How to undermine your credibility in two words: David Icke
March 2nd, 2008 at 02:02

I went to another gig yesterday evening, to see Anti-Flag play at Birmingham Academy. Predictably, it was really good. I say “predictably” because I also saw them playing in Peterborough a week ago, so knew what to expect.

For the uninitiated, Anti-Flag are a highly politicised punk band: all of their songs stick it to the man in one way or another, and are effectively protest songs, with the choruses just being chants that you chant along with in agreement. As luck would have it, I agree with most of their politics.

So they have a pretty agreeable message - anti-war, politicians are bad, racism and sexism are bad, that sort of thing. Unfortunately, towards the end of the gig, one of the band had to go and sour the whole gig experience by revealing where the band’s philosophy comes from.

“Have you guys heard of David Icke?”, one of them asked in a bizarre bit of stage banter. The room fell silent, apart from me, who let out a rather loud laugh at the very notion of Icke being mentioned. “He’s a bit weird… but he writes some really good books”, they continued. “No… I didn’t hear that right did I? They can’t be talking about celebrity-crackpot-who-thinks-that-the-royal-family-are-lizards David Icke… can they?”

It wasn’t even a “Haha, he’s a crackpot” angle. They were mentioning him as if he were a credible source of… well, anything. They could have mentioned anyone else and my respect wouldn’t have dropped as much. They could have logically cited, say, Noam Chomsky or John Pilger as a good writer who reflects their political views… or could have gone back further to Kant or Marx… hell, they could have said that their political views are derived from the work of Kerry Katona and their credibility wouldn’t have nosedived so quickly.

Mortified, I tried to put this behind me and enjoy the rest of the gig… although it all felt a little tainted.

At the end of the gig, I saw one of the band milling around and meeting fans, so I decided to confront him. At this point, I was on a post-gig high, so I was rather animated, loud and sweaty, so rather than construct a well thought out academic argument, I ended up approaching Chris Barker, the bassist and, waving my arms in the air, cried “David Icke?! He’s MENTAL“.

Slightly taken aback, Sane replied, to my relief, “Yeah… I don’t know why we mentioned him… he’s pretty crazy!”. My respect for the band rose slightly.

So… I guess it was all okay in the end, and the band aren’t hopefully that mental… although I now get a feeling my admiration of Anti-Flag and their music is going to be a lot more difficult to defend when confronted by critics moaning about my favourite bands. I imagine its a bit like a Mark Speight fan feeling obliged to defend Speight in the face of murder allegations.

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Nutter of the week
November 14th, 2007 at 01:03

I got a later than usual train back home today - the quarter past nine. This exposition is probably unnecessary, but does perhaps help me frame this week’s nutter as a weird drunk, rather than just the regular type of nutter who hangs around train stations as a matter of course.

The train was approaching my stop, so I went to stand by the door, where I discovered a man gripping both of the rails at either side of the door, pushing his head, as if looking through railings, towards the window in the door, seemingly talking to himself.

He reeked of booze, so I tried to look away, finding myself taking an extra-careful interest in a route map on the other side of the carriage. Unfortunately, he started to talk to me.

“‘Scuse me, brother”, he said in a cool jazz-man New Orleans accent, “has the train stopped yet?”.

“Er, no”, I replied whilst looking at him looking out of the window. I realised he was wearing sunglasses. I couldn’t work out whether he was blind and asking a valid question, or was just determined to try and look cool and jazz-like.

After an agonising few moments of awkward silence, where I hoped he wouldn’t ask any further questions or attempt to conduct any other conversation, the train finally came to a halt. At which point, the weird jazz-man walked back into the seating part of the carriage and sat down.

Bizarre.

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Threats of physical violence
August 14th, 2007 at 01:53

When I was down in London the other day, I was with Katy, and we went for lunch at Pizza Hut - it was the one near the site of the failed Tiger Tiger nightclub bombing in Piccadilly Circus, so we were really living life on the edge.

As we were sitting waiting for our food, for some reason Katy made a vague punching fist gesture towards me (you’d be surprised how often my friends seem to do this to me) for conversational reasons that escape me (for the sake of context, assume it was after a hilarious sexist quip).

Suddenly, one of the waiters chipped in: “No fighting in here, please… you’ll have to take it outside”. He was perhaps 40 years old and sounded like a proper cockney - I imagine he is the sort of person who would use rhyming slang as a matter of course rather than when trying to sound like a Londoner.

“What have you done?” he asked in his best cockney accent, to which I could only manage to respond with genuine but perhaps slightly over-forced laughter. “Do you want any help?” he said to Katy, as he himself clenched his fists and mimed a punching motion.

Its not that I don’t mind receiving threats of violence from strangers… it’s just a little odd. And it made me worry as he looked like the sort of bloke who might “know some people”.

Maybe he used to be a contract killer, but work dried up when the made murder illegal a few years ago, so he’s turned his hand to waiter-ing (waiting?), and has a lot of pent up aggression?

After we’d finished eating he came back. Rather than ask if we wanted the bill or whether everything was alright, he again made his hands into fists and said directly to me with some faux-indignation “Are you still alive?“. It was almost as if he’d expected me to be a bloody corpse by the time he returned.

I don’t know what it is about Piccadilly Circus - first terrorists try (and fail) to bomb somewhere close to where I was two days after I was there, and now a passive aggressive threat. Weird.

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Nutter of the week
July 7th, 2007 at 01:13

I was in Leicester earlier today with Katy, and we were walking past some road works. For the past eternity they’ve been re-paving the majority of the city centre. For some reason, when discussing how long it is taking with Katy (we’d exhausted discussions on the sciences and the arts, clearly) I thought it’d be suitably wry to claim that it’s “political correctness gone mad!”

Cleverly, not only was I remarking on the redundancy of the term, satirising the right-wing obsession with applying it to all sorts of tenuous situations, but it was also highlighting how ridiculous it was that they’re still digging up the pavements. Er, basically I was just talking shit and proving that I’m not very witty in real time conversation.

So I exclaimed “it’s political correctness gone mad!” waving my arms about to emphasise my words, when completely unexpectedly, a passing pedestrian decided to take me to task on my misapplication of the term.

The man, who to paint a picture , was about 35, of moderately large build with short black hair, quite excitedly said “It’s not political correctness gone mad! They’re [the builders are] all white! Where’s the Muslims?!”

Whilst he had a point, it strikes me as slightly odd that you’d interrupt other people’s conversations you’re overhearing to point this out. It was just a bit… unexpected. If I wanted to be engaged in conversation by strangers I’d hang out near some charity muggers or post a deliberately contrary opinion on an internet forum.

So I’m going to award him my Nutter of the Week award. I admit this is probably the lamest yet.

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Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
July 1st, 2007 at 01:18

Birmingham is an awful city, and is full of awful people, yet for some unfathomable reason, decent bands still insist on playing there.

I went to see Me First and the Gimme Gimmes at Carling Academy, with Bouff. They do out-of-genre covers of famous songs in a punky sort of style. It’s basically a combination of the two greatest things in music: out of genre covers and punk. It’s basically the only time you’re going to see a circle pit to Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Getting into Birmingham was a veritable nightmare - every road seems to simply splinter off of every other road, which confused the satnav, and the people of Birmingham don’t seem to understand basic traffic signals. As I drove through the centre, they’d just haphazardly wander into the road without a care in the world. At one point, approaching a pedestrian crossing with the lights on green, two women with pushchairs simply walked out into the road. I’d have had a billion points on my license if I wasn’t such a careful motorist.

After eventually getting parked, in a multi-storey car park on which most of the lights were not working (resulting in near darkness), we had a look around the city centre. It was full of hundreds of thousands of awful people - aside from the pedestrians who are no more coordinated in a pedestrianised area than in the middle of a public highway, we were approached by two nutters on two separate occasions.

The first woman was after a light for a cigarette, who could simply be ignored. A few minutes later a shifty looking man said “excuse me guys”, whilst I had my mobile phone out. Now, if you’re the critical type, you’re probably thinking “he didn’t look shifty, James is just paranoid and using loaded vernacular language”, but he really did look shifty. He had the sort of stereotypical murderer face - covered in unusual bumps and battered through years of socio-economic hardship, with an expression set to a permanent grimace. Like Cherie Blair.

I said “Sorry!”, and continued walking, as I thought he was going to grab my phone, “you haven’t even listened to what I was going to say yet!”, he cried back at us. I don’t think I missed much - I doubt his pearl of wisdom would have been that earth-shattering. Phone snatchering, maybe.

The gig was good though. It was a little disappointing that bassist Fat Mike (of NOFX fame) had pulled out, but he was replaced by Eric Melvin, also of NOFX. I’m not terribly familiar with the Gimmies discography, so didn’t really identify most of the songs - although they were all covers. They did the famous song from the musical Annie, Somewhere over the Rainbow, Ghost Riders in the Sky, I believe I can Fly, Don’t cry for me Argentina, that sort of thing. All with thrashy guitars and shit.

Unfortunately, the gig was soured slightly by the pit. I don’t mind people jumping about and so on, and my tolerance for this sort of thing is usually quite high, but I got the impression that the pit contained less a group of people enjoying the music in a heavily physical way and more a bunch of wankers being twats. It got ridiculous- during the verses of the songs, the twattier ones (who take their shirt off to prove out totally hardcore they are) went around motioning to clear an empty space, so that when the chorus kicked in, they could all run at each other as fast as possible. They must have really wanted to mosh to the theme tune to The Spy Who Loved Me (”Baby, you’re the best” - that one).

Hilariously, they misjudged the start of the fast bit a few times, but started moshing anyway, so what I ended up seeing were a bunch of people running at each other and going mental, but to really slow music.

It was a good gig though - bit of a shame though that they didn’t play their version of “These are a few of my favourite things” with the start which plays to the tune of Bad Religion’s Generator.

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Nutter of the week
May 31st, 2007 at 00:08

Driving home from work today, I stopped at some traffic lights and waited for an old man to cross. It was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen.

Actually, that’s a slight exaggeration, as I’ve seen the internet.

He was your typical old unhinged type - slouch, stick, lack of teeth, looks like he’d murder you if absolutely necessary.

He ambled across the crossing, but as he did so, stopped every few seconds and turned to the three waiting lanes of traffic, and waved, looking at the drivers. He then, bizarrely, waggled his finger at the drivers, as if he was telling us off. Before walking a few more steps.

As he was passing in front of me, with the lights already on green, he looked straight at me with a face that said “Haha, I am slightly delaying your progress”.

I just wanted to write about this so I know that it definitely happened, and I wasn’t just station at a green traffic light, as has happened many times in the past.

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Nutter of the week
March 14th, 2007 at 01:10

I was travelling to university on the train today, and I met Katy on there. After a few minutes, our conversation got on to the topic of the TV series 24. All of a sudden, a head popped up from the seats behind where I was sitting, and there was an old man with a battered face and a raincoat staring at Katy, who was sitting opposite me.

“I do not wish to hear your conversation”, he said in a quiet, considered way. We were probably being quite loud by the standards of the rest of the carriage, so Katy apologised and we spoke more quietly, with no projection in our voices.

A couple of minutes passed, and he popped up again, and still seemed to have an issue with the volume which we were speaking at. After repeating that we were speaking too loudly, he offered some advice: that you express things with words and not volume. He laboured this point quite a bit - and Katy who had merely been slack-jawed and making a monotone squawking sound prior to this sagely advice, changed her tune.

We reduced our volume further - literally speaking no louder than a “loud whisper”, in the sort of way you do if you’re whispering but want to make it obvious that you’re trying to conceal something.

A couple of minutes later, and nearly at the station, the man’s head appears over the top of the seat again. He seemed pretty irate this time, as you could hear the anger in his voice as he stressed each syllable: “Words… Not… Volume“. I was getting pretty worried at this point- he seemed to be focusing all of his anger on Katy and not me, so I was worried that I might have had to intervene and try and mediate the situation, by saying “leave it out, it’s not worth it”.

I thought Katy was going to explode with anger, as you could see it in her face that was covered in pointy eyebrows and a tense jaw. I could see her clenched fists as she calmly, but firmly replied something along the lines of “I’m sorry sir, but I have reduced the volume at which I am speaking, and I am sorry if this offends you. I’m getting off at the next station so you only have to put up with it for a couple of more minutes”. Imagine her saying that entirely in italics and underlined, as that is what it sounded like.

The unfortunate thing was that the bloke, the Nutter of the Week, seemed to win. Slightly shocked at what had happened made us a bit lost for words, meaning that all we could do was silently look at each other with an expression of “what the fuck?”. As we left the train, a couple of other passengers commented that he was an arse, which was fun.

I think the strangest thing is that he seemed to only pick on Katy and not myself - despite me being equally as loud an, er, loudmouth, and at least twice as arrogant. We’ve come up with a few working theories to explain his actions:

• He watches 24, and doesn’t want to hear any spoilers from, er, season one.
• He’s old, and thus assumes that women should be seen and not heard, hence why he didn’t mind me shouting my mouth off.
• He’s old, and thus homophobic, and possibly Christian, because at the time Katy was explaining that she thought one of the actresses in 24 was “pretty”. And the word “pretty” is obviously a youth slang term for her desire to have a lesbian encounter with the person she is describing… and this offends him?
• He’s just a nutter.

I think the last theory is the most likely - after all, you’d have to be slightly unhinged to pick an argument over a minor issue on an almost empty train. I think most sane people would simply opt not to cause a fuss and move seat if they can’t bear “raised voices”, as that’s the British thing to do.

So yeah, that’s the first Nutter of the Week in a while. At least he didn’t try to mug me.

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Cultural Exchange
March 2nd, 2007 at 23:01

I haven’t been to university all week, because lectures have been cancelled due to a “cultural exchange” - they’ve invited a load of celebrities in to give talks, basically. In keeping with the spirit of cultural exchange, I went to see two white, middle-class, British men talk about what they do. Specifically: Alan Yentob and Andy Hamilton.

Alan Yentob is the creative director at the BBC, and he gave an interesting talk, using exciting media buzzwords like “360 degree commissioning” and “user generated content”, and excellently, gave us an exclusive insight into the Google/BBC deal that was only announced about an hour previously. It was almost as if I was on the bleeding edge of the new media zeitgeist, whatever that means.

After giving a nineteen minute answer to the question of “What is a creative director?”, the audience were allowed to ask him questions. And this is when I remembered why I hate the general public. The bloke sitting next to me decided to commit the heinous crime of asking a stupid question. He tried to take issue with Yentob, who is also a former controller of BBC Two, over a programme about art transmitted over two years ago, claiming that it was “woefully inadequate”. He seemed to get quite worked up over this - he’d even got the book of the series out of the library to illustrate his point. It makes me wonder why when he saw that a top BBC exec was coming to town his mental process was approximately “I know, I’ll go and ask him about an old TV series that he had no hand in, and pick him up on minute details, and try and express my conspiracy theories about copyright issues surrounding the artwork shown on the series, in detail, in front of audience of one hundred people”.

It was embarassing to watch as he just hammered on and on about this art show that nobody saw, nor even cared about. He was probably about 45 too - shouldn’t he have been, er, working or something?

And he was sitting next to me? What is it that makes me some sort of nutter magnet?

Finally, when they got around to taking more questions, the bloke from the university running the show seemed to have a problem determining people’s genders. Hilariously he mistook a bloke for a woman. Then later on the other way around. It was probably funnier if you were actually there, but I want to note it on the internet so that this moment in time is archived somewhere.

Andy Hamilton was good too - he’s the baldy hairy chap who writes comedy for Radio 4 and telly. I can’t really think of much to say about him as the audience were slightly more sane, and I seem to have lost the ability to describe events in, er, bloggy way.

I think the most terrifying part of the day was discovering that Alan Yentob had parked his Jaguar (complete with driver) outside the fire escape on the specifically “do not park” bit, so that if the building had burnt down, we’d all have burnt alive inside of it.

UPDATED: Listen to the entire Yentob talk by clicking here. (82.8mb - yeah, it is a bit big.)

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Big Issues
March 2nd, 2007 at 01:02

Yesterday on the way to work I bought a Big Issue, in order to make myself feel better about my position in society. As the transaction was taking place, the seller tried to make some light conversation.

I’m not a fan of light conversation - especially with big issue sellers, so the very notion of having to make conversation scares me. What might he discuss? The weather? Sports? The reason I’m in town?

“Are you Christian?”, he asked.

“WTF?”, I thought. I felt slightly cheated - I wanted a Big Issue, but not that sort of Big Issue. Have Christian’s reached the point where they’ve got to disguise themselves as the homeless if they want people to not deliberately avoid them when they’re trying to harass people in the city centre?

I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond - I didn’t want to get into an argument about religion as I had work to get to and no peers within earshot to impress with my incisive wit and facetious analogies.

“Er, no”, I replied, eventually. I’m hoping I didn’t spend as long standing silently pondering his question as I did describing it to you, as that would have been awkward.

“Atheist?”, he enquired. I thought about this - I thought that if I said I was he’d have spent time trying to convert me, so I decided to meet him half way. I said “Agnostic” as I began to walk away, realising that for some reason I was discussing religion with someone who it was only a matter of time before I said something that offended him.

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Back at Uni
October 4th, 2006 at 02:05

So, I’m back at Uni at long last. I knew I was back into the old routine when I got on board my late train yesterday morning to the unmistakable smell of urine. The dischevelled old man who takes his small dog with him on the train everyday is still travelling on the railways.

I’m not entirely sure what he does, or what his purpose is, as I’ve only ever seen him on the train. He can’t be travelling to work, as he looks like a tramp, carries a dog in his arms and stinks of piss. Its almost unbearable- even if you’re at the other end of the carriage. He’d be an excellent candidate for Nutter of the Week, if only he’d speak to me.

Yet the strange thing is, he must be earning money somehow, because he can afford to ride the train day in, day out.

Anyway, so far I’ve had a grand total of three lectures- all of my seminars have been cancelled this week, and the lecture that was scheduled to last two hours lasted: 30 minutes. Having to get up early has made work a pain… I can see myself quitting in the near future.

This year I’ll be studying the EU, American domestic & foreign policy, the history of capitalism (or ‘making of the global world’, as they call it), and international relations theory. Its essentially going to be another year of armchair politicans talking as if they have some sort of influence and feeling self important. Excellent.

I’ll be able to tell you more about these once I have actually attended any seminars on the subjects.

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