Track: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - 'Jesus Alone'

His first new material since 2013's 'Push the Sky Away', Nick Cave's lead single from forthcoming album 'Skeleton Tree' strikes a tone that is both solemn and bewitching. For its 6-minutes it throbs and undulates with an intricately woven mesh of distorted synths, string layering and the twilight howl of a theremin.

The refrain 'with my voice, I am calling you' is intoned with increasing strains of longing, accompanied by spare piano chords that cut through the surrounding drone in a way that is simple yet thoroughly effective. It sounds like the throes of an insomniac night spent sat in feverish grief.

As is to be expected, the lyrics teem with interpretative imagery, but resound with motifs of lost faith, by way of drug addicts in Tijuana hotel rooms and African doctors harvesting tear ducts.

Cave has now firmly adopted his position as one of alt-rock's most eminent and consistently inspired figures, and here's hoping that the new album matches the foreboding heights of this first release.

Track: Esben and the Witch - 'Sylvan'

I first saw the gothic post-rock trio Esben and the Witch in a draughty Manchester hall sometime around 2010. They were supporting The Big Pink, but easily upstaged them with their simplistic yet frantic paeans of despair and dark enchantment.

(Incidentally, does anyone remember The Big Pink? They were a Jesus Jones-esque electro-rock outfit who had a minor hit with 'Dominos' and then disappeared into obscurity. Although their debut album 'A Brief History of Love' was one I remember listening to quite frequently when it was released ... perhaps one to revisit, or visit for the first time should you feel so inclined.)

I was equally taken with ESTW's debut album 'Violet Cries', deeming it to be a foreboding and haunting well of mature compositions that conjured up images of Norwegian pine forests, Brothers Grimm tales and German silent expressionist cinema like 'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari'.

However, my interest in their following two albums never quite reached the same level; I deemed them incapable of moving beyond the sepia-toned field of woe they had ploughed very well on 'Violet Cries', and I gradually forgot about them.

So I was pleased, earlier this week, to hear their new track 'Sylvan' and find myself suitably impressed.

At 13 minutes-long, it ebbs and flows with the same plaintive vocals from Rachel Davies and atmospherics that swirl like a morass of ghostly fog. When it erupts though it is cataclysmic and epic, with the same kind of operatic dread that made 'Lucia at the Precipice' so enthralling. A good omen for further new material later in the year.

Have a listen to 'Sylvan' here...

The Comet is Coming - 'Channel the Spirits'

Nominated as the token 'wildcard' entry for this year's Mercury Prize, The Comet is Coming's debut album deserves, if not to win (Bowie's 'Blackstar' deserves to on its own merits rather than poignancy), then to achieve an awful lot of attention.

'Channel the Spirits' is an engrossing and captivating expression of energy and imagination on the part of the three London-based musicians who formed a loose improvisational trio and recorded the album in a matter of a few days.

The promiscuity with genres throughout the album is what drives the music on in an eclectic sense, allowing the tracks to melt into one another but at the same time move between psychedelic jazz, Afrobeat, electronica, tribal and funk.

The band have cited inspiration as being the cosmic jams of Sun Ra, but at times it sounds like a collision between the gritty bass grooves of Fuck Buttons and the blissed-out synths of old-school The Orb.

All the tracks though are scored through with acid saxophone attacks and flourishes that provide the album with its spaced-out, reverb-heavy vibrancy. 'New Age' embraces electronica to the extent that it doesn't sound far from Aphex Twin's debut 'Selected Ambient Works I', while 'Journey through the Asteroid Belt' harks back to bands like Harmonia.

In all, this is a piece of work that adds depth and colour with repeat listens, and which demonstrates a versatility and creative energy that can only mean following on the tail of this comet will be thoroughly rewarding.

Housewives / Massicot - Cafe OTO

Housewives / Massicot at Café OTO, London
24/08/2016

It's an evening taut with late-August heat, and as people begin to gather on the street outside Café OTO a release of rain falls from the bruised sky. There is a palpable feeling of tense anticipation among the collective, the sense that everyone knows they are about to experience something equally bruising.

Housewives are a South London 4-piece who have amassed something of a cult following due to their formidable live performances. They released their debut album 'Work' in October 2015, recorded on a farm in the remote French countryside, and have so far maintained an online profile that is refreshingly low (there are, for instance, barely any photographs of the band).

This air of mystique is only enhanced when the band arrive, dressed in disarmingly bohemian clothes - natty cardigan, suit blazers, black beret. It all adds up to an impression that this is a band carefully cultivating their own image, aware that people will find out about them but strictly on their own terms.

They start by whipping up a whirlwind of droning loops - from a didgeridoo of all things - before launching into as dense and abrasive a half-hour set as I have seen in a long time.

There's an industrial chaos that harks back to Einsturzende Neubauten, while having the propulsive rhythms and ferocious intensity, not to mention the barked vocal stylings, that can only remind you of early-Swans.

Indeed, with sweat dripping from noses, it's hard not to be reminded of the legendary Swans gigs in which the band would order the venue's air-conditioning to be switched off, so subjecting the audience to a sweltering onslaught.

The detuned guitars and percussive precision is at its best on 'Tele', which swiftly descends into the sound of a diseased church bell's death throes.

Thinking politically, there's something about 'Autarky', in which the mantra "Work harder! Hard worker!" is yelled to the approximate sounds of a collapsing factory, that makes this just about the most perfect sonic response to six years of Tory austerity and 'anti-scrounger' rhetoric.

By the end of the set, it is impossible not to conclude that this is a band that must be experienced in a live setting, simply because there's likely very few new bands in the country who sound quite so scathingly appropriate for these tense and chaotic times as Housewives.

Check out their Bandcamp page here - http://housewivesband.bandcamp.com/music

Massicot are a Geneva-based 4-piece who tread much the same musical terrain as Housewives, but eschew the same droning chaos in favour of tightly syncopated rhythms and jagged guitar work that fit together like falling pieces of Tetris.

The songs are built up around the spinal drum work, which shifts from motorik to funk to cowbell-inflected calypso, and back again. Around this is an exoskeleton of sparse guitar and bass - in this case a curious red mini-bass - weaving repetitive discordant riffs that, in same way as Housewives, you can't help but be swept up in.

Add into the mix a John Cale-esque electric violin sweeping and scratching its way across the taut structures and you have a band that display an impressive array of experimentation and potential. Check them out.

Check out their Bandcamp page here - http://massicot.bandcamp.com/

Syrian air strikes

There was an interesting point made on Twitter a few days after the failed coup in Turkey; that since the accused instigator Fethullah Gülen is exiled in the genteel suburbs of Pennsylvania, would it be acceptable for Turkey to send drones to execute him before he can provoke further unrest in his homeland?

Gulen is the former ally of Prime Minister Erdogan and supporter of the ruling AKP party, which is now spreading its despotic arms across the whole state apparatus, smothering all and any embers of dissent, illusory or real.

The absurdity of the above proposition is a simplistic indicator of the American exceptionalism that continues to pirouette so deftly across the world stage. It is 'acceptable' for America to send drones to execute perceived enemies on foreign soil, but would be unthinkable for anyone else to do the same.

As Michelle Obama pontificates at the Democratic National Convention about America still being "the greatest nation in the world", like someone with an inferiority complex talking to themselves in the mirror, I'd like to draw attention to a shocking news story from last week that was met with predictable silence.

US-led air strikes targeting ISIL in the northern Syria city of Manbij killed at least 56 civilians including 11 children, bringing the collateral damage total since the end of May to 167.

With a fresh terrorist attack hitting Europe at what seems to be an almost weekly rate, it is this sort of atrocity-in-error that can only serve to enflame local anger, despair and, for a minority, radicalisation.

These and other atrocities like them simply don't resonate in our consciousness because of the perceived complexity and hopelessness of the situation. The horror of the US firebombing the Afghan MSF hospital in 2015, in which 22 people burned to death, is now a distant memory with apparently few lessons learned.

When it is said that Jeremy Corbyn offers little effective opposition to the Tory government, it is perhaps worth bearing in mind that the Labour MPs who have sought to undermine him and forced a leadership contest, were predominantly the same MPs who voted with the Tories for the UK's commencement of Syrian airstrikes.

Last week's atrocity plays into the hands of ISIL, who use local populations as human shields, and is precisely the reason so many stood in opposition to the idea that you tackle a problem as complex as the one in Syria only by dropping bombs.

Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!

So it's official, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for the 2016 Presidential election. I'll be writing plenty more about Trump in the weeks to come, but essentially my view is that it's time for people to stop dismissing him as an unelectable joke. Clearly, the ground rules on what is and isn't 'electable' are more malleable than ever at present, and he has to be taken seriously, regardless of the fact that he looks like an overgrown teabag with a yellow duster wig.

I would find it easier to rationalise Trump's popularity were he a ranting oaf like the US 'shock jock' Alex Jones, or a charismatic and occasionally witty racist like Nigel Farage; but the fact is that Trump is staggeringly inarticulate, so much so that he almost makes George W. Bush seem as eloquent a rhetorician as Obama.

Trump may have hijacked the Republican party, much to their evident dismay, but he is a monster entirely of their own making. When you poison the well of political discourse with such committed toxicity, with the Tea Party faction et al, and grind Congress to a halt on numerous occasions, don't be surprised when an odious carp like Trump breaches the surface of the noxious water and grows fatter from the poisonous minnows in his way.

Watching his convention speech, there was an interesting parallel to be made with current world politics elsewhere.

A centrepiece of Trump's threadbare policy tapestry was his pledge that "the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end." How might he go about achieving such a feat?

Perhaps he has been modelling his policy strategy on that of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines who was elected in May on a swollen wave of anti-crime rhetoric. In his short time in office so far, Duterte has advocated the murder of drug dealers and addicts, and has galvanised his police force to kill some 30 suspected 'drug lords'.

Such incendiary attitudes to law enforcement may begin to spread closer to home. New Prime Minister Theresa May - she of the 'Immigrants Go Home' van - is nothing if not a tad authoritarian. As Home Secretary she has pushed hard for the Counter-Extremism and Safeguarding Bill - the 'snooper's charter' - which essentially empowers everyone to keep a suspicious eye on everyone else in an effort at rooting out early signs of extremism.

She has also passed the Psychoactive Substances Act; a ridiculously regressive piece of legislation which bans as an 'illegal drug' substances on a definition so broad as to potentially include incense sticks and wax candles.

This is not only wrong-headed, anti-scientific law but also grossly unfair of our Dear Leaders. After all, in a world that can present Donald Trump as a possible 'leader of the free world', we'll need all the psychoactive substances we can gobble down just to stay sane.

More on The Donald soon...

Corbyn leadership

Almost one year ago, on a humid Wednesday evening, I made the trip after work to Ealing, where I had a ticket to a sold-out event with the Labour leader candidate, Jeremy Corbyn.

I had been following his steady ascendancy onto the grassroots pedestal for some weeks, and like many was buoyed by this man who, for all his lack of obvious style and charisma, or perhaps because of it, appeared to be the representative of a new kind of politics that might be possible.

Across Europe, left wing movements were reaching office in Greece and gaining traction in Spain, while reports were starting to emerge of a guy called Bernie Sanders who was making promising ripples in the stagnant reservoir of American politics.

I had seen Corbyn speak a year or so before, at a Stop the War conference in Central London. Although I'd been there predominantly to get a chance to see the late great Tony Benn speak, I remember being impressed and faintly surprised that the Labour party still possessed, on its ragged fringes, an MP of Corbyn's conviction and moral principles.

In Ealing Town Hall the atmosphere was of that kinetic level of excitement normally only experienced at a gig before the main act takes to the stage. Corbyn was almost an hour late, as he had spontaneously addressed the crowd still outside without tickets, then going to an overflow room, before finally arriving in the main hall full of around 1,500 people to a standing ovation.

I remember what a diverse and eclectic crowd it was in attendance, the demographic sweep appeared to have been uniquely comprehensive. I recall recognising the journalist Seamus Milne lurking off to one side of the hall; at that time not yet appointed as Corbyn's communications guru, but there to survey the lay of the land nonetheless.

My overriding feeling of the event was one of genuine enthusiasm, cautious optimism and tangible hope; feelings that my perhaps overly cynical self had not expected to find being aroused by a political rally for a Labour leader.

One year on, and the UK has voted to leave the EU, Theresa May as the new PM has appointed the most right wing cabinet in years, Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton as Democratic nominee, and Jeremy Corbyn is having to restand for the leadership again. Yes, it is turbulent times for Labour, who have done their utmost to discredit and destabilise Corbyn since his election, and have descended into petulant mutiny since the referendum.

At time of writing, Labour had just received 183,000 new members in 48 hours, a staggering and surely unprecedented achievement. The opportunity for Labour to harness the passion, energy and enthusiasm that I felt pulsing through Ealing Town Hall has never been more pressing or possible. Time will tell whether it flourishes or wilts on the poisonous vine of the Labour party machine.

Ark 2.0

With all the gloom and despondency shrouding America at present, what with a borderline civil war being played out on the streets between blacks and the police, and the electorate facing perhaps the most hair-tearingly dreadful Presidential candidates, it is reassuring to see evidence that the nation that brought Cheez Wizz and Scientology to the world hasn't lost its penchant for the spectacularly bizarre.

This week saw the grand opening of Ark Encounter, a Bible-themed park in Northern Kentucky. The centrepiece of this 800-acre attraction is a colossal replica Ark, built by Amish craftsmen to biblical dimensions, which is now the largest freestanding timber structure in the world.

This monumental act of hubris is the work of Australian multi-millionaire Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis, a creationist group that asserts the literal truth of the Book of Genesis.

Accordingly, they believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that, to counter-claim Bill Hicks, humans co-existed with dinosaurs. (Although surely even they must think it a little odd that absolutely no scholars of the time saw dinosaurs as being worthy of even the slightest mention...?)

It is easy to be incensed and appalled at the idea that this is being fostered and promoted to American children as gospel truth, not to mention the fact that the park developers were gifted $18m in tax incentives from the state of Kentucky. Instead, it's best to applaud the blind ambition and wanton commitment to realise a Jean Baudrillard-esque simulacra of a myth.

In this age of grand confusion and schizophrenic certainties, it is somewhat comforting to see the persistence of some of the oldest myths in their most reductive and literal form.

Just as the flood of Gilgamesh may well have formed the basis for the Old Testament flood, in a future world blighted by devastating climate change and resource wars, this post-modern 21st century ark may well be discovered by AI-archaeologists and used to inform retrospective myths about our own ambitious, but ultimately very very strange, time.

The only way that America will get over guns

It does not really bear repeating the fact that America has a deep-rooting philosophical problem with guns. A frontier nation which won its freedom due to the bearing of arms is now enslaved to them, and it seems no atrocity can possibly burn with an intensity strong enough to melt away the intransigence.

Not 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook, not 49 gays in Florida, not 5 police officers in Dallas. Even after all these atrocities and countless others, the political will for even a modicum of restrictive change - such as the refusal of firearm sales to those on the FBI's terrorist watch-list - is diluted by the liquid flow of dollars from the arms lobbyists.

Even the supposed radical Bernie Sanders shied away on his Democrat nominee campaigning from any form of substantive proposal, himself having voted against the 1993 Brady Bill that mandated federal background checks on firearm purchasers.

By deferring to the Constitutional right to bear arms like a sacred text, the US demonstrates the same fundamentalist mindset that corrupts the religious extremists against which they wage war.

It seems there is only one way that America has a chance of freeing itself from this arms enslavement, which shackles them to a septic root of paranoia and anxiety. It will require something far broader than the Black Lives Matter movement. It will require something on the scale of the civil rights movement if enough pressure is to be brought to bear on the political system.

But more importantly and more fundamentally than this, it will require an entire shift in attitude. Even if Congress passed anti-gun legislation overnight, there would still persist the reality of an estimated 300 million guns in circulation. These will continue to circulate on the black market, perhaps with the added cachet of being an 'illegal' item.

Therefore, it will be necessary to create a taboo of owning a gun. It will need to become something embarrassing, something you wouldn't readily admit to others, something that reflects badly on the individual's character.

This can start right away with individuals making a powerful statement about refusing to bear arms. Only by rejecting the hyper-security narrative that perpetuates the gun industry's power and influence, only by making a defiant pledge that guns are not needed for safety or defence, only by choosing to adopt and promote a gun-free lifestyle, can people really take power into their own hands.

Waiting for political change is futile, with a head of state who is straitjacketed by the myopia of Washington and who can only stand at a lectern after each new atrocity with a tear rolling down his cheek.

The Referendum fallout

With everyone becoming a psephological expert over the last few weeks, I thought it best to wait a couple of weeks to digest the result of the EU referendum.

When I went to bed at around 10 on the night of the 23rd, Nigel Farage was being quoted as saying "Remain have edged it". When I got up at nearly 4am to watch the results come in, he was giving a premature victory speech, pontificating about "decent, real people" having won the day "without a shot being fired". (This despite the fact that an MP had been shot and killed less than a week earlier as campaigning reached its frayed apex.)

Having not been enamoured by either of the options on the table - a largely unreformed EU or a Tory party given free reign to complete their Thatcherite mission - but having voted Remain on the day, I have subsequently arrived at a handful of general thoughts:

1.
The dominance of immigration in deciding the vote reveals a depressing but unsurprising reality. As I wrote on this blog a few days before the vote, the ghosts of prejudices-past that were supposed to have been exorcised by globalisation have been awoken; an indictment of both the left and right to adequately address them.

However, while many voted Leave in the hope that immigration would be curtailed or reversed, with trade deals almost certain to include free movement of people (it being a fundamental tenet of the capitalist consensus) they will likely be sorely disappointed when those high street mosques and Polish delis go exactly no where.

2.
While not everyone who voted Leave will have been xenophobic or racist, they did nonetheless take the decision to ignore almost the entire weight of the establishment as well as experts from economics, science, law amongst other fields, in favour of those who clearly are.

Throughout the campaign, people were crying that no one was "giving us any facts"... when we live in a hyper-real world suffused with accessible information this is an absurdity. Indeed never in the history of civilisation has the banquet of facts and opinions been so glutinous. The reality being that so many chose to disregard facts and reason should give considerable cause for concern.

3.
The result may prove to be the touch-paper on which generational discontent begins to burn.

After all, the older generations who benefitted the most from the successes of globalisation - affordable property, free education, 'jobs for life', golden pensions, large-scale peace - have now decided in large part to rebel against its failures, at the same time risking the future of many millions of young people.

With a greying society that affords baby boomers such power and influence, it would not be a surprise if the younger generation, and especially millenials, started to exhibit increasing signs of resentment towards them.

4.
The Leave result was a real hammer blow to the neoliberal consensus. Whether they may have realised it or not, so many voted as a rebellion against the influence and might of a global capitalist system that impoverishes and disenfranchises whole sections of society. It is a crumbling edifice of socio-economic orthodoxy that, as the political centre-ground subsides across Europe and America, means late-capitalism is well and truly upon us, and real change of one sort or another is just around the corner.

5.
Indeed, there is the real potential for Britain, free from the overbearing rules of the EU, to divert from the fixed-gear trajectory towards market capitalism and privatisation that serves to widen societal inequalities ever further and foster disharmony.

However, I remain convinced that on issues such as the environment, climate change, cyber security, tax avoidance, and disruptive technologies, national borders are arcane and irrelevant concepts for which broader collaboration and mutual cooperation is the only way to ensure decisive and substantial steps are taken.

6.
The petulant and reactionary response of those on the Remain side and the Labour party (with what must surely be one of the worst coup attempts of all time) has shone a harsh light on the parlous regard many hold the democratic process. Where were the masses with their 'I heart EU' placards before the 23rd?!

And if we really want to 'take back control' from the undemocratic elites, how about dismantling the House of Lords, pushing for electoral reform away from a voting system that places the balance of power in a handful of marginal market towns, oh and abolishing the monarchy while we're at it....

Why I will vote Remain

It is with a heavy sigh that I will be voting Remain in the EU Referendum.

My reluctance stems from the fact that I can't help but feel that this whole campaign has been a waste of valuable time, energy and political will.

There are many good reasons to leave the EU.

As much as I would like to believe in Corbyn's notion of a reformed EU built on social democratic foundations, I fear this is idealistic in a Europe that is shifting ever further to reactionary right wing politics.

The EU is run by an anonymous bureaucratic elite that is concerned solely with maintaining its plutocratic influence over the whole of Europe no matter what cost, as was evidenced by its response to the Syriza government of Greece.

There is also the little-mentioned fact of the subsidies it distributes among the wealthiest landowners in Europe, that account to approximately 40% of the total EU budget. As George Monbiot writes in this excellent article, 'as much as 80% of the funds are harvested by the richest 25% of recipients.'

There are no two-ways about it, the EU is an undemocratic monolith. Two of Tony Benn's oft-quoted questions for a functioning democracy are 'To whom are you accountable?' and 'How can we get rid of you?' With the EU, it is very difficult to answer these questions in a way that would convince of democratic virtue.

This democratic deficit however, may in fact be an advantage when it comes to the major issues effecting the continent and the world. The EU as a power-body holds considerable weight against the US, India, China and others in terms of securing real and tangible commitments on the environment and climate change.

Short-termist national governments all competing to achieve growth in a slowing global economy are the wrong vehicles for achieving anything substantial on the environment, as can be seen by the Tories' sudden scrapping of the Zero Carbon Homes initiative in 2015. Anything even remotely positive on environmental issues has been achieved at EU, not national, level.

Despite all my reservations, I will be voting Remain because the alternative that has been offered by the Leave campaign is far more troubling. Were there a Brexit option that involved closing the equality gap, reassessing the land subsidies, investment in housebuilding, public services, infrastructure and manufacturing, and improving conditions for workers, it would be well-worth voting for.

As it is, Brexit would lead to a right wing government, most likely led by the oafish Boris Johnson, that in its desperate effort to secure the economy would sign the country up to any number of dreadful TTIP-style agreements, making us even more subservient to the whims of the United States, and turn the City of London into a glittering Las Vegas, a deregulated financial playground.

This is the crux of the issue. The great neoliberal capitalist experiment of the last 30-40 years - which the IMF only recently conceded in a report paper that it had on balance failed - has succeeded in changing the nature of the country whilst remaining so illusive and intangible that the disaffected who now back Leave have focused their ire on the EU instead.

The real focus of attention and debate should be directed at whether or not we can move away from this economic system, that has been entrenched by the political class as a form of inarguable orthodoxy, that perpetuates and widens the wealth gap, shifting ever more concentrations of wealth to the top level of society, diminishes public services, and buttresses social mobility with ever higher levels of personal debt.

The great irony of this free market capitalist system is that it means nothing and cannot operate without the associated free movement of people. For the right wing Tories who have banged the free market drum for decades to use immigration as a basis for leaving the EU is the height of insouciance.

The fact remains that the defining challenges of the 21st century - adjusting and responding effectively to the environment and unstoppable technological developments - operate with little-to-no acknowledgement of national boundaries.

Anything that attains to entrenching national borders is archaic and irrelevant in the face of these issues, which will have to be addressed on a continental, if not global, level at some point. Pining after a nostalgic vision of Britain's 'glorious past' is no doubt attractive, but misguided.

The referendum, at the heart of it all, is a vote on which rich over-privileged elite you want to govern over you. Nothing else. Undeniably, Project Fear has been operating in full force on both sides, with a machete of scepticism needed to hack through the forest of lies and fabrications that have been allowed to grow out of all control.

I'll be voting to Remain, but I suspect in the long run it won't matter much either way.

There is no future in England's dreaming...

The EU Referendum has stirred ghosts within the body politic that globalisation was supposed to have exorcised.

Instead they have remained below the surface, restless forces and emotions that once disturbed will be very hard to ignore.

Myths of Great Britain's glorious past, the land of hope and glory, have been invoked by those claiming the leaving of the EU to be an act of patriotism.

In a culture that is marketed and devoted so fervently to nostalgia, it is only natural that politics should follow suit, and that misty-eyed visions of 'better yesterdays' come to inform and influence decisions for the future.

Because we once had an Empire and led the world so proudly, it is assumed that we will be able to slide back into our former role on the global stage if we 'take our country back'. But what does this slogan actually mean to those who espouse it? Does it mean that we can isolate ourselves on our island of white cliffs and rolling fields and finally be masters of our own national destiny?

Power and influence was ceded to global capitalism a long time ago, and the ills that so many decry as not having control over our country directly follow from this.

Disenfranchisement and disillusionment derive from austerity politics that is a response to boom-and-bust neoliberal capitalism that Britain was signed up to by Margaret Thatcher and has been pursued ever since.

Immigration is perhaps the most emotive issue, the one most likely to provoke the nastiest 'Little England' response from those who have been corralled by right wing media to feel like they are under siege by swarms of 'others'.

The hysteria of the campaign, that has ultimately lead to the death of an MP, is due to the abject failure of both left and right to appropriately address the issue of immigration.

Regardless of being couched in ignorance or xenophobia as undoubtedly many people's views across the country are, this should not detract from the many others who have legitimate concerns about the ability of public services, housing and infrastructure to accommodate increased numbers.

Meeting such concerns over and over again with platitudes, correct though they are, about how immigration has a net economic benefit, and that they are 'good for the country' is to treat the issue with an intellectually insulting dearth of seriousness.

The great irony is that those Conservatives who banged the drum so keenly for power to be handed to the markets and for the unfettered free flow of capital, cannot come to terms with the fact that this necessarily means the free flow of people as well.

Meanwhile, the left has wallowed in its blind spot over immigration. Supporter though I am of Jeremy Corbyn, this is the issue on which I think he will prove most unelectable. Large numbers of the working class, who have been hit hardest by austerity and who have been enchanted by the ghosts of petty nationalism that swirl in the toxic mire, have turned to UKIP out of frustration at the left's inability to grasp the nettle.

It is my view that there is very little point in coming to a decision on leaving or remaining in the EU based on immigration. It will remain as difficult to control as ever, and any trade agreements that are signed up to post-Brexit will undoubtedly involve allowance for the free movement of people.

Instead, it is essential that the tenor of the debate changes in this country.

The facts have to be accepted that immigration benefits and enriches the country to a considerable extent. But similarly there has to be firm and committed plans in place to ensure that it is managed well. I am sure that people would feel differently were they to be assured that an actual plan was in place, that immigration was encouraged in certain places that might benefit more from it, and discouraged from those that may not.

Government funding should be allocated to areas, weighted according to the numbers of migrants they have absorbed, as a means of helping address concerns over strained services. All of this should be transparent and open, with the emphasis on there being a plan in action, rather than people's feeling that they have been left to become 'out of control'.

Because if that is allowed to continue happening then the inevitable result will be for the politics of fear and hatred to further take hold, as they have across Europe, and the awakened ghosts of a Britannia that no longer exists will haunt the stage.

Those who lie together...

It is a mistake to compare too freely, as many seem to do, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.

Yes, both look like bloated dirigibles inflated with the air of born-to-rule self-entitlement. But it is more appropriate to compare Johnson with Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton.

It is scarcely worth enforcing the axiom that suggests politicians are natural born liars, and yet it is a curious sign of the times that possibly within a matter of months, the UK and America could both be led by two politicians who, perhaps more than any other in western politics, are characterised by their almost pathological inability to tell the truth.

Johnson has been fired from cabinet and from newspapers as a punishment for lying about an extra-marital affair - itself a deception - and for fabricating quotes.

Look at character profiles of him and you can't help but be left with the perception of a man as ruthlessly hungry for power as he is devoid of any tangible plan of what to do with it.

His record as London Mayor is woeful. Firm campaign pledges he made in both 2008 and 2012 elections on homelessness, tube fares and ticket office closures were all broken, and then some. Only very recently, he was subject to painful scrutiny by a select committee who burst the various anti-EU balloons that Johnson had clownishly blown up with calumnies, exaggerations and outright fabrications.

Clinton is a woman who, if you opened her closet in search of skeletons, would likely result in a scene not dissimilar to Pieter Bruegel's 'Triumph of the Death'.

Stories abound in endless quantity of her penchant for lying; from accusations of harassment and bullying of women making allegations of sexual misconduct against her husband, to the Whitewater scandal, to her ongoing private email debacle, to her infamous story of coming under hostile fire in Bosnia (footage existed showing her calmly strolling from a helicopter in perfect safety...)

Christopher Hitchens said "one should not become President for therapeutic reasons." Similarly, with regard to Johnson, the role of Prime Minister should not be given to someone who covets it for no other reason than to fulfil the arrogant proclamations made in an Eton dinner hall.

It is said that the pathological liar is someone who is oblivious to their own lying. Perhaps in these illusory times, the only statesmen we can trust are those who at the very least believe their own lies.

Encaged animals and our outrage

Over the last couple of weeks, two water fountains of viral outrage have been curiously synchronised.

Harambe the gorilla was shot dead by zookeepers after a child managed to infiltrate his enclosure. Cue social media shock and outrage. The suitability of the mother and the family were all held up to scrutiny, with calls for prosecution being klaxoned at high volume.

Likewise, Johnny Depp has been encaged within an enclosure of the celebrity zoo and left there to peddle his rackety, faux-bohemian, Hunter Thompson-wannabe schtick to all those who stop and goggle and him.

He has been accused by his estranged wife Amber Heard of being mentally and physically abusive towards her, including acting very much like a wild animal with a magnum of champagne.

Both encaged animals have been made victims of a social media storm that is as reductive about its subject as it is morally misguided.

Individual cases such as the death of Harambe, and Cecil the lion, serve as useful lightning conductors for us to channel our collective rage at animal cruelties. How dare those vile humans destroy such beautiful creatures?!, we cry.

(By the way, what has happened to that American dentist Walter Palmer? Have animal welfare zealots strapped him to his own surgery chair to perform sadistic orthodontic experiments on him?)

We repost viral memes and sign online petitions about these events, but the truth is we still cannot shake the underlying belief that animals are entirely subject to our own superiority as a species. We hate on a rich dentist because of his recognisably deplorable human traits, but we turn a blind eye to the mass extinction of animal life because we know our own lifestyles are to blame.

According to estimates, the rapid loss of species is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate, and is being termed the ‘sixth mass extinction event’. This is being exacerbated, if not outright caused, by human behaviour-led global warming and habitat depletion. And yet there is silence as we prefer to get enraged about a mother from Cincinnati…

In the case of Johnny Depp; his famous friends and former wife were quick to come to his defence, with not-so-subtle insinuations and questioning as to the malicious ulterior motives of Heard.

Just like endangered gorillas and lions, we hoist megastars like Depp up on the iconic pedestal, unable to countenance the fact that as human animals like the rest of us they are perfectly capable of being flawed and liable to do bad things.

Just as it is quite possible for someone to fabricate lies about abuse in an attempt to extract revenge or reward, it’s also possible for them to be the victim of domestic abuse. Just as it’s possible for a megastar to be the victim of blackmail and lies, it’s also possible for them to be a flawed human who sometimes abuses his partner.

Either way, it’s always interesting to watch the tune to which the fountains dance…

Introduction to The Drone Age

On January 26, 2015, the White House was sent into lockdown mode. The cause was a remotely-piloted, unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that had crash-landed on the front lawn. While no malicious intent lay behind it, the accident served as an ironic symbol of the military-industrial complex, mandated by successive US administrations, having lost some semblance of control of a technological innovation that it had helped to pioneer.

What the automobile was to the 20th century, the drone is to the 21st.

Similarly, the other defining technology of the last century, television, is in the 21st represented by the arrival of virtual reality.

While the earlier technologies exemplified the modern age desire for freedom of the consumer and gratification mediated through the largely sedentary pursuits of both place and entertainment; the later technologies represent a yearning on the part of the collective unconscious for self-transcendence, for an escape from a reality that feels increasingly confusing, isolating and intractable, and from a world with which we appear trapped in a self-destructive relationship.

The drone is the defining technology of the digital age.

An age in which everything is capable of being replicated and immersed in the hyperreal spectacle, where technology appears increasingly autonomous, and where, in the face of a mass surveillance culture, privacy is fast becoming an obsolete concept.

Despite having vastly significant implications on both legal and moral grounds, drones are characterised, like every technology, by their teleological ambiguity - in simple terms, the nature of their intended purpose.

At present, drones are viewed through the matrix of two overriding drivers – military and commercial.

But as they become more ubiquitous, and the ‘dronisation’ of everyday life continues apace, so the range of possibilities for how they could impact on social, phenomenological, political, cultural, spiritual, philosophical, even sexual, levels are far from being mere fantasy.

In terms of the primal instincts, drone pornography is already being experimented with, but how long will it be before the first non-military drone atrocity, and what will be the lasting implications?

Already we see what once was a technology used as a ‘humanitarian weapon’ by the President to strike names off a kill list with all the detachment of swiping through profiles on a dating app, now being promoted for purposes as benevolent as tracking whales in the sea or capturing the perfect view of a winning goal.

Despite all his great intelligence, charisma and panache, Barack Obama was hoisted up on a petard of his own moral character to be stained by the blood of drone warfare. The man of such potential and historical significance, being compelled to state that he had "no regrets whatsoever" about the children killed or made orphans in Waziristan.

In this sense, Obama and his legacy, not to mention the hopes of a nation that were rested upon his shoulders, is another victim of the drones, to an extent that perhaps he is only just realising.

The symbolism of this, in simple terms, is his visiting the shrine of Hiroshima and, caught in the crosshairs of the world media, attempting to show contrition for the lives of so many thousands, in the name of a war which revealed such evil, and in pursuit of a devastating technology that would claim so many lives but which from that point on we would never to able to live without.

The subliminal or dominant, subtle or profound roles that people will ascribe to the drone as it becomes another feature of the technological virtual theatre, can as yet only be imagined.

Will we come to prescribe to them certain meanings all of their own, a personalised logic mandated by our psychologies or neuroses, see them as a curious measure of comfort in uncertain times, or as an omnipresent threat, the small shadows cast by the post-Hiroshima world of possible annihilation, whether by our hand or by nature’s sweeping arm?

When starting to think about my new book 'The Drone Age: Streetview Stories', before writing anything I spent many hours sat in front of Google Maps and Streetview. I sank into an almost hypnotic state as I roved across the entire world, diving down completely at random, taking screenshots of anything I landed on.

The people and scenes captured in these images served as inspiration for the characters in this book. As author, by striking indiscriminately and without aim, I have played the role of the drone.

The book itself can be seen as a form of literary drone.

Throughout, I have used the concept of the drone as a metaphor, sometimes explicitly, other times more subtle, for an array of alternate conditions, from guilt and memory, to paranoid delusion and mental breakdown, to capitalist greed and dreams of flight.

It is my hope that this will be the first example of drone literature.

Back again

Last May 2015, I was walking in the Bavarian forest on a trail that spiralled away like a plume of smoke from bonfire of tourists engulfing Schloss Neuschwanstein. As I scampered higher, the castle looking increasingly like a child's plastic toy against a cartoon sky, was struck with clichéd immediacy by a fictional idea. It was obviously inchoate yet furnished with enough potential to inspire the decision to shift my focus away from beginning work on a novel I had been psyching myself up to start.

The intrigue of the concept, coupled with the pertinence of the drone theme, lead me to fasten all my attention on the project from that point on, leaving me with no time for any other written output.

'The Drone Age: Streetview Stories' is now complete, and so I embark on the Sisyphean task of convincing anyone to read and consider it seriously.

In the mean time, I fully intend to resuscitate this blog with renewed invective. I will write about everything and anything that comes to my attention and interest, however menial, trivial or controversial. And why not?! The world is as confusing and fractious a place as ever, with leading figures increasingly creeping towards extremes while real powers hide away behind concocted myths of their own making, that exist solely in order that these are perpetuated. There is simply too much not to have anything to write about.

I can claim no insight or expertise in any of these subjects. I offer no salient view on anything, being as distracted, puzzled and entrapped by the modern way of life and thought as anyone. And yet I can offer a view that will have been considered, however wide of the mark some may see it to be. A view that will try to excavate beneath surface narratives and received wisdoms in the hope of chancing upon some semblance of real perspective and alternative vantage over these issues as they stand.