Well, the Digital Economy Bill passed. One of the stupidest yet most potentially catastrophic bits of legislation ever forced through in the Wash-Up (the last couple of days of a Parliament before an election.

I opposed it, I still oppose it and I will continue to oppose any legislation about the internet written by people who don’t understand the internet or, in this case, the music industries and the role that music plays in our culture.

I’m particularly ashamed that the Musicians Union – a Union of which I am a member, was a proud member, and have supported by paying double what I should’ve been paying for the last two years - supported this insane bill, to the detriment of musicians everywhere.

I made this public, and got an email of their ‘official position’ this morning, which is:

We fully support the Digital Economy Bill in the interests of getting it through Parliament before the election. We support measures that will reduce the opportunity for pirates to rip off musicians and we also support the graduated response that should help to persuade most filesharers to respect the rights of artists who want to be paid for their recordings. We remain optimistic that the final version of the Digital Economy Bill will directly and fairly address both these issues, and we believe that Government support and intervention in this area is not only welcome but vital.

As you know, our Executive Committee are involved with our policies and decision-making, and the members of the Committee are themselves working musicians.

Here’s my reply to Kelly Wood, The Regional Officer for The North, who sent me the message:

-o0o-

Thanks Kelly,

I think that’s an entirely absurd position to take. Using the word “Pirates” discredits you immediately. These are music fans, discovering music. That’s a great thing.

Teaming up with the BPI does us a great disservice. The BPI wrote the bill as a protectionist measure of an outdated and unworkable business model. It was a model that was NEVER to the advantage of musicians who cared about the music they played and the culture it existed in, but one that made sense at a time when physical distribution was required to reach anyone, and the costs involved were prohibitively high. At that point, labels lying to musicians about how much they dig the music, while making a fortune for themselves but still never ‘recouping’ on the album was deeply unpalatable but a neccesary part of recording and releasing music.

All the costs have dropped. I’ve written extensively about this – most notably here – but nothing has changed in the industry. They still spend money on the behalf of musicians, pay themselves that money, recoup it (AGAIN) and own the product at the end. None of that is remotely to our advantage.

• The internet is an awful broadcast platform. Terrible. If your model for business sees recorded music as a broadcast-followed-by-sale experience, you’re screwed.
• The internet is an awesome conversation and sharing platform. Get that, and you can build a sizeable sustainable audience on zero budget. Factor in the reduced cost of making records, and you can release a record at near break-even point, get an audience, then set about given them reasons and means to pay you to do what you do. There are loads of ways. Not least of all, charging for downloads.

People pay for downloads on my site, even though they are available for free. I’m as happy when people download for free as I am when they pay as they are still discovering what I do, and forming a relationship with my music, and me through my music.

So, the premise of the bill – that the situation is desperate – was spurious. The figures quoted for industry ‘losses’ are insane. Utterly nonsensical if mapped against spending trends on ‘physical and download entertainment media’ – we are part of a much bigger entertainment industry now that we ever were, and we don’t dominate it in the way we did from 1956 to 1998. Games and DVD are a bigger part of it than ever. And entertainment spending continues to rise. So 200 million hasn’t been ‘lost’, it’s being spent elsewhere. Meanwhile, the cost of making and distributing records is tiny, and download sales go up and up.

How you can see that as a situation that needs legislating is utterly beyond me. To shut down sites and services on suspicion of illegal activity is a civil liberties travesty. To have my internet traffic monitored ‘in case I do anything bad’ is like the royal mail reading my post, in case my letters contain naughty words. While threatening to brick up my front door if they find them, or think they might have found them.

I’m ashamed of the Union, ashamed to be a member, and feel that your support for this bill is a massive black mark on a Union that has done so much for grass roots music. By focussing on a pre-millenial obsession with money-changing-hands-at-the-point-of-discovery, you’re effectively crapping on the best music discovery, fan-generating, culture-sharing, life-benefitting ecosphere that musicians in the world have ever experienced.

And that is why I’m still considering whether I should stay in the Union any longer.

If you’d like to meet and talk this over further, I’d love to talk about it with you more.

yours,

Steve

The discussion on Facebook then got as far as one friend suggesting that people who objected to the planet-trashing excesses of U2’s tour wanted us to “email [all the gig-goers] to stay home and make organic muffins…..” – the kind of Richard Littlejohn-esque reductionist, lazy thinking that leads someone to say such things, often stems from the feeling that something they value highly has been questioned – in this case, it was a friend who was deeply moved by the U2 gig he went to, so any attempt to frame them as irresponsible needs refuting and debunking.

The problem with this is that the alternative to planning a tour of such a bloated and frankly ludicrous scale is not to ‘not tour’, it’s to plan your tour with some concern for the impact it’ll have. And to resolutely NOT rely on the kind of bullshit pseudo-science that sees ‘carbon offsetting’ as a credible alternative to actually limiting the degree to which you eff up the planet.

The actual rational argument here is a far more nuanced one, that starts with issues of power:

If you are a small band starting out, have signed an old school record deal (even worse, a 360) and are being promoted by people paid to do that, you have little or no say in how that takes place:

• You don’t book the venues
• you probably don’t plan the stage set
• you certainly don’t get any say in your lighting design

You are there to play music, while the machine of the industry rolls on around you. If you question the validity (or environmental impact) of the way things are done, you’re putting yourself in direct conflict with the people running the show.

U2 are NOT in that position. U2 are actually in the same position that I’m in. They are entirely free agents, able to decide how when and WHY they tour, and to weigh up the value of that tour happening against the negative impact on the planet that tour will have. They are in a position to minimise that impact, to plan around it, and perhaps even more importantly, to INNOVATE for other bands in how that works.

But instead of behaving like an independent, free thinking, spiritually minded group of individuals who happen to have 50 million fans worldwide, they behave like a multinational corporation. They put on a tour of the most enormous scale, they use 200 trucks – TWO HUNDRED FUCKING TRUCKS – to cart their stuff around. And then think it’s OK because they plant trees. And their 200 trucks doesn’t even begin to take into account the impact of audiences getting to their shows.

So what are they to do? Well, given that it’s U2, let’s get all spiritual for a moment. Our vicar, Dave – top bloke – contributed to a Church of England paper on a “a Christian vision for a sustainable future” – in it, they describe “the feast of enoughness”. Here’s an extract:

“The Sabbath is an occasion of thanksgiving, a feast of contentment and ‘enoughness’. In the Sabbath rhythm of days and yeras, passing time is given a measure and the earth is given a rest. The fallow season constrains human activity and limits human exploitation of both the natural order and of the poor. Leaving land fallow and forgiving debts are part of the Jubilee call to justice and peace.”

One of the features of modern corporations – and the laws that govern their behaviour – is that they have no concept of ‘enough’. None at all. The failure of the banks was that they had no restraint, and still aren’t repentant. They just want to go back to hitting the limits of ‘growth’ – getting as big as possible, just without bursting this time.

U2 are doing that. They dress it up in the language of responsibility, but are using discredited measures to try and mitigate the impact they have, rather than understanding ‘enoughness’.

So what’s the alternative?

Well, we can discuss that in the comments, but one idea I just had is for ‘open source touring’ - there are loads of pieces of equipment around the world that are considered ‘standard issue’ in music. Pretty much all rental companies have them. What if you designed a stage set that used just those elements. I don’t mean just dropping a load of parcans onto a lighting beam and playing straight rock ‘n’ roll (though obviously that is also an option – back to basics – it works…) but instead, a bespoke, clever, Willie Williams production that just uses locally available elements. There are other industries with familiar elements – construction, DIY, Theatre, industry… they could be brought into play too.

• It would be utterly media-friendly (they love this shit),
• it would acknowledge that there are limits.
• It would be the Tour Of Enoughness.

Right now, the world needs a fallow decade. Perhaps a fallow 50 years. It needs to be left alone to recouperate. We need industry rotation the same way fields are preserved by crop rotation. And touring on the scale of the current U2 tour is utterly and unforgivably irresponsible given the scale of the catastrophe we’re facing. Not just for what it is, but what what it says about limits.

This tour says there are none.

It lies.

The death of Michael Jackson – like so many celebrity deaths – has brought with it a swathe of responses, both from the public and in the media.

Anyone who ever met him gets dragged out to talk about ‘their relationship’, and anyone remotely famous who might have a connection (be it sharing the pop-charts with him in the 80s, that they at some point in the past expressed a liking for his music, or just happen to be famous and black) is door-stepped for their comment.

It’s a fairly unpleasant media feeding frenzy, but it’s definitely serving a voracious need amongst a large section of the populus to be handed a secular liturgy for mourning the death of someone that, while insanely significant in the history of popular music, hadn’t made a notable artistic contribution in 20 years, and was written off a few years ago as a freaky paedo that many people (without any real evidence or experience of the case) thought escaped jail on a technicality…

For all those of us who hadn’t seen him live in over a decade, only listened to his older records (or not at all), and whose main month to month awareness of his was the reports of his spectacular and mind-boggling financial collapse, the emotional outpouring seems to be more an expression of 3 things:

• a desire for some kind of connection with *the thing that’s going on* – get our opinion in, be part of the public conversation, tell everyone you always thought he was a genius/freak/whatever.
• a sadness – close to grief – for our youth (a deeper expression of the same thing that drives people to watch I Love The 80s)
• a largely unarticulated – but it appears, deeply felt – sense of loss for the age when musical and media megastars could MEAN something. (Andrew Dubber mused on this on Twitter)

Michael Jackson in his day combined musical genius, innovation and fame-beyond-measure. He was a truly global phenomenon. Massive far beyond the reaches of late 70s Ameri-centric radio and the English-speaking world. Larger than life, weirder that weird, but astoundingly gifted. Ever since Off The Wall came out, generation after generation of kids have connected with his music (there’s something about his music that definitely – and in light of the court case from a few years back, disturbingly – connects with pre-teen kids more than almost any other soul/funk-based music).

His creative partnership with Quincy Jones, producer of Off The Wall, Thriller and Bad, produced some of the most iconic moments in the pop canon, but since Bad, he’s produced little that’s considered musically significant (I saw him live in the late 90s, when I interviewed his bassist, Freddie Washington for Bassist Magazine – outstanding show, but definitely all about the decade-plus old hits).

So what do we get out of grieving?
What are the questions we need to ask about the impression we had of him, the false feeling of connection we had with him as a person through his music and the press, and our complicity as part of a media-hungry world that fueled his madness (largely, it seems attributed to a seriously screwed up relationship with his dad, but made worse by his fame-neccesitated isolation).

Neverland, bubbles, oxygen-tanks, Liz Taylor, plastic surgery, llamas, friendships with kids, that documentary… A life documented like a dystopic flip-side to the Truman Show, but one that destroyed him.

At the recent UnConvention conference in Salford, I was asked at the end of our panel on being ‘outside the box’ what my one piece of advice was for musicians looking at their place in the world of music. My comment was

‘it’s more important to be nice than it is to be talented’

if becoming a ‘great musician’, and more pertinently, a ‘famous musician’ turns you into a reclusive lunatic, your priorities are screwed. Quit music, get a job in a bookshop, and leave fame to those whose narcissism is so overpowering they’ll pursue it to their own death.

Michael was rightly celebrated for his musical contribution, but his fame and its destructive influence on his life was out of all proportion to that (how could any music possibly live up to that??) – his public persona was a media-created 2-headed chimera: musical deity and social demon, invented to seed the front pages with stories between the album releases. If the next album’s a turkey, who cares, we’ve got pics of him in an oxygen tent, kissing a monkey dressed in tiny human clothes! Win!

Fame is the downside to success, and the way it removes the consequences from ones actions means that people like MJ who desperately needed help to recover from his screwed up childhood-in-the-spotlight never got it. If you’re heading towards it, in the words of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, “Run away! Run away!”

Or, indeed, put another way:

“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Nothing is worth that.

So, commenters – fame, celebrity, talent… where does it all go from here? What does a tale like this mean for those of us working in music, and using social media to break down the myths around our lives? Is ‘accessibility’ just another myth, once you get beyond a certain as-yet-undefined number of pseudo-personal connections? Have at it!

What interesting for us musical types is their response to the financial crisis. A situation which, naturally, they took very seriously indeed, partly because they were deeply affected, but also because it was a time when all the big finance companies were being shaken up, and previously held notions of who were the ‘big players’ could be re-jigged. It was a chance for companies to rebrand, reposition, and use the recession as a chance to do some fairly risky thinking, and ask some massive questions.

Which is what they’ve done. Sungard have gone round the world and interviewed pretty much anyone who’s anyone in the world of Big Money – CEOs of NASDAC, European Cental Bank dudes, bigwigs from newspapers, big banks… everyone.

And then, they’ve put the videos online. Not only on their own site, but also on youtube. And they’re blogging. Under the heading of ‘What Happens Next?’, they’re facilitating discussion about the future of the finance industry.

They’re also hosting events – free to attend – where these questions are presented and discussed.

This is, clearly, a fairly risky strategy. Despite the options for moderating the discussion on their own site, they’re still setting themselves up as THE lynchpin in the discussion. The benefits – and the dangers – are obvious.

It’s brave, but it’s also vital. They’ve seen that without a conversation happening across the industry - and happening in the open – the chance of anyone doing things differently within the industry is pretty small. Business as usual won’t cut it, but they clearly aren’t about to be advocating the collapse of banking and a reversion to feudalism either… (and if financial businesses don’t appear to be putting their own house in order, the level of Government regulation will far exceed even those measures so far introduced this year)

The tools they’re using are all the open ones the rest of us use - WordPress, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube (they’ve got a custom scrolling video thing on their site, but all the vids are on Youtube too.) – inviting people to take their videos, embed them, and continue the conversation as started in the videos.

Imagine if one the major record labels had done that.

Instead of doing what Virgin and Universal have just done - setting up their own ‘all you can eat’ download service, bundled with Virgin’s broadband etc. They’ve done it without, it seems, any consideration for how it affects indie musicians, how it serves the culture of music in this country or further afield. They don’t want to be ‘a’ player, they want to be ‘the’ player. No-one comes to the music except through me. It’s a land-grab for the space where ‘people get all their music’ – if they can tie it in with TV and internet, why would anyone go else where?

The simple answer to that seemingly rhetorical questions is they’d go elsewhere because, as Andrew Dubber once brilliantly said ‘it’s not just about music, it’s about MY music’ – music isn’t even remotely ‘like Water’ (sorry, Gerd, it just doesn’t stand up as a metaphor) – music is music, it’s not ‘necessary for life’ in the way that water is, but it does have vitality. Expensive music isn’t just a bottled version of ‘free’ music. There are no ‘taps’, no Evian-style branding. There are songs and stories and meaning and relationships and stars and fan-clubs and posters and t-shirts and gigs that change our lives and the chance to play the songs at home.

Our relationship with music:

• with musicians
• with music culture
• with music-branded tribes
• with playing our own music
• with the artwork that we wrap around music
• with the TV programmes and ongoing reality-web stories of the people who make music

is so complex is completely unmappable in any accurate way. We have massive trends and we have the ultra-personal. Very little in between.
I’ll believe that music is ‘like water’ when people start doing cover versions of expensive water at home, wear ‘Vittel’ t-shirts and go to water gigs. Til then, the metaphor is pretty much, if you’ll pardon the pun, dead in the water.

Virgin are peddling ‘all the music you’ll ever want’, but claim they’ll police it rigorously – don’t you dare be social with it! So basically, you can have all the MP3s you want, we’ll take your money, you’ll stop looking elsewhere because music is now ‘that thing you subscribe to’ – anything else is ‘premium content’ (the stuff that Mr ‘music like water/porridge like transport/kindness like trousers’ etc. thinks of as Evian) – but that 2-tier notion of ‘value’ is utterly spurious, and is clearly designed to claw back some territory the only way they can – by using the only leverage they still have: size and infrastructural control.

(It might even be considered monopolistic, but of course, a coalition of tiny people like me can’t afford the challenge in the courts…)

So in the meantime, we just call ‘BS’ on it, and look wistfully at the way that a financial services giant like Sungard can open up their stricken industry to a public consultation, in which they brand themselves as the thought leaders, but invite anyone to the table who cares to comment on their blog, or embed one of their videos and add their thoughts to the pool of wisdom on what happens next.

Fortunately with music, the people who care about music as culture are continuing the debate without worrying too much about the machinations of the fuckwits at the major labels. It’s just a shame they won’t be part of the discussion…

So where do we go from here? Feel free to use the comments to discuss anything raised here – from the financial crisis to the nonsense of Virgin/Universal’s deal.

How do we as indie artists tell the story of our music in a way that has value beyond the firehose?
How do we differentiate between ‘music’ and ‘my music’?
What lessons can we learn from Sungard?
What more could they be doing, particularly in their use of social media, to open up the discussion on the future of finance culture? It’s such a HUGE question…

The floor is yours…

So, following on from my first post about careers advice, what are we to do with careers in a music industry that’s entirely in flux?

I think this question needs to be looked at on many levels. The obvious one for me is the thing I say over and over again here – the best you’ll ever be as a musician is when you are pursuing your own vision for what music should be and can be, soundtracking the world as you see it. I feel like a stuck record going on about it, but I read so little about it in other places, that I need to keep throwing the idea into the mix until it sticks (fortunately, things are bubbling under for this to become a much bigger conversation – one I didn’t start but have been invited to be a part of. Watch this space).

But beyond that, from a ‘careers advice’ point of view, there’s a great point that Terence Eden made in Pt 1 of this post about having ‘basic skills’:

What are the basic skills needed to make a living in music?

Well, I often say that being able to touch-type has been the 2nd best skill I ever developed after playing the bass. Communication skills are so important to working in music, it’s amazing that music students aren’t forced into a double-major at university. My work as a journalist has been equally important to my music career as has, for example, the big tours I did opening for Level 42 and 21st Century Schizoid Band. My ability to write – here or in magazines/newspapers has given me the skills to draw people into what I’m doing, who wouldn’t otherwise have listened to a ‘solo bassist’ or to someone ‘looping’ – the mechanics of it weren’t enough, but my story was well told enough to get them to hit play and let the music speak for itself.

Web skills are clearly vital for an modern musician – not least of all because they’ll save you tonnes of time and money by being able to administrate the web-side of what you do yourself. Again, I am where I am as a musician because I was an early adopter as a musician on the web – I had a website in late 97/early 98, and for the longest time was the ONLY bass guitar teacher in Europe with a website! That helped.

An ability to dissect what’s really going on is vital in any vocational area that thrives on myth. Way too many musicians have their careers curtailed by being dragged into the bullshit quagmire of rock ‘n’ roll mythology. Seduced by limos, big gigs, cover features and TV specials, they allow someone else to spend their money for them.

If those musicians were pre-warned about the BS of the industry, and introduced to other models of business, from co-operatives and collectives, to co-working, self-employment and creative entrepreneurship, they may be better equipped to be part of defining the future of the world of music, rather than stumbling punch-drunk into a dying industry only to have their last shards of hope dashed on a 360 deal from a record label making a desperate land-grab for intellectual property.

Those basic skills – on top of the non-basic music-world skills of being brilliant and motivated and tenacious and passionate – are vital to anyone wanting to approach music making as a career with any seriousness at all…

So where does this inspiration and career information come from?

• From people who are doing it telling their stories.
• From academics documenting actual career trends, not freakish chance occurrences in a TV talent show were 0.01% of people end up with anything.
• From colleges and universities allowing music courses to have more loose definitions of what goes into an accredited music business module, so they don’t end up teaching out-dated notions of what ‘the industry’ is, but can modify it and bring in the emerging specialists as the landscape shifts.

How does this fit with iCould.com? Well, it’s a great platform for the story telling part. Here’s a video of Huey Morgan from the Fun Loving Criminals, talking about his start in Music:

If you want to see the full version of the interview, click over to it on icould.com - it’s obviously got more of a music industry sheen on it than my story, but he’s talking about his life, his story… imagine if we all did that? Here are a couple more from the site – Vicki Burke, Harpist/teacher , and Clare Finnimore, classical Viola player. I also really like this one from Peter True, guitar builder.

In an industry that thrives on larger than life myths, it’s always tough to get honest information about the realities of a job within it. It’s all the more important when the internet presents such amazing opportunities to musicians to be heard, to build and audience and do it without treading some out-dated crap-strewn path to the doors of the major labels.

If you’re in London, and want to hear my story, I’m speaking at Imperial College tomorrow – click here for more details and to register (it’s free).

So, musicians, tell your story – the good, the bad, the ugly, the funny, the day to day, the life lessons – the comments box is yours:

I don’t know about you, but our careers advisory service back then was woeful to the point of being hilarious. There was a tick-box questionnaire that then made recommendations for what kind of jobs you should do. If you ticked yes to ‘do you like being outside?’, you invariably had ‘forestry commission’ suggested as a potential job on the dot matrix print-out you received.

As someone who was obsessed with music by the time we got that far, all my answers related to the fact that I wanted to be a musician. I was rapidly failing Biology at A Level, had already dropped Classics by then (did the first year, went into my mock exam slightly drunk thanks to using home-brew beer as a memory aide, failed it and quit) and was doing rather well as AS Level Music (ended up failing, after getting one of the highest marks the school had ever had for composition… failed the history paper for the same reason I failed Classics… not smart).

But there was no advice for musicians, other than ‘our survey says you could be a musician. Maybe join the army, they have musicians’.

It was rubbish – the reliance on wholly inadequate technology was a cop-out, and there was no sense that careers advice was meant to inspire us to do anything GOOD in the world. This was one year post-Thatcher, the yuppie years were on the downward slide, but careers advice was still geared towards getting a job in finance, engineering, industry… Anything outside that was just ‘does not compute’.

So what’s changed? Well for one thing, people can seek their own career’s advice. Back in ‘91, I could’ve gone to the library, but there was very little written about working in the creative sector, and how would I have found it?

Now, young people (or older people looking to change jobs) can get online and find endless resources about what they can do, why they should do it and how they can end up making a living at it.

In short, no-one talked to me at 17 about the difference between a job and a vocation, about the validity of turning passions into careers, about the reality of diversifying, about the REAL relationship between university education and employment.

I’m not sure how much better it is in schools these days, but one website that is telling a whole range of amazing stories is iCould.com - a collection of video stories will real people in real jobs, many with completely non-standard ways of getting where they got to. Doing it cos they love it.

The UK Government are using iCould to find out what people think about careers advice. This video from Alan Milburn sets the scene:

And over on this page, there’s a chance for people to tell the government what they think of the careers advice they’re getting…

The majority of the most interesting people I know have ‘non-standard’ careers. Most of them are doing what they feel compelled to do, and have somehow turned it into something that’ll pay the bills so they can do more of it. Sites like iCould.com give voice to those non-standard paths that until now have never appeared in careers advisory presentations and computer print-outs, and yet are ultimately what makes life interesting.

I’m helping iCould.com out with some social media strategy stuff, getting the word out about it. It’s an exciting initiative, and I wonder how many people my age would be living very different lives if they’d had access to real life inspiring career tales before making their job decisions.

So, two things:

• Please ask people you know between the ages of 16-25(ish) to go and fill out the questionnaire – the more people do, the more impetus there is for a change.
• Have a browse around iCould.com – there are some fab stories in there, especially when you contrast them – these two from photographers were faves of me – this one in fashion, and this one a medical photographer. Two very different approaches to the same career, and neither with a standardised path into it…

In the comments:

• what were you advised to do at school?
• Were they right?
• Did you have any really cool teachers who told you to ignore the print-outs and go with your passions?
• How did you end up doing what you’re doing?

Feel free to write your own blog post, and link back to here so it appears in the trackbacks… I’ll follow this post up with some thoughts on careers in music and creative sector.

The Blair government ignored the will of the people, and pursued their fallacious and illegal path into the US-lead invasion of Iraq, and the despondency of those who went on the march fragmented the protest movement again. The anti-war movement became, for a time, a mouthpiece for a coalition of George Galloway’s Respect Party and the Muslim Association Of Great Britain. This lead to a multiplicity of protests organised by a disparate and disconnected group of activists, many of which failed to gain the critical mass of support due to a) the nuance of the point being protested and b) the conflicting nature of the vested interests involved.

So today, with so many protest groups coming together, it was another watershed, on the scale of Genoa. The strength of feeling in ‘regular’ people – rather than just serial protestors – was palpable, given the number of non-crusty, normally-dressed folk not waving battle-scarred banners, but just turning out to lend their support to the calls for reformation of the governance of the global financial institutions.

Which made the behaviour of the Met Police today all the more sickening. I’m not normally one for dissing the police. There are clearly factions within the police that like to act as agitators in situations like this, but in general they do have a tough job to do, and there is a public order issue with any protest.

However, what happened today – as happened at the May Day protest on Oxford St in 2001 – was that the police formed a closed cordon which no-one could get into nor out of. When asked about this, they cited their belief that the protest itself was a breach of the peace – suggesting that our very presence made us complicit in whatever the terms were that they used to define said breach – therefor we weren’t allowed out until the ‘ring-leaders’ of the violent anarchic element were singled out and dealt with.

Which is, frankly, bollocks. There was no room to negotiate or discuss the veracity of their statement. Any moron on the ground could see pretty easily who was causing trouble and who wasn’t. The police had officers placed on every possible vantage point around the Bank, and could have picked out individuals based in their chosen brand of cigarette or style of earrings, if they’d wanted to. To treat the mass of peaceful protesters as criminals, to patronize us, offer no support to those who were in pain or distress, and to conform to the psychological lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment by remaining utterly unmoved when confronted with people in distress only to say they were ‘only following orders’, was disgraceful.

It was an embarrassment to them, and to me as a citizen of a country where I felt completely powerless in the face of a law enforcement agency utterly unaccountable for the degradation it was inflicting on people (they weren’t letting anyone out to go to the loo, so people were pissing in the streets). People who were there to lodge a dissenting voice in a legal, peaceful way.

I’m dismayed, saddened and angered by it. I was posting videos to Qik most of the day (apparently some of my footage was used by the BBC, with permission), til my batteries ran out – you’ll see that some of the police interactions were friendly and polite. My battery had gone by the time I was told by a police officer informed of my bad back that I’d ‘better go and sit on the floor then’ (cos that’s great for your back – sitting in piss on a concrete floor). here are two videos from today, the first an interview with Ciaron O’Reilly, the second is Andy Williamson talking about trying to get out of the cordon:

It was sounding a lot like the behaviour of a police state.

That at the other end of the protest, the police were not only arresting those who broke the windows of the Royal Bank of Scotland, but were hitting protesters who chose to sit down in the road (wasn’t that what the police grunt I spoke to told me to do??) is yet more evidence of this shameful policy.

Seriously, the policing of today’s protest was horrendous. It was unneccesarily violent, it treated peaceful protestors as criminals, forced them to urinate in public and was answerable to no-one.

So what happens now? The protests were incredibly well documented, perhaps better than any protest before. Almost everyone I saw had a camera of some kind, recording events. Protest is changing, but will we be able to hold the police to account for their part of provocating violence and restricting the movements of peaceful protesters? What do you think? (more photos over on Flickr)

Well, actually, it could. And that, for me, is the joy of these kind of mass actions. Only the seriously deluded could possibly think that switching off your lights for one hour is going to have any material impact on the problem of the incremental rise in global temperature. No, what is was was a symbol. A gesture that got us thinking, and talking and feeling like we weren’t just sitting here on our own feeling guilty about just how hippyish our own concerns about the planet are. It was a time for us all to get creative and imaginative in talking about, tweeting about and considering the possibilities of reduced energy consumption. And then – in response to all that thinking and talking and idea-sharing – do something about it.

Maybe it’ll lead to some people turning off their lights routinely, as part of a strategy of reducing their energy consumption. Hopefully, there’ll be a lot of conversations about where most of the energy in our houses goes (anything heat-related, mostly – electric heaters, tumble dryers, elec. kettles….) And we’ll start to think of better ways of drying clothes, or turning down thermostats, or not heating unused rooms… These are the kind of conversations that are best sparked by a mass action. A mass symbolic action.

Let’s face it, starting the public dialogue about climate change issues by telling everyone who owns a car that they are planet-destroying scum isn’t really going to change anything. It’s forces people to defend their current energy use patterns, instead of us all accepting culpability together and hoping to inspire one another to change.

Earlier on today, we had a great chat on the boat about what we can do to save energy, how we can reduce our leccie bills and harness the natural energy around us. It was fun, creative, inspiring and helpful. And it came out of us talking about Earth hour.

Actions like this can be empty. They can be passifiers, ways of abdicating responsibility, of feeling less guilty. But they don’t have to be. They have potential to inspire, to collectivize, to encourage, coordinate and challenge. And I’m pushing for the latter.

Lovely Lloyd David wrote a piece with a few imaginative earth hour suggestions here.

So, what did you do? How did it help you think about climate change, energy, culture, consumption? What conversations did it spark? Do you feel more helpless and alone afterwards, or inspired that the people around you care as well? Thoughts and comments please, lovely people.

So let me list a few, with a note about how they inspire me:

Darika Ahrens gets PR. She REALLY gets it. She understands the relationship between the Marketing and PR worlds and this new scary social media world of blogs and sharing and recommendations and communities better than anyone I’ve ever come across. Any time anyone comes to me with a PR-related social media question, I go to her.

Joanna Geary – until last week, she worked at the Birmingham Post, and took a regional newspaper into a whole new international digital space via her knowledge and use of blogging, twittering, video, etc. Joanna’s interview with an anonymous blog commenter is one of the smartest moves I’ve ever seen a journalist make in social media.

Joanne Jacobs is a Tuttle-buddy, who I knew for a long time before I really started reading her blog. But when I did, I discovered she’s one of the sharpest commentators and theorists on social media and business that I’ve come across. Proper clever!

I doubt I recommend any single person for work as much as I do Josie Fraser – she really is THE go-to person for information on children on the web, privacy issues, and how to talk to the government about such things. She consults far and wide on a whole range of social media issues, and is quite simply brilliant.

And of course, my lovely wife Lobelia – as a musician/blogger she has possibly the most consistently authentic voice of any musician I know that also writes about what they do. She’s a mine of amazing information and quotes about social media, and is most often the person I go to to bounce ideas off, and tell me if I’m talking balls, given that she’s not even remotely impressed by gadgetry that isn’t useful.

There’s five. I could write about Jo Twist and Jamillah Knowles doing great things at the BBC, or Annie Boccio and Tracy Apps doing great web design-y things, podcasting and video-blogging… but where would I stop? There are loads.

The point being, when there’s no institutionalised gender disparity, being a women makes no qualitative difference at all. All of these women are fantastically motivated, some have probably overcome the sexism of the industry they work in, the others have just got on with being brilliant and ignored the whole ‘ah, I see you have breasts, you must be a writer about women’s issues then‘ nonsense.

Thank God we live in a time when so many areas of work are dispensing with outmoded notions of sexism, and are open to talented women doing the work they do well. But it’s worth recognising that in many industries that’s still not even close to being the case. There’s a wage disparity, infrastructural male-centricity and unwritten policies of hiring women for secretarial posts and men for ‘proper’ jobs. It’s horrible, stupid and pointless, so let’s fight it, and practice equality in our own lives.

So the Atheist Bus Campaign are delighted that they’ve raised £135K to put up adverts around the place telling people not to worry cos there probably isn’t a God.

So, let’s get this straight – their logic is that putting God-bothering ads on buses is a stupid idea. So in response they… put up anti-God-bothering ads on buses. Genius! An eye for an eye. An ad for an ad. Maybe we can just start having whole conversations via 15 word slogans on the sides of buses. it’s a pretty nuanced way to talk about things.

Oh no, my mistake, it’s a fucking stupid way to discuss anything. Regardless of my own beliefs/faith/whatever, I’ve always been baffled by posters stating ‘facts’ about God, or with bible verses on them. It always smacked of some kind of talismanic evangelical witch-craft; ‘if we use bits of the Bible, it has special powers and people will be saved‘… Surely actually talking about this stuff is more useful. As some fab Welshmen once said, ‘this is my truth, tell me yours‘.

But, to counter it with equally bogus ‘there probably isn’t a God..’ banners helps no one. It does as much for discussion of the merits of faith and atheism as the original posters do. Precious little.

The picture at the top is my contribution to the debate. Happy new year, whatever your faith-persuasion.