A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of Conservatism. All the Powers of Middle England have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Big Business, The Countryside Alliance, Fundamentalist Christians and large swathes of an uninformed electorate.
Horrifyingly, I learnt today that one of my oldest and closest friends appears to have joined Conservative Future, the Tory youth organisation – judging by the Facebook groups he’s joined anyway (I’m hoping to retract this when it turns out he’s joined it to troll).
Its perhaps unfortunate that I now have an official Tory Friend. This means that every time I talk about him, he’ll be labelled with the prefix “my Tory friend”, to differentiate him from the Guardianistas I usually hang out with.
I’m not sure what horrified me more – the fact that someone I know has outed themselves as a Tory, after experiencing years of me railing against the party both on my blog, and in my sweary real-life self, or that an apparently well educated, relatively young person can be indoctrinated by Tory dogma, and actively support the party.
It’s weird – its like when you find out one of your friends is gay, only worse, as him being a Tory will actually impact upon my life in a negative way, if his votes in elections are counted – and like when you find out that someone is gay, it contextualises history and suddenly it all fits together, like explaining why someone has spent so much time kissing men.
It does all make sense now though – the lack of political views, and silence during political discussion for all those years wasn’t due to being uninformed or lack of interest… it was because he was too afraid to admit to being a Tory. Until Cameron came in, they were the Nasty Party – they still are, but Cameron has inexplicably made it acceptable. Which is why its only now he’s come out Tory. Maybe the reason his appearance at the party at the local Conservative club was so fleeting because he was scared that his two world were colliding: the one where he knows me, and his secret Tory life with his evil Conservative friends?
Who knows what is going on inside his brain now? And worse still, what does this mean for my opinions? If others think like this, why don’t I? Maybe leaving the standard of living on the poorest people to the whims of the free market is the best way to do it? Maybe the market never does fail? Maybe an overpowered, sabre-rattling military is the best way to achieve world peace? Maybe immigrants are coming over here and doing the awful thing the Dailies Mail and Express say they do?
Please, readers, tell me: has the whole world gone insane or I am the mental one?
Last night, I went all the way down to London for a gig so peculiarly tuned to my interests I thought that it might be a set up to put me on some modern day Beadles About equivalent.
It was Frank Turner, supporting Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello (“The Nightwatchman“) in an anti-war gig organised by the Stop the War Coalition. Oh, and it was compered by Mark Steel. I think its pretty difficult to get a better collection of celebrities and causes – what made it all the more spooky was that the venue (The Scala) was a six-minute walk from St Pancras station.
This actually meant that to get there I probably took less steps than it would take me to walk to my “local venue” in Leicester.
What with it being in London, and being a gig organised by some undoubtedly nutty left-wingers, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Unsurprisingly, there were some proper Marxists outside handing out leaflets and getting people to sign petitions. For some reason, when coerced into signing the petition (against the war, not capitalism), I gave away my real home address. I think this might end up being a mistake.
We (JD and myself) were frisked by some security guards on the way in. I was patted down by a security guard. As this happened, I pre-empted any sort of search by trying to explain that my pockets contained, er, my phone, wallet, camera, PDA, iPod and London map book (I was travelling lite). When I offered to prove this, he didn’t seem to care, and just waved me in. My PDA could have contained a flick-knife SDIO card for all he knew.
For a left wing gig populated by socialists who love sharing and holding hands, I thought £6 for two Cokes at the bar was a bit expensive.
The gig started with some Stop the War Coalition chap coming on stage and doing some spiel about, er, the war, before introducing Mark Steel, who did some talking, before introducing the first act: Frank Turner.
Frank played a short set including most of his, er, “well known” songs – Thatcher Fucked the Kids, and so on. I’d love to write more about what he did, as he was good, and I enjoyed his music, but I can’t really think of any way to explain what happened, other than “a man played a guitar and sang for a bit”.
The next act was more “interesting”. Susheela Raman sang some Tamil folk songs and did some “covers” of more popular songs. I’m not sure it quite gelled with the rest of the acts – whereas the others were strummy guitar things with English language lyrics, she did the sort of stereotypically screechy “non-western” folk-music noise and sang in Tamil – which sort of makes any of the political points she was trying to make more difficult to understand.
Ed Harcourt, who was the third support, was alright too. Perhaps a bit generic. He ended his set by doing some clever bit where he recorded samples of him playing different instruments live, and built up a song live. First he hit a drum for a bit, then did something on the guitar. Then did something else, and something else. It was really quite clever. I guess you had to be there.
It was Morello everyone was there for though. Before he came out on to the stage, Mark Steel did some stand-up-come-political-rant about the war, which was excellent. If there were an audio version of YouTube, I’d upload it, as I had the foresight to take along my iTalk iPod thing to record most of the gig.
Morello finally came on stage at around 21:45. Whilst the time might not seem like an important detail, it was utterly critical to my and JD’s success. We had to catch the last train at 23:15 or we’d be trapped in London overnight. If I weren’t an atheist, I’d have been praying that the gig didn’t over run.
So he played some songs – his solo stuff. Which is quite good, really. I like how still does vaguely rage-esque bits in otherwise acoustic songs. When playing a cover of This land is my land, this land is your land, or whatever it’s called, he pushed his hand against the neck of his guitar and continued to strum, creating something resembling the unique Rage sound.
At one point, someone in the audience yelled out “Play Bombtrack” – for the uninitiated, this is a Rage song. The audience cheered wildly – more than at any other point in the gig. “I’m not going to play that tonight”, Morello responded. But the audience still cheered and clapped. You could tell he was backed into a corner. Let’s face it – most of the audience were there to see the guy from Rage Against the Machine, and wanted to see RATM songs – myself included. Excellently, he relented and played the first bit of Bombtrack, but unfortunately, didn’t play all of it. The audience still cheered. Perhaps admitting defeat, he said to the audience “if you behave yourself, perhaps you’ll be rewarded later on”, like a parent – if we were good enough to endure his “alright” solo stuff, he’d play what we really wanted to hear.
It must be a bit depressing as an artist to have fans only want to hear your old stuff.
True to his word though, he played a bizarre acoustic version of Guerilla Radio – which was also well received.
It was getting pretty tense as the gig neared the end. The encore began at 22:52 – our train was leaving in 23 minutes. Morello finished his set at 23:03, and literally as the last chord was still echoing, we had to start moving in order to catch the train in time. The audience were still cheering wildly, shouting “more” as we left the building. I then had perhaps the worst eight minutes of my life, as I tried to run (although JD would contest it was a light jog) to the station, knowing how much was riding on me making it on time. JD cleverly left the iPod recording, so I’ve got eight minutes of audio at the end of myself, hideously unfit, puffing and panting and complaining my way through central London.
We narrowly made it – with only a couple of minutes to spare. I was about ready to die. But it was worth it, as I’d just seen one quarter of my favourite band play live. And it was for a good cause, even if it is about four years too late to stop the war. Excellent.
As you might know, having watched the video blog below, I went to London yesterday with JD and Fundar. We went there to see the third series of That Mitchell & Webb Sound being recorded. It’s basically like their similarly named telly sketch show, only if you close your eyes.
Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; At the station; Cost: £1.00.
About 90 minutes later and we were in central London.
“Trains are great!”
Coke Price Watch: 500ml bottle; London St Pancras; Cost: £1.10.
Our first port of call was Camden market. It was a bit weird, as it was full of people in a different socio-economic group to me. Or at least people who dressed like it. Being a market, the place was covered in people hawking tat – even the shops were open at the front and sprawled out into the streets. It reminded me of seeing a news correspondent walk through a crowded Kabul market place, I mean, if Afghanistan was populated exclusively by goths.
One man even offered to sell us cannabis – not that I realised at the time.
Almost every other market stall was selling t-shirts with “hilarious” slogans. As you might know if you’re a regular viewer of my torso, I quite like t-shirts with slogans on. I’m currently wearing an excellent t-shirt with “I’m blogging this” printed on it, for example. The trouble is, it was like the t-shirts on sale were bought wholesale by people who are a few years behind everyone else. “National Pornographic” isn’t clever or funny and “I’m a bomb technician, if you see me running try to catch up” was old even when the first alchemists were inventing explosions for the first time.
Our next port of call was Leicester Square, where we went to get some lunch and have a look around.
When I wasn’t buying overpriced Coke, we were trying to be too clever for our own good. We put together an excellently long shot for the video, and then JD phoned his brother to see if he could see us on a webcam. He could, although unfortunately screenshot evidence of this incredible event does not exist.
After lunch we headed to Embankment, which is just next to Whitehall, where all of the big Government buildings are. I love London because its so easy just to stumble into landmarks. It makes it almost unremarkable when you realise you’re standing outside of Royal Bank of Canada head office.
It took us a second to realise that we were standing outside the Ministry of Defence. Unfortunately, as you might see if you’ve watched the video, I didn’t remember to take the opportunity to mention the MOD’s seven paper cuts last year. We walked past it and bumped into the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. I’m the sort of person who finds this exciting.
Standing outside the FCO was Tim Marshall, Sky News’ Political editor. In retrospect, I probably should have gone and harassed him – after all, he is a celebrity, and I assume celebrities love nothing more than idiot members of the public going up to them and talking to them because they recognise them, despite not being able to remember their name.
Sort of next to the Foreign Office is Downing Street. The Downing Street. Despite it just being an old house that you can barely see behind the multiple layers of security (a ramp, a big set of gates, a number of police with machine guns) it was dead exciting. I reeled off as much Downing Street trivia as I could on the off chance that the Policeman near me would say “Hey, you know your stuff, want to go in for a look around?” Unfortunately he just continued to look stern.
Excellently, it was about at this point that I tried to show-off my knowledge of history by explaining that Whitehall used to be one massive Palace of Whitehall before it was destroyed by a fire. Fundar, being a cynic and troll, accused me of making this up just seconds before we passed a sign explaining that a building was the last remaining segment of the Palace of Whitehall.
Just behind the foreign office, when we weren’t really sure where we were going, we stumbled upon the Treasury. Not just any old treasury too mind- Her Majesty’s Treasury. I missed a golden opportunity to see if I could get in because I’m a tax-man – it would have made an excellent scene in the video too. I did, however, have this excellent photograph taken of me:
“Do you take Maestro?”
After a bit more walking we ended up near Parliament and Brian Haw’s anti-war protest. MPs passed a law to try and get rid of Brian, by banning protesting near Parliament without a license a couple of years ago – unfortunately for them, Brian’s still there because he’s been continuously protesting since before the ban came into force. Interestingly, Brian’s patch of green is surrounded entirely by a massive roundabout, and the conspiracy theorist within me thinks that they’ve made it intentionally difficult to get to the centre where Brian is by altering the traffic light patterns, as I was stuck in the centre for a good five minutes before I dared cross the road.
We spent a few minutes standing outside Westminster Abbey. We were going to go in for a couple of minutes, but discovered that it costs eight pounds to visit a church. Although you could apparently “worship for free”. I didn’t think I could get away with pretending to be religious.
We walked down past the Palace of Westminster to the green where they do the live reports on the telly and did a bit for the video, before deciding to head to the Tate Modern. Exciting travel story: we took the circle line from Westminster to Mansion House.
It turns out that St Paul’s Cathedral is right next to Mansion House, and opposite the Millennium Bridge.
Unfortunately, it’s my sad duty to report that the Tate Modern is the most overrated place in history. Even more so than the Auschwitz “theme park” the Nazis set up during World War II.
The Tate Modern: Don’t ‘bovver’.
I feel like an idiot for not being able to appreciate modern art, but most of it is shit. One of the biggest pieces (in terms of physical size) was Matisse’s Snail (click that for a picture). It’s some coloured paper laid out on to a bigger piece of paper. It looks like something a child with learning difficulties could have made.
What makes it worse is the, er, back-story, as it isn’t even deep and metaphorical. According to the textual description next to it, Matisse saw a snail, and then laid out some coloured paper in a shape (very, very, very, very) vaguely resembling a snail. That’s it? That’s shit.
Beret-wearing sycophants probably look at the same picture and say in their trumped-up posh accent and say to each other “that’s bloody brilliant, oh, it’s just so inspirational. My god, it’s a work of genius.”
Another incredible work was a canvas painted almost entirely orange, apart from a strip down the right hand side which was painted a slightly darker orange, the premise being that the darker line is “disruptive”, or something like that. I’ve never seen such pretentious bollocks, and I’m a regular viewer of Newsnight Review.
It must be great being an artsy twat, as you’d experience such an exciting life. “Fuck me! It’s a lightswitch… that’s just, like, so powerful… on and off, representing despair and consequence“.
One of the more ridiculous things was some metal tiles on the floor. Apparently this changes the viewers interaction with art by allowing you to walk on it. That’s fucking incredible. I mean, walking on tiles. Genius.
Judging by my experience with one of the members of staff, they seem to have employed the snootiest minimum wage workers available. I was carrying a sealed Pepsi, bought from their own cafe through one of the galleries, and a Zoe Wanamaker-esque woman approached me, and said without even mentioning the brand, “I see you have a carbonated drink, could you put it away please? We’ve had people drop them before causing spillages”. I can’t imagine the disasterous repercussions of Pepsi getting near birdshit on a canvas, or whatever. I’d have thought the artsy Tate people would enjoy interpreting what the Pepsi stain represents.
In fairness, it wasn’t all terrible. Roy Lichenstein’s Whaam! was good. And there was a gallery of some framed pages of an old Soviet magazine showing the industrialization of the USSR, which was interesting. And I can’t really complain about the entrance price, as it was free.
After we left the Tate bitterly disappointed, we thought it finally time to head to the Drill Hall to see Mitchell & Webb. We took the tube to Goodge Street.
Coke Price Watch: 500mlish glass; Goodge Street Hamburger Union; £1.65.
Before the show, we went to Hamburger Union, which seems to be a medium-speed food chain exclusive to London. We filmed some more video here.
Coke Price Watch: 330ml can; The Drill Hall; £1.
Finally, we got into Mitchell and Webb ready for the recording. Our tickets had been validated and we had been allocated seats. Unfortunately, before we could go in the theatre, we had to wait in a tiny bar for around an hour standing up with around 200 other people. It was almost unbearable after a day of running around London. My legs hurt and I was overheating, but we stuck with it, as, after all, we were now at the primary reason why we were in London.
Mitchell and Webb recorded two shows at once, so we got approximately 90 minutes of new sketches from them, supported by Olivia Coleman and James Bachman And they were excellent. There were a few about a doctor arguing with a patient who got diagnosis’s off of the internet, which got progressively more surreal. If this sketch makes the translation to their second TV series, I imagine “I’m Bill Paxton” will become a well known catchphrase. You’ll know why when you see it.
In retrospect, I should have taken my iTalk and covertly recorded it so I could write more about this. I can’t remember many more of the things they did, but I remember enjoying it immensely. So, er, I guess I win.
I had an incredibly good day over all, and I don’t think even if I had bumped into Hitler on the train home he could have dampened my spirit that much. London late at night is surprisingly non-threatening, but we were in a reasonably posh area- right near Tavistock Square, of London Bombings fame, in fact. I imagine I’d be telling a different story if they’d been recording the radio show in Hackney or wherever. And you’d be reading this from my will rather than my blog.
It was also a research packed day – our serious scientific survey has conclusively proved that London prices are infinitely more expensive than rural England. Which, er, is no surprise really.
I would highly recommend listening to That Mitchell & Webb Sound when it’s broadcast on the radio – I’ll plug it on here when it is, as it’s dead good.
Well done for making it through nearly 2000 words too. Why not watch the video?
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