Tag: interview

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Campaigner against violence or shamless media whore?

There’s an ad campaign running at the moment on the London Underground, for Reebok, the sports clothing manufacturers. The slogan across all of them is ‘I Am What I Am’, and various loser celebs are spouting nonsense about their free spirited approach to life, grabbing life by the nads etc… All rubbish.

What’s particularly odious is the Jamelia ad – TSP came in the other day fuming about it, which piqued my interest – The Small Person is v. intelligent and a fine culture watcher and observer of gross inconsistencies in celeb behaviour – so next time I was on the tube, I looked out for said ad.

Here it is –

and this is the close up of the text –

it reads, “I’ll speak out against violence whenever I can. in interviews, in songs, in my life. If you stay silent you’re part of the problem”

However, surely staying silent is preferable to becoming the poster-puppet of a company with a seriously dubious human rights record, helping them to green-wash their reputation, and gloss over the human rights abuses that the factories where Reebok stuff is made have been guilty of. Hey, Jamelia, I got your violence, RIGHT HERE!

If you are reading this, Jam (don’t mind if I call you Jam, do you?), I’d suggest having a nose around Corporation Watch website before you agree to stick your well intentioned by deeply crass and misplaced anti-violence waffle on the posters of a company like Reebok again.

If you want more info, here’s one article you might like to read – a very enlightening read in light of your stance on ‘violence’.

And if you want to know more, here’s a link to a search of the corpwatch site for mentioned of Reebok. I think you’ll find quite a lot of them, dear girl.

you can click here for some crass greenwash from the Reebok Human Rights Award – which is up there with the News Of The World ‘truth in journalism award’ and the McDonalds ‘animal rights activist of the year award’. the only difference being that these other two laughably crass notions don’t actually exist.

Here’s a quote from the ‘non-acceptance speech’ of one of the people Reebok attempted to award their greenwash award to, Dita Sari, a campaigner for Independent Trade Unions in Indonesia –

“I have taken this award into a very deep consideration. We finally decide not to accept this…. In Indonesia, there are five Reebok companies; 80% of the workers are women. All companies are subcontracted, often by South Korean companies…. Since the workers can only get around $1.50 a day, they then have to live in a slum area, surrounded by poor and unhealthy conditions, especially for their children. At the same time, Reebok collected millions of dollars of profit every year, directly contributed by these workers. The low pay and exploitation of the workers of Indonesia, Mexico and Vietnam are the main reasons why we will not accept this award.”

Now, Jamelia, do the decent thing, recant, and do some ads for No Sweat trainers or Ethical Threads clothing.

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So, about this immigration thing then.

“they come over here, taking our jobs”, goes the familiar racist nonsense about ‘immigrants’. I wonder if any of the people using that argument refuse to buy cheap veggies from the supermarkets who employ immigrant workers in huge numbers at wages virtually no-one in the UK would work for.

This article in today’s Guardian contains a few fascinating bits of info from a report commisioned by DEFRA –

“The reports say that between 420,000 and 611,000 temporary workers are employed to harvest and pack produce in farm factories around Britain in the course of a year. Previous government estimates, based on a census in June 2002, said that 62,000 temporary workers were employed in the sector.”

and

“All the suppliers we interviewed said there had been a dramatic change from UK nationals to foreign workers in recent years and the reason was that they needed workers who were more desperate,”

and

“The significance of the study is that it shows the connection between concentration of retail power and deterioration of conditions for workers,”

So, the issue is one of supply and demand, it seems – people want cheap veg, the supermarkets want massive profits, a large number of people in the new EU countries want jobs, and are willing to work harder for less money than Brits, so a supply chain is established, in which the ones being ripped off are the immigrant workers and the farmers. The Supermarkets get their profits, the consumers get their cheap veg, but the workers get low wages and ever decreasing protection under law, and the farmers get lower and lower prices for their produce.

So what’s the answer? Well, as far as we can, avoiding supermarkets seems like plan. If you can, buy local, buy from the farm – that cuts out the middle man, and also takes the transport and related pollution figures out of the equation. If you can’t, try an organic box scheme. Some of the alternatives are pretty expensive, and will require some budget juggling, but buying less stuff is the best way to save money, rather than buying cheaper crappier versions of the stuff you were going to buy anyway. Buying food with no nutritional value doesn’t really help anyone, no matter how cheap it is.

We’ve got some changes to make round here to get our shopping habits to where they should be, but we’re on the way, step by step…

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Me in a magazine.

Here you go, there’s an interview with me in the new issue of Bassics magazine – and on the CD there’s a track (shizzle) and a bit of video with me explaining looping and performing a tune (can’t remember what the tune is, maybe Grace and Gratitude). Filming the video was lots of fun – The Cheat acted as video monkey, and did a fine job. I recorded the audio to Minidisc and then chopped up the different video angles to fit the soundtrack. The only problem is that we did it at St Luke’s hoping to be able to use one of the groovy burgandy curtains as a backdrop, but they were installing a new PA in the main bit of the church, so we were through in the back hall, with a yellow brick background that makes it look like I’m in prison… niiice.

Soundtrack – Mo Foster, ‘live’ (an advanced copy of an upcoming album by Mo – as with everything Mo does, it’s lovely, and of course I’ll report here when it’s released); Cathy Burton, ‘Speed Your Love’ (Cath was singing BVs at Greenbelt for Ricky Ross, and her album is lovely); Julie Lee, ‘Stillhouse Road’ (a fantastic record that I never get tired of hearing).

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Italy post no. 1

(written on the plane, 21/7/05 18.02)

What a day!

Given the travel fuck-ups in London of late, I decided to leave plenty of time to get to Gatwick for the flight to Italy… Little did I know I’d need every second of the FIVE HOURS that it took to get from Southgate to the airport!

The Picadilly Line is already suspended up where I am, so I had to get the ‘rail replacement bus service’ from Arnos Grove to Seven Sisters (oh yes, I’m going into all the really dull details, just for you lovely bloglings… and cos I’m on a flight with not much else to do!) but when I got to Seven Sisters tube, a little man in an orange jacket (perhaps fresh from Guantanamo) said that the whole Victoria Line was suspended…

At this point, the serendipity of my having just got a new phone (Sony K750i) kicked in, as it has an FM Radio built in. I’d been listening to the mighty Robert Elms on BBC Radio London, and he’d done a quick announcement that something had happened just before I got to the tube, but as I crossed the road to try and get on a bus towards Victoria, the situation started to unfold in a fledgling way. The report came through that three ‘incidents’ had taken place, at Oval, Warren Street and Shepherd’s Bush tube stations, and soon after a fourth incident came through on a bus in Shepherd’s Bush. Radio London switched to rolling news, and kept updating with all the facts and no speculation, and did a remarkable job, which greatly helped with the next installment of my journey, definitely the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me on a bus…

…the radio broadcast is interrupted by my phone ringing, and it’s Muriel Anderson on the other end of the line – it’s always a delight to hear from Muriel and my immediate assumption was that she was coming to England to look for gigs. ‘I’m in Indianapolis, doing a live radio spot, and was wondering if you wanted to talk on air about the bomb situation’…!! I checked to see whether they meant the one from two weeks ago, or todays – not knowing whether news would have filtered as far as Indianapolis – and they confirmed it was today. Fortunately having been listening to the radio I was able to fill them in on all the latest official details, and quash a few rumours about huge explosions and the like… My first ever live international radio interview whilst on public transport, that’s for sure!

The bus proved to be a pretty unreliable way of getting across London – it stopped for over an hour on High Holborn, and then turfed us all out – but with the tube network being pretty much closed, I didn’t have any choice but to sit it out, and watch the three hour margin I’d left myself gradually ebb away. The second bus moved much quicker once we got past Oxford Street, and eventually we got to Victoria, and I made it straight onto the Gatwick Express.

At this point, I want to praise British Airways. my initial idea for this trip was to take my rack on the plane as handluggage, and put my bass in the hold in a foam-flight-case. But I weighed my rack-case this morning and it was 50lbs! Not the kind of thing you can get away with as hand luggage. So the plan switched to taking the bass in a soft case again, and checking the rack, hoping it’ll get through OK (it is packed with all my clothes too, so should be padded OK).

I’m used to having to sweet-talk my bass onto a planes by all means neccesary – starting with chat about favourite shades of nail varnish, moving up to compliments on people’s hairstyles, and culminating in blind panic if it looks like I’m going to have to put a soft case in the hold… At the BA check in desk, not a question was asked. The lovely lady who took the rack from me was fine with me taking the laptop and the bass onto the plane, and was very helpful with labeling up the rack as fragile and getting it hand carried down to the plane. None of the other BA staff questioned me taking the bass on board, and it’s now nestling in the overhead compartment above my head!

So as you can now tell, I made it onto the plane, from whence I write (to be uploaded when I find some delicious Italian WiFi at the other end). I’m sat here, listening to Gillian Welch, sipping tomato juice (why do I only ever drink tomato juice on planes? I really like it!) having just eaten a lovely veggie meal, along with everyone else: BA are smart enough to just serve veggie food to everyone, so there’s no questions about who gets what food! smart as plums.

Anyway, the situation with the ‘incidents’ as I left it in London was that there had been four explosions, all much much smaller than the ones two weeks ago, and that no-one had been killed, and there were very few casualties at all – the only confirmed one being the owner of on of the rucksacks that exploded.

Whoever it was who did it did a rather good job of ballsing up London’s transport for another day, and have probably scared quite a few commuters. I’m just glad that the bombs either malfuctioned or were only detonators with no payload. Enough already with the bombing, please!

…and in that serendipitous way that chance can provide a day’s soundtrack, the track that’s just come on iTunes is John Martyn’s ‘I don’t want to know about evil’ – I don’t want to know about evil, I only want to know about love… I’ll find the lyrics and post them when I find the delicious italian wifi.

Soundtrack – John Martyn, ‘Solid Air’.

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Ken Livingstone on the bombings…

nice to see Ken getting back to his campaigning side. In the aftermath of the bombings, he quite understandably steered clear of political point scoring and sought to offer words of consolation for the victims and condemnation for those who carried out the bombings.

But now he’s placing the blame for the unrest between Arabs and the west squarely at the feet of 80s years of interventionist politics in the middle east. There are some choice quotes in the article, taken from an interview he did this morning on the Today Programme on Radio 4.

You can Listen again to his interview here.

Most of his comments are bleedin’ obvious, but it’s important that they are made at this time. I think Ken’s timing is also worthy of note – he’s left a respectful gap before engaging in the politics of the discussion, giving time for the first wave of shock and grief to pass (though obviously not for the families of those who died).

Anyway, nice one Ken.

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The problem with statistics

Inexplicably, the bombings in London – committed by four British guys – have reawakened the frenzied debate about asylum seekers and illegal immigrants.

A lot of the papers today have covered the story about the government’s failure to meet their asylum targets – that is, they wanted to be deporting more people than were coming in.

The problem with this is that it gets people thinking about numbers and net gain to the population and about those who are categorised as illegal or legal, as economic migrants (is that what anyone who moves to live nearer to their work is?) or terrorist wannabes, instead of focusing on lives.

So it’s apt that the guardian news blog today re-high-lighted the story of Verah Kachepa, and her four children – whose case made front page news during the last election because some odious lying tory scumbag (that narrows it down to, er, all of them then) doctored a picture of Anne Widdecombe protesting on behalf of the family so that it then displayed some crap about controlled immigration, like so –

So this week, Ms Widdecombe, George Galloway and other are calling for this family to be allowed to stay, once again.

We know their story, we’ve seen them in the press, we’ve heard her interviews. The trouble is, there are thousands of stories like this, and crass government targets gloss over the personal stories of threat and tragedy and torture and persecution and good ole fashioned wanting a better life for your family, in favour of quotas and soundbites and the fear of driving the country to the right by being soft on immigration.

This weekend, I had a long conversation with a whole load of 60+ essex residents, all of whom typified the muddled racist rhetoric of middle england. Lots of talk about the colour of their neighbours, mixed in with the problem with muslims but still acknowledging when challenged that none of the problems were anything to do with race or religion and that just as many people have trouble with antisocial neighbours who are white and british born as those who have trouble with immigrant neighbours. When given the language to unpack their situation, race became far less of a feature in the complaints, but the governments statistical chat is lost on a middle england populus who only tell stories about troublesome neighbours when they are definable as ‘them’.

I really hope the Kachepa family are allowed to stay – to deport them would be inhuman, as inhuman as many of the other deportations that go on to try and keep the quotas met. Quotas are bad enough when we’re talking about traffic wardens dishing out enough tickets. When it comes to whether or not to send someone back to a situation where they face persecution or even death, let’s drop the stats and hear the story. If it means we miss the targets, so what?

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Read this book.

Last night I finished one of the greatest works of non-fiction I’ve ever read.

I first heard about ‘Father Joe – The Man Who Saved My Soul’ when its writer, Tony Hendra, was interviewed on Danny Baker’s show on BBC London. My interest was piqued because Tony played Ian Faith in Spinal Tap, and Danny declared it straight away to be one of the greatest books he’d ever read.

As the interview went on, it became clear that Father Joe was an extraordinary character. He was a Benedictine monk at Quarr Abbey on the Isle Of Wight, off the south cost of England, who Tony met when he almost had an affair with a married woman, at the age of 14, and was sent to Joe for penance. Thus began a lifelong friendship, the story of which unfolds in the book, bought for me a few weeks ago by TSP.

It’s a truly remarkable story – Tony’s story in many ways is similar to a lot of people in the media – one of vocation, compromise, and hurting the ones nearest to you. The big difference is that always in the background are his visits to Quarr Abbey, and letters from Father Joe.

The end of the book is utterly heart-breaking. I finished it on the tube last night, and I’ve never sobbed on the tube before now – the odd tear as a sad part of a book, but never like this. I’m rather glad the train was pretty much empty.

When I got where I was going, I must’ve looked like I had the world’s worst hayfever, with my swollen red eyes…

Anyway, buy it, please. It’s amazing. A life-affirming, heart-warming inspirational story.

oh, and we SO need to get Tony Hendra for Greenbelt – The Cheat, get onto it.

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Noel doesn't get it…

World reknown and respected political commentator, Noel Gallagher, has been criticising the Live8 gig.

He says,

‘Are they hoping one of these guys from the G8 … sees Annie Lennox singing ‘Sweet Dreams’ and thinks, “Fuck me, she might have a point there, you know.” It’s not going to fucking happen, is it?’

Oh dear – he’s never been the sharpest tool in the box, but does he really thing that the idea of having the bands on is that they themselves will persuade G8 leaders to change things? Does he not see the importance of raising the issue, of building a worldwide pressure build-up of public support for changes in a brutally unjust world trade system?

He’s clearly even more stupid that I thought. He’s being interviewed by The Observer, there’s a bunch of his peers doing what they can to raise awareness about justice issues, taking the mad existence that is pop superstardom and attempting to channel some of that spotlight onto the plight of the world’s poor, and he uses his platfom in a national newspaper to launch an ill-conceived attack on the aims…

So this week’s berk of the week award goes to Mr G.

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Weekend of musical friends

So, Friday was the last commuter jazz gig (or ‘computer jazz’, if you’re the chief exec. of the South Bank) before the big refurb kicks in at the end of Meltdown at the end of June. Peter King was playing, and was marvellous – very fine saxophonist, even if he does play alto (not a big fan of alto, generally – it’s just a tenor sax for kids) – and the aforementioned malapropism-prone chief exec. did a lovely speech about lady jazzshark who as previously mentioned has been booking bands at the RFH since prehistoric days, and will be much missed.

So, naturally, sharky person had a big party afterwards, at a friend’s GORGEOUS flat overlooking the Thames along by Blackfriars bridge. That’s one hell of a view to wake up to each morning, for sure. Much celebration took place, and by all accounts no small about of debauchery, though I left at 10.30, so thankfully missed all that.

Saturday was a fun day – started by meeting up with the wonderful Todd Reynolds – an outstanding violinist, and truly lovely wonderful person. Todd and I have exchanged emails and been reading eachother’s posts to Loopers Delight for years, but hadn’t met, so it was great to put a face to an email address and spend the day filling in the gaps. We went back down to the RFH Foyer for the last Saturday gig before the closure (and therefore JazzShark’s last saturday gig) – many fragile hung over people there from the party the night before (fools… ;o) ) – and a lovely short film about a couple in their 70s who meet at the free gigs in the foyer to dance together.

After that, gave Todd the shortened tourist trip round central London (interesting that my tourist trips never take in Buckingham Palace – maybe my anti-royalist sentiments are spilling over into my appreciation of what’s valuable to see in town. I always take people past Downing Street and along Whitehall (the seat of our sham-democracy) and Trafalgar Square (site of many a kick-ass protest) and down to the South Bank (home of the arts), but ignore any of the Royal nonsense, unless it’s for a quick walk round St James’ Park.

I digress… A fantastic day spent wandering round with Todd, all in. Top bloke, fun day.

Then home, to pick up TSP to head out to Lizzie’s leaving do, only TSP is behind on writing work (TSP is high powered celeb journo, interviewing the great and good about all things healthy), so I leave cinderella at home and head off to the ball on my own.

Lizzie is one of life’s lovely people – a fantastic photographer/photo journalist, and very funny lady. Party was full of lovely people, naturally, with no repeats of Friday night’s debauchery (totally different group of friends here…) So good send off for Lizzie, but crap that she’s moving (only to Bristol, so we’ll still see lots of her, but still…)

Sunday – head off to church, but it’s an ‘away match’ (meaning that a family from outside the church are having a christening – though it turns out they were from the church, I just didn’t know them – major black mark against my name for not having said hi to them!!) anyway – decide to go for fry-up at nice cafe on the Holloway Road was Gawain instead. Gawain is a marvellous producer/programmer/musician who has got heavily into community music education and is doing amazingly well. Very inspiring to talk to, with lots of plans for collaborative stuff.

Then home, domestic stuff, drop mixing desk off at St Luvvies to be used at Soul Space service before heading to Finsbury Park tube to meet up with BJ and Juliet to go to Joe Jackson/Todd Rungren gig at Hammersmith homebrew Apollo or whatever it’s called this week.

The reason BJ and I are at the gig is that the lovely Todd Reynolds who I met up with on Saturday is playing with his amazing string quartet Ethel as opening act and collaborator with Joe and Todd (BJ played with Todd in John Cale’s band in the 90s). Juliet had a ticket anyway, so Todd got her an aftershow pass and we all piled down to the gig together.

Ethel kicked out – wow. Incredible energy and performance, and great gig. They looked great, played great, the music was magic and the audience were captivated.

Then Joe Jackson came on – now I’m quite a fan of Joe’s singles collection (playing at the moment, in an attempt to rescue my memory of his music), but the gig was poor. Very poor. The sound was very compressed, and solo voice and piano versions of his uptempo stuff didn’t, to my ears, work at all. The new material was particularly bad. Some of his piano playing was lovely, but the overall feeling was one of big disappointment.

So a lot was rest on Todd Rungren’s shoulders. And he didn’t rise to the occasion either. The songs all sounded thrown away, I couldn’t remember one snippet of melody at the end of any of them, his guitar sound was possibly the worst I’ve ever heard at a ‘big’ gig, and again I was left contemplating self harm as a more pleasant sensory experience than the assault my ears were currently being subjected to.

Then, all change once again. Ethel come back on, and we’re back to the gig being amazing – a Gilbert and Sullivan tune, a couple each from Joe and Todd and an encore of ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (after Todd’s solo set I wanted to rename it ‘While My Guitar is Gently put through a wood-chipper’) – I’ve never seen a couple of aging rock stars so outrageously upstaged by a string quartet in my life. If the gig had been 40 minutes of Ethel, followed by 80 minutes of all five of them on stage playing a mixture of hits and misses, it could have been a breathtaking gig. As it was, it was two hours of dire self-indulgent horse-shit topped and tailed by two exquisite but far too short sets.

Ethel were a revelation, and are destined for hugeness. Please go and buy their CD, I guarantee you won’t regret it.

After all-too-brief chat with Todd after the gig, with just enough time to introduce him to Juliet and blag a copy of the Ethel album, it was time to hop on the last tube home.

Soundtrack – Joe Jackson, ‘Stepping Out – The Best Of’.

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…and while I was watching SuperSize Me…

…the leaders of the three main parties were being interviewed over on Question Time – thank God for the BBC archiving such things, so we can all watch it online, and find out what was said…

The election is next Thursday, DON’T FORGET – the polling stations open early, and are open ’til late.

I’m a big supporter of exercising your democratic right to vote. Not least of all because low voter turnout helps the fascists, and we don’t even want the BNP to get their deposit back, let alone get any kind of political kudos for a good placing. (they aren’t actually going to get any MPs).

However, having read some of the stuff on notapathetic.com, I can see some great reasons for not voting. People who see it as an insult to their right to vote for them to have to choose between three flavours of dogshit, people who feel like a low voter turnout will show just how disillusioned we all are with UK politics (we could well be heading for the lowest voter turnout ever anyway). It’s an interesting site, and well worth a visit.

As it is, I’m going to vote – my approach is vote for the best you can find, and then hassle them to do a good job. It’s like the US election – Kerry was hardly the most glowing lefty on the political scene, but at least he could have been called on to instigate some policy decisions that were in keeping with the democratic tradition… Trying the same thing with Bush, you’d just have to suggest that he be a little less obvious about his military action abroad, and take the Reagan method of backing right wing paramilitary groups instead of sending in your own troups for anything other than training…

Anyway, I digress – please vote, keep the Tories out – they need to know that spreading racist lies is no way to run an election campaign – and let Blair know that illegal wars that lead to the deaths of over 100,000 civilians are not acceptable, and can’t be supported. I’d suggest checking out either Lib Dem, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru or whoever else offers an anti-war alternative (I can’t bring myself to back Respect, the unlikely alliance of the Muslim Association of Great Britain and the Socialist Workers Party – I’ve never been a fan of the SWP, and don’t like political groups with a strict religous agenda – smells too much like the GOP in the States…)

Soundtrack – more of me and Cleveland.

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