'Interview transcript for the Thai military' or 'How I might have just got myself killed'

One of the Thai parents at school is involved in politics and is due to meet one of the main military leaders who recently took control of the country. She came and asked me to write a short piece from the view of a foreigner. Here's the transcript. I do hope they don't know where I live...

My thoughts on the recent events in Thailand - M. White, Teacher (British National)

I have been closely following the escalating political events in Thailand ever since I moved here two years ago. During that time I have tried to keep a neutral viewpoint and take both of the main political sides’ arguments into account. 

I must admit that, I did begin to lean towards the side of the yellow shirts, as I believe that their aim to rid the country of a clearly corrupt political power in the form of the Thaksin family would be beneficial. From my experiences at both a national level (on the news) and at a local level (my own personal experiences), it seems that many people in positions of power, whether it be the government, the police force or immigration, have a price and are willing to accept payments to bend the rules. This is evident from the small bribes that can be paid to be allowed through the immigration checkpoints first, to huge amounts of money paid to build on prohibited land. 

However, I did not agree with the yellow-shirts when they made suggestions to give middle-class or intellectuals two or more votes, whilst poorer working-class people only received one. In a democracy, everyone is entitled to their opinion and each person who is eligible to vote must have equality. Although the yellow shirts thought that they had the better and more logical argument, they were still outnumbered and that is how a fair system of government works in any democratic country.I myself support the Labour party in Britain, who were beaten at the last UK election, but I have to accept this and hope that my party can work towards acquiring more voters.

With regards to the Coup, although I cannot say that I believe that this was the best method of trying to end the protests and disagreement, it did seem that there were no other options and the situation had become a stalemate. Talks had become predictable and monotonous and nothing was being achieved. Sometimes extreme situations call for extreme measures. 

However, I must admit that since the military have taken over, I have seen many examples of the new leaders trying to bring stability to the country and their actions such as removing illegal building and taxi ranks from the beaches and roads, plus a crackdown on immigration has been positive and widely appreciated by both the Thai and Ex-Pat community. But, these issues are still very small in comparison to the bigger picture. I do hope that these small gestures are not been used to lull the Thai people into submission to the current regime. 

At the moment, the Thai military is not receiving endorsement and support from the EU or America and people are worried that the seizure of power may have damaged international relations and monetary support from other countries. But, as a European myself, I think that all that we want to see is that the country can quickly return to democratic rule. European and American systems are built on the right to vote and we have never experienced a seizure of power in our country, so it is harder for us to condone or understand this. However, I believe that international relations can and will be re-established, but not until the military can come to a swift solution to ensure that elections can be put into place as soon as possible. I hope, for the Thai peoples’ sake, this can be achieved very soon.

Coup D'Ètat

If you've been keeping up with the news, I'm sure that you'll be aware of the current troubles in Bangkok regarding the government. Yesterday, the military seized power in a coup d'ètat after two days of martial law and have established the Orwellian sounding 'National Peace and Order Maintaining Council'.

So far, they have ceased all radio and TV broadcasting, both local and international and replaced it with the very fetching graphic below.

Thailand's current prime time show

A curfew has also been imposed across the whole country, stating that we all have to be home and in bed by 10am and not surface until 5am. They've even closed the schools. 

I'm always glad of an unscheduled holiday, but when that holiday involves having to sit at home twiddling my fingers in the drinking capital of South-East Asia, I'd choose good old democracy any day. 

Harrisons

Harrisons

I've not really spoken to many people about all our experiences with the band as I don't really like to brag/bore people, but it's your choice if you want to read this, so I don't feel as bad writing a bit of a potted (and very watered down) history of it all. People always ask me about the band and I've always been quite coy about it, but I don't see why people shouldn't know about what we got up to!

2003

I'd been playing guitar in a band with Birch for a few years and by the end of the 2003 we'd finally realised that we were shit and split up. Birch was asked to join a new band that two lads who we knew from the 'Can You Jam' nights we used to go to at the Deep End in Hillsborough had formed. I got a phone call from Birch a few weeks later asking for our old drummer's number as they couldn't find anyone else to play drums and I said I'd phone him back once I'd found it, but I had no intention of doing so. I was missing playing and thought that the drums must be easy enough to pick up, so I 'phoned back ten minutes later saying I'd spoken to our old drummer and he wasn't interested. I said I'd come down and have a go at keeping the beat until they found a drummer.

After a few practices I'd begun to pick it up pretty quickly and we'd managed to write about ten songs through November/December.

2004

At the beginning of January we were asked to play at the Deep End. We agreed, but when they asked for a name to put on the posters we hadn't got a clue what we were going to call ourselves. That same week, we were walking down Ben's road trying to think of a name when we walked past the 'Harrison Road' sign. We borrowed some of Ben's Dad's tools, chiselled it off the name/stage prop was born.

After playing a few gigs in Sheffield I got a phone call from a posh bloke saying he was interested in managing us. At the time this was massive news, no other bands we knew had managers or any interest and we jumped at the chance. The legend of Paul Bassett was born that day.

After Paul had begun to work with us the gigs and recording sessions began to pick up and we recorded an album's worth of material in the cellar of Champion Kickboxer's house as well as some early demos with Alan Smyth. Summer was coming and we'd been planning to go to France to live in a van for the whole summer, but were scared to tell Paul as we thought he'd lose interest. We finally told him and he was okay with it and told us that he was working on booking a tour with another new Sheffield band called Arctic Monkeys for the Autumn. He booked us one last gig before we left, which ended up being the first chapter of the reputation the band managed to acquire.

Our final gig before our imminent departure to France was a charity event organised by another Sheffield band whose name slips my mind. It was the May bank holiday Monday and the first hot day of the year. We took advantage of this by beginning drinking at eleven in the morning and not stopping until we got on stage at ten at night. I remember being sat outside ten minutes before we were due on stage trying to wake Jubby up as he was so drunk. We'd been given a book of tickets to sell, but we'd just been handing them out in the pub for free, so after the gig finished and we were asked to give the ticket money to the charity, we were stuck. All through the summer there was a big campaign throughout the Sheffield music scene calling us thieves which we still hear about now.

We spent the summer in France and got back to Sheffield at the end of August. The Monkeys had asked us to play at a party they'd arranged at their new practice room and we thought it'd be a good idea to get together as there'd been a bit of friendly rivalry between our friends and their friends over who was the best band. We turned up at their room with all of our friends and began to play, but as soon as we started their mates started started shouting abuse at us. This carried on throughout the set and once we'd finished it all got out of hand and a big fight erupted between our friends and their friends.

The next day Birch and Ben had to go and try and apologise for the fight to save the tour we had planned. The reluctantly agreed to play the tour, but the atmosphere remained very frosty throughout.

After the tour we booked a recording session with Alan Smyth and recorded four songs, including one which ended up as or first single.

This was also about the time that we heard that the NME had caught on to our music. I remember being in the van and Paul telling us that the editor had been in touch and was raving about 'Shirley's Temple'. It got to Christmas and we ended the year with a show at an old warehouse where Ben ended up drinking piss from the ceiling (ask him!).

2005

Our first big news of the year came when Dave Cooper of Melodic Records offered us a two single deal with his company. We couldn't believe we'd been offered the chance to release a song properly, but then we were told we'd also be making a music video. We carried on gigging through the first couple of months of the year while trying to think of a good ideas for our single cover and video. This was also the first time that we got our first national radio play on Steve Lamacq's Radio One show.

We recorded the video for 'Wishing Well' in our practice room one Sunday. I remember everyone being very nervous about having to wear makeup. The single was due for release at the end of August. In the time leading up to this we began to get some very good press in the music magazines which lead to a sell out single release show in Sheffield which ended up as a bloodbath due to the over-enthusiastic moshing. We also got a slot at Leeds festival, Zane Lowe's video of the week on MTV2 and most importantly a Radio One session for Lamacq at Maida Vale studios in London.

The single sold relatively well and we began to prepare to record our next release. we chose to record 'Blue Note' with Mike Crossey in Liverpool. All I remember from this session was the awful Be Here Nowesque guitar solo that Mike made Ben play on the last part of the song. We'd been thinking of ideas for the music video where we could get our friends involved and chose to make a parody of the football scene in Kes. It was shot over two days and we spent ten hours a day in PE kits on a freezing football pitch. Grindle ended up stealing the show with his amazing acting.

We celebrated the New Year by playing in a kitchen at a big Akoustik Anarkhy house party in Manchester.

2006

We started the year with our first big tour supporting Be Your Own Pet, who turned out to be idiots, but it got us some well-needed exposure. The interest in the band had been building even further and our new video was receiving a lot of air-play on the radio and TV. We were asked to play at the Leadmill in February and managed to sell it out, which is still probably my favourite memory. It was the first time we ever walked out to 900 people all cheering our name and I couldn't compare that feeling to anything else I have ever experienced.

Interest from record companies was also growing and at the beginning of March we signed a deal with Melodic/Sony in Fagan's pub in Sheffield before celebrating with a Sunday dinner at the Fat Cat in Neepsend. Two days later we flew out to Texas to play the SXSW festival.

The three gigs we played in America probably did us more harm than good. We were starry-eyed and let of the leash in a foreign country and it was all free. We treat it like a holiday and ended up being in such a state for all of the gigs that we played terribly. The NME were good to us and promised not to review the gigs for our sake and Radio 6 even named us the 'best band of the festival' for some reason.

We got back to Sheffield and realised that we need to grow up a bit and decided that instead of recording the album straight away, we'd lock ourselves in the practice room and write some better songs. This was probably the mistake that lead to our loss of popularity. We played our last gig in March, and apart from playing the O2 festival and acting like little kids when we were given the chance to hang around with Kate Moss, Keanu Reeves and the Strokes amongst others, we went away to write the album and didn't play live again until November.

During the summer months we treat practising as a full time job and spent every day writing the more songs for the album. Richard Hawley became involved and was earmarked to record the album, but was nominated for the Mercury prize and ended up being too busy, so we got intouch with Hugh Jones who had produced Echo and The Bunnymen and booked to record the album with him.

We spent two months in a residential studio in the countryside lazing around getting our meals cooked for us, drinking too much, getting very fat, getting cabin fever, trying to kill each other and recording our album. People from the record company kept dropping in to see how it was progressing and told us that they wanted to delay the album release until the summer of 2007, which we thought was a terrible idea, but had no control over.

We came out of the studio at the end of November and were put straight on to a month long tour, only stopping to film the awful video for the next single in London.

2007

By the beginning of 2007 we were starting to realise that we might have 'missed the boat'. Our gigs weren't as widely attended as before and the press and radio/TV coverage for our new single wasn't as intense as usual. Still, throughout the first few months of the year we managed to do a tour supporting The Twang, a support slot for Travis in a forest to 10,000 people and a slot at the London Calling festival in Amsterdam, which was probably one of our finest gigs.

We carried on touring intensively through until June, still waitng for Sony to release the album. We also recorded the video for our final single in this time. We spent two days in the freezing cold again, but this time at Park Hill flats doing our own version of 1984.

The chance to support The Enemy came in June and we ended up playing 14 dates with them in some huge venues. Every crowd we played to loved the band, sung the words to all of the songs and went mad to the new single, but when it was released it sold considerably less than the three singles before.

We drove straight from our final gig of the tour at the Astoria in London to play our own show in Paris and drove straight back home to try and figure what to do next. As we arrived home we got got the news that we'd been asked to play at Ibiza Rocks with The Enemy and at the end of July we flew out to Ibiza for four days.

We arrived back in Sheffield late on a Thursday night and went to draw our wages out of the bank as usual on the Friday, but there was nothing in our accounts. I then received a phone call from the record company to say that they were stopping funding for the band as we'd spent twice our agreed budget over the course of the last 18 months.

We were all faced with the prospect of finding jobs. We played a festival on the beach at Scarborough the next weekend and met our agent who proposed a 28 day tour throught September/October to earn us some money and we agreed to it. By now everyone had grown tired of the everything and we were still waiting for the release of the album. Halfway through the tour Jubby tried to cancel the remaining dates and we had to sit down and persuade him to finish the tour. We decided that after the tour we would split.

We arrived back in Sheffield in October after the 28 day tour without a break and all went to find jobs. We met with the record company and told them we had split. They asked us to keep it quiet until the album came out, which it finally did in February 2008. We playd our last gig on the 1st of December at The Big Reunion at Butlins which ended up being a fitting tribute to our career. We had hit it so hard the night before that we were too ill to play properly and I even walked off of the stage after what I thought was the last song and had to be lead back to my drums to play the last song.

That's about the most condensed version I can write without going into detail. Hope I haven't bored you too much. Please ignore any mistakes, it's half three in the morning.

Some nice links for you:

Dear Constable Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yil1wiK3McI

Blue Note Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46uRtA6ZBdw

Wishing Well Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1sjEdE1XxY

Making of Blue Note:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH4oiOG-LQ4

Monday's Arms Live in Amsterdam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDsKsajihGE

A vodka induced record of how I wasted my summer holidays. Part One: Books.

Hello to all that may read this. This is my first ever blog and I'm going to proceed to ramble about what I've been up to recently. It'll probably bore you to death.

 It's actually taken me a lot longer to write one section of this, so I've decided this blog is going to be solely for books. I'll do the next one another night.

*Please excuse any grammatical/spelling mistakes and my tendency to ramble*.

A quick review of some of the better books that I have read over the last couple of months:

Fighting in Spain  by George Orwell.

Orwell is my favourite writer, so you'll never hear a bad word about him from me (apart from 'A Clergyman's Daughter'). This book is basically a condensed version of 'Homage to Catalonia',  which is Orwell's account of the Spanish Civil war where he volunteered to fight against Franco's fascist regime. This abridged version just includes the main stories, from his arrival at the front up to the point where he was wounded in the neck and discharged from the POUM forces. He also gives harrowing descriptions of trench warfare in the Spanish hills and street fighting in Las Ramblas in Barcelona. I would recommend this book to anyone who is new to Orwell's reports of his life experiences, as it should leave you with a great appreciation for his distinct talent for the written word. In conclusion, I would urge you to read the full version of the book as it gives the reader a greater insight into the the history of the war, the fragility of the Spanish government and more importantly, we see the beginning of the events that ultimately lead Orwell to condemn Communism in his later works.

Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley 

When Huxley wrote 'Brave New World' in the 1930s, he wasn't expecting his prophecies to materialise so quickly, but in this essay written in 1959, he already proves that his predictions of test-tube babies, sub-conscious persuasion, over-population,  propaganda-as-truth and the loss of social morality were all becoming commonplace hundreds of years before he predicted. Huxley frequently highlights the major differences between his work and George Orwell's '1984'. The original book portrayed a world where the population were controlled, but ultimately raised to enjoy their lives and social-statuses through constant chemical-conditioning and easy access to simple human pleasures such as casual sex and drugs, as well as the eradication of war.  '1984' portrays the same totalitarian rule as 'Brave New World', but Orwell writes that the masses will be ruled under a regime of violence and fear, with the major continents in a constant war with each-other. 

We have to remember this book was written in 1959 and considers both Huxley and Orwell's predictions and sixty years later, it is evident that both books gave scarily accurate accounts of society today. Before you read this, make sure you've read both authors' original books. Both will make you realise how close they both authors became to predicting the future and this book will then solidify that opinion furthermore. 

Various Books by Jeffrey Archer

When someone gave me three of Archer's books to read, I put them straight on the shelf with the intention of giving them back without reading them a few weeks later due to my preconceptions of the author.  So when curiosity got the better of me one day and I finally picked one up, I was really shocked that this man could write such gripping stories. In the space of two weeks I read 'A Matter of Honour', 'As the Crow Flies' and 'A Quiver Full of Arrows'. It pains me to say that I could easily compare Archer's knack of gripping the reader in the same way as Dan Brown does in his novels. They both write with the same talent for drawing the reader so far into the plot that you have to finish the book as soon as possible. But when I read Brown's books, it was easy to tell that they were aimed at people who wouldn't usually sit and read a novel (no offence intended), whereas Archer's plots were deeper than Brown's, but they still managed to keep me so engrossed that I couldn't put them down. So, apologises to Archer. He still is a stuck-up idiot, but he does write very good stories.

Death In The Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway

Throughout the '20s and early '30s Hemingway lived in Spain and developed a great passion for bullfighting. This book gives detailed accounts of the major stars of the bullfighting profession and their celebrity statuses that they acquired, which also usually brought about their deaths in the bullrings of Spain. There are also vivid descriptions of the atmosphere that the spectators enjoyed at the fights and even details of Hemingway's visits to the ranches that reared bulls for the ring. 

Whether you are for or against bullfighting, the book is a very well written account of the events of eighty years ago and although some people may be shocked at the graphic details of the treatment of the animals and the graphic description of the act of the maiming of the bulls, it is still a great account of an age-old Spanish tradition.

I reckon the next one will be about new music I've heard...