes me as a nice guy who would like to be doing more than he is to put some clear water between himself and the ConDems but is hamstrung by trying to please the middle class vote. Which is clearly rubbish because if Ed would try and come up with some policies that would make things more fair to the ordinary people in this country, there is a huge swathe of disaffected voters who would probably be happy to give him a chance especially given how odious the alternative is. For example - renationalising the utility companies and railways so that prices can be fixed centrally and if people are upset then they can always kick the government in the ballots at the next election. Re-opening some of those Sure Start centres and libraries that the Tories have closed en masse. Reintroducing the controls on the financial sector that (spit!) Thatcher abolished in the '80s so that a bunch of spivs in Canary Wharf never have the opportunity to sink this country's economy again. Ensuring that the Leveson Report controls are forced on Fleet Street editors whether they like it or not so that maybe we'll have a press that has to grow up and act responsibly in this country. Kicking private enterprise out of the NHS where it doesn't belong - seriously, what's more important, making a few quick bucks or making sure that we have a healthy population in this country? Ditto the education sector.

I could go on and on until the cows come home but it's safe to say that until Labour starts to try and act vaguely like a socialist party again, I won't be voting for 'em. So where does that leave me? The Greens I s'pose. As a friend recently said to me, you know things have got bad when the hippies are making the most sense. But nevertheless, I will be voting for them at the next election because that's what democracy is about. Use it or lose it.

The solution to the problem that is "The Daily Mail"...

"The Daily Mail". It's horrible, isn't it? Page after page of hateful diatribes against anyone who isn't a white male earning more than £50k a year, relentless scaremongering about stuff that probably will never affect you all written by the sort of people who appear to have all the morals of your average crocodile.

After the whole episode regarding its hatchet job on Ed Miliband's late father, the general response got me thinking. You see, I'm pretty damn sure that there are far more people out there in Britain who disagree with what the Mail says than agree with it, it's just that we don't have the literary version of a megaphone to blast out our message from the rooftops.

But it also got me thinking - really, what sort of person generally has this much anger and bitterness and spitefulness inside them? I mean, just reading someone like Richard Littlejohn's column (well, okay, one of them - any more makes a sane and right-thinking person want to claw their own eyes out just to make the torture stop) makes me think that this is not a happy man. Ditto Melanie Phillips and most of the other so-called "columnists" the paper employs. I mean, you don't come up with this sort of level of hatred and bigotry overnight. There is clearly something very wrong in these peoples' lives - maybe they have an unhappy home life, maybe they've befallen some great personal tragedy or injustice which has scarred them or maybe they're just not sleeping very well and are perpetually grumpy. Either way, the evidence is clear - these people need something to cheer them up and de-stress them. Badly.

I therefore propose the following - we get a deputation together, head over to the Mail's offices in Canary Wharf. With us, we bring tea, biscuits, cake and some kittens and puppies for the people who work there to cuddle. The writers there will have full access to this for the day and once they're suitably chilled out we can get them to work writing their columns. Then maybe they'll see that this isn't such a bad old world after all and that when it all comes down to it, we're all human beings and really it'd be a lot more productive if we all just learned to get on and be happy with what life's dealt us rather than just whinging about it all the time and putting the blame on the easiest scapegoat.

It can't fail I tell you. Now who's with me?

Nu-metal - sorry but it was rubbish. And the indie scene at the time wasn't much better.

So I've been meaning to catch up on this thing for quite a while, it's just been a question of finding the time to do it. And luckily, I'm currently in the middle of an extended weekend with some free time on my hands. Which gives me an opportunity to catch up with some stuff that's been on my mind in recent weeks.

Such as this entry which should really have gone up a month or two ago. It all started off when I ended up reading this here NME article following the recent nu-metal revival this summer which was quickly followed by this rejoinder in the excellent "Louder Than War" webzine.

Now personally, I'm afraid that much as it pains me to do it, I have to side with the NME on this one. Trust me, I was there at the time and nu-metal (and the pop-punk explosion that ran parallel with it) was rubbish. Numbskull jock morons bleating out cringeworthy sexist lyrics and cribbing from the equally misogynistic gangsta rap movement. Think Limp Bizkit, the Bloodhound Gang, Linkin Park, Alien Ant Farm, Wheatus...it's a bit like bringing up a long-suppressed childhood abuse memory. Granted there were a couple of decent bands in there like One Minute Silence, Grand Theft Audio and System of a Down but they were small lights of respectability in a ocean of shite frankly.

However, where the NME then proceeds to completely ruin their own argument is by claiming that groups like the Strokes were the ones who saved us from nu-metal. Erm, nope. If anything, the indie scene of 2001 was just as wretched as the metal scene. Anodyne shit like the Strokes, the Libertines, and their zillion-odd imitators was just as hard to stomach in my opinion. Just in a different way.

I was just cutting my teeth as a music fanzine journalist at this time and the way bands like the Strokes got such an easy ride to the top really made me realise the truth in the old Hunter S Thompson adage about the how "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." Or, as the excellent Sleazegrinder webzine put it at the time, yes, a band like that may look like a million dollars but THAT IS WHAT HAVING A MULTI-MILLIONAIRE DAD BANKROLLING YOU WILL BUY YOU. And really, let's be honest, the Strokes have only ever been a bad third division photocopy of '80s Iggy anyway.

I guess if serving my apprenticeship as both a music writer and a musician in 2001 taught me anything it's that if you want to do things your own way in the music business then you should be prepared to accept that you aren't gonna make any money out of it. But then, maybe that's not such a bad thing - after all, if the only reason you're in a band or making music is because you see it as a career option or a way to make money rather than any sort of love of what you do, it really makes you no better than an X Factor contestant in my opinion.

Anyway, I can hear you saying "Okay smartarse, so what were YOU listening to in 2001?" Well, there was some good music around then, it just kind of flew under most people's radar. Stuff like this...

Y'see, there was some damn good rock 'n' roll around in 2001. But because none of these bands wore designer thrift store clothes that they'd bought on their parents' credit cards or wore backwards baseball caps and sang about how much they hated their parents, they mostly went under the radar which was absolutely criminal. Still, at least their music's held up over the years and really it's got much more merit to it than the blank-eyed career men of Fred Durst Inc/Julian Casablancas Inc.

I guess if there's a motto to this ramble it's this - good music will always be out there kids but don't let the NME or Kerrap! tell you where to find it - go and look for yourself. End of message.