If you are like me, living in London, what a night! I am in a relatively peaceful area but there’s been a strong smell of smoke coming into my living room since early evening, sirens, the odd scream. I don’t think there is much going on my way but hearing about Ealing and now Camden, well it could all “kick off” here too, it could “kick off” anywhere  in any disillusioned British town.

I am not at all surprised at the riots, no matter what the media people and politicians say, it is not purely due to just looting or just about one guy killed by the police. I do not think this rioting and looting would have happened if it wasn’t for many factors, including school holidays. How can they not expect trouble sooner or later? After all  we have had the politicians ripping us off with their expenses, the bankers ripping us off  massively and throwing us into a global recession while most of them still live a life of luxury, the entire global economy has collapsed since Thursday again..and then all the scandal about Rupert Murdoch’s  media empire and corrupt policemen, corrupt politicians….ridiculously expensive University fees suddenly imposed on a whole generation, massive cuts suddenly imposed on a whole generation without warning…well I am not surprised, why would anyone be surprised that we are having riots.

What do these rioters have to lose? They are already being punished before they even started to cause trouble. Prison is probably not that much of a threat compared to a life of poverty for many young people, having been brought up with the idea that materialism is everything.

Meanwhile all those moneyed politicians were quite happy to stay on their posh holidays and it’s only now that the crisis is absolutely Londonwide that they are moving their arses, pathetic lot!

But to any young person reading this I say :

“Enough already, you are  burning your own town, your are hurting your own people, destroying the homes of your friends, families, and neighbours. You may feel disconnected from everything but you are not, everything is cause and effect . You are special but  you need to change things to make things better not worse!”

British society is just f****d. I don’t like capitalism,or conventional lifestyles, but …use your brains! This is going to ruin us all, who is going to want to come here and employ you next summer?

I saw Ken Livingstone speak on the BBC News and I have to say that I agree with the things that he said. Ken will always be a hero for trying to abolish fares on public transport and for being a pain in the neck to Margaret Thatcher, even though I also remember seeing Ken promising the London Irish Community that if they elected him as mayor that he would make St. Patrick’s day a national Holiday,which I found very weird at the time,  much like Boris saying he’d get rid of bendy buses. If you don’t come from London none of this will mean anything to you.

But although I am just another alienated urban dweller, I do feel that this is my town, and I don’t like to see it go up in smoke.

Hippie ideals were political, were/are rebellious but at the heart of it all was collaboration, love and peace, simple.

You can achieve so much more by not wrecking things but by creating things.

But I feel that this is just part of the chaos going on generally and on this I will do one of my personal rants:

Last Thursday and Friday before the rioting, I experienced a series of strange incidents that demonstrated how stressed, angry and impatient Londoners were. For instance, on Friday I nearly got run over by a large Tesco truck who was reversing round a corner, on the pavement. He saw me but reckoned I could probably jump out of the way. I did but only just.

Later I was in a catholic church, yes a church, I know this may sound weird but I had my reasons, and during the mass these two women of a ripe old age were having a loud row, claiming one of them had pinched her seat while at communion, well they were kind of shouting in loud whispers, at the back of the church. But I have never seen a row in a church like this while a mass was taking place.I put it down to the heat, the economic cuts and general stress.

The next day in the afternoon before the riots started,  I was in a Tesco supermarket (yes bad me, how ironic after nearly getting killed by one of their trucks ) ,I was calmly minding my own business when a woman tried to pick a fight with me. She was not crazy, but was deliberately standing in the middle of a limited space and was stopping people from getting past her, i.e. me. I said “sorry” no less than three times to get her to move but she didn’t budge, so I ever so gently, edged my way past her, and she started to pick a fight with me. She shouted to me that:

“English people say ‘excuse me’  not ‘sorry’  if they want someone to move.” I soon left the shop after I realised she was determined to have a row with me, she probably thought I was a tourist. I decided to go home because everyone seemed so stressed, and then I witnessed three more incidents on my way home.

OK, so  it was crowded and it’s summer, but I could really sense that there was more tension in London than usual. One of the next incidents was in a little garden/children’s area. A young man was shouting aggressively at this two year old boy, who he didn’t know, and then the man burst into tears, leaving the toddler and his mother bewildered and upset. I  then saw the man sitting on a bench rocking  slightly to and fro, his girlfriend was rubbing his back and consoling him. He also did not look like he was mentally ill, he looked like an average “respectable” bloke, but maybe everyone is just cracking up under all the global economy meltdown and so many changes and strange events worldwide. As he  was being consoled by his girlfriend, the mother and toddler were left to themselves, clearly shaken and distressed.

So I think these riots that are taking over London and perhaps the country are part of this general chaotic reaction to many stressful and oppressive events.

How is it that people are surprised that there are a load of young people miserable, willing to go to jail, and going  mad?This is how people are feeling after being told they won’t get an education, or a job, or a pension, that their library will close down that everything will be harder and harder. But also young people have had 20 or 30 years of being brainwashed that all that matters is money, sex, what you look like and in particular what objects you can buy that will get you ahead in life or make you feel better about life. 

You only have to look at the T4 presenters on Channel 4 , to know that a whole generation have nothing  but shallow, trite, crap to aspire to.

The police implore “know where your children are and ask them to come home” , but why the hell don’t you know what your children are doing anyway???? Don’t you ever spend time with your children or talk to them?

Some music now, something peaceful, not a typical piece of hippie music, but a modest example of how some popular 70s idealism helped to change mindsets. I think first you have to change your mindset, if you are strong  enough, and then put it into action to change the world.

Cat Stevens  ( BBC Theatre 1971).

I  hope that London can be rebuilt, not just the homes, the shops, the streets, but a soul , a collective heart, a willingness to care for one another, to leave behind our  screens and desks and to face one another honestly.

I think we are going to see a lot more  protest of one sort or another , we have so much monitoring, self-monitoring, outside monitoring, and rules and more rules to make everything in life that might be free or good, complicated and exhausting. Everything in our British  society in 2011 seems to assume, that everyone is a criminal. A criminal before proven innocent. I’d like to be able to go somewhere and help tomorrow, help someone, another Londoner who I don’t know, but I can’t because I don’t have a recent CRB check. I might be a pervert or I might be doing voluntary work when also claiming benefits, or I might be this or that……………..It p*****s me off because most of us are not criminals yet all of us are treated that way, it makes everything ten times more complicated than it needs to be and everything ten times less satisfying to do.

If you treat teenagers like they cannot be trusted and have to be monitored all the time, guess what? They’ll prove you right and start playing up and rebelling and doing all the things you dread. As citizens we are not treated like responsible adults able to make responsible and useful acts and decisions. Don’t get me started!!!!

I am almost sure we will have a curfew soon, except the  government will want to look good and not oppressive, so maybe they won’t bring in a curfew. Even as a hippie I actually would be scared if we had a curfew because I want to feel that I am not living under siege, but I could also understand that if parents really don’t know where their children are,  and London is going is going to be burnt to the ground that a temporary curfew might be a good thing until people calmed down a bit. I never thought I would write that!

So let’s hope somehow young people can find another way, collaborate with one another, but still kick up a fuss.

We are in a terrible financial situation and this society needs to totally reinvent itself. Labour is f****d ,the Conservatives are f****d, the other ones are also f****d.

These stupid political parties are so intent on looking good that their leaders are ineffectual insipid thunderbird puppets, and not in any way credible as leaders with brains ( I don’t mean “brains” the thunderbird puppet). As a slightly older person I see these political leaders as being students at suburban comprehensive secondary school, like the one I went to in south London, which is probably being burnt to the ground as I speak, or write.

Ed Milliband is the harmless naive, gormless first year student, in his school blazer, he still doesn’t know how to knot his tie. Ed’s mother bought his school uniform from John Lewis, it is two sizes too big,  she hopes that he might grow into it one day. His big brother doesn’t want to be seen with Ed in the playground during break time , but sometimes he comes to Ed’s rescue when he is being bullied for his lunch money.

Nick Clegg is the student teacher in English, he gulps with tension,  as he faces his class for the first time, with a sweaty forehead and clammy palms. The head of the English department always gives student teachers the most difficult classes to teach. No one ever listens to poor young Clegg. Maybe once he went into teaching with high ideals to change the world and educate all, but he soon found himself towing the line, having to follow the national curriculum, thinking about the league tables, regardless of their usefulness in children’s real education.

Lastly we have the Head Boy,such a good boy, David Cameron.

Cue music…Kevin Coyne - Good Boy ( 1973 from the album Marjorie Razorblade).

David ( Cameron)  the head boy , likes to earn points for his house. His mother’s au pair, gives him a fresh hankerchief  and irons his tie every morning and if it isn’t done properly the au pair is reprimanded, she also has to make him a fresh organic packed lunch so that he doesn’t have to sit with the poorer pupils with dribbling noses who get school dinners. David knows he is better than the rest. He is in Clegg’s class but intimidates him. David  and his best friend the dim but jovial “Bozo” Boris, sit in the back of the class, sniggering while  exchanging little notes about Clegg  written in Latin. They both know that they do not belong with the masses in this comprehensive school, and will help one another up the social ladder once at University.

But who is the headteacher??? Or should I say who is the Head Mistress of this school? It is of course Theresa May, in her imagination,  she likes to pretend she is Supreme Commander Servalan  of Blakes 7 , as she rules. She has the brains and the gravitas to put all these silly little boys in their place.

Servalan ( Theresa May’s role model ) and Blakes 7

Anyway…on a more serious note , I dread to see how much damage there will be in London once the smoke clears and the sun comes up.  All the time I have been typing this, I have had the BBC News in the background, it’s windy outside and the smokey air is still blowing in through my living room window, sirens are heard in the distance from time to time. I’m not sure 24 hour news coverage is helping matters, young people want to be famous, it is encouraged in every way by endless reality TV shows, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them relish seeing themselves on TV.

Before I go I’d like to leave you with some music from my good friend Frobischer Neck. He has done a wonderful cover of this track by the German band Neu! with some great Mellotron arrangements. Enjoy!

I wish all of you in London ( and elsewhere) Peace and Safety, hoping some inner wisdom could gently guide the next generation in a better way and inspire them to hope and  build an alternative world  instead of  just destroying the old one.

Born2rant

It’s not all the media coverage of corrupt politicians, police, and dodgy journalism that inspires me to write as so many others were already deluging us with commentaries on this. It’s the tragic events in Norway, the bomb blast in Oslo but in particular so many young people killed on the nearby island by a so-called christian that breaks my heart. On top of this I feel personally so moved by the death of Amy Winehouse. I had written previously in this blog how much I wished that someone older with experience of both fame and drugs could help her, guide her, and protect her from the pressures of fame and the music business. I feel she was let down by her entourage although we do not yet know the cause of her death. This entry will be brief due to some problems I am having with my computers/internet.

My heart goes out to all the young people who died in the past 24 hours in Norway and to Amy, a little girl lost in a young woman’s body.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1evzhSast8

http://youtu.be/w1evzhSast8

Love and protect one another ( hatred is weaker than love and seeking a new way through)

Born2rant

I just want to write a little thing,because I am so furious and shocked about the media coverage on the imminent strike in the UK for people working in  public services. I just saw that great educationalist, role model for good behaviour and well-known feminist, James Whale ( please realise I writing with extreme sarcasm!), and to my shock  and horror Miriam Stoppard, both criticising the strike, and teachers in particular,in no uncertain terms for striking and depriving children of their education.

I am so furious with them and the media coverage I have seen so far.

I will just speak about the teachers as education is something I know about. First of all , correct me if I am wrong, but by the end of June all the essential teaching, main exams, have been done and dusted and frankly the last 3 or 4 weeks of the summer term, are taken up with end of year tasks, days out, sports days, school concerts, award ceremonies etc. Many children disappear on cheap holidays with their families at this time. You can more or less write off the last three weeks of the school year in terms of serious academic work . Also most private schools are either closed or closing by the start of July while the state schools run for another couple of weeks. If you wanted to close a school for one day this is not a bad time. In fact I hope all young people will support their teachers and join the march.

Secondly in the past, successive governments have totally disrupted the entire state education system in several ways.The government has closed down schools not for one,but many days during term-time, for years now in order to re-train teachers.Originally called “Baker days” teachers have been constantly forced to change the way they teach , what they teach, how they teach in order to please successive governments , and this has meant many days when schools were closed down.In terms of working parents, frankly there is very little consideration or help at any time of year to cope with school hours, school holidays etc., so an extra day of trying to find childcare for a good cause to will ensure quality of education for one’s children, is no big sacrifice.

The government’s implementation of the National Curriculum , league tables, and adding more and more non-academic responsibilities to the work of teachers, has been far more disruptive to children’s education that one day’s strike, at the end of the school year.

The teachers I know get up at 6. a.m. and sometimes work into the evening planning lessons, they also work at the weekends and holidays correcting work and planning lessons. The lessons planning becoming increasingly ludicrous with the ever-changing  demands of the National Curriculum.

For example one primary school teacher I know, who teaches in a very “rough” area of London, explained how she had to create a lesson teaching the painting technique of “Pointillism” , illustrated with famous paintings by Seurat which included rivers, sea and pools of water, so that this could also double-up as a science lesson on water.

I like creative  education, and I am all for teaching art in schools, but considering many of these children do not have books at home, and come from very economically deprived backgrounds, I think maybe Seurat would not be my  priority  if I were in charge of my own teaching.

Getting back to my point, this teacher retired at 60. But even though she worked tremendously long-hours, she loved her job so much,that she decided to stay on beyond 60 as a supply teacher within the same school.  However by the age of 62, she found her energy level were just too low to keep it up indefinitely, and  even though she is incredibly fit and energetic, at 62 she is forced to retire altogether at the end of this term. She can because she has a pension!

Teaching is demanding physically, emotionally, spiritually and one can expect to work a 60 hour week. It requires great commitment to children and to the future of society. Teachers are under-valued and their teaching is constantly disrupted with each changing government’s new policy, no matter which one is elected.

Therefore I am furious at the media coverage that seems to criticise teachers for wanting to retire before the age of 68  and  who expect to have a good pension to live on.

If I were not a hippie, and I was a dictator who ruled  Britain ( which I can be  in my blog), I would seize the private assets of  bankers and politicians, and their power-mad fantasies, and make them do community service: a couple of years of teaching for free in state schools, also forcing  all their children to attend the schools they work in. If they failed their OFSTED inspections then they would have to try and claim benefits and see how far they got before they would almost inevitably give up!

I would also not allow such bias in the news and other media coverage against the strike. Maybe all these critical media people could do worse than spend a couple of years working in a state school as well and then see if they thought they could still do it at 50 let alone 60 or 68.

I feel this government is trying to re-create class differences in the UK  and prohibit social mobility by creating two types of education. I doubt if private schools would employ full-time 68 year old teachers! If the teachers did not strike it would show that they didn’t understand the nature of their job and that they did not care about the quality of education for children.

Love and Peace

Born2rant

( will be joining protests soon in support of them. I had both a private and a state education, my best school  teachers were without question from the comprehensive I attended.)

I thought I would start by telling you that although I smoked lots of imaginary spliffs yesterday, in real life I can’t get away with such behaviour! Dope makes me feel thoroughly ill, especially a couple of days afterwards when I get what I can only describe as “emotionally weak, panicking easily and slightly paranoid”, so these days I can only get away with the very occasional indulgence and then pay dearly for it afterwards. I love the feeling of getting stoned but I also lose keys, money, and cannot function and do all the stuff I like doing normally if I ever indulge! When I was younger I had a better resistance to these things but also grass now is  just so much stronger than the stuff we had twenty, thirty years ago.It’s a different drug these days.

So at my imaginary Glastonbury I wake up Sunday morning feeling also really rough, like a hundred elephants have been stampeding on my head in my sleep. I also get cramp in my left leg!

My Imaginary Sunday at Glastonbury is a bit of a blur, and I have in reality, little time today to write about it. So I will do this briefly( sorry!).

I look for the Healing Field to see if anyone can help me with my dope hang-over but instead find the International Music  field.

I stop and find a Javanese man who speaks no English, he endeavours to show me how to play a Sundanese zither from West Java, to accompany the singing of his beautiful wife.

After this morning’s music lesson, I traipse across the International Music field and go into a large marquee.What I see next is so bizarre that I wonder if I am imagining it all.On a cinema screen they are showing  the Chinese Revolutionary Opera: Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy ( I don’t think you’ll be seeing this at WOMAD! Please note that the singer/dancer is riding an invisible horse whose movements  are portrayed through percussion)

Leaving the International Music Cinema , I stroll around the field and come across a myriad of old friends and we edge our way to the Krautrock and German Electronica tent where we find a serene performance by Klaus Schulze

For the rest of the day, we gather our resources to make a picnic and find a dry piece of ground next to the main stage. We are all recovering from the previous night, the sun is blazing and we want to take it easy and chat about our news and lives.Some of these people I haven’t seen for ten years, a festival is more efficient than a Christmas card to stay in touch. We are all exhausted but cannot resist dancing when the Ozric Tentacles appear on stage.
Domes of G’Bal

After this we can hardly believe our eyes, as a navy blue box with a flashing light on the top,gradually manifests itself on the stage. It’s the tardis!

As if by magic,out comes the original Dr. Who followed by The Beatles ,( and a small dalek groupie wearing a pink feather boa round her neck) .

We just have to get up and sing along as they start to perform  I am The Walrus.

Inevitably we get stoned again and have to eat an entire packet of chocolate biscuits, plus crepes and drink more beer,until Pink Floyd’s set starts with  Careful with that Axe Eugene.

As we reach the final act, the sun has gone and mercifully the air is pleasant and cooler. A well-loved hippie band takes the stage, they must have some kind of secret sacred store of energy after all these years, and all those drugs.I know I can’t really cope with the pace but somehow this group’s energy is infectious and makes us feel 18 again . Yes it’s  Gong,what a great way to end the imaginary Glastonbury festival!

I go home, tired and too exhausted to go into details! I am sad to go home to an urban space where I am not constantly surrounded by live music and many friends, but we have talked about meeting at Solfest towards the end of the festival season and other festivals in between.

Love and Peace

Born2rant

(still editing this, sorry about errors, it was written in free-flowing time)

In a fit of self-serving blogging to cheer me up, I am going to bore you all with Day Two of my imaginary ideal Glastonbury.

It’s Saturday , so it will be a long day. Weather is cloudy and unsettled, but hey it’s not raining. I got wellies on for the mud and last night had an imaginary sing song with bearded dread-locked strangers playing djembe by the fire until dawn, sharing bottles of scrumpy, herbal cigarettes,many jokes and looking up to spot shooting stars. I was woken up by the dawn chorus of birds and grumpy young tikes, am a bit dazed, but am looking forwards to foraging for breakfast and a cup of good coffee, and to see if there are any solar powered showers.  Can smell lovely bacon but am trying to be veggie. Maybe I can find a nice veggie sausage alternative.
By the time my physical needs are slowly sorted, it should be time for the first act of today ( at my imaginary Glastonbury…cheaper than the real one and with some of my favourite bands).

Led Zeppelin are billed on the Folk Garden Stage, ( playing electric later on Mainstage). Great, that will do to start my day. This pedal-powered stage is adorned with flowerbeds   and with creeping honey suckle plants hanging over the stage instead of a lighting rig ( this is not evident in the footage I have chosen…you need to use your imagination).
Going to California – Led Zeppelin

Well after that beautiful acoustic performance, I sit down on a bale of hay and chat to Jimmy Page about his acoustic guitar tunings and smile at Robert Plant who talks incessantly about Viking Sagas, ( John Paul-Jones has gone off for a morning shit in the backstage portaloo).
It is still dry, but the skies are turning dark grey.Was that a rumble of thunder in the distance, or an amplifier farting angrily? I don’t know, that Honey Rose cigarette I scrounged off Mr. Plant is giving me a strange sense of space, colour and time.
All the tents look the same as I amble back, I spend two and a half hours looking for mine, it’s blue and I bought it from Millet’s.

Found my tent and collapsed like a clean-living middle-aged hippie who cannot cope with intoxicants of any kind. I am woken up by what sounds like a load of balloons being inflated simultaneously.Ah, a herd of young people and their nitrous oxide I think! I don’t approve, but it’s a festival, and the UK do both festivals and excessive alcohol and drug consumption particularly well.

Managed to get a lift in the back of the van of some crew member to get to a supermarket. All the locals look at us with dishevelled hair and screw up their faces as they sense the smells of skunk and woodfires which suddenly seem to emanate from our clothing once indoors.
The security guard follows us around. I buy festival essentials:cuppa soups, rizzlas, rolling tobacco, tea bags, powdered milk,chocolate biscuits,beer,candles, spare lighter,loo roll and a magazine that I will never read.

Getting back into the festival takes a while due to queues of traffic and getting lost on country roads.My driver is a guy I never met before called Botty. I have  known three “Botties” before,and they were all pretty much the same. He wears a hat , a torn t-shirt and an evil grin.  He likes loud classic rock and  heavy metal music , and so while we are stuck in lines of traffic surrounded by fields, he enriches my musical education with his stereo blasting AC/DC, ZZ Top, Rush  and many other rock bands. He tells me I should investigate the Free-floating Anarchy Noise Tent this evening. So later I go and investigate and to my surprise find my old friends Treatment performing on stage.
Treatment -The Hidden Attack (at a Club Dog event at Shoreditch Town Hall?)

After dancing  like a maniac, I join Clive, Adam and co.  and they encourage me to stay to watch Acid Mother’s Temple from Japan.

I love loud musical anarchy.

Later on,it’s getting dark , and I walk around aimlessly, munching on a reasonably-priced and delicious nut-burger ( remember the prices are imaginary),who is this on the Acoustic Politico-Philosophy Stage? Yes it’s Benjamin Zephaniah, oh joy!

At the end of Zephaniah‘s act, an MC appears in a silly jester’s hat with bells on,  a big pink tutu , his hair in plaits dyed purple to match his beard.
He tell us that he runs “Men and Gender in the 21st century workshops”in the Healing Field and also reminds us that Bob Marley is about to appear on the main stage, creating a minor stampede of Benjamin Zephaniah fans to rush out into the rain. Yes it’s raining, out come the plastic macs distributed with free copies of the Guardian.

But as we plod through mud and showers, to get to the main stage , the sun appears,  re-awakening the evening sky. Bob Marley  is resurrected from the dead, like  a Messiah living  briefly once more to sing us songs of love, hope and tribulation all encased in Rasta spirituality.
Concrete Jungle

After Bob Marley, having  danced and sampled spliffs handed to me from smiling multi-coloured strangers in the crowd, who instantly became my friends, Steve Hillage appears on the stage as he was in 1977! (Steve Hillage  is as great now as he ever was but can’t find recent footage with  good sound quality )

I have been dancing my socks off,drinking some beer, met many strangers, had many laughs, got reasonably covered in mud. I have few possessions but  great happiness renewed in my  heart and spirit.
Late at night, now the booze has worn off, there’s a special guest  on the  Literary and Pensive Songs Stage . It’s my favourite songstress: Joni Mitchell.
This is a sung poem really, about a woman who will not commit or give up her freedom, and her abandoned lovers(or fans?). A few tears run down my cheeks as she sings, but they make feel more alive emotionally and I cannot regret them:
Cactus Tree

I need to go to bed now before I get too stoned ( in my imagination) to enjoy the rest of the weekend. I can’t wait until tomorrow. I have no idea who will be playing as I couldn’t afford a programme as usual.

Well I hope you have enjoyed my Saturday at Glastonbury, I have. I just need a time machine, a ton of money and to own a big plot of land near a spiritual place.

Love and Peace
Born2rant

I have been thinking that I need to write a new post but was a bit depressed due to various things and didn’t…until now, and now I’m glad I have started writing because it bloody well cheered me up.  How are you all in cyberspace, how is M15 and how are all you scammers, spammers, lunched out people, and hippies of course, and all those pretending not be hippies even though deep down you really are?

Instead of writing depressing stuff I thought I’d write this daft thing instead:

If I ruled Glastonbury…. Day 1.

I know I’m an old fart...but listening to the uninspiring airs and lyrics of some the blander bands  the crowds love at Glastonbury, this early Friday evening, I thought I’d compile my own  personal  ideal Glastonbury line-up , just to cheer myself up a bit as a boring old fart.

So here it is in no particular order:
Jimi Hendrix singing Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”  while chewing gum and playing around on his guitar with an ease, brilliance and charisma sadly lacking in  the over rehearsed CD quality performances of today ( yes I am being an old complaining fart today).

Next,some Here & Now with their timeless song  Addicted , the first song of theirs I heard and liked before I saw them live for the first time in 1979.
I don’t think this is the same version though, as the one on the Here & Now/Alternative TV  Album ( correct me if I am wrong). I no longer have a copy. I wish someone would upload it on youtube.
I also would have loved to have put up Only Way from their All Over The Show album but only have it on vinyl.

In 1998 I was at Glastonbury in the monsoon, and decided to go and watch Tori Amos who I knew little about.Thanks to the rain, I stood in the front “row” , so close I could see my own reflection in her piano. I saw her do this amazing performance, every song  was done with the most amazing psychotic passion, and she inspired me to go back to London and play and sing to my teeny audiences with a new crazy confidence.

I make no apologies for including Genesis with their early English subversive songs.
However they do feature Phil Collins , I must apologise very deeply for that.
This is Selling England by the Pound from 1973. I think we will be selling England by the pound very soon, to a stronger economy, perhaps China, Germany or to  aliens who are secretly living among us with wardrobes lined with gold , platinum and diamonds they brought to trade with us in case of emergencies. I assure you I’m not stoned , just rambling to entertain myself.

At sunset I think there should be all night anarchy from Hawkwind ( Urban Guerrilla again):

Some English folk at sunrise with the lovely Anne Briggs singing Living by the Water.

I must go to bed now, having successfully ignored the 2011 Glastonbury procedings on the TV  in the background for several hours now, and created my own Friday night/Saturday dawn alternative line-up.

I bid you goodnight and actually I wouldn’t want to see these acts at Glastonbury at all, it would have to be at a new “Peace, Love and Green Anarchy” free festival at Stonehenge .
I’m sure I will hear some good music this weekend on the TV from Glastonbury but I’m not sure if much of it will be innovative or spontaneous. Cynical old fart I am!

Love & Peace
Born2rant
p.s. now there’s an act on as I type this who I like a lot , I think the music improves the later it is. Ah it’s Primal Scream , now that the vocals are over and they are having a good jam, I quite like them.More old farts like me.

Yesterday evening, during the rush hour, a strange thing was going on in the West end of London. I was in the street and people were rushing about without scowling. In the packed supermarket people were scrambling to buy champagne, nibbles and cakes and even the staff seemed happy, partly because they were about to go home and get a day off. On over-packed tube there were happy French tourists, happy Americans and drunk bureaucrats coming home from work after a few drinks.

On my home territory there was a similar atmosphere and last night at around midnight the streets went quiet, without traffic, just the odd shouting drunk. Was everyone on Prozac? Was there a second coming of Mohammed/Jesus/etc.. or maybe we had all somehow won the lottery , saved planet earth from ruin forever, or maybe The Beatles had travelled from a time machine in the sixties and were doing a gig on some central London rooftop?

No! I opened my copy of the Evening Standard and found there was a wedding about to take place and euphoria had spread like a happy virus in the rush hour.

I saw no opposition to this wedding, because the paper said how they’d had them all arrested beforehand by rounding up the usual suspects. Ah isn’t it lovely to live in a free country where the police know where you live, and where London can be sanitised, cured of the presence of beggars, tramps, and people who don’t fit in the frame of a pretty wedding photo.

But who is this Kate woman, someone who smiles constantly with no visible traits of personality ? I’d like to see her interviewed by Jeremy Paxman for a good hour, her smiley fake tan face, plain clothes and pretty hair are not enough information for me. Maybe I should have watched the film about how William met Cate or Kate? You see I don’t even know how you spell her nickname.

They will be travelling in the same Rolls Royce that was attacked when it strolled into a group of random protesting anarchists, how very symbolic and a bit pathetic. Yes, like so many plebs I woke up and decided to watch it on the box, some of my close acquaintances are meeting dressing up in wedding guest clothes, waving Union Jacks, and will be having a wedding breakfast with lots of sherry and champagne.

Apart from my cynicism, I have to say I do hope that the wedding goes on without any terrorist attack or people getting harmed from overcrowding etc.. But I think a protest, somewhere should be allowed and if I was Prince William I’d be a bit p***** off that I get demoted to Duke of Cambridge. That’s because there is a Royal Secret. The Queen will never die!!!!! She is here forever in her pastel clothes, hats and condescending attitude to us plebs who pay for the lot of them. The last joke must be on us!

Some people think this song was written by Hawkwind but actually this is only a cover, the lyrics were written by the Queen in 1953.

I must go now, I have work to do. Plus must turn off the  TV, just saw Victoria Beckham posing in her funeral outfit ,her eyes radiating  dark rays of evil!

P.S. I hope the Queen doesn’t die today or I will be arrested for making a joke about it on my blog!

Love and Peace

Born2rant

A personal rant on yesterday’s events in London…

Did you you on the march or take part in some form of protest yesterday? In which case I applaud you, about time people made their feelings known while the lives of so many people are being trashed by the government.

But I have mixed feelings about the protests in London yesterday. This morning I must say I find it all a bit depressing. I cannot see any party I would want to vote for or any group I would wholeheartedly support to replace our current government. I see anger and protest on the streets but no solutions. All the parties and all the extreme activists are playing the media game, trying to maximise their popularity by getting air time and I feel that where media manipulation occurs, sincerity is lacking.

Also I don’t agree with violence towards other people at all, and I do not see violence as a solution.  I find myself upset at reports of  people attacking the police with nasty devices, they really let everyone else down.

In terms of media footage, I was overjoyed to see a load of smiling peaceful young people occupying Fortnum and Mason’s , to me that was a peaceful but disruptive statement.If the level of direct action had remained non-violent it would have been a thousand times more effective . They would have gained the respect of all but shop-keepers. But then who was it who said that Britain is a nation of shop-keepers?

I must state, humbly and apologetically, that I was not able to march on the protest due to illness and also could not find anyone to with, which is a bit sad. Next protest I am going to drag friends or find people to march with. I would do peaceful direct action, but I am sure those who did their peaceful bit of building occupation got caught up in the crowd of violence and chaos that ensued, and being a bit ill and a bit older, that does not really appeal.

However later in the day I managed to get to the Hyde Park “rally”, arriving quite late at 4.30pm due to disruption on public transport. By then loads of people from the march were just arriving, but all the speakers,or any musicians on the main stage had scarpered! Instead it was cold and there wasn’t much going on.

They’d put Ed Milliband and the head of the TUC up on stage at around 1p.m. but that was clearly not for the benefit of the majority of the protesters. The march had only set off at 11.30 a.m. from Victoria embankment and by 1 pm only a few of them would have arrived. Instead it seems to me that they were speaking earlier for two reasons: 1. because they knew there would be rioting by late afternoon 2. to get maximum news coverage before the riots.

I find this very disappointing. I remember on so many protests where then there were speakers and bands all evening, especially in Trafalgar Square . People used to march the opposite way, meeting at Speaker’s Corner and marching up to Downing Street, and celebrations in the evening in Trafalgar Square. I like the idea of marching up to Downing Street on a weekday and shouting enough so that the Prime Minister can hear me!

So anyway, I thought I could take part in the peaceful event somehow by attending the rally in the park. Coloured by my seventies youth recollections, iI half expected to find the 2011 equivalent of bands UB40, The Damned, Aswad and Benjamin Zephaniah on stage…ah those were the days…

At least they could have had Annie Lennox to sing us a song! I think it’s lame that there wasn’t more going on after 5 pm.

I was not alone in arriving at that time, there were others on my bus. So I followed the police helicopters to try and find something interesting to join in with and see. I tried really hard to find the trouble but to be honest there wasn’t an awful lot of it.

As I walked around Mayfair there was this strange atmosphere with pubs overflowing with smiling people with their placards, having a pleasant drink after the march, and then in the background a couple of helicopters, hearing the odd firework and flare with police vans tearing around the place. I walked past one building that was guarded very heavily with armed police officers who regarded me with great suspicion, I think it was a private men’s club, but not sure, it could have been some kind of palace. I don’t frequent those kind of places!

I came across a police line around the Hilton Hotel and they let me walk straight through, as they evaluated quite rightly , that I was not about to smash it up. Although at that moment when they let me through I had this little fantasy of proving them all wrong and having a secret bomb strapped to my back! I was unwell so had to boringly go home then.

On the bus home, from the top deck I saw some trouble in Hyde Park, with lots of noise, a fire, flares and fireworks but then watched the rest on TV.

My son phoned me late in the evening to check I hadn’t been arrested or kettled. I’d like to think that he misjudged me, but the truth is, he was probably right, I like to be part of what’s going on, in a non-violent way. I’m getting a bit old to want to be arrested, especially by a police officer half my age,but I would have PEACEFULLY occupied a building.

The media will now say how terrible this all is and how these few people hijacked an otherwise peaceful demonstration.However……..I think your average Joe Public, or Mary Public, or Sexually Ambiguous Public , is probably angry enough to be quite happy, on a subconscious level, to see the banks getting a few windows broken.

I also found the direct action informative, as I did not know that Fortnum and Mason’s was related to Primark and that both owed millions of pounds in tax. So actually they fulfilled their goal in getting that kind of publicity. But fires, violence, intimidating people, no I’m totally against that.

All in all it was an amazing event but what depresses me is that I don’t think it has changed much. Maybe the changes will happen gradually as more protests occur, which they will. If I were Prince Wills , I’d put my wedding on hold for now!

I think we need a new party that will actually represent the needs of the public, and help us out of the financial mess we are in in a constructive rather than destructive way. Ed Milliband and the labour party have no credibility of any sort and neither do the others, so it is likely that there will be chaos until some viable alternative is created.

These are times of revolution and chaos, things are getting shaken up in the world down to level of the earth’s crust.

I think we need to start thinking positively and look for strong positive and creative solutions.

So much has changed. Last year when I was on the T.U.C. march it was a totally different situation, not so well attended, but already  many strong ground level political organisations run by  mostly young highly educated passionate people were emerging. What a change in the past four years since I started my little blog, urging youth to become political and to rebel. They have far more to say than me now.

a bit of music “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery”

Love and Peace

Born2rant

I’m not sure anyone apart from myself will read this…

Yes, I know, I ask you to subscribe and then disappear in a puff of smoke, if it’s any consolation my nearest and dearest hardly hear from me either due to 1. a lot of studying 2. a lot of writing music 3. a lot of being ill 4. a lot of trying to see my boyfriend and other friends and relatives when not doing 1., 2., and 3..

I really don’t know who has the time to spend online or watch TV, I know I don’t these days, and when I do, I feel bored unless it’s something gripping.

Yes I rebelled against online addiction some time back. I guess I am a hypocrite writing about this on my blog.

I am about to rant in a totally different direction to what I was originally going to .Before I do so , can I just urge any hippies or people who care about our society on any level, to go on the march in London tomorrow Saturday 26th of March, leaving Victoria Embankment at 11 a.m. If like me you oversleep , you can always join it all later in Hyde Park.

This is in protest to all the cuts the government is making in many public services,and many jobs lost, as opposed to making those bloody bankers and politicians who allowed this to happen and encouraged so many to live “on credit” i.e. in debt, for the past two decades, suffer financially themselves.

However having recently studied the history of Cambodia and China, I cannot say I am a communist, although more equality and a fairer society with equal access to education, services and jobs , no matter what background you come from is important to me. But I’m not a communist, I don’t believe in dictatorships as a rule, I like to dictate to myself .

Yes in terms of people spending all their time online. I find this quite disturbing, on the one hand if you are unemployed or ill or just don’t know how to make friends in a stressful urban or remote landscape, then it can certainly make you feel less isolated and validated, a lifeline.

However I have known several people who spend their entire time online and although they may be happy enough on one level, its clear there can be problems.

I am about to say something very flippant, so I apologise beforehand…

Recently a friend of mine told me of his very depressed female friend who had stopped going out, both her and her husband spend their days online in separate rooms and barely speak to one another. She plays online games and now never contacts friends, has abandoned her work and studies and is on anti-depressants, and drinks heavily while gaming all day long. This woman was recently very distressed  because a close friend of hers  had committed suicide. My friend , who was relating this story to me , said he was baffled to hear this news from her. This girl has barely seen anyone or gone out the door for two years. She elucidated  ( ooh that’s a posh word, I didn’t know I was that eloquent, sorry , back to the story) she elucidated by saying her “close friend” was another character in the game she played online.

I said ( here comes the flippant  remark),” You should have asked her if she was an Orc!”.

I then withdrew that comment as it was totally insensitive , but without wanting to sound like an American commenting on my myspace profile, OH MY GOD!  This is so wrong. People spending all day pretending to be other people and fighting battles and killing eachother all day, surely cocaine must be better for you, at least you have to get out and talk nonsense at other people for a bit ( only joking kids, repeat after me “drugs are bad, okay?”). Her unemployed husband is addicted to buying and selling his shares all day, even though he is not wealthy. There must be thousands of people now doing this every day,  even with a poor and unreliable economy.

How long will it be before we need to have rehab centres for people who do too much online gaming, or trading online and ending up broke? If all the libraries, all the leisure centres, parks,all the meeting places for people, like all the acoustic clubs that disappeared due to having to have some kind of expensive licence, if all the places where you can meet people face to face are either too expensive to get to, or are in areas that are too dangerous to get to at night, if all the neighbours stay indoors and never speak to one another, if old friends lose touch and never phone, we will all become incapable of face to face, person to person contact, what will it do to our mental health? I cannot stand the thought of  a whole wave of people staying indoors living out some kind of fantasy online and then getting overly depressed once they turn their back on the computer screen and see the grey reality of their lives and all the problems and insecurities they cannot face up to or solve.

With a good network of friends , people can pull together. It is uncanny how in some parts of the world where people are poorest, and that they survive better emotionally than Westerners surrounded by so many luxuries. We lack community, we lack a sense of belonging, of being able to rely on one another. But I don’t believe in Cameron’s “Big Society” , he clearly makes one rule for business and another for everyone else.

So I am hoping tomorrow we will see a show of unity on the march through London, and maybe make some new friends. I was going to write about Japan and the uncanny synchronicity I experienced with those events, although my connection is trivial being so far away.But I think on a subconscious level we are all linked. …maybe another time I’ll go into that one.

In the meantime I hope you get to the march tomorrow and if not I hope you support those who do and do not believe those who try and make you think we are a load of thugs….and that’s another thing, making squatting illegal, NOW? When people are going to be struggling more than ever, let students squat empty pubs, empty derelict buildings that no one wants to buy or improve, why not?

OK enough ranting…I’ll put on some music. I can’t bring myself to play western music at the moment, as I have been trying to write  music influenced by  other  cultures and am infatuated with it.So instead I’ll put this on, one of my favourite Indonesian tunes I found on You tube from Sunda West Java. Enjoy and have a good and safe weekend.

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it” Mahatma Gandhi.

Here is this beautiful clip of Gamelan Degung enjoy:

Love and Peace

Born2rant

Some of you may have found that you have been locked out of this site. A BIG SORRY to you. I want to make my blog private for various reasons and yet I know that I have some faithful readers. I don’t write very often because my life is too busy with good but exhausting projects.

I know some of you still would like to visit this blog so here’s the deal:

For this weekend I am making my blog public again and then on Monday I will set it to private. That means you will not find it through a search engine which will mean less intruders who are not genuine hippies at heart!

To continue to have access you need to either copy and paste

http://hippiecounterculture.wordpress.com

into your browser…

or bookmark me and check in from time to time

or subscribe to know if I have posted anything new.

If I feel I need to be even more private than that, then I will limit access to subscribers only.

In the meantime, I have of late , been less concerned with British hippies and more with music videos in South East Asia, as well as my own music projects.

So here are some videos I would like to share with you.

Firstly this band from Indonesia called Project Pop. I love them to pieces and so does most of South East Asia. They don’t have a specific genre but like to parody different kinds of pop music. Here they are with a song where Metal Rockers and Dance DJs do battle called Dugem vs.Metal (Dugem refers to Indonesian House Music):

and now for something completely different, some beautiful Molam music from one of the highland tribes in either Laos or Northern Thailand, I love this music and there’s tons of it online from the most insipid pop to this:

Ready for some more delights? Well this video just makes me smile. This little guy is singing in Isan and plays a character from an Isan tribe also in Thailand. I don’t understand the words but you really don’t need to , just watch the crazy video. He  falls in love with a city girl who comes to visit his village as a tourist to look at the arts and crafts and meet the tribes people, but when she leaves his heart breaks and he must find her again. This guy has tons of charisma, I don’t know his name but he is a star! This is a style of music called Luktung ( country music) but to me it sounds like just a great tune.

In the UK , long ago,  pop and rock artists got way too cool to write strong melodic pop tunes. London bands are the worst, they may be good, but the whole music media machine has ruined their ability to see that writing or playing good music is not necessarily a British or American thing. No musician should ever rest on their laurels!

One last video, my favourite Project Pop again with a song called Dangdut is the music of my country, a call for peace and understanding and an end to divisions between the many different cultures within Indonesia through the magic of  Dangdut Music. This was a huge hit in many parts of Asia, I put this version up because of the English subtitles but there are clearer versions both in sound and image on youtube. Dangdut is a pop style in Indonesia popular in the 70s , 80s,90s and beyond, derived from Indian film music and various types of Malay and Indonesian pop music.  In this video there are symbollic references to the pop music culture of Indonesia but I won’t go into it here, you can read more about this on this site myindo.com/story/198.asp

I hope the recession brings with it some new political and thought provoking music in the West.

In the meantime here is Project Pop with Dangdut is the music of my country…

Enjoy and subscribe or bookmark this page ( even if I am ranting on about Indonesian Pop!)

(watch this and the previous “Project Pop” vid  seven  times and then try not to sing the tune in your every spare minute)

Love and Peace and Prosper ( subscribe!)

Born2rant