Peak n'Oil No #1 - Faith No More

Faith No More - my Number 1 band to listen to as we circle the plughole

Well, it took me a while to get there but finally I can reveal the Number One band to listen to when contemplating the decline and fall of our industrial civilization.

Faith No More - yes, even the name of the band spells it out - the band from California who make the act of juxtaposing easy listening classics with death metal riffs seem like the most natural thing in the world. It's their later stuff, however, that saw them break away from the pack and mature into something that will still be eminently listenable as long as CD players continue to spin. The albums Angel Dust and King for a Day ... Fool for a Lifetime are regularly taken out of their cracked and scuffed CD cases in the Heppenstall household.

Faith No More were the band to see in the early 1990's and, yes, I was there whenever they came to the Brixton Academy in London, stage diving with the rest of them. They are a band who fire on all four cylinders, and there are no duff members. The band was always driven by bassist Billy Gould and keyboardist Roddy Bottum (not forgetting the drummer/founder Mike Bordin) but really came into itself when the very strange Jim Martin was brought in on guitars and, later, the youthful Mike Patton was employed as frontman and lyricist.

When surveying their back catalogue there are simply too many tracks to choose from, but I've narrowed it down to the following.

Starting at the beginning back in the mists of time in 1985 We Care a Lot revealed FNM to be more than just directionless mutoid waste rockers - they could be snarky social commentators too. It's pretty anarchic stuff and  vocalist Chuck Mosley does a good job of sounding like a sneering cynic. The words are great and, just like writing a blog about peak everything and the end of industrialism - it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it.

Moving on, Everything's Ruined sees the welcome introduction of Mike Patton, and speaks for itself.

Off the same album we have Caffeine (this is a live version from 2009). My look how they've aged ...

Moving onto their next great album King for a Day ... Fool for a Lifetime we get such greats as The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (seemingly a peon to business executives) ...

Cuckoo for Caca - surely the best song about nuclear waste that was ever penned delivered in a suitably, er, urgent way and featuring the verse ... Shit Lives Forever ... you can't kill it ...

And let's not forget FNM's gentle side with such tracks as the Icarus mentioning Just a Man. To me, this track is pure poetic beauty. Check out the lyric:


"Man was born to love- 
Though often he has sought 
Like Icarus, to fly too high- 
And far too lonely than he ought 
To kiss the sun of east and west 
And hold the world at his behest- 
To hold the terrible power 
To whom only gods are blessed- 
But me, I am just a man" 

And let's not forget the Bee Gee's cover I Started a Joke. Patton can't take credit for the lyrics, but it's hard to listen to this track without thinking that it is being some by some tragic personification of industrial capitalism ...

The album Album of the Year also yields a few nuggets, such as the ethereal Stripsearch which says quite a bit about contemporary life and our increasingly authoritarian governments.

And finally, from Angel Dust, FNM's Midnight Cowboy is a suitable track to end this Peak n'Oil Top 10 on. Pour yourself a glass of something strong, turn up the speakers, put your feet up and imagine our whole way of life go riding off into the sunset.

In case you're wondering what Mike Patton does these days (or in case you're not) he has become an Italian and now sings classic Italian pop hits (in Italian) with his own symphonic orchestra ... and he also sings opera.

Pink n'Oil #3

So, we’re down to the Top 3 of my Peak n’Oil series of music to listen to as you contemplate how screwed up things have become. I originally only had about three bands in mind, so we’re now down to those three. 

Just to recap, the bands/artists so far – all of them picked from the shallow pool of my own CD collection - are as follows:

10 – Julian Cope

9 –   Fleetwood Mac

8 –   Led Zeppelin

7 –   Simon and Garfunkel

6 –   Neil Young and Crazy Horse

5 –   The Beautiful South

4 –   Morrissey

So, without further ado …

Peak n’Oil #3 – Pink Floyd

In my last post I mentioned what I thought were the important things we should bear in mind when confronted with our low energy future. One of the most crucial of these is that we have to develop different ways of relating to the universe and relating to one another. The track ‘Echoes’ by Pink Floyd, I think, says this point beautifully.

It’s a long track; almost half an hour all in all. When we listen to it it takes us back to the beginning of time, reminding us of the primeval chaos from which we emerged and to which we will one day return. It is, in a word, heavy. It then takes us on a surreal trip in time back from the point of humankind to those beginnings to hear ‘the echo of a distant time comes willowing across the sand’.

The instrumentals continue, and we pass through a very bleak phase with what sounds like howling alien voices crying out on the face of a scarred, desolate planet. That's us, now.

[Note how things undergo a 'rebirth' after this point. That's the future I talked about in my last post.]

The key lyric for me is something that one of the members of Pink Floyd (I forget which one, probably Dave Gilmour) once revealed that this single lyric underpinned everything the group was ‘about’. That verse is:

Strangers passing in the street

By chance two separate glances meet

And I am you and what I see is me.

And do I take you by the hand and lead you through the land

And help me understand the best I can?

And that, to me, is what our whole predicament is about right now.

The rest of the lyrics go as follows:

Almost every day you fall
Upon my waking eyes,
Inviting and inciting me
To rise.
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning.

And no one sings me lullabyes
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky....

And that's what I'm trying to do with this blog - throw the windows wide and call to you across the skies!

Turn the lights down low and the volume up high, get your pouch of 'shrooms out and let the Floyd take you away …

Introducing Peak n'Oil

Am I living in LaLa Land? That's a question I ask myself every day when I awake because whatever crises that are unfolding in the world at large they are rarely mentioned here in Denmark. You can have both financial and nuclear meltdowns and all the time it all seems like some faraway dream, only mentioned in passing on the news because they had some spare airtime to fill after all the slots about teachers wanting slightly more pay, and kindergartens looking at a staff shortfall of 0.3% by 2020, possibly.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself. Is it me dreaming or is it everyone else? Denmarkland, you see, is populated with the world's happiest people, and everything here is the Best In The World - it must be because we are told that on the news practically every day. Or occasionally second best (after arch-rivals Sweden). Nothing is ever allowed to disturb the flow of good news here, which is kind of ironic in the country where an awkward man who felt like he didn't fit in wrote a story called The Emperor's New Clothes.

In this country nobody is poor. Nobody is rich either (in theory, at least). Everybody has a high standard of living. Many families have second homes - usually here in Denmark but often in far-flung places like Thailand. A woman I know played a round of golf there last weekend and said it is best to go for a whole week but that it was not too far for a weekend break. Thailand! I once saved up for a whole year to go there and 'find myself'.

Here, your life is mapped out for you from the cradle to the grave and is done so by means of welfare. When you are six months old you go to nursery school. You then go to primary school, followed by proper school which, confusingly, is called gymnasium. Then, usually, you go to university (remember, most are middle class), which lasts for up to about 12 years and is normally rounded off with a PhD in something obscure but usually related to Denmark's big money earners: pharmaceuticals, IT, engineering and design. Then you have a stint known as your 'working life' which brings you up to 60ish, upon which you retire to a golden nest egg.

If, at any point during your working life you have the misfortune to find yourself unemployed, you don't really need to worry. Despite having no job you can still look forward to about 12,000 kroner a month courtesy of the government (that's about $2,100 after tax).

Some people retire early- like when they are 30. This is called 'before-time-pension' and is usually awarded to people who have had something traumatic happen to them, like a car accident, or if they are stressed at work. There are currently about 245,000 people on this - or about 7% of the working population.

All this adds up to make Denmark one of the happiest places in the world. People walk around with wide grins and proclaim that they could never live anywhere else because nowhere else matches up. To suggest otherwise is taboo, as I have once found out. And there are some good historical and cultural reasons for this which I am not going to argue with at all.

In fact, it's not my intention to rant about the country where my daughters were born, or where my life was saved when I suffered acute peritonitis or indeed where I took advantage of the generous welfare scheme as I worked my way through most of the books on my shelf that I had put off reading. No, that's not my intention at all (although gods know I've done so in the past).

Instead I just have one question: who is paying for all this?

It's a simple enough question: who pays for a lifetime of welfare and one of the highest standards of living in the world in a country that, basically speaking, has almost no natural resources, a smattering of light industry and the highest taxes in the known universe?

This is not a question most people would be willing to have a go at answering. But I'm just wondering about the gap between reality and the perception of reality here. Denmark, after all, was one of the few - perhaps the only - country to take oil shortages seriously in the 1970s. Could it be that in the intervening years a culture of schadenfreude has developed - a kind of ingrained 'resting-on-ones-laurels' attitude?

I suspect, after a decade of observation, that the true answer is much more complex and murky than that. For now at least, investors are pumping money into the country as it is seen as a safe haven. But how long can this last? I'm just wondering.

But in the meantime I have to try and convince myself that I am not going insane. Please, somebody tell me that there are actual problems out there in the real world and that all the smiley happy faces I see everywhere, and all the TV talk of Denmark avoiding 'the crisis' as they call it, and the suggestion that the most salient news event of the year so far was that cruise ship turning over off the Italian coast - please somebody say that it's not me that is going insane!

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Peak n'Oil

In each post from now on, in a countdown from 10, I will be introducing a Peak Oil rock band.

Have you ever listened to a piece of music and thought: 'Wow, that perfectly expresses how I feel about peak resource production and some aspect of the likely ramifications on our wider society that are likely to ensue'? I thought as much. This, then, is my Top Ten of rock bands spanning the last 40 years or so who tell it like it is regarding mankind's follies when it comes to energy expedience, rampant consumerism and our vapid, empty and entitled way of life.

Why rock music? Because, just like science fiction, rock music has a way of getting to the core of important matters. It vents our fears and anguishes and gives voice to the power of the soul in its indignant howling rage. As such, it is probably the only modern form of music that is unafraid to challenge the status quo, albeit in a safe 'free speech' type of zone.

[Don't worry, there will be no actual Status Quo in in the Top Ten]

Please note that all these selections are taken from the shallow pool of my own CD collection, which effectively mirrors my own lifespan of the last 40 years (plus a few extra - I was 'retro' before the term was even invented) - if you'd like to add your own choices feel free in the comment section.

So, without further ado:

No 10. Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes

As a once legendary imbiber of consciousness altering drugs, Mr Cope makes it into the Top Ten by virtue of the fact that he wrote the song World Shut Your Mouth, which contained the lyrics 'put your head back in the sand and shut your mouth'. Clearly Cope, who went on to become one of the foremost modern-day scholars on Megalithic remains in Europe, was thinking of the blanket refusal of the modern world to take serious matters, er, seriously when he wrote those lyrics.

Despite being a pagan, a blogger and a scholar of the antiquities, Cope still found time to go solo and release several albums, including Autogeddon - an album about the fate that awaits us if cars are allowed to dominate our lives. It includes, seemingly, a reference to killing an SUV driver with a rock and is clearly the stuff that more people should have listened to while they were growing up in the 1980s.

If you like Julian Cope's music, you'll possibly like his history documentaries about ancient Britain.

Next week: No. 9