Grateful when you’re silent?

So this was interesting viewing. I was dimly aware at the time of a certain fuss surrounding the band Kula Shaker, something about their singer Crispian Mills holding some kind of dubious political positions, with that fuss not helping their career prospects, and the band splintering in 1999 after their second album did markedly less business than their first had done. I was never into them as such (really liked “Tattva”, though), and they fell so far off my radar that I was astonished to discover not that they had reformed, but that they’d actually done so in 2004. Good grief.

Anyway, our host Mr Hargreaves goes into the details of the affair, few of which I’d known about before. Brother Crispian did himself few favours by saying thing about having flaming swastikas on stage; he was and I presume still is deep into Hinduism so he has a particular relationship to the swastika as a result, and I understand that, but… well, if you talk about how great the swastika is to a primarily Anglo-European audience, they’re probably not going to consider that point. And so a Jewish journalist called Matthew Kalman, working for the Independent, decided to take Mills down.

So while KS were touring the US, Kalman wrote to him and asked him to respond to the accusations of him being kind of unsavoury. And Crispian sent back a long fax clarifying himself… whereupon Kalman chose to ignore what Mills had written and went ahead with the hit piece he’d evidently intended all along. But Hargreaves actually shows us the content of the fax and what Mills actually wrote, and the latter is pretty concrete about repudiating the far right; here are some screenshots from the video that you can enlarge:

Basically, therefore, Crispian Mills was a dickhead in the way he expressed himself, and he essentially admits as such. Of course, this assumes he was in fact being honest here and not just lying about abhorring the far right (I remember reading somewhere that even Ian Stuart Donaldson denied being a Nazi a few years before reforming Skrewdriver as an overtly Nazi band; someone evidently had his number well before that)… but I feel like he is, cos if he was stupid enough to say the things he did in press interviews, he probably would’ve been stupid enough to admit it in this fax if he were into Hitler. I’m willing to be charitable and assume Mills chose his words poorly at the time, and I think if he or the band in general were Hitler-happy, they wouldn’t have got away with coming back like they did; maybe their second phase has been less starry but it’s certainly been more enduring. (I can’t see that chud from Tau Cross bouncing back in any similar fashion.)

Interestingly, Kalman’s hit piece announced that it was drawing on the work of a small journal called Open Eye, citing its co-editor John Murray, without acknowledging that Kalman himself was the other co-editor of the thing (curiously, his Wiki entry also completely ignores it)… from what Hargreaves presents, it appears to have been a somewhat cranky left-wing conspiracy mag, and I just found that interesting, cos Kalman obviously wanted to expose Mills as a crypto-Nazi, but these days magazines of that alternative/conspiracy/counterculture sort seem more to lean right to varying degrees… indeed, I remember reading somewhere that Uncensored from NZ had actual Nazi-aligned funding behind it, which I don’t know if that’s true but I do find believable when I look at the front page of their site and see the Holocaust referred to with inverted commas around it. Also you can find them a lot more easily in newsagents now than you ever could’ve done with Open Eye and its apparently two-yearly publication schedule…

Also, David Icke gets referenced a few times, on account of Mills saying at one point that he doesn’t want to turn into him (a noble ambition, of course), but James Hargreaves keeps pronouncing his name as “David Ick”. And I love that. Not only had he somehow had the good fortune to remain ignorant of Icke until now, but “ick” is actually a pretty fair response to him as well…