The KLF - Chaos Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds - John Higgs

THE KLF - CHAOS, MAGIC AND THE BAND WHO BURNED A MILLION POUNDS -

JOHN HIGGS

Call me a cynic but I don't actually believe Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned a million pounds. The only way they would have done it is if they had at least the equivalent amount behind them, thereby reducing (to them in their eyes) the worth of the amount burnt. One million is a lot and it's enough, another million on top is peripheral and surplus to requirement. It's only greed and a lust for money that provides the impetus to keep adding or trying to add another million after a million after a million after a million ad infinitum. It's feasible, I guess, but I don't imagine Drummond and Cauty were rich enough at the time to be in a position of not needing anymore money so I suspect the idea of burning a million pounds was just that: An idea. An experiment. A test. An investigation into the consequences of burning a million pounds and one that clearly proved to be interesting, not least for the mythology that has since sprung from it of which this book is a part.

"Bill Drummond is a cultural magician," as writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray once said, whilst according to comic book artist and writer Alan Moore "Bill Drummond is totally mad." Well, I've actually met Bill Drummond and found him to be a very likeable and affable bloke though at the same time someone who is probably prone to exaggerate and who probably believes his exaggerations to the point of coming across as a confident and very believable exaggerator.

When someone begins talking about the Illuminati, Discordianism, and the assassination of JFK as author John Higgs does, you know you're entering a maze of mirrors and it's probably time to go home and go to bed. When Higgs then also starts talking about giant invisible rabbit spirits as in the kind that the sleeve art of the debut Echo And The Bunnymen album evoked, the kind that Robert Anton Wilson talked about, the kind that walked with Jimmy Stewart in Harvey and popped up in Donnie Darko that opened with the Bunnymen's track The Killing Moon - and then tells you not to think about it - you can't help but wonder where he's going with all this? Well, the answer is in the title of his book: The KLF - Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds.

Higgs weaves a tangled web of conspiracy theories, coincidental coincidences and Chinese whispers in a bid to serve up meaning and critical theory to Drummond's and Cauty's art and music but the only thing that really sticks is Situationism, an optic that when looked through makes complete sense of it all.

'The Situationists,' Higgs writes 'saw in our culture a shift in our focus from being to having, and then from having to appearing to have. This is a process that the users of Facebook will probably grasp immediately.'

Situationism explains Bill Drummond, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Time Lords, the KLF, the K Foundation - everything. It's all cultural jamming. It's all spectacle. It's all appearance. A fine example of this being the KLF appearance at the Brit Awards in 1992 where they performed a Hardcore Punk version of 3am Eternal accompanied by Extreme Noise Terror, ending with Drummond spraying bullets into the audience from a machine gun. Although the dead sheep left on the steps of the after-show party venue was very real, the bullets were fake. Machine-gunning the music industry was appearance. It was spectacle.

And then at an earlier appearance at the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam, whilst performing a twenty-three minute long version of What Time Is Love? they gave most of the instruments and mixing equipment to the audience for them to take home and keep. A slight problem, however, was that none of it actually belonged to the band but was instead the property of the club. 

The fact that I don't believe a million pounds was ever burned presents a bit of a problem when reading Higgs's book as it blows the whole premise out the window from the very start. Not that it really matters to Higgs, however, because apparently rather than just burning a million pounds, Drummond and Cauty actually sacrificed it. There's a difference. It's a fine line between the two but it is there if you care to look and it's where Drummond and Cauty can be placed. A kind of no-man's land between imagination and reality. A hinterland between fickle Pop gimmicks and subversive art. A three o'clock in the morning-type place. An eternal 3am. The cusp of the moment when you're waiting for the MDMA to kick in and your mate turns to you and asks 'What time is love?' It's a place where anything can happen and where the choice is essentially yours as to whether you hang on to the balloon as it rises or you let go before it's too late? Posing the next question, of course, as to how long can you keep a grip on the rope?

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty are interesting people though Drummond is arguably the more interesting. The KLF were an interesting band - or should that be 'concept'? John Higgs's book is pretty interesting but not absolutely and is somewhat less interesting than Higgs probably thinks it is.

John Serpico

The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship - Charles Bukowski

THE CAPTAIN IS OUT TO LUNCH AND THE SAILORS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE SHIP - CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Written in the style of his classic newspaper columns disguised as diary entries, The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship was published in 1988, four years after Charles Bukowski's death and was the last thing he ever wrote. Bukowski was 71 years-old and having survived the senselessness of life he was only too aware that the end was fast approaching. What then to do with the finite time left to a man? Never mind 'to be or not to be', that is the question.  Having spent his life drinking and fighting and in the spaces in-between working dead end jobs, going hungry, reading books and writing, Bukowski gets to wondering what is a life well spent? 'Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.' Bukowski writes 'Sometimes I feel as if we are all trapped in a movie. We know our lines, where to walk, how to act, only there is no camera. Yet, we can't break out of the movie. And it's a bad one.'

Has Bukowski's life been a wasted one? Hardly. At least no more wasted than anyone else's. His life's saving grace, of course, has been his writing and it's that flame that he has kept alight through the thick and thin right up to the point of where he is at the age of 71. 'The whole world is a sack of shit ripping open. I can't save it. But I've gotten many letters from people who claim that my writing has saved their asses. But I didn't write for that, I wrote it to save my own ass. I was a fool. And yet, even when I was a fool I knew that I wasn't a complete fool. I had some little corner of me that I was protecting, there was something there.'

Bukowski is hardly a role model and his cynicism is often over-bearing but there are aspects to him that are identifiable particularly in regard to his love of 'the word' and his respect for the masters of it. The Great Writers. The Great Novelists. They are the only people he's ever really respected and the inspiration he has derived from them is the fuel to his own creativity. They were the keys to the unlocking of the doors to his own writing and to the release of the words that have subsequently poured forth. It was they who first lit the fire he has shielded and kept alight his whole life. This, in my eyes, is a significant point because in my own small way I have also endeavoured to keep a little flame alight. A candle lit to the act of writing.

On leaving school at aged 16 I can guarantee that most of my peer group never used a pen again and the closest most would get to writing anything nowadays would be when sending a text message or some kind of work-related report. I guarantee it. Whether it's actually important or not I don't know but I feel that once you discover something of some semblance of good within yourself you should try at least to keep it alive. This is what I think Bukowski is saying and it's this that he ruminates on in this book alongside horse racing, humankind, readers, specific writers, workers, gamblers, life, death, the universe and everything therein.

Whereby in the past Bukowski would always use a typewriter, at this late stage in his life he uses a computer of which he extols its virtues. No dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist he possessed of misguided notions of the purity of the soul transferred through the click clack of tapped keys. No, a computer makes the act of writing that much easier that subsequently makes for an easier life. As he said, he might be a fool but he's not a complete fool.

At one point in the book Bukowski writes about him and his wife being invited to a concert by a millionaire rock musician who reads his books and how during the set the rock star announces to the audience of 25,000 people "This concert is dedicated to Linda and Charles Bukowski!" 25,000 people then cheer as if they know who the Bukowski's are. It's great that rock stars read his work, Bukowski thinks, but so too do men in jails and madhouses. So what's the difference? Though he doesn't name them, the band that Bukowski is referring to can only be U2 whom he describes as being 'simplistic' and what a very apt description, it must be said.

At the after-show party in the VIP bar Bukowski wonders what he's doing there among the rich and famous who though he doesn't dislike at all, he knows he has very little in common with and is not impressed by. In fact the one person he finds he has something in common with and has respect for is the huge black bartender who Bukowski at first light-heartedly offers outside for a fight. The bartender, however, actually knows who Bukowski is from reading his Notes Of A Dirty Old Man columns of old in the LA free press. "Well, I'll be god-damned," Bukowski says and they shake hands. The fight was off. For Bukowski, meeting this bartender is better than meeting Bono and the various actors and film directors also present.

The Captain Is Out To lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship is illustrated throughout with pictures drawn by Robert Crumb - another so-called derelict loser from the Sixties of a life mis-spent - and it's a perfect match. Crumb obviously knows where Bukowski's coming from and captures him perfectly in his classic black-and-white pen and ink style that makes for the book being even better, more of a novelty, and even more worthy of reading.

John Serpico

The Basketball Diaries - Jim Carroll

THE BASKETBALL DIARIES - JIM CARROLL

Patti Smith always spoke highly of Jim Carroll, saying how great a poet he was and in fact his book The Basketball Diaries whilst dedicated to the memory of folksinger Phil Ochs, singles Patti out for special thanks. Apart from the film of course starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carroll is probably best known for his song People Who Have Died that is exactly what it says on the can as in a list of Carroll's friends who have died along with the circumstances of their deaths. It's a cracker. When it comes to his poetry, what tends to stand out first and foremost about it is where it's coming from as in New York on the Lower East Side, the kind of impoverished place that in the Sixties was ghetto-like and not somewhere you'd expect to find a lot of poetry. No gleaming spires of Cambridge, moons in June and chasing butterflies there. No, Jim Carroll was a proverbial flower in the dustbin, an original angel with a dirty face.

The Basketball Diaries chronicles tales of his growing up in New York and involves his playing basketball, drinking, smoking reefer and sniffing glue. It's the story of a wise-cracking, street-smart kid growing up with the city as a playground and what better playground than New York in the mid-Sixties? In fact what better playground than New York in any decade? The drawback is that the city is also a jungle wherein dwell monsters be they in the form of over-zealous police, predatory paedophiles and easily if not near freely available heroin.

So, at the age of thirteen Carroll takes his first heroin hit and loses his virgin veins, as he puts it. By the age of fifteen he's a recreational heroin user turning tricks on Third Avenue for middle-aged homosexuals on New York vacations. A veritable mini-Midnight Cowboy. A toilet trader rather than a rose by any other name. He's in control, however, and in spite of his usage becomes a talented if not erratic Junior High School basketball player though over time the more books he reads the more he realises that what he actually needs to do is write. Alas, also over time he proves to be no exception to the rule and ends up like Bowie's Major Tom strung out in heaven's high hitting an all time low, with nothing else to be done apart from spending all day chasing a fix.

Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries is a stir of echoes channelling Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Lou Reed and Christiane F. A majorly interesting aspect of it is in the fact that it's the voice of a genuine working class street kid that at the time was a rare thing though arguably it's even more of a rarity nowadays with culture at all levels becoming increasingly the domain of the University-educated middle class. Jim Carroll, however, is/was the real deal and for that if for nothing else makes The Basketball Diaries a thing of rare if not dark, tainted yet entertaining beauty.

John Serpico

To Dream Of Freedom - Roy Clews

 TO DREAM OF FREEDOM - ROY CLEWS

If your regional water board compulsory-purchased the area you and your family have lived for generations so as to flood it from a dam to be built to supply water to Liverpool, how would you feel? This is what actually happened in 1965 when the residents in the valley of Tryweryn in Wales were evicted from their homes to make way for a massive reservoir. The residents objected, of course, duly going on protest marches and collecting petitions but all to no avail. Back then, the water industry was still nationalised so it wasn't as if the residents were just up against a single, corporate company but instead were pitched against what was then called the Liverpool Corporation and behind them British Parliament and the House of Commons.

When all forms of peaceful protest fails, what to do? When the government of the day rides roughshod over those it governs and in the process destroys lives, what to do? Enter Owain Williams, a Welshman living and working in Canada as a logger who on gaining knowledge regarding the use of explosives returned to Wales in a bid to try and do something about the Tryweryn situation and show that the spirit of Wales was still alive. 

Along with a few acquaintances of similar disposition Williams formed a small organisation - a resistance group - and called it Muiad Amddiffyn Cymru, in English 'Movement for the Defence of Wales', MAC for short. His plan was to destroy the Tryweryn site completely, to blow up the bridge carrying site traffic, the oil dumps, trucks, machinery, everything; and on netting stolen detonators and gelignite from a quarry he and his comrades were good to go.

For all their passion and conviction, however, all they managed to do was to get themselves arrested and jailed, the saving grace being that they acted as a catalyst for the formation of another nationalist group going under the name of the Free Wales Army (FWA).

On reading To Dream Of Freedom by Roy Clews, the leaders of the FWA were experts in self-aggrandizement, self-publicity and farcicality with a penchant for blowing up water supply lines. One of the leaders of the FWA explained, however, it was never their intention to storm over the border in armoured cars and tanks but to be more of a war of propaganda punctuated by acts of sabotage and shows of strength.

For all their mishaps and near-comical escapades that the book chronicles, the saving grace of the FWA was their intervention into the after-effects of the Aberfan disaster where they were approached by families of the victims of that day to help sort out the bureaucratic mess of getting money that had been donated to the Disaster Fund actually into the hands of those who needed it rather than into only the pay cheques of those employed to administer it. The FWA simply held a press conference where they declared that if a sum of £5,000 was not paid within a week to each of the bereaved families of Aberfan then the Active Service Units of the Free Wales Army would start blowing things up and Government buildings would be destroyed. Within a week it was announced the monies would be paid. According to one parent of a child lost in the disaster "If it wasn't for the FWA the families would never have received a penny. When no one else would help us, they did. There was no one else we could turn to until they came along. Great to us they were. Great lads."

And then came along a happily married man and father of two young boys by the name of John Jenkins, who on the surface had everything to lose and nothing to gain by taking the course of action he did. Feeling that the Welsh national identity was not only being threatened but was in the last stages of survival, Jenkins took up arms and declared war against the British State that subsequently rejuvenated the MAC and over time sent a genuine shiver of fear through the political Establishment.

On joining the by then somewhat moribund MAC, Jenkins proved himself by blowing up a water pipeline before formulating a more long-term strategy to centre on the forthcoming Prince of Wales Investiture of 1969. His plan was that every time a member of the Royal Family stepped foot in Wales they would be met with protest and resistance - resistance being in the form of an organised bombing campaign. And so it began.

Come 1969 and the time of the Investiture there was open talk in FWA internal communications about arming with shotguns, guns, bows slings, pikes and weapons of all sorts and storming the town where Charles the Pretender was to be crowned. There was even talk of calling in the IRA following an offer of assistance from them, with their men of course being well-trained and well-armed. Not surprisingly the police moved into action and the homes of all the known leading FWA members were raided and arrests made. Jail sentences followed and from that moment the FWA were to all intent and purpose a spent force.

This still left, however, John Jenkins remaining at large who by then had become the clandestine leader of the MAC who very brilliantly it must be said delivered on what he promised. Bombs were going off left, right and centre, most spectacularly being the one let off at the offices of the Inland Revenue in Chester, shattering two hundred windows and sending thousand of tax documents floating across the city.

For all the efforts of Jenkins and the MAC, the Investiture managed to still go ahead but under massive State security, meaning in a way it was still a victory of sorts for the MAC as not only had they forced it to be held at State gunpoint but had also massively reduced the number of attendees.

And still the bombings continued until finally Jenkins too was arrested from being betrayed by an informer, effectively bringing to an end all active operations from then on.

To Dream Of Freedom is an interesting book if only due to telling a tale that is rarely told these days to the point of it being almost wiped from collective memory. The problem with it is that it's about nationalists and nationalism which means a lot of the politics are skewed. If Conservatism attracts a lot of swivel-eyed loonies to the Conservative Party then nationalism attracts to its ranks a lot of serious mind-benders ripe for therapy.

At one point in the book John Tyndal's National Front is mentioned in regard to them contacting the FWA wanting to know their political aims and this in itself speaks volumes as any right thinking politico would never have considered entertaining the National Front for one second. It doesn't say so but hopefully the FWA told them to jog on. It's clear the FWA or the MAC were in no way virulent racists although quite a few of their leaders were self-confessed uncompromising anti-Communists, which always begs the question as to where the line is drawn and do they mean they are just anti-Left full-stop? Is it just a way of saying they're solidly Right-wing and proud? Julian Cayo-Evans, the main leader of the FWA was also an ex-public schoolboy that again is problematic to anyone au fait with class politics.

For all this, To Dream Of Freedom is still an interesting read that if nothing else gives pause to think twice about Wales and its relationship to England, particularly post-Brexit and the looming, very distinct possibility of the future break-up of the UK with Wales along with Scotland of course embracing independence not through bombs but by a natural repulsion and aversion to London-centric Tory governance.

John Serpico

The Politics Of Ecstasy - Timothy Leary

 THE POLITICS OF ECSTASY - TIMOTHY LEARY

"My advice to people in America today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out."

So advised Dr Timothy Leary and so ensued a social earthquake the like of which America had never quite seen or experienced before. Turn on, tune in, drop out. A slogan as good if not better than any advertising logo ever devised. The problem being, however, that any successful advertising slogan is immediately cast in stone and deprived of any nuance or subtlety and so subsequently becomes a monolith to a depiction of a black and white kind without any shade of grey let alone any other colour.

The term 'turn on' in the Dr Leary sense is self-explanatory as in 'get in touch', the term 'tune in' means to harness, whilst the term 'drop out' means - what exactly? Therein lay a problem. At face value, to 'drop out' means to stop what you're doing whatever that might be and if that means or includes living and participating in society then it means stopping your involvement with that society on whatever level you're engaged with it.

There's no real way of knowing how many people took Leary at his word and followed his advice to the letter but it's a substantial amount. 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,' as Allen Ginsberg put it and there's an argument that says this is applicable to Leary's slogan where the best minds were destroyed by his advice leaving the paths to positions of social influence and power wide open to those of a more conservative bent. Meaning this explains how someone like George W Bush ended up as being the President of the United States rather than someone like Jerry Garcia.

That's not to say, however, that 'dropping out' is all bad. It may put a halt to any dreams of becoming President but it can also lead to a job in Silicon Valley and to the invention of the i-Phone or to living in a cave in the Mojave Desert. So it's swings and roundabouts. It's the American dream. It's the reason why the advice to 'drop out' was the hardest pill to swallow and caused the most alarm because it could potentially ruin the careers of a good many students or middle class men with mortgage payments.

And there's the nub. Dr Leary whilst addressing anyone who would listen was being picked up on by a largely middle class demographic and this little fact was never being acknowledged. There was never any class analysis or class politics in any of Leary's words of advice. Does it matter, you might ask? Well yes it does, particularly when considering the social impact Leary had upon a generation.

The immediately striking thing on reading The Politics Of Ecstasy is how Timothy Leary is such an eloquent writer. He's like a cosmologist poet - or a poet cosmologist. He's like a cut-and-dried case for when sending an astronaut into space to send one with at least a grasp of poetry rather than some of the meatheads NASA sends up and on being asked what the view is like they reply "Great!" or "Neat!".

Leary was, of course, a sort of astronaut himself but of innerspace rather than outer. A clinical psychologist, a personality astrologist, a scientific messiah of sorts whose arguments many of which were irrefutable.

'Your body is the universe.' he declared 'The ancient wisdom of Gnostics, Hermetics, Sufis, Tantric gurus, yogis, occult healers. What is without is within. Your body is the mirror of the macrocosm. The kingdom of heaven is within you.' And who could argue with that? Buzz Aldrin?

Likewise with his condoning and advocacy of psychochemicals: 'Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides, telescopes are unnatural.' And who could argue with that? Isaac Newton? 

The Politics Of Ecstasy is a collection of articles, transcribed lectures and interviews presented as a testament to Leary's psychedelic/ecstatic vision. Unlike his 'turn on, tune in, drop out' slogan, however, it's not a vision cast in stone but more an ongoing, organic one. It's a vision buffeted both forwards and backwards by ongoing drug experimentation along with reaction and retaliation from what Leary calls the 'middle-aged menopausal mind system'. Authority, in other words. The Establishment and the protectors of it. The defenders of the status quo. The Ronald Reagans and the J Edgar Hoovers of this world.

Leary understands but tends not to forgive: 'One of the terrible things about the menopausal society is that the older you get, the more brain damaged you are, but in our society, the older you get, the more power you get. So we now have this paradoxical, suicidal situation in the United States, all of the wealth being in the hands of the menopausal people, who are naturally only concerned with protecting this, and that's why we have a very unhappy, violent country.'

And Leary's solution? Turn them on, baby. Offer them the sacrament. Turn on your parents and even your grandparents. With consent, ideally, though Leary doesn't stop short at seeing it as a wholly bad thing if the Viet Cong were to drop LSD into the water supply. As a cherry on the cake he also thinks there should be laws that allow people to vote at puberty and that voting be taken away at menopause - that no one over the age of fifty should be allowed to vote.

When Leary's saying these things it's like he's riffing on a theme but one that hasn't been clearly thought out. LSD in the water supply would be a major acting of 'spiking' without any precision behind it so would be pretty irresponsible if not reprehensible. Not allowing voting for the over-fifties opens the door wide open to all kinds of other things to be disallowed, leading ultimately down the path to Logan's Run territory. Opening up voting upon hitting puberty leads on to standing for election at the same age and whilst being governed by old duffers with their fingers up their arse and their eye on their stocks and shares is no joy, being governed by a twelve-year old spotty brat could be even less so.

'American culture,' Leary tells us 'is an insane asylum. The Western world has been on a bad trip, a 400-year old bummer. War heroics. Guilt. Puritan ethics, grim, serious, selfish, striving.' LSD in the meantime is 'the spiritual equivalent of the hydrogen bomb'. It's not a narcotic, it's not a medical drug and it doesn't cure any illness. It is instead a new form of energy that will sweep the user 'over the edge of a sensory Niagara into a maelstrom of transcendental visions and hallucinations'. And where's the problem with that? It's almost the kind of thing you might want to have available for free on the National Health.

'There's no such thing as an overdose of LSD,' Leary continues 'There's no known lethal quantity.' So why the big moral panic over it? Why the prohibition? Why has the possession of it, the use of it, the manufacturing of it etc, etc been made illegal? Fear, says Leary. The fear of everything the Established Order stands for becoming obsolete and crashing down, or at least fading away into insignificance. But why then has this not yet happened? Why is there still a constipated Established Order governing a mutually constipated populace? Patently, LSD doesn't lead to psychomania but neither does it lead to a Jesus Christ complex and the creation of heaven on earth. So what does it lead to? Well, that's the beauty of it. LSD leads only to you, the imbiber. It leads to the mirror, to your own reflection. LSD takes you home.

'Write your own life,' Leary advises as a final parting shot. 'Start your own religion. Write your own bible. Write your own ten commandments. Start your own political system.

Reader, write your own Politics of Ecstasy.'

John Serpico

Sic - Chumbawamba

 SIC - CHUMBAWAMBA

Produced in 2002 by members of Chumbawamba when they were flush with money from the success of Tubthumping, Sic is subtitled as being a 'magazine of no value' and described on the back cover as 'an irony-free zone where artists, activists and sex and drugs and rock'n'roll meet up'. Design-wise it's more like a Reader's Digest than a typical kind of magazine you'd pick up at your newsagent and content-wise it's neither 'a pop magazine with politics or a political magazine with pop'. To be a bit more precise, it's probably better described by the mock caption on the cover: 'Adventures In Anti-Capitalism' - but without the exclamation mark.

So what do you get for your cover price of £4.95? A bargain that's what and a pretty good one at that. An interesting and easily readable compilation of interviews, articles and graphic design that whiffs of social change and do-gooding without the typically associated embarrassment. It's a roll call of participating names that if put together in the same room would erupt into arguments but on paper sit very well together. Jake Black of Alabama 3, Mick Farren, Jeremy Hardy, Seething Wells - and that's just the ones who have since passed away. Caroline Coon, Bill Drummond, Rob Newman, Jon Savage, Mark Thomas - and that's just some of the better known ones.

Twenty years after it first being published and it's interesting how 'soft' some of the politics and points of views expressed within Sic's pages now seem. Even though the kind of world being aimed at by all the contributors might appear even further away than ever, everything being expressed sounds so very reasonable and easily achievable with just a bit of good will and fortitude. So after twenty years it now begs the question that Marc Bolan first posed back in the early 1970s as Glam Rock wobbled on its stack heels: Whatever happened to the teenage dream?

In Italy that dream was represented for a moment by the Tute Bianche, otherwise known as the white overall movement on whom there is a very good article written I presume by one of Chumbawamba? Dressed in white overalls with home-made foam and cardboard body armour beneath and sporting crash helmets and home-made shields, the Tute Bianche would make their way to the front of demonstrations and advance towards lines of riot police with a chant of 'Here we come, bastards'. Significantly and importantly the only weapons they held were soft cuddly toys and bendy balloons whilst the foam padding meant they could only push and use weight of numbers. In effect, this meant that any violence could only come from the police. 

During the anti-globalization mass demos of the late 90s and early 2000s the Tute Bianche were a sight to behold and they easily stole headlines. Come the anti-G8 demo of 2001 in Genoa, however, these tactics came to a head when the Italian State responded in the way they knew could be most effective: by massive indiscriminate violence. To witness Italian police armed with tear gas, batons, guns and armoured cars attacking people armed with teddy bears, balloons and water pistols might well reveal the true face of the State but it doesn't bring that State down, though it does leave a lot of people injured and jailed. Clearly, post-Genoa 2001 it was time for a re-think.

Meanwhile in an interview with Sri Lanka-born writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan, migration is cited as a way of looking at what capitalism does to people's lives. 'Globalisation displaces people, I call it economic genocide by stealth. There's no such thing as an illegal migrant, there's only an illegal government,' he says. 'The cultural demonisation of asylum seekers takes place before the law comes into place. Capitalism moves in mysterious ways, its miracles to perform. There's a collective subconscious about capitalism which allows it to use the cultural feeling, the cultural instance, the cultural dynamics of a people in order to soften them up for the economic exploitation to come. In an old democracy like Britain it's a blotting paper society that absorbs and negates opposition.'

And then there's artist, writer and veteran of both the hippy movement and punk, Caroline Coon, who says 'The most heroic thing you can do is smuggle refugees into this country. I always feel that I should do it. The poor lorry drivers who are getting fined, it's a very heroic thing to do.' And remember, this was twenty years ago she was saying this.

More closer to home and in what is the best interview/article in Sic, the late Reverend D Wayne Love (aka Jake Black) of Alabama 3 expounds upon his interactions with Crass and whilst acknowledging their influence sees them now as having been extremely conservative in their politics. As for the One Little Indian label Alabama 3 were on at that time, according to the late Reverend all that label boss Derek Birkett was doing was accumulating and writing off groups as tax losses or viewing them as grist to the mill, just in the same way that any boss would do in terms of surplus value. The interesting thing about this is that One Little Indian was the label Chumbawamba were on prior to them signing to EMI and the release of Tubthumping - leading to the financial success without which Sic would never have been produced or published. There's some kind of lesson there.

As is there also a lesson in the fact that copies of Sic are currently for sale on Amazon and AbeBooks for £75...

John Serpico

Bright Lights, Big City - Jay McInerney

 BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY - JAY MCINERNEY

Whenever Dillinger had cocaine running around in his brain and he would tell Jim that a knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork was the way you spelt New York I used to think: No it isn't. When I actually first went to New York I thought I might hate it there, this powerhouse of capitalism where money is God and where its inhabitants are loud and crass as a matter of course. But I was wrong. I was impressed. I stood looking out at Manhattan from on top of the Empire State Building and the noise from down below was like some colossal machine. A never-ending roar like that of a gigantic waterfall. Down there below me was one of the pinnacles of human creation. Looking up from the street from down on Fifth Avenue the buildings stretched up into the sky and were indeed like canyons. And then with the hustle and the bustle and the extremities of all human life I though yes, I could live here.

Whenever Peter York or some such similar talking head was on television defining the 1980s solely as a time of extravagance, Sloane Rangers, yuppies, and wealth creation on the Stock Exchange I always used to think: No it wasn't. On picking up a copy of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City I thought I might hate everything about it, this tale of a young urban professional carousing the streets of Manhattan in a blaze of cocaine and first world problems. But I was wrong. In fact I'm almost impressed.

According to the blurb on the cover from Tony Parsons, Bright Lights, Big City is 'probably the best book ever written about being young, about doing drugs and about music'. It isn't and Tony Parsons is wrong but then when is he ever right? Were it not for its wry humour and weird attention to weird detail then it would be a tale of self absorption and self pity kept afloat by a druggy white line fever but it is instead a sort of immorality tale of a fall from grace and a gradual redemption. It's well composed, finely executed and not too serious which makes for the final redemption to come across as quite touching that in itself is an achievement because let's face it, no-one likes a yuppie.

Its drug angle is of interest as well because the whole book seems to be not so much about drugs but drug-fuelled: 'The sweet nasal burn hits like a swallow of cold beer on a hot August day and by the time you all troop out of the bathroom you are feeling omnipotent. You are upwardly mobile. Certainly something excellent is bound to happen.'

Would it come as any surprise to know that the whole Thatcher/Reagan economic free-for-all, the whole shoulder pads and Armani fashion sense, the whole selfishness and greed is good mantra of the 1980s was ridden on the crest of a cocaine wave? Of course not. Why else would all those brash city slickers of that period appear so confident? How else would the musical emptiness and the lyrical shallowness of someone like Phil Collins gain such traction and provide the soundtrack to anyone's life? Why else would a place like Studio 54 become so popular? Why else would anyone want to go to the Groucho Club?

Not that I would ever condemn cocaine use, however. In fact more power to it, I say. Whatever gets you through the night, etc. It's just that Bolivian Marching Powder does not make for witty or erudite conversation nor does it make for great art which is why Bright Lights, Big City impresses because it is witty, it is somewhat erudite and it is rather great.

John Serpico