Dear friends the world over,
As I sit here in the last of the sunshine, marvelling at the gang of house-martens hoovering up insects all around me whilst narrowly avoiding careering into my head, I realise it’s been a while since I sent out my rather disturbing, more than slightly unhinged and very profane Easter missive. My deepest apologies to all for failing to fix the "content warning" to the top of it. My brother and I were sure we'd done it correctly but clearly in the process of uploading it to mailchimp on a very dodgy connection, with me going totally mad and him late to cook lunch for his family, I messed up the process. So I'm very sorry for springing that on you all without warning.
I decided I needed to publish it, as typing it out once was a traumatic thing to deal with, and I feared having to do it umpteen times, tailored for different people (which I did try to do) would be the end of me. Over the years I have been very careful not to publish any swearing at all, apart from one song on one album, which was written by someone else, and seemed a perfect description of Nye and I on tour, (and for which I received a telling-off from a dear friend who likes to play our music to the kids) so April's effort was a huge departure. I shall try to keep it clean from now on.
It was cathartic to get it off my chest, and the euphoric creative flow it unleashed after being locked away for a quarter-century was amazing; I can't wait to share the new album with you when I'm able to get it finished, but the subsequent down-swing has been challenging. Luckily I have managed to do an awful lot of building, gardening, cycling, house-work and indeed music, which certainly helps.
Endless thanks to all the kind souls who sent messages of solidarity. A true balm for the soul.
In a three days time I will be heading north to play a few shows in Scotland, then a few in England, and would dearly love to sing to as many of you as possible along the way. On top of my own craziness, the whole spring has been beset with tragedies and calamities which have almost totally bankrupted the venture, but I don't like to cancel shows, and to be quite honest, really need to get out and share some of this beautiful music with the world.
We'll be starting at Scotland's biggest second-hand bookshop, in Wigtown, Dumfries & Galloway on Saturday, June 13th, then to Glasgow, Falkirk and Edinburgh, so if you know anyone anywhere near any of those places, please encourage them to come. They will thank you for it, and it may enable us to cover the diesel it'll take to get there. Anyone who has suggestions of how to get word out to local music-lovers, please get in touch... I'm all ears.
All the details are on the "Shows" page of the website. Message me for ticket links etc. If anyone is feeling rich, benevolent or keen to buy music, all purchases, tips, recommendations and the like are always much appreciated.
For those of you who enjoy a bit of political invective, this year has certainly been a wild ride. I sympathise deeply with Stewart Lee who has been commenting recently on the difficulties of writing anything coherent about current affairs in such febrile times; waking up in the middle of the night to check the US news cycle to see if his current touring show, Stewart Lee Versus The Man-Wolf has been rendered totally irrelevant by the latest pendulum-swing in the whims of madmen who've managed to colonise the minds of millions.
This part was mostly written a couple of months ago, but with the wanton assault on Iran and Lebanon, it was rendered almost immediately old-hat before I could edit it and send it out, but funnily enough, since then, we've gone full-circle and it's become relevant again. Small mercies and all that...
It's been a couple of months since I last wrote, but in many ways it seems like several years. Almost everyday I’ve felt the impetus to communicate with the world, but ridiculous and catastrophic events have been rolling out ten-a-penny, which render coherent thoughts, or, god forbid, a coherent argument almost an impossibility. By the time I begin to digest one epoch-changing event, another three have happened.
As I’m sure you’re already well aware, this is largely because the increasingly unhinged and literally quixotic President Caligula (taking a momentary break from tilting at windmills) is intent on “flooding the zone” to the extent that he’s almost literally pouring his effluent into a fan which he’s kindly aimed directly into all of our faces in his latest attempt to distract us from the fact that he’s in the Epstein Files more than a million times.
Though the fascinatingly titled Department of Justice under the erstwhile leadership of desperate maniac, Pam Bondi offered access to the files through a web-portal which makes the gov.uk site look modern; in order to obfuscate a little further, for those of you interested in these weirdos’ “alleged” terrible deeds, and provenly terrible spelling, some patient and persistent web-types have kindly created a very searchable jmail site which is just like your own gmail, and puts the officials to shame, as though they needed any help…
Do you remember the turn of the year when he kidnapped the President of a sovereign nation, threatened to invade a NATO ally and knocked down half of The White House? It’s there in the distant memory, but since then he and his stooges have slandered innocent citizens murdered in the streets of Minneapolis by his own private gestapo, whilst simultaneously railing at Iran for killing protesters. Sent out an “armada” to the Persian Gulf over their nuclear program, which he claimed to have “destroyed utterly” last year, in order to be pushed into a catastrophic war by the only other world leader to even approach his levels of corruption.
Not wanting to rest on his laurels, he's continued systematically dismantling American democracy whilst giving his goons free reign to de-stabilise the rest of the "free" world, and created his very own Bored of Peace™ consisting almost entirely of bellicose tyrants and war-criminals (save for that strange man-baby from FIFA, presumably to hand out prizes to the others). His bizarre ramblings and rampant misogyny have reached new heights, matched only by his narcissistic nut-jobbery, but however many twists he turns, he seems unable to shake off the stench of the talented Mr. Epstein.
The same can certainly be said on this side of The Atlantic, where a growing list of rich dimwits, serial perverts and two-tongued money-grubbers are beginning to quake and stammer, writhe and wriggle as they realise they might be a touch less untouchable than imagined, and bring a whole new meaning to “the domino effect”.
Andwew Mount-Battenberg-Cake (the artist formerly known as “The C**t” by his own personal protection detail) has made history by becoming the first British royal to have had his ruff felt since Charles 𝐈, and perhaps the first ever Duke of the Realm to have had his portrait hung in Le Louvre. I must admit that I actually gasped and expleted out loud on reading the headline. It's been long enough, and without his mother's skirts to hide behind, it did seem somewhat inevitable.
(Lord) Peter Mandelbatten-Windbag, the famously corrupt and avaricious “friend of Tony Blair” and self-titled Prince of Darkness was shopped-in by Sir Lindsay Hoyle (on a brief break between taxpayer-funded holidays) for being an infamously corrupt and avaricious (but also rather cheap) friend of Jeffrey Epstein (Who’d o’ thunk it?), before he could skedaddle to some oligarch’s private island. Poor old Hoyle was subsequently outed as a grass by PC Plod as I suppose his masonic connections are outranked by those of Lord Mandelbatten-Cakebag, for which they have since “wholeheartedly” apologised.
As a brief aside, I’ve marvelled for years now at the sheer number of “enobeled” (or perhaps entitled) weirdos who have risen to the top of British politics, rather like the crust on the River Thames, and what very silly names they often have.
Lord Pannick, Lady Moan, Lord Frost, Lord Adonis, Baroness Wyld, Lord Pickles, Lord Fink, Lord Cameron, Baron Gove, Lord Doyle, Dame Romeo, Lord Sugar; it’s like The Mister Men books, with slightly lax nominative determinism, rather like the vetting process. Even the commons is overflowing with titles; Sir Keir “Son-of-a-toolmaker” Starmer, Sir Ed “Waterslide-Puddleduck” Davey, Sir Cash, Sir Fox, Dame Eagle, it sounds like the cast of a pantomime, which to be honest is not so far from the truth, and to the rest of the world really does look like we live in the Middle Ages. Is it really such a surprise that many of these over-privileged and often intellectually-challenged people are deeply corrupt?
Talking of deep corruption, and indeed Lord Sugar, I noticed that the BBC suddenly announced a new series of The Apprentice earlier in the spring, as though there aren’t enough delusional twats on the airwaves already, and wonder if people realise that this will mean a rather enormous payment of Licence Fee money to one Tronald Dump who owns a fair chunk of the “intellectual property” (Jesus wept... I fear that might finally break the ironyometer). It has bothered my pedantic mind for a long time that many British people refer to him as “the former host of the American version of The Apprentice”, when it’s the other way around, Sugar being the proverbial “Poundshop-Trump”.
I wonder if that clandestine payment might be a nod to The Donald from Boris-stooge and malignant potato, Sir Robbie Gibb, and part of the reason why the $5 billion law-suit seems to have slipped from the headlines…
Back to the slow-motion car crash of the Epstein domino effect. Though in the states it’s so far mostly private individuals suffering the fall from grace, rather than those obvious sex-pests in and around the top of government, in the UK, France, Norway and various other places the foul wind seems to reach slightly further up the greasy pole.
For those of you unfamiliar with the work of Peter Mandelson, he was the architect of Tony Blair’s New Labour back in the 90s before twice being sacked for corrupt relationships with very rich men. More recently he was the architect of the campaign to destroy the Labour Party in order to rid it of Jeremy Corbyn, (through a “think tank” operating under the innocuous name of Labour Together); rather like one of his and Epstein’s friends trying to cure their syphilis by cutting of both legs.
This think tank was run by disney-leprechaun and Mandelson protégé, Morgan McSweeney; specialising in funnelling undeclared corporate donations to fund attempts at career-ending defamation against potential candidates, party members and investigative journalists in order to purge the party of socialism and bring it “together”, with Starmer eventually chosen as their “front-man” in 2019 and McSweeney becoming his Chief of Staff in government.
It really illuminates the perennial question of “How did someone so bad at politics as Keir rise so far and so fast?” The Mandelson-in-his-briefs-reading-briefs-next-to-a-young-woman-with-a-black-box-on-her-head photo put an end to the goblin’s reign and I believe he’s slunk off to Argyll, leaving Starmer to deal with his other appointments of friends of paedophles to positions of power. We’re back to tongue-twisters again.
Though they did manage to destroy the left-wing website The Canary and take over the Labour Party, they seem to have bitten off more than they can chew by attempting to defame several journalists who were not prepared to take it lying down. Paul Holden’s excellent book, The Fraud has worked wonders to enlighten us as to what these folks were up to, but their real mistake seems to have been an attempt to attack two Times journalists through decidedly dubious methods and getting caught red-handed.
It was always only a matter of time before Sweeney’s successor, Josh Simons became the next domino in the line. Fascinatingly, after having to resign in disgrace from the cabinet, he swiftly resigned his seat in order to make way for Andy Burnham, sometime King of The North, to swish back to Westminster on a white charger to rescue us from Sir Keir.
Soap-opera might be a more appropriate analogy than pantomime. At least pantomimes have an ending...
The other prevailing wind this year seems to be an awful lot of guff about how AI (Art of Fish all in Telly Gents) will revolutionise everything, usher in an era of unbridled prosperity whilst simultaneously destroying humanity, when in actual fact, it seems to be rather stuck at the level of making funny lego-videos, composite images of maniacs masquerading as Jesus, and bombing civilians. I'm sure it's deeply useful for analysing vast amounts of data, and recognising certain patterns, but it does seem a touch suspicious that the people pushing the project are either those touting for more investment, or freelance sociopathic money-grubbers like Tony Blair.
It is amazing how much time the man is given to spout his nonsense by supposedly objective and "balanced" media outlets. Why anyone would want to pay Blair for advice is beyond me. I admit his first three years of government (very nearly three decades ago) accomplished some truly incredible progress, from Northern Ireland to Sure-Start, but since then, he has specialised in cosying up to tyrants and cheer-leading for every war he can, whilst making an obscene amount of money from the word's worst people.
Sadly, with all the constant pyschodrama about the comings and goings of deluded narcissists, attention seems to be constantly deflected from the actual crux of the matter; the deeply disturbing antics of neo-fascist data-harvesting operation, Palantir, a company named after an evil crystal-ball used by corrupt wizards in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, who actively sought out the grandson of Oswald Mosely, of The Union of British Fascists, to lead their UK operation, even going so far as to quote chunks of his grandpa's speeches to him during the interview.
Palantir is run by an unholy alliance of 13-year-old boy who's stolen the car-keys, Alex Krap and Bond-Villain, Peter Thiele, who believes Greta Thunberg may well be The Anti-Christ, though is less sure that the continued survival of the human race is a good thing. Like crazy Uncle Elon, he is also a South-African who fled for America when apartheid ended, and made a fortune through Paypal before moving on to wholesale evil and the pushing of the white-supremacist nonsense which has now fed through to your local flag waving discontents. He is also the registered owner of J.D. Vance.
Not content with running the data processing for the IDF's wholesale murder of Palestinian children, the paramilitary over-reach of I.C.E. in the US and countless other malign projects, they are quickly becoming the preferred partner of what remains of the British state. The contracts they have obtained (or are trying to obtain) for the UK Department of Defence, The Metropolitan Police and the NHS are some of the most worrying developments in years.
To allow these unscrupulous idealogues access to the confidential medical records of 70 million people, on the understanding they won't even think about selling the data to their mates in the pharmaceutical and medical insurance business, seems at best naïve, and truly irresponsible.
The fact of the matter is that Palantir was introduced to British Government circles by Peter Mandelson, who was himself introduced to Palantir by one Jeffrey Epstein, along with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak back in 2015, both looking to cash-in whilst out of government, inspired, funnily enough by one T. Blair. That we can have kicked up such a fuss about Mandelson standing in his underpants whilst allowing the fruits of his misdeeds to infiltrate the heart of government, shows just how effective the sleight-of-hand has been in the writhings of this AI behemoth. The sycophancy of media outlets towards anyone who claims to represent "big-tech" certainly doesn't help, but last week there was an inspiring glimmer of hope amongst all the gloom.
After almost three hours of fawning over Tony Blair and his big-tech overlords on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, there was a brief interview (for balance, naturally) with Cory Doctorow, celebrated author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.
After three minutes outlining the similarities of the over-capitalisation of this particular tech-bubble to all the other tech-bubbles of the past three decades, he eloquently and concisely outlined an alternative reality where we update UK copyright law to prevent app-stores creaming-off 30 pence in every pound for our feudal overlords, and charging £10,000 a gallon for printer ink, "instead of consuming the last drops of water in the United Kingdon that aren't contaminated with human faeces, to cool a data-centre to make child pornography." Such a beautifully delivered "mic-drop" it was, that the presenter nearly giggled as she thanked him and tried to segue to the next bit.
For any of you who've made it this far down, you are clearly still capable of a little reading, which I'd suggest might help us all out a bit. The thing with attention-span, the same as practicing languages or musical instruments, is that it is by definition a "practice", based around the creation and maintenance of synaptic connections in our brains.
If we lapse in our practice, of course we notice a steep drop-off in ability, concentration, stamina and the like, but equally it is eminently possible to re-start our practice, and get the old machine working again.
Maybe it is tempting to some to have a machine "think" on our behalf (I couldn't possibly comment as I've never tried it myself), but when you realise that Chat, j'ai pété (Cat, I farted) and all these other Large Language Models are just scraping the entire internet with all the precision of a deep-sea trawler, and serving up endless slop, I must admit that reading a bit of Steinbeck, DeBernières or indeed Doctorow is infinitely preferable.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to catching up with as many of you as possible over the next couple of weeks.
I will try to write a little more regularly, and work on the levity and indeed brevity.
With much love from way down here,
Jez