A Month's Worth Of News In A Day

The headline may be an exaggeration, but it is only a slight one and that is a testament to just how much has happened on this particular Tuesday.

I’m still trying to gather my thoughts on the afternoon’s events so far as the hacking scandal is concerned. Ever since the Guardian broke the story that the News of the World had hacked Milly Dowler’s phone on Monday 4^th July, a mere 15 days ago events have unfolded so quickly as to leave the paper issues of every newspaper seeming redundant before they even hit the shop shelves. This afternoon was always going to be a particularly heavy news period, with Sir Paul Stevenson and John Yates attending one hearing and Rupert and James Murdoch along with Rebecca Brooks attending another. My twitter feed, which is always dominated by political and journalistic figures, has been going crazy all day, with up to 30 new posts every 15 minutes or so, and it’s showing no signs of slowing anytime soon.

Even as I type more stories are breaking in relation to Neil Wallis, deputy editor of The News of the World at the time of the hacking, being an informal advisor to Andy Coulson during the period that the latter was working for David Cameron. Normally not all that incriminating for the PM because it is likely to be quite deniable so far as his knowledge of the role goes, but as part of the larger picture, with more and more people around him clearly having been involved in criminal activities, it adds to the pressure on him.

As part of the questioning of Yates this afternoon, he made reference to emails between himself and Ed Llewellyn, David Cameron’s chief of staff, that included what appears to be Llewellyn advising Yates not to raise the issue of phone hacking with himself or anyone attached to 10 Downing Street. It seems to be the subtle political equivalent of sticking his fingers in ears and going “la la la I can’t hear you” so far as phone hacking was involved.

The committee’s sessions with the Murdoch’s didn’t include many major revelations, though I did get the impression that they both must have been on one epic decade long bender, so large are the gaps in their memory and knowledge of what was going on. Rupert can perhaps legitimately claim that The News of the World is such a small part of his media empire that he wasn’t particularly aware of individual practices there, but James has no such excuse, yet tried to use it anyway.

Frustratingly some idiot attacked Rupert Murdoch with a custard pie during the later stages of the hearing, merely succeeding in making him look like an 80 year old victim for the first time in the past fortnight, not an angle that helps anyone hoping that those responsible for the whole sorry scandal are brought to justice. It is also deplorable on the more simple level that it was an attack on an elderly man who, whether or not you agree with his politics or business strategies, does not in any way deserve physical attacks. Even more frustratingly he is a member of UK Uncut, though the group was quick to point out that they were in no way involved in what happened. It does sadly give the right wing press, who already have an axe to grind against the anti-cuts movement, more ammunition. From the footage I’ve seen it looks like Rupert’s wife got a good hit in on the attacker and good for her, the guy deserved both that and any criminal punishment that follows, it was a callous and stupid attack that also trivialised a serious political issue.

A sign of just how busy a day of news it has been can be reflected in two stories which have barely got any coverage.

Last night a group of hackers going by the name LulzSec managed to get past the online security of the Sun newspaper’s website, initially redirecting traffic to a fake version of the page with a lead story about Rupert Murdoch having committed suicide and then later linking straight to LulzSec’s twitter account. Normally a hacker or group of them hijacking one of the nation’s major newspaper’s websites would be big news, dominating front pages and online debate. However in this current climate it barely caught anyone’s attention, and as little seems to have come from the hacking in terms of big revelations discovered in emails or anything of that sort, the public’s attention only turned most fleetingly to that story.

It was the public being distracted that also led the Health Secretary to choose this particular day to announce that more than £1b of NHS services were going to be opened up to competition from private companies and charities. It’s a great example of a government taking an opportunity to bury bad news, aware that everyone will be looking in the opposite direction.

I’m sure by the time a lot of people read this, the post will already be out dated and outpaced but that is kind of the point; this story, with all its separate but interweaving strands is moving so fast as to make systems like the Guardian’s live blog one of the only effective ways of keeping up to date.

I’ve got more to write on the hacking scandal, especially in relation to The Daily Mail and a previous inquiry into hacking and blagging carried out in 2006, but I will save that for another day.

For now I will leave you with a song from an artist that I keep meaning to check out more extensively than I have so far; Robyn. It’s an acoustic version of a song from her ‘Body Talk’ album.

An Example To Fear

Earlier today the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the charges of aggravated trespass against 109 UK Uncut activists who staged a peaceful protest at the upmarket Fortnum and Masons store in London on the 26^th of March. Charges against another 30 are still to proceed and their cases will be heard in November.

I never understood the arrests from any point of view other than serving a political agenda; these people were in a shop that was open to the public and as far as I can tell were engaged in a remarkably calm and good natured protest against the coalition’s austerity measures and tax evasion by major companies. The Guardian even quoted one of the police officers at the scene, Chief Inspector Claire Clark, as saying that the protest was non-violent and sensible.

Adding to the sense that this whole affair was far from the police’s finest hour is the fact that the protestors were told they would not be arrested or kettled upon leaving the store and were tricked by the police before being arrested and held for up to 24 hours in police cells. The video of the police’s assurances is here. It's worrying if as citizens exercising our democratic right to protest we can't trust the police to at least be honest about their intentions.

Now almost regardless of your political stance or your vie of UK Uncut and their actions, this case must have seemed like a waste of time. Prosecuting a group of non-violent protestors for occupying a shop seems odd when surely the courts could be put to better use. As it is I feel the problem goes beyond that to cover the fact that the police and the courts seem to be trying to make examples of some protestors in an effort to put off future demonstrations.

You only have to look at the sentence of 16 months in jail for Charlie Gilmour to see the kind of excessive use of the law to punish protestors. I am not defending Mr. Gilmour’s actions, he was a drunken and drugged up idiot that day who desecrated one of Britain’s most important war memorials (though this wasn’t actually a crime he was sentenced for) and who was involved in some minor acts of vandalism towards a car in the convoy carrying Prince Charles and towards the window of a Topshop store. Not behaviour I in any way support, but also in no way is it behaviour deserving of that length of custodial sentence.

It would seem to be a clear statement by the courts to other protestors that future protestors will have to expect to be prosecuted at the absolute extreme of the law, without genuine perspective towards the severity of his crime. Gilmour did not assault anyone, he was more a danger to himself than to others and the degree of punishment is in my opinion highly unfair.

Gilmour deserved to be taken to court, perhaps he even deserves some time in prison, though I’d argue that the nature of his crime would suggest a community service order would be more productive all round. He isn’t a danger to others, but he could be useful to his local community.

Sadly though he has been made an example of, and it is still to be seen whether the remaining 30 protestors from the Fortnum and Mason case suffer similarly excessive punishments or if the CPS sees sense and throws out those cases like it did 109 today. The cases aren’t in the public interest to prosecute, nor is it in the public’s interest for a 21 year old student to be imprisoned for 16 months because of an idiotic, drug fuelled day that in the end caused no physical harm to anyone and who has shown clear remorse for his actions.

As a student and someone who shares the views of many of the student protestors and members of UK Uncut, the kettling, the arrests, the drawn out court cases and the excessive sentences all seem to have an additional purpose that goes beyond simply trying to enforce the law; it seems that the government and/or police want people to be scared to go out and protest in the future. They want people to remember that you can protest entirely peacefully and still be taken to court, they want people to remember that attending a protest may mean being kept on freezing cold streets, cramped together without access to basic amenities for hours at a time, subject to police charges on horseback and they want people to remember Charlie Gilmour and how little he actually had to do to earn himself a long stay in a prison cell.

As is often the case, I don’t want to post a song following a more serious blog post like this.

Mid July Musings

Currently watching the Women’s World Cup final and am really impressed by the quality on show, both the U.S.A and Japan are technically very good teams, a good degree better than England I have to concede. It’s a shame that this is the only match the BBC have decided to show on an actual channel rather than only available via the red button; as I said in a previous post, tournaments like this are a great opportunity to raise the profile of the women’s game and remove some of the stigma and prejudice surrounding it, but it will need a bit more bravery on the part of major television channels. I’m rooting for Japan as they’re the under-dogs but on the basis of the first 66 or so minutes, a U.S.A win would be probably the right result.

In other news the basket beneath the News International guillotine is getting a little full, with Met Chief Sir Paul Stevenson joining the list of people jumping before they were pushed. I’m planning to write a full blog on the current state of the scandal either tomorrow or on Tuesday, though by then I imagine the picture will have changed yet further. It’s a rapidly changing situation and there are still an awful lot of questions to be answered.

Jonathan Ross has posted a link to a blog post detailing allegations of illegal activities at The Daily Mail. There’s a temptation for me to say that I’d let Murdoch retreat now with no further repercussions if The Daily Mail was taken down in return. I make no secret of my opinion of that particular newspaper, it is a virulent and hate filled production more concerned with peddling it’s particular agenda than with journalistic standards, perspective or truth. It is a paper which employs Jan Moir and Richard Littlejohn, which surely says all you need to know.

I also intend to write in the next few days about the sentencing of Charlie Gilmour for his part in the student fees protests last year. It might not come as a huge surprise that I’m not particularly happy with it.

In amongst those political posts I’m sure I’ll write a couple of film related pieces, and perhaps I might do a blog on the final of ‘The Apprentice’ but those are less set in stone.

For now though I’ll leave you with a song I listened to earlier today, a song off of a great, if a little repetitive album released last year.

My Favourite Films (12/15) - Crime

Favourite Crime Film - The Town (Affleck, 2010)

Choosing the Ben Affleck directed 2010 film ‘The Town’ over Michael Mann’s classic ‘Heat’ wasn’t an easy decision. In fact I was very tempted to just call it a tie and write a joint piece, but as I’ve eventually managed to settle on an outright winner in every other genre it didn’t feel right taking the easy option here.

Unsurprisingly on its release ‘The Town’ drew a lot of comparisons to the 1995 film which pitted De Niro against Pacino in a cat and mouse game between a master criminal and the detective charged with stopping him. The surprising thing was that, considering the high regard ‘Heat’ is held in by a lot of film critics and fans, the majority of comparisons were highly favourable.

It’s a fairly classic crime film set up; a skilled and professional criminal and his gang of accomplices are attracting the attention of a determined cop, who closes in on them. There’s the girl who makes the thief want to change his ways and the “one last job”. There’ve been plenty of films that try to make the audience relate to the criminal more than the police officer, the anti-hero is a staple of most film cultures, but Ben Affleck’s character Doug MacRay is more straight forwardly likeable and engaging character than most. ‘The Town’ is a film about people who feel trapped by where they grew up, forced, or perhaps more accurately, raised into a life of crime where robbing a bank seems almost like a regular job.

Affleck gives the character a real subtlety and depth, dealing with a range of elements of Doug with a nous that, perhaps if applied to ‘Pearl Harbour’ could have made the film a whole lot more likeable. Then again maybe Affleck has suffered somewhat unfairly for his involvement in that particular travesty of a film; in a film where he has either received good direction or directed himself he’s actually been quite consistently strong. Sadly ‘Pearl Harbour’ has left a scar across his career that will probably not fully fade. A few more performances than this though and perhaps people will forget it’s there at least.

Whether dealing with his ex (Blake Lively) and the daughter from that relationship, the girl who he likes (Rebecca Hall), his convicted felon of a father or his best friend and borderline psychopath James (played superbly by Jeremy Renner who I’m yet to see do a bad performance), Doug is both incredibly believable and painfully pitiable. He’s a strong individual, yet you can’t help but feel that with a few more lucky breaks he could have been so much more than the bank robber he is.

I think Affleck/Doug is the reason I prefer ‘The Town’ to ‘Heat’. Mann’s film is one about men so focussed on their pride in their respective careers that they damage everything they touch and seem unable to really relate to others; utterly fascinating to watch but difficult to empathise with. Affleck gives all of the central cast in ‘The Town’ a degree of humanity that is deliberately left out of ‘Heat’ and for me that was the deciding factor in why it gets the nod for my favourite crime film; when the final showdown rolls around I felt a passionate attachment to Doug that I simply didn’t for De Niro’s McCauley or Pacino’s Lt. Hanna.

Tightly scripted and paced throughout no scenes feel like filler and every conversation feels important. It has to be admitted that it doesn’t have a scene to rival that coffee shop scene in ‘Heat’ but it has several moments that suggest Affleck has a long and productive career in front of him as a director and actor. One scene during a dramatic escape with a lone police officer is beautifully underplayed and subtly comic, while the scene between Doug and John Hamm’s Special Agent Frawley may lack some of the delicious tension and mutual respect of the equivalent ‘Heat’ scene, but has one of the most deliciously aggressive and un-PC rants by Frawley being met with utter nonchalance by MacRay going for it.

‘The Town’ wouldn’t exist without ‘Heat’ having been made almost 15 years earlier; the similarities can’t, and shouldn’t, be ignored. However I believe Affleck created the superior film because, without sacrificing any of the moral confusion of rooting for the criminal, he also created a fantastically human character in Doug who not just holds the plot together but gives the film it’s complex, but beating heart. Renner, Hamm and the late Pete Postlewaite are superb as the men who Affleck relies upon and fights against, sometimes at the same time, Lively and Hall are similarly excellent, but it is Affleck who deserves the respect for this film. To direct a great film and give a great lead actor performance are rarely combined in the same film and he’s gone a long way to establishing himself as one of the most talented people involved in Hollywood right now. Perhaps one day reviewers like me will even forget he was ever in ‘Pearl Harbour’ at all.

For now he will have to comfort himself with the knowledge that if he can build on this and the impressive ‘Gone Baby Gone’ then he will definitely go down in history as one of the greats of the turn of the century and rightfully so.

Another mark of just how good ‘The Town’ is, is that it’s one of the few films I’ve ever dedicated more than one blog to, reviewing it briefly a couple of months ago, but I feel that this post has perhaps done better justice both to the film in its own right and its relationship to Michael Mann’s ‘Heat’. I advise you watch both of them and I don’t really mind which you prefer, because you’ll have watched two extremely good films and that’s what matters more.

Today's song was going to be from one of the bands I'm excited to see at Tramlines next weekend, but I'll save that for a later post, because this just came on my iTunes as I've currently got a playlist I made a few years ago on shuffle and it brought back a lot of memories. It's off of one of the first CD's I ever owned, a Christmas present when I was 12 or 13 if I remember rightly, and I was amazed to find that this evening I still remember pretty much every word to this song, which was always my favourite on the album.

A Dream Weekend

I, like I imagine a lot of people, have been thinking in the past couple of days what I could have done with the money if I’d won that £161m Euromillions jackpot. One idea that would probably be completely impractical but when viewed with the same degree of realism as involved in me winning a lottery without entering it in the first place, it seemed pretty brilliant was that I would organise my absolute dream festival. The idea was triggered by my excitement about Tramlines in a week’s time and the knowledge that it’s now about halfway between Glastonbury and Leeds Festival, the two national festivals that I always wish I could afford to go to.

As it is a festival being paid for out of my money it would of course have a line up handpicked by me, and just as obviously, every single artist I’d like would be available and eager to play at the festival. I’d also somehow control my weather to be a beautifully sunny every day and have some kind of control over who was allowed to turn up. Because in my fantasy I’m allowed to be a bit of a snob.

That though naturally rolled into this one; who would make up that dream line up. I decided to settle on a 3 day festival, with 10 bands playing each day (I have no interest in booking a festival so fully that I end up having to choose between two bands I want to hear.) There’d also be an almost excessive number of conveniently placed toilets and cheap beer stands, so there would be no issue of too much or too little hydration. There’d be 15 minute breaks between each band for people to get food and drinks and stuff.

So here goes, in chronological order of when they’d go on stage, starting at around 3 pm, with the first 6 bands having 45 minute sets, the next three having an hour and 15 minutes and the headliner getting two whole hours. Factoring in the breaks that means the headliners would finish at around half 12. At which point a club in a giant tent would start up. I would also have final decision on set lists, which for some of the bands listed would mean skipping whole albums or focussing on 1 particular record.

Friday

· Hurts

· Delphic

· Arcade Fire

· LCD Soundsystem

· Naked and Famous

· The XX

· Wild Beasts

· Fleet Foxes

· Elbow

· Bloc Party

Saturday

· Florence & The Machine

· Chapel Club

· The Gaslight Anthem

· The Strokes

· We Are Scientists

· The Boxer Rebellion

· Muse

· White Lies

· Arctic Monkeys

· Rise Against

Sunday

· Tegan and Sara

· Jamie Woon

· Frank Hamilton

· Sigur Ros

· Bon Iver

· City & Colour

· Adele

· Laura Marling

· Mumford & Sons

· Frank Turner

That festival would, for me, be absolutely worth whatever expense it took to arrange. It’d be worth it just for the three headliners, but with all those other bands I can’t really think of a way I’d rather spend a weekend than at that festival.

Today’s song is a Frank Turner one, a song that fits well with yesterday’s post, specifically the section where I mentioned that he is responsible for some of my favourite lyrics ever. This song has probably my favourite two verses worth of lyrics and I think I’ve posted them before, but I love them so much I’m going to post them again.

“I am sick and tired of people who are living on the B-list. They’re waiting to be famous and they’re wondering why they do this. And I know I’m not the one who is habitually optimistic, but I’m the one who’s got the microphone here so just remember this:

Life is about love, last minutes and lost evenings, about fire in our bellies and furtive little feelings, and the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering, and help us with remembering that the only thing that’s left to do is live. After all the loving and the losing, the heroes and the pioneers, the only thing that’s left to do is get another round in at the bar.”

A Man With A Guitar And A Whole Lot Of Heart

So I now feel that I’ve given Frank Turner’s new album ‘England Keep My Bones’ sufficient listening to be able to write a good review of it. The title is drawn from a lesser known Shakespeare play, ‘The Life and Death of King John’ and as Turner himself explained in an interview with ‘mindequalsblown’ website, “the album was, for the most part, about mortality, and about Englishness”.

Those themes are abundantly clear throughout from the gentle build up and reflective lyrics of opener ‘Eulogy’ to the medieval ballad ‘English Curse’, this is an album that is all about what it means to Frank Turner to be English and what it means to accept that life has been going on for a long time before you arrived, and will do so again after you die. It’s an album about not just understanding, but taking pride in your place in the world, the fact that you’re just one person among billions being a beautiful thing rather than a negative.

It’s no secret that I love Frank Turner’s music, I’d definitely say he’s my favourite solo artist and so I listen to any new songs from him with that combination of expectance and nervousness that we reserve for our favourite artists. We are sure it will be brilliant but are terrified it might fall short of what we expect from them.

This album didn’t disappoint and it is perhaps an improvement on the previous album in my opinion. I never connected with ‘Poetry of the Deed’ in the same way I love his first two studio albums and the collection of b-sides and alternative takes released under the title ‘The First Three Years’. It was maybe a little too polished and radio friendly when compared to the wonderful roughness and passion of his earlier material. That’s not to say it was a bad album, far from it, merely that by the ridiculously high standards I hold him to, it was a tiny step backwards.

On ‘England’ the passion and the hint of pain is there again. I think I’ve mentioned before my theory about there being two types of music fans; lyrics people or melody people, and that I fall within the lyrics camp. Well one of the things that appeals to me about Frank Turner is the lyrics in his songs, so many of my favourite lyrics come from his music and that fine tradition is continued in this latest album.

I’m going to post a selection of the lyrics that have stood out so far in the album, the lyrics that show the themes of Englishness, mortality, passion and romanticism, themes I have more than a passing interest in.

Eulogy

‘Well I haven’t always been a perfect person,
And I haven’t done what mum and dad had dreamed,
But on the day I die I’ll say “At least I fucking tried”,
And that’s the only Eulogy I need.’

Peggy Sang The Blues

‘And Peggy said “It doesn’t matter where you come from,
It matters where you go,
And no one gets remembered, in this listless, loveless life,
For the things they didn’t do.”’

I Still Believe

‘I still believe in the need for guitars and drums and desperate poetry.’

‘I still believe that everyone
Can find a song for every time they’ve lost, and every time they’ve won
So just remember folks we’re not just saving lives, we’re saving souls and we’re having fun.’

Rivers

‘And all our sins will be forgiven, washed away to set us free,
By the rivers that run through our homesteads, by myth and modal melody.’

I Am Disappeared

‘We are blood cells alive in the bloodstream of the beating heart of the country.
We are electric pulses in the pathways of the sleeping soul of the country.’

If Ever I Stray

‘And some days it feels like you just can’t win,
No matter what you do or say.
Things didn’t kill me but I don’t feel stronger.
Life is short but it feels much longer’

‘The path I chose isn’t straight and narrow -
It wanders around like a drunken fellow.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to follow,
But if you’ve got my back I’ll go on,
If you’ve got my back I’ll go on.’

Redemption

‘Oh is love really real and can any of us hope for redemption?
Or are we all merely biding our time down to lonely conclusions?’

‘These failures shift and shake me in the night,
Like I fever I can’t break, try as I might.’

Hope, pride, retrospective thought, passion, desire, despair and determination; all are emotions that are touched upon in ‘England Keep My Bones’ and surely that’s the mark of the truly great music, the songs that manage to combine a great tune with lyrics that are heartfelt and meaningful. It’s the reason that no matter how much I might be enjoying the dancier end of the musical spectrum, no matter how much I’m loving an album that is 90% or more comprised of computer based noises, I will always return to the songs by men and women with guitars and pianos, who sing about life, love and all the painful stuff that goes along with it.

Instead of posting a song here like i usually would, I simply advise you to give the whole album a listen, including the bonus tracks if you can track down a version with them on. If you can afford it and still own a CD player and a set of speakers rather than playing everything through your computer, go out and get a physical copy of the CD, put it in the CD player and just listen, without distractions or skipping songs, appreciate an album in the way it should be.

Box Set Bonanza

So continuing my lazy/tired top 10 lists as I don't want to write anything lengthy right now, I'm going to list the top 10 DVD box sets that I would buy right now if money was no issue.

1. The Wire (Seasons 1-5)

2. Battlestar Galactica (Complete)

3. Band of Brothers

4. Woody Allen Box Set

5. Disney Collection (10 Films)

6. Star Wars (Original Trilogy)

7. Lost (Seasons 1-6)

8. 24 (Seasons 1-7)

9. The Walking Dead

10. The IT Crowd (Seasons 1-3)

Today's song is one off of the album that started the day off for me today, an album I haven't listened to for a long time.