Here's an interesting question from our European sister "perhaps people can tell me who the "enlish icon" of today is, if it's not jonathan ross..
For me Roy Harper is the quintessential English Icon of today. Let me explain:
Roy was born into good working class stock in the North West of England. He suffered from pulmonary fistulae and the blinkered religiosity of his stepmum and endured the pain of falling in love before he reached sixteen and the subsequent loss of a love child. He joined the RAF and feigned insanity only to be placed in a mental institution and was tortured by Electro Convulsive Therapy. Roy didn't just become anti-establishment he was coerced into opposing the forces of darkness.
One of the worst treatments that Roy endured in the sixties was being sent to prison for a year for committing what was no more than a youthful prank; climbing St Pancras clock tower but whilst incarcerated for something that these days would at worst only raise a magistrate's eyebrow, he read and studied everything that was available to him in the prison library.
If you had rated his chances of survival they would have been very low and yet here is someone who turned his life around, continued to refuse to knuckle under to the music recording industry behemoth and did his own thing producing some of the most profound and influential music of the twentieth century; music that has changed many people's lives and words that hang in the air and scintillate.
Here is a man who has loved and lost and loved and left and is loved and found by people who weren't born when Stormcock was released!
So when you ask the Stormcock List/Community who is the English Icon of today I would have to say that Roy Harper represents those things that I admire and aspire to in an Englishman or in any man. Fortitude, determination, command of the English Language (read his essays), a man of peace, a lover of beauty, a father, a husband, a musician's musician, an idealist, a realist...
But I think that deep down you know that already, else why would you be involved with this List?
Wouldn't it be great if Dutch TV played and read out the music and words of Roy's songs and essays? Imagine a new generation of peaceniks based on the thoughts of Chairman Roy? Every day we would have to sit down and listen to at least both sides of Stormcock before venturing off to work......
And then since Roy would thoroughly disapprove of being deified, I thought I'd have Tony Benn, the politician with the most integrity that I ever met, as a backup!
Peas and Love
Pete
AWB
The only thing I have against Anthony Wedgewood-Benn / Lord Stansgate is that he was responsible for the criminalisation of pirate radio during his days as Postmaster General. Is that a bit like Witchfinder General I wonder ?
Tony Benn
That will always be a part of the state of conflict between the State and people who contravene the law as it is perceived.
The characteristic I have grown to admire in Benn is his desire to persuade people to his point of view rather than to usurp power to achieve it. When Benn renounced his Peerage, he took a much harder path than he could have done. There are plenty of examples of how Benn has trodden a difficult road. He is as good a listener as he is a talker and has a pragmatic approach to the difficulty of development of social democracy in the UK. Disemination of power in a Capital Market economy is always going to bring conflict.
Regarding Pirate Radio, it served its purpose as a means of bringing new music to the attention of people who were interested in it at that time. However, the music industry is Big Business and nowadays we have the Internet. Just explore MySpace to see how many people are putting music out there for people to listen to. Most record companies are investing heavily in social networking projects and trawling internet to find people who have successfully marketed themselves. This doesn't mean that the best are successful in fact often its quite the opposite.
People are not constrained in following the latest fashionable trend or passing whimsy and young people are discovering the delights of Roy Harper, Nick Drake, John Martyn to name just three.
I also think the issue of Royalties is still a fundamental problem for music writers and publishers although some aspects have improved over the last twenty years. Phongraphic Performance is still based on statistical reporting that requires people are on the 'Official Playlists'. Commercial Radio evolved from the Pirates when the establishment knew it could no longer control output entirely by civil means and they offered franchises instead and so advertisiers were no longer dependent on paying the Pirates to broadcast their messages. Therein lies the dilemma. Freedom for expression comes at a price!
What I for one who took to the streets to demonstrate for in the sixties has led to Pandora's box being well and truly opened but we just exchanged one set of shackles for another. Thatcher's cynical approach to populace control was to create the society which has material goods but is saddled with debt and needs to conform to be able to repay that debt. The huge danger for democrats is that people will wake up to the fact that they were conned. The rich got richer and the poor more debt laden. We completely failed to inculcate the values of responsibility and the media take a huge responsibility for their role in corrupting our society and values.
There is a war raging across the planet and in the end it will be either won or lost because individuals will either take responsibility for their actions or not.
regards
Pete