I am currently existing at a higher level of excitement, dear readers, as tomorrow I get to stand in a field and see one of ‘those’ bands. You know the ones, that rare breed that makes a massive impact on you at a young age, who shape your musical horizons and then disappear into the night just as you get to the age you could actually go and see them live.

I was introduced to Faith No More in the early 90’s in the only way that a young kid could get into music back then. I was lent their album by an older kid.  At my school I was pretty universally hated by most of my year, for reasons I never fully grasped. But amongst some of the boys in the higher years such things didn’t seem to matter and they saw me as a geeky little spotty kid who seemed to be the one with a good tape collection, who always sat with headphones in his ears.

The truth is, I had my headphones in my ears chiefly because being bullied at boarding school is an unrelenting 24 hour a day ordeal, and because sticking my headphones in at least cut out the verbal abuse. But this was when I started to notice such things as lyrics, riffs and those separate components of music that make up a whole. It was how I grew from being a music fan into an obsessive.

Two years above me were two boys whose names completely escape me now, but for a little while in my first year they took me under their wing. They were both windsurfers, and at 15 or so, were far more schooled in the ways of grunge cool. They were the ones who sat me down to watch the Point Break VHS so often in the common room that we broke the tape and had learnt the whole script.  It was them who insisted we watch the MTV Awards coverage. It was them who pressed the cassette of FNM’s ‘The Real Thing’ into my sweaty teen aged palms after discovering that I hadn’t heard it, a mixture of incredulity and disgust running across their faces.

If you’ve never heard Faith No More past their one big hit, ‘epic’ then you missed out on one of the most inventive and wildly, belligerently authentic bands of all time. Initially dismissed as a rip off of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, they then veered wildly into their own territory, greedily guzzling at whatever genre took their fancy, from covering the Bee Gees and Lionel Ritchie to performing ‘Digging The Grave’ in front of an utterly bemused Top of the Pops audience, Mike Patton’s throat damaging scream visibly stunning the Brit-Pop era teenagers.

This is the same bad who courted nothing but controversy, some for good (they were the first alternative mainstream American band I can remember with an openly gay member) some bad (Mike Patton’s scatological tendencies which saw him taking a dump in a hotel hairdryer because he liked the idea of the next resident of the room getting a surprise) and finally imploded under the weight of their own internal disagreements, and left one boy in Essex utterly heartbroken that he hadn’t been able to see them just once.

Since their split, Mike Patton has been the most productive, churning out release after release of varying quality with people as diverse at Noisecore icons Dillinger Escape Plan and Gorillaz stalwart Dan The Automator. Other members have done a variety of different projects, and all the while the idea of a reunion seemed about as unlikely as a Nirvana reunion.

And yet tomorrow I will be stood in a field, watching five of my idols, who taught me that diversity in music is something sacrosanct, that sticking to the rules will get you nowhere, who to me were the only band who made it big and remained true to that punk rock ethic of doing it for yourselves rather than your audience.  And that will be for me a very happy day.

Unless of course they suck.

On days like this, I don’t really know what to say. Last night my region went and elected a former National Front leader and hatemonger to be our representative in the European parliament.

Great.

This is the sour part of free speech. It’s a principle I would defend at all costs, but this is that cost.  120,000 people voted BNP in Yorkshire alone. That’s a lot of people to discount as protest votes. We can only hope that these people are lacking a basic understanding of the effects of the BNP’s policies, and have been led down these paths by certain elements of the right wing press (I’m looking at you Littlejohn and Dale) who have pushed so many lies about immigration that they start to sound like truth.  The other side of the coin is that there really that many people who would like to see Britain as an institutionally racist and fascistic state.

The other fact to consider is that it is the erosion of mainstream politicians ability to appeal to people that is responsible. The BNP were elected in Manchester with less votes than they got at the last European elections, due to not losing as much ground as the main parties.

The great thing about freedom of speech is that it allows us to confront the worst of society in open and honest debate, in the hope that reason will prevail in the end, and that the hatred which appeals to the basest nature of man cannot stand against logic and reason. But clearly the argument is not holding up as it should, and every one of us needs to do what we can to inform as many people as we can, and more importantly have our voices heard each and every time in every election by going out and voting.

Until then, we can only hope that the presence of two BNP MEPs will not damage our country too badly over the next four years.

Earlier this morning I was planning on writing something about the elections tomorrow, throwing my hat into the ring with some badly thought out but heartfelt pleading for my readers to both go out and vote, and avoid voting for any party that has David Cameron or Nick Griffin as its leader. (See, I can do subtle with the best of them!)

But of course, the kamikaze Labour party is so hellbent on self destruction that they have not even waited for the results of the election before they have decided to fall on their swords and hand the next general election to the Fucking Tories. (This is, incidentally, how every politician and TV pundit should refer to them, just to remind everyone what they we all called them in the 90’s.)

According to the Guardian, we could see a change in leadership of the Government within a month, and a resignation within the week. As I have explained before, this makes no sense, but then clearly sense is not in huge abundance in Westminster these days.

I am not a Labour supporter. My vote will go to the Lib Dems tomorrow. But Labour are the lesser of two evils in my mind, and to see the governing party of the last 20 years, who have presided over a lot of successes as well as failures, destroy itself in a fit of pique is disheartening, but understandable and somewhat inevitable.

These last few weeks have seen a total shake-up in Westminster, with the MP’s expenses row engulfing all parties, and a more politically astute leader should have seized it as an opportunity to shake the whole tree, institute rapid and wholesale reforms of our political system.  By doing this, Brown could have shown himself to have been above the masses of money-grabbing crooks.  What this country needs now is leadership, what they have received is nothing but dilly-dallying and defensive politics, business as usual.

But who can step into the breach? Which Labour MP will be willing to destroy their own career by standing as the Labour leader in the next election? Bear in mind, with the second unelected Prime Minister, there will be no means of establishing themselves in the public eye before the weight of pressure comes to call an election. And so the Labour Party will lose power. It’s highly possible that it will be for decades, long after everyone has forgotten the names and careers of the plotters like Hazel Blears. 

The most depressing thing of all is that all of this has happened without a single vote at the ballot box. And that, rather than the predictable engorging of expense accounts, is why we need real reform of our entire political system.

So once again it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, I’ve been suffering with a writers block so severe it’s become crushing. But really it’s hardly surprising, given that every day seems to bring so much to comment on that it’s impossible to choose.

First of all we have total meltdown of our entire political system, which sees every range of the political world running around, flailing their arms, blaming the system for allowing them to steal and promising to ‘do something about it.’

Secondly, we see that the tabloids have a new sport, which I like to call disability taunting, wherein the red tops go positively agog with the news that a woman with learning difficulties reacted to instant global superstardom by acting like someone with learning difficulties struggling to deal with an overwhelming change in their life.

Thirdly, we see North Korea’s heirs to the throne staging their own talent contest by trying to be more threatening to the world than the others. Less Britain’s Got Talent, more North Korea’s Got Apocalypse.

Now, planes are falling from the sky, the world’s ex-biggest company has gone bankrupt, doctors are being shot in America for helping women, and Africa has yet another calamity of a nation on the brink of disaster.  And yet, through it all, half the publishing houses in the UK are more concerned with the divorce of the two most despicable people imaginable.

Happy days, eh?

On the plus side, while there is a massive whiff of FAIL all around the world, I have recently discovered the marvellous FailBlog, which makes me chuckle whenever it drops a lovely little thing into my google reader. So it can’t be all bad.

When I was at school, one of those bristling stiff-upper-lip boarding schools now so cash strapped they can barely afford pencils, the army was a big deal.  There were groups all over the place teaching spotty thirteen-year-olds how to become ‘officer class’ and giving motivational speeches on the career opportunities available to us poshies.  Not for us the trauma of being privates in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, if we joined up young we would probably never even have to shoot at anyone ourselves. That was for the common man.

I never understood the appeal myself. Despite my own family’s history in the army (and given their more working class background this was not as officer class) I never really saw the appeal of killing people just because someone else told you you had to. Maybe it was all the Rage Against The Machine I was listening to.

Since then, the Army hasn’t had a huge amount of good PR, with the war in Iraq showing a whole generation of potential recruits that the army is a one way ticket to a hell unimaginable to those raised on X Box. The demonstrations against the validity and morality of the war can’t have helped, either.

So imagine the nightmare for Army PR.  How do you get the kids interested in soldiering again? Well, surely there is only one way…. Toys.

Yep, to replace Action Man, we now have, um, well, there isn’t a catchy name just yet, so we’ll just call them ‘Generic Interchangeable Army Units.’ Which is probably how the MOD refers to its real soldiers.  But this is no blunt recruitment tool, oh no. However would you jump to such a conclusion?  Says Commander Steve Pearson:

“It is not a conscious ‘buy this and join the armed forces’, but it is educating people in what we do; there are a variety of trades and opportunities in all sorts of fields across all three armed forces.”

I see, so it’s not about getting people to join up, but instead showing them that joining them is a good career. Judging by the range shown above , however, the range of ‘trades and opportunity’ open to you include; man with rifle, man with bigger rifle, man with jet pack, and man in scuba gear.  Oh, and there’s even a black man there (although he looks to not be trusted with a weapon), just in case the giant Union Jack draped behind them gave the impression that this was a new range of BNP toys. 

Oh, and there are no female soldier toys, presumably because while the army can’t stop women from joining the armed forces, they don’t want to encourage them either. Apparently there will be a female one soon, but in no way is that the MOD caving into pressure over the issue. Presumably the reason she’s not ready yet is because they can’t decide what she will wear, or how she will do her hair.

Most interesting though, is the forthcoming ‘villain’ figure. Now obviously all toys need a goodie and a baddie, otherwise kids won’t bother playing with them, but here is where I think the new toys really fall down. With Action Man, kids were playing with a fictional character that represented the ‘ideals’ of army life, but for whom you can easily construct elaborate villains and back story for, like a mad scientist or crazy Bond villain clone. But these are real world soldiers, and so must the villains be.  Which, given that we are currently at war with, um, lots of Arabs, could lead to a few problems. Politically speaking. It will be hard for us to claim we are winning the hearts and minds of the Arab world if we are producing mad terrorists as a state-sanctioned toy.

So instead they are opting for a ‘generic mercenary.’  Which sounds incredibly dull. Unless you start thinking about the possibilities of kids using their army men to track disgraced Blackwater Mercs through the sandpit. Either way, this new marketing tool is utterly reprehensible.  If cigarette and alcohol companies cannot advertise to kids, I don’t see how our own government sponsored merchants of death can get away with it.