Someone asked me (about six months ago – sorry!) what I was banging on about in the song ‘Deep and Meaningless’ from Gramophone Logic. Well I guess the simple answer is ‘conspiracy’ and ‘complacency’, but I don’t do simple answers, I do ‘pompous and dull’ so prepare yourself.

The more observant of you will have noticed that over the course of these – well lets call them digital musings – I have made a couple of overt or thinly veiled references to works on film and contemporary ‘think’ pieces which the lazy, the disinterested and the extremely powerful would group together and describe as ‘conspiracy theories’.

The very expression ‘conspiracy theory’ implies a disproportionate level of wacky-brained, semi-psychotic, instantly dismissible arguments, leading to ridicule at best, and a possible jail sentence at worst.

In my opinion this is unfortunate, because lurking amongst the more outlandish ‘aliens live among us’ weirdness, there are undoubtedly a small amount of well-intended, thought-provoking salient questions being asked. All the more relevant at this particular point in time, when most of us know that we are being lied to. Regularly. Provably. When we see items of news being altered during the course of a day to suit the political output of a government supporting news channel, we witness first hand that things cannot always be as our so-called ‘democratically’ elected leaders would have us believe.

And so some brave individuals go out in to the world in a desperate attempt to get to the truth. Some have their conclusions already drawn, and simply force the facts into their own pre-formed slots. Others are simply curious to understand the anomalies and contradictions that they witness daily, and without an agenda of their own to promote, they scrape beneath the thick-inked, front-page official headlines to find that things are not as we have been informed.

This in itself is enough to be angry about, but when we are denied access to relevant information that could conclusively prove an argument one way or another, we are left with no option but to assume that the versions of events presented for public consumption are in all probability manipulated in a manner that makes a mockery out of the notion that any of us live in a truly democratic system. (As one tiny recent example, why does the American government deny it’s citizens access to the photographic evidence of an airplane hitting the Pentagon?)

In the absence of relevant information, our would-be saviours occasionally speculate at what the motivation might be behind the dis-information and the contradictions that they encounter. This is of course where most fall off the map. Without proper access to information some people are inclined to make quantum leaps of assumption in order to reach a pre-fixed conclusion, thereby handing their detractors a neatly wrapped gift, exposing themselves to ridicule and dismissal, thereby allowing the establishment authorities to neatly side-step the main issue, that is to say, the original relevant question as to why we are being lied to, which is still valid and still demands an answer.

However, once you’ve ventured down the road of implausible conclusion and have been found to have overlooked or misinterpreted crucial facts, your entire argument is dismissed as facile, no matter that the original questions that set you off on this quest are still brazenly left unanswered.

In fact it might be said that the entire western capitalist system relies on the fact that most of us are content to go on sleeping through these anomalies, no more than occasionally curious at events like the Kennedy assassination, the Iraq war(s), the US election in 2000, and the September 11th attacks, to name but a few.

Recent history is littered with these questionable occurrences but so long as we, the great un-washed, are distracted from the big picture by the pursuit of our desires to own cars, houses, computers, the latest designer clothes, games consoles, gadgets etc, we seem willing to turn a blind eye.

Besides which, it takes energy and time to pursue and investigate, and if our worst fears are confirmed, we’re powerless to do anything about them anyway, right? What a bunch of sheep we are. You could argue that essentially we get what we deserve. I think I was probably making that argument in ‘Deep and Meaningless’. I think I make it again from a slightly different stand point on the new album (now definitely titled ‘Bipolar Diversions’) in a song called ‘Illuminati’. Actually, now I consider it, I think it’s been a recurring theme for me in a great many songs. Which probably makes me a conspiracy nut. Ah well, I guess its good to have a hobby of some kind. And despite my asking you ever so politely, you still haven’t watched ‘Loose Change’ have you? I urge you to do so. Come join the nuts.

And to conclude in a completely irrelevant and unrelated manner I thought I’d mention that I’m mastering ‘Bipolar Diversions’ at Metropolis studios on July 24th so it should be available by the end of August, only five months behind schedule. I blame the aliens.

Willie