Patrick Pittman

Stephen Lewis: Beyond AIDS and genocide, the search for hope in Africa

2006-06-25T07:03:30Z

In 2000, the United Nations established eight Millennium Development Goals, a series of targets designed to tackle poverty, hunger and the spread of HIV/AIDS. The world’s countries and development agencies agreed to meet these goals by 2015. We’re almost half-way there, and throughout continental Africa, things are no better.

I’ve said it a thousand times on here and in other media. We ignore Africa. We ignore it at our peril, but we ignore it and it is our greatest shame. One man who has not ignored it is Stephen Lewis, United Nations Special Envoy to Africa for HIV and AIDS. Truly one of the greatest and most decent men on the planet — father in law of Naomi Klein and father of Avi Lewis (with whom I spoke last year regard his film The Take, an interview I will post someday soon), former Canadian ambassador to the UN, Canadian of the year and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, there are few people as qualified to speak on the west’s failings in Africa as he. He has recently published a book, Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-ravaged Africa, which examines the complicity of the United Nations and the G8 in Africa’s plight, and surveys the situation from his meetings with Rwandan orphans to his frustrations at the highest levels of global bureaucracy. Promises? The West has those by the sackful. But we’ve been making and breaking them for far too long.

There’s a tendency to think of Africa as hopelessly, endemically sick, moribund almost, and there’s often an assumption that this is purely a legacy of colonialism and everything that’s happened since. This is not an interview focussing on the worst ravages of corruption that tear Africa apart. If you want that, I recommend the first part of Allan Little’s extraordinary Faultlines series for the BBC World Service. Lewis is a man who, despite all he has seen since his early visits in his youth, insists on searching for the hope in the continent.

In your book you talk of the visits to Africa in your youth, your real romance with the continent. It was a very, very different place then…

I was in Africa in the immediate post-colonial period when there were very high expectations, enormous enthusiasm, great excitement. You break through the basis of slavery and all of the neo-colonial angry, nasty, manipulative, controlling impulses and suddenly you’re out into the light of day with all of the possibilities stretching out before you. The place was alive with music and enthusiasm and hope, and it was pretty depressing to see the decline of the continent over the subsequent number of years.

Simple question, then. What happened?

A combination of things. I think that the colonial powers continued unexpectedly to manipulate Africa from a distance, to use African leaders as their pawns. There’s no questions that Africa got caught in the cold war and sawed off between east and west, as it was availed by the communist bloc on the one hand and the western bloc on the other. I think that the international financial institutions — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — engaged in an imposition of constraints on the African economies, they imposed conditions, they made it very difficult, particularly in the social sectors. All in all, it was rough for Africa, and as a result, in this manipulative orgy, you had a number of African leaders who themselves became corrupt and totalitarian, and that made things even worse.

So now you have a continent that’s being simultaneously ravaged by AIDS on the one hand and criminal governance on the other. They’re interlinked problems. It seems that you have a continent that is dying.

I don’t agree with the analysis. I don’t think AIDS and criminality are intertwined. I think what is intertwined is AIDS and poverty. Terrible and desperate and almost incomprehensible poverty. The relative aspects of corruption, there are countries which are obviously corrupt, but there are 53 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the great majority of them are increasingly re-elected in democratic traditions and they’re working very, very hard to quell corruption.

My god, I’m on a continent where in the United States, corruption is dealt with before grand juries almost on a daily basis. In my own country of Canada, the last election was fought on an issue of corruption and the government was defeated on an issue of corruption. One shouldn’t be too smug and self-righteous about it. Africa is a continent which is desperately poor, which has a lot of disease, it has incidental conflict, not unlike other continents, but it also has, at the grassroots level, a tremendous resilience and generosity of spirit and sophistication and if Africa had the resources which are constantly promised it and forever betrayed in the delivery, Africa could break the back of the AIDS pandemic and Africa could come out of the economic doldrums.

]]> Do you find there is a tendency in the circles of bureaucracy to treat Africa as one generic country rather than a disparate set of nations and cultures?

Yes, that’s an absolutely good observation. There’s a tendency to make sweeping generalisations about the continent. Of course it’s profoundly different. South Africa is a nation with considerable economic power and clout, which power is being compromised by the centrality of the AIDS pandemic — there are between 5.5 and 6.5 million people infected in South Africa, the highest number of infections in the world. So that the country is struggling with disease but it has a great deal of economic strength.

Nigeria has oil, but it’s also struggling over artificial boundaries and divisions of ethnic groups imposed by the foreign powers back at the end of the nineteenth century. You have Kenya, which could be a quite remarkable nation if it can get past the internal corruption which has harassed it for some time. And then you get countries like Rwanda, which came out of a dreadful genocide and are in fact seeming to restore their democratic traditions and working hard at overcoming the resentments and the hostilities and the fratricide. The same is true of Angola, the same is true of Mozambique, every country is quintessentially different from its surrounding neighbours. It’s a fascinating continent, everything exists in Africa and one should not make generalisations.

Tell me about visiting a country like Rwanda after the genocide, as it is rebuilding and redefining itself. What are the feelings that you have in those moments when you go to these places?

Rwanda’s a particularly haunting example —- it feels as though there have been two genocides. You had a terrible genocide in the 100 days between April 6, 1994 and early July when 800,000 people were slaughtered in the full light of the world and the world raised not a finger. To overcome that, to overcome the trauma of that internal horror, takes a lot of work at human rights, at tolerance, at dealing in the schools with peace studies, of trying to overcome ethnic divisions by seeing everyone as a Rwandan, not a Rwandan tutsi, not a Rwandan Hutu, but a Rwandan.

They’ve worked at it so hard, but then along comes AIDS. And it’s so accentuated in Rwanda because so many women were raped during the genocide for the purpose of transmitting the virus. The depravity that that suggests is almost more than the mind absorbs, but there’s no question that there was a deliberate transmission of the virus through rape and sexual violence of horrific kinds, so you have so many women now who went through rape during the genocide who are experiencing full-blown AIDS, and that presents a whole new pattern that the country has to deal with. It’s so sad, and it’s so difficult. After the genocide, so many parents died, you had the phenomenon of child-headed households, where the oldest sibling in the family looks after the youngest sibling. There were 60,000 child-headed households after the genocide and then along comes AIDS, and again the entire extended family is demolished, the grandmothers die, and what you have left are child-headed households from AIDS. So this is a country which was ravaged by conflict, ravaged by disease. And yet if you go to Rwanda today, everywhere you go there’s hope. Everywhere you go they’re rebuilding, and there’s a sense of purpose, and the kids are in schools, they’ve got health centers and they are doing an excellent a job of treatment with anti-retroviral drugs for AIDS, so I actually like visiting Rwanda. You know, the commemorative sites of the genocide are heartbreaking, but the determination of the people is exhilarating.

Your book talks a lot about the relationship between the reforms and conditions of the IMF and things such as structural adjustment policies and the spread of HIV. You talk of the IMF actively denying countries the right to invest in health care. Even though we know so much about the failure of the IMF over a long period of time, some of that is pretty shocking.

Actually, let me bring it right up to date, because it continues to be shocking. In the country of Kenya, which is struggling hard against the virus, and has a wonderful minister of health by the way, a woman named Charity Ngilu, you have a country which has 4000 retired nurses, and the government is desperate to get the nurses back into employment in the hospitals and the health centers, because they are struggling so desperately against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. And they cannot hire the nurses. It is so crazy, it takes your breath away.

Why can’t they hire the nurses? Because it would break the macro-economic framework imposed by the IMF. In other words, the IMF has said to Kenya, you want to continue to have those loans, you want to continue to have those grants, then you cannot break the economic strait-jacket which we have imposed on you with our own dogmatic version of economic truth.

They must live in some other world, because when you’re dealing with the pandemic of AIDS, you have to show a degree a flexibility about the human condition. You’ve got too many people dying, too many people struggling, too many orphan children emerging, too many women suffering such disproportionate vulnerability because there’s gender inequality everywhere and the women are the target of the virus, so you have to have flexibility. You have to have common sense. These economic nostrums which the international financial institutions continue to impose on Africa, they’re nuts, frankly. I don’t know how they will ever be overcome but they have to be overcome.

I notice that the British have decided that they’ve got to rethink conditionality, I notice that someone as illustrious as Mary Robinson, the former International High Commissioner for Human Rights, was making this same point about Kenya: how could it happen that these financial institutions could behave in a fashion that so defies common sense?

And on the other side of the world in the lush Scottish countryside, you have the G8 last year meeting and paying an extreme kind of lip-service to the problems of Africa, when right there you see the problems as you talk about that sit directly with them. You’re very critical of Bob Geldof’s seduction by the power in that process of Live8. I remember reading similar sentiments from George Monbiot at the time — Live8 may have done, in the long term, more harm than good.

I know something about the seduction of power. I was once an ambassador to the United Nations, and you do get a little self-congratulatory and self-impressed, and you’ve got to fight those kinds of things when you’re in the rarefied halls of power. Bob Geldof obviously enjoys it, and he engaged in such ridiculous hyperbole about what a wonderful conference it was and that it had saved Africa, and that he gave it ten out of ten. It seems to me that he was transported into his own private world of irrationality, but in truth the promises that were made at the G8 summit at Gleneagles in July were quickly sabotaged by performance.

Just eight weeks later at a major replenishment conference for something called the Global Fund on AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — which is the chief international financial vehicle through which money gets to these countries to fight the disease of AIDS and others — which everybody assumed would be a success because of all the promises and all the words at the G8 summit; well, lo and behold they didn’t get half of what they needed and had asked for. That was quite a shock and it showed how insubstantial are the promises, how quickly they are abandoned. I don’t understand that.

I have to say, Patrick, I am completely bewildered by the continued willingness to write off a continent, to behave towards Africa the way the G8 countries behave towards no other section of the planet. We’re losing millions of lives, mostly women, and I don’t understand how you can live with losing millions of lives unnecessarily, because we have the drugs to prolong the life and the prices have now been reduced to a level where, were the western countries to deliver on their promises, we could keep millions of people alive who are otherwise going to die. It’s beyond me. I’m 68 years old, I don’t know whether I’ve passed into my dotage and I’m no longer able to understand the way the world works, but I have to say it’s really lamentable, the way we’re behaving.

What fault the United Nations in this? Is it an institution that needs to be or can be reformed? It’s an almost depressing repetition in your book, that every great idea in the end disappears into the void of United Nations bureaucracy. What can be done?

Boy, I worry, I tried to give in the last chapter a number of potential solutions and I worry about my own tendency to convey distortion. I actually quite like the United Nations and I have a deep faith in it, and in some ways I’m a shameless apologist for it. But it has failed in many areas around the AIDS pandemic, and it’s really a matter of leadership I think. There’s a lot of great talent on the ground in the various agencies, whether you’re talking about UNICEF, or the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Development Program or the World Food Program, there’s a lot of talent on the ground in countries but at the headquarters of these organisations, it’s not that there’s rigor mortis, it’s just that there’s a certain inertia, there’s a certain lack of vision, there’s a certain lack of urgency.

I’m so fascinated by the dynamic, as I’ve watched things unfold in the last four or five years, if I were to identify the group that I’ve been most impressed by with their absolute urgency in response to the pandemic, it’s the Bill Clinton Foundation. It’s Clinton’s foundation and his initiative which has without question demonstrated they really know people are dying, and they cannot fool around. So when you ask them for something on Monday, they get it to you by Wednesday. If you ask something of some of the bilateral donors and some UN agencies on Monday, you’ve got to wait three months. It’s that lack of the sense that you’re fighting to save lives, that you just can’t delay, that you have to intervene, that you have to have a vision.

The closest we’ve come to a vision, and it’s commendable, is the World Health Organisation effort to put three million people into treatment by the end of 2005. As we know from their recent report, they didn’t succeed, they barely made it to halfway, they didn’t quite get to halfway, but they unleashed a momentum which is now irreversible and they will keep a lot of people alive.

But by and large, the UN, like most of us — and I was guilty of it myself in the 1990s, I’ll never forgive myself for it — we’ve just all moved too slowly. In the last five crucial years, the organisation I quite love and work for, the UN, has moved far too slowly and I’m not prepared to take them off the hook.

Some of the content of Lewis’ Massey Lectures series that forms the basis of Race Against Time can be found on the CBC website

The Anger of a Desert Storm: Scott Ritter and the myth of WMD

2005-12-08T10:18:26Z

When Scott Ritter, the United Nation’s Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq, resigned in 1998, minor shockwaves rippled through the international community. A man who had been at the center of much controversy in the country, and whom the Iraqis claimed at the time was behind obstructive and intimidating tactics at the behest of the American government, had resigned in frustration at American interference in the United Nations process, claiming that UNSCOM was being used by the CIA as a front for invasion plans.

In the desert sands of Iraq, Ritter saw corruption on both sides, and an inevitable explosion of that corruption in the future. In the ensuing years, he has published a book, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein and released a film, In Shifting Sands, which then UN chair of UNSCOM Richard Butler denounced as “propaganda”. He has been one of the most outspoken critics of the war in Iraq, and one of the most uniquely placed, as an American once deeply entrenched in the United Nations, to comment on the fundamental decline of that body in recent years.

His moral standpoint since 1998 is not without controversy, and his Wikipedia entry certainly outlines some mucky conspiracy theories that explain the shift in stance from military hawk to outspoken activist — it is not for this blog to repeat those, but one must always question the motivations for those who speak from positions of authority, even if you agree with what they say. In the context of a 15 minute radio interview, I did not do nearly enough of that here, but Ritter’s fight is generally a brave and respectable one. Ritter has often done a good enough job of answering his critics when called unamerican, as the media and political machines of the state turned against him and worked to discredit his views. In these most interesting times, when dissenting voices are dealt with through fear and paranoia, Ritter has remained steadfast. Sure, he may have sold a few books in doing so, but I have no doubt he was on a decent salary before his decision to resign.
In person, the former Marine is an intimidating presence with a booming voice and a precise, well-worn line in anger. It’s a long way from the deserts of Iraq to a community radio studio on the far side of Australia, but Ritter’s rage has not simmered.

You were a weapons inspector in Iraq for several years, at some point there was a turning point when you decided things weren’t as they ought to be.

It’s not that there was a turning point per se, as a weapons inspector from 1991 to 1998, I was fully cogniscent of not only the difficulty of our task but also the inherent contradiction in the policy of certain nations, namely the United States, when it came to supporting our tasks. Our job was a job of disarmament, getting rid of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in accordance with Security Council mandate.

The United States is a member of the Security Council. They voted in favour of this mandate, and yet the United States had a policy that embraced regime change as opposed to disarmament, so there was always this conflict taking place between the weapons inspection process and the policy of the United States. I rode it out, so to speak, for seven years, in belief that if we could accomplish our mission, we could trump America’s policy imperatives. By 1998, it became obvious that the United States would not allow the weapons inspection process to proceed with its full integrity, void of the corruption of American influence, and so I resigned.

]]> So you believed that UNSCOM was fatally compromised by the US’s intentions in its involvement?
It’s not what I believe, it’s a statement of fact. UNSCOM was fatally compromised by the US policy of regime change, which violated the rule of law set forth by the mandate of disarmament.

And how did that manifest on a day to day level in your work?

In a number of ways. First of all you have the overall poisoning effect that comes when you have a member of the Security Council state that economic sanctions which were linked to Iraq’s disarmament obligations, these sanctions would never be lifted, even if Iraq cooperated with the inspectors, until Saddam Hussein was removed from power. This of course being statements made by Secretary of State James Baker in May of 1991, and repeated by President George Herbert Walker Bush in June of 1991.

So the Iraqis were confronting us and saying “so why should we even co-operate with you? If we do do everything you ask us to do, it’s irrelevant, because the United States will never let the sanctions be lifted.” You have this overall poisoning effect that takes place and then you have the United States not accepting the technical findings of the inspectors.

In my case in 1992, I briefed the US intelligence community on the fact that we had pretty much come to closure on Iraq’s ballistic missile programs. That was a finding that was unacceptable to them. They created new intelligence information that had to be investigated over the course of a year-long effort, and in November of 1993 I went back to the director of the CIA and told him that all missiles were accounted for. The CIA’s response was to say that there are twelve to twenty missiles in Iraq, and that number will never change, regardless of what we do.

So again, that’s one manifestation, and a more nefarious manifestation is the CIA’s use of the unique access provided to weapons inspectors in Iraq from the mandate of disarmament given by the council, using this access not to gather intelligence in support of disarmament but to gather intelligence about the security of Saddam Hussein that facilitated the CIA’s efforts to launch a coup d’etat against Saddam and remove him from power. This of course terminally corrupted the integrity of the inspection operation, because once this became exposed after a failed coup attempt in June of 1996, when the Iraqis looked at a weapons inspector, they didn’t see somebody that was trying to disarm Iraq, but rather somebody that was trying to assassinate their president, and sadly they were correct.

It’s important to remember that, as you’ve stated, there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the point of the process of disarmament was to disarm. Do you believe that the co-operation of the Iraqis allowed your organisation to do that fully and completely?

Absolutely not. I’ve never said that. What I’ve maintained is, based on the work of the weapons inspectors that we could account for, in verifiable fashion, 90-95% of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. We don’t know what happened to everything. Iraq claimed that they destroyed it. They said 100% was destroyed, and it turns out historically that they were correct—the CIA has acknowledged that yes, the Iraqis destroyed everything in the summer of 1991, but because the Iraqis did lie to us early on in the process, as inspectors we could not take what they said at face value. We could not give them the benefit of the doubt.

The only way we could determine that a weapon had been accounted for was to verify through documents, through visual inspection, through forensic investigation, that they had in fact been destroyed. We could only account for 90-95%, but we were able to mitigate against the unaccounted for 5-10% by putting in place the most comprehensive technologically advanced on-site inspection regime in the history of arms control, where we blanketed the totality of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure with no-notice inspections, cameras, sensors, and we were able to ascertain that Iraq neither retained weapons of mass destruction at these facilities or was reconstituting weapons.

So even though I couldn’t tell you that we could account for every single weapon, I could say that Iraq was fundamentally disarmed. But unfortunately the Security Council doesn’t give us the luxury of saying “fundamental disarmament”, the Security Council’s mandate was one hundred per cent, and that’s the benchmark that we were trying to achieve, and when I resigned in 1998, I pointed out accurately that we had not achieved our mandate, that Iraq was not disarmed in accordance with the standards set by the Security Council.

You were an outside observer of the inspections in 2002 and 2003. What was your observation of that? Do you think that was a legitimate process?

Of course it was, from an inspection standpoint, it was a legitimate process. The problem though, we come back to the same fatal flaw that haunted the original inspection process. It’s what’s going on overall that represents the problem, not the inspectors on the ground — they did their job. But it’s the environment they operated in. For instance, resolution 1441 passed by the Security Council, which mandated their work, wasn’t a resolution for disarmament, it was a resolution to justify the invasion of Iraq. It set conditions that were virtually impossible for the Iraqis to meet, and it also created opportunities for the United States to debunk anything the Iraqis did. Case in point: The Iraqis were required to submit a new declaration, listing the totality of their weapons of mass destruction. They did so, a 12,500 page dossier was submitted to the Security Council in early December. Within a week the United States dismissed this document as nothing more than a combination of lies. They said that the Iraqis have biological weapons, they have biological weapons programs, and if they don’t declare these weapons in this document, this document is fraudulent.

Well of course, the Iraqis didn’t have biological weapons, they didn’t have a biological weapons program at the time, so it wasn’t declared, so the US dismissed the document. It turns out that of all the dossiers prepared about Iraq’s WMDs by the CIA, British Intelligence, Israeli Intelligence and others, there’s only one compilation that stands the test of time. It has yet to be proven false on a single point of substantive fact. But when you have the United States casting this cloud over the inspection process, it’s very difficult for the inspectors to do their work. But they did do their work—in the short period of time they were there, they were able to debunk the totality of the CIA’s intelligence about WMDs: where they were hidden and where they were being produced.

But apparently truth didn’t matter. Colin Powell went before the Security Council in February and basically said that the inspection process was irrelevant, because the Iraqis, in the way that they deal with inspectors, are so prepared for the inspections that they can be perceived as telling the truth when in fact they are telling a lie. Donald Rumsfeld made an amazing statement: he said the fact that the inspectors aren’t finding weapons in Iraq is the clearest evidence yet that there are weapons in Iraq. How, as an inspector, do you overcome that rhetoric?

There is the fundamental question of the state of the United Nations. Would you say that the United Nations is now weakened because the United States disrespects it and pays no heed to it, or is the United States right to disrespect and pay no heed to the United Nations because it is weak?

I come at it from a standpoint of an American. An American who has served in the armed forces of the United States, where I took an oath to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Article 6 of the Constitution states that when the United States enters into an international treaty or agreement that is ratified by two thirds of the US senate, that is the supreme law of the land. We are signatories to the United Nations charter, so we don’t have the luxury of saying “oops, we don’t want to work with the UN, we’re going to walk away”. The senate can pull us out of it, but no president, no congressional leader as an individual, has the authority to say that the UN is irrelevant.

So the US has no right to say that because the UN is weak, we don’t want to a part of the UN. The UN is weak because the United States is not a true partner in the UN. It is not this singular entity, it’s a club, it’s a membership, and the United States is a key member of it. But unless everybody abides by the same set of rules, the club’s not going to work, and the United States has shown itself to be an imperfect partner. The UN will never be a viable organisation until such time as the United States decides to be a true, genuine member of that organisation.

And the imperfect partner at this time sends a most imperfect ambassador to the United Nations in John Bolton.

Well that was done on purpose. John Bolton’s soul task in going to the United Nations is to destroy the United Nations. He’s done everything in his power to do that, in terms of hijacking the reform agenda, he’s already confronting the Security Council, calling it an impotent organisation because of its refusal to stand up to Syria, to Iran, basically for its refusal to rubber-stamp the US agenda, he was picked on purpose, this was not an accident. People should not give him or the administration that appointed him the benefit of the doubt — he is a dire risk, not only to the United Nations but to the whole notion of international and security. As an American, I view him as a risk to my country, because he is destroying the framework of international law, as imperfect as it is, that has held the world together since the end of the second world war.

And he was not actually appointed by congress but by the president directly.

Again, another indication of just how flawed this character is. He would not have been appointed by congress. The advice and consent of congress was sought, and congress was prepared to reject this man, so the president took advantage of a bureaucratic manoeuvre known as a ‘recess appointment’, and put John Bolton in place.

You mentioned Iran there just briefly. You did make some claims earlier this year about the US’s intention to invade Iran.

Again, I make no claims, I only highlight stated policy objectives. Condoleeza Rice just finished testifying before the congress of the United States a month ago where she said that not only should we be prepared to stay in Iraq for another ten years, but that congress needs to be prepared for the eventuality of conflict with nations like Syria and Iran. One would have expected Congress to jump up and scream and shout, instead they said “surely you’ll advice us before the president undertakes such actions”. She responded “I will do nothing that ties the Commander-in-Chief’s hands when it comes to freedom of military action”.

The President has linked Iran as part of the so-called axis of evil, the president has stated his intention to change the nature of the regime in Iran, administration officials have testified before congress about the policy of the United States when it comes to the middle east, that is a policy of regional transformation, calling for regime change in a number of nations, and then you have the actions that are undertaken for instance the CIA’s taking under the wing of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition group that used to work for Saddam Hussein but now works for the CIA to carry out intelligence actions and sabotage bombings, direct action, inside Iran today. We’re overflying Iranian territory with unmanned aerial vehicles, and the US airforce has been placed on notice to be prepared to bomb Iran as of June 2005, when instructed to do so by the president.

I’m not making any of this up, it’s all part of the public record. The problem is people are shocked when I happen to put it all together and run it into a sentence or a paragraph, because nobody’s paying attention. People believe because we’re neck-deep in a quagmire of our own making in Iraq, that this administration would not have the ability or the desire to move on into Iran or Syria.

Now that we can use words such as ‘quagmire’ when we’re talking about Iraq, do you advocate withdrawal? Does this initial debate about weapons of mass destruction still matter in terms of the state of Iraq now, after what the invasion has done to it. Is the responsible thing to do now to stay there and fix the mess, or to get out?

Well there’s two issues there, one is does the issue of weapons of mass destruction still matter? Of course it does, especially if you live in a representative democracy that claims to believe in the rule of law. We went to war illegally. This is an illegitimate occupation. I know in a couple of weeks I may not be able to say that in Australia without fear of being arrested for sedition, but the fact of the matter is, the invasion of Iraq was an illegal invasion violating international law, and the occupation is illegitimate. What makes it illegal and illegitimate is the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and as societies we must reflect on the nature of our involvement in this conflict. Will we accept our leaders lying to us, misrepresenting information? This was not an intelligence failure, this wasn’t “oops, we got it wrong”. The intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Israel, France, Russia and others knew that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed, they knew that the case that the Bush administration made about massive stockpiles was an exaggerated case, a false case, a deceptive case, a misleading case, and yet they went to war anyway, so yes we must pay attention to WMD.

But you’re right in pointing out that that is not so much a factor in what’s going on today in Iraq. Do I believe in withdrawal? Immediate withdrawal. I view Iraq as a nation on fire and the fuel that feeds that flame is the presence of American troops. The only way you’re ever going to have a hope of putting that fire out is to pull the fuel from the flame — get the troops out. We are the problem in Iraq, we are not the solution. But we need to recognise that withdrawing the American troops is not cutting and running, it’s just a recognition that the unilateral application of military force, the solution is the multilateral application of diplomacy. And this is what we need to start thinking about when we speak of coming up with a solution in Iraq. How do we get Iraq’s neighbours? How do we get the international community to come together and contain and mitigate the inevitable violence that will ensue when American troops come out?

It’s not as though there’s no violence going on right now, and when we pull the American troops out, the violence will continue, it may even expand. Unfortunately that’s the tragic consequence of invading Iraq, removing Saddam Hussein and thereby removing the glue that held an Iraqi nation together. There is chaos and anarchy, and unfortunately the only way Iraq is ever going to solve its problems is to let this play out until one side emerges dominant over the other. But that doesn’t mean that we pull out and have no checks and balances in place. Unlike Vietnam where we withdrew, the Vietnamese war didn’t follow us home. If we cut and run from Iraq and we don’t have a system in place to contain and mitigate this violence, it will follow us. Not only to the United States but to Europe, to Australia, to elsewhere. And we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.

On a personal level, you’ve been speaking out against the American government for a long time now, about the policies that have led to the situation in Iraq. In 2000 when your film came out, Richard Butler, essentially said that it was propaganda, and he said your allegations were completely false. That’s to be expected, but have you found it a difficult process, what you’re doing? Is it a dangerous one?

It’s not dangerous. Danger is going to war, danger is running into a burning building. That’s danger.
Is it difficult? Of course it’s difficult. Is it sometimes personally inconvenient? Of course. But you know, history is going to judge me properly. I spoke truth to power, and I did the right thing. Richard Butler is going to be hung by his own words. It’s absurd today to listen to what Richard Butler said in 2000 knowing full well that he knew what the true situation was, but he didn’t have the courage to stand up and say the right thing. History will judge him differently. I’m very comfortable with how I will be judged by history — yes, it’s difficult, but, you know, it’s becoming easier. Because as time passes and people reflect on what I did say and the stance I took, they know that a) it was a morally correct stance, and b) it was a factually correct stance. The longer this debacle goes on, the more solid my position becomes.

Counter Service: Jason Schwartzman talks Shopgirl

2005-12-06T10:16:44Z

In the pocket of my recollection that’s reserved for my childhood cinematic memories, it’s amazing how stubbornly and consistently a gurning white-haired loon can be found running about causing havoc. For me, and probably for a generation, Steve Martin was the movies. Whether it was the over-stressed dad of Parenthood or the useless not really wannabe hero of The Three Amigos, or perhaps when I was a little older the highly strung fireman of Roxanne or the jerk of The Jerk, he’s there, causing mayhem. A few years ago a flatmate introduced me to some of his extremely coked-up standup from the early 80s, and it is unwatchably brilliant, particularly his frenetic banjo solos.
Strange, then, to see the current incarnation of Steve Martin, coming off of a decade of flops (nothing after the criminally underrated LA Story has been worth watching) as a fake-tanned highbrow ‘witty’ writer of novellas, a man who writes for The New Yorker instead of Mad magazine. Shopgirl is a sombre character study, an attempt to tell a story more about emotion than action. It is generally the tale of an older man (Martin) who whisks a much younger girl (Claire Danes) off her sales assistant feet, and how insistent disconnection and distance can sometimes really mess with what love might be. Truth told, it’s mostly an indulgent ego piece for Martin, and would fail miserably were it not for the ever-amazing Claire Danes, and the boy who plays her competing love interest and comic relief, Jason Schwartzman.
If Martin is an idol of my childhood, Jason Schwartzman is the idol of my geeky early twenties. His turn as Max Fischer in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore gave him a place in the hearts of geeks and freaks the world over. The son of Talia Shire, and a cousin to the Coppola family, he is Hollywood royalty once removed, but exists in almost purely indie spheres. He’s worked with David O. Russell and Sofia Coppola, and was the drummer in Phantom Planet, and is thus kinda responsible for the theme tune to The OC.
Shopgirl is probably Schwartzman’s highest profile role to date. It’s not often you get to interview somebody whose poster has been gracing your wall for what seems like forever, but the inner geek in me soldiered on. Possibly the most genuinely nice movie guy I have ever interviewed—and I’ve had a few—he revealed that even in the giddy heights Hollywood, the 80s oeuvre of Martin meant just as much in the Shire/Schwartzman/Coppola households as it did in mine.
I guess you must have grown up in the same 80s that I did, in which Steve Martin is a massive memory of your childhood?
More than a memory. I did, I grew up in the eighties and my family, what we would do every weekend is go see films, and that’s how we would bond and spend time together. Because we were all kids, the only movies we were allowed to go see were comedies, and Steve Martin was basically in all of them. Not only did he bring me joy and my family joy in the theatre, but I’ve got so many great memories of the drive home from the movie doing lines from the film and making each other laugh, and renting the movies, and watching them on Saturday nights with my brothers.
These are the great memories. I remember, from Three Amigos, me and my two older brothers, we had that whole little dance memorised, and we would come and do that for our parents while they were eating dinner, we would do it in our boxer shorts or whatever and make them laugh. Those are just priceless memories, and to me that’s what moviemaking’s about, it’s almost less about the movie and more about the car ride home, and a family trying to make each other laugh.

]]> So were you concerned at all, with these great memories of The Three Amigos, that you’d then be making a film with the aging, stern, serious, Chekhov-esque Steve Martin?
No, because I know how good he is, because I know he’s an amazing man, an amazing comedian and an amazing dramatist. I felt like I was in great hands and I wasn’t nervous to get this Steve Martin, because it’s all Steve Martin, and it all comes from the same place, which is his heart.
I was just nervous, not because of any Chekhov Steve Martin, but because of how much he means to me. I was more starstruck than anything.
Was this obviously a very personal film for him? He’s the producer, the writer, the novelist, the star. It must be quite a presence a work with on a film like this.
Without question it was personal, he put so much love and time into it and wrote the book then thought about adapting it, and adapted it, produced it, starred in it, it meant so much to him, you definitely want to make him proud. But one of the incredible things about him was that despite how personal it was and how much time he spent with it, was how trusting he was in all of us, and especially in Anand Tucker the director, giving him the piece and saying “here you go, this is yours now.”
And giving you the responsibility of being the funny guy in a Steve Martin film…
Yeah, well at least trying to be funny. That was a hard pill to swallow, that one. The idea of me trying to be funny in a movie that also starred Steve Martin is like Keith Moon asking you to play drums on his record. Shouldn’t you do that?
Tell me about the character you play, Jeremy.
He basically is this young amp stenciller, which isn’t a real job, because I asked Steve Martin, I said “so I’m playing an amplifier stenciller? so, that’s.. is that a real thing?”. And he’s like “nope, made it up”. He’s a young guy who meets Claire Danes character in a laundromat and basically kind of falls for her. His part of the movie is in the beginning not getting it right with her and making a fool of himself, and then it’s his growth apart from her while he goes on tour with a band and listens to a bunch of self-help tapes, as he says in the movie, he reads a lot of books on tape.
The character himself, it was basically the most fun I’ve ever had playing a character because he speaks from his heart and he only knows what’s in front of him. He doesn’t overthink anything and he speaks oftentimes without thinking about it, or the repercussions of his words might have on people around him. He’s almost a kid, like how a kid can say something like that hurts your feelings or is offensive but you never hate the kid because you know he’s sincere and doesn’t know any better. I think that the character I play in the movie is a little bit like that, because he often says the wrong thing or is sometimes neglectful or inconsiderate but he’s saved by the idea that he’s not an ill-hearted person, that he is sincere and that he does really care for Claire Danes’ character.
Claire Danes, she’s an actress who seems to bring some kind of effortless integrity and watchability no matter what she’s in—Terminator 3 she just made entirely watchable. Now she’s a friend of yours, but what’s she like to work with?
I wouldn’t even call it working with her, I just call it being with her, she is effortless and she has dignity. You know, she’s an intelligent person, I think that comes through in all of her performances, she’s a good heart, and I think everyone can relate to her, man or woman, because she’s not afraid to feel emotions in front of people as an actress and she’s brave.
I must say that I had this incredible script Steve Martin wrote, that’s almost, you know how you can have a blueprint for a house, this is almost like a blueprint for a person, and then Anand Tucker, the director and I tried to kind of build that person and make it three dimensional, but I must say that the real Jeremy came to life when they yelled action and I looked in her eyes. Things started happening that I could never have planned on happening, weird tics and physical things started to happening from being with her in the scenes, that just shows you how great an natural she is, it just brought it out of me. The character was almost like invisible ink inside of my veins and she was like lemon juice and brought it out. She just has it, and I’m just blown away by how amazing she is as an actress. I don’t know how she does it, I think she’s just natural, I think she has a good heart.
You’ve worked with some iconic indie directors of the last ten years, Wes Anderson, David O. Russell and such. Here you’re working with Anand Tucker, who’s really only made one major film (Hilary and Jackie) and that was seven years ago. Tell me about him.
Well I couldn’t have made the movie without that guy, I tell you. He’s like… you should meet him, I mean, he’s incredible. He has so much energy, he’s so sweet and kind. And his style of directing is really wonderful for me because he’s a gentle guy, and he’s kind of unfraid as a director, he’ll try. He’ll try it. That’s his kind of thing, ‘let’s just try it’. He tried to make a movie about feelings, and that’s a tough thing to do because feelings are very abstract, as you know, and so I don’t know how he did it but he had it all kind of figured out. He wanted to make a melodrama, that’s what he told me, and I was down for that.
How Jeremy pops in and out through the film, he’s there and then he’s not there, and then he’s there, we get thirty minutes of Steve and Claire and then Jeremy comes in, that’s kind of what it was like for me shooting the movie because the way the schedule worked out. I would come in, I would do a scene with Claire, I would leave for a week, I would come back in a couple of days later, do three scenes, and so even though I had read the script, I was very unaware of what Claire and Steve were shooting, and what their chemistry was like.
You don’t even actually share any scenes with Steve Martin.
No, I don’t. So I was kind of out of the loop, just like Jeremy is in the movie. I didn’t know what was happening, and so for me I was a little bit concerned, like I don’t know how big to make the Jeremy character, how do I keep him from being over the top or goofy and how do I keep him from undercutting what Claire and Steve are working towards.
If they do these really emotional and truthful scenes and I come on and just make an ass of myself, it kind of erases everything, and I trusted Anand, because he was there every day, and he did have the overview, and he knew what he was getting with Steve and Claire, and he knew what their chemistry was like, and he was great at giving me the correct dose of Jeremy, like he was great at saying this is how much we should do in this scene of that guy, and I trusted him. And that trust is all you need when you work with someone, that’s what saves you.
You also get to be roadie for the great Mark Kozelek in this film.
Oh my god, isn’t he the best?
What was with that, what was he doing there?
I don’t know what he was doing there. Anand loves him, and I love him, it’s cool because I get to play a young guy who goes on tour with a band who admires a singer and is inspired by a singer, and that’s not hard to do when you’re with that guy, because I think he’s great and I look up to him very much as a musician and as a guy.
Yeah, I saw him last year in Perth, it kind of struck me he was a little bit of a grumpy sort which surprised me, but it shouldn’t, because he wrote some of the most beautiful and grumpy songs I’ve ever heard.
Maybe he was just having a tough night, I found him to be super nice and sweet, and just awesome. Between takes, he was playing Red House Painters songs, and solo songs, and it was great.
Are you still Max Fischer to most people, and if you are, do you mind?
Oh yeah, I mean, that character and that movie and that moment, that changed my life completely in the most positive way. It’s almost like my life was an hourglass and right when that movie came, they turned it over. It was a point of departure for me from the rest of my life, and how can I hate that?
It gave me not only that wonderful experience but the friendship of Wes Anderson, who’s basically my best friend to this day. So without that, I wouldn’t be in Sydney right now talking to you.
And having worked with the Steve Martins, Bill Murrays, Dustin Hoffmans and Al Pacinos of the world.
I know, so how could I ever turn my back on an amazing thing?
But you did walk away from being a drummer in a potentially successful band at the time to do that, do you miss that?
I didn’t walk away to go act, I can tell you that honestly. When I left the band I wasn’t making any movies, I was having actually a tough time with that, and I just left because it had been basically ten years, and I just needed to move on for myself. The decision to leave the band was a tough one to make because I was going to basically be leaving a situation where I was playing music with my friends. That was hard. What made it okay was that I wasn’t turning my back on music. Music I could always make and still do and will always have and will always be there for me. So that’s okay, and I still, and I must play music every day, and try to write, and I need that just like people need to eat food, it’s part of my life and part of my daily routine. But yeah, it was tough to have to say “hey guys, I can’t play with you anymore”. That was sad.
Tell me a little bit about Marie Antoinette just quickly.
Well I haven’t seen it, and the process and the product of making a movie are two different things, so it could be many things, but I do know that what we shot was a very intimate tale of decadence of power.

Bun Fight

2005-09-01T11:19:50Z

As silver jubilees go, this one was something of a fizzer. In the 50 years since former milkshake-mixer salesman Ray Kroc had witnessed the future flipping on a sizzling hot San Bernardino grill, the company had never met anything quite so thorny as these two activists that now seemed permanently embedded in their side.

For the figures standing outside the McDonald’s store in Central London where their journey has began some two decades earlier, 2005 had finally brought vindication. After 20 long years grilling the burger giant. Helen Steel, a trained electrician, bar-worker and former gardener, and Dave Morris, an unemployed single father and former postman, had just pulled off what has been called the greatest legal and public relations victory against corporate power in living memory.

When McDonald’s first set their clownish eyes on the gardener and the postman, shiny new golden arches were towering over street corners in Thailand, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Venezuela, Italy, Mexico, and Aruba. McBlimp, the world’s largest airship, was flying high over New York City. The counters beneath the arches marked off 55 billion served. Ronald McDonald was more recognisable than Father Christmas.

In 1985, Britain was rumbling with political discontent. Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her powers, the Falklands were not yet forgotten, and the miners were just going back to work after the violent strikes of the past year. Morris was among a group of about 20 activists with London Greenpeace (no relation to the international organisation) who were looking to address growing concern with exploitation of people and planet by multinational corporations.

The two maintain that the real target was never McDonald’s itself. It is the system that is sick, explains Morris on the line from his home in Tottenham, North London:

“London Greenpeace brought together the views of a whole range of different movements that weren’t necessarily working together-the labour movement, environmentalists, animal welfare campaigners, nutritionists—in one leaflet focussing on McDonald’s as a symbol, not just calling for reforms of McDonald’s but as a symbol of a wider system, McWorld, and what it’s doing to our lives and our planet.”

The six-page leaflet, What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?, seemed harmless enough. It was rather poorly written and made claims that many would say were nothing new. Amongst other points, it stated that junk food makes you fat and may cause heart disease, that their advertising exploited children, that beef was sourced from cruel slaughterhouses, packaging caused litter and damage to the environment and that staff suffered from low wages and a lack of unionisation. It was produced to coincide with an international day of action against the company in October.

]]> Some five years later, five members of London Greenpeace were issued with writs by McDonald’s, demanding both a retraction and an apology. Morris and Steel (who joined the group in 1987) also learned that new members of their group whom they had befriended were actually spies planted by the corporation to gather facts for the legal action.

During the 1980s, McDonald’s had threatened to sue at least fifty British publications and organisations, including Channel 4, the Sunday Times and The Guardian. All had given the requisite retractions and apologies. In Britain (and Australia), defendants in libel suits have no recourse to legal aid. When an individual is sued by a corporation, they must pay for their own defence. The burden of proof also rests entirely with the defendant—in this case, McDonald’s need not prove the statements to be damaging or false; rather, the defendants must prove them to be true.

Three of the five eventually backed down and apologised, rather than take on the burden of defending the writs. Helen and Dave would do no such thing. They would defend themselves in court.

“When we said we weren’t going to apologise, I think they still thought they would be able to wipe the floor with us,” recalls Helen Steel. “The advice we got at the time was that libel laws are stacked in favour of the rich and powerful and we would never be able to comply with all the pre-trial procedures, just because they’re so complex, but we hung on in there.”

McDonald’s sent forth an army of lawyers through the golden arches, towards these two pests, forecasting three to four weeks of litigation at most. The trial that would come to be known as McLibel began on June 28, 1994, and ran over 313 full days, finally grinding to an exhausted halt in June 1997 as proud new holder of the record for the longest-running trial in English legal history.

In the British legal system, only primary evidence from factual or expert witnesses can be considered as proof. Secondary evidence such as a newspaper report or a technical or scientific publication is considered to be hearsay, and must be sworn to by an expert. There is no defence of “reasonable belief” which would have allowed Steel and Morris to rely on published fact or common knowledge to defend their claims—-only testimony in person or by sworn affidavit could be considered as admissible. The two defendants, one an unwaged single parent, the other working part time in a bar, would have to use their own money and the contributions of well-wishers to pay all the legal costs and bring in expert witnesses. The burden of proof on Morris and Steel was so great that the case became a virtual public tribunal examining McDonald’s corporate practise.

“We had to prove to the judge, as litigants in person, that a high-fat, high-salt diet was linked to heart disease and cancer,” recalls a bemused Morris. “The World Health Organisation had just produced a book which was a complete analysis of all scientific opinion on the links between nutrition and chronic disease, and we couldn’t rely on it. Sixty days of the case were spent conducting an expert tribunal to convince the judge that the World Health Organisation knew what it was talking about!

“In America, in a libel case, if a matter is in the public domain, you can rely on that for evidence,” he continues. “We had fifteen different reports and newspaper cuttings about McDonald’s employees being sacked or being employed when they were under 14. In Philadelphia, we had 450 breaches of employment law in one store! But in Britain, we had to actually bring McDonald’s workers to court to try to prove to the judge’s satisfaction that there were low wages and poor conditions.”

The trial had given rise to an international support campaign, and the McSpotlight website-a revolutionary use of the then-fledgling world wide web to collect thousands of documents on the organisation. The site, which still runs to this day, became a blueprint for almost every major activist site that has followed. And the campaign and global attention only grew.

In the end, after an appeal, the court found partly for McDonald’s, but conceded that several of the pamphlet’s points were true, specifically the claims of low wages, deceptive promotion of McDonald’s food as ‘nutritious’, exploitation of children in advertising and responsibility for cruelty and animals. Despite this, Morris and Steel were ordered to pay #40,000 damages (an amount the company has never attempted to collect), but the real damage had been self-inflicted, and the McLibel Two, as the world’s media had come to know them, were far from done.

“It mushroomed,” says Morris. “Leaflets that were being given out in thousands when we were sued were being given out in millions by the end of the case, all over the world. It was one of the rivers running into the sea that would become the global anti-capitalist movement. It was a global campaign looking fundamentally at what corporations and governments are doing in the world, and calling for real alternatives.”

Buoyed by the international movement, Morris and Steel, described by one commentator as force-reared lawyers, were ready for another day in court, and this time they were on the attack. Their target was the British libel system itself. Their destination was the European Court of Human Rights, and the argument was that their right to a fair trial and freedom of expression had been breached.

“This was because of the complex, unfair and oppressive nature of UK libel law,” explains Steel. “There was an imbalance of resources between us and McDonald’s-they were estimated to have spent ten million pounds on the trial, we managed to raise about 35,000 pounds; there was no legal aid…and we were denied a jury trial.

“UK libel laws had failed to protect the public’s right to freedom of speech. We argued that multinationals shouldn’t be able to sue for libel, as they’ve got such power and influence in society and yet no accountability whatsoever. It’s vital that the public have the right to make criticisms of them.”

In February, in the build-up to McDonald’s jubilee, the European Court found in favour of Morris and Steel and declared that their right to a fair trial, and freedom of speech, had been breached. But Morris and Steel are not entirely celebratory, despite their immense final victory. Things, they claim, were a little bit fudged. The Court ruled 100 per cent in their favour, but the lack of specificity in the verdict means it does not directly address their statements on the right of multinationals to sue, or for reasonable belief to be a defence. As a result, the long term effects of the victory are unclear. But Morris feels that the fight has been worthwhile:

“The battle for freedom of speech had already been won long before we even got to the European Court,” he explains, “The mass defiance campaign had spread round the whole world, and effectively turned the tables on McDonald’s in the public mind and in the court of public opinion.”

Steel agrees that the victory of their epic legal struggle was not necessarily in a judgement, but in the movements it had stirred amongst grass roots throughout the planet:

“McDonald’s realised that they were on a hiding to nothing, and to try and get us jailed or anybody else jailed for distributing leaflets would be pointless. Now other companies have been warned not to do a McLibel and not to end up in a similar trial with all their dirty washing being exposed to the world.”

When Helen and Dave first fell under McDonald’s gaze, anti-corporate protest was a niche populated mainly by anarchists, like them, and those on the far reaches of the political spectrum. “What’s wrong with McDonald’s?” was not a question on the tips of many tongues in the hyper-consumptive surrounds of the 1980s, so much as “why are my fries lukewarm and soggy?” But the last 20 years have seen fundamental changes.

Books such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation have turned the table on the practises of the fast food industry, in the same way Upton Sinclair did a century before in the slaughterhouses. Morgan Spurlock’s film Super Size Me gained notoriety worldwide, forcing McDonald’s Australia to erect posters in its stores rebutting the film’s shocking evidence of what a diet of pure McDonald’s might do to a healthy body. McDonald’s had fallen so low in public opinion it was actually closing restaurants.

Before the trial began, McDonald’s could never have realised they were kicking the nest of a quietly growing anti-globalisation movement. The McLibel trial saw an evolution in global activism through newly democratised means of communication, and a fundamental change in corporate PR practise from which many litigious corporations may never entirely recover.

“We’re just the tip of a very large iceberg,” says Morris, whose only experience with McDonald’s food was a couple of excessively sugary milkshakes in the early 1970s. “We couldn’t have fought the case without so many people helping out in so many different ways, coming forward as witnesses, doing research, sending in money, even helping me with babysitting.

“All around the world, people were stepping up the protests to show that if one group is attacked, people will spring up to spread those ideas everywhere.”

The story of the case has been dramatised on British television (with Julia Sawalha playing Helen), and turned into a cult documentary by Franny Armstrong that has screened around the world. It has also been told in a book, McLibel, by The Guardian’s Environment editor John Vidal. Morris and Steel’s lives will be defined for many by this one epic battle, and the effects of the case will continue to reverberate well into the future. However, for the still unwaged Morris, secretary of the Federation of Residents’ Associations in the London borough of Haringey, it is time to get back to what really matters.

“I never chose to get into a battle with McDonald’s,” he explains. “They were the ones that decided to try to silence their critics. It was a battle that we had no choice but to fight. For me it was a sidetrack-my main activity has always been in my local community in a whole range of different campaigns and issues.

“It’s about being involved with organisations, struggles and issues that everybody can play an equal part in,” he says. “The McDonald’s case was a very unusual once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

That opportunity came with a demand for a dedication nobody could have expected when the writs were first served, but the community of support around Helen and Dave supported them through the long dark years in court, as they had to put the lives they had planned on hold.

“It was very dominating and exhausting and stressful,” says Morris. “We, and the people supporting us, had to focus almost exclusively on it. We had to work really hard for a number of years to ensure that we could rise to the occasion. McDonald’s effectively had declared war on their critics, and we just felt an obligation to respond all out.

“The stakes were very high. It was a mountain to climb, but people climb mountains.”

Morris and Steel had been friends, but never a couple, for many years before the case. If you’re about to launch into a 20 year battle with another person, Morris advises, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re not going to destroy each other in the process:

“It helped that we had known each other and worked together on different issues prior to McDonald’s,” he says. “We lived in the same area of North London, and at one time we had shared a house with other people as well.

“We had also worked on allotments [market gardens] together, so we knew each other pretty well. It was a lot of strain on us-two is certainly easier than one but you have to make sure you get on and have a good working relationship.”

Being an unwaged single father, Morris found particular demands in trying to balance the case with caring for his son. But family, friends and neighbours rallied around.

“People responded magnificently,” he says. “They were picking up my son from school and bringing him home. We had people offering to take him away on holiday when they were going away with their kids for a week, so that I could focus on the case. All of us involved knew that something really special was happening. We just had to keep going somehow.”

Helen and Dave, two activists from the other side of nowhere, Greater London, refused to bow to a multinational for the better part of 20 years. They would not accept a reality where those with money could crush the poor and the angry with little more than a letter, and they stood their ground.

Now, they return, both unwaged, to a quieter life campaigning on traffic calming and the preservation of local parks. The gloves may be off, finally, but a global movement has picked them up, and won’t be putting them down any time soon.

Shane Meadows: A Room for Romeo Brass

2002-10-10T06:15:49Z

Since the release of Shane Meadows’ debut TwentyFourSeven in 1997, when the director was a mere 24 years old, British critics have anointed him as the natural successor to Mike Leigh. The harsh black and white tale of misspent youth and boxing clubs in Nottinghamshire, told with a wicked sense of humour, had him earmarked for greatness.

The film’s complete commercial failure, soul destroying for any other director, now sees Meadows edging his way back onto cinema screens two years on with A Room for Romeo Brass, a glorious and hilarious paean to the simplicity of youth and the bond shared with best mates.

“At the time that it happens, you’re walking around with a dark cloud over your head wondering why people won’t watch a black and white film,” Meadows says. “But what actually came out of the other side is that I never would have made Romeo Brass had it succeeded enormously.

“It would have sent me over the edge mentally, I probably would have ended up growing my hair out, dying it blonde and calling myself Shane Warhol,” he laughs.
Meadows and co-writer Paul Fraser stumbled upon Romeo Brass almost by accident, after toying with some more novel ideas to follow TwentyFourSeven.
“I went away to write a Western about group of guys from the Midlands who went over to the Wild West in the Gold Rush — people from Derby and Stoke on Trent,” he says.

“Paul Fraser and I, with the critical acclaim that we got from TwentyFourSeven, had a bit of a free reign to go away and write a new film. We were sat there one night trying to write this Western idea, and just talking about our childhood and how amazing it was that these two kids who had lived next door to each other and grown up together ended up working in the film business.”

Romeo Brass emerged as a largely autobiographical tale of the two writers’ childhood friendship, and the cruel things that kids do in the name of friendship, played out by the thinly veiled characters of Romeo (Andrew Shim) and Knocks (Ben Marshall).

“One day Paul had a friend back from school,” Meadows says, recalling one of the pair’s more surreal misadventures. “When your mate brings home somebody else, suddenly they don’t want to hang around with you, because they’ve got their new friend. They were playing badminton in their front garden, and wouldn’t let me join in.

“I went in the house and I watched The Outlaw Josey Wales, because me and my dad always had loads of Westerns on the shelf that we’d recorded off telly. When I saw the plight that Josey Wales had been through when the American rebels had burned his house down, I decided that I’d been treated in the same way. I got my air rifle, went outside and said eif you don’t let me play, I’m going to shoot you’. He said ewell go on then, I bet you daren’t’, and I shot him straight in the stomach.”

Having been banned from seeing Fraser for almost a year by his irate mother, Meadows eventually fell in with the wrong crowd (represented in the film through Paddy Considine’s deliciously surreal and menacing Morell) and felt a painful shove into adulthood. It was Fraser’s unquestioning decision to forgive Meadows for all he had done wrong that inspired the film.

“When you grow older, you forget, and you lose the mentality that you have at that age. We realised that if we didn’t tell a story about this now, it would probably pass off, and if we ever made a film about childhood, it would be the kind of ‘golden haze’ movie that I didn’t want anything to do with,” he says.

“I wanted to tell a story of truth, because childhood is painful and difficult, and it’s funny. It’s a very organic process being a kid.”

Phillip Noyce & Ningali Lawford: Rabbit-Proof Fence

2002-03-12T08:57:29Z

The early films of director Phillip Noyce, such as ‘Newsfront’ and ‘Heatwave’, have left an indelible mark on Australia’s cultural landscape. After the success of 1989 thriller ‘Dead Calm’ propelled him into the Hollywood stratosphere, the past decade has seen him remodelled as an established blockbuster man with such behemoths as ‘Patriot Games’ and ‘The Bone Collector’ to his name.

A decade is a long time away from home in the belly of the machine, however. 2002 sees Noyce return to his homeland to tell a story of the stolen generation and, in the sweeping outback brushstrokes of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, create what may just be one of the most important Australian films in decades.

“I was contracted to make a $220 million adaptation of Tom Clancy’s ‘The Sum of All Fears’, which was to star Harrison Ford,” recalls an exhausted Noyce, putting the finishing touches to the film just a week before its first screening. “It was to be the third in the series of Clancy novels, and Harrison was having doubts about doing another one. I was holed up in a New York hotel working with a writer and trying to convince Harrison to commit.

“The ridiculousness of the situation finally got to meoI woke up one morning and thought I’m in the wrong country, I’m in the wrong city, I should go back to Australia and make ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’. The daunting nature of the blockbuster, where in many ways you are directing traffic as much as directing, just got me downothis film was an antidote to the Hollywood machine.”

‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ tells the true story of Molly Craig (Everlyn Sampi), a young Aboriginal girl stolen from her family in Jigalong, Western Australia, in 1931. Sent to the Moore River settlement by the white authorities, “for their own good”, the girls were early victims of a government policy which the nation still struggles to come to terms with to this day. Along with her younger sister and cousin (Tianna Sansbury and Laura Monaghan), she escapes the settlement and sets off on a 1500-mile journey, pursued by the authorities, knowing little except that if they follow the rabbit-proof fence, which separates the East of Australia from the West, they will find their way home again.

After dragging renowned Australian cinematographer and ex-Merchant Mariner Christopher Doyle from “under a barstool”, the greatest challenge Noyce would face in the production of the film was finding and preparing three young Aboriginal girls to carry the film, and to draw natural emotions from their performances.

“Pretty early on in the casting process, we realised that we were going to need to look in the hinterlands for kids that were more in contact with traditional lifestyle,” he recalls. “They were cast because they were natural performers, but I could never hope for them to absorb all of the technical needs of film acting in just two weeks of preparation and seven weeks of shooting. Each of them was typecast according to their natural similarities to the characters that they were playing.

“Everlyn Sampi, who plays Molly, the eldest and the leader of the group, is herself very proud and singular minded and she is a determined young woman who doesn’t like being told what to do. She brings all of those characteristics to her portrayal of Molly without even being told what to do.”

“Everlyn was a bit of a bitch here and there,” laughs actress Ningali Lawford, her on-screen mother, “but she was fantastic. Everlyn is in the middle, between a teenager and a little girl, so there’s all that stuff she has to go through, it’s a nasty age.”

Sampi is the spiritual and emotional centre of the film, a radiant screen presence seemingly nonplussed by the gravity of starring alongside such screen legends as David Gulpilil (eWalkabout’, ‘Crocodile Dundee’) and Kenneth Branagh. Off-screen, however, it was a different story.

“She left the set many times,” Noyce admits, “but that was okay because she was playing the part of a kid who didn’t want to be locked up and told what to do. The more that she related to me as a de facto A.O. Neville [the infamous chief eprotector’ of Aborigines] the better. I was the authority figure in her life who was telling her that she had to do things because they were for her own good, and sometimes she was willing to believe me and often not. That was fine, because she used that to fuel her performance.”

The most confronting scene in ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ is the harrowing abduction of the children from the Jigalong settlement, which was, for Noyce, an outpouring of rage, fear and shock that strikes at the very core of our nation’s history.

“Two of the children and all of the indigenous adult performers had family members who had been taken,” he says. “They have grown up with these stories in their memories and it was almost like all the pain of 200-plus years of contact and confrontation between two very different cultures came out in the re-enactment of that scene. It was like it was all vomited up.”

Lawford, perhaps best known to Western Australians as the face of the Water Corporation and for her work with the Yirra Yaakin theatre company, confronted deeply personal emotions as she found her character fighting with the authorities, searching for some comprehension of an incomprehensible action.

“My father was taken away, along with his brothers, and I was just putting myself in my grandmother’s position,” she recalls. “I was there, it didn’t become a set for me, it became reality. My mum was there as welloit was really sad for her. We all cried, everybody on set cried.”

Despite the inherently Australian nature of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, and its great significance as a long-overdue look at a dark chapter of Australian history, Noyce believes it has a reach far beyond our shores.

“The story has a special significance to Australians,” he says, “but the storyOeis a universal one, and I’m sure the film will play on an emotional level everywhere that it is shown. All of the political issues are embodied in what is a very, very simple, emotion-driven storyothree girls get taken from their families and incarcerated, they escape, and they struggle to get home.”

Beyond the performances of its actors, and the power of its story, perhaps the greatest thing to take from ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’, as Lawford testifies, is simply that the time has come when its story can be told.

“I’m lucky that it’s not a policy now in my time, with my children,” she says.

“It is a story, and a warning, but it is real. It will put light into that part of our dark history.”

Low

2002-02-11T09:06:03Z

Low, a band for whom the word ‘slowcore’ had to be invented, sound like nothing else you’ve ever heard. The lingering tempo and mournful lyrics of husband and wife duo Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker paint a sweeping emotional canvas where the real heartbreak is found in the moments between notes, where the empty spaces swallow you whole. After a week of missed calls to their hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, Hype tracked down Sparhawk in Melbourne via the mobile phone of their ex-Perth labelmates Sodastream, and asked him where Low’s unique sound originated.

“We were fairly young when we started the band, and there were certain influences that we were pulling from, but it became evident right away that this was a new thing that not a lot of people had done before,” he explains. “There were some elements going on that hadn’t been explored very much — mostly it was the spiritual, transcendent thing that can happen when you explore minimalism and repetition, quietness or subtleness.

“A slow pace rips a song open and opens it up to a bit more, I don’t want to say drama, but it seems like a lot of we do is stripping things down to a very simple language in the hope that in doing so, whatever you’re trying to say will be a little bit more powerful.

“At the same time, you’re taking a risky road in that most people in passing are just going to hear something quiet and think that there’s nothing going on here, I’m not going to listen and invest my mind. But we try to make something there for people who do listen.”

Low’s last two albums, ‘Secret Name’ and ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’, have been produced by the legendary Steve Albini, a man known more for his mastery of fuzz than for Low’s brand of sparse minimalism.

“Steve seems to work at the same pace and ethic as we do, which is usually pretty fast,” explains Sparhawk. “The Auteurs record he did was very lush. He is just really good at capturing sound, that’s why a lot of those harder records have such an edge. If that amp is screaming, he’s going to pick that sound up and get it on tape. There’s an art to that.”

Their last long-player opens with Sparhawk and Parker in duet, crying “when they found your body, giant X’s on your eyes”, and from there delves into a sombre, dark lyrical world perfectly in tune with the sprawl of the music. Sparhawk claims that the band’s reputation for serious, dark songwriting stems from a desire for honesty.

“It’s kind of a personal thing and I’m pretty picky about what I’ll let myself say. We’ve always felt that whatever is said is going to have to be something you really mean, because you are going to have to get up in front of people and say it. I don’t think our lyrics are terribly negative, but they are serious.”

On Low’s first visit to Australia, Sparhawk admits to being tentative about the size of their audiences on the other side of the world.

“We get correspondence once in a while, but it is always hard to tell until you come and do a show and people show up,” he says. “We always expect twenty people to show up, so it’s nice when everything goes well. Once in a while, maybe thirty people will come.”

Their gig at the Watershed on February 14 gives Low an opportunity to play in a small-scale music festival, but Sparhawk is openly relieved that they aren’t faced with a mega-festival situation.

“If we’re thrown on the bill of a huge music festival, we don’t go so well,” he laughs. “It’s Huey Lewis and the News, and now here’s Low! Well that was fun, bring on the Red Hot Chilli Peppers!”

As serious and slow as their reputation claims them to be, Low have, of late, begun to rock out a little more. On their wonderful ‘Christmas’ EP, one could have almost accused them of being, well, jaunty.

“The Christmas EP has some shiny moments,” Sparhawk concedes. “The more we do this, the more we are open to letting go and thinking that if a song happens to be somewhat positive, let’s let that be, let’s not stifle that, obviously that’s something we’re feeling.

“There’s some rock business going on the last album. We’ve got a couple of new songs that may be construed as a little more rock, but it’s just something we step into a little bit once in a while, to mixed success as far as our own feelings about it, but it depends on the night. Sometimes playing the loud songs feels a little wrong.”

Domestic Disturbance

2002-02-06T09:03:37Z

Director: Harold Becker
Starring: John Travolta, Vince Vaughn, Matt O’Leary, Teri Polo, Steve Buscemi

Have you ever seen a major Hollywood star defy gravity? Look out the window—there’s John Travolta falling from the stars, and he’s falling faster than anybody thought possible. Once upon a time, after one failed career, Quentin Tarantino gave the disco-king a chance at a second life in ‘Pulp Fiction’ and Travolta blew Hollywood away. After following up over the next few years with further memorable roles in films such as ‘Get Shorty’, ‘Face/Off’ and ‘Primary Colours’, something strange has happened recently. With his scientology creeping in at the edges in the worst film that nobody has ever seen, ‘Battlefield Earth’, and the worst haircut of 2001 in the inexcusable ‘Swordfish’, Vinnie Barbarino seems to have lost his legendary charisma. ‘Domestic Disturbance’ signals another low for a rapidly fading star — he is outshone by the wooden stylings of Vince Vaughn, Hollywood’s most uninspiring leading man (editor’s note, five years on: Vince found his feet in the frat pack, and now I love him muchly).

Veteran director Harold Becker (‘Sea of Love’, ‘City Hall’, ‘Taps’) should know better than to turn out a morally questionable b-grade thriller at this stage of his career, given a reputation for psychological thrillers that are both mature and suspenseful. Screenwriter Lewis Colick (‘October Sky’, ‘Ghosts of Mississipi’) also has a fair share of strong material under his belt, including the inexplicably brilliant ‘Judgment Night’. If nothing else, ‘Domestic Disturbance’ is proof that talent don’t mean nothing if you don’t use it.

Frank Morrison (Travolta) is an impossibly nice boat-builder in a small coastal city with hints of a drinking problem in his past. His twelve year-old son Danny (Matt O’Leary) lives with ex-wife Susan (Teri Polo — ‘Meet the Parents’), who is about to marry Rick Barnes (Vaughn), a wealthy newcomer to the town. In this little triangle, everybody gets along famously. Frank even helps Danny, who is wary of Rick’s enew dad’ status, to accept inevitable change as life marches on. But when a mysterious character from Rick’s past (Steve Buscemi) shows up on the wedding day, darkness begins to creep in at the edges of this wholesome character. Then Danny witnesses Rick committing a brutal murder, and nobody believes him, even the police, because he is a little brat who likes to make things up so his mum and new dad can split up. Enter ass-kicking real dad, no longer just a gentle boat-builder but bona fide hero, solving mysteries and pulping psycho-killer heads.

‘Domestic Disturbance’ is the same tired evil stepfather story, pursuing the line that any woman who chooses to remarry should suffer horrible consequences. Not a single original piece of dialogue is spoken in the entire film, as the cast plod through an ocean of clichEs looking positively bored. Only Buscemi is vaguely watchable, but even he delivers his eslimy weasel’ role with a certain bemused air. Despite laughable attempts to give his hero a dark side, Travolta’s character comes off as a ludicrously good guy, trained only to innocently paint boats and spout silly dialogue. Vaughn is even less scary here than we was in ‘Psycho’, and when the film takes a turn towards slasher territory in the final act, not even the twelve year-old O’Leary can muster up enough terror to seem afraid of him.

As cornball thrillers with simple moral messages go, ‘Domestic Disturbance’ offers few surprises. I learned that stepfathers are evil, police are stupid, twelve year-old boys never lie and that you should always listen to father, as father knows best. Let us hope that the once important Travolta has no plans to sink even lower on the Hollywood scale.

Monsoon Wedding

2001-12-17T08:53:24Z

Director: Mira Nair
Starring: Naseeruddein Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Tilotama Shome, Vasundhara Das

Beneath India’s schizophrenic collision of high technology and ancient tradition, and from its stuffy old-Raj sensibilities to the explosion of sound and colour that hits you in the face as you stumble between bars and bazaars, there can be few more intense, sensory places on earth. Although its film industry has a (deserved) reputation for turning out an endless supply of incomprehensible four-hour gangster musicals, a long and proud tradition outside of the Bollywood machine, from the masterful work in of Satyajit Ray throughout the second half of the last century to Deepa Mehta’s spectacular ‘Fire’ and ‘Earth’, suggests that India has the potential to be a sleeping giant of world cinema.

Mira Nair (‘Mississippi Masala’, ‘Salaam Bombay!’) has had an impeccable knack for creating films which cross over from India to the global market, while never compromising on their frank examinations of contemporary Indian culture. ‘Monsoon Wedding’ takes place in New Delhi, a city located firmly on the truly Indian cusp of old and new. Centred on the wedding of Aditi (Vasundhara Das) and Hemant (Parvin Dabas), it is an Altman-esque story which spirals around the sprawling family of Aditi’s father, Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah). As a Punjabi family, weddings are by no means registry office affairs for the Vermas, and with four days left and guests arriving from all over the world, Lalit and his wedding planner P.K. Dubey (Vijay Raaz) are beginning to run out of time to get everything ready.

Weddings are hardly the most challenging of subject matters, and with the comedy focussing on the beguiling, marigold-eating Dubey, this could have been a subcontinental ‘Wedding Planner’ in lesser hands. But Nair is a director with a social conscience, and Aditi’s wedding is, in her eyes, a barometer for social change in India. Confronting issues of sexuality and, more seriously, a crumbling class system, Nair paints a loving, if critical, portrait of a country heading in too many directions at the same time. As the dialogue slips effortlessly between English and Hindi mid-sentence, people with little experience of Indian culture may have a hard time tuning in, but an impeccable subtitling job deals well with the constant language shifting and keeps things on track.

Shot mostly with hand-held cameras, Nair captures the vibrancy and colour of an Indian wedding, as the monsoon pounds, soaking everyone, and the song and dance carries on. ‘Monsoon Wedding’ feels warm, natural and immediate in its exploration of family values, but all is bound by Naseeruddin Shah’s wonderfully understated performance as a father trying to maintain his family’s dignity, and somehow hold all the chaos together.

Nair’s film is wickedly contemporary, continually hilarious and always delightful. Avoiding all the clichés of Indian cinema, and of those who attempt to describe the country but only end up describing how colourful the clothes are, the film does not care for catering to any particular audience, or fulfilling anybody’s expectations of what India should be — it is a film about the joy and the horror of family, and the kind of rapturous celebration that only a wedding in the pouring rain can bring about.

Judas Priest: Metal Messiahs

2001-11-23T08:42:43Z

After 31 years at the frontier of heavy metal, Judas Priest have been through countless highs and lows. On the eve of their first ever visit to Australia and the release of new album ‘Demolition’, Hype caught up with Ian Hill (bass), a part of the band’s legendary full-frontal rhythm assault since 1969.

The nineties were a relatively quiet decade for the Priest musically, after the departure in controversial circumstances of legendary vocalist Rob Halford in 1992 and the general downturn in the classic metal scene. After their sonically brutal 1997 comeback effort ‘Jugulator’, the band needed a new approach. Four years later, the release of ‘Demolition’ sees the band expressing themselves in new ways, with near-ballads such as ‘Close To You’ nestled alongside more traditional extreme metal fare such as ‘Bloodsuckers’, ‘Metal Messiah’ and ‘Devil Digger’.

“It goes back to ‘Jugulator’,” Hill says. “When Rob left, the band didn’t do anything really. There were seven years between ‘Painkiller’ and ‘Jugulator’, and because of the steps forward we keep trying to make between every album, there were at least two albums missing in that period.

“We had to decide where we would be if those two albums had been there,’ he continues, eand with “Painkiller” being such a heavy, brutal album as it was, the logical step was to ‘Jugulator’, which was a very, very hard album. But if there was one thing missing on that album, it was the subtle passages and ballads which we’ve also been known for over the years, so we decided to rectify that with ‘Demolition’.”

Judas Priest were not the only metal band to have a hard time in the 1990s, as the whirlwind that was Nirvana washed the decks of the old guard, fundamentally altering the alternative musical landscape and killing off some of the more excessive excesses of the 1980s. Heavy metal, one the great 1980s icons, found the new landscape tough going.

“A lot of other bands didn’t do a great deal either,” Hill explains. “[Iron] Maiden went their separate ways, and all the standard classic bands all stopped playing for some reason. This left the door open for the new wave of metallers coming through, and I think metal’s better for it as well. These new bands have a lot to offer — if you take the make-up and the bullshit away, you’ve got a damn good heavy metal band underneath it all,” he laughs.

The story of Judas Priest in the last seven years has been the story of Ripper Owens, the man plucked from the obscurity of a Judas Priest etribute’ band to replace his hero, Rob Halford, as the frontman to carry the band into the next millennium. Owens only got the job when the band chanced upon a video of an Ohio man with a Judas Priest tattoo, and it blew them away.

“He was a great find when we found him,” Hill says. “When Rob left, it knocked the wind out of our sails. I don’t think there were any of us who didn’t think at some stage that it was about time to hang our hats up.

“When we found Ripper and discovered his capabilities, he gave everybody the drive and incentive to carry on. It was very much a fresh start for us.”

According to Hill, ‘Demolition’ reflects Ripper’s growing stature, as the band’s Halford-tinged history is finally consigned to the past.

“eJugulator’ was written for a vocalist, any vocalist, because we didn’t know who was going to end up singing on it,” he says. “But with ‘Demolition’, we knew his capabilities so we could write material accordingly. I think it shows, there’s a lot more confidence coming from Ripper.”

If Ripper’s story sounds familiar, you have probably been reading reviews of the Mark Wahlberg film ‘Rock Star’. While both sides have played down the Priest element to the film, the links are obvious to the neutral observer. Any similarity to any persons, living or deadOe

“It started out as a story about Ripper joining the band, from a New York Times piece,” Hill explains. “The production company bought the rights to the story, and next thing you know, all over the internet, it says these people are putting out the story of Judas Priest and Ripper joining them!

“Our management thought that if they were going to do a film about Priest, it might be a good idea for them to talk to us, and find out what the characters are like — if somebody’s portraying you on film, you want to have at least a little bit of control over it.

“They were contacted but they didn’t want to know,’ he continues. ‘They wanted total artistic freedom and all this business. So we said that if they were going to do that, they couldn’t use the name Judas Priest. The story’s basically the same, with somebody playing in a cover band who gets to play with their favourite rock stars that they’ve been following ever since adolescence. That’s as far as it goes, but any similarities end there.”

Thirty years on, Hill sees no end in sight for a rejuvenated Priest with Ripper at the helm, and only opportunity in the future.

“It gets to the point where you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else,” he says. “Some of the songs we play on the stage are 20-odd years old, but when you see the reaction to them, if we dropped any, we’d probably get lynched. It’s that reaction that gives us the incentive to carry on playing.”

TISM: Progressive Rock Wankers

2001-11-01T08:17:33Z

In a desolate desert landscape, winged Victa mowers hover around a decaying Hills Hoist, the last bastion of civilisation before you reach Uluru, far in the distance. The boys from TISM are back, and if the Roger Dean-esque Yes-stylings of the cover of their latest album ‘De Rigeurmortis’ are to be believed, they’ve gone a little prog-rock. Hype put the question to TISM frontmen Ron Hitler Barassi and Humphrey B. Flaubert — have you been listening to too many Osibisa albums?

‘The Roger Dean album cover came about because Festival Mushroom Records bowdlerised our original concept which was a triple album,’ Barassi explains. ‘Do you know that young people these days don’t even know about triple albums? They don’t understand what it was like opening Yes songs with the huge gatefold cover opening to reveal the El Greco-like vista that was Roger Dean’s work.’

‘Our album was in fact a triple album called Finger album — a dedication to the great Finger bands of rock,’ Flaubert elaborates. ‘Badfinger, Snakefinger and Powderfinger. The album was tentatively titled “Give Your Mates A Sniff. TISM: The Finger Album”, however FMR decided not to go with that.

‘In fact, what you get in ‘De Rigeurmortis’ is merely the ghostly remains of that great masterwork.’

Ghostly remains or not, ‘De Rigeurmortis’, TISM’s first album in three years, is as loaded as ever with their trademark savage wit, angry rants and cheesy beats. From the anti-dance music tirades of ‘Come Back DJ, Your Record is Scratched’ and ‘Fat Boy Slim Dusty’ to the more general tirades of ‘If You’re Not Famous at Fourteen, You’re Finished’ and ‘Thou Shalt Not Britney Spear’, TISM fans have more than enough to satisfy them until the band get pissed off enough for another release. But the real standout is saved for the bonus disc of the connoisseur’s edition — a disc devoted solely to the sprawling 40-minute rock opera e2Pot Screama’.

‘Were you aware that Britney’s actually got a novel out?’ Flaubert asks. ‘It’s co-written with her mum. I’ve always felt that when you get to the stage of being able to write a novel, you’ve transcended the sort of one-dimensional rubbish that they’re peddling.

‘This is why I feel that Cormac McCarthy needs to immediately put out a pop album,’ Barassi suggests. ‘For too long, Cormac McCarthy has been satisfied with merely being the most innovative and deeply serious novelist working in the American literary scene. That can’t satisfy him for very long and I think Cormac McCarthy needs to immediately rush out there and record a pop album with his mumnMrs McCarthynto really try and beat Britney at her own game.’

TISM’s last album, 1998’s ewww.tism.wanker.com’, met with infamy through its lead single, a track which even Triple J would not play: ‘I Might Be A Cunt, But I’m Not A Fucking Cunt’. The C word sent such powerful shockwaves through the country that they even received an irate letter from Bruce Ruxton. But that was back in their days on Shock Records, and their new label have something of a different outlook, the boys claim:

‘We’ve really toned it down because we are aware that Festival Mushroom are funding a number of right-wing military juntas in South America,’ Flaubert says. ‘The sort of damage they could do to our kneecaps if we encountered the ire of the conservative right in this country cannot be overestimated.’

Humphrey B. Flaubert wonders how people could possibly be interested in questions about their music, or themselves.

‘It isn’t beer and skittles what we do, in fact it’s very unglamorous,’ he points out. ‘What we wanted was to get attention from good-looking girls. That really hasn’t eventuated, so everything after that is a disappointment. Being in a rock band would be great, but unfortunately we’re not in one!’

For a band so unashamedly non-rock, TISM take great pride in the production quality of their recordings. For ‘De Rigeurmortis’, they drew on the legendary production talents of Paul McKercher and Phillip McKellar to knock the album into shape.

‘Oh yes, they’re very rock,’ Flaubert says. ‘They were rock people but we had to communicate with them through an interpreter. Neither of us understood each other’s language.’

‘They’re not very nice men,’ Barassi points out. ‘Phil and Paul take themselves very seriously — we had to explain to them that if they didn’t drop their pretty boy rock and roll attitude straight away and get down slumming it with the dorky guys from TISM, they’d be out that door.

‘As they made their way towards their door, we begged them to come back.’

Serendipity arranges it so that ‘De Rigeurmortis’ is released just as bullshit is circulating at its 3 year-high on the electoral cycle — as perfect a time as any for TISM’s spleen to be vented.

‘There was a little while there when we were a bit afraid the fires were burning out,’ Barassi says, ebut all you have to do is hear the voice of Phillip Ruddock and you think yep, the hatred is as strong as ever. That sort of pompous, disaffected, soulless inability to empathise with anyone else and to persecute people less well off for your own base self-interest, I think that’s what it’s all about.

‘If Phillip Ruddock ran a record company, we’d join.’