A lot of students seem to know who you are without knowing exactly what you do – what does the role of Director entail on a week by week basis?

I sometimes wonder as well! Roughly, I would say about half the time is management. The Director’s management team meets every week, which makes all kinds of decisions about all kinds of routine, daily things. Then I chair the Academic Board, the APRC, which is the Resource Allocation Committee, the Promotions Committee, and the Appointments Committee. Then there are others that I don’t chair but that I still go to, like the Council, the Court and the Finance Committee. This is an organisation with a turnover of about £150 million, so you have to have good management control and financial control.

Another quarter of my time is on a combination of fundraising and external representation, which merges together, because if you’re talking to an alumni group, they want to know about the School, but also in the long run they are probably going to be financial supporters. Fundraising for a university isn’t “Give me money”, it’s explaining what the School is doing and talking about interesting people within the School.

The other quarter of the time is activities within the School. Some teaching – I lecture on the Law and Accounting programme and others. Also, some student things, for example I’m currently rehearsing for ‘The Wizard of Oz’. Also some research that I do myself – I don’t do a full scale academic job but I’ve published one book since I’ve been here and I’ve got another one coming this month, and quite a lot of articles as well.

Your public profile, whether it is chairing the Man Booker Prize or appearing on Radio 4 to discuss the World Economic Forum, is relatively high. Is this something that you feel is beneficial for the school?

If you look back at the LSE tradition, the distinctive feature of the school is that it has always been an engaged academic institution. Some people like to claim that it’s had a particular political leaning, which I don’t really think is true. If you look at the combination of people here – you’ve had the likes of Hayek and Popper at one end to people like Laski and the Webbs on the other. But whoever it’s been most LSE Directors have been actively engaged in political policy. Giddens clearly was, in a different way from me, and certainly Dahrendorf and Beveridge were. That’s the tradition of the job, and I think people like that. Many of the students here are interested in what’s going on in the outside world, and the fact that the School is engaged in that debate seems to fit.

School

We reported last week that the School has a surplus which it is using for capital investment. What difference will the various redevelopments make?

First of all, about this surplus. If you look at our finances the core activities of the school, the teaching, research and degree programmes, is about the break-even proposition. Where we make surpluses is on executive education, the summer school, Enterprise LSE, residences in the summer and things like that. That’s where the profit comes from. If you look at our balance sheet, we’re relatively highly indebted for this sector. Oxford and Cambridge have basically got no debt because they were sort of given their land. Most of what we’ve got we had to buy. We don’t get much Government support. We get about £3 million a year for capital, and since the New Academic building is costing £70 million, you’ve got to make the money yourself.

My view when I arrived here was that the facilities of this place did not match its international reputation, so I thought we had to go for a major redevelopment project. The first stage is the New Academic Building, and then we have to redevelop St Philip’s. That will be a brand new Students’ Union building. The Students’ Union facilities here are, in my view, poor. I mean, they’ve got character. The Underground and the Quad are fun places to be, they generate good events, but they’re not great. Clearly the sports facilities are poor, so the only way you’ll do significantly better is with a new building.

So we’re doing that next, and then in about 2011 we can empty the Students’ Union and the towers above it, and redevelop it. That’s the tricky bit, because it’s right in the middle. Nobody can hide the fact that that will be quite disruptive, and that’s why we need to do the other thing first.

The one thing that I think we’ll be able to do sooner is the sports facilities. So I think we can refurb the gym as a temporary solution until the new building in four or five years.

Won’t the ever-increasing student numbers place a strain on facilities while work is going on?

We shouldn’t have a problem maintaining the numbers we’ve got. I don’t think we’d be able to expand and I don’t want to expand any further. 9,000 is what we planned to do by 2011-2012. The new building gives us an extra 125,000 square feet, and almost doubles the teaching space in the School.

You’ve said that the School should be aiming for a first on People and Planet’s environmental performance league. Are we on course this year?

I think so. We’ve increased the amount of green energy, and also there were various technical things that hit us last time, like not having a travel plan on the website. In fact our travel is not a big deal. I was at a meeting of international university leaders, and the guy from Yale said “I think we should commit to having low emission vehicles in all our fleets”. So I said “We don’t actually have a car.” He just laughed; it never occurred to him that we could have a whole university and not own a vehicle at all. So on things like travel we’re very good actually, because almost everybody comes in on public transport. We haven’t got a car park. We have a bike scheme that a load of people use, so I think we’ll do well on that – we just didn’t have a policy stated on the website.

We’ve also set up a new sustainable LSE partnership, which I chair, which met for the first time just recently, and various workgroups below it, so I hope we’ll do better this year – but the bars always going to be raised.

Students

You have said in that past that it is important to ensure MSc Courses offer value for money. Do they?

Well, it really relates to the teaching taskforce. Value for money in education is a tricky concept. On the one hand, if you look at demand, there’s not an issue. Demand has gone up 23% this year for Masters programmes. If you were just a business, you’d say “Well what the hell! They all want to come.” The second aspect of value for money is what people do afterwards, and there you wouldn’t say there is a problem, I think we’re the highest starting salary on graduation. One reason that people come here is that it does improve their market value.

On the other hand, I don’t think that’s all we should be doing. There is evidence that people’s satisfaction with teaching here is not what we would like it to be. That’s what the teaching taskforce has been looking at, in terms of contact hours, class sizes, use of graduate teaching assistants and everything else, and I hope that we can put more into that. Obviously this is something that you have to bring the academic community along with, because it’s largely their work. So we’re going to be taking a set of proposals to the Academic Board in the Summer Term, and I hope that we can get agreement on it, but we’re still debating it at the moment.

You are now two years into the five-year planning process to renew the curriculum. How instructive has that been, and how much change should we expect to current academic programmes?

Well, the planning process here was what I call ‘decibel planning’. He who shouts loudest, gets most. We thought that this was not ideal, and given that we had an extra 1,000 students to share around we started a process to look at what sort of degrees we didn’t have. We’ve now brought in an MSc in Finance, an MSc in Financial Mathematics, which has got an absolute mountain of applications, an MSc in Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies and others. So it was a good process that has produced a set of new degrees. There will be a continued roll out because you have to refresh the degree portfolio. For example, the European Institute had a degree on the growth of Europe to the east. Well that’s kind of happened now, so courses get revamped. Also, a big chunk was the new Management programmes.

Students’ Union

What are you expecting from the new Sabbatical team?

The students’ union plays an important role in the management of the school. What we need is a good sounding board on the issues that are of interest of us running the school. We’ve had a good response on athletics. We’ve said we are prepared to invest some money in this, what do you want? I can guess what a 19-year-old girl wants to do with her spare time, but I don’t know. It’s much better if the Union can intermediate in that way. You need Sabbaticals who care about that part of the job. I’m not stupid and I’ve been here for five years and I know that there are other things that student politicians want to do. They want to debate the state of the world, and that’s fine. I hope that they don’t spend all their time on that, because the reason that they are paid to be full time sabbaticals is not for that. It’s because they have a role in the running of the school. What I hope is that you get people who do care about the school as an institution, who are worried about the basic stuff about how we teach and facilities. Because that is an important element of decision making process. That’s what I hope for every year, and I am sometimes disappointed!

But this year for example Ruhana has really thrown herself into that. She’s been to every meeting of the teaching taskforce, she’s surveyed people, and she’s held focus groups. That’s what we want.

Any other thoughts on the outgoing Sabbaticals?

Fadhil has been a very assiduous attender of things. He’s certainly never shirked the job.

You occasionally have to push and prod about issues in relation to the School, because they can get distracted on to other issues. It seems that the Union’s finances have been soundly managed. I have no complaints about the Sabbaticals this year.

You are presumably aware of the new General Secretary from his time campaigning against the appointment of Peter Sutherland. Firstly, did you ever expect the protests that arose following the appointment?

No I didn’t really, because there were students involved in the selection process. I was surprised because normally here, although people may have different views about things the School’s got fairly painstaking decision-making processes. Sometimes I think extensively painstaking, but it does. Unlike many places the students are heavily involved in decision-making. They were involved in decision-making on my reappointment, which is unknown elsewhere, and in the appointment of the Chair, and I don’t know of anywhere else where that is the case. Normally, once a decision is made here – one of the advantages of painstaking processes is that when a decision is made, people say “Okay, I’ve had my say”. In this case, I thought people would say “Well that’s the decision. He may not be the person we’d have chosen, but that’s what it is.” They did not, and that was I think disappointing. Anyway, he is chairing Councils, so they’ll just have to live with it.

Do you foresee any problems with the two working together on Council next year?

I presume he wouldn’t be prepared to be General Secretary if he didn’t know what it involved. Not attending Council meetings would be rather curious, so I presume he’ll turn up!

Much has been made in the press of the Israel Divestment motion. Considering the School-backed proposals for a forum on the Arab-Israeli conflict, are you concerned about anti-Semitism on campus?

There are three dimensions to this. Firstly, the Students’ Union’s right to engage in these issues. I’ve no problem with that and I am prepared to stand up for that and do so when pressed on the issue. That’s fine.

The second thing is the implications for the School. As far as the divestment is concerned, I think there’s a lot of confusion. The LSE does not invest any of its students’ money in anything, actually, except short term deposits. We are net debtors, asking me about my net investments is like asking how I invest my overdraft, it’s meaningless. The idea that there is money coming from student fees that we are investing in arms companies is just not the case. Now we do have an endowment, that’s money that’s come from other people, effectively all of which is hypothecated income for scholarships or Chairs. That’s the money that we invest, and it’s almost exclusively invested in index funds, usually Charitrack. We have about £55 million. This is compared to Harvard’s £30 billion pounds. £55 million across the whole of the world’s investment markets is trivial.

That said, we do think it is reasonable to debate whether the School should have more of an active investment policy. We have typically been passive investors. With £55 million, some of which is in boxes and little pots with specifications from individual donors, there’s a limit to what you can do, but we are discussing whether we should have a responsible investment policy and say there are some things we will do and some things we won’t do. That’s still under debate.

The third point is that it is the case that some of the student societies, the Israeli society and the Jewish society, did approach the school to say that they were concerned about community relations, and they felt that this was spilling over into a degree of hostility which was not a good thing. They asked if we would support a kind of dialogue process within the student body. We said yes, and there are one or two people here who have experience of conflict resolution, so we offered their assistance. So far, I don’t believe this has started. There have been proposals and societies have come back and said they don’t like this or that. They are still engaged in a debate, and I haven’t seen the latest terms of the debate except when I see it in letters to The Beaver. But I am concerned that the school should not be seen as a place which is hostile to students of any particular community, whoever that might be. I think so far we’ve managed to achieve that. I think there are people who are concerned that it has been a hostile environment and that I don’t like. That’s why we were prepared to support this dialogue.

There are people out there who have thought that the School has passed motions as opposed to the Students’ Union. There are people who thought the Students’ Union passed the first motion, which had the more inflammatory language in it. I get emails congratulating me on passing a resolution as Israel as an apartheid state, and have to point out that I haven’t passed any resolutions and furthermore the resolution that did get passed did not actually use that language. There’s a lot of misunderstanding.

The Future

Your term runs until 2013, what are your remaining ambitions for the School?

First of all, the big plan for the campus. To get that done, without getting in to more debt than we can manage, is obviously the big thing that I have to do. The other thing is to keep the LSE relevant.

For example, the economics of climate change. We will be the big British centre for the economics of climate change. I’m trying to raise some money to build a bigger research programme and I’d like to think that people around Europe will say, the LSE is the place to go for the economics of climate change. That’s why I persuaded Nick Stern to come back to the school to build that. I also think there is a gap in the market for an academic institution that is engaged in diplomacy. I continue to hanker after having a proper Middle East centre here, and also I would like to develop further our urban work, because I think that the big social and environmental issues will all be addressed in the big cities.

Those are not ambitions I can personally achieve on my own; they depend on gathering together groups of academics who want to do them. At a school of this kind you’ve got to be fleet of foot and be able to develop new centres and degree programmes. For example, I’d like to have an MSc Economics of Climate Change which meant that you were training people who could go into governments and corporations and would have a tool kit so that they could understand what makes sense in terms of investments to reducing carbon emissions. I think that would be our best contribution.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 11 March 2008.

For a man who has just uncovered the simply vast amounts of money his country is squandering on a war he describes as “stupid”, Joe Stiglitz is surprisingly jovial. He is quick to laugh and engages with a wide smile, and doesn’t strike you as either a bookish Nobel laureate or as the “green eye-shaded accountant” that the Bush administration attempted to dismiss him as.

Bush now has another reason to dismiss Stiglitz, following the publication of ‘The $3 Trillion War’; named for the true cost he believes America will pay for its decision to invade Iraq. Standing on the brink of that day’s fifth anniversary now is the time to assess what Stiglitz points out is “the second longest war in America’s history, after the Vietnam War, and the second most costly, after World War II.”

Stiglitz provides many examples of what could be bought for a fraction of the price of the Iraq War – the USA’s spending on autism research equates to four hours in Iraq, ten days fighting costs $5billion, which amounts to total American aid to Africa each year, and one sixth of an Iraq War would pay the United States’ social security needs for the next half-century.

Of course, despite its cost, World War II was famously credited with lifting America out of the great depression, and has helped to promulgate the cliché that war is good for the economy – a misconception that Stiglitz aims to correct. “Wars use resources that could have been used to promote economic growth, and the fact is that since Keynes we know how to stimulate the economy in more constructive ways. This war has been particularly bad for the economy because of the impact that it’s had on the price of oil (oil prices per barrel have risen from $25 before the war to $100), and because it was totally deficit financed. Even as we went to the war we had large deficits, but then the Bush administration actually lowered taxes for the rich. The symptoms didn’t show up because they were hidden by lax regulation which flooded the economy with liquidity which was buoying the economy as these other factors were depressing it. We were in effect living on borrowed money and borrowed time, and a day of reckoning had to come, and it’s now come.”

Stiglitz believes that the actions of the regulatory authorities have had a direct impact on the current financial crisis. “The monetary authorities thought they had to do what they needed to do to keep the American economy going. The high oil prices and the war was having an adverse effect on the economy, and they simply did what they thought was right, but in a very myopic, short-sighted way – and it worked, in a very myopic, short-sighted way. The symptoms of what the war was doing, of what the high oil prices were doing, were not evident. They now have become evident. But the problem is, by postponing the cost we have increased the cost. The cost the economy is going to have to pay, not only the American economy but the global economy, will be a multiple of what it otherwise would have been.”

There can be no doubting Stiglitz’s determination to keep the issue of the war at the forefront of political debate at this crucial time for American politics. As far as he is concerned, it is the biggest issue there is. “My work focuses on the economics of the public sector, and you might say that the Iraq War is the single largest public project that the United States has undertaken. Typically when we begin a project like building a bridge, we do a cost-benefit analysis. We certainly don’t undertake a large project without looking at the cost. This was a war of choice. But we began the war without thinking about the cost.”

For Stiglitz, however, there is more than just the financial cost to consider. There is also the cost to the idea of democracy. “This was a war that, in part, was allegedly to spread democracy. Democracy means that citizens ought to be able to participate in decisions, and meaningful participation means that they have to know the consequences, and among the consequences are the costs. It seemed to me that if we are going to be talking about democracy then it was important for the American citizens to know what this particular project was costing. The Bush administration did everything it could to hide the costs from the American people. I’m testifying in congress on Thursday, and one of the points I’m going to make is that we should not have had to write this book, and if we did have to write the book it should have been a lot easier.”

Stiglitz explains how the Freedom of Information act was required to uncover even rudimentary information about the number of people injured in the war. In the course of the investigation he also turned up more alarming discoveries, such as the fact that the military were denied a request for MRAPs (Mine-resistant ambush-protected armoured vehicles) which Stiglitz argued would have saved a large fraction of lives, at a short term cost which will now be far outweighed by caring for the injured.

With a war this badly managed, it seems to me that those in charge must be either highly incompetent or highly corrupt, I ask Stiglitz which he sees. “There are elements of both. The Bush administration deliberately tried to obscure what these costs were and has continued to try to obscure it. Particularly the way the money has been appropriated in 24 separate bills, including emergency appropriations five years after the war started. When you go to war it’s an emergency, but five years later you should be able to plan. The way they have deliberately hidden information clearly shows an intent for people not to know. But there’s also an element of what you might call self-deception. The bureaucracy has been created to have a whole set of checks and balances, because you realise that people like to please their superiors. The Bush administration short-circuited many of these checks and balances, and the predictable consequence is that the quality of information was lower than it otherwise would have been. Then they said “How could we have known?” So they were responsible in part for the low quality of information, and many of the specific things they did predictably raised costs. For example, the behaviour of the contractors that were hiring people from Nepal and the Philippines rather than hiring Iraqis, fed the unemployment, while the failure to safeguard the weapons caches, meant that you had an explosive mixture: unemployed young men with weapons, and that explosive combination exploded. Now that was predictable.”

He points out the $19.3 Billion that Halliburton have received in contested contracts in Iraq, and describes current defence spending as “corporate welfare.” He bluntly observes “weapons don’t work against enemies who don’t exist.”

Looking to the future, it is hard to resist wondering how Stiglitz views the upcoming presidential elections. He is blunt about the differences between the candidates. “What is clear is that McCain’s policy, saying that we may be there for 100 years, is not the right policy. If you extrapolate what 100 years would cost, it’s huge. If you ask what the benefits are, it’s hard to ascertain. Obama has been quite forthright in saying he’s not against wars in general, but he is against stupid wars. And this was a stupid war. He was aware of the kind of divisions that existed, and therefore the difficulty of obtaining a sound outcome to the war, and he’s called for a quick withdrawal. I think that those are all policies that are consistent with prudent actions.”

How does he rate the chances of seeing Obama in the White House? At this question he smiles and nods, a look of real excitement in his eyes. And would this mean a return for the man who spent three years as chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors? “Perhaps”, he laughs, but maybe a different job this time. At least Obama has already expressed a desire to have Stiglitz as an advisor. The current administration’s response to Stiglitz’s appearance before Congress was derisory. “People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11,” said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. “It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. $3 trillion? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?”

Whoever wins in November, the world should listen to Stiglitz. Whether or not Joe can catch the ear of the next administration could have a serious effect on the cost the globe is forced to pay for Bush’s most spectacular folly.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 4 March 2008.

Frank Dobson has become one of the Labour Party’s defining MPs. A constructive critic of the New Labour experiment, he is a former Secretary of State for Health as well as an LSE graduate. He says he studied Economics, “In theory anyway. I know enough Economics to know when someone else is talking bollocks and that’s about it really.”

“I think LSE has changed, I think more attention is now paid to undergraduates than used to be. Certainly at the time I was there, my impression was that there wasn’t a great deal of attention. In the past I’ve caused offence by saying that I don’t think I really got very much from the academic staff there. But I gained a lot from talking and listening to my fellow students, who were from all over the world. It was a remarkable change for me coming from an all-white grammar school in the north of England.“ Dobson says he enjoyed student life immensely. “If you don’t enjoy yourself for three years of pretending to be an academic, you’re never going to enjoy yourself are you?”

Perhaps surprisingly for a man who is now in his 28th year as an MP, he was not involved in SU politics. “I didn’t particularly like student politics, and I still don’t. I think it’s certainly a way of learning the ‘dark arts’ of politics, but generally speaking, it never appealed to me. I was involved in other political campaigning but that wasn’t done through the Students’ Union, which was fairly tedious and a lot of willy-waving, and whatever is the female equivalent of willy-waving.” I told him that it hasn’t changed much, and he leant back in his chair, laughing heartily.

After leaving LSE Dobson became a local councillor. “I was a member of the Labour party throughout that whole period. I lived in Passfield Hall and then in a flat in Bury Place, near the British Museum, and continued living there when I ceased to be a student. I got heavily involved in local campaigns, basically related to stopping the residential population being driven out, and houses and flats being turned into offices. That was how I got involved in campaigning and the local Labour party, and in many senses that was why I stood for the council in 64. I didn’t get on, but I then stood for the council again in 71, and was elected. That was very heavily to do with trying to make sure that there remained a normal, ordinary, resident population.”

Dobson has now been a member of the Labour party for almost half a century. I asked him how he has dealt with the changes that have occurred in that time. “It was frustrating – I spent eighteen years in opposition, of which I think sixteen were on the front bench. Also, playing a part in – being close to Neil Kinnock – saving the party from ruin, really. Gradually strengthening the party, and after 1992, when Neil decided to pack in, I was a strong supporter of John Smith. I was very saddened by his premature death. Then supporting Tony Blair.”

I asked him what he thinks of Martin Bell’s recent assessment that New Labour got a lot of things right but threw them away with an illegal war. “The bulk of our election manifesto in 1997 was an up-to-date Labour manifesto. Most of the things that were introduced then were a modern version of a fairly traditional Labour approach to things. Things like the national minimum wage, actually getting people back to work or tax credits to ensure people actually got a decent wage. The last time John Smith spoke at the TUC he asked me to help with the speech, and I think I contributed two phrases. One was ‘A Britain on work, not a Britain on benefits’, and we wanted to make sure that when “people worked for a living, they were paid a living wage”. The Labour government in the first few years delivered on that, and continues to deliver on it, which is a dramatic assertion of timeless Labour values. Quite a lot of the things that we did in health, and in education, were along the same lines, and most of the things that have worked fall into that category. The things that haven’t worked are the fancy Blairite ideas, this obsession with choice and diversity. A certain elitism, and a belief that the best way to improve local hospitals is to have one supremely wonderful and the others will aspire to be like it. Similarly with schools, which is clearly claptrap. If you want to improve the worst performing institutions, you attend to the worst performing institutions. It is an obsession with elitism and management-ism, if you see what I mean, because if you look at it from the point of view of the patient, or the pupils, then you should be addressing the needs of the people who are getting the worst deal. Not marginal improvements for the people who are getting the best deal.”

“As far as the war’s concerned, I don’t think the fact that it’s illegal is of much consequence one way or the other. Combinations of powerful nation states make up international law, and it may have been an illegal law or not. But it was stupid. That’s the main offence. We’re in a worse position now than if we’d not got involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The first duty of any government is to ensure the safety and security of the country and it’s citizens at home and abroad. No one could possibly argue that we’re safer either at home or abroad. We’re infinitely less so. I used to carry around the page out of Hansard which was my speech in the February debate about a month before we actually went to war. My only criticism of myself in there was that I think I give the Prime Minister too much…I don’t doubt his intentions at that time. Also, I understate the things that I predict will go wrong. They’ve been worse than predicted. That continued and continued, and it was what led in the end to him going as soon as he did. Because my impression is that the absolutely craven, stupid position we got into over the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon, when we were the only country in the world, apart from Israel and the US, who weren’t saying that they should withdraw. That was the pits. I think a lot of people who’d given him the benefit of the doubt up until that point decided that there really wasn’t any doubt any more. He was just getting it wrong, wrong and wrong again, because we were tied into the United States. I think Iraq has also restricted our capacity to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons if they want to. I don’t want Iran having nuclear weapons, and I can’t see any sensible person who does, but Iraq has made it more difficult to do anything about that. Also, I think action would have been taken to prevent what’s been happening in Darfur, apart from the embarrassment of you can’t have a go at another Muslim, another Arab government. It has been a total, unrelenting disaster.”

There have been successes of course, Dobson mentions the “phenomenal” investments in the NHS, Gordon Brown’s work on overseas aid and cites John Prescott as an unsung hero for his work on the Kyoto agreement. He even singles out Blair for “a huge amount of credit for the settlement in Northern Ireland.”

However, he retains his belief that Labour can do better. He points out that NHS improvements have been undermined by costs spent on consultants and lawyers, and the private sector currently receives 11% more per operation than the NHS.

As a former London Mayoral candidate, I asked Dobson for his thoughts on the position. “My view on the mayor’s position has always been that I think this total singling out of the mayor is not the best approach. I’ve always preferred what might be called the ‘Barcelona Model’ which was that each political group would have councillors elected and they would say which of theirs would be mayor if they won, but the mayor would not be so separate as is the case in the United States and now here, but would remain part of the ruling group.”

And as for Boris Johnson? “Were, by some freak of fate, he to become Mayor I don’t think he would succeed. But I doubt he will do very well. You never know because there is this sort of “oh, well he’s quite funny on TV” “He can’t be as stupid as he pretends to be”. I think in some aspects he is as stupid as he pretends to be. Well not quite as stupid, very few people could be as stupid as he pretends to be and still be able to ride a bike.”

“More bothersome is trying to combat the BNP. With our current electoral system there is a significant danger that the BNP will get some members of the Greater London Authority this coming year, which would be very harmful for lots and lots of people in London.”

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 23 October 2007.

“I never said that. That’s the last thing I’d want to do. Fuckin’ Ell!”

Paul Oakenfold reacted with amusement and seemingly genuine shock when I mentioned a rumour that I’d read online about him planning to sing on his new tracks.

“I don’t even sing in the shower that’s how bad I am. That’s the last thing I’d want to do. Fuckin’ Ell!” Well, I suppose that’s what you get for using Wikipedia for research. Let this be a lesson to us all.

We were sat in the Ascott Hotel, an exclusive Mayfair hotel just off Hyde Park. It is not one of the grander, showier affairs on the park itself, but its discreet entrance indicates an understated elegance. We were in the basement, in a conference room where Oakenfold had spent the day answering questions, apparently mostly about the Big Brother theme – the only cultural context within which Middle England understands him. His assistant left us alone, and despite the size of the room we squeezed ourselves into two chairs close together at one end of the mahogany conference table.

He asked me whether I wanted a cup of coffee, and indicated a pot on the far side of the room. Without thinking I said ‘yes’, and a moment of awkwardness followed. I wanted a drink, but I couldn’t get to the coffee without squeezing uncomfortably past him. Either I asked a man who’s sold over five million albums, without including his countless remix sales, to go and get me a drink, or I stick my ass in his face.

Noticing my hesitation, Oakenfold rose to get me my coffee, apparently without thinking anything of it. Thank fuck for that, I thought, but then realised I’d have to say something to break the silence before being waited on became too weird. “Sorry to come at the end of a day of interviews – I’ll try and think of something original to talk about. ”He flashed a wide grin back at me from across the room. “Good Luck!” he chuckled, with the air of a man who has been dealing with the attention of journalists for twenty years.

In that time he’s gone from playing tiny provincial clubs to selling out the Hollywood Bowl. But now, strangely enough, he’s going back. “I’m really looking forward to the tour. I left the UK five years ago, so it’s been a long time. I’m excited to be going to the likes of Swansea or Hull, and playing small venues in Manchester.”

It was in Manchester, of course, in which Oakenfold first made his name producing the Happy Monday’s seminal ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches.’ I ask him whether this tour feels like a homecoming. “It doesn’t at the moment, but it will. I’ve got bunches of friends all over the country, so I’ll be meeting up with them, going to dinner – I just spoke to a friend from Liverpool who tells me they’re tearing up the city at the moment – road works and that. You always notice the differences. I haven’t played in some of these places for 10 years.”

By his own admission, Oakenfold is not the sort of person to spend time looking back. He describes his biography, on which he collaborated with Richard Norris, as a “long process”. “I’ve always thought the past’s the past and you can’t change it so let’s move on. I’ve never kept a diary. But people are interested. The question I get asked most is ‘How do you do it?’ So the book tries to answer that. I went back and spoke to people, and I think we’ve built up a pretty good timeline of how it all happened. Maybe it’s not the specific day when I did this or that, but its close enough.”

Even without his music, Oakenfold has a presence which fills the room. His tattooed forearms are in perpetual motion, and he has an expansive grin, especially when he’s talking about having a point to prove on the forthcoming tour. “I love it. I’m playing to a whole new generation of kids who’ve never seen me DJ. They maybe know the name, but they’ve never heard me play so it’s like ‘Who the fuck are you?’ I enjoy that challenge.”

You get the impression that it is also an opportunity for Oakenfold to prove to himself that he’s still got what it takes. More than anything he hates the idea that living in LA, where he moved when he scored ‘Swordfish’, might have taken his edge off. “DJing isn’t my main job any more. I’m living in Hollywood – which is the last place I thought I’d be. I never thought I’d move to the States. But I was offered the chance to score a film and I thought, ‘A door’s opened here, and if I don’t take this opportunity I’ll regret it for my whole life.”

As well as the DJing, the film scores and the remixing, Oakenfold has produced two of his own studio albums. His most recent album, last year’s ‘A Lively Mind’ featured vocals from the likes of Brittany Murphy and Pharrel Williams, but his debut, 2002’s ‘Bunkka’, featured an even more eclectic mix of guest vocalists, ranging from Perry Farrell to Ice Cube.

Crazy Town’s Shifty Shellshock featured on the single ‘Starry Eyed Surprise’, which was omnipresent upon it’s release, but surely the strangest collaboration was on the track ‘Nixon’s Spirit’, featuring the excess scarred growl of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. How on earth did that come about? “Well, I was a big fan of Hunter’s work, so I approached him and said ‘Look, I know you’ve never done anything like this before, but I can introduce you to a whole different demographic to the people who read your books.’ I got the idea from the fact that three or four different clubs were using his quotes on flyers at the time. He agreed to it and so we got together for a couple of nights, two sessions of six hours. We became friends, we drank a few beers and partied. But I learnt a lot. I learnt a lot about American History. And the idea for ‘Nixon’s Spirit’ came from talking about growing up. The younger you are the stronger your dreams are. And that’s where that twisted lyric came from. The fact that we had both grown up with these dreams and that we were both living them. And with Hunter you were never going to get a straight message from him, a ‘Believe in yourself and you can achieve your dreams’, but we wanted to do something that would connect with young people, because it was dance music, and that would say that if you wanted to be a fireman or whatever then you could be. And that’s where Nixon’s Spirit came from.”

At this point I asked Oakenfold about the connection between drugs and dance music. Moving from Hunter Thompson to recreational drugs seemed to me like a natural segue, but Oakenfold curled up defensively in his chair, sliding a foot underneath his thigh, and that illuminating smile switched off. I feel I have stepped onto a subject that he is bored of discussing. “Drugs are society’s problem, not dance music’s. You don’t have to take drugs to listen to dance music and you don’t have to listen to dance music to take drugs. I think it’s a shame if you associate the two, and its plain naïve to blame drugs on dance music.”

What he is happy to associate with music is his love of travel. From the journeys to India which produced the ‘Goa Mix’, his 1994 set which was massively influential in the rise of trance, to his more recent sojourns in Ibiza, Oakenfold has always been adept at selecting the best of what the world’s music scenes have to offer.

“If there’s anything good, then share it. The whole idea is to share. That’s what DJing is all about. But not just DJing; the internet, travel. I mean, I’m dyslexic, so I suffered at school. Everything I’ve learnt I’ve learnt by experience. It’s about giving something back, smiling at people, opening doors for people and giving two pounds a month to charity. The society you’re in is the whole world and you’re a fool if you don’t think you are. I used to believe, wrongly, that one person couldn’t change the world. But I saw this television programme about a National Geographic photographer. He was off taking photos in Bumfuck somewhere, I dunno where he was, somewhere in Africa. But the government was oppressing its people. This one guy took photos of what was happening, and they put these pictures on the cover of National Geographic. It brought all this awareness to the situation, and so the UN put pressure on the government and they stopped fucking with their people. One guy did that. One guy changed the world. So hopefully I can do my little bit. It’s just laziness otherwise.

People used to think things weren’t their problem, but times have changed. It is your problem.”

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 9 October 2007.

“If Scarfe was in the newspaper when it arrived on the breakfast table it would be just as if the family dog had shat on the table. It was an outrage within their little world.” There is more than geography that seperates Gerald Scarfe’s rooftop studio from the “homes around the Shires” that he is referring to. The difference is in the mindset, an almost pathological mistrust of authority and those who wield it.

Examples of his latest works of irreverence adorn the wall behind him, huge caricatures of Tony Blair and George Bush, waiting to be sent off to the pages of The Sunday Times and The New Yorker. Next to them, amongst printed emails is a smaller cartoon, with the word FAITHLESS printed above it. “Have you heard of them?” he asks, “It’s an old cartoon but one of the band’s a fan, apparently, so they want to use it for a single cover.” The room is littered with memorabilia amassed throughout his career, a gold disc of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which he designed the artwork for and provided animations for the film, a mug with Disney’s Hercules on it, for which Scarfe designed all the characters, videos of Yes Minister, for which he famously drew the opening sequence. On his desk, amid the paints and the vast sheaves of papers, sits a copy of his book, ‘Drawing Blood’ which collected some of his most famous political cartoons alongside uncensored drawings that his employers had refused to print.

Unsurprisingly, there are no shortage of these drawings, as Scarfe has never been afraid of tackling taboo subjects. “I thought, being an artist, I should be able to draw everything, you know? I can draw life and death and love and sex and whatever.” he says. However, early in his career Scarfe was shown that there were limits to what even he could draw, when the Daily Mail sent him to Vietnam. “The Daily Mail didn’t know how to handle me, because the stuff I’d been doing in Private Eye was fine for a cult audience, but for the general public it was too much. So they sent me off to Vietnam. I suppose they thought, “cruel, grotesque artist, let’s send him to a cruel, grotesque situation”. It was my first experience of war, I’d only seen war on television up till then, and I was drawing it symbolically, I was drawing President Johnson shitting bombs on Vietnam, and that sort of thing, but I hadn’t actually realised what it was really like, young guys who’d been pulled out of college and flown to the other side of the world and told to kill these people, told to ‘shoot these gooks’, as they called them. I had great difficulty in Vietnam really, drawing it, I found it too much to stand, the blood and guts of it all, and the incompetence of it all and the sort of stupidity of it all. I went into the morgue in Saigon. I went in there and I was just shocked by what I saw, because it hadn’t struck me that there’d be bits of bodies, heads without torsos and torsos without heads and torsos without limbs. Some were just like lumps of meat, and they were all being cleaned up by American medics. Some of them were whistling, because to them it was just a job, they were whistling and doing a daily job, in their white coats spattered with blood.”

The Mail refused to print some of the drawings he sent back, particularly those that showed Americans in Vietnamese brothels, but Scarfe has never regretted working for papers that don’t share his political views. “There’s no political censorship at all. I’m often against what the leader page in the paper is saying. I think it’s just that sort of sexually overt drawings are not acceptable in a ‘family’ newspaper, but I’ve never had any political, touch wood, interference at all. I’ve obviously been against the Iraq war, I’ve been against the Vietnam war, but I enjoy preaching to the unconverted. There are some newspapers who hold my point of view completely, and I’m therefore just doing the party line within that paper, really. The idea of a cartoonist is like an opinion writer on a paper, you’re there for your opinion, even if it is opposite. The great thing about this country, I guess, is that one can do that. It’s very healthy. There are different points of view in the same newspaper. When ‘Drawing Blood’ was printed in China, they wouldn’t print the pictures of Chairman Mao. I had to go to Hong Kong, which is still China but it’s kind of capitalist China, to print. So there is censorship. They even censored – there are some very large willies in here, some erect penises, and they said they wouldn’t print them, I said ‘Why not?’, and they said ‘Oh…too big’, so I said, ‘That’s the way we are in Britain.’ So there is a lot of censorship around the world, and I do appreciate that we have a huge ability to print freely.”

Totalitarian control was one of the central themes of The Wall, which Scarfe worked on with Roger Waters. “Roger came here with his Wall tapes which he’d done with a synthesiser himself, and he said at that time, “We’re going to make a film, we’re going to make a record, we’re going to make a show out of it.” Which, to his credit, all three happened. The show part was fun. That was travelling around from LA, the rock’n’roll stuff with black limos and helicopters and all the stuff backstage that you can imagine. But then when it got to the film, it got more difficult, because the director Alan Parker was brought in, and Roger and I had worked for say three or four years before Parker even appeared on the scene, but being a director naturally he wanted complete control, and Roger and I were not about to relinquish control, so there was a lot of pulling and tugging and angst there. I found myself at the very end, when we were doing post-production at Pinewood Studios, driving there at nine o’clock in the morning with a bottle of Jack Daniels on the passenger seat, and I had to have a kind of slug to go in and meet what I knew was going to be an onslaught of misery. But it’s very good because it keeps me in touch with a younger audience. My sons and their friends know about the Floyd, so I know it has applied to your generation as well as my generation at the time. God knows what it was in it that somehow struck a chord, about something that was happening at the time, I don’t know what that chord was but we all hit it. I don’t know what that magic ingredient is.”

At the time, Scarfe expressed a fear that certain aspects of the film might strike too much of a chord with far-right groups, and indeed a now defunct American neo-Nazi group, calling themselves the Hammerskins, adopted his crossed hammer design as a logo. “I was worried, yes, because when you’re railing against something, it means that you have to depict it, and there might be those that enjoy that depiction. They might enjoy the violence in the drawing. What I’m really saying is I am against violence, and I think some people mis-state that and think I’m advocating violence, which is the last thing I’m advocating. When we filmed the sequence a lot of young guys came along and they had shaved their heads, and shaved the crossed hammers mark into their haircut and I thought ‘Shit, this is a bit worrying’ because the last thing I wanted to do was start some kind of pseudo-fascist movement. It was the complete opposite of what we were saying really. What we were saying was that these are bastards. These are horrid people, not how wonderful they are.”

Irreverence is a key theme of Scarfe’s work, something that he traces to his bedridden childhood. “I think I very much mistrust authority, and I think that comes from relying on doctors. I’ve had some dodgy treatment. There was an osteopath who used to rabbit punch me on the back of the neck because he thought my vertebrae were out of line. I think I mistrust people. I mistrust politicians, obviously, and I think we’re all fallible. I mean, I’m part of it. I’m often talking about myself in my drawings when I talk about fallibility. We’re all here not quite knowing why we’re here, what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. Really, its all very mysterious, the whole question.”

I ask Scarfe about the impact technology has had on his work. “I’m an artist and I think you can’t beat hand drawn. When I was working on Hercules with Disney they did a whole sequence with the Hydra, which was perfect to computerise because as you remember, with the Hydra when you cut off one head, two heads grow, and you cut those off and four heads grow. So it was perfect computer stuff, you just regenerate. I did one Hydra drawing and then they made a model from that and computerised it. I think it took about six or seven months to do this whole sequence, which was probably only about half a minute, and it just looked computerised when you’d done it. It’s like computer games, they are brilliant but they look computerised. My sons play football games, and there’s the atmosphere and so on, but they’re still slightly inhuman, as this sequence was. They then had to spend a whole stash of money to redo it graphically. To make it look graphic like my work, and I said to them at the end, “Wouldn’t it have been quicker to do it in the old Walt Disney way?” and they said, “Yeah, probably, and cheaper too.” The ultimate result of the film, I thought there was some of me in it. There were 900 of them, and one of me, so I didn’t do too badly, considering the odds. But it was a great experience, and I would say it’s the nearest I’ll ever get to being Tom Cruise.”

Technology has also aided his ability to work internationally. “I used to have to send my New Yorker drawings on Concorde. It used to arrive before it left, so I could work all night. If they rang me on a Wednesday I could work until five in the morning if I wanted to, then a courier would come and take it to Heathrow, and put it on Concorde, which left at nine and arrived in New York at eight, so it was there at the start of day. But now of course it goes electronically, it’s brilliant. But also I can alter things electronically. If I do a drawing of Bush and Blair, and Bush is ok but Blair I didn’t like, then I can do another Blair on a separate piece of paper and marry them on a computer. Certainly some of the drawings don’t exist, as an entity, now.”

Another aspect of Scarfe’s work is his theatrical designs. He has designed stages for productions of The Magic Flute and Fantastic Mr Fox, and is currently working with Jim Steinman on a theatrical version of Bat Out Of Hell. “That’s great. It’s collaboration and being an artist is a lonely life, but when you’re working in the theatre you’re working with a director and all sorts of other people. But it’s a collaboration so you do have to listen to what other people say, whereas I as an artist, whatever I want to put on paper, appears on paper.”

“I think the people who employ me know the kind of stuff I do, they don’t expect me to do normal theatre but people giving you their opinion, of course someone as experienced as Peter Hall, who’s spent his life in the theatre, can help. I upset a lot of people at the ballet, I did ‘The Nutcracker’ three or four years ago, and the ballet critics really didn’t like what I’d done to their darling Tchaikovsky. So I did a drawing of all the critics up one another’s arse, Critic’s Circle, I called it. But, as I say, most people when they employ me, I think assume that I’m going to do something a bit weird. That’s my job. I wouldn’t do an orthodox production.”

Finally, I ask about his remaining ambitions, but he replies contentedly that it is “Only to go on”. Fittingly for someone whose work has spanned artistic mediums and insinuated itself into popular culture, he says he has no more burning ambitions. “I’ve been very, very lucky, considering where I started, as a timorous, asthmatic, anxious child in the war; I’ve done what I wanted to do for years, and still feel incredibly privileged to be able to walk up here in the mornings and draw.”

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 27 February 2007.

“Now really isn’t a good time,” says Pavla Fleischer. In the background I can hear a man’s voice, shouting questions for her to relay to me. “Where is he from? Who publishes his paper?” I answer his questions for her, and she tells me to call back in another couple of hours. This is not the most typical nor the most auspicious start to an interview and I am already beginning to sense bad vibrations lurking in the ether. I have a horrible suspicion that the man’s voice was Eugene Hütz’s.

Unfortunately, Pavla has made me promise that the interview will focus on the new documentary that she has made about Hütz, and the fact that he will be performing in London with the traditional gypsy band The Kolpakov Trio. I’m not allowed to mention his day job, which means that I can’t tell you that he is the lead singer of notorious New York gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, famed for their riotous live shows, or that he is a talented actor, as seen when he portrayed Alex alongside Elijah Wood in the adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s ‘Everything is Illuminated’.

What I can tell you is that after meeting the documentary maker Pavla Fleischer in 2004 he agreed to let her make a film, The Pied Piper of Hützovina, about his trip across the Ukraine in search of the traditional gypsy music that he loves. Adding intrigue to the tale is the fact that she proposed the film in part as a way to spend more time with him, having found herself falling into what she called “a strange sort of obsessive love” following their initial brief encounter.

I ring back and Pavla answers. She sounds much more positive this time around, and passes me over to Eugene quickly. With a certain amount of trepidation, I begin the interview by asking him how he is finding London. “Well, what can I say? I’m back again. I like it.” So far, so brief – Mr Hütz is obviously not one for small talk. I hurry on to my first proper question: would he have made the trip to the Ukraine if the film had not been being made? “Absolutely! It’s not the first time I’ve done the trip, in fact I do a similar trip every year. There’s going to be another one in May. The film is just of one of them.” But would you ever have thought to make a film out of your experiences if you hadn’t met Pavla? “Maybe not” I pause, hoping for elaboration, but he refuses to fill the silence and I press on regardless.

The film shows a number of older gypsies who react badly when Eugene plays them his music, because they believe that the traditional folk music should not be bastardised into the punk version that Gogol Bordello play. I ask whether he was surprised by this negative reaction? “No, I’ve always seen a clash. With my music, some people love it and some people hate it. It’s a big community, so it can be like hot and cold. But I will continue on that path because it’s the only path I feel. Hopefully through my own search I can help other people to find their paths. For example, I met a lot of people who were Romany kids who were taken away from their families in the 70s and relocated to places like Switzerland and Austria, and those are the people who are my fans. I also work with a lot of young gypsy kids, well, young and old. But 80% of the reaction I meet is very positive. Conflict is very rare. But there will always be some conflict, you know? I mean, there are so many different kinds of gypsies, it’s like night and day, I feel like I’m part of a swirl of finding out what a gypsy really is. But there is one man who everyone agrees about, and that is the man sat next to me now.”

That man would be Sasha Kolpakov, a legendary Romany musician who has long been the star attraction at the Theater “Romen” in Moscow, the only Roma theatre in the world, and has toured North America with his Kolpakov Trio. “Sasha is one of the artists who can settle down the controversy. It’s such an honour for a musician to become a band mate of your hero. But also I think he saw elements of what I can bring in, in a refreshing and organic way. But even within The Kolpakov Trio there has always been an organic mix. One of Sasha’s old band mates, who unfortunately is now dead, was actually a Carpathian gypsy, so he was much more Hungarian, but they all share a love of the raw folklore, so all types of gypsy music can be married in an organic way. It’s all Eastern European.”

Eugene moved from the Ukraine to Burlington, Vermont after the Chernobyl nuclear accident. He was a refugee aged 14. I ask him whether he thinks his music would be more traditional if he had remained in the Ukraine, and to what extent being exposed to punk music in America affected him. “Actually, I think I would be more of a punk if I had stayed. I was already exposed to punk music in the Ukraine, but being in America made me crave what I was missing. I think as an artist you are always trying to fill the void with what you lack. I’ve always been attracted to the super-raw, exciting forms of music. When I moved to New York I was in a number of different bands – punk, industrial, metal – and I was always trying to bring it into a more traditional setting, sometimes literally. But the influence of what I was lacking grew over time, it’s been how I feel for decades now though, you know?”

On the film’s website, Pavla writes that Eugene did not like the original edit of the film, and that even after re-editing he told her that there was “no fucking way” that the film could ever come out. I ask whether he feels that now, attending a major screening of the film, he feels that he has grown to accept or even enjoy it? “I think so. I have a very directorial mind, so it can be difficult for me, but I’ve been an actor before and experienced being directed, so I have some experience of having to allow other perspectives. And while it was painful at first I am learning to let go. Also, you know, while it is nice to be told that you are doing well, I don’t get bent out of shape by crazy critics. Some people just get paid to write bullshit.”

Bad vibes all around. Hütz’s voice is getting accusatory, and I have little doubt that he suspects that I am a crazy critic getting paid to write bullshit. Fortunately, the moment passes, and he continues. “But yes, I have grown from the experience and grown to love the film. I actually think that some of most mind-blowing stuff is stuff that I wasn’t involved in. For example, the performances of the musicians that we managed to capture when we were stumbling about were incredible.” The film is described in it’s official press release as chronicling Eugene’s search for gypsy music, do you think you found what you were looking for? “I don’t think that I was searching. I have been there before and I knew exactly what I wanted. I crave it. I can’t let go of it. I don’t know what the fuck it is, but it always draws me back to the Ukraine.”

Eugene seems to be warming to his subject, but I make a mistake when I ask him whether he would ever move back to the Ukraine permanently? “Absolutely not. I never belonged there in the first place. What the fuck?”

He pauses.

“Listen, I am never moving back to the Ukraine.”

The line goes dead. Did I touch a nerve? Should you never ask a gypsy musician whether he’d consider settling down? Or did I just catch him on an off day, stressed out by press commitments the day before the premiere of a documentary which lays bare his incredibly personal trip across his estranged homeland and the intimate nature of his relationship with the film’s director? I attempt to ring back, if only to apologise to Pavla for offending Eugene, but the phone goes straight to answer phone. So that’s that.

Interview over.

What have we learnt from this debacle? Well, we’ve learnt that punk musicians are not the most amiable conversationalists and that going into an interview with a long list of offlimits topics makes for unsatisfying questions, but perhaps what has also been demonstrated is that it is often the most passionate and angry of individuals that make the most challenging and provocative art. Eugene Hütz, the Pied Piper of Hützovina, is certainly doing that.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 30 January 2007.

No matter what medium he has chosen to work in, Stewart Lee has been dogged by controversy. In 1998 he and Richard Herring found a cult audience with ‘This Morning With Richard Not Judy’, but the show was cancelled after falling out of favour with the BBC hierarchy. Seven years later, the BBC had forgiven him enough to televise the musical that he had written with the composer Richard Thomas, ‘Jerry Springer – The Opera’. They received 55,000 complaints prior to the show even being broadcast, due to claims of blasphemy and ridiculing Jesus, not to mention profanity due to its reported 8,000 obscenities. Stand-up comedy is perhaps his most natural habitat, and his latest work combines this with his new-found love of theatre. “It’s called ‘What Would Judas Do?’ and it’s sort of me being Judas for an hour talking about the last week of his life and why he did what he did.”

Before the show, he plays down the comedy aspect “I wanted to do it in character and I wanted the jokes to be incidental to it, rather than being the bits where you ‘tick’ whether it’s worked or not.” In fact, the show is as funny as you’d expect from a winner of the prestigious ‘Tap Water’ Award, the anti-Nestle version of the Perrier. Despite the furore that surrounded ‘Jerry Springer’, it might seem that Lee has no qualms about making a joke out of Christianity, but he denies that he has explicitly set out to mock the faithful. “It’s not really about religion. It’s about hero worship, about being let down by someone you’ve idolised. This is a really good way of telling that story. I don’t set out to prove or disprove the existence of the characters involved. I thought that about ‘Jerry Springer’, which wasn’t in any way a criticism of religion, it was just the use of a story that’s very familiar in the Christian West to look at some different ideas. They don’t own the story. It’s in the public domain, so I think you should be allowed to do what you want with it.”

It is not, however, merely a story amongst others. Surely he must have expected to cause some controversy? “Well ‘Jerry Springer’ played for four years in theatre without a problem, it was only when it was on the telly and it was seized upon by a succession of right-wing gay-hate groups as a platform to get their own stuff into the marketplace that anyone gave it any thought. Before that it had got good reviews in the Church Times. The difference between its content and its supposed content was vast, really.” It is perhaps worth noting that despite the 55,000 complaints it received before going on air, it received only 8,000 afterwards.

Clearly well versed in Scripture, and a talented wordsmith, the role of preacher would seem to come naturally to Stewart Lee. Has he considered going into the Church? “I don’t even like going into the actual buildings anymore. I think the Church of England would probably be able to accommodate an atheist priest though – they seem very broad-minded. The good thing about doing a show here [The Bush Theatre] is that it’s an eighty-seater room, I’m on equity minimum every week, it’ll sell out before the loonies even find out about it. It’s on a safe level – I wouldn’t want to do anything particularly high profile again, all that happened is that I was kind of randomly picked on by mad people. You don’t make any money off it. What is the point? There is actually no point. I suppose when you start writing and you have a little idea you think, “It would be great to communicate with the masses”, they can fuck off. They can have all the shit that they want. It’s not my problem. The masses are idiots if they allow themselves to be dictated to by the Christian right, so they’re welcome to it.” Spleen vented, he smiles, “Much better to be here, in this ‘elite’ theatre, limited so that only eighty people a night can come.”

Like Lou Reed releasing ‘Metal Machine Music’, Stewart Lee has actively engaged in culling his audience. “Daniel Kitson said after the Perrier awards that he felt he had to shake off a lot of his new audience, they had sort of expectations of what he would do. I’ve largely managed to drive those sort of people away I think. You think “This’ll shake a few people off.” Also, where you perform, how you promote it, which magazines you go in. My DVD got reviewed in Nuts and Zoo magazine, but I refused to do any interviews with them, because you don’t really want those sorts of people coming to see you. I might have done ten years ago, before I was bitter, but now I just think it’ll make for a miserable night. A room of thick people, you couldn’t use irony, I’m too old to struggle.”

In his younger days, however, Lee and Herring were lauded as the comedic kings of the emerging ‘Lad’ culture. “Well we didn’t pull in much of a crowd. I think that was probably because a lot of the two million people who watched the TV show were about twelve years old and couldn’t really go out. Ironically now fifteen years later they’re journalists and promoters and things like that so there’s been a sort of weird second wave. ‘Loaded’ was different in ‘95 anyway. It used to have decent articles.”

Youth culture has certainly shifted, and student life is very different to the mid-90s. “It’s harder for students nowadays, I got a grant. I don’t think I’d become a student now. I think people were more politically active, or more visibly politically active I suppose, 20 years ago. Every day you were faced with a new challenge about what was the correct way to address a woman. Those things have just sort of settled down now. I enjoyed being a student though, I wrote for the Oxford Revue, and directed. That was amazing. There was money for student arts then. You could go to Edinburgh Festival. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but one of the best things was the opportunity to have educated, clever adults who were obliged to speak to you about things that you were supposed to be interested in. To treat that as a chore was really disgusting. Looking back, I really wish I’d done more work! The last few years, a lot of things that I’ve written have used things that I studied. ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’, the framework of it was very Blakeian, with a sort of Miltonic quality, so it was nice to find an outlet for all that, fifteen years later.”

Lee’s current work is eclectic to say the least. “I’m writing a sitcom about the Norse myths, about Odin and Thor, and I’m working on a sort of folk-music musical about William Blake at the National. And I’m doing a site-specific theatre piece about DIY – someone walking you around their house, explaining why they want to sell it because they’ve done it all wrong. And then I’ll do another stand-up show in August.”

With all his work, however, he is defiantly steering away from the mainstream. “Critically, ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’, was a big hit, but because of all the problems we didn’t really make anything out of it. So that’s kind of put me off commercial theatre. But ‘What Would Judas Do?’ is great – it’s cost effective and I might get a little radio drama out of it. I can’t keep doing things for nothing. Supporting the things that you want to do even if they aren’t viable. Working away at stuff that you think will make a difference.”

Music is one of Lee’s great passions. Offering him the opportunity to drive a tank, he says “I’d drive over all those Foxtons Estate Agents Minis that are made out in a kind of punk-rock livery, as if Foxtons Estate Agents had anything to do with the spirit of ‘76.” But in his new-found spirit of pragmatism, Lee finds himself accepting Murdoch’s greasy buck. “I write record reviews for The Sunday Times every week, and I do about one feature a month, and you know what? Between 2001 and 2004 that was the only money I earned, I earned about £12,000 a year, and it was exclusively from writing about music in the papers. Jerry Springer was being written, I was kind of doing that full time, and that’s really what this show is about. About being an idealist and about where you draw the line in the sand. I’m really glad to have that job. They let me write about whatever I want, and yeah…I hate Fox News, I hate Murdoch as a person, but it buys me the time to do other things. I’d have been in a lot of trouble without it.”

“I have a much more straight-forward relationship with my editor at the Sunday Times culture section than I’ve ever had with anyone at the BBC, who are the most duplicitous, lying, dishonest people. I feel much happier, much more ethically comfortable writing for a Murdoch newspaper than I would doing anything for BBC2, which to me is just so mad and chaotic and dishonest and panicky. I’ve wasted so much of my time there. There are things I wouldn’t do, I wouldn’t write for the BNP paper, but no-ones ever censored anything I’ve done for The Sunday Times on the grounds of politics or taste. Whereas you run into that sort of thing all the time in the BBC. You never know where you are, or what they want. It’s not even political correctness; it’s more nonsensical than that. When people say that there’s too much political correctness I think they forget that there was a black bloke beaten to death in Liverpool last year by racists, and that the next week there were MPs standing up in Parliament trying to deny gay people the same rights to goods and services that straight people enjoy. There are still people trying to prevent the exercising of basic human rights, and using the media and the courts to do it. It’s a bit of a red herring to blame political correctness.”

Speaking of Herrings, how does Lee view his long time partnership with Richard, forged in the writing of ‘On The Hour’ and growing to fruition with ‘Fist of Fun’ and ‘Lee and Herring’, “We were diet coke visionaries, we were like the romantic poets with laudanum, except we were on diet coke. We wrote about a hundred hours of radio on diet cokes and crisps between 1994 and 1997. We were caffeine visionaries.”

“Armando Iannucci got us in to write ‘On the Hour’. It was a satire of what radio sounded like. Satire had traditionally been about personalities, but he made it about the delivery mechanism, rather than the information itself. It was something new, compared to the very retrograde world of Dead Ringers. We wrote two series of that, and loads of things that went on to become comedy staples of the nineties, but we dropped out when it went to TV as ‘The Day Today’. Patrick Marber managed to get a share of the credits for the creation of Alan Partridge, even though he hadn’t been on original creating team, and we had. We felt me should have some sort of recognition for that, which seemed fair at the time. It could probably have been handled better. Sometimes I think dropping out of that was a major career mistake, but then on the other hand, it did mean that at least we were still, throughout our twenties when you’ve got a lot of energy, we were still coming up with our own ideas, rather than becoming writers for hire. Both individually and together me and Rich sort of developed our own voice. I can’t really write for other people, and I’m quite proud of that – it means that what you do is more distinctive. Although, if I had a percentage share of Partridge like Marber does, I wouldn’t be sitting here now with this on. Swings and roundabouts.”

“I learnt that I’m in this for the long haul. Doing a show at Edinburgh, touring it. That’s the only thing that I’ve got which is a certainty. There’s no interface between me and an audience. It doesn’t have to go through the filter of people commissioning it or funding it or whatever, and it also doesn’t have to go through the filter of someone deciding whether it worked or not. It’s pretty obvious if it worked. It went well. More people come next time. So that’s really really simple. I’m not managed by anyone at the moment, because I was very reluctant to go with anyone who wanted a cut of my work, because at the end of the day, it’s kind of all I’ve got. That and writing reviews of leftfield free jazz for a neo-Nazi newspaper, is all I’ve got.”

“I’d love to do a radio show, but the breadth of things I’d want to play wouldn’t really fit in anywhere. Which, again, is their problem. It’s a problem of broadcasters and formats and producers – it’s what you call narrowcasting. I got sent a letter asking if I wanted to write for a new comedy, and it explained how it had to be a little bit risqué and blue, but be targeted at 25-35 year old women with a sense of independence but also a degree of responsibility. I just screwed it up and threw it in the bin. Only an idiot, or a person with no heart whatsoever, would write to that brief. I mean, my Odin sitcom is going to be targeted at people who believe literally in the existence of Norse Gods.”

The internet is changing the way that comics work, and, thankfully for us, the audience, reducing the importance of agents, PR and management. “I’ve just put out a DVD through a website [www.gofasterstripe.com] because no-one wanted to put out my new DVD after the controversy that surrounded ‘Standup Comedian’. They’ve covered their costs so now they’re doing loads of stuff with people who can’t get deals. Its sort of an indie label for comedy DVDs.”

“I’m not at the stage where I’m thinking about developing content specifically for the web, but to sell DVDs just through a website, with no advertising, is entirely cost effective. About 2,000 people come to my website, and there’s another 1,000 or so on a MySpace page I have, so if I alert all those people to new shows and stuff I can sell out venues with no advertising costs. I was invited to go on ‘Derren Brown’, and I like ‘Derren Brown’ but they don’t pay you anything. Three million people watch it. It’s not worth being recognised by three million people in the street, for no money. It’s not really worth being recognised by eight million people for the amount of money you get for going on ‘Have I Got News For You’. It’s quite disconcerting.”

On the other hand, there’s still people who recognise him from ‘This Morning With Richard Not Judy’ “It’s tailing off, but it’s astonishing and very gratifying the amount of very nice people who do come up and say Hi.”

At least some of the sacrifices of celebrity are worthwhile then. Stewart Lee may not be the messiah, but he’s a very funny man.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 23 January 2007.

David Mitchell is a happy man, and he has every right to be. He is currently mid-way through a UK tour as one face of “The Two Faces of Mitchell and Webb”, which comes to London next week. “We feel like we’re back in it now. We’ve been touring for just over a week, but we hadn’t been on stage before that for about five years, and that was when we were playing the Edinburgh Fringe and tiny little venues, not the massive hangers we’re playing now.”

David is clearly enjoying his return to the theatre. “It’s really good to be on stage again. You feel like you can shout and ham it up a bit. You can’t really do that on television. On stage it’s not just that you can shout, you actually feel like you should!”

However, he can’t help sounding a little like his Peep Show alter-ego Mark Corrigan when he mentions some paranoia about the upcoming dates. “The shows we’ve had have gone really well. Everyone’s laughed. We haven’t had any awkward silences yet, where there’s been a car crash outside the venue that we don’t know about and the whole audience is still traumatised.”

It is of course starring in Channel 4’s cult sitcom Peep Show that Mitchell and Webb have garnered the most attention, but they have been working together since meeting at Cambridge’s legendary Footlights society, of which Mitchell became president. Footlights is a veritable production line of comedy genius, and the presidency has previously been held by the likes of Peter Cook, Eric Idle and Hugh Laurie. “Footlights was a great experience, it’s like a drama society but it only puts on comedy. We did three main shows a year, including a pantomime, and then also lots of little informal shows as well. There’s an ongoing show called ‘Smokers’ where you can go along and try out new material every week, so it’s a really good place to just be creative and come up with fresh ideas. It’s somewhere where you feel like you can just have a go at it.”

I ask how much influence he feels the ability to join Footlights had on his career. How would he have fared, for example, if he had ended up at the LSE? “I’d probably have still have had a go at comedy. Do you have a drama society? I would definitely have joined that. Without Footlights I would probably have become a serious actor or something like that. Or maybe an economist, who knows?”

I ask whether he was ever tempted to go it alone as a stand-up comic. “I much prefer comedy that’s sketch based. I think you tend to start off doing what you like, and I’d got into comedy through watching TV. My heroes were people like Monty Python, Fry and Laurie, and shows like Blackadder. I didn’t grow up watching Lenny Bruce, or Billy Connolly. Even though they’re very funny, it’s not what I wanted to do. Also, I don’t think stand-up comedy works that well on TV. My goal was always to get into television, and to me that meant sketch-based comedy.”

After graduating, Mitchell’s partnership with Webb continued, as they began searching out their niche in the comedy mountain, stuffed full of vivid dreams of television superstardom. Inevitably, however, their first work was less glamorous, and away from the cameras, and indeed the limelight. “Our first jobs were writing for other shows. We were writing for Armstrong and Miller, and lots of other places, for television and for Radio 4. At first it was just exciting to be getting properly paid, to be able to see your jokes on actual television shows was great! At the same time we always knew that we really wanted to be doing something for ourselves. That’s why we kept doing live shows, and kept going and playing the Edinburgh fringe. In the end, it was actually a bit of a surprise that we eventually broke through with a show that someone else had written for us. For a long time we thought we’d break through with something we had written for someone else.”

That show, of course, was Peep Show. Since its humble beginnings in 2003, the show went on to win the inaugural sitcom Rose d’Or in 2004, had more than a million pairs of eyes peeping inside the heads of Mark and Jez in 2005, and in 2006 if you piled up all the DVDs they’ve shifted, you’d have a pile over half the size of Mount Fuji, and eight times more explosive. A fourth series was commissioned just a minute ago. “Yeah, we start shooting series four in January, so that should be on TV sometime next year, Spring I guess. We’re incredibly proud of the show. But we’re also very happy with our own show that’s on BBC2 at the moment.”

That would be That Mitchell and Webb Look, in which the duo stop satirising the foibles and neuroses of thirty-something men, and instead start dressing up in silly costumes, putting on funny voices, and generally farting around pretending to be game show hosts, posh waiters or superheroes. I ask David about the contrast between Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look, and about how challenging he finds it to be funny in two very different scenarios. “I really like the fact that I have that mixture. Sometimes when we’ve been shooting for seven weeks I can hear myself moaning on and on, as Mark does, and realise I’m starting to get bored of it, and worry that other people will as well. But I suppose they just get it in 24 minute bursts. They don’t have to live with it for seven weeks. At the end of that it’s nice to be able to put on a funny beard and a silly voice and pretend to be a superhero. On the other hand, after a few weeks of that you get sick of all the make-up and just want to go back to playing someone who looks a bit more like you!”

The success of Peep Show means that next year you’ll be seeing a lot more of Mitchell and Webb in the New Year. As well as the new series of Peep Show, they’ll be stretching their faces by a factor of 1000 in order for them to appear on great big cinematic silver screens in a proper moving picture about a pair of competing magicians. David is excited. “We’ve just finished shooting ‘Magicians’, which will be out next April. It was written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the same guys who write Peep Show. It’s really great to be working with them again, not only because we respect their work and enjoy working with them, but they’re also both really funny! Shooting the film was very similar to shooting Peep Show, except that we were all aware that it had to look even better, you have to kind of justify the use of the much bigger screen. It was also great to have the time to go back and do things in different ways. When you’re shooting for TV, or doing a theatre show, you’re always working against the clock, but with the film you have the extra time to go and try things from different angles and in different ways.”

While on this form Mitchell may seem inseparable from Webb, they have in fact worked separately on a couple of recent projects. Mitchell has a small part in the forthcoming Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle I Could Never Be Your Woman, and Webb played a lead part in last year’s Confetti, with Mitchell relegated to a fleeting appearance. As anyone who has seen Confetti will testify however, it seems that the two do their best work together, and David agrees. “I still love working with Robert. Having time working on separate projects was really good though, as it meant we were able to give each other some much needed space, after we’d been working in such close proximity to each other for so long. Also, when we started working together again we were able to come back with fresh new ideas.”

In that case, rejoice merriment-seekers! Mitchell and Webb are together again. Next spring, they will be on your television sets and in your cinemas. But wait! Put down those pills and forget about sedating yourself until next year, for this very week they are playing a great big show in London, and, like some sort of mirth-orientated Justin Timberlake, they’re bringing funny back.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 5 December 2006.

“Right now… right now… I think it’s time to… KICK OUT THE JAMS MOTHERFUCKER!” begins one of the most incendiary tracks of all time, from the debut of MC5, a Detroit band who, whilst not widely feted in their time, are now recognised for their unique inventiveness and influence, especially within the American Punk movement.

Originally the band were together for just eight years, from 1964 until 1972, when they caved in under the pressure of their individual drug habits. Bassist Michael Davis was the first to leave the band, but I’m surprised when he tells me the scene of his departure. “I missed a gig at the LSE, and they kicked me out. We were really excited about playing there, we’d heard about the Stones playing the LSE, and it was only the third time we’d ever visited Britain. But I got busted at the airport with works in my bag, and I had to get a later flight to London. By the time I got there I’d missed the gig and the other guys kicked me out.”

Original members Rob Tyner and Fred Smith both died in the 90s, and Davis and Kramer had an unusual reunion in prison. Davis tells me “I was serving time for drug offences, and Wayne sent me this letter, saying that he was facing similar charges, and asking for my advice. I told him to say that he was serious about rehabilitation, and he was then sent to the same prison as me.”

However, it wasn’t until 2003 that Davis would play live with Kramer and Thompson again. “The reunion actually came about because of Levi’s. They were launching a new range of clothes inspired by that era, by the punk attitude, and apparently their marketing people told them that the band that best represented that music was the MC5. Can you believe that? So put out a line of t-shirts featuring old MC5 artwork, and they invited the three of us to play together again. There’s a British link again here, because our first gig was at the 100 Club. We really enjoyed it, so we toured after that, under the name DKT.”

The MC5 were famed for their overtly political lyrics, and their campaigning stance. I ask Davis whether he still thinks that music can change the world. “Absolutely, I think it’s the most nonviolent thing you can do, to be creative, and to play music together with other people. That’s why I set up a charity, musicisrevolution, to get more money for schools to have live music classes, to give more kids the chance to play instruments together.”

One of MC5’s most famous political moments came when they played for over eight hours at the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, but at the time no-one could have guessed at the carnage which was to follow. “I don’t know if I was in a Marijuana world or something, but when we were loading up the van, it just felt like going to play any other show. We just thought, we’re going to play for a load of political campaigners, and the Democratic convention just happens to be on at the same time – that’s why we’re meeting there, y’know? We weren’t prepared for what happened. We were playing to this field full of people, and we just saw the back of the crowd start to go crazy as the police closed in, and everyone start to surge forward. That wasn’t even the worst riot of the day. It was later in the evening that the police really started kicking the shit out of people.”

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 28 November 2006.

“How can we control the arms trade? How can we stir up enough public interest? Well, if emotive pictures of destruction and child soldiers were going to work, they would have worked by now. What we need to do if we want to control the arms trade is thoroughly destroy all of their arguments.” Mark Thomas fires his opening salvo with the precision and intensity of one of the guns he is working to control. Throughout the interview, Thomas rattles off figures and statistics with unnerving accuracy. But then, he should be good at this by now. Mark Thomas has been Britain’s foremost campaigning comedian since The Mark Thomas Comedy Product was first broadcast, eschewing tired sketches or “celebrity guests” in favour of creating a platform from which to attack social injustice and political negligence.

He has campaigned for greater corporate responsibility, against the dam in somewhere, and for the removal of third world debt, but in his new book As Used On The Famous Nelson Mandela, and on his current UK stand-up tour, he has his sights set firmly on the arms trade. “All the old lines that get wheeled out, “If we didn’t do it, someone else would”, “It’s good for British jobs”, “It’s good for the economy”, they’re all wrong, and we need to prove that they’re wrong to a wider audience. I mean, the arms industry is one of the most protected industries in Britain, these are companies that sponsor conflict, that sell weapons to the sorts of regimes and the sorts of individuals that sane people wouldn’t even invite round to their house for a cup of tea, and I really think they’re a cancer, a cancer in our society and a cancer at the very heart of our government. So really, my aim is to get people to engage with the arguments.”

Thomas’ campaigns have seen him doing extensive undercover journalism, posing as a pr specialist for aiding repressive regimes deal with amnesty, to setting up gun smuggling rackets in order to expose the loopholes in the current arms system. In light of his experiences, I ask him what he thinks of the LSE UGM’s recent decision to boycott donations from arms companies. His answer is less straight forward than perhaps one would expect. “Well, I would say that it does depend on the details of the companies, it not as easy as saying all companies ever involved in the manufacture of arms should be boycotted. Just to give an example, Land Rover have been involved in various arms deals over the years, but if they wanted to fund research, let’s say to develop a truck that could transport groups of people over large areas of difficult terrain, aiding the movement of refugees. You shouldn’t say, ‘They’ve been involved in arms in the past, we shouldn’t work with them’.” However, when I cite BAE Systems by name, his answer is slightly different. “I do think there is a very real ethical issue, with anyone, especially any university, accepting money from a company that has time and time again proven itself to act unethically. I mean, this is a company which has bribed, which has hidden information from investigation, which specialises in the most secretive of deals, which supports repressive regimes and that has the Labour government in its pocket, so I would definitely support a refusal to be funded by BAE’s money.”

It is a mark of Thomas’ nous as a campaigner that he does not see the world in a simple world-in-opposites reality. There is such a thing, for example, as a “good” arms company.

“The thing is, I do know some moral people who work within the arms industry and the arms trade, and people within the industry who support tougher laws and international treaties. These people will tell you that there are “good” arms companies and “bad” arms companies, and that you can distinguish between the two. Now, its fairly easy to see what a “bad” arms company is, I mean, even people within the arms trade will say that someone gunrunning to Zimbabwe is a “bad” arms company. The confusion comes when you try to work out exactly what a “good” arms company is. But it’s not as black as white as some activists seem to think.”

For Thomas, one of the failings of the arms control movement up to this point has been a lack of education, a simple ignorance of the facts. “I mean, some activists just haven’t done their homework. For example, you tell them that the Labour government has done good things, and they’re shocked. The Labour Government has brought in extra controls on the proliferation of torture equipment. That’s fucking brilliant! I mean, yes, it should go further, it should apply to all small arms, but it is a step in the right direction, it’s better than nothing. I always say that if the last Conservative government got 0/10 for arms control, then Labour is getting maybe 2 and a half/10, but that’s still something.”

The idea of a “good” arms company, I suggest, is perhaps a bitter pill for many activists to swallow. “Well, look at Liberia. The people of Liberia really deserve peace and safety. I mean, considering the things they’ve been through, the horrible atrocities, child soldiers and human rights violations of the worst kind, they really deserve some safety now. If that means that there has to be an armed police force, then arms are playing a positive role. It shouldn’t be assumed that all arms are bad.”

In this context then, support for stricter arms control does not need to infer a support for pacifism, and indeed Thomas refuses to sign up to what he refers to as “The Gandhian Perspective”. “There’s no point in adopting a pacifist strategy if the people attacking you are dropping Napalm on you from thousands of feet in the air. Non-violent resistance only works by eliciting shame in your attacker, but burning to death with your human dignity intact is still burning to death. Everyone has a right to life. That is the single most important human right. Article 2. It’s only natural that along with that right you have a right to defend your life. That’s just stunningly obvious. You have to be able to defend your own life against an aggressor.”

Thomas avoids being pigeon-holed into a neat category, and perhaps the same could be said for his career as a performer. He has worked in stand up, radio, television and written articles for publications such as The New Statesman, but As Used On The Famous Nelson Mandela is his first book. I ask him if he found the experience of writing it. “In a way it was daunting, and in a way it wasn’t. A lot of comics have written books, the likes of Alexi Sayle and Jo Brand, and I think the reason for this is that all comics are egoists. We all think we can do anything, and the sort of thing that people would regard as a challenge, the sort of thing to be approached with care and precision, we think is a piece of piss. But I’ve been working on issues in and around the arms trade for years, and basically I really saw the book as storytelling, a chance to fill in the gaps. When you do a television show you get about 24 minutes, once you’ve taken out ad breaks and the opening sequence and that sort of thing. If you want to really engage the audience in an issue, and present them with all the facts, that isn’t really long enough.”

One area his career has never taken him is into the realm of conventional politics. I ask him whether he has ever been tempted to become an MP, and also about his friend Tess Kingham, who is mentioned on several occasions in his book. Kingham was a Labour MP between 1997 and 2001, but she retired after a single term citing disillusionment with the political process. “Tess is an incredibly passionate person, she’s a friend, and she didn’t fuck about when she was an MP. I mean, before she became an MP she used to go out and do body counts, and collect other data on human rights violations. But her experience as an MP meant that she resigned because basically she felt her position had become untenable. She felt as if she had become part of the problem, rather than part of the solution. I think that’s what puts me off conventional politics, but also that I’m not disciplined enough to be an MP. I mean, I don’t think I could follow a party line! My skill is in offending people.” Indeed, his uncompromising style has hardly endeared him to the targets of his campaigns, but I ask him whether his humour is useful in the often dangerous situations he finds himself in, or whether the comedy only comes out later. “A bit of both, I guess. I do find myself in situations where I come away thinking, that was a bit scary, or that was a bit weird, or that was a bit horrible. I think anyone after an experience like that tries to rationalise their actions a little bit, tries to understand why they did what they did and said what they said, and I suppose humour comes in there.”

One story that Thomas details in As Used On The Famous Nelson Mandela is his uncovering of an illegal deal by Dheeraj Hinduja and Anders Spare to supply military trucks to the Sudan. Thomas worked on the story for BBC2’s newsnight, but the show was never aired following pressure from the Hinduja’s lawyers, a decision by the BBC which obviously disappointed Thomas. “I think that the moment they decided to pull the program will live on as a moment of ignomy, really. It was a shame to see a broadcaster politically cowed, and I think that it made the corporation seem very timid. The BBC has a special role to play. It’s remit is public broadcasting, and I think it has a duty to stand head and shoulders above other news broadcasters, and really hold people to account. That’s really what democracy is all about, holding people to account, and I think they failed on this occasion.”

However, his work was not without reward. “A lot of very positive things did come out of it. The committee report came out of it, the show I’m touring at the moment actually features it substantially – we’ve actually printed off copies of the final report and we distribute it at the end of it show, and of course the deal did fall through. Although a Chinese company did eventually come in and fill the order anyway, at least my actions did have some effect and proved that forcing the issue can produce results.”

Thomas’ campaigns over the years have brought many successes, but, as with any campaigner, the extent to which he knows how much personal influence he has had is unclear. “I think with anything in life you sometimes know the influence your actions have had, and sometimes you don’t. There’s a famous story about Kissinger advising Nixon not to nuke Vietnam with the words “Beware the hammer blow of the peace movement”, so while they may not have ended the war immediately, perhaps without even knowing it the peace protestors prevented nuclear bombs being dropped. To give another example, there was a strike in Colombia, and the military was called in to sort things out – it was getting very nasty, so solidarity protests were called outside the Colombian embassy in London. Now at these protests you’d get 10 people, maybe 20, maybe even 30 if you were really really lucky. However, when the Colombian government called off the military and began to negotiate, one of their non-negotiable demands was that they “call off the pickets in London”. So even relatively minor actions can have a major impact.”

But some important tangible changes have occurred. “But as for my proudest moment, I think getting real changes in the law. The thing I did with furniture disclose tax was a lot of fun, and getting the law changed. Finland also introduced a new law to restrict arm sales after one of my programs, and we’ve got Nestle to change their packaging and that sort of thing.”

“The next big aim is an international arms trade treaty, but really the aim before that is just to get as many people as possible engaged in the debate. It may seem complex, but, for example back in 1992 I was talking about reducing world debt, and people were incredulous. If you told them the facts they simply wouldn’t believe them. If you told them that some of the debt had been created by the Americans funding a nuclear power plant in the Philippines at the foot of an active volcano and in an earthquake zone, people wouldn’t believe it, but its true – a fucking active volcano. But now, some 14 years later, the removal of world debt is a large and popular debate, which shows that the public can get behind quite complicated arguments and movements. The same can happen with arms treaties.”

Thomas’ message, like his body of work, is a rallying shout, a call to arms if you will, for each of us to get informed and get engaged with the debates that will shape the world for years to come.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 24 October 2006.

“Hunter used to call Blair a ‘simpering little whore’, and I think we saw that yesterday” says Ralph Steadman, speaking the day after Tony Blair’s speech at the Labour Party Conference, and quoting his long time collaborator Hunter S. Thompson “Blair has dragged the socialist party of Britain to somewhere I never imagined it would be, and I don’t think the party did either.”

Perhaps the same could be said for Steadman himself, dragged out of his ordinary surroundings by his unstoppable talent. His career has taken him places that he could barely even of conceived of as a schoolboy growing up in North Wales. Born in 1936, Steadman’s artwork took him from the confines of the London College of Printing and Graphic Arts to working for the foremost satirical and cultural publications of the era, including Punch, Private Eye and Rolling Stone.

Described by Will Self as “Britain’s foremost post-war satirist” Steadman has forged a niche for himself with his instantly recognisable artwork that unflinchingly mocks and undermines the major political players of the day. However, as Self explains, he has not always achieved the intended offence; “Ralph eventually had to give up drawing politician’s faces after he discovered that no matter how disgusting, corrupt and venal he made them look, they’d still ring him up trying to buy the original prints.”

Self continues to work with Steadman on his regular Psychogeography column for The Independent, and speaks fondly about having Steadman as an illustrator. “After he gave up drawing their faces, he would just draw their legs. I used to get reams and reams of faxed politicians legs sent to whichever hotel I was staying at while I was writing the accompanying articles, which would utterly bewilder the hotel staff who received the faxes. I ended up just screaming at them ‘Have you got the legs??” Self states unequivocally that “Receiving a brand new Ralph Steadman print every week has been one of the greatest honours of my life.”

Steadman is currently in town to promote his latest work, a memoir of his late friend Hunter Thompson, entitled “The Joke’s Over”. Specifically the book focuses on the time the two spent working together covering such events as the Kentucky Derby, the Americas Cup and the Honolulu Marathon. Thompson wanted him to capture in his drawing ‘absolute evil’, the face of the decadent America that Thompson was pursuing. Steadman says he failed, and was only able to draw certain shades, certain types of evil.

He describes writing this memoir as a cathartic experience, which helped him to deal with the loss of a companion of was not only a great friend but also a constant inspiration. “I think we sparked off each other”, he says. Steadman now possesses a number of items of Thompson memorabilia, such as a distinctive hat, pair of aviator glasses and a cigarette holder. During the promotion of the work, he has begun donning these items to recreate the character of his lost friend, something he says he only feels comfortable doing now that he is dead. “When I used to go to Hunter’s house in Colorado, there were lots of people trying to be Hunter when they were with him. I could never do that.”

Steadman was always an outsider, and cursed with a naivety which at some times it seems Thompson took advantage of. He shows me a fax from Thompson, which begins with pleasantries but is soon down to brass tacks; “What I really need is $50,000 dollars. Keep your advice and send money.” Thompson was notoriously unwilling to share the credit he received for his work. Indeed, Steadman says that Thompson always regretted one of their deals when they did end up splitting the royalties. “For “The Curse of Lono” we agreed to split it 50-50, but afterwards he was never happy. He would say to me ‘Ralph, couldn’t we change that deal? Make it 51-49 in my favour?’ but I always said No.”

However, despite their differences of opinion, and of character, Steadman played an integral role in the forging of Gonzo journalism, Thompson’s great literary legacy, and Steadman delights in explaining the phenomenon. “What is Gonzo? Well, there are two concrete events in his life which I would point to and say “That’s pure Gonzo” The first would be, quite late in his life, when he had had a hip replacement and surgery to his spine, and he insisted on smoking inside the oxygen tent. The second would be his habit of turning off his lights and driving very fast down the wrong side of the road. We could see the other cars coming, but they couldn’t see us. We’d go past like ghosts, and they wouldn’t be sure whether they’d seen anything or not. The police had no idea. There was nothing to report. How could they know that some maniac was speeding down the wrong side of the road in pitch darkness?”

Thompson revelled in danger, and claimed that he wanted to drive fast enough that the “thrill of speed exceeded the fear of death”. Bearing this in mind, I wonder whether Steadman was surprised by Thompson’s suicide? “I say in my book ‘I have always known that at last I would take this road, but yesterday I did not know that it would be today.’ I always knew that he’d do it someday, but I wasn’t ready for it when he did. I understand his reasons for it. He was sick. He hated not being able to do what he loved, he hated not being able to do what he’d always done, and he hated the idea of going to an old people’s home. He used to say, “Ralph, the thing I worry about is being in an old people’s home, being strapped into a chair and some woman coming along and playing with my balls – and not being able to do anything about it.” Arthritis and illness had crept up on Thompson in later life, a man who had always been larger than life. Steadman mimics Thompson’s peculiar ambling gait, so ably reproduced by Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “Well he had one leg shorter than the other due to an American Football injury, so he always ended up with one foot just off the floor” Steadman explains “He would walk into a room and everyone would look at him. They had to; he was right in their faces.” He talks about Thompson fondly, but without deifying him, as so often happens after the death of a public figure. “He was a bastard” Steadman smiles, “but he was a lovable bastard.”

Speaking of bastards, Steadman is back to ranting about Blair. “He’s claims to have achieved everything he dreamt of coming to office – presumably that means bombing the shit out of Baghdad.” As I leave, Steadman is approached by a fan who asks him to doodle on the cover of the day’s Guardian. He willingly obliges, and sets about defacing the grinning image of Tony Blair with devil horns and other demented features. I suggest that he’s getting closer to absolute evil. He laughs, “I think you’re right”.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 3 October 2006.

Wolfmother are a band in demand. My interview with them before their sold-out show at the London Scala tonight is delayed and then cut short as their late arrival means cramming my demented inquisition in alongside my better paid but clearly inferior peers at the NME and several representatives of the international press. Whilst bassist Chris Ross has seemingly baulked at the gruelling schedule of interviews, playing truant at today’s proceedings, the band should be no strangers to attention. They are already superstars in their native Australia, where their debut album has garnered massive success which has been reflected by critical praise. Influential Australian radio station JJJ awarded them their ‘album of the year’ award and the band also had an unprecedented six songs voted on to their annual top 100 list.

When drummer Myles Heskett and Andrew Stockdale, the band’s impressively afroed lead singer and guitarist, finally arrive they are both laid back and happy to chat away, although this could be to do with the fact that they both seem very very stoned. Indeed, some critics have attempted to pigeonhole their sound as ‘stoner’ rock, but they tell me that they’re ‘not that absorbed’. To my ears, they are ‘everything-but-the-average’ rock, drawing influences from countless genres. They say ‘We want to take elements of stoner and mix it in with elements of punk, or take the finger plucking from country and mix it with straight out rock. We take things from hip-hop or anywhere else. I wouldn’t want to designate one scene.’ Myles cites Kyuss, and his subsequent discovery of Pink Floyd as key influences, whilst Andrew seems to naturally draw influences from anywhere he can find them, saying that even at school he could socialise with any scene, and listened to anything and everything from Black Flag to the Blues Explosion. This openness to eclecticism has made for an album with some unusual highlights. ‘I don’t see why people freak out over panflute solos,’ says Andrew, ‘I think for our next album we’re gonna get an entire flute orchestra together.’ Their debut LP was recorded in Los Angeles with Dave Sardy, a big name producer who’s worked with the likes of Oasis, The Dandy Warhols and Marilyn Manson. Andrew tells me that their openness to his ideas helped the band to progress, and to move on from the level they had already achieved after the years of jamming and rehearsing which had led up to the EP they self-released and which brought them so much attention. They are coming towards the end of this tour, and feel triumphant that their work has brought fresh recognition.

It’s been a far cry from the nightmare gig that followed their last visit to London. As Myles recounts the tale, Andrew seems physically pained, wincing “I feel like we shouldn’t even talk about it, I don’t wanna go there” Apparently a hectic departure from London, en route to New York, involved a very stoned Andrew and Wolfmother’s tour manager breaking into his old flat in order to retrieve his passport, then flying half way around the world to a photo shoot which involved sitting in the snow for several hours. By the time they played their New York showcase Andrew had lost his voice and Myles was suffering with flu and finding that his rented drumkit disintegrated mid-show. As their PR shuffles them off to sound check, I hope that the Scala will be kinder to them. By the time I next see them, striding onto the Stage to an exultant roar, they are changed men. Gone is the laid back, not a care in the world attitude, and in its place is classic showmanship. The show is pure foot-to-the-floor rock. Part Zeppelin riffs, part Sabbath howl and part Floyd psychedelia, they unite a diverse audience of hairy head-banging AC/DC fans, huge sweaty skinheads apparently on loan from Millwall riots and skinny girls with blonde pigtails, awakening an initially lethargic Tuesday night crowd. They roar through a crowd pleasing set, with Apple Tree, Another Dimension and Mind’s Eye particular standouts. Be sure to catch them at the Koko for their final British date next month, because as they exit stage right, world domination surely awaits.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 14 March 2006.

‘If Tony Blair was in front of me, I’d fucking lamp him.’ Benjamin Zephaniah is back, and he’s angrier than ever. His new album ‘Naked’ is his first since ‘Belly of De Beast’ a decade ago, and he begins our interview by explaining that he never gets himself tied into a record or book deal, so you know that if he’s got material out then it’s because there’s something he needs to say, not because he’s fulfilling a contract. However, he tells me that there could be another record not too far away, simply because there’s so much going on in the world that he feels the need to speak out about. He may be best known as a poet, but his albums allow him to combine music with the performance poetry that comes naturally to someone who favours the oral tradition over dull textbooks. ‘Naked’ sees him at his very best, ‘undressed’ and ‘looking at the truth’.

Despite his righteous anger, I get the feeling that Benjamin Zephaniah is something of a reluctant radical. He’s as laid back and easy going as they come, and happily tells me that he’d much rather be ‘writing comedy and having lots of sex’. Unfortunately for the Tony Blairs of this world though, he’s the sort of person who couldn’t live with himself being apathetic.

On the title track of his new album he says ‘I hate dis government as much as I hated the one before it and I have reason to believe that I will hate the one to come’. It’s a powerfully delivered statement, but I ask him if he ever feels depressed about the lack of difference his message, and those of people like him, has made. ‘Yes, in a word. One of the most frustrating things is that there are no alternatives.’ He tells me about his experiences in South Africa after the fall of Apartheid, where he experienced the rare phenomenon of people actually being excited to vote for someone, rather than voting for the lesser of two evils. The end of Apartheid in South Africa was an issue that was close to Zephaniah’s heart. In the early 80s he recorded a protest song for Nelson Mandela with the Wailers, becoming the first artist to record with them after Bob Marley’s death. He tells me that the issue of South Africa brought them together, and the song was heard by Mandela, who asked to meet him when he was released from Robben Island. Zephaniah cannot help but remark at the way Mandela’s image has transformed in the West ‘You have to remember that at the time, the ANC were Al Qaeda, and Nelson Mandela was Osama Bin Laden, except that he’d been caught!’

Africa remains a central theme in Zephaniah’s writing. On ‘Rong Radio Station’ he says ‘I waz trying to convince myself that I could ease my conscience, If I gave a few pence or a few cents to a starving baby in Africa, Because African babies need me so, Because African babies needed my favours, Because Africa is full of dictators, and oh yeah, Globalisation will bring salvation. I’ve been listening to the rong radio station’ I tell him that while I agree that giving money to charity may not be the long term way to solve inequality, it must have an important role to play for the people suffering right now. Anyone who received the Kenyan Society’s recent urgent email regarding the drought that has hit the Horn of Africa will know that it has been estimated that eleven million people there will require food aid, but is the urge to give them our loose coins any more than middle class guilt? Zephaniah thinks that charitable giving is short changing African nations ‘If you have a stab wound, you don’t try and cover it up with a plaster do you? I’m not saying that people who give to charity are bad people, I’m saying that they should get political. Too often people give to charity and think that that counts as being political, because they’re scared of being revolutionary or radical.’ He compares the difference to that of not being a racist, and of being actively anti-racist. ‘If you’re walking down the street and you see a guy getting beaten up by a racist, do you walk on and say ‘That’s bad, I wouldn’t do that’ or do you actually get involved and do something to stop it? It may not be directly confronting the racist, but just anything to actively stop it happening. The same applies to charities. There’s more to stopping inequality than putting money in a tin.’

Issues of inequality are never far from Zephaniah’s mind, which is hardly surprising given his personal journey from spending time detained at Her Majesty’s Expense to being invited to the palace to meet HRH in person and collect his OBE, an ‘honour’ which he famously declined. He wrote at the time ‘Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought. No way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen’ He rejected it on several grounds, not least the fact that an Order of the British Empire would be an unwieldy honour for someone who is ‘profoundly anti-empire’. Today he stands by his decision, describing those who accept one as ‘getting into bed with government and monarchy’ He says ‘I mean, I got a letter from Tony Blair inviting me to Downing Street. If Tony Blair was in front of me, I’d fucking lamp him. I’m a vegan, and when I was offered the OBE it was like someone who knew that offering me a steak, I’d fucking hit them, y’kno?’

He tells me that the years he spent in prison were formative for him. He says ‘Prison gave me time to think. Screws always have this thing where they’ll be like, ‘I’ll give you a year, you’ll be back’ When they said that to me, I said, ‘I’m not saying I won’t be back, but if I am it’ll be political.’ I realised that stealing off of the working class guy wasn’t achieving anything, but political activism could.’

Honours that he has been happy to receive are the honorary doctorates that have been bestowed on him by various Universities scattered across Britain. He counts ten proudly displayed on his wall, and tells me that for someone who left school at thirteen, being told your work is influential is an especially great honour, and one with some unexpected privileges. ‘After the first one I went to give a talk to some school kids and they introduced me as Dr Benjamin Zephaniah. I said, ‘Oh No, You don’t have to do that’ but the kids seemed impressed. I told them that I had had it put on my drivers licence so that every time I get stopped, the policeman has to call me ‘doctor.’

Freedom of speech has always been a key issue in Zephaniah’s writing, but he says that he thinks the recent uproar over cartoons published in a Danish paper highlights the ‘responsibility that comes with the right’ to free speech. Furthermore he tells me that he believes portraying the prophet as a suicide bomber perpetuated the negative stereotype that all suicide bombers are Muslim. He tells me that when he was in Palestine there was a suicide bomber who was a Christian, but ‘the media reported that he was a ‘Palestinian suicide bomber’, and never mentioned the fact that he was a Christian. It just fits in with this blinkered view that all suicide bombers must be Islamic.’

Musically speaking, ‘Naked’ is Zephaniah’s most diverse album. Every track stands out as an experiment in a different genre. He switches effortlessly from drum’n’bass to hip-hop and from garage to reggae dub. He tells me that whilst previous albums have been mostly reggae orientated, like ‘Belly of De Beast’ which was produced by the legendary Mad Professor, the new album ‘experiments with any genre of music that will enhance the words’. This openness to experiment has seen the involvement of a couple of talented collaborators. Preceding the release of the album is a remix EP by Rodney P, a friend of Zephaniah’s who ‘demanded’ that he got involved after he first played him the album. The album itself, unlike so many of the cheap and mundane CDs on the market, is physically a work of art. It is presented as a mini book of poetry, something Zephaniah says was intentional to ensure that the poems could stand alone from the music, and features the artwork of genius graffiti artist Banksy, whose work has become notorious worldwide and is ‘displayed’ everywhere from Palestine to LA and in several places close to the LSE campus. Zephaniah praises the alternative viewpoint that Banksy’s art provides. ‘He’s subversive and gives you another way of looking at the issues, which complements my poems.’

You sense that whilst he is very much a performance poet, he is at heart a wordsmith. I ask him how he sees himself. ‘I describe myself as a ‘Griot’. It’s a West African term which has no exact translation in English. Probably ‘Troubadour’ or ‘Bard’ would be closest. It’s someone who travels from village to village. Maybe they’ll tell a story in one village, sing in the next and perform a poem in another. Sometimes they aim just to entertain, but sometimes their aim is to get people off their asses and ready to storm the government.’ At a time like this, we need Griots like Benjamin Zephaniah more than ever.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 7 March 2006.

A lot can change in a year. Twelve months ago Pope John Paul II was still happily popeing around, part-time horse impersonator and full-time home wrecker Camilla Parker Bowles was preparing herself to marry into our glorious monarchy and I was living in a hut in the vast, desert-like stretch of land that surrounds the remote Indian town of Lucknow. The only means I had of keeping tabs on Prince Charlie’s equestrian pursuits or surveying the spread-betting on the date and time of JP’s demise was scalpeled from The Hindustan Times, a decent and upstanding publication with many fine English-language articles and an unintentionally hilarious section in which desperate parents seek spouses for their children. However, this is certainly not the time or place or page in which to discuss the merits or otherwise of arranged marriages, as it was on this date, exactly a year ago, that The Hindustan Times was to bring me news of the death of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. He had, the Times informed me, put a gun into his own mouth and ended a life that had brought him literary notoriety as well as a reputation for personal excess, no holds barred journalism and fire-and-brimstone prose.

The front page of the paper carried the quotation “The best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism” It was wrongly attributed to Thompson, the words in fact first being written by William Faulkner, but they were often cited by Thompson and influenced the genre of writing which he carved out alone. He called it ‘Gonzo’, a form of journalism where the writer not only brings their own experiences and opinions into the writing, but also becomes the protagonist. Hunter Thompson didn’t simply report the story, he was the story.

This is a man whose ashes, six months later, were loaded into huge flares and fired, along with enough fireworks to celebrate every Guy Fawke’s night for the rest of the decade, out of a cannon topping a 150-foot tower shaped like a fist with two thumbs and clutching a peyote button, an hallucinogenic cactus native to the south-west of the United States of America.

It’s an horrifically pathetic cliché to say something along the lines of “if you looked up crazy in the dictionary, his picture would be there” but his picture and biography actually appeared in text books about manic compulsives. He was a maverick, a dangerous lunatic and in my opinion at least, the best thing to happen to the written word since cavemen first took up pointy sticks and carved crude approximations of their grunts into the earth.

He first rose to infamy in 1966 when he established himself as a journalist who was not constrained by ordinary boundaries by riding with the Hell’s Angels in San Francisco, imbibing gallons of alcohol, guzzling prescription drugs and LSD and eventually getting his face pounded into the asphalt. Then writing a book about it. Whilst shocking and controversial at the time it was published, in contrast with his later work it is in fact remarkably conventional journalism.

The success of Hell’s Angels secured him work with a number of American magazines where he began to hone his trademark style. The most high profile of these was Rolling Stone, who serialised his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in 1971. Starting life when Sports Illustrated gave him the chance to travel to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race, Thompson hit the road with Chicano lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta and a veritable pharmacy of illegal narcotics alongside him in a huge red convertible. The “mean gibberish” he sent back transformed from race coverage into a “Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” and was predictably refused out of hand by Sports Illustrated. Rolling Stone proved to be more accommodating and the book went on to critical and commercial success.

‘Fear and Loathing’, like all Thompson’s ‘Gonzo’ work, blurs the lines between fiction and journalism, but as Thompson himself said “only a goddam lunatic would write a thing like this and claim it was true.” As such, identities are always thinly but necessarily masked. Thompson becomes Raoul Duke, an alter ego he used on several occasions, often in the third person, and Acosta is referred to as Doctor Gonzo, or simply “my attorney”, and transformed from a Mexican into a 300-pound Samoan.

The book itself starts at a ferocious pace which never slackens. Like a drunk on a powerful motorbike, Thompson twists the throttle without let up, and as his passengers all we can do is cling on for dear life and hope that this unstoppable force manages to keep tyres to tarmac. Ostensibly about Thompson’s attempt to cover the race, and later the district attorney’s drug conference, the themes the book explores capture the zeitgeist of an era. It deals with the death of the dream of a non-violent revolution, which the sixties had seemed to promise, and sees the American Dream itself being killed off by war in Vietnam and the election of the crooked Richard Nixon. However, the book is much more than a period piece, it is a book about the human condition, in particular our desire to anesthetise ourselves as insulation from ugly realities.

By second half of the book the narrative has broken free from its shackles and has set about destroying itself, like a scorpion doused in alcohol, insane and stinging itself to death. Part two’s ninth chapter opens with an editor’s note informing the reader that the author is no longer in a fit state to lash the prose together, and there follows simply a transcript of Thompson’s recorded conversations. The narrative re-appears in time to close the book, emerging blinking into the cold light of day in fittingly hung-over, but unrepentant, style. Alongside the vivid imagery of the prose, Ralph Steadman’s hectic illustrations, which originally accompanied the articles, have become inseparable from the novel.

He followed what he called “my Vegas book” with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in 1972. Unlike most of the jaded hacks covering the race for the presidency, Thompson actually had experience of running for office. Two years earlier he had been a candidate for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Aspen in Colorado. He ran under his own “Freak Power” banner and proposed renaming Aspen “Fat City”, a ploy designed to discourage the developers who sought to turn the town into a money-spinning ski resort, and also, somewhat predictably, proposed the decriminalization of the possession and sale of recreational drugs. In order to subvert his image as a hippy he promptly shaved his head and during public debates referred to the crew-cut-sporting Republican candidate as “my long haired opponent”. He lost the election, but only by a handful of votes.

Even in his later years he continued to publish and stood out amongst the pantheon of global social commentators. On 12 September 2001 he memorably wrote ‘The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country.’

A common criticism of his work as a serious body of literature has been his own, and by extension his protagonists’, vast narcotics consumption and many critics have used this as an excuse to dismiss the uncomfortable truths that Thompson frequently voiced. However, unlike comparable authors, notably William Burroughs, Thompson never baffles the reader or slips too far into his drug induced stupor that he becomes incoherent. While drugs undoubtedly inform the text, it is his intellect which drives it.

The biggest criticism of Thompson, however, and it is a major one, is that by his success and his genius in writing about truth and what it means to be alive, he has inspired hundreds of fucked up morons with drug habits to think that they can write, and it is for that reason that papers like The Beaver have to endure contributions like this one.

On that note it only remains for me to drain this bottle of Wild Turkey and cram these pages into the mojo wire. Only his own words can come close to being big enough to serve as an epitaph. “Too weird to live, too rare to die.”

Res Ipsa Loquitur. Mahalo.

Originally published in the LSE’s The Beaver, 21 February 2006.