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June 16, 2022 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:23:42
Michael Stock
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Welcome to The Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
But look who I have bagged.
I have got Mike Stork.
Mike, welcome to The Delling Pod.
Well, thanks for inviting me.
I don't know what's going to happen.
No, isn't that the exciting part?
I mean, I've done no research, or almost no research, as usual.
But I was thinking, you know, like, if I'd been doing a podcast with you, say, five years ago, it would have all have been about, you know, Mike Stock wrote the soundtrack to the 1980s, and I'd be asking you questions about Kylie or whatever.
And now, in this new world we're living in, all that seems to belong to a world that no longer really exists and actually, even at the time, was an illusion, though we didn't know it.
Are you with me on that?
Well, I'm not quite sure.
I know that it all feels a bit like a dream now.
And also, Times have moved on from when I was having those hits with Kylie and Rick and stuff from the 80s.
I think social media, Twitter and all the stuff that we're doing now has brought things into light that I never considered back then.
So in a way, it's an awakening from a dream, I suppose.
Well, I mean, the reason I was keen to get you on is because I've been looking at your Twitter, and I get the impression, and I have to say, this is, I think, is a much greater achievement than having got However many singles, number one singles by different artists.
You've got the record, haven't you?
Yes, according to the Guinness Book, yes, we're the most successful writers and producers, living or dead.
Right.
But even more impressive than that, in my book, is that you are really one of, passing few, People with any major public profile to be calling out the craziness of what's going on that you haven't buried your head in the sand as so many, so many celebrities, politicians, et cetera, the majority seem to have done.
And I was wondering what was your sort of wake up moment?
No, well, I think, look, I stood up against the music industry back in the day.
After Stock Aitken and Wolfman split up, I actually went head to head with them because some of the things that we're talking about now, the sort of general rise of tyranny, I suppose is what you call it, that was happening in the music industry and in media in general.
And the people that haven't spoken up now, the ones who used to think of themselves as very rock and roll, I've kept very quiet, toeing the line, because I know which side their bread's buttered.
But I've always felt myself to be independent of the music industry, as I was, and I fought them over a number of issues, and they ostracised me.
But more recently, I started on Twitter 12 years ago, and one of the first things that happened was all the music fans complained.
They said, we don't write stuff like that, we want to just hear about Kylie or Jason, tell us stories about the pop music.
And they got quite offended.
That I would be moving into other areas.
I suppose half of that is that most people think that if you wrote those sorts of songs, you're a pop music guy, you're not really into the world in general, politics, and you're not particularly clever maybe.
But I always thought I had a brain and I still do think that.
I'm really glad you said all that, because that means that I can journey with you down the music industry rabbit hole.
This has all been a big wake-up for me.
Just as you spent the major part of your life in the music industry, I was in the mainstream media for getting on for 30 years.
It was my bread and butter.
I thought the mainstream media was a reliable source of information.
I thought that journalists were motivated by a desire to find out what's really happening, to find out the truth and so on.
So it's been a bit of a rude awakening for me to discover that actually Certainly in the last two years, but actually going back decades, the mainstream media has been a line machine for the elites.
It's a brainwashing operation.
But I've also learned in my journey of discovery that the music industry is one of the most corrupt, actually, I mean, let's not beat about the bush, diabolical, genuinely diabolical industries in the world, and that That it's not even that its function as a form of entertainment is secondary to its real objective, the people who are really in charge.
It's about corrupting, dumbing down the culture, increasing the kind of sexual deviation and profligacy, increasing drug use.
I mean, particularly things like gangster rap to to create social division, to criminalize elements of society or to make them More prone to criminal activity, etc, etc.
Did you... I imagine when you started out, you know, you had your own band, didn't you?
I imagine you thought... Sorry, go on, yes.
You thought that it was about entertainment and fun.
Well, I did right the way through, even, you know, when I had my band before I became successful.
But even after that, I felt, and most of the songs that we did, when you look at the canon of work that I did, it's very innocent and deliberately so.
We thought we were aiming at young teenagers.
And I remember how I felt In the 60s when I was a teenager and listening to the Beatles and hearing that kind of stuff, even though we can go down the Beatle rabbit hole as well.
But I like for the pure fun and the innocence and and, you know, melodies that moved me.
And that's all I was trying to replicate.
I didn't realize until some time into my career when we were having the hits that there was this underbelly that was horrible.
Um, and I refuse to take part.
I mean, listen, I was, I was offered, you know, I don't want to sound too dramatic, you know, ritualistic opportunities were put towards me, which I rejected entirely.
Um, people were, people, they would do this occasionally.
People have meetings in hotels and things would go on.
Um, I never know exactly what it was that did go on, but I absolutely refuse to go along with anything like that.
There were two or three occasions when I was invited to somewhere and I just said, it sounds a bit dodgy to me.
And on one particular occasion, the guy said to me, well, don't worry about it.
The head of Metropolitan Police will be there anyway.
You know, it sounded a bit like a script from Monty Python.
Actually, Mike, hold that a second.
I'm just going to let the dog in.
and it's barking and it's annoying me.
So how do these invitations manifest themselves? - What are the examples?
Well, the one in particular I was just talking about, one of the habits that me, Pete and Matt had were with some of the studio staff at the end of the day, which we normally finished around 10 o'clock in the evening, we get out of the pub and we have a couple of pints and a laugh and a joke.
And on a particular occasion, we were introduced to I can't even remember, it's a long time ago, it's 30 odd years ago now, I can't remember the name of the person.
I just know that the invitation, I did not want to take part in it.
Because everything was offered, you know, we'll have a nice weekend, we'll do this, we'll do that, and there'll be boys, there'll be girls, there'll be drugs, basically very open like that.
And I've never ever in my whole life taken any illicit drugs or illegal drugs.
The only thing I've ever done is got drunk a few times, but, you know, on alcohol, but never anything like that.
And it used to annoy me when certain artists would walk into the studio and want to roll a joint or something, or take a line of cocaine, because it would, it disrupts the process, and they think they're singing better, and they certainly aren't.
And, you know, the session goes downhill, especially if they're smoking the stuff.
I can't stand it.
So, although I used to smoke cigarettes a long time ago, I'm not entirely a Saintly in my approach to life, but things that directly affect your mental state, apart from the alcohol, I suppose, which does, I'm scared of, I think.
Frightened.
Yeah, yeah.
But okay, so we know that the music industry is awash with drugs.
I mean, that's a given.
And I imagine that we expect our rock stars to have lots of sex, but So the relations to those parties wouldn't in themselves set alarm bells ringing because you'd think, well, sex and drugs, that's what the industry is about.
But there must have been some extra element that made you suspicious of what was going on here.
Well, yeah, one of the examples I can give was one of the invitations was taken up by a band member who I was working with.
A very famous name and I won't be mentioning it, but he came back shocked, frightened, because he said they were going, seriously this sounds really weird now, but there was a young black boy, a young little African boy.
And there was panic, and something happened.
And this particular guy that I'm talking about was frightened by what he saw, but I didn't really get to the bottom of what exactly happened.
But this all happened in a hotel room in London, in a suite Are you talking about a child?
A black child?
Yes, fairly young.
Had probably not very much, in a way, clothing on.
My recollection.
I couldn't tell you exactly how it was described to me now, it's so long ago, but it was something that frightened him as much as frightened the child, I think.
So stuff like that.
And what I've read more about, looking into it more recently, clears up a few of the things that my recollection is fallible over.
I know now what that could have been, and I'm fairly aware of what goes on now.
Yes.
But you know, that area of things I'm not very clear on.
What I do know is, and I did speak up about this ten or so years ago, was the over-sexuality, the over-sexualizing of young girls in pop music, on videos.
And I complained about it.
And similarly with other areas where I've stuck my head above the parapet.
I mean, you lose your friends, you lose your associates, all sorts of people turn their back on you.
It doesn't particularly bother me about that.
But as soon as you decide to speak up, actually nowadays with Twitter, I've got a whole raft of new friends, really, that kind of like what I'm saying.
Well, I mean, look, you're brave and decent and that's not, I don't think, that common in the industry.
I mean, I've got friends.
Who have become pop stars.
Our babysitter became a pop star.
I'm not going to mention her on this because it would be unfair.
But the impression I get is that there are these talented young boys and girls who want a career in the music industry.
And there comes a point quite early on where it's made clear to them that unless they put out, for example, to their producers or label bosses or whatever, and unless they start embracing this kind of Satanic behavior, ranging from drug use to all the symbols, all the symbols of Freemasonry.
The way they all pose like this, with one eye closed, or that, or whatever, which we now know are high-level Freemasonry symbols to do with Luciferianism.
They effectively have to sell their soul to the devil in order to get a proper career.
I mean, is this your understanding of how it works as well?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Of course it is.
Except that with us.
I don't know what went on with the managers of the artists, but all I know is that you would be presented with sometimes a talented person, sometimes a not so talented person.
We just had to make the best record we could with whoever.
But this is the way I see it now.
And this started to rise to my attention around 1990, 1991.
The charts changed, the way the charts operated, the way they were compiled changed.
It became totally under the control of, and incidentally, the people that we're talking about at the head of the music industry are the same characters involved in everything, you know, right at the very highest level.
It's always the same names or replicas of these people who've moved sideways over the years.
Some of the ones that I dealt with have passed on, they've gone, but, you know, they get replaced by the same type of person.
And I just remember there was something called the Brit School, which is the London School, and now there's something called BIM, and there's ACM in Guildford, where I am.
And all over the country, there is what you might call colleges for people who can go to them, which their parents pay for, and they can learn how to be talented or learn how to be a pop star.
And these colleges have 3,000 kids in them.
Their parents paying 30,000 for their three-year course.
And how many people of those could ever be successful in the pop industry?
One out of thousands and thousands will make it.
That's the numbers.
It's always been that way.
What happens to all those other kids?
Well, their dreams are shattered.
They're probably flipping burgers now or doing something of the sort.
But the ones that made it had to be extra special.
What I know is lots of girls can sing.
Lots of girls can sing quite well.
Lots of boys are budding guitarists or whatever you, you know, rock stars or whatever you want to be.
What makes the ones that have the success different from the rest of them?
And it's only what you're saying.
It's only that.
Because I know that the parents have been sold this rather foolish dream that their kids are going to be successful and pay for them to go to college.
I mean, you know, what we need, as we all know in this country, are plumbers and plasterers and electricians.
We don't need another pop star.
But they're pandering to this idea.
What do you want to do?
Go to college to learn something useful?
Or do you want to go and be a pop star?
And so they all come out of that very disappointed.
So I see that as a very bad move in the industry, and it went hell for leather for that in around 1990.
Now, I don't want to do anybody out of a business, because it's a great business for the people who are running these things, but they're not being honest.
Anyway, so I was just really... My information is very limited on any particular activity of any artist, because all I can speak about are those that I worked with, and whatever happened behind the scenes, I wouldn't know.
How, I mean, you started off as Stock Aitken Waterman, and then you changed, you became PWL, is that right?
No, PWL stands for Pete Waterman Limited, and the two are not interchanged.
Oh, sorry, that's, sorry, sorry.
PWL was the studio in his business, Pete's business, and he was really started off as our manager.
Pete's not a writer or producer in the normal sense, And we had to fight for our position on that.
So we formed Stock Aitken-Warsman as a production team.
We just happened to use the studios that Pete had rented, called The Vineyard, from the offices from which he ran his business.
So, you know, only Kylie and Jason were on the label of PWL.
Bananarama, Rick Astley, Donna Summer, Sonia, I could just rap them all off, Mel and Kim, etc, etc, were on other labels, not on PWL.
Right, okay.
So you had this, sort of, the hit factory, this, you know, you were writing songs for diverse artists, and you were very successful.
How How high up the food chain were you though?
I mean, were you actually really low down compared with the sort of the really high ups?
Well, in the music industry, we were frowned upon.
Look, I had meetings with the chairman of the BPI at the time, BPI being the sort of overriding body of the music industry in this country, the British Phonographic Institute.
And the argument was, After I'd left Pete and Matt Aitken and I were working together, we were starting to tear up the charts again.
We were number one in the UK and number two in America with different artists.
And the industry, BPI, Tried to stop us.
And we had a meeting with him and the chairman and the general secretary.
These are really, so these are high up in the, the highest as you can get in the ostensible music industry, but there's the shadowy people behind.
But anyway, these people told us, said to me, we're not going to allow you to do again to us what you did in the 80s.
And I sort of looked at him and I said, well, what do you mean?
How are you going to stop us?
We're just making records that people want to buy.
And I found out very quickly what they could do and how they did it.
And they completely ruined us.
Stopped us, blocked us.
Claimed we were rigging the charts.
Claimed we cheated.
Claimed we bought all our own records back.
We sent out teams of people to buy them.
That sort of thing.
Claimed we put out extra formats.
You were only allowed at the time three formats.
Seven inch vinyl or a cassette and a CD or whatever.
And claim we put out more formats to cheat.
None of those things were true.
We were trying to compete against them and they were massively in control.
So we had to pull out a few tricks to try and beat them.
But in the end, they just blocked us, stopped us.
And I had to sell the building.
We got undermined by the London Underground, by the Jubilee Line extension.
So I ended up fighting Pete Waterman for our rights back, which we'd lost.
I ended up fighting the London Transport for the Jubilee Line extension and the BPI for pulling us out of the chart.
So we'd had a record go in the chart and they pulled it out before anyone saw it.
You know, that's the power they had.
Well, they could control the chart, you see, which is what they were doing from 1990 onwards.
So it was a sort of control thing it was they didn't like you were kind of maverick outsiders and they didn't like it because they didn't own your arse is that right?
That's it yeah that's absolutely right and um I mean the charts were always a bit of a dicey thing to be honest.
I mean Brian Epstein's famous for saying that he uh He bought the first Beatle record by the dozen, you know, in his shops in Liverpool and forced it up the chart.
But, you know, if you're going to spend your own money buying your own record, well, good luck to you.
You don't sell millions that way.
It's impossible.
But so right away through the 80s when we were having big hits, People like Gallup were the pollsters.
They were collecting the data from Woolworths, who were having their own independent data verified, and then the charts were made out of that data.
By the time you get to where I'm talking about, Woolworths are fading into the background slightly, and Millward Brown are formed as a data collecting agency, and that was a collaboration between the BPI and something called CIN, Chart Information Network, which were in fact the same people.
And they were, so they collect the data and they just make up the chart as they saw fit.
And Matt and I used to rack our brains saying, how can we, how can we get more sales?
How can we do anything?
It was irrelevant.
They were just, you know, like these days with Fiat money, when you buy a house or sell a house, you never see the money.
It's just numbers on the spreadsheet.
And so that's what the charts were.
The numbers were just made up and they took it in turns.
There were five majors, major record labels, and one week it's CBS, the next week it's BMG, the next week it's CMI.
And there was no room for any outsiders.
And, you know, they said it was their business, it was their... And when I queried the chairman of the BPI, I said, well, what right, what authority do you have to pull me out of the charts?
And he said, well, you know, we were... Now I know very well the BPI was formed in 1970-something.
But he said that they were formed in 1945 or some date which is well before I was born, so claiming some kind of provenance ahead of my birth date as justification for their authority.
You know, that's the way people operate, isn't it?
What gives people a right?
What gives the government a right?
What gives anybody a right to do anything on anybody?
They claim authority and I think in this sense what they were doing were putting their own interests ahead of record buyers who just wanted to buy records because they like them, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, who do you think the people are at the top?
At the very top?
Well, James, you know, don't make me sound like I'm a mad lunatic.
No one would know, because if they became obvious, then we'd deal with them.
So they are very clear about keeping their identity closed.
But the families involved pass this power over Many, many generations.
I mean, it's stuck in a groove from an authority given to them that goes back to the earliest times, really.
That's my understanding.
They claim authority back to an early period.
I mean, kingship, you know, over humans.
Where did that come from?
Yeah.
That makes sense to me and doesn't sound too weird.
Did you ever encounter any of these people?
I encountered one guy at the BBC who I didn't recognise and didn't know who he was but he had a... I didn't like his aura!
He was a bit of an unpleasant character.
He popped into a... I was doing a recording there and What happened to the BBC after 2003, after Tony Blair got his hands on it, they destroyed the broadcasting authority, the IBA and various others, and they created Ofcom, which is a pointless thing really, because that's after the horse has bolted.
You complain after it's been broadcast, what's the point of that?
Up until then, the BBC was very careful with videos and things.
I had a video that I was putting out around 1999 and in the video there was a scene where unwittingly we'd left a box of matches on a coffee table in a house which was being used for the filming.
And I think it was Sue Verity, one of the people at the BBC, said you'll have to edit that bit out because this is going out on kids television on a Saturday morning, alive and kicking.
We can't have a box of matches on the table.
That's how protective they were of their young audience.
I got that.
Understood it.
Later after that, they gave up the BBC after Tony Blair and Ofcom and then giving them Dave on Sky where they can earn advertising revenue.
They got loads of money rolling in.
And I don't think the BBC is funded by the license fee payer.
That's why they're not bothered, really.
We're all complaining about their biases and the threat to lose their license.
It doesn't bother them at all, because they get their money from elsewhere.
And so I just saw the change in the BBC.
So I went over there to do a show one time.
And what used to be producers who had the suits on, now all the producers were in jeans and T-shirts.
So you had the crew and the producers, and then there was another layer of management inserted into the BBC in the early 2000s, who sat upstairs and pontificated and barked orders, I think, or whatever.
And that's one of the guys that, inadvertently, I bumped into.
Didn't like him one bit.
I mean, the people I related to were the crew members on the floor or the producers trying to create something.
It was certainly not of that sort, you know.
Yes.
I mean, I think I've come to the conclusion that the BBC is actually a branch, another branch of the deep stage.
It's actually the entertainment division of MI5, MI6 and the civil service.
Yeah.
But I wondered, going back, that Even when it did sort of pay lip service to protecting children, I wonder whether that was part of the illusion.
I mean, when, you know, I remember when Relax was banned because, you know, it had when you want to come and it was, you know, you had various Radio 1 DJs sort of, what, pretend to be horrified or the BBC sort of made I think I agree with what you're saying.
only added to its mystique and and probably helped to go up the charts so it was all it was all kind of part of the the act wasn't it um i think i agree with what you're saying i don't i don't mean to say by the thing i related just now that the bbc wasn't already uh a corrupted organization because we know about jimmy savile we know about all the stuff that went on and it could continue to go on But it's about the honeypot, isn't it?
Because it attracts all the people, good people, but it also attracts all those who've got other things on their mind.
So, the same as some of the charities that I've had to deal with, you know, children's charities, that's where all the paedophiles go.
It's very logical when you think about it, because that's like their little sweet shop.
So, you know, most of all of these organized major charities, particularly the ones involving children, I don't trust any single one of them.
And I'm dubious about every single person involved, although they have to prove themselves to me before I would accept them.
And I've had to have dealings with Over Childline and NSPCC.
I've had to have dealings and I didn't like it at all.
Of late.
What happened with the BBC, I think, became more and more obvious as Tony Blair's government took over in 1997.
You know, because they freed it all up, supposedly, but all that did was open the doors to more corruption.
And, yeah, the BBC has always been... Well, you know, that's the problem.
They're doing it to themselves, aren't they?
They're shooting themselves in the foot.
We used to trust them.
They used to be the voice of the nation somehow.
And when an emergency happens, you needed information and you trusted the BBC, you know, throughout the Second World War.
What would we have done without that information?
Even though it was probably, looking back now, probably all misleading one way or another.
So now they've shot themselves in the foot over Covid.
Most people now don't believe a word they say.
So what's the government going to do next?
I mean, not most people, but a lot of people still believe it.
But you know what I'm saying?
It's getting, the awakening crowd is growing.
And the more they awaken, the less power the BBC can have over them.
So I really find it hard to see why they're doing it to themselves.
Who is the voice of authority anymore?
I certainly can't trust I can't trust Boris much more now.
I think it's all unravelling insofar as the powers that be They've had this long term plan, which probably goes back to at least the 1880s, that Southern General, who was a senior Freemason, I forget his name, who planned, you know,
envisage three world wars and of course we know about the first two but I think we're in the third one now.
But a lot of what's happening now was planned in more detail in the aftermath of the Second World War when the powers that be started panicking about the fact that the useless eaters were breeding and that we needed to be culled and controlled.
And I think, you know, there have been various stages on the way, the kind of the weakening of our culture through things like pop music.
And now it's coming to a head where you've got this battle between their desperation to implement the last details of their plan and before enough of us wake up to resist.
So I think we're at this rather... We are.
Nervous moment in our history.
What I've seen over my lifetime is emasculation of the Western males.
And that's through pop music and other means.
Because, you know, we are many and they are few.
And so they have to weaken us.
Because if we do waken up enough, they're going to, they're not going to win.
So I've seen that happen.
I've seen the other thing that weakens us is the breaking, breaking down of the family structure.
Because to me, that's fairly obvious.
I mean, I once talked to a hypnotist who explained how easy it was to hypnotize people to behave like a frog or something stupid on stage.
But if you ask them to do something which was against their upbringing, you know so something really outrageous they couldn't do it hypnosis didn't work so if you can break down that it's like when you you know some of these religious cults like the moonies they take their the first thing is take them out of their family get them away from their family's control and get them under our control um and i saw that with a you've probably heard of common purpose
i saw that i know loads of people in the early early blair years gordon brown has sort of set this all up and you this guy related he was sitting in a coffee and he was approached by common purpose you know all we're going to do is produce it's a bit like the waf and klaus schwab the uh Getting leaders, showing young people how to be leaders and getting them to penetrate all the cabinets of the world, you know.
So they have a long-term plan and they have fingers everywhere, but there's still the people at the top are just a few, very few.
So yes, which is why they need organizations like Common Purpose to infiltrate your organization with little mini-me's.
I mean, it's classic Marxist entryism, isn't it?
It's out of the kind of revolutionary playbook.
Well, it's cultural Marxist because the old financial economic Marxism has failed miserably and no one dares raise that again.
So this is a cultural Marxism, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yes.
Sorry, just tell me, explain what you saw of Common Purpose.
You saw industry figures going into the training course?
No, no.
People who I related to, in the sense that they were artists or music engineers or whatever, people I see in my daily life.
One particular I was telling me, he was sitting in a cafe in Brighton and was approached Just randomly by a couple or asking if he'd like to come to a meeting of common purpose.
You know, they were picking people up off the street.
And I think they went out just to get, that was their aim, wasn't it?
Just to get as many, particularly if you're sitting in a cafe at around three o'clock in the afternoon or something, you've got no home to go to.
They're picking kids who are probably, the latchkey kids, can't get home until their parents are back from work.
Anything that can break the family up a bit.
So I thought that was a fairly obvious tactic.
So I know nothing more about that other than I've read and heard some of their propaganda.
I mean, it would be a terrible waste for you if I didn't ask you more about, in more detail, about the music industry.
I mean, for example, you were talking about the kind of the decline of masculinity, and with hindsight, it's obvious that the pop stars who played with, you know, who sort of with being the opposite gender, Like, opposite sex rather, like David Bowie.
Yeah.
Whether wittingly or unwittingly, they were part of this war on family and war on civilization.
I mean, have you got a view on Bowie?
Do you think he was a... Do you think he was a goodie or a baddie?
Yeah, I'm a bit... He can't answer for himself, unfortunately.
You know what, he was... Well, he might be able to.
You know the theory is still alive.
Yeah, well, actually, Mike, you should look this up.
There was three died.
Somebody claiming to represent some David Bowie fan club.
Right.
Gave an interview to guy and it looks so like no one had ever heard a guy before.
It looks exactly like David Bowie.
It's freaky.
And if it's not, well, I apologize to the ghost of David Bowie.
You know, it does make you think when you when you look at this.
Well, there's been that about John Lennon, about Michael Jackson, about Elvis Presley.
I would love it to be true one day, because it's a great career move if you're trying to sell records.
But I would just say about David that I felt ambivalent, you know, because he acted outside of the industry a lot of the time.
He was self-motivated, self-generated.
So I think he was independent of some of the other stuff.
Although messing with the sexual side of it, with the clothes and the makeup and the hair and all that, you know, he just used those I did used to sell records and that's all that matters I think.
I don't want to sound like an old man here but it seems to me That in the last 10 years particularly, maybe in the last 15 years, that music has got incredibly bad.
That it's just, there is nothing around now that I'd really want to go and Well I wouldn't want to hear in my car as I was driving along.
It's just everything is so samey and so overproduced.
Is that a fair criticism or is it just I'm showing my age?
Well it is James and it's a bit of a rabbit hole but I mean I think the reason for most of the I watch this with incredulity.
I see a song written by a modern day artist.
I look on the label information online and it's got seven writers Or it's got, you know, it's impossible.
How does that work?
Bad enough, putting Pete Waltzman on the label, in our case.
Matt and I used to fight over every word.
So, you know, I can't imagine seven people in a room all chipping in.
So it's because nobody, everyone wants the quick way.
The quick way these days is not to write a song, but for a producer, Many times in his bedroom, who comes up with a good little dance beat on his drum computer, or a drum sample.
Most of it's sampled, so that's somebody else playing it.
You know, a lot of times you sampled drummers from the 1970s, because they were funky drummers, and you'd sample a bar of that and link it all together in a computer, and that's a new drum track.
So that's a quick way of doing it.
You don't have to learn drums, you don't have to be skillful, you don't have And then you've got the same with bass lines and chord structures.
I don't see anybody sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen and writing a song.
That never happens.
People go into a studio, the producer's got a drum track going, they put a girl behind the mic and say, And when we hear something we like, we'll stop and try and capture that.
And then you can chip a line in, you can chip a line in.
So, you know, it's not organic in the way that a song used to be written, you know.
And you can hear a song that's cohesive.
You can normally hear every lyric of a song that's written by somebody who's proud of what he's done.
Normally, you can't understand the lyric of modern music.
Because it's indecipherable, it's been so processed.
So they're embarrassed of the lyric or the lyric's just nonsense.
So that's what you need.
You need to be able to go back to a time.
I mean, Bo is a good example.
He wrote some great songs and you could hear every single word of what he sang.
Even though we had that accent.
The Beatles, what great vocal delivery there.
A lot of the songs in the early 80s.
And so, you know, you could hear all of the lyrics in my songs.
People still sing them at venues and shows in the festival season.
And that's another example.
Most of the 80s acts that I work with and many others are still working, but there's no act.
And that's 40 years on, you know, there's no acts.
That you can say have come out in the last five years that are going to be here in the next five years.
I can't think of anybody who's got that sort of longevity in them.
They've got to be genuine acts, they've got to have genuine material for people to genuinely love them and treasure them.
Yeah, I suppose Harry Styles is the one that's, well I don't know, One Direction must be a while back now, but he seems to be one of the few that's You managed to carve out this old school career of enormousness.
Well, Harry is not, not really.
I don't, I don't agree on that.
I don't think, I think he's had a hit just recently.
He's wearing a very effeminate costume.
He wears pearl necklace.
He's a bit like Eddie Izzard was the other day in that photograph where he looked like You know, like your granny, your maiden aunt.
He looks like that Formula One driver, doesn't he?
Lewis Hamilton.
They all put on dressings.
Yeah, but some people will tell you that it's just a fashion thing, you know.
Yeah, right.
But we can see the design in it.
Oh, don't get me wrong.
I think Harry Styles' new album is awful.
I mean, I really do.
I think it's absolutely terrible and it really upsets me that members of my family rate him.
And, you know, this guy who is having sort of pyramid symbols with a single eye in the middle as part of his iconography and you think, well, I know what that's all about.
I don't think he's good.
I mean, I think he's very good looking and I think he's good at delivering his tunes and stuff and he's good at coming across as a kind of normal person.
Well, can I just say about that because I think this is the important thing that we've touched on earlier, but this is the difference.
So Harry Styles, you know, went on a competition with that's how they got to their fame on X Factor or whatever it was.
And once they'd had the fame, or won the competition, the industry kicks in.
What you see with Harry Styles, that new record in his album, is Masses of money, mass promotion.
We're talking millions and millions to shoot the videos, to make the concerts work.
So he's the chosen one at the moment where they're going to spend all their cash on, as they were with, like say for Adele, who's probably retired now.
I don't know what's happened to Adele.
And so over the last 20 years, she stood out as being taller than the others.
Harry Styles is the one at the moment.
One or two others, but their names have gone now.
And that's to do with the power.
That's the one they said we're getting behind.
And the amount of money they've spent...
And when you've got that amount of money spent, so you've got the finest video directors, the finest photo shoots with the camera people who are brilliant with their stuff, the finest musicians, producers, all of the post-production and pre-production at their disposal, venues, you know, when you can pack a venue, Because who's organizing all the ticket sales?
Who's printing all the tickets?
It's a massive organization that gets behind someone like Harry to get the success that he wants.
And of course, your family, people that I know that like Harry, just sold it.
You can't escape it.
That's very true actually.
Which brings me to... I keep bringing this up in podcasts because I think this book is seminal and so key to understanding how the world works.
The book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon.
Have you come across that?
Say it again?
There's a book called Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon by Dave McGann who I think was... Was it Laurel?
Is it Laurel?
Laurel Canyon, yeah.
I have not read that book, I don't think.
I've read about Laurel Canyon and I know stuff about that, yeah.
Right, I mean you're aware that there had been no tradition of music of any kind in Laurel Canyon, that suddenly in the mid-60s you had a bunch of kids, all the children of either CIA or military or whatever, coming over from Norfolk, Virginia and places like that and settling in Laurel Canyon and suddenly having remarkable music careers.
Yeah.
And what I find shocking about reading the book, I wanted to ask you about this, is that if the whole of the West Coast sound that we cherish so much, you know, like Eight Miles High and stuff, and I don't know, if you're going to San Francisco and... Mums and the Puppets.
Yeah, exactly.
Monday Monday and California Dreaming, all these classic songs.
And I'm thinking, well, if all these bands even then were manufactured, that seems to me to mean that it's not about talent at all, that talent can be manufactured.
Is that the case?
Yeah, yeah, it's obviously the case.
But, you know, I always used to think it's a lot easier to start with somebody who was talented in the first place.
So I think they go looking for people, you know, because the Beatles were manufactured.
The Beatles were just about as manufactured as any band could ever be.
They were not organic.
They weren't just four lads that happened to me in Liverpool.
You know, that was a massive exercise.
And I think you probably know of Tavistock.
Well, I do, but you can tell me more about this because, okay, so there is the official narrative about the Beatles and people who say, oh, they were just, I mean, my old friend is now dead, Alexander Nekrasov, he used to be great on Twitter, was this sort of grumpy Russian.
Who used to particularly hate the Beatles and used to say it was just manufactured rubbish and it was just like, which was a shock to me because I'd grown up with the Blue Album and the Red Album and I liked all their singles and I liked, you know, I liked pretending I was stoned listening to Sgt Pepper and stuff and Revolver.
And the narrative we were told was that the Beatles were real because they cut their teeth in Hamburg and they wore leather jackets and that was real rock and roll, so they were authentic.
But you're suggesting otherwise, that they were... Yeah, there are real serious question marks.
First of all, they were already As it were, in the mold.
They were put into the mold by Tavistock Institute before they went to Hamburg.
They were there to hone down skills, to toughen up.
That's true.
But they'd already been chosen.
I mean, look, this is just, you've got to go dig deep for all of this, but it's there if you want to find it.
There's something about McCartney which is not ringing true.
There's something about the family of McCartney with stepsisters and relations that don't really talk to each other or know each other.
And Paul's mum, who died very young, adopted children.
She adopted children.
She worked at Maternity Hospital in Liverpool.
And you know, there's some connection.
Oh God, it just goes on and on and on.
But you know, on the front of the cover, you've only got the one person who appears twice in the group of people on Sgt Pippa's.
You know who I mean, I can't think of his name right now.
What do you mean?
He's the one person, if I could just think of his name, James, we'd all be there.
You know, do as thou wilt.
Oh, Alistair Crowley.
Alistair Crowley, yeah.
He was at my school.
Oh, was he?
Yeah, he was.
He apparently crucified the housemaster's cat.
Right.
Well look, you can check this out, but there were some, we'll show you convincing evidence that he's in fact Paul McCartney, the original Paul McCartney, not the one that replaced him, but his father.
Well actually no, it's the one that, actually it's the replacement, he's the replacement's father, not the original.
You know that there is a Paul is dead world out there.
The current guy has been playing the role now for 50 or 60 years, but he's not the original.
He's really perfected that double thumbs up pose, hasn't he?
He's really good at that.
Look, it goes on, a lot of things go on and on and deeper and deeper, but it was to back up your story about Laurel Canyon, about the military connection to, and actually not just in American acts, but in British acts, and when you dig enough you find that there's all some kind of a military background.
And when I look at Paul McCartney now, the guy that's playing his, he's a soldier without a doubt.
He's been doing this for 60 years mate, he's not, He's five years older than he claims, so he's really 85 now, so he's doing very well.
Blimey!
He shouldn't sing though, that's the point.
I wonder what incredible rejuvenating drugs he's been taking.
I don't think he looks, he sounds dreadful now, but you ask yourself why do the Stones, who are also Tavistock, you know, which is MI6, which is all these things you talk about, but why are they still having to work?
Why are they still I mean, he's over in America or in the Americas, McCartney, at the moment, doing on tour.
At his age, it's tiring.
It's difficult.
It's stressful.
Why is he doing it?
I hadn't thought of it that way.
Well, why doesn't he write?
Yeah, I suppose on some level it must be fun, though, doing what they do.
I mean, to be going onto a stage and to be adored by lots of people and to play the, you know, To play the tedious riff of Start Me Up yet again.
Once in a while, for old time's sake, I'd go along with that.
But McCartney is non-stopped.
You know, he's always doing something over the many, many years.
He's always on tour or making an album.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'm not going there any further.
I think that's it.
No, I think you've done well.
Which of your tracks that you were responsible for, are you proudest of?
Well, I get asked that quite a bit and normally I go with, well, whatever was the biggest seller, because keeping faith, my idea was always, you get an endorsement from the record buyers, that's the reason you do it, they like it, you give them another one.
Never going to give you up.
Rick Astley has done now over a billion and a half on YouTube or whatever it is.
I don't know the numbers.
Kylie's I Should Be So Lucky.
You've got a whole range of other songs that have done very, very well.
So I would just sort of say that I'll go with whatever the public tells me they like the best and that's a ringing endorsement.
I still can't decide whether I like Rick Astley's voice or not.
It is very weird, isn't it?
Well, at the time, Matt Aitken, my partner, he wasn't sure either.
And I do remember that we both communicated in the studio.
I worked with the singers behind the mic.
It was my job to get a performance out of them.
Rick's voice is very powerful.
He's actually genuinely a baritone.
But we got him to stretch it a bit for Never Gonna Give You Up because pop music sounds better when you're in pain.
But his voice was loud and there wasn't sort of attenuation.
It was either on or off.
That was the thing we noted.
But that comes really well.
It works really well when you're in a live setting or, you know, the engineer hasn't got to do much work.
To set the volume and go.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, my favourite of your singles is, I think, is probably the Dead or Alive one.
Right.
I mean, it's very catchy, isn't it?
Well, look, I always draw a distinction between a good song and a good record, and I would actually argue that that's a good record rather than a good song.
I mean, what you couldn't do with that song, very convincingly, is stand round a piano and sing it on your own.
No, you couldn't.
But you can with the ones that I've used earlier.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Kevin Macdonald.
Is it Kevin Macdonald?
The guy who wrote the book, the definitive book about the Beatles songs and analyzed them and stuff.
Ian Macdonald rather, Ian Macdonald.
Kevin Macdonald's a film director, isn't he?
Ian Macdonald said that you're into music for one of three things.
You're either into the music or you're into the tune or you're into the The image or the sort of the surrounding stuff and I think that's why I'm drawn.
I like the totality of that, you know, that sort of the dance beat and stuff that you gave that Dead or Alive song.
Yeah.
I was the wrong age or the wrong temperament for the I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky.
I think my sister liked it and I just thought it was bloody annoying but I wasn't your target audience was I?
Well, nothing wrong with liking something or not liking something, but as long as you have made the point that we didn't make that for you.
And there was always this divide.
I mean, it took others quite some time.
I remember Radio 1 DJs, after we'd had a few hits with Kylie and Rick, which were definitely pop, you know, pop dance, dance pop, he said, I've grown to like this stuff now, Mike, but it took me a while to realise Mike, but it took me a while to realise that music, Music wasn't just three boys and a guitar, or three boys and a drum kit, you know, three guitars and a drum kit.
He made the point that he'd grown up on guys slinging a guitar around their necks, drumming, and being macho, I think.
And we used to work out that girls liked our music more than boys, and gay men liked our music.
Yeah.
More than straight men.
But because women and gay men make up the majority of people, we were going to the biggest audience we could by doing that.
Yeah.
But listen, but to me, I know I liked, I used to like, I still like and I'm moved by a good pop tune.
I don't, a lot of boys aren't, they just like the cut and thrust of something or It gets them on a different level.
You know, I get emotional about pop songs, if they're good.
I mean, I think Dead or Alive, if you spin around, probably gets you at a more visceral sort of thing, I think.
It gets you in the gut, I think, because it's quite aggressive.
Yeah, it's quite aggressive.
Yeah.
But odd coming from Pete Burns, who was a cross-dresser with a big wig and high heels.
Well, there you've got this trend, which has only got worse, this sort of androgyny.
The other thing I meant to ask you about, actually, on that score, was have you noticed how in recent years, and it started with autotune and then it sort of got much, much worse, this tendency for women
Female singers particularly, not to sing, sound human, to sound increasingly like robots, which I'm sure is a deliberate policy to steer us all towards transhumanism, just in the same way that the dance music scene was.
But it's also a very quick way of getting somebody who can't really sing in tune to sing in tune.
And the more you have to work on somebody who's singing flat or something, the more it will sound robotic.
And that is the problem.
They're picking these girls because they're going to wear the right clothes and be suggestive in their dance movements and not because they're great vocalists.
That's exactly the point you're making.
And whether there's the underlying Transhumanism thing going on.
It could be that as well.
It all goes to the same end point.
It makes us all uncomfortable.
I mean, without without sort of troubling libel lawyers or whatever, but I've been looking at the careers of people like Katy Perry.
Katy Perry was a lovely Christian girl, but her career was going nowhere.
And then she obviously made her pact with the devil and had this string of really, yeah, I saw her at Glastonbury one year and she was great.
This string of sort of entertaining hits um or you look at somebody like well even worse worse example of the way lady gaga who is obviously luciferian satanic in her affiliations you look at her you look at her stage stage sets but how autonomous Or actually, the best example, because you've mentioned her, is Adele.
How much of the stuff these people put out is actually the work of their own hand?
And how much of it is written by seven or so songwriters?
Well, you'd have to take the cases in turn.
I mean, Katy Perry's broke through finally with a producer called Dr Luke.
Who then went through a court case against one of his other artists, Kesha, who'd sued him for sexual misconduct or something.
That's a matter of record.
Katy Perry certainly went over to the dark side.
She started off Clean and lovely.
Don't know what happened to her.
Miley Cyrus is a good example.
She was in the Disney Club and then she's gone.
Very, very weird.
But she's from a, you know, from a background, showbiz background.
I don't know what they're trying to do, but clearly they're being driven.
And you do wonder, but I don't know why they think... See, what I do now, James, I don't put records out into the general I don't go out into the world and hope that the radio will play me or that somebody will buy it because they heard it.
I just sell to particular people who like the band.
So if they've got a fan club, I just go straight to the fan club.
I'm not not bothered with radio or anything else, because and if you're going to compete with what you're discussing, you've got to be a major signing.
See, Katy Perry, the fortunes they spent just on the videos and Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga, massive, massive budgets there.
You know, no individual like me can do that.
So I can make money just by selling a small quantity of records to people who want to buy them.
But they're in a different world.
Yeah, well you're sort of like going to the local market, whereas they are sort of international hypermarket type thing.
You're selling to our office a lovely artisanal produce from a street store.
I compare what I do to, I don't, you know, think about this for a second because I can't think of a more honest job because it's a bit like you go out and you dig up a bit of clay and you make a pot and you sell it to somebody for a fiver.
You get a fiver, they get a pot.
You know, when I'm writing a song or making a record, I start with absolutely zero, a blank sheet of paper or whatever, and go and make it, get somebody to sing it and hopefully somebody buys it off me for a pound.
You know, I'm not, and I'll tell you what else I do.
I've got my studios here.
I've got, I'm solar powered.
I make all of my music out of sunshine.
But you think about it, I don't actually, it's not like I go out and tear anything up or destroy anything.
I just actually, they come out of my head and somebody buys them.
A carpenter would make you a chair or something.
So I find that I don't have a conscience about anything I do.
I'm quite clear about what I'm doing.
Yeah.
Do you think there's a I mean, you've obviously been punished to a degree for failing to do all the right things like go to the evil parties and calling out the vices of the industry.
I mean, do you think that's why so?
Because we've been trained to think by the culture that pop stars are the anti-establishment and that they are rebellion.
And yet what we've seen, for example, during The lockdowns and during the pandemic, what we've seen is is pop stars.
Well, you've got ridiculous things like what's that terrible band?
The one that sings got one song.
I put it to write the Kaiser Chiefs, the Kaiser Chiefs actually asking their fans which has up who's taken the Pfizer vaccine and hands up who's taken AstraZeneca.
And you've got who else?
The other example, Foo Fighters.
Only playing to vaccinated audiences and so forth and almost nobody has spoken out.
Is that because the industry is part of this global conspiracy against us and that if you speak, if you're a musician who speaks out against what's going on, that's the end of your career?
Well, like I say, I don't rely on the industry anymore, so I can say what I feel.
If anyone came near me with a needle, I would actually take a gun to their head.
Yeah, yeah.
But here we go, you see, Kaiser, all the others, Bono, all the big dinosaurs, they've all come up and said, take your medicine.
And I found that, I mean, who's more rock and roll?
That's just such an establishment thing to do.
And they know, the thing that gets me is they know, It's wrong.
They know people are ill from this vaccine.
People are dying from the vaccine.
It's both ineffective and unsafe.
So, and yet they're promoting it to their fans.
So, excuse me, but, you know, I've called them out wherever I can.
It would be lovely.
It would be absolutely lovely if somebody with major influence these days, an artist of some sort who had some kind of a big enough following would stand up.
And speak the truth and, you know, tell it like it is.
It would be lovely.
But it's not, you know, I've lost friends, my family, some of my close family members, with stand-up rows.
All I was trying to do was say, don't take the vaccine.
Don't take it.
Don't, just don't take it.
You don't need it.
Don't.
And they went ahead and took it.
And then you have an argument.
You have a massive argument.
And so I don't see... I've safely been there.
Yeah.
It's horrible.
Yes, well, one of my heroes of the last two years is Ramis.
You must have heard his track, Don't Take The Vaccine.
Yeah.
It's a really good song.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've heard a few.
There's a few.
Yeah, I know.
But they're not like in big names.
They're not anybody that has the influence.
This is what's frustrating.
So the point you're making is that they are all in the game and that game is satanic.
It is.
But you've got, okay, so you've got the recent case of Justin Bieber, whose eye seems to be betraying signs of vaccine damage.
Yeah.
Which inevitably, there are some people down the rabbit hole who say this is part of IOP, he's faking it to do... I can't remember what the reason they gave for this theory, but justification for why he might fake this thing.
But it looks pretty good to me.
But I've heard that Who knows what to believe, that he's been told by his record company that if he talks about vaccine damage, that's the end of his career.
Yeah, I expect that would be the case.
I expect he would.
And the same with professional footballers.
I mean, I know firsthand, but I can't reveal, you know, they haven't taken the vaccine, but they've organized saline or placebo or something.
Um, because we all know 145 or more than that professional footballers have keeled over and died.
Um, so, but there was the clubs were saying you must have the vaccine and particularly the Italian clubs.
You couldn't travel anywhere unless you had a vaccine and footballers are traveling all the time.
So, um, But I know people who've got out of it.
I have absolutely no doubt Boris never got near an actual vaccine.
I've got absolutely no doubt the Royal Family never had a bloody vaccine.
I'm sure Biden never had a vaccine.
I'm sure Trump never actually had the vaccine.
You know, nobody, but they'll put it on camera that they've had it and they'll fake it.
Well indeed, but you raise an interesting point there.
Given that you've got loads of money in the music industry, if you're a pop star or you're a footballer or whatever, surely it's not beyond the wit of man to find some tame medic or nurse who's going to give you a saline or just squeeze the jab into the contents into the sink and you just bung them a few A few hundred quid.
Why would somebody like Justin Bieber even... How do he be in a position to get vaccine damage?
Well, the thing is... Look, I think you've got to have a brain to work that out.
He probably thought... He went along with the idea that it was a good thing to do.
It was the right thing to do, you know.
It's going to protect him.
I mean, I don't rate him as a fairly intellectual person.
You don't?
Well, Justin, to be honest, I shouldn't really say that.
I've not heard him launch out on any topic.
No, I think you're probably right.
Yeah, I mean, what I know is that I'm surprised more people higher up in the echelons of society, either in the media or, you know, haven't succumbed to vaccine damage.
I know so many others in the lower Well, they have, you know, people who are just ordinary people.
This is true.
I don't know of a single... Actually, there was one politician in Australia who had some sort of reaction on TV, live on TV.
Oh, did he?
I haven't seen any MPs at all suffer signs of vaccine injury.
It would suggest to me that nobody in the House of Commons has had the jab.
Yes, because there's 600 or so of them, isn't there?
At least one of them should have had a reaction.
Yeah, of course they should.
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, I don't want to suggest that they should all die.
But actually, I think if you're going to be responsible for pushing this stuff, as they have, there ought to be consequences.
They really ought to have been forced at gunpoint to take these vaccines.
They're going to insist on the rest of the country.
Well, just to show us they're safe and effective.
I mean, that would be really helpful, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, look, I don't think we should ever forget what they've done.
I'm hoping we never forget.
I'm hoping the people, as it unwinds, as the story unravels, we mustn't let them get away with it.
This is what's frightening me.
I agree.
But you and I have both been, in our small ways and unwittingly, part of the problem because we both spent our formative years or our early careers in industries which are responsible, to a great extent, for creating a brainwashed populace.
Which would take these vaccines and not resist in the way that they should be resisting.
Yeah, well.
But I was really interested, actually, to hear about your sort of experiences in the industry.
Because at the time, in the mid 80s, when you were having all those hits, Yeah.
If you'd asked me who were the most powerful people in the industry, I'd have said, well, you know, Stockache and Waterman.
They can do no wrong.
They can control who gets to number one and stuff.
But talking to you, it's clear that the industry is run by people who can close you down, even if you're hugely successful, at the drop of a hat.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, they control the chart.
They decide who's in it.
Sorry!
Can I just... I'm going to turn it down.
Yeah, you go and answer your phone, yeah.
No, it's alright.
I don't mind.
It's going around on the desk over there.
I can't do it.
Um... Oh, excuse me.
Yeah, go on.
Off you go.
Go on.
Go and answer it.
Hello?
I'm still on doing this thing.
I'll call you back, yeah?
James, have we gone on a long time?
What time is it?
I know, I have.
But you see, I've got mic stopped, for goodness sake.
I'm not going to let you go just like that.
But actually, I've almost squeezed the last drop of juice out of you.
If you were making your money in the mid-eighties, I'm hoping that you invested wisely and that you didn't spend it on, I don't know, Ferrari.
No, well actually that would have been a good investment, wouldn't it?
Have you kept your money from your peak of your career?
Well, let's... I am, you know, I'm not... I'm well off.
I'm not... You're not skin?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I have made more money outside of the music industry than I did in it.
Which is an indictment of the industry.
I still retain the interest in my publishing of those songs, which continues to earn money.
And I run my music business now.
I'm just building a new studio.
So I continue to operate in my world.
I've just built my own world.
And like in other things, I recommend this to anybody.
I grow some vegetables.
I've got solar panels.
I try and make myself independent of all those that could just harm you or stop your life somehow.
So I'm doing everything I can to retain my independence.
I'm teaching my kids the same thing.
I've grandchildren now and I'm well off.
I'm not complaining about money in any sense.
That's good.
I mean, one sort of hears that people like Noddy Holder doesn't need to work because of his Christmas.
Presumably you're in a similar position.
I mean, I imagine, I should be so lucky, still pay up decent royalties?
Yeah, you'll be surprised because it was number one in 25 other countries.
And so, you know, every year, I don't want to put figures on things, James is a bit crass.
No, they're all the songs.
I mean, I've got probably 900 songs in my catalogue, and they're all earning.
But you're still making more money from your outside investments?
From what?
Property and stuff like that?
Well, yes.
In terms of the quantum, I still earn from my publishing, but in terms of the overall amount I've earned, I've earned more outside of music by making other investments in other things and doing other schemes and projects.
Oh, what?
Bitcoin?
Did you get into cryptos?
No, no, I've never... I don't know enough about that.
I haven't done that, no.
No, I haven't.
Mainly property and various ventures that have paid off, so... Right.
That's good.
Before we go, have you... People on your sort of level of fame and fortune and celebrity or whatever, Have you been getting through to them at all?
Or do they just think, oh Mike Stock's a tinfoil hat lunatic and don't know what to do with him?
Is anyone getting the message at a high level?
One or two and then, to begin with, a lot of derision.
You know, you've probably had a Twitter storm or two.
You say something to somebody and suddenly all these people who don't follow you have come from nowhere and followed your tweet and given you all sorts of hell and calling you all sorts of names.
And I gave up on those.
One Twitter storm went on for two weeks.
I thought, this is just wasting my time.
What did you say?
I can't remember what it was now, back in a while back, that was the first Twitter storm I had.
Because a part of my feeling is to be as independent as any individual can be all the time, be independent, that's my advice, of those who would stop you from operating or whatever, plough your own furrow, I was all for Brexit.
And I remember that got me into all sorts of trouble with people.
Because it was always the left wing, for some reason, who hated Brexit.
Most of the conservative ones I saw were all right about it.
But for some reason, the liberal left hated it.
And they're always the nastiest ones online.
They're always the aggressors and violence and all sorts of threats.
I wonder how much of this is actually real.
How many of these people are... I think it is all part of... this is all organised.
Yeah of course it is.
Everything is organised.
So I tempted him, this one bloke said I'm gonna come around there and kick your head in or something and I said okay could you could you make it late this morning because I'm out this afternoon and he just went away.
I'll be in from 11 o'clock.
Sure.
Yeah, so you haven't got any good... I was hoping you were going to say, my mates are all waking up now, finally, and better late than never, but you're not experiencing that.
I don't have many mates, that's true.
I have one friend I've had for 65 years and I have colleagues in the business and family, an extended family.
I'm hoping my extended family, who fell out with me over this, over vaccines, are going to one day say, perhaps you might have been right, maybe we shouldn't and let's have a drink, you know, perhaps.
Well, let's hope so.
We've got a mountain of horror to overcome before we see the valley of peace beyond.
I pray to God that nobody gets injured, that nobody dies, but I fear a lot will as a result.
I do.
It's why I've been doing a lot of praying recently, like you.
I just think God is... This is a war between good and evil, isn't it?
Yeah, well look, there's something I've said.
I think I've said that on a tweet, I think.
In politics, you used to think it was left and right.
It's now about good and evil, one way or another.
And you know, the thing that I'll never forgive, I'll never forgive the doctors, the local doctor who kept ringing me and kept texting me saying, are you coming in for your vaccine?
You know, the doctors who had their mouths stuffed with gold, didn't they?
They know.
I don't know any doctors who've had the jab.
Really?
I don't know any, no.
I mean, I don't know many doctors, but I'm saying, you know, I've just seen enough of them online and know that they're not that stupid, are they?
They know what's in it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just for the little people, isn't it?
The people who are dispensable.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, apparently.
Mike, I've really enjoyed talking to you.
There's probably lots of stuff.
Oh, sorry.
The question that popped into my mind.
When you became aware of the kind of the really dodgy elements in the music industry, were you able to do anything to protect your stars?
Could you do anything to protect them?
No, no, this is a regret, that really.
Because to be fair, we weren't in a position to do much.
Without exception, they had managers and record deals with whomsoever.
And my job was purely what I did.
Come into the studio, sing a song, go away.
And I had no more contact with any of them than that.
So this is a bit of a regret because I know there are a few and some haven't survived, you know.
Quite a number have died through misuse, drug abuse sort of things.
Other sad stories.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah, it is an industry.
I'm not even sure that it really is the story that we're sold, that it is drug abuse, that they may just be off because they've become inconvenient.
Yeah.
True.
Yeah.
There's another rabbit hole.
Yeah.
Well, Mike, it's been lovely talking to you.
Is there anything you want to give a plug to before I... No, no, I don't.
I don't, James.
I'm absolutely fine to have a chat with you.
And at some point, if we have a little bit of communication via Twitter or email, I'd like to raise a couple of other topics with you that I'd like your opinion on.
But no, we're not going to use this space to be so crass as to promote pop music.
Okay, that's fine.
I very much look forward to meeting you at some stage and having this further discussion.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, everyone, as I'm sure you have, please remember I really appreciate your support on Locals, on Subscribestar, on Patreon and on Substack.
So, thank you very much for listening and thank you for your continued support.
And thank you, Mike Stock, again for being on The Delling Pod.
I've really loved talking to you.
Thank you for asking me, James.
See you soon.
Thanks a lot.
Okay, bye-bye.
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