Bjork - Virus (Hudson Mohawke Peaches and Guacamol Remix)

One of those tunes that makes you stop your conversation because hairs are raising on the back of your neck. It did for me when HudMo played at the Gilles Peterson Worldwide Awards back in January. I’ve been raving about it ever since, despite not being able to find it anywhere, in that way that you only can when you know a song is the best tune of the year and it doesn’t matter that you can’t even prove it with a dodgy rip off the radio.

I urge you to go see this man DJ, and hear this song in the way God intended. A while back, after the riots in fact, I called Hudson Mohawke’s Scud Boots ‘Music to rebuild a society to’. This tune can go on the album of the same name. A true Re-Renaissance man.

What’s The Big Idea? Podcast: Occupy London Part 2

Last week I posted the first part of a podcast documentary myself and my friend James Shield began to make back in late December about the Occupy London protests. Above is the second part to stream, and below this text is the episode in full, uploaded to SoundCloud, and available to download as an mp3 if you’d prefer to whack it on you Itunes or Ipod for later listening (other companies are available…)

For more information about the What’s The Big Idea? Podcast please visit: http://bigideapodcast.org/

What’s The Big Idea? Podcast: Occupy London Part 1

Several months ago I wrote an article for this blog entitled Occupy Labour Party Conference, comparing my experiences at my first Labour Party Conference last Autumn to my experiences at the Occupy London protest at St Paul’s Cathedral. I concluded the article writing ‘…if Labour really is looking to be a broad church, as they repeatedly seem to stress, they have lost part of their congregation. They only have to look outside St Paul’s to find it again. They might even find me there too’.

Turns out that was a rather prophetic post, as just after I published it myself and my friend James Shield decided to make a podcast documentary about Occupy London, and I found myself visiting its protest sites multiple times over the course of a week in late December.

The podcast was supposed to be about what Occupy was for, straight from the horses mouth, and whether it would work. It very much ended up being about the people there, and the stories of how they found themselves camping in the centre of London for several months during the winter of 2011/12. We wanted it to sound like the innovative NPR documentaries Radiolab and This American Life, approaching British politics in a slightly less staid, stiff upper lipped way. Producer James has taken a pretty good shot at it if you ask me. I swore a couple of times on tape to seem down with the kids.

Occupy London was evicted from its site outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and from its Bank of Ideas site in the heart of the City of London, on February 28th 2012. Whilst this podcast was recorded in late December, it remains relevant as a reflection of the people that were part of that protest, who defined what Occupy was, and ultimately wasn’t.

Above is the first of two parts. Let me know what you think.

Portico Quartet - Ruins

The newly re-jigged quartet embrace the electronic drum machine and come out with something which sounds like The XX mixed with Four Tet and Radiohead and topped off with their own inimitable jazz stylings.

Even better is that after you listen to this track and like it you can download it off Real World Records for free here, simply by telling others over the internet how grateful you are I showed it to you. Which you would have done anyway I suspect. You’re welcome.

Lowkey - Hand On Your Gun

Political UK hip-hop. But it’s not as bad as it sounds. In fact it’s good. Lyrically very smart. I went to see Lowkey in a fundraising concert for the Fortnum145 last Friday and the crowd got pretty intense, and as is always the case with hip-hop artists, or really people in general, I don’t agree with everything Lowkey says. But I do agree with the lyrical content of Hand On Your Gun. And as for the tune below, Voices of the Voiceless featuring the brilliant Immortal Technique, the beat agrees with me.

Word of warning. The Hand On Your Gun video concludes with some pretty shocking footage. If you are offended by it, ask yourself what you are really offended by.

For people who are truly interested in politics, it’s not just an interest. It defines the food you eat, the clothes you wear, where you work and even sometimes your relationships with other people. When your political beliefs change I imagine it is somewhat like losing faith. You don’t just stop going to church, you fundamentally see things in a different light.

The church comparison is an apt one, because I visited my first political congregation just a few months back: the main hall of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. I was attending conference for the first time in an attempt to regain my faith in the party. I was brought up in the Labour church, and despite doubts have remained throughout my life. In my teenage years I was even a relatively devout Blairite, a defender of the Iraq War, an apologist for top up fees and PFIs. Better an electable left of centre party than an unelectable left wing one I preached. But in my heart I always believed we would return to our roots eventually. New Labour shifted parts of the political discourse to the left, opening up the opportunity to once again focus on building the ‘New Jerusalem’, I argued.

A Catholic losing their faith might take pilgrimage to the Vatican. I chose the Labour Party conference. Like many a visitor to the Vatican my visit only confirmed my doubts. Spending my first day without a pass outside the secure zone I saw nothing but men in suits. Politicians in suits, businessmen and lobbyists in suits, young men in suits because their ambition is to be one of the former. I attended political debates open to the public but not attended by them, and void of inspirational ideas that breach mainstream political discourse. Even as a paying member of the Labour Party I felt deeply uncomfortable and unwelcome in my surroundings. Inside the secure zone was not much better. Again men in suits, with a few more women this time, also mostly in business attire, milling around hallways and bars looking important. Fringe meetings with a token rushed contribution from an MP who had barely read the brief. A Young Labour policy forum with Liam Byrne which was genuinely insulting in its brevity and irrelevance. And then there is the conference hall. The best that can be said of it is at least people go casual and aren’t necessarily there to boost their career prospects. However, the hall truly is an exercise in preaching to the converted. Speech after speech from Labour members from around the country with the same party approved ideas, the same buzzwords. Something about Labour investment over the last decade. A joke about the Bullingdon Club. A rallying call to get behind our leader and take it to the Tories. Rounded off with a slightly more polished version from a shadow cabinet member to conclude the proceedings.

Contrast this experience with my trip to a real religious relic, St Paul’s Cathedral, to visit Occupy London a weekend ago. Yes the place smells of cabbage from the free Hare Krishna food on offer throughout the day. Yes the smell of cabbage is mixed with a slight whiff of urine emanating from the portaloos. I admit if I was to make political decisions on smell alone I probably wouldn’t be down there. On a more serious note there are a good few homeless people at the camp now, and others with mental health problems. It is not always the most comfortable experience being around people with those sorts of issues, but in my view the fact that they feel at ease in the camp amongst the people protesting there is an excellent reflection of the values of Occupy London, and the compassion that lies behind those values. The Labour Party conference was certainly not setting up welfare areas for the homeless and destitute of Liverpool.

Occupy is messy, both in a physical sense and a political sense. This is what tends to happen when there is a genuine exchange of ideas. Their Tent City University puts on free talks by innovative and often reputable political thinkers. Members of the public walk in off the street to see what’s going on. In the background you might actually hear people having a political discussion rather than sipping on cheap wine and exchanging phone numbers. Or at very least they might be doing both. Occupy is certainly no schmoozefest. Unlike the Labour conference you don’t go there to network. There are no careerist ulterior motives. I accept that some people are just as intimidated by hippies as I am by suits, but most of all at Occupy I don’t think there is a sense that you have to hold back talking about your true political beliefs. Obviously the protest attracts certain types of predominantly left-wing people, but in the very nature of the space there is engagement with the general public, and there have even been efforts to engage in discussion with the very 1% that Occupy is challenging.

But ‘so what?’ you might say. The Labour Party conference and Occupy London are two very different spaces with two very different aims. The conference is attempting to rally together a group of people to ultimately elect a political party to power, whilst Occupy is a discussion point, a place of protest, with different political pressures to the ones that arise when you are engaged in the electoral process. Well my point is that a lot of people like me are no longer inspired by the model of political change offered by the major political parties. The biggest contrast I can offer between the Labour Party conference and Occupy is that unlike the occupation the conference was not actually a political event. It was a rally. It was a PR event. But there was little in the way of real political thought, political discussion, and even political action. Some of us, who are interested in and passionate about politics, are looking for those things, and not just every 4 years when an election comes around. The most striking thing about the conference was the dogmatic focus on getting Labour elected again. There is rhetoric, but no real consideration, of Labour as a genuine political movement, enacting change in local communities in the time between people going to the ballot box. Occupy has sprung from a gap in the political market. There are a good few people out there who have seen that Labour are not selling them anything of substance right now and have exited the shop. Occupy have decided to sit in the space they have vacated.

The Labour Party is not concerned. I am a lefty nutso. Too young to understand the realities of the world. At worst in the same breed as Militant and to be chastised and pushed out of the party. At conference, for my sins, I attended a Progress fringe meeting entitled ‘Green to Red: How can Labour stop the Greens Spreading?’. Party luminaries such as Douglas Alexander seemed to believe that the main reason Labour were losing council seats to the Greens in places like Brighton was because students were being offered free tea and biscuits. Progress members laughed and sneered. Myself and a few friends squirmed in the corner. We knew that the real reason Labour was losing support to the Greens was because of the people in that room, and their attitude towards people like us. Maybe they don’t care, and maybe their polling tells them they are right not to. But if Labour really is looking to be a broad church, as they repeatedly seem to stress, they have lost part of their congregation. They only have to look outside St Paul’s to find it again. They might even find me there too.

Just watched this week’s Frozen Planet, which if you haven’t seen you must, if only to be able to defeat anyone who ever argues against the BBC license fee with only two words. Those words being ‘Frozen Planet’, rather than the two you were thinking of.

Then came across the above video via my brother, which is just astonishing, and completely captures the feeling of joy and excitement that seeing the most amazing things in the natural world provides to pretty much every human being, I think, or at least hope.

We can be inspired by all sorts of things. Beautiful paintings. Political movements. A well constructed shot in a film. A well written line in a play. But it only takes a bunch of birds to randomly decide to fly in otherworldly formations for us to be utterly awestruck. One could take that to mean we shouldn’t bother, we’ll never live up to the standards the rest of the natural world sets. I say videos like the one above give us something to aim for.

Lucas Santtana - Super Violão Mashup

World music and electronic music is about to collide and become the coolest thing since boat shoes. Mark my words hipsters, you read it here first.

From the movie A Single Man (2009), written and directed by Tom Ford.

Performed by Colin Firth.

‘Will Britain Get Through This Recession?’ 1992-3

‘Help’ 1992-3

from Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say

Gillian Wearing OBE (born 1963)

Also on display at Tate Liverpool as part of This Is Sculpture, despite quite clearly being photographs. Someone sack the curator!

Clearly I am posting these because they say something I want to say rather than what the people photographed want to say. Obviously I am doing that to highlight this tension within the piece. Obviously.