What is Industrial Records' situation now?
G. We're bankrupt. We've got no money. We spent a lot of money doing the two new singles - more than we ever spent on any other record, becouse we wanted to do the actual recording in a very complicated way. So we used a 16 track tape recorder and then we went to a proper studio for the first time to mix them on computer mixing. We spent about 2 000 pounds, which really is a lot of money.
C. We usually spend a third of that on recording!
G. Then we have to pay in advance for records, to get them pressed and the printing done. So we spent a lot on the sigles because they've all got picture sleeves and plastic bags. Then we brought out the Dorothy record and 11 new cassettes and we spent about 2 000 pounds on doing the video cassettes. Then, when we thought we had just enough money to keep going without any problem, the tax people came and took 3 500 pounds tax, and we only had 1 000 pounds in the bank. So we gave them a cheque for 3 800 pounds, but we had to borrow some money to cover that cheque. So we've got nothing, we ve got something like minus 3 000. We're just hoping that we'll gradually get the money back as we sell the things we've done.
So England is very happy that you're bankrupt!
G. Probably. I think some people would be, but I think we'll survive.
C. We're not bankrupt as such, it's just that at the moment we have no cash flow, as they say, we have a cash flow problem.
G. But otherwise, we're healthier than ever. This month we've released three singles, 11 cassettes, 2 video tapes. We've done the masters for the William Burroughs album and had a few ideas for more TG projects. We also spent a lot of money completely rebuilding our equipment to play live.
Why did you decide to do this record in a proper studio?
C. We didn't do it in a proper studio. We just rented better equipment to record it on, and then we took it in to a proper studio because we wanted to see what effects we could use. We had certain ideas for the records which we couldn't do in our studio. And it was good because it was something we'd never done before, and we always like to move on. We like to be moving the whole time.
G. We used DJM studios which is where Elton John started, and it was like a new big toy, really - huge mixing desk and loads of harmonizers and things like that. They had a technical engineer to tell us what everything did, and we told him exactly what we wanted. There was no question of him saying what should happen. He just moved the knobs for us. Even Sleazy moved some of the knobs, Cosey as well. I didn't do any knob twiddling. I punched in the computer drumming. I had to punch in the drum rolls on the drumming because there was a crackle on one of the tracks, which was another reason we had to go there. We had a fault in the tape recorder which we didn't know about. You couldn't hear it on normal playback, but when you tried to mix it down, there was a crackle, so we had to do it on the compter and punch out all the crackles individually. So we had to memorize where they all were and then punch them out.
Has TG's music changed?
G. I don't know about changing. It's better organized, more complex, but in a different way. It's evolving.
For how many years has TG been going?
G. Five years.
And aren't you tired of it?
C. No. You see, we only play just before a gig or to do a record. We don't use it as a job, we play when we feel like it. We don't practise every week-end or every day, so we never get sick of it. The only thing we get sick of is the office work for the record company. That's really time consuming, which is another reason why we don't play as often as we'd like to, because we have a lot of letters to answer and orders to get out. We have to stop answering our fan mail now, because we can't do it.
G. It's impossible. It's like trying to eat all the spaghetti in Milan, you can never finish. It's true. We only do TG occasionally so we've kept it special for us.
C. Besides that, music to a lot of groups is like a living, and they go and do it just like that, they do a song to words, it's like Chris ad Sleazy trying out new things and building new little gadjets. And as they try out, we have an idea of something we'd like, and we tell them, it's technology. We like to try things out, so it's not just music, it's not just bashing out a number - we actually try different sounds.
C. Because there were certain groups we felt should have a record out for historical reasons. To show that they were around at that time. A lot of the people we've got have been like the hard core of the whole movement, and yet the public in general doesn't know of them. I think it's nice to put out records by people that are very much there but are forgotten.
G. We always want records we like to listen to, to gradually build up the library of records we want to hear. And not all the records we want to hear we can play or would want to play. So if somebody else does something that we'd like to listen to as a record, we can bring it out and add it to the library of Industrial.
What about the press and TG?
G. Sounds are OK, they are the only ones that are fair with us in England. They don't like every record we release but they always listen to each one.
C. They give a fair review as well. They actually say what they don't like about it, and they don't do character assassinations which have nothing to do with the record or the music at all. The other music papers tend to take one individual, and usually it's Gen, and say they don't like him for the whole review and the record isn't mentioned at all. And that to me isn't journalism in music press, it's just someone who's got a grudge against Gen.
G. And plus, the people who write these reviews attacking me, when it's not necessarily a TG record, are people I've never met.
C. They're often a lot younger and don't know anything about the music business.
G. Like nineteen year old kids who have just left college and want to prove that they're good writers. They write like sixth form essays, school essays, and they start saying they don't like me, they say I'm an ex art student.
C. All the facts are wrong.
G. They say things which are totally untrue, just lies! They don't mention the record. They've never met me or asked me anything like: why it's happening or why I choose to do things - it's just rubbish. They're worse than the people from the News of the World, you know, the real bad gutter press, cheap sensationalist press. And the saddest thing is that they're lying. In London most people can roughly find out what's really happening, but outside London in the rest of Britain, the young kids only have papers like the NME to go by, and if a paper like that is full of lies, then they re corrupting the minds of all those young kids who have faith and trust in them. They're deliberately giving them false ideas, and false views and facts for their own personal ego. I think that's really evil, whether it's Margaret Thatcher or the NME. Just because they think they're hip, they think it's OK, and they don't do it only to us, they do it to other groups. They did it to Adam and the Ants, for example, and just lied and kept saying he was a terrible persons with no real reason. They attacked him continuously because he mentioned sex, basically - how pathetic and puritan and victorian. And this is the NME, who's supposed to be so forward looking, and aware, and tollerant; they can't even face the fact that somebody mentions sex, ahd in a very witty way. What he mentions is all very humorous and intelligently worked out. I don't actually enjoy his records but I can see what he's doing and I think he does it very well. He's very careful about what he does. He's not irresponsible and it just makes me angry when peole use those kinds of techniques. It's the worse kind of censorship lying to people through the power of your own newspaper. That's exactly how Hitler got to power, through the newspaper of the Nazis. Most of the kids who are into rock music are kids who are trying to think about the world, who are trying to develop ideas, so when the NME gives them false information it's the worse crime you can really do to somebody's brain. Because there they are saying basically: I'm ready to listen and take in ideas and find out things. But they just fill them with shit. Then they wonder why people get screwed up. And when they get older, from the NME they go on to the bad newspapers because they've been trained by the NME and the bad daily papers to accept false information. That's the war that's going on, and I think that's why some of them are so scared by us because they ultimately know that we're very honest. We don't care if they don't like what we do - that doesn't matter. They know that whatever the music sounds like, is irrelevant, at least it's exactly what we want to do and we know why we're doing it. I think it scares them. If your like is based around falsehoods and deceptions and being lazy when you write, instead of writing the truth or checking the facts, just writing what's easy and clever, then when you come across people who are intelligent, who do think and do try and be careful, it must be very disturbing for them. Instead of confronting it and arguing with it or accepting part of what we say, they just dismiss it completely. And they do it to other people too, not just us; we obviously know from our own experience that it happens. I think it's one of the worse things going on in Britain at the moment - the way the music press is abusing its position. They could do so much - they've got the audience that wants to try and develop.
C. Well that's why fanzines are so popular. The kids now buy a lot of them, as much as they buy NME. There are quite a few going around and they're good too, because they're an honest opinion, no bias at all. It's really good to read it even if someone's against you, they do it from their point of view, and that's fine. But when they do it the way the NME does, it's just evil.
G. Fanzines don't rely on record company money to exist, and they don't rely on record company advertisements to get their wage, but people who write for the national music papers do.
C. When they're going to get a free trip to Japan or Berlin with a group on tour, they go all over the place, and they do a two to three page spread review on them, that's their pay off. They get a free trip, they get cocaine to sniff, they get groupies, and they do it. And the result is this three page thing in the NME on some crap group no-one's even heard of, and immediately all the kids in the provinces and everybody thinks they're good. And they're not! It's the result of some little twirp who's gone out for a good time, to see another country, to have a good night with some birds and some dope and all the rest. And that's what the music press boils down to, everybody just having a good time at the expense of all the kids.
G. And the strange thing is that it's not like that abroad. All the reviews we've had abroad, or even people who didn't like us, have been really well written and very fair. So it doesn't have to be bad; so why are they so lazy and stupid in England? Because in Japan, Australia, America, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, we've had people who didn't and did like our records, but they were all very well argued, very well written. They all actually quoted what we said, they actually talked about the music, the style, the ideas. You don't seem to get that in England, its pathetic!
What about W. Burroughs' record?
C. It's a nice one. This one's Gen's «baby» - that means it's his project. He went with Sleazy to do it because he knows William quite well, Chris and I looked after the house and the company while they went. So he can tell you all about that. We've got all the tapes now and what we want to use. We've got to figure out which order to put them in. I think that will be quite important because they're all the tape experiments he's done from the 1950s to the present day. It's all cut up with his tape machines. He used to do that and a lot of experiments with tape recorders, sort of magic things, etc...
What are the things you did in art to put you on the front page of many newspapers before the Sex Pistols?
C. We just did an exhibition. We used to do performance art. We called them 'actions'. We went all over, we represented Britain in Milan, Paris, Vienna. Then we decided to have a retrospective - we put everything that we used, and all the documentation, and other people's views on us together, like the press, the reviews we'd had, photos that people who'd seen our performances had taken and sent to us as presents. We put them all up, as well as all the instruments and things we used in performances, in the gallery, and also my photos from nude magazines. I put the photos in nice art frames with glass and signed each one, like artists do, who are so precious about their work. I signed each magazine in this big frame - and they're just sex magazines! But that was my project for five years. From every type of magazine, from the very dirty little ones to the big «men only». The building where we had the exhibition was near the Queen, Buckingham Palace, and it was rented from her. So her representative came down and saw the pornographic magazines and said: no you can't do it. So did the government. They said; if you do it then you won't receive the grant. So we had a big conference and they said it could be the end of the gallery, but the guy that ran the gallery said: I'm determined, it s a stand of honour, we must do it, we can't be knuckled under, we can't let them tell us what to do with our gallery, if it's art it's art, and it must go ahead. So we had to have no-one under the age of eighteen, like in the cinemas. We had the porn squad coming in and checking it out. There was nothing pornographic, the only thing was that you could buy nude magazines at the news agents in there. It was just the press who blew it all up into something it wasn't - pornographic - and everybody came storming down on us. Every newspaper, every magazine you can think of, came running through and they chased me from one end of the gallery right through to the other end, they punched these guys that were trying to keep them off me, so I had to run and catch the tube home because you couldn't talk to any of them - these journalists were hysterical, so were the photographers. It was really bad. Then we never did any interviews, we never spoke to any newspaper. They came here and they went to the shopkeepers asking what we were like, what dirty pornographic people were like. The answers they got were: they've come in my shop for seven years now, and they're very nice people, don't you ask me to tell you they're horrible because they're not. This used to be a street of old age pensioners and old people rehoused by the council, now it's full of artists. All the old age pensioners said: they're very nice, a very nice couple. So the journalists thought: Oh shit! They didn't get any story, and when they were waiting for us outside the door, we'd nip out the back. It was really horrible. Then luckily the Sex Pistols were on TV and swore. But we got to the point where they mentioned us in the House of Commons. They keep a record of every question and Cosey Fanni Tutti is mentioned, so it's down on the history books! The government said we were going to America and Canada as well, to do the show, but they said we couldn't go to Canada and if we tried to get in we would have had our passport confiscated. They also said that if we did anything in America we'd be in big trouble when we got back to England. This news had gone everywhere, even to Brasil. As far as they were concerned we were British, and we were representing Britain abroad; and if we were bad and if we were bad and pornographics then it was a had reclection of England. You see, the British Council gave us the fares to go to America. But the day we opened the exhibition was the day we were finishing doing this, and beginning TG. We opened the art exhibition which is usually an occasion with white wine, nice paintings, dealers and very nice people. Instead we invited everybody - Siouxsie and the Banshees, Generation X who did their first gig that night as LSD. The whole of the beginning of the punk movement was there instead of the white wine set or the jet set. There were people going mad and drinking beer. We played our first gig there - it was really good. It was a completely different opening. We had a stripper on as well to start the evening off - she was very good.
The group has changed a lot since then, what happened?
C. At the beginning we didn't know much about the equipment, we didn't know what was possible. Then Chris started developing things. He was the only person we'd met that when we said: we'd like to play but we never get the sound we want, he could do it. The first steps with TG were just bringing everything down to pure sound. No blues, no rock and roll, nothing like that, it was just sound and emotion. And gradually we progressed. We got more and more different instruments and little gadsets, that's all.
Compared to the beginning, the musical scene has changed. Before there was a lot of enthusiasm, now it has become sluggish.
C. Yes; because when a new movement of fashion begins you get the first people who start it, the instigators who are the hard core of it, and then you get the hangers-on. Not only do you get the hangers-on, but you get the people that were something else before - who change - for instance, from mod music to electronic music because electronic music is what's going. Then they'll change to reggae, then to 2Tone and then go on to something else. That's what happened to punk. There were these stray groups who were selling to record companies and were going nowhere, so the record companies said: you've got to change, what's now is punk. So they sent them out to have their hair cut and dyed. And all the kids that weren't into groups, but into the punk fashion and movement, began to follow these groups, unaware that these groups were not the real thing. That's when it all fell apart. We used to get a load of letters from young kinds saying they were disillusioned with it. They thought it was a really good movement and they believed in it. Then they realized it was just another fashion. At the beginning it really did work, the punks were really good, then it became a fashion and fell apart. Once the jet set in Kings Road gets hold of it there's no chance.
There's also the fact, that in the 1960s new groups had a better chance...
C. But you see, in the 60s all the people that were responsible for the hippies etc. are the people that are responsible for the punk movement now. All the ones that opened 'boy boutique' are 60s people.
However, in the 6Os the Doors and Jimmy Hendrix were played on the AM radio in the US, so they were given an opportunity. There was the Vietnam war and Watergate which were very bad for the system. So now they're very careful and want to stop these movements right from the beginning. I think this is why punk ended after one year.
C. The punks didn't have a direction. They were against everything. They didn't want to know about anything they disagreed with, they just wanted to have a good time. And something like that can't last. If you haven't a goal to aim for you're just going to go up and then down real fast. You've got to have something to go along with and to think: I've got to get there. Nobody gave them anything to go by; and I think that's very sad because a lot of the young kids are very intelligent. the ones that write to us are really clever and I think that's why they got bored with it; because they found out there was nothing there for them to get hold of, there was nothing to use their minds on. It was a shame. The fashion clique used to come and see us. It was a close-knit group of people, like Jordan from Seditionaries. They used to go along and see a group and then it would become the next hip thing. They came to see us, but only twice, because they realized we weren't into fashion and didn't want to know anything about it. We weren't interested in them and we were the first people that weren't impressed by what they said or did or wore. We just weren't interested. They had nothing to offer us. And after the second time they never came back.
Rock music is often used as an alibi.
C. Yes, it's an escape. There's nothing wrong with it. If people like to escape now and then I think it's wrong to not let them. You need to be able to get away from everything, it's a human thing, otherwise you'd go crazy. Some people choose to do it with rock music and others choose to do it with us. They find it soothing. When we do our music it's our way of spilling out emotion and everything that's gone on in our heads for the past few months or past week or day. And when people ask us why we sing about horrible things like war and death, they're things that happen to us and there's no way we can ignore them otherwise we'd be hypocrites. I've chosen the medium of music to express my feelings, and Gen's chosen the medium of singing and playing his bass guitar. If he didn't sing, the same emotion would come through. You still get an overall feeling of doom if we're feeling bad, and a horrible feeling comes across when something horrible has happened to us. Just like you get a light-hearted feeling when Gen does 'Something came over me'. Or when people come over and say: what a fucking day, he did a song about that - 'What a Day' and it's about the bloody awful day he's had.
Why did you do pornographic modelling?
C. At the beginning I did it because it was something I actually wanted to do. We used to use a lot of pornographic magazines in collage we made. It was a nice thing to think I could be collage with my own photos. It was an ideal situation where, in the pornograhic magazines I was using, it was me, and it was a real magazine, not photographs we'd tken of ourselves and published ourselves. It was in a real situation and it was on the market, and I was just another girl, another model. I wanted to be behind the scenes, I wanted to know the whole situation and what the girls were like. So when we moved to London, a friend of mine was working in it and got me my first job. I started working as a model above a camera shop where you were payed so much per hour to be photographed nude. It was the first time for me and my girlfriend said: if you do this now, you'll never get anything as horrible again, you'll always look up from now on. It helped me a lot to do that first. Then I went on to all the different magazines. There's a whole big case full of them, we collected every one, or as many as we could; there are films as well. I did ordinary modelling also for things like the motol show. I tried every angle of it, one of everything so I knew what it was like. Then I met a girl who was doing strip-tease and also modelling. I said I'd get in touch with her when I fancied doing that. I didn't go to her agency because at the ICA I met a girl who was stripping and she gave me the telephone number of her agency. I rang them up and started doing strip-tease. I began doing topless go-go dancing and then I did strip-tease. Now I do it only for the extra money. But I've got all the photos and documentation from it and I did an exhibition on it in Austria last year in October. It was really nice because I linked it up with performance, which is so similar; you can't split them in any way whatsoever, because people come along for the same reason, to see you. Because the guys that buy the magazines see one girl and they always look for them in different magazines, they collect them. There was a man who used to ring me up. It started off as a dirty phone call, then he rang me up for two years. We just used to sit and talk. He'd tell me all his sex problems and I used to tape him. So I've got two years of tapes. But in the end he got to be a real drag, so when he'd ring up and ask if he could talk to me, I'd say no. But then he'd ring me up in a weeks time.
Gen, can you tell me about your 'baby'?
G. The LP is going to be called 'Nothing here now but the Recordings'. It's not just a reading from his books, it's his original experiments with cut up tapes. He used to write things, chop up the paper, and re-read them, and then record that. Then he'd go back to the beginning of the tape, and at random points, record other things on it; so you get bits of him talking, bits of TV, then bits of him talking about something different. It was originally suggested to him by Brion Gysin in Paris in 1959, and then William started doing lots of experiments because he found it related so well to his books. He was basically trying to find out what really happens with words. He had the theory that if you keep abusing them and mutilating them and chopping them about, the future leaps through. He used to say that you can find out what people are really saying. For instance, if you read a newspaper article, it's propaganda, but if you cut it up and keep cutting, you can often find out what they re really saying behind all the words. In this way you're destroying the power of the word as a divine thing by insulting it and throwing it around and putting it in the wrong place. You also get incredibly evocative phrases that are very poetic, or make you think of interesting images. They have a lot of good uses. He kept all these old tapes for years; he did them right through the 60s and he started to develop theories, that if you wanted, you could use them like contemporary magic. For example, he went to a café once, and they gave him food and then threw him out when he wouldn't pay the bill after big arguments with the people of the café. So he went to the café and photographed it in the street with the other buildings around it. Then when he printed the photos, he cut out the café and glued the photo back together minus the café. He then taperecorded the street noises outside the café on a cassette recorder; he cut them up and then recorded other things like police sirens and ambulances and people crying - they were like distress noises. He'd then play that back outside, so that he was generating distress and things going wrong. Within a couple of weeks the place went bankrupt and closed down and still hasn't opened since. So it has a lot of interesting connotations; it has a lot to do with the way people are controlled by magical suggestion and by deliberate propaganda, and how to short circuit it or break it. He let us go through his entire archive of tapes that had never been heard, although he's referred to them quite often in his books and lectures. And we said: you're always talking about these tape experiments, don't you think it would be good if people could at least hear some of them, so they can find out what they sound like and then it might inspire them to go out and do things - it's more concrete for them to listen to some of them. So he finally agreed, and we went over and selected enough to make an album out of. Basically he took examples of all the techniques, not necessarily the best, but all the different ways he tried doing them. For example: slowing the tape down, putting it backwards, pulling it through by hand, inching it so that he garbled the words, or cutting up the tape with scissors and recording bits off the TV or the news broadcast. Some really funny things resulted from this. There's one about the president of America being impeached eight years before Watergate; and they're two different news broadcasts about two different things. That's an example of the future leaking through.
But Burroughs said a lot of things about drugs, what do you think about drugs and heroin?
G. I think they stop people from being able to realize their full potentials. Heroin is basically a drug that shuts out the real world - even morphine. You're turning away from the world, and I just don't believe in doing that. I think it's one of the most successful ways of destroying youth culture and potential, and a lot of intelligent creative people. It's very easy in this world to feel despair and to feel that everything's worthless and a waste of time. And when something like heroin is easily available, I'm sure governments make sure it is, it's in their interest. If you've got somebody that's very creative, or an anarchist, or a junkie, which would the government prefer? - a junkie, every time. Because a junkie is the easiest persons to control - they'll do anything for heroin. And if you want to arrest them you can always do it, if you want to kill them you just give them a bad overdose. So it's the best way of getting rid of opposition. There's also the fact that people think they're doing something rebellious, so it's like making a whole generation commit suicide. A generation that otherwise would be very constructive and create a lot of trouble. So for those reasons alone I'm very anti-drugs.
I've written some strange comic stories, basically about music. In one of these stories there is a very powerful man who pays Lou Reed to sing 'Heroin' so that a lot of kids can idenify themselves in this song in order to sell a lot of heroin.
G. It's not such a fantasy, that seems very reasonable to me. I think that's more likely to be truth than most other things. All western governments have a vested interest in people becoming junkies, because it stops people caring, it switches them off. Burroughs kept saying that it's the best control drug, and it is, it's the ultimate control, and you don't even have to sell it - once they're on junk you don't have to convince them to keep buying it like any other product. There's no advertising needed once they've started. And I think rock music is another form of drug. The vinyl junkies - that's what I call them.
Like religion, TV, drugs...
G. Yes, Mum and dad have TV and beer and wine, the little kids have rock and roll, heroin or dope. When you get older you switch your symbols, but they're still the same thing. Yet each lot despises the other as if they were different. The parents think the kids are outrageous, the kids think their parents are, but they're doing the same thing. They've just got different versions of it, they've got no real freedom.
How can anything be done against all these things? Telling the truth to the people, or shocking and astonishing them?
G. Just telling the truth. Shocking them can be dismissed.
C. They're shocked every day, anyway, by the people that are confusing them.
G. They've already started removing the ability to shock by putting more and more outrageous things on the TV and the newspaper every day. There are pictures of dead bodies; they're always zooming in on blood and dead bodies in the news - I mean, they can't wait to film dead bodies. They realized that those tactics were working, so they started using them to make people insensitive to it - they're just deadening people. Basically, everything is aimed at making people dead; without feelings. If people don't respond, then it doesn't matter what goes on around them. Even if the Japs and the guys with machine guns are walking in the street outside your house, they'll sit unresponsive. And even if you're the one that's dragged outside and shot, people will still sleep. So there's only one thing to do, which is to keep repeating the truth as you see it, and feeling that at least you've not contributed to the shit that's going on. The only action left, is to not contribute to the shit. And if you meet people that have a certain understanding, even if you don't agree on everything, you should try being a nice person to them; remember them and be kind to them. When you feel lonely you can remember that those people are there, even if you don't see them very often. You remember that there are a dozen people that understand why you exist, and care for you as you care from them. So that's all that you can hold onto. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do things. You do things, you're active; we are, but I have no illusions about the real effect of them. But ultimately, on the grand scale, we have to lose, but on the individual scale, we're the winners. They can't beat us. They can kill us, but they can't beat us as individuals. So you have to choose what you want. You can be on the mass scale but have no personality, or you can be an individual who wins.
What do you think about TV, videocassettes, TV as the truth of the future?
G. For a start, there's so much money, they charge a lot for videocassette. They've just realized there's loads of money in it. But the videotapes they sell are so boring. You'd only want to see the films once or twice at the most., So instead of paying two pounds to go and see it at the cinema, you pay forty pounds to see it at home on a small screen and then you can't do anything with it. So then you become another addict, a video addict and the parents are all becoming videoaddicts. Instead of LPs, there's a much bigger turnover; they want to get rid of records now, they just want to be able to buy videotapes because the profit margin's better. And then they deteriorate. A product that goes off is much better because you have to keep buying more. It's also harder to make good duplicates, so they keep more control over it. They've got all these shit things they want to sell off; they've got these films which cost milions of pounds and they want to get more money back on them, so they get extra money this way. Plus, the big governments invented video for their own reasons. The CIA didn't invent it for the benefit of you or me. They did it for themselves. But they spent so much money that they have to share it with the mass of people, in order to get some of the money back. But we can use it against them, like with Xerox machines. I'm sure they hate the fact that they're available to the public, because anyone can distribute propaganda. But they had to do it. They trapped themselves. But they keep giving us polaroid cameras, miniature cassette recorders and videomachines. And althought the quality might not be fantastic, now anybody can make videocassettes, send them to each other in the mail, of anything, whether it's them having sex with their wives, or them just talking about politics, or doing videos of newspaper cuttings that are weird. They can do it an send it - they're distributing their own information. So they're giving us the weapons to fight the world, which is one thing we've got going for us - they're making available better means to fight back.
In an article, I wrote that TV is the power of the future, so we have to fight for a place in independent TV and in the official TV.
G. You see, in England there are only three stations - two of them are owned by the government, and the other is owned by a big business. There is no independent TV like in Italy, so it's very hard to infiltrate TV in Britain. It is very controlled and very puritan. Sexuality is taboo. Occasionally you see a naked woman, but it's still considerd a surprise, and it's done in a very uninteresting way. The controls are very strict. They only tell you what they want. They're not stupid. Why should they tell you want they don't want you to know? Who would do that? Nobody who's intelligent would tell you what they don't want you to know. So you have to remember that whatever you see on TV is what they decided they want you to know. Why do they want you to know? So that you'll form a particular opinion. So it's basically always geared to try and make people think in a particular way, to make them think the way they want them to. It's logical, it's the only reason. Entertainment, pure entertainment, is just another drug to keep people quiet after work. Instead of getting bored and going out and smashing windows, they watch the TV. I hate pure entertainment and show business - it's really bad. It's just another example of the way people are made stupid. Everything is geared to keep people stupid. No government or system that runs a country or big business has any interest in intelligence, except its own executives. They don't want their workforce or anyone to be clever because they are going to have endless questions and endless people asking: why? And they don't want that. They want people to do what they're told. It's obvious. So, the education system, the TV, records, all of it, are geared to make people do what the people that run it want. They're not idiots. Only an idiot would encourage trouble. So, that's the way it goes.
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