15 ALBUMS THAT MEANT SOMETHING TO ME #2: THE FUTUREHEADS, BY THE FUTUREHEADS

The first time I heard this album was in the Fopp on Rose Street in Edinburgh, August 2004. You remember back in the day, when most people didn't have the internet or iPods or anything and if they wanted to buy an album they hung around in record shops and waited for the grumpy dude behind the counter to put the record they were interested in on those little banks of headphones where you could stand and look really cool and hope all the boys noticed? Well, yeah, I was doing that, and to be honest I just stuck the Futureheads on because the other records available were Gang of Four's Entertainment!, which I mistrusted as too highbrow, and some irrevelevant shitey jazz that you're not legally eligible to listen to if you're female or less than 47 years old. Anyway, that probably holds the record for my 'best-single-music-related-decision-originally-taken-to-impress-boys'; it certainly outweighed spending 25 quid on Dylan tickets because I had a crush on some knobhead who thought he was the best musician that ever lived (spoiler: HE'S NOT). Anyway, I liked them immediately: the way that occasionally happens when you meet a friend of a friend in a bar and know by the end of the evening that you're going to spend a bit too much of the next decade making fart jokes on their Facebook wall. All of this was great, for two reasons. Reason 1 was that it meant that I knew of the Futureheads before they became famous for being That Band What Did A Cover of 'Hounds Of Love' Which Is Possibly More Eccentric Than The Original. I don't usually have the energy to know about good bands Before They Get Famous, so this was a rare treat. The second reason was that the second week I was in Edinburgh, I lost the CD carrier I had brought with me (yeah, 'CD carrier' muthafucka. Remember them? No, of course you don't, because you're on the internet and therefore 10) so the only music I had for the six weeks I spent there was the CD I had playing in my Discman at the time - this one. This is probably the one album associated with a specific time and place more strongly than any other piece of music I've ever listened to, ever. It's weird, because the album sounds definitively modern: those precise guitars and sweet-voiced, I-don't-give-a-fuck-about-gender-paradigms harmonies never fail to recall for me bruised, brooding, historical, masculine Edinburgh, but there you go. Memories that involve music are always like that: endlessly contradictory, endlessly compelling. And also, this album is so good. Just so fucken GOOD, man. I'm re-listening to it now, and I still can't fault it. Do you remember those chocolatey pretzel crisp things that you used to be able to buy around 1998/9? The ones that worked because they were all crisp astringent interior and then melty sweet chocolate on the outside, and then part of the pleasure of them came from just how unexpected they are? This album is like those guys: there's the crisp, brittle precision of Dave Hyde's drums, then the sugariness of the famous acappela backing vocals, and THEN ON TOP OF THAT THEY TALK ABOUT MURDER AND PEADOPHILIA AND SHITTY LOW PAID TEMP JOBS AND THEN THEY WHIP OUT THE KATE BUSH COVER AND START CHATTING ABOUT MAN RAY. Seriously, re-listening to this album now: these dudes are so under-rated. Everyone liked them, but no one seemed to think they were that interesting. And damn it, they are! They're clever and funny and interesting and actually, I'd really like to be friends with them. Even if in 2004, all I cared about was that they wrote kick ass music for indie kids to dance to and I thought that if I listened to them enough I would magically be transformed into the kind of girl that boys who look good in tight trousers wanted to kiss.

This was meant to be a facebook post, but then I got qualmist about how maybe it was a little bit too personal for friends only,and decided instead to post it to EVERYBODY ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET. HURRAH. Ok, here it is. It's about music, predictably: 15 ALBUMS: [The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen albums you've heard that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what albums my friends choose.] DISCLAIMER: These are not the 15 albums that I love the most, or the ones that I think are best, whichever criteria it might be that you're using to define 'best' at any given moment. They're the ones around which memories have crystalised and hardened to such an extent that I fully expect to be hanging on to them long after I've started mistaking my children for my siblings and have been packed off to the nursing home/labourcamp/privatised incinerator for the elderly and infirm which will no doubt be the only option for impecunious OAPs once this government is through with our health service. ANYWAY THAT IS NOT THE POINT I AM NOW TALKING ABOUT MUSIC THAT I LOVE AND CARE ABOUT: 1 - The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee I first came across the Mountain Goats through the good offices of a close friend who was going through a horrendously painful break-up and, as a result, linked me to possibly the most acrid divorce ballad ever written, 'No Children'. Although I thought it was great, I was a callow 23 year old at the time, and was more interested in taking ecstasy and listening to Dodgy's 'Staying Out for The Summer' and Das Racist's 'Pizzahut/Tacobell' remixes to pay much more attention. When I finally got round to following up the tip, I bought the only MG album in the shop, the excellent but slightly less mindblowingly, accost-you-in-a-dark-alleyway-and-hold-a-knife-to-your-throat-while-divesting-you-of-small-change-family-keepsakes-and-probably-underwear arresting 'We Shall All Be Healed'. So I forgot about them for a while, and listened to some more Dodgy. Hey, I thought. Mountain Goats. They're on the longlist. I'll get round to it one day. It didn't matter that my friend was practically howling at me to buy Tallahassee. What the fuck, I thought. He howled at me to buy St Vincent, too, and he was definitively wrong about that. More Dodgy. When I finally did get round to buying it, it sat virtually unlistened on my iPod for a few months. And then it was November, and it was a pisswet day, and I was hungover as hell and I had the glaze in my eyes from too much shagging and I also had the sinking feeling in my stomach that, at the age of 24, I was learning to recognise as an early sign that I was falling in love (again) with the wrong person (again) and suddenly 'Staying Out For The Summer' didn't seem quite the thing. I was walking down Crookes Valley Road in Sheffield and put Tallahassee on - maybe because I wanted something to match the bile and dread of 'No Children', maybe because I was going to work and I knew that if I listened to it, I'd have something to talk to my friend about which wasn't this new and painful dread in the stomach. And then I heard: 'I handed you a drink of the lovely little thing On which our survival depends People say friends don't destroy one another What do they know about friends.' Bizarrely, that love-affair - despite possibly the most acrid beginnings in the history of relationships that John Darnielle might plausibly write a concept about - worked out pretty well. In fact, if anything, it's the only time I have ever fell completely, besottedly, and embarrassingly in love with two people at the same time. One of them, predictably, was John Darnielle.

Flights of Fancy from a Mind Jailor

As I mentioned in my last blog, I have recently started working as a teaching assistant. This has simultaneously been one of the most rewarding and most frustrating decisions of my life to date. Obviously, I could use this opportunity to go off on one about how fucking awesome it is to teach a kid how to use commas properly (surprisingly awesome) or to rail against the iniquities of an education system that insists that at age 11, all children - whether they can read and write or not - should be able to identitify a metaphor as opposed to a similie (rail rail) but I'm not going to (or at least, not very much.) This blog is actually about a thought experiment. It is aimed at those who believe that the human race are inherently slavish followers of their given authorities and that because of this a society which is organised around the interests of the people who live in it rather than a disproportionately influential - and therefore priveliged - group of financial and political power-mongers.

Think back to when you were at secondary school.* Do you remember how many hours of every day were spent arguing with your teachers about the rights and wrongs of every un-written homework assignment, every incident of name-calling, every time you tried to throw a chair at another student and accidentally broke a window? Do you remember how many times the scary kid (his name was Bradley. It's always fucking Bradley) at the back of the class got up and marched out because he quite fairly believed that it really wasn't necessary for him to know the date of the invention of the Spinning Jenny?* Do you remember how loudly he slammed the door? Or, for the more studious amongst us - do you remember how many times you forged a sicknote excusing you from P.E? Do you remember when you told your physics teacher that you'd spent two an a half hours finding your way back to the science block from your violin lesson? Do you remember bribing the kid in the NUS office at sixth form college to lie about your age on your student ID? Do you remember traipsing an hour and a half across town in the rain because you had £8.25 and you needed £7.50 of it to get an ISIC card with said fake d.o.b proudly emblazoned across it?

Course you do.

I'm not trying to say that the model society would look anything like a modern secondary school (I did write the bit about the iniquities of the education system, right?) But - and here's the thought experiment - imagine if all that energy - that sheer bloody-minded teenage tenacity - was directed at the people who were *really* trying to screw you over. Imagine if, when the HR guy at your work comes round to inform you that, because you're only in the first six months of your employment, you're not going to get paid for the day you had off sick - oh, and also that the free-lance work that you did for us is now part of your job descriptiona and you won't be getting the six hundred quid that you thought you were. Imagine if you could summon that level of pure ballsy not giving a shit-ness next time you're working in a café where they take all of the credit card tips and half of the cash ones and stick it in the till at the end of the day. Imagine if you could bust it out every time you saw The Times Weekend Magazine.

Imagine if you could get that angry at the people who wrote this year's budget. And I think I know why it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen because the people who you see, face to face, aren't responsible for it, are they? Of course not. But imagine if instead of letting that anger dissipate, you simply asked - as politely as you knew how - to see the person who was responsible. Or at least the person who's next in line. And when you worked your way back through the H.R managers and the C.E.O.s and the junior ministers and the cabinet secretaries and finally got to George Osborne and he said 'there's no one there. There is no one behind me, yet I am not responsible: the system is to blame' you were allowed to say 'Fine. You have said that you are not responsible. I will be responsible for this. Me and the thousands of other poor fuckers who can't pay their heating bills any more. But that means you need to fuck off. And also, you're in detention until you die.'



*This may not work if you went to a fee-paying school.
*1764.

University fees and other major questions that have occured to me in the past six months.

K, I haven't been on line for about six months. I'll talk about that at some point, but not right now. Right now, I felt it was important to talk about some of the things that I've learnt about the world and the way that it's organised since I started working as a teaching assistant.

Oh, wait. Ok, I am definitely going to do this, but not right now. I will do this tomorrow instead.

Sorry to get you all excited.

ships in the night....

So, this is my first experience of an international crisis as a half-committed politico. I got a text message mid-morning last Sunday, urgently calling Sheffield activists to gather at the town-hall at noon to protest against the Israeli boarding - by force - of five aid ships attempting to deliver aid to Gaza. I did have reservations about this - the protests that I've been to in the past (particularly ones pertaining to the Middle East)have proved depressingly simplistic and one-sided, and besides, I've never felt terribly comfortable shouting slogans and waving flags unless I feel that I can defend my position with an intelligent, informed and sceptical interlocuter for at least fifteen minutes afterwards. I went, in the end - even (more or less) observing the fifteen minute silence proposed - perhaps rather ill-advisedly - by the organisers*. Whether this gesture did any good to the world is something that I'd like to explore in the course of this blog.

My first reservation - after the initial shock of the evident brutality used by Israeli forces - was the creeping sense that the outrage being expressed about the course of events was somewhat misplaced. I don't pretend to know a huge amount about the situation in Gaza, but even I'm aware that had an incident such as the violence on the Mavi Marmara taken place on land and been directed at Palestinians, it would have been, if not exactly routine, then certainly not an international news story: in all honestly, probably not much more than a ripple on the back-pages of the Guardian. Even the main speaker at our impromptu protest tacitly acknowledged that when she asked us to get in touch with our local MPs: 'we need to stress that there are British civilians on those boats... of course, *we* care equally about all the suffering, but parliament will do nothing unless it's in the British interest.'** I was quite impressed that she could acknowledge the protectionist impulse, even if by attributing it only to Westminster she rather begged the question of the motivations of most of the people in the crowd. Ultimately, it's an impossible conclusion to avoid: the cause of the furore was not violence, but rather the people against whom the violence was directed.

I'm not convinced that this is a terrible thing, in itself. The organisers of the flotilla had said explicitly that the mission had been arranged to call attention to the blockade, and, at the risk of sounding cynical, it worked. My principal concern is that the focus on the international questions raised leaves issues about the nationalistic tenor of the discussions surrounding Palestine and Israel unanswered. The violence is situated in a debate about the right to national self-determination, which, as far as I can see, doesn't address the central problems that Palestinians - and Israelis - have to deal with on an everyday basis: ie, how to get through a day - a week - a whole life - without going cold or hungry or being shot at. Although a loosening of Israel's stranglehold on the people of Gaza would undoubtedly improve their lives, the discussions posit these problems as something that can be resolved through the framework of national and international politics, rather than national politics being their cause. This is disingenuous: it is hard to imagine that the same bitter disputes would be taking place if we lived in a world where the notions of 'nationality' and 'the nation state' didn't have as much purchase on our psyche as they do at the moment.

That argument, however - convincing though I find it - doesn't really give us much to *do* with the situation as it now stands. It's more of an issue that it's well to be aware of than an incitement to - erm - do nothing. It seems to me that if enough international pressure is applied, then there might be an opportunity to achieve something positive - the lifting or at least the lightening of the blockade - out of a particularly brutish set of circumstances. If this is in part facilated by a wave of popular protests, then it has a double advantage: firstly, it might - and it's a puny and tremulous 'might', because it's *never* very sensible to be optimistic about anything in politics - make the lives of some people who have been shat on from a great height a bit easier. It also might - with the same caveats - draw attention to the fact that popular protest can and will have an effect. And I am coming to the conclusion that anything that lessens the sense of popular impotence in the face of injustice is a good thing. A huge part of that, obviously, is because such an awareness would give injustice in general a slightly less easy ride. But I think I mean something more than that. I have spent most of my life feeling in one way or another weak and impotent. My own experience has taught me that in such circumstances, it's in many ways easier to ignore suffering than it is to confront your own powerlessness to change it. This leads to apathy of a particularly insidious kind: the kind of apathy that is generated by a wilful shutting down of your own powers of empathy, a semi-conscious decision to become even less conscious. Ulitmately, powerlessness and impotence make you feel - make you act - less like a human being. So I suppose, overall, that I'm glad that I did make it to that protest - although next time, I'd prefer it if we could have fifteen minutes of noise rather than fifteen minutes of silence.

*A word to the wise, protesters: A hush descending on a crowd of people can be very effective, but not when there's only about a hundred of you and you weren't being terribly noisy in the first place, in which case, the effect is more one of embarrassed silence than overwhelming moral authority.

**I'm paraphrasing here, so - whoever you are, activist lady - I'm sorry if I've misquoted. In my defence: I thought taking notes at a protest would get me some funny looks, or possibly an accusation of spooking.

New Politics

So, having said in an earlier post that I don't find parliamentary politics or the goings-on at Westminster compelling per se, I have found the horse-trading and king-making of the last few weeks pretty interesting, particularly this notion of the 'new politics' that Cameron and Clegg are bandying around. It has to be acknowleged, I think, that the past few weeks has generated an exceptional level of interest amongst people who don't normally care that much about politics. As an example of this - a few weeks ago, I went for a Friday night drink in a Sheffield pub, and was drawn by a total stranger - a middle-aged father of two - into a conversation about the election, which eventually extended to include everybody on our side of the bar - 15 or 20 people, almost all of them total strangers to each other. Even the nine year old had an opinion about it. I've never experienced anything quite like that before. And when Clegg says, of the coalition government, that it is:

"new politics, where the national interest is more important than the party interest, where co-operation wins out over confrontation, where compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength".

I think that is the mood that he is invoking - a tangible if temporary shift in the way people engage in the decisions they make about their own lives. That said, this change is patently not a product of the electioneering of the main political parties: it is the simple but largely unspoken fact that for once we were faced with an election in which the outcome was uncertain. When was the last time that happened? '92, probably - when I was seven years old. In every election that I can recall with anything approaching an adult consciousness, the outcome has always been assured - usually whole electoral terms before. How can it be that in a so-called democracy, the belief that the future is not yet determined is something that we experience for a few weeks once in a generation? In Cameron's inaugeral speech (can I call it that?) he claimed:

People last Thursday in the ballot box told us politicians that they didn't think any party deserved an outright majority. so the only way you can create stability is by creating a government, a coalition government, which lasts.

Quite apart from the fact that I don't recall their being an option for 'no outright majority' on the ballot paper (there certainly wasn't on the one I defaced), Cameron has jumped the gun here - fetishised without any justification this notion of stability - and all the stagnation that this entails. 'Uncertainty' is a peculiarly British bete noir - mandarin-speak for job-losses, deprivation, social unrest - a code word for a plan that has gone wrong. That seems to me to be a terrible dereliction of the political function. Politics and politicians should never be certain. Cameron has attempted to capitalise on both by hybridising a hope for some indeterminate but profound change with an ideological and political commitment to the status quo (which is, after all, what 'Conservative' actually means'.) As a starry eyed idealist who's had the benefit of a congenial conversation in the pub, I reject this commitment to stability with every screed of energy available to me. We should acknowlege not just the danger and the possibilities of uncertainty, not only that mutability is an undeniable fact of the universe, but that as human beings - animals able to make conscious decisions - uncertainty and instability are essential parts of our make-up. It is this fact that make us properly people.

Do Anarchists Dream of Electoral Sheep?

So, given that this blog is meant to be about all politics and that, it seems appropriate to write - erm - something - about, you know, voting. This is not something on which my thoughts have settled, as of yet. On the one hand, I have no truck with the notion that if a citizen forfeits their right to vote, they also forfeit their right to comment on their own political situation. I've got every right to comment on any political situation I damn well like, whether that be the regularity of the bin collection in Meersbrook, Sheffield, or the fraught relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe with regards to immigration control and, erm, well, mainly the fact that the Zimbabwean people don't have any food to eat right now, yeah? Provided, of course, that I've bothered to inform myself to any degree about it. Which, actually, I haven't, and this is why I'm refraining from commenting about either bin collection in Meersbrook (it seems to happen) or the situation in Harare (pretty fucking terrible, I'd have thought.) But I *have* thought a bit about the ethics of voting vs abstention, and you, dear readers, are going to get the benefit of it.

As far as I understand it, if you don't have much truck with the political elite as represented by Westminster - by which I mean that if you don't find the goings on in the corridors of power entertaining in the same way that you find a soap opera entertaining - then the reasons for votiing are as follows:

1) You think that a vote for the party that you want to win/find least objectionable will make an appreciable difference to your own life and to the lives of people you care about.

2) You think that voting for a specific party upholds or extends a part of your own identity.

3) You have a genuine respect for one of the candidates put forward to represent your own area.

4) You think that if you use your vote to support a minority party, this will somehow contribute to a critical mass of opinion-formation that may in time change the whole tenor of the political establishment.

5) You don't think 4) at all, but you're going to use your vote to protest against the fact that you don't see any of the current viable options as, well, viable.

I'm sure there are others, but those are the most significant ones for my purposes. As it happens, I'm not of the opinion that voting for a minority party - whether this party finds some representation in parliament or no - will significantly change the character of mainstream politics in this country. I simply don't believe that this is the case. Even if by some miraculous, miraculous occurence the Green party romped home (home? No.) to power by a comfortable margin, I don't believe that they could effect a genuine change in the way that people in this country organise themselves. It wouldn't change the way that we think, because, you know, we're the ones that need to do that. And besides, they won't win. They probably won't win a single seat. The BNP is obviously a far more frightening proposition, and in fact offer the most compelling reason that I can think of for voting so far. If I felt that they were genuinely within reach of becoming a serious force to be reckoned with in British politics, I would turn out and vote Labour without a shadow of a doubt.

I suppose there is an argument to say that even if far right parties like the BNP aren't currently a serious cause for concern, refusing to vote allows them an opportunity to gain ground that should be denied to them. That's a relatively compelling argument, as is the idea that you should vote in the forthcoming election because, say, a Labour victory would probably mean a slightly more clement set of cutbacks in the public sector and therefore maybe a few more nursery schools and dialysis machines staying open. I'll ignore for now the fact that I live in an extremely safe Labour seat so essentially whatever I choose to do will be meaningless because I think that's a copout of an argument. So yeah, two relatively convincing arguments there. Essentially, then, the question of whether to vote or not hinges - like the last post - on a question of compromise. Do I believe that it's better to knuckle down and vote for a party that I find comtemptible - for its deceptions in the war in Iraq, for its continuing commitment to the introduction of prviate finance into the public sector (did you know that in some Sheffield primary schools kids are now being sent home adverts for private companies selling school equiptment along with their dinner order forms?) for the ugliness of its private smear campaigns, for the Hutton enquiry, for the cash for questions, for their sheer, petty, incompetent, humiliating lack of imagination - which as far as I can understand it rests either on a total inability to appreciate what it's like to be alive and a human being, or else a wilful ignorance of this state of affairs - in order to secure a slightly less shaky future for certain public services that I genuinely believe are useful and worthwhile.

I dunno, basically. Maybe I'm just a bit too proud to put my name to that shit. Maybe I feel that the whole sordid business debases what I think politics should be about - trying to work out what's right and fair and to balance that with what's possible - because I've never believed that it's right to demand the impossible. Seems like a waste of energy. But I do believe that it's important to think about what you're signing up to before you put your name to something, and I believe that voting is probably amongst the most important forms of signature that you'll ever make (birth certificates and rent-books notwithstanding) and if you don't think that there's an option there which represents you enough - which isn't too much of a compromise - then there's no shame in withholding it. So to be brutally honest, it looks like the option that I've plumped for is on the surface of it the most superficial one at all. I don't want to vote because to do so would damage my sense of who I am, of my integrity as a person.

Yeah, sure. I know, I know, big drama, right? Get over yourself and all that. But the thing is that my sense of identity gets bashed about on a bi-hourly basis anyway. Most people's do, I think. I'm in no hurry to make it worse, and certainly not for the sake of a myth of intelligent participation invented principally to legitimate the power that has been held in the same hands for generations and generations. Fuck 'em. They can do without me, to be honest. Not that they'll care much anyway, and not that my staying at home on May 5th - in my strong Labour seat - will make a ha'porth of difference anyway.

Next week: voting, part 2. So, I'm not voting in this election. But is it wrong to vote per se?