Really Hacked Off.
When I was younger, hacking to me meant just one thing. It meant I wasn't fast enough to catch whoever it was that was faster than me when playing football on the school field at lunch, thus leaving me with one option - take a big swing with the left boot and chop away at their speedy legs. No worries of a yellow/red card. This is lunchtime football we're talking about where the rulebook simply doesn't exist. Another major show of ignorance of a different rule book (let's call this the moral rulebook) has taken place over obviously quite long a period of time that has meant the word "hacking" means a completely different thing to me nowadays. Our news coverage in the UK has been absolutely littered over the last fortnight with continual stories of News International, and specifically one of it's papers, News Of The World, hacking into some very high profile phones indeed. It seems politicians and celebrities were not enough for the greedy paws of some News Of The World journalists, and the stories that have emerged of phones being hacked of murder victims, families of war victims and even 9/11 victims are nothing less than some of the most shocking things I have ever read. And all because they wanted to sell a few more papers. Indeed, when news becomes news, you know that things are not looking good.
The upshot of it all is really rather blurred. It's a fantastic shot in the arm for anyone with an anti-tabloid stance - and there are many of those - and it is currently dismembering Rupert Murdoch's bloated media empire as we speak, which can only be a good thing. In fact, our political talk of the morning today is taken up with people stating there should be laws on multi-ownership of our media. On a far less important level, this is not allowed in the ownership of football clubs, so how it has carried on for so long in our media circus is quite the joke. The fall guys of course (other than the victims themselves) are the innocent ones. The people in the background of things at News Of The World. The people who do sports reports, arts reviews and all sorts of other jobs that were a million miles away from the disgusting corruption that has gone on, who are now, as a result of the paper ceasing to exist, out of work. The whole thing has left a sour taste in the mouth and has dominated a lot of conversation in these parts, that's for sure.
One part of the media that is obviously NOT on the downturn is the internet. With us hardly being darlings of the press ourselves, it is on the web that a lot of our support has consistently come. A sign of that this week came from the nice people at http://www.blackcabsessions.com/ and http://www.last.fm/ who got us involved in what they were doing. It started with a rather good black cab session (it does exactly what it says on the tin) which involved a cool rendition of 'No Harm'. I actually have to take people's word for it on this one, as due to a lack of space, I was temporarily ousted from The Boxer Rebellion and they did it as a 3-piece (I'm sure they would all vouch for the fact it was better without me...). These cabs aren't that big you know. There are lots of cool sessions available to view on their website, which is linked 3 lines up. Definitely worth checking out.
Straight after that, I met the boys out of their cab, right in the heart of London on Carnaby Street, where we performed a short 3-song acoustic set. I don't think we can say that it was spontaneously announced the night before, for obvious reasons, but it was revealed at the last minute, giving it quite a nice pop-up feel. There was a large bunch of people there when we played (including a friend of ours who apologised afterwards for turning up late and "only getting to see the last 3 songs" - quote of the day for me). It was a really fun experience for everybody (other than when Todd's mini amp decided it needed a break), so thank you to anyone who turned up with such late notice, and we hope anyone that was there deemed it worthwhile to give up their lunchbreak for. Or their entire day for a handful. Big kudos must go to the nice chap (never forget, I am terrible with names...) who traveled up from Brighton just for it. Even more must go to the 2 girls we met who traveled all the way up from Southampton especially, and missed the whole thing. I did feel bad about that one - like we should have taken them out for lunch or something.
I think had we done that, they might have ended up regretting it as I would have to have taken them somewhere that included watching the first round of the British Open (golf, if this is all alien to you). Indeed, I am about to settle down now, with regular cups of tea, to watch the final round, kind of hoping that, after all the fuss of the super-talented and young Rory McIlroy, that actually 42-year-old Darren Clarke, with his self-confessed un-athletic physique and on course smoking habit, can see it through and show them all how it's done. Which is kind of like going to a festival hoping to discover the really exciting next big thing, getting to the end, and then realising that the best thing you saw was Bruce Springsteen. And I say that because it's happened before. Anyway, where did I put those tea bags...
Piers.
