The other one I'm doing.
It's a song I wrote with David Bowie about thirty years ago. I think the only release it had was as a B side. Actually it's a great song and so I'm taking that apart and rebuilding it with some hyaenas.
Good evening and welcome to a special bonus episode of Midnight Chats. First time we've ever done this, but we do have an extra episode this week which we wanted to bring you. Tonight's guest is Brian Eno, and whilst we normally put out an episode of Midnight Chats every Monday night at midnight, this is a little extra special episode that we've been working on.
Greg.
I'm going to let you introduce this because this is very much your baby.
Let's call it our Earth Day Special because that's coming up and I'll explain that in a second. But yeah, we wanted to bring you this because it's hot off the press, it's straight out in the oven stew, it's still scolding hot. This couldn't wait till our normal Monday midnight drop. That's because, like you say, earlier today there was an announcement about a super innovative music initiative led by Earth percent who Are an organization co founded by
Brian Eno, our trailblazing guest on the podcast Tonight. Lots of amazing artists involve, and lots of new music being
released today. So what you're about to hear, you can actually go out and listen to those songs on streaming services, etc. Today because this is all about Earth Day and that's coming up this Monday, April to twenty second, and as many people know who will be listening, that's the day that's marks all around the world by people and communities and others sharing their support for the protection of our
environment and the planet. And so Brian and Earth Percent they have this initiative it's called Sounds Right, which is all about crediting the sounds of nature in songwriting. It's absolute genius, or I think it is, and it's explained in the chat you're about to hear, and I should say also post some links into the show notes so that people can go and read and listen to the next everything else more about it.
Basically earlier this week on episode with MGMT, I made a joke at the beginning that you were best friends with them because I was being annoying and I'm going to make the same joke now, but it's not so much a joke this time. Because you've met Brian Eno a few times through different things. We've recorded a podcast with him, another podcast that we did a while ago. But he does sound like he really genuinely.
Likes you in this.
Am I that difficult to like? I can?
I mean, I can see why. There's something about someone that you revere, that's that's you know, like a legendary figure. When they say your name back to you, do you find this like he says Greg back to you, Yeah, which I'm pretty sure some of the some of the episodes I've recorded I've left and they've not known my name by the Whereas the way he talks about it, he says Greg back to it. I think it's really sweet and it's really lovely, and he clearly enjoyed talking
to you about it. As I said, you've spoken before. We've been to his studio. It's not like a normal studio, though, is it? You recorded this there? But it's not like you expect recording studios to be, with a big mixing desk and a wall of glass where you've got a booth inside. It's it's like an empty room it is.
I mean, just to speak to that first point that you make, just to clear up, I'm not Besti's with Brianino, have met him before. He's an incredibly amiable guy, very humble, very sweet, very down to earth basically. But you're right, it is the stuff of dreams to go to Brianino's studio, drink some mint tea with him and you're hearing this, he plays me some new music. We went into the little side room and he played me some new music, which was just like I was playing it cool obviously.
I was just like, oh sure, yeah, Brian just playing a bit of new music.
Totally fine.
But you're right.
The studio itself, it's not what you'd expect, probably not full of instruments and huge sound desks and sort of memorials and memories to the legendary albums and music that have been recorded there. It's pretty sparse, like it's a table and some chairs and some of like Brian's artwork sort of around the place, and a humble kitchen and it's. Yeah, I think every time an artist comes there, they really do. They bring their own thing to it, do you know
what I mean? It's like a blank canvas for them to go and explore.
Do you think we need to tell our listeners, not tell our listeners, remind our listeners who Brian Peter Georgio.
Is, Well, you go for it. Shoot.
I think most people you know are aware of who you know is. But in case you don't, hear is a seventy five year old man from Melton, Suffolk, as we all know, are you reading it doesn't matter where I'm getting my facts. He's got three children. He was born in nineteen Stop.
Right there, tell us about his contribution to music history.
Please fifteenth of Mace got birthday coming up? You know, is, of course the godfather of ambient music. That's one of his things. He worked with Bowie a lot, especially on his Berlin trilogy. A member of Roxy Music early on, a visual artist, a sound designer. He's produced so many other people as well. You two, Coldplay, talking Heads, Bowie, etc.
Et cetera.
There's so much to get into, but this, as Greg says is, it's focused on a particular new project that he's got coming up. It's really fascinating stuff. We put loads of links in the description of this podcast so you can check out all the things that they're talking about. What if I missed out Greg before we go.
What I would say is that there's a lot of chat about music and climate in here, which as you can tell, I love talking to Brian about. But there's also the release of what's been called the definitive documentary of Brian Nay's life. He could have made this at any point probably in the life like three decades, but has chosen to do something now. So we talk about that. It's called Eno, but of course this is Brian Eno, and so there's a twist. So this film is a
generative film, so it's different every time it's screened. That's because it's using AI and it's being premiered in London at the Barbercane Cinema tomorrow night, Saturday the twentieth. And there's also a soundtrack that goes with the album that's got some unreleased music on it, and that's out now, so if people are interested in that, they can go and listen to that and check it out right now.
Okay, that's probably enough from us. Thank you for downloading this episode of Midnight Chats. If you're new to us, this is the Late Night Music Interview podcast. Please do give us a follow wherever you're listening. We're also on social media at Midnight Chats pod. Instagram is your best bet there. Stay in touch dm US, let us know what you're thinking of these shows. There's some video clips from some of our interviews, including this one with Brian Eno,
a special one this week. We'll all be back next Monday, but here is an extra episode for this week. Greg Cochran talking to the legendary Brian Eno.
Brian, welcome to Midnight Chats and thank you for inviting us to do this in your studio, which is a place steeped in creativity and myth and legend and can I add very nice mint tea.
Thanks thanks for inviting us here to have a chat with you today.
Thank you, Greg. It's a pleasure to suit you again.
You two, and we're sharing this episode of the podcast around Earth Day. So I want to start by talking to you about your work in climate change, in the climate space and your passion for that, your kind of activism in that area, and how you've brought that together with your music and the music community more broadly. Some people listening to this will be familiar with Earth percent the organization that you co founded, so maybe four years
ago now perhaps for you. Yeah, the tagline of Earth Ascent is unleashing the power of music in service of the planet. So I wonder if you could start by briefly telling us a bit about what earth percent is and what are you doing when you say you're unleashing the power of music in service of the planet.
So Earth Percent is really a way of connecting the music business to the problem of climate change. So a lot of money flows through the music business, and most of the people I know, artists and business people in the industry as they like to call it, are concerned about climate change, and many of them don't quite know how to address it. So it's not for lack of goodwill or generosity. It's out of confusion really that they're thinking, there are so many things to do, it's such an emergency.
What can I do? And so we wanted to see if we can answer that question and set up a simple way for people to be sure that any contribution they made.
Was being used well. So our initial idea.
Was to say to people, give us one percent of your income from say your next tour or your next album or a song or a show, and we will make sure that that goes to people who are really being effective in terms of dealing with climate change. And this is very often the smaller organizations that you wouldn't normally hear about. We don't support green Peace or Friends of the Earth or things like that, not because we don't like them, but because.
They already have a high profile.
So we're looking for smaller organizations who are doing really critical work. And some of those organizations are as small as two or three or five people. We have had some help. Some companies have been very generous with us. Most of them haven't really yet caught on, so they they're kind of leaving it to their artists to do the work. But there are, you know, lots of other people making money out of music, like promoters or agents, managers, lawyers.
There's a whole structure behind the music business, and we want to persuade them that really, if their artists are willing to contribute, so should they be. And one of the reasons I want to start this thing was that I wanted to say, let's not be pessimistic.
It won't help.
It's very easy to be pessimistic, and it's actually an overstated case in a way. You know, bad news sells, so we see a lot of that, and there is a lot of bad news, There's no doubt there's a lot of bad news, but there's also a lot of good news, and we don't hear much about that. I would really like to redress the balance and say there is a fight going on. You know, people tend to cast the climate fight as we're either going to win or lose. It isn't as simple as that we will
never win. We're going to have to do a lot of adapting and we can lose in many different ways. If we manage to restrict climate temperature rise to something like two percent, there's a chance two point one percent is quite a lot worse than two percent. Two point two percent is quite a lot worse, and it gets exponentially more catastrophic as you go up. So it's worth every little bit that you can do to stop that change happening.
Anyway, that's enough from me for a moment.
It's a fantastic summary of where the idea of earth percent has come from and why and how you've tried to galvanize the music community so far, and there is I agree with you a lot more engagement that could be coming.
From the music community.
You've done an incredible amount of work in quite a short period of time. Earlier this year I saw you speak. I've seen you speak a couple of times this year, but earlier this year I saw you speak alongside Jervis Cocker from POULT who's created a project called Biophobia, and he's kind of collaborating with Earth percent and appearing at Earth percent kind of affiliated and partnered events to deliver
this new project. I wonder if you'd talk to us a little bit about that, what it is, your interpretation of what it is, what you've made of it, and how you engage Javis to talk about climate and storytelling.
Javis has been such a treasure. I have to say, he's been really, really helpful. So we kind of first spoke to him about a year ago and said, would be very nice if you join us because you're a good front man. People like Jarvis quite rightly. He's a very nice person and he's a thoughtful person as well, so he's exactly the kind of person you want to
be a face in a campaign like this. So we talked to him probably about a year ago and he said, yeah, I think I'd be interested to help, and then didn't hear from him for quite a long time, and I thought, oh, well,
perhaps it's not for him. And then he came back to us and said, I think I've got an idea and okay, fine, love to look at it when you're ready, And he turned up at my studio here and he performed this piece is really a piece of performance art, and he performed it for three of us here, and it's about a thirty minute piece and it's so clever. I think it's one of the most brilliant things I've seen done in this area. And I'll tell you why.
Without going into details of exactly what it is, I can tell you that it's a sort of PowerPoint presentation with a difference. The difference being, of course, Javis Cocker, who doesn't do a PowerPoint.
Presentation like anybody else would do it.
But it's very powerful and it's very moving, and I think the reason it's moving is because he's done it as himself. It's not Javis suddenly dropping his day job to come and talk about climate change as though he's a scientist. It's Javis being Javis and applying his mind to this issue, his mind and his abilities as an artist. That's what I think is really brilliant about it. What so often happens is that artists or celebrities, you know, sports people, whatever, are sort of invited to talk just
because they're famous. Their actual experience is not called upon. People don't know how to use it, So you get people like me just sort of stuck in front of a microphone saying something about a subject that really isn't ours. You know, you should be talking to climate scientists or moral philosophers or other people if you want that kind
of information. But to take one person's reaction to this subject, a person who's thought about it deeply and has thought about how to express his feelings about it deeply, that's really quite revolutionary. So the reason I'm so excited about Javis's contribution is because I think that's the way we artists have to tackle this. It's not take off the overcoat or the smark or whatever you use as an artist and stop being an artist and talk seriously about something that We've had a.
Lot of that and we want something different now.
I think, yeah, definitely onto this year for Earth Day, Earth percent are launching a project called Sounds Right, and the idea and correct me if I'm wrong here is that nature, the sounds of nature were obviously artistic expressions.
Original muse.
Being that like the first songs, the first stories, the first paintings, would have been inspired by our natural surroundings and our environments. And that obviously happens all the time to this day. But somewhere along the line, we've forgotten that nature was important than that always very much taken it for granted. So this is about this is a project about giving nature the credit that she deserves for
her contribution to our artistic expressions. And so Earth percent have got around sort of a number of artists, fifteen or so artists are all sharing unreleased or unheard to this point music that feature an artist, and the artist is Nature, so she features.
On these tracks.
What happens then, is when these songs get listened to, when the time comes for the royalties to be distributed, Nature gets her credit. She receives a royalty and that goes back into one percent, and it's distributed to the protection and the elevation and the restoration of nature. Is that a neat summary of where the ideas sort of come from and how you're trying to approach this.
That's a brilliant summary, and I wish i'd said it. It's really it's exactly exactly right. Yes, First of all, the attraction of it is that it does, hopefully if it works, and I think it will work, it provides a very long term income stream.
You are one of the artists that are participating as well, and so you're sharing the reimagining of a song for this, and you've been working on it the past days, I understand.
So there's two songs I'm working on. One is with the Norwegian singer Aurora, who's one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met, absolutely original human being. You just think who designed her?
Yeah, she's a lot of fun tog out.
She's such a one off, wonderful person. So we took one of her songs. I think, yes, I am remembering the title because it had another title which I'm getting mixed up with. But it's called now a Soul with No King. It's a beautiful song. And so what we've done with that song is we've made a.
Sort of.
It's as though she's walking through a forest and then we've made a clearing, a kind of sonic clearing in the forest, and we've inhabited that with Norwegian birds and her voice and it's I think it's.
Really a lovely result. I'll play you a little bit of it later.
The other one i'm doing, it's a song I wrote with David Bowie about thirty years ago, and we recorded a version of it. I think the only release it had.
Was as a B side. Actually, it's a great song, and so.
I'm taking that apart and rebuilding it with some hyenas.
I was not expecting you to say.
That, Well, I've got a number of recordings of different animals here. I just wanted I wanted big, slightly menacing animals in the song, not birds and wind and things like that. So I tried a Siberian tiger.
That was a bit too overwhelming. I tried some rooks.
I've always loved rooks, but they sounded like ducks in that context, which is not quite the same message. And the two I've settled on and I'm working with at the moment. I haven't finished this piece yet. Hyenas and wild pigs. The wild pigs sound really good. They're in a kind of frequency range, which is quite hard to fit into the music.
But I'm working on that.
But so so, yes, we'll have We'll have David Brye and some wild pigs.
There's something so perfect about that, because obviously you enjoyed such a sort of warm and surreal, humor filled relationship with David.
He would love it.
I was going to say, you think you'd approve of wild wild pigs and hyenas.
He'd say, Oh, it sounds good to Babra. I think we should go ahead with that. It's one of the voices he used a lot in the studio.
Yeah, what was it that the song is called?
Get Real? Is that right?
Get Real?
Get Real?
What? Why did you want to revisit that particular song? Has that been sort of nagging away at you?
Or you? Yes?
So i'd completely forgotten the song.
I don't.
I still don't even really remember making it. It was pretty quickly done, I think. But I liked the title get Real, especially for this, because what we're talking about is using real sounds of the earth in a piece of music. And I think it's a really good song too. I love the song, and it was kind of unfinished. I think we had.
A bit of a surplus of material.
And I've found other things that we did that that never got released, which are also really good. So you know, we were working fast and with great excitement and whatever got finished when it went out onto records, but that piece didn't really get finished. The B side version of it, which I think was I don't even know that it was a B side. I think it was an extra track on a on an album released somewhere something like that.
But it's a it's a powerful song and with this and very good lyrics by the way, it's really a good lyric in it.
And with this new.
Kind of container that we're putting it in of being a song about relationship with the earth, I think it really works. I haven't finished it yet, so this is all. I think it will really work, I should be saying.
I'm positively well, it's I mean, the original song is sort of like quite like a rollicking kind of like sort of yeah, since like rock song, isn't it because it was part of the one outside sessions, that's right. So this real imagining of it, is it going to sound kind of slightly alien? Is it going to be something very different? Or is it going to be there or are there kind of similarities to that original?
Quite a lot of it will be similar. I've been wondering about whether to add more than hyenas and pigs, in the sense of whether to add instruments, new instruments. I still haven't decided about that. That's sort of a it's slightly a moral question as well of can I can I.
Do that without him being here?
I think he would definitely get the animal connection and would want to be part of that.
I think he would.
He used to like things I came up with on my own anyway, so I think it would be fine to go ahead, but I haven't done that it.
In terms of the other contributions that artists have made to this sounds right campaign, I don't know if there's anybody else that you know of that's going to be involved that you're excited about their participation. I can't remember fair enough, and I wasn't told because it's top secret, like I should remind listeners that we are recording this like well ahead of actually this this.
Campaign is darting.
I'm looking forward to hearing about that sort of challenge that artists have almost been set to feature nature.
Yeah, well, you know, a lot of it's sort of a thing in pop music to feature nature anyway. You know, there are lots of outstanding tracks that have that kind of stuff coming in. I mean, I'm thinking of remember Walking in the Sound, for instance, that song, But lots and lots of songs, beach boys songs, beatles songs, that and my songs, well you know that just dragged in
sounds of the outside world. One of the reasons I like that is because I like the idea of having a music that sort of bleeds at the edges into the sounds we hear around us anyway, So a music that isn't so cut off from the rest of our experience. You know, classical music is totally boundaried. You know exactly what the music is and you know exactly what's outside of it. But a lot of the music I've been interested in, particularly my own ambient work, I've deliberately used material that.
Was ambiguous. It could be in the music, or it.
Could be the sound of traffic outside or the sound of something else happening that wasn't intended to be musical. And I like that idea of a sort of soft edged art form where there's a bleed with the environment.
Listening to you speak about this, I can't help but think of how like retrospectively, when you think of all the music that is lent on the sounds of nature over the decades, and every time that nature is either informed an actual sound or a lyric or the inspiration of how big that the size of that credit would be if we'd actually been doing this for the seventy years.
So hopefully in a few years time, maybe this could be adopted as a you know, a default thing that just you know, without nature, we wouldn't be having pretty much any of these songs.
What we really hoped for is that gradually people would come to think, well, it's completely normal to want to make a contribution to the planet.
That's what we're here for. We are here to look after.
It, so we want to make it exceptional and odd. If people don't, we want them to feel, oh, what we've forgotten. Oh yes, we've forgotten to include the planet.
The ground that we're standing on.
And it is quite easy to forget.
And obviously quite a few people have completely forgotten. You know, the very wealthy of the world have so forgotten the planet that they're now looking for others to go and live on and make a mess of.
One thing I was gonna say is I hope you've got a break planned in April, because you're the start that you've had to this year has been incredibly full on. And also in April, it's not just the activity that Earth Percent are doing with the Sounds Right campaign. You do also have a documentary film coming out called Eno, and also have an album that you're sharing of the same name that is music from the documentary and does
feature some unreleased music. So perhaps if we start with the documentary, it's a generative documentary, So you've worked with a collaborator called Gary Hustwitz and also someone called Brendan Dahr, and it's using AI and it's going to be different every time somebody views this documentary. And I'm guessing that over the years, you've had plenty of opportunities to make a sort of very conventional linear story of your life
in a documentary form. So I wondered whether you've always been reluctant to do that, and have you just been waiting for the right opportunity to come along to do something that felt more in keeping with the way that you might want to tell the story.
Yes, So I don't like biographical documentaries very much in general, and I think it's because in order to make one in the conventional way, you have to decide on an order of things, and it always looks like this person started their life, you know, at sixteen or seventeen, and had the big plan into the future, and it was all imagined, and look it all happened, how wonderful, Whereas my experience is that actually, not only for me, but for nearly everyone, it's a sequence of blunders and bits
of good luck and bad luck, and sometimes grasping an opportunity, sometimes failing to grasp one, collisions that you didn't plan. It's so much more messy than it's ever made to look in documentaries. So documentaries are nearly always misleading in that they give this impression of a life carefully planned and organized. I think it's much braver to say, no,
it wasn't planned and organized. A lot of it was chance, and I was quite lucky, and there are a lot of people that I owe thanks to I'm not a self made man. I've been made up by all the circumstances around me, including you know, for instance, the fact that I was born into a new.
Welfare state that actually worked at the.
Time, the fact that I was lucky to get a scholarship and a decent education, the fact that art schools were free when I was younger, the fact that I happened to step on to a particular tube train and meet Andy McKay one afternoon when I could have stepped through the next door and had a different life. You know, there's so many contingencies, and so I've always resisted a straightforward narrative of a documentary because I just think it
isn't true. And then when Gary came along with this idea to say let's make he calls it a generative documentary. So he's taking all the bits and pieces of he can find from my life, several of which I didn't even know existed. He's the film of me talking here and there and walking down Portobella Road in nineteen seventy two and things like this, and he's kind of shuffled them, and every time you see the film, you see them shuffled in a different order. And I have to say
that is really so much more appealing to me. So that if you go and see the film, you'll see a different version than I've seen, And if you go again, you'll see a different version than either of those two versions. And that to me, it seems to me that throughout our lives we always keep repairing the narrative of our
lives anyway, we sort of tell the story differently. Different things now seem important than that didn't seem important before, and different some things that seemed really critical have faded into the background. So we're always doing that shuffling anyway in our minds, and I wanted to really have something that acknowledged that and said we are shufflers. That's what we do. We keep retelling the story to support where we want to be now and how we want to
view our past. It's not a single fixed story.
I'm quite looking forward to I hope to see the film and I'm looking forward to sort of going to the pub with other people that have seen the film at different times and being almost like a sticker book where you open and go, what did your version? When did Brian did that? Being the one that you saw? Yeah, I quite like that idea. Everybody feels a little bit special by the version that they saw.
Yeah, well, I think I think Gary has done a great job, actually, and I think that I'm pretty sure that a lot of documentaries will now be made in ways similar to this. Might not be exactly the same way, but I think that idea of which, of course, has been in literature for a long time. You know, there are many many books written in that way, where flashbacks
and flash forwards get rearranged in different time sequences. But it hasn't happened much in film, and I'm not sure that it's ever happened before in documentary.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it and the album that accompanies it. There are three underleased tracks that will previously unheard tracks that appear on the album. How did you find that experience? Because I know that you generally, you don't spend an awful lot of time kind of chronicling your own work or kind of you know, prefer to sort of generally look forward and are creating all the time. So this is a sort of retrospective experience sort of putting that together?
How did you find that?
You're right?
There are pieces on there that I haven't listened to for thirty or forty years. I don't listen to my own work that much. I sometimes hear it by accident because somebody else is playing it, or somebody wants a piece for a film, and so suddenly I'm presented with it again, and I like that experience. Actually, usually immediately after I finished something, I don't want to hear it
again for quite a long time. Then it starts to slip back into my life occasionally in that In those ways I've described, I hear it through a window or something and I think, Oh, that's good.
What is that.
I did that.
I've often had that happen where I've thought, oh, I like that, and then realized, oh, yeah, I made that. It's it's a really nice experience. And it occasionally happens the other way as well.
Fuck what's that?
Oh yeah that's me, But funnily enough, it more often happens the positive way around. So it's it's kind of encouraging to think that you haven't been completely wasting your time. And I have a new device I've been using which I might be able to show you, but I don't know how you will make any use of it in your podcast. It's it's a way of I have archive, which has about ten thousand pieces in it.
Wow.
Some of them are actual pieces, some of them are very close duplicates of things in there. You know, there's quite a lot of repetition. But I would say there's probably four thousand different pieces of music in there, and as I said, ten thousand pieces altogether. So my friend Peter Chilvers and I have now developed a new piece of software that just plays them one on top of the other. It just makes a new piece out of those existing pieces. And that's been incredibly interesting because the
algorithm makes choices that I would never ever make. I'd never dream of putting these things together, but very often they work. I'll show you in a minute. It's quite fascinating. In fact, shall I show you now? Yeah, we can do because I don't think you'll be able to record it on here, but.
Well what we can do, yeah we can. We can stop and have a look at it and come back and carry on.
Yeah, just so you've got to.
Effectively, we just listened to a whole bunch of new music which sounded great.
Pieces that have never existed before.
What are fantastic tool resource opportunity to kind of pull on. That sounds like a real exciting new creative Pathway.
Well, you know, we were talking about the film, the documentary, so this is sort of another example of generative work in the same way that that documentary is. So just to describe to listeners what's going on. I have an archive in my studio which has about ten thousand pieces of music in it, and some of them are very simple, they're a single sound, and some of them are quite
complicated finished pieces. But Peter and I designed some software which enabled the computer to just pick at random among those pieces and just stick them together and play them all together. Now, that sounds like a recipe for chaos, and probably it would be with most other people's music, but because a lot of my music doesn't have rhythm
and doesn't have changing chord patterns, it actually works. And so what happens is you hit the go button and a new piece of music, a combination of three or four or five existing pieces existing in my archive anyway, are put together and surprisingly often produce really really interesting results, things that I would never dream of doing. If you listen to the individual tracks, you'd think that isn't going to work with that, but it does when it's with
that other third thing, you know, So it's been. It's been a real education for me and left me with the difficult problem of having about trillion pieces of music.
Yeah, exactly, and having kind of the algorithm or this tool is your sort of co producer or co writer, is quite an exciting idea. I think, just to circle back to the very beginning of the conversation, you've called the climate movement the greatest movement, one of the greatest
movements in human history. And I think a lot of us feel quite nervous about twenty twenty four and where we're at, and sort of there's more democratic elections taking place this year than ever before in any year of human history, given the climate context, which is that we need to work across boarder is, how does that all
that make you feel? Like? Do you share a sense of nervousness about the sort of trajectory that we're on, or you actually like a feeling sort of like this, this is an unstoppable thing that's happening and there will be progress, or you can feel both these two things at the same time.
Of course, so.
Well, I do feel both of those very strongly.
At the same time.
I see a worldwide trend towards fascism you know, I see it in countries like Holland, Germany, England, the USA, Israel, more and India. There's more and more countries are facing an uncertain future by demanding ridiculous kinds of certainty.
You know.
Ethnic cleansing is a sort of stupid attempt at creating purity, creating a problem free world by by inventing a false problem and then a completely unsuitable solution to it. So I see that happening everywhere, and I find it alarming. And at the same time I see quite a few countries quietly getting on with making a better world. Of course, the Scandinavian countries as usual. I don't know why we just don't stop trying to govern ourselves and just invite
them to give us a hand. Yes, dear Finland, you're obviously better at this than we are. Can we hire you for a little while to sort things out for us? And of course the huge threat I think is grotesque inequality. Now inequality people think, yes, it would be nice if everyone was equal. It's a nice thing, But actually it's more than a nice thing. It's really really important. Very rich people are very resource hungry.
They're actually the problem.
Very rich people create very difficult, uneven circumstances.
You know, in the.
Last four years, the five wealthiest men on the planet have doubled.
In wealth.
The five billion poorest people on the planet have all become poorer, so that wealth spread is increasing, And there are all sorts of really really good reasons for thinking that's a terrible idea. Inequality is not just a sort of cosmetically unpleasant thing. It's actually in ecological terms, in ecosystem terms, which is what we should be thinking, and it's a disaster. It's if you think of it in
ecological terms, imagine it's a plague. You know, we have a plague of rich people, people who've sucked wealth up. As opposed to the libertarian theory was that wealth will trickle down. It doesn't wealth trickles up. Wealth is magnetic. It sucks more wealth to itself, and we have to really deal with that because, of course, the other problem is we're supposed to be living in democracies, and everybody
knows that the idea is one person, one vote. But does a guy worth one hundred billion dollars have just one vote? Of course he fucking doesn't. Everybody knows that money translates into power. So we have a situation where you and I might have one vote, but somebody has one hundred million votes, and to pretend that that is not a factor in a society that calls itself democratic is completely ridiculous. So that's the bad news. Sorry, I thought I should jump in there and say, on the other hand.
Yes, but I think also let's end on a note of talking about for example, you'll work with hard art and the way that you for people don't know, it's a kind of collective of creatives and artists, a multi discipline community. You do meetups, you know, you help each other, you exchange ideas. And one event you did earlier this year twenty twenty four was called the Fate of Britain.
It was in Manchester and it was an example of the exchange of those ideas and to just because I'd like to end on a note of like basically addressing that those points that you just made that are incredibly important and depressing because it's the realization of the systems that we are in and want to stay trapped in.
But actually no, it takes people to challenge those to imagine different features for us to approach different features, and so just to speak to you great to hear how when you get together with the hard art community or whoever it might be, do you feel positive about the direction that things could go.
What's encouraging to me is that we're all starting to realize that community is our strength, and so hard art is really an attempt to make a new kind of community, a community of people who want to agree with each other and want to work together and want to reach consensus. Now that is profoundly anti capitalist. Funnily enough, capitalism really succeeded by telling us all that our strength was in being individuals. Margaret Thatcher is a very good example. We know,
she said there's no such thing as society. They are just individuals and their families. What I'm finding more and more now is people are realizing that, Okay, the fuckers have got the money, but we've got the people, and we the people, have to start working together and not be distracted by these idiotic culture wars that are confected to keep us distracted. They are they're an invention. Actually, of course, you can always find people who do think like that, but you don't have to put them on
the front page of the newspaper all the time. So it's where you choose to put your focus that matters. And I'm finding now more and more people want to put their focus on the successes of communities rather than the failures of individuals. At the moment, we're stuck with this carapace of the old forms of government that have gone completely wrong. They're completely corrupted by money. Now you know what's his name, Tim Marshall and gb News. This
this is money talking, that's all. It is, quite literally to money talking. And of course it says all the right things that press the buttons that there are too many immigrants, that climate change activists are nutcases, and so it has an audience. We're hoping that what we're doing will start to build up another kind of story, in another sense of value within within and among people.
Well, I feel like there's a there's a fantastic kind of note to end on. I just want to say thanks to you for inviting me here today. What a treat to come and speak to you, What a treat for everybody's listening as well, to get to hear from you and spend this time with you. Thanks for playing me some music, and yeah, thanks for all your thoughtful conversation. I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much, Greg, It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
Midnight Chats is a joint production between Loud and Quiet and to My Studios for iHeartRadio. It's hosted by Stuart Stubbs and Greg Cochrane, mixed and mastered by Flow Lines, and edited by Stuart Stubbs. Find us on Instagram and TikTok to watch clips from our recordings and much much more.
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