Richard [K] Morgan's News and Views

Saw something extraordinary last night. Saw the Dandy Warhols live.

Which is something I've been trying to do for about a year and a half now, ever since I ran into Pete Holmstrom at a book signing in Portland and was bowled over to find he read my books. Ever since then, Pete has been brandishing free tickets and backstage passes at me whenever the Dandys showed up in the UK, and every time I managed to find myself locked into some other engagement - convention in Italy, anniversary in a stone circle on the outer Hebrides, like that....

Well, no more.

The Dandys blew into town last night, played the Glasgow ABC, and blew out again, headed for Dublin. In between, they turned in what has to be one of the most mind-blowing gigs I've ever seen. I mean, I thought they'd be good, I expected them to be good, but this.......

Where to start? The fact they wandered on stage with no more ceremony than a high school band doing a soundcheck? The fact that by the end my throat was raw with yelling and my arms ached from shoulder to wrist with held-high hand clapping and mad waving about? The fact they shrouded standby anthems like Godless, Not if you Were the Last Junkie on Earth and Bohemian Like You in a swirling fog of guitar sound, holding the audience breathless until the giveaway chords swam up like sea monsters, broke through and turned us all into raving, screaming maniacs once more? The fact that Wasp in the Lotus still sounds like it's a building coming down on you? The fact that what you'd once believed were softly modulated retro-eighties lullabies like You Come in Burned and The Last High turned edgy and raw with the power coming off the stage? The fact they played for two hours straight, no breaks, no retreating off stage at any point for anyone?

Pete Holmstrom stands like some moody dark elf out of myth, a whole switching sequence of different snarling and moaning guitars held low in his arms like he's just torn them bodily up out of the Earth and they weigh a lot, or need gentle soothing before they'll behave. Zia McCabe puts out a twisting, jiving, lost-in-it-all vibe as she works huddled black machinery, sends out bone shuddering waves of sound and raises a tambourine to the crowd like a warrior queen lifting a standard for salute. Oh, and somewhere in there, she finds time to play harmonica too. Brent DeBoer, way up front by usual stage set-up standards, wears a beautific beam plastered across his face for the whole gig, puts in sweet harmony backing vocals, and knocks the drums about like it's something he could do standing on his head if he wanted to, y'know. And Courtney Taylor-Taylor fronts the whole assembly with schizo double-mike vocals, slicing guitar counterpoint to Pete's wall of sound (and vice versa), brief switch-out to percussion that goes smooth as a new-razor shave, and a virtuoso delivery that puts undoubted truth behind the thing he told me earlier backstage - that you write these songs for yourself and no-one else, because it's what you want to hear, or what's the fucking point?

And it doesn't hurt that backstage these guys are as amiable and unassuming after the event as if they'd just finished a twenty minute soundcheck. I expected them to be wiped out, collapsed on sofas, uncommunicative with post performance endorphins.... Instead, they stood around chatting quietly, to the faint smell of Courtney making toast for himself and burning it. Good gig. Yeah, glad you liked it. Felt pretty good to us too. See you again soon.

Oh yes.

Been wanting to write about this for a while now, but I've been struggling with my own anger for a way to do it that won't earn me an unwelcome visit from some stony-faced Special Branch officers. Someone asked me a little while ago in interview if my experience of asshole students when I was still an EFL teacher (finest example being the Egyptians who fronted a colleague of mine with the delightful quip Ah Hitler - now there was a guy who knew how to handle the Jews) has now ebbed as a source for the rage that informs my writing. My answer was something along the lines of yeah, it has, five years out of the profession is a long time. But I'm never short of fresh sources of rage - just look at the papers.

Well - let's look at the papers:

There is this

And this

And this


For a full view on this stuff, you're best just googling something like "Diego Garcia judgement" and backing up through all the links it'll give you. Probably when you're done you'll be as angry as I am.

The question is - what do you do with that anger?

Well - and here comes the visit from Special Branch - it'd be very tempting indeed to suggest sending a detachment of armed men to the homes of our charming Foreign Secretary David Miliband, and Law Lord Hoffman and his majority-ruling chums, and any British politicians still living whose grubby, murderous fingerprints can be found on the Diego Garcia affair (the dead ones could just have their graves desecrated). If any of these people have dogs for pets, said dogs would of course have to be gassed; then their homes could be demolished and they themselves, with their families, could be escorted at gunpoint to some unpleasant form of ocean transport (say a bulk freighter registered out of Liberia) and transported to Port-au-Prince, where they could be dumped on the quayside with fifty quid each in their pockets and the clothes they stand up in, and be told to fuck off and make a living whichever way seems appropriate to the circumstance. Meantime, the ground their homes stood on could be used to build something nice for the Americans - say a statue of George Bush with Tony Blair's tongue up his arse.

These people would, of course, as British citizens, expect some recourse under law for having suffered these outrages - but they would be gently reminded that, in Lord Hoffman's words, the law giveth and the law taketh away, and guess what, guys, today is a taking-away day. David Miliband would be told that of course what was happening to him was most regrettable and we don't excuse it, but we don't feel like doing fuck all about it either, so get on and deal, David.

Sigh.

No, I don't advocate any of this really - I'm too fond of dogs, for one thing. And I believe in the rule of law. My problem is that I believe in it for everybody. And when the law is twisted and broken at the highest level, I believe that those who abuse their power to do it should be punished with correspondingly massive sanction. At a minimum, any living British politician involved in this on-going crime against humanity should go to jail for life. And the Diego Garcians should go home with honours and abject apologies from the British government and whatever funding is necessary to in some small way redress the colossal injustice against them.

And until that happens, any British citizen who's still proud of their country, I will have words with outside.