In 2019, shortly after announcing Messengers of Deception – the third album from Tau Cross – Relapse abruptly dropped the band in response to frontman Rob Miller having thanked controversial author Gerard Menuhin in the liner notes. Although the album itself contains nothing explicitly from the text, the fact that Menuhin, whose Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil contains elements which question the nature of the Holocaust, had been namechecked, was seen as an endorsement that proved irreconcilable and, amidst a flurry of opprobrium, Rob found himself carrying the band forward alone. Now, a year on from the initial controversy, Rob has returned with a new line-up and, in a surprising move, a re-recorded version of Messengers of Deception. As Rob attests, the album (drawing its title from a work by Jacques Vallee), does not offer anything salacious, with the lyrics laying the groundwork for an intellectual journey rather than a didactic worldview.
Nevertheless, when Rob approached SonicAbuse to review the album, we started by discussing the controversy. What became immediately apparent was that few people had taken the trouble to engage with Rob, preferring to indulge in starkly polarised debates online. Rob himself, following a brief and somewhat inflammatory statement in the immediate aftermath of events (which he likens to being “a rat in a corner”) has remained staunchly silent, starving much of the debate of oxygen, but also leaving the issue open. Thus, when Rob agreed to an interview to discuss the events surrounding the release of Messengers of Deception, we were glad to take the opportunity to discuss the process by which Rob arrived at the album and his views on the increasingly censorious nature of modern society.
Over the course of the last year, you’ve ostensibly been on a journey where you had an album ready to release, and then all hell was let loose. Yet, it seems strange that few people were willing to engage in any sort of dialogue with you to consider your point of view on what occurred. The whole thing seemed very one-sided, with no nuance to the debate…
I suppose, as somebody who’s coming from a fairly extreme background musically, there a sense of being defined by this necessity to walk into areas where other people would be uncomfortable. In the same sense, really, as when you have the tribal unit, and you have one individual whose task is to go out and retrieve information, which is to help the tribe to survive in some way. So, it’s kind of the Shamanic kind of thing, to do this journey. And, if there’s anything you can bring back, which is usable for other people then great. If not, then the journey itself is important, you know – we keep on learning. We keep on asking questions. But also, what all this highlighted for me (and you pointed out there the difficulty of having any sort of dialogue or debate online) – it’s almost as if it’s purposeful – it seems to be the logical conclusion of social media is this corralling people into groups that agree exclusively with one another and are not able to articulate any kind of argument outside of that very, very narrow spectrum.
I left this thing in the air, to a degree. I thought that’s what I would do, because I was very aware of what was happening (and how quickly it was happening) – that sort of dogpiling that was going on. As one individual, the pressure is great, so if I had started fighting and getting involved on a one-to-one basis, I’d have lost my mind if everything got really fucked up; so, I thought it best to just watch and learn something about people from this experience. And what I did learn is that, left to their own devices, people can extrapolate a whole load of stuff from very little at all.
And that’s exactly what happened. I’m in the same position a year and several months down the road now, where people are coming at me with very distinct accusations, and I turn around and ask them to tell me where they got that information or how they came to that conclusion – and they can’t. You leave them to it. It’s like that thing about Chinese whispers – that kids’ game – where you end up with nonsense or something completely different to where you originally started out. But it’s been interesting.
“Interesting”, but I think very stressful as well, because it’s kind of created a paradigm shift in your existence from where you were at the point where you were about to release ‘Messengers of Deception” in its original incarnation and, obviously, the whirlwind that followed. I can imagine that was quite isolating.
Yeah, it was difficult. I don’t want to spend too much time whining about it, but it was extremely hard. My wife and I were just… we were the nucleolus, and that was it. I lost a lot of friends. I lost people, even locally, in the village where I live as well, which is unfortunate. But, again, it came down to people who never came to me personally and asked how I felt, or if I wanted to talk about it – people didn’t do that. What they did instead was, under the guise of intellectualism, they considered that they understood everything about whatever the subject was and that there would be no engagement whatsoever with it.
So, it was difficult, but (as I said at the time) it was a process of “separating the wheat from the chaff” and it’s a very important exercise to do that – to consider the people you have around you and whether they’re real. One of the criteria for a “real” person is the exchange of ideas and being interested in what another person has to say, rather than jumping to conclusions.
We had a few difficult moments. We had threats. I think probably the worst thing that happened, was that it came into the local sphere. You live in a small community, there’s a local newspaper and someone decided it was to their advantage to put it to them and, of course, that’s right in the front line here and it’s more intimate and personal when you go into your local shop and you’re looking at the way that people look at you. But, strangely enough, what I was really pleased about was that a lot of people on this little island would come up to me and say that it was ridiculous, that they knew me and that it was completely ridiculous that a local newspaper (that normally talks about Mrs McDonalds’ cat getting caught up a tree) would cover this kind of thing. So, they were just saying that it’s sort of salacious, and that it didn’t sit well with the world view here.
So, yeah, it was a great separator, and it gave me some insights that I wouldn’t have had otherwise; and I think that, when we go through these little fires in our personal lives, and when we do it willingly and know that there’s a cost, then things change. I think that, at this stage, I am very, very glad to have done the journey.
But, I suppose, the toll of that is that I’ve gone from being in a supergroup to being in very much an underground band that some people are going to be studiously ignoring, and that’s fine too. But it’s also… it’s this whole thing about authenticity and what’s real? What kind of people are real? What do they want in life? Do they want to just mimic one another and have a safe space in which to feel accepted within a group, or are they prepared to keep taking some sort of journey? Are they prepared to annoy people or suggest something different to people as well, you know?
As I said, I’ve always seen that as my job. I couldn’t just forsake that and say “no, I need to backpedal immediately and start apologising left, right and centre”. No, I will not. I won’t get on my knees for anyone about this and it’s had its consequences, and I accept those consequences absolutely. Not a problem. I don’t have any problem with that.
What I do find comforting is the level of interaction I’ve had since then. It’s probably only over the last six months or so that I’ve been getting emails from people all over the world saying that we can disagree about anything, but that it’s important that someone stands up and says: “enough of this bullshit now – stop being overly censorious about absolutely everything.” We’ve already gone down a road that has taken away so many of our rights, really, in that respect and it seems increasingly to be a war of attrition. So, what do you do?
It’s an interesting subject. There’s a theory in sociology and media regarding binary oppositions, which looks at how absolute opposites are presented – the black and white or the good and the bad. Certainly, we live in an age where media pours forth these images of binary opposition, and this has arguably been exacerbated by social media, where it felt like you immediately became this “evil” person and there was no nuance to any of it –it strikes me that people have bought into this media construct of there being only good or bad rather than the nuance that comes through intellectual exploration.
People seem to need absolutes now and they don’t really want to put in the work to find out their own truth (if you like), so they will acquiesce and hand over their own personal sovereignty and power to people who speak louder or have more social influence. So, it’s not to do with the search for wisdom or truth in itself; it’s to do with how people are represented on social media, because that is the platform. If you’re a beautiful blonde with big tits, or you’re some guy with lots of money – people that other people aspire to be – then you have more power as an influencer and people think that perhaps you’re more deserving of your opinions. We’ve got this false dichotomy, really, haven’t we, where people are influencing on a massive scale, but they haven’t put in any work to come to their opinions.
It’s so easy too – there’s this whole thing about the American elections – and I’ve kind of kept my nose out of that stuff since 2016 – but I’ve never gone into that camp of “I hate this person” or “I hate that person” and stuff like that – I keep seeing it and disregard it. The general overview is to be able to look at both parties and ask what is real and what’s not, particularly with that whole Trump phenomenon. It’s so easy and so lazy to say: “look at this guy, he’s the evillest person in the whole world!” But what else is there about that? What else is going on. Why are we responding so dogmatically to one particular person? How can they represent, without any consideration at all, all the evils of the world?
Like you pointed out there, again, it’s a very definitive kind of statement about a person – that they’re absolutely the embodiment of evil – so there’s no nuance at all. Where is the nuance? Where is the discussion?
Even within my own social circle, it’s still quite a rarity to sit down with someone and have a really good argument and to come out of it still friends. You don’t have to defriend everybody. The most important thing is, if we’re both adults about it, we might come away with something we didn’t know beforehand. So, I’m always prepared for that, in an exchange, and I’m always prepared to be changed by it. Because the intransigence of people and the reluctance to step outside of their comfortable position is what’s at stake at the moment. I think that, to be able to develop as a human being, you need to be able to not get encumbered by all this baggage. You need to be able to strip these things off.
For instance, with the taboo subject we’re talking about, without mentioning it outright – I’ve read and talked with people about that… and a lot of things have changed in the last year as well. I’m constantly having to navigate through, so it’s really about adjusting tack (like in sailing terms). You have to be able to say “OK, I didn’t know that” -then you need to start looking at these things from a different angle altogether. So, I’m not making definitive statements. You never can do – it’s so childish to try and do that because, in six months’ time, I may have found something profound, where I need to readjust. If I don’t adjust, then I’m just stuck in one of these social media circles where all you have is people patting each other on one another’s backs and saying: “that’s it – we know everything about life now, we don’t need to explore anything else at all – tick the box!”
It’s got to be an adventure – the love of wisdom itself has got to be something that we take up to the fucking edge of the grave with us and we still don’t know everything. It has to be like that, or it’s not living and it’s not thinking.
That plays into your lyrics, I think. I spent a long time listening to the album because I believe in the power of lyrics; what you can say with them and what you can express with them. One of the things that I like, and what you’ve said in other interviews is as well, is that your lyrics are oblique and more about the quest than the result, and that’s how I separate this album from the noise that was generated around it a year ago. So, yeah – there are a couple of questions there – the oblique nature of the lyrics and the extent that any have changed since the first recording?
No, none of the lyrics changed. Well, I think I changed one word – one nuanced word in Yaldabaoth. And, of course, I wrote Babylonian Death Cult, which is a completely new song that goes into different territory as well. Otherwise, none of the lyrics changed. The song structures have changed a lot, though.
It was this ideal position – what do you do when you’ve gone through the process of making a demo, first of all, and then getting that together? It was the first time that Tau Cross had been in a studio together and we thought we’d get a great album from this, and we spent a lot of time and a lot of money getting us all to the States and recording that album in Minneapolis. We were pleased with that but… [breaks off as something occurs to him] … have you heard the album by the way? The original?
No.
No? OK – it’s different. It’s very different. The production is very much different, and I would say, definitively, that it’s so much a better album all the way around, because I had that unique time to go through a demo stage, then a complete album stage and then be able to treat that album as a really good demo. You know, as a musician, you’ll always go home and listen to stuff and you’ll think it sounds great and then, after a month or so, you’ll go “aaaah – balls!” and you notice all the things you’d like to change or do differently. So, I’ve spent this last year doing those little changes – just adjusting stuff so it would make a bit more sense. And also, you know, dynamically, so everything would fit together a little bit better.
The album takes its title from the writings of Jacques Vallee, so how did you come across his writings and how do you feel about his idea that UFOs are a constructed human reality that are used as a method of control – how far did you find that to be a convincing argument?
I was blown away the first time that I read his book, Passport to Magonia, which is one of the first ones… [pauses]
To backtrack a little bit, one of the things that is striking about Jacques Vallee, is that he wrote a book called The Invisible College because he, himself, came across a great deal of censorship at an early stage in his life. He was an astronomer and one of the first people to get into Silicon Valley and the computer scene and stuff like that. Anyway, as an astronomer, he was starting to observe these phenomena with other people and he was writing this stuff down and he was told, from up above (in the ranks above him) that he needed to forget about this stuff and that they didn’t deal with it. So, he became aware that there was a great deal of censorship by people that didn’t want to talk about this, and they didn’t want to recognise that things that were happening, which were being observed within the scientific community. They were just told to shut up and that it wouldn’t go any further than that.
There’s a lot of stuff like that – it’s the same with the reports through the Navy and Army and stuff like that too. So, Jacques Vallee, he started out as a maverick character because he had to go both against the scientific establishment, who were telling him this thing wasn’t real when it was observable to him and his compatriots… and also, because he started to use the scientific method, which is very, very particular. You use scientific method to diagnose the “phenomena” as he calls it. He was finding that his research was leading him directly away from contemporary thought, which was about extra-terrestrial spaceships and beings from another planet and stuff like that, and it was almost completely the opposite.
So, he referred to the historical examples and realised that this phenomenon has always existed, and it’s always existed in cohabitation with us as human beings and, throughout the different periods, we’ve come across it in different ways. So, Alexander the Great – flying shields in the air and that kind of stuff; Tibetan mythology; the fairy culture and the Little People; Demons and Angels and so on… So, he tied all that together, really quite succinctly, in Passport to Magonia by just citing a lot of these examples.
But he was drawn toward this idea that we need to start regarding this phenomenon and looking at it scientifically and finding out… not what it is – you’ll never be able to explain it – but what does it do? And he was saying that, when you observe so many – hundreds and hundreds or even thousands – different reports, certain situations keep on arising all the time. So, you can start to say, you know, most encounters happen on a Wednesday between 9 and 10 in the evening, or something like that. You get data from that, and you keep diagnosing. So, as I say, he took a very hard-nosed and very scientific approach. And he threw up a lot of information, which seemed to point very deliberately toward this cunning deception – as used by the phenomena – in its relationship to human beings. So, we always have these ridiculous situations, where somebody’s driving through the night, a spacecraft lands in the middle of the road and they start tinkering around with tools and overalls. Well, there are so many incidences of this ridiculous situation. So, he’s trying to say: “what does this mean?” Not literally, but what is it saying?
And it seems to be saying that you’re not looking at what it is directly – you’re seeing the phenomenon through the lens or the prism of contemporary thought, and that’s why it always changes appearance. That’s why you get this idea, in the 1950s, of these crappy, blobby spaceships with a dome on the top and a green man inside and a couple of aerials waving around. You got that, back then, because that seems to be just beyond the ken or the understanding of people at that time. And people, back then, thought it was really far out and weird and wonderful… and now, the UFO phenomena you get these amorphous shapes appearing in the sky, and changing shape and shifting, and colours and lights and stuff like that. Things that are just beyond what we can accept ourselves, or what we would project in our future.
That seems to tie in with John Keel’s idea of seeing what you want to see and reading into things what you want to read into them. And that’s an interesting wider lesson, because his background was psy-ops and propaganda, which gives him a unique insight into the way you can manipulate thoughts and ideas. And that then, seems to lead to the social media phenomena where people are basically viewing everything through their own cultural and social lens.
Yes, you’re quite right there, because there’s a psychological angle to it, which is something that can be manipulated of course, too. John Keel is different to Jacques Vallee, and I don’t know that they ever met. But he posits this idea that, as human beings, we have a very narrow spectrum of available data. We have our four or five senses and it’s an exceedingly small bandwidth and he posits this idea that there’s a much wider bandwidth out there – and we know that anyway, through infrared and ultraviolet and all that kind of stuff – but the phenomenon itself exists outside of our perception range, but it can interact with us (or into our environment) through altering its frequencies.
So, he did a book called The Eighth Tower, where he gives this idea that it seems to be a lot of the sightings where you’ll have something come through that appears to be in the shape of something or other and it might be glowing orange or yellow and then it’ll start to change down through colours, and everything starts to shimmer and shake and then come into a sort of form. And that’s what pointed me towards this idea about manifestation of angels and demons and all that kind of stuff associated with the magical arts… and it seems to be exactly the same kind of thing. It seems the phenomenon, whatever it is, can interact with us but only for a limited period and then it has to leave, it has to get out almost. In that sense, in the magical sense, the magician creates a safe space within the world for eh manifestation to appear, and then interact with whatever it is they’ve bought into the conscious sphere… and then banishes it so that it goes back out of this broad frequency range that we have as human beings. So, the ideas are very, very similar. Also, I’ve stumbled upon this phenomenon in cult working groups, which have come across the same thing that UFO working groups do – the Men in Black – three men, dressed in black that come to give warnings. I didn’t realise that it happens in magical circles too – it’s quite fascinating.
John Keel coined that term, I think?
He did – it was him and Gray Barker. Yeah, that’s right.
So, these two texts particularly (or these two writers) – when you gave an interview recently you said they were two major pillars of the album now. Were you approaching these two texts in tandem with, or from the wider gnostic perspective of inquiry?
Well, I started plugging in to Jacques Vallee back in 2013 / 14 – something like that and things started to click together. So, what I’m trying to represent in this album, as you probably gathered, is a world view of where I’m at now.
Now, that might change. But, for now, I’m trying to draw a map and say, “this is how I think things are connected.” I’m not sure if anybody has tried to do something like it on so broad a scope. So, I’m trying to connect these ideas about Ufology, Demonology, the Gnostic and how all these things link to one another and almost to try to get an understanding of… no, not the nature of evil… it’s not that… [pauses] but the nature of manipulation within this human sphere.
So, I’m trying to get a handle on that, and I’ve found these people especially useful. Again, a point of view that was contrary to everything that I had grown up reading about Erich Von Daniken and all that spacecraft kind of stuff- I thought it was refreshing to have people say “actually, put the pause button on here and let’s have a proper look at this and see what it is and why it doesn’t conform to this idea about extra-terrestrials and all the garbage that we seem to have been inundated with as a social meme over the years, so that, when you come across the subject, you’ve already got pre-conceived ideas. So, they took it completely away from where it is in the popular imagination.
In terms of tracing a map, to return to some of the foundations of the album (and the issues that fell within it); inevitably you’re going to end up questioning both the good and the bad – the nature of evil and issues of representation – is that what started you down the path of exploring the writings of Menuhin and people like that?
No, no not really that. I’m not looking for an understanding of good and evil as absolutes. I suppose that I’m drawn more toward the idea that these things only become concrete once they enter the human sphere because it’s all about the objectivity of it (or the subjectivity of it) – how things react on us because, as human beings, we’re subject to pain. And everything revolves around that – comfort, pain, warmth, familiarity, and all of that. So, anything that pushes us outside of that is generally seen as bad, as dark as without any purpose whatsoever. But in the bigger picture, I don’t think there is a good and evil. There’re just our reactions to circumstances and things that are happening. And, of course, within the human realm we can say empirically, these things appear to be absolutely evil, but then again, there’s always something within the structure itself which will undermine that as being an absolute.
But for many people, and probably part of why the journey is so hotly debated, is that there’s more a fear that you might recognise something of value within something that, at a wider level absolutely does not fit with your world view. But to find that there’s anything in common with it can be profoundly disturbing to your equilibrium, I guess.
Yeah. Yeah, I’d agree with that. The Gnostic approach was interesting because they had this idea about what they refer to as a demiurge. But it’s not empirically an evil god. They call it “the blind god” because it’s not very self-aware. It perceives itself as being the chief in charge of everything in the manifested world that we live in, but it’s non-referential. It’s not able to regard itself outside of its own ego space at all. And the way that it manifests certainly pushes toward what we would equate with great evil in this sphere. But also, funnily enough, in the realm of just mischief and deception, and all the tricks that are put in front of us to take us away from what we are as human beings and to try and detract us from the journey into finding out what it is that we are and what makes us unique and where is our personal power.
I think that the deception is always about taking us away from the inner journey of discovery about what a human being is and why we are such a centrally important part of this great mythical cycle – of the world itself and our relationship with the cosmos. We know, from a lot of different writers over the ages, that there is this idea that we’re not fulfilled and that we’re very, very powerful creatures who can manifest greatness. We can be more than the mundane that we always appear to be. It’s almost Nietzschean kind of thing – there is great potential within us, but everything seems to be designed around us to draw our energies away from that. So, it’s that discussion and also from that journey towards one where we’re just indulgent and we’re just told to refer to everything material as being the end goal of our existence.
For me, that’s an interesting question that you pose, and I’ve always wondered the extent to which the nation-state system is predicated in drawing people away from any sort of personal journey and any sort of personal revelation. Within the history of the nation-state (and particularly authoritarian nation states) is the attempt to gain ascendency over the thought process of the individual. So, to that end, I would have thought that a step in the direction of (for want of a better word) an enlightened Globalisation would be desirable within that context.
Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it seems that there’s not many lights on at any given time. There aren’t that many people that are prepared to move out of the familiar, and again, there’s this thing about the journey. Joseph Campbell refers to “the heroes Journey” – the willingness to move outside of the familiar comforts and into the unknown. And, because we’re physical beings, and we define ourselves by (generally speaking) our comforts, belongings, relationships and all that kind of stuff; it’s possibly the last thing we want to do is to go into a state of alienation from all that we know and that we feel connected to.
And that, again, seems to be actively discouraged, too, because there’s no longer the cultural imperative for rites of passage for the individual, but also for seeking, even within the education establishment… or particularly, within the educational establishment probably. It’s so politicised these days that you seem to need to wade through a whole heap of bullshit to even get the space to sit down and think for yourself. Even in education, it seems to be a pre-requisite that you must take on the ideas of the establishment in order to have some kind of education, let alone to be able to go into the philosophical world.
It depends on the establishment, I suppose – education has always been challenged by, I guess, a need for a structured approach (even within philosophy), and there is a use to it in the sense that, once you know the structures, you can start to deconstruct them and step outside of them. It’s a case of having as broad a knowledge as it’s possible to gain, certainly from a philosophical standpoint.
[Unconvinced] Yeah… I’m not an academic. I’m a comprehensive schoolboy. In school I was put in for O Levels, back when they had those, and then I discovered punk rock and immediately managed to reduce that down to two, which I kind of got by mistake really – English and Art (and I don’t know if you can possibly fail those anyway). So, I never pursued anything like that at all.
I’m that most hideous of creatures – the self-taught man really – the auto-didact. But at least that’s afforded me the luxury of being able to pursue my own interests. So, yeah… hence, a weird eclectic album like this, which is me sewing together into this big fabric as many ideas as I can so I can represent a point of view at a particular point in time. And I’d like to be able to develop that because, like I said, there’s this ongoing restructuring of stuff. Like writing songs again, because you’re always learning new information and you can always do things a little bit better, so it goes on – the journey goes on.
After everything that occurred with the breakup of the band. When you brought in the musicians to rework the music, did they wish to sit down with you and discuss lyrics and philosophy behind the album? Or did you choose to do that? Or did you not, and leave it unsaid?
Well, with the guy that I have on drums, we had a meeting first of all, and I was very upfront about that. I told him that there was controversy and that he needed to have a look at it, and then we’d have a talk about it. So, we set that aside, had a glass of gin, and talked things through as human beings. I managed to get across my point, which is that the way we deal with people these days is not right. It’s not right at all. I felt there was something worthy about the journey and the album itself, to be fair, has got nothing contentious at all on it. It’s not about any of these things.
I happened to mention an author because I was going through a period where I was getting deeply… influenced, I suppose, is the wrong word… but deeply informed about things that I had no idea about; so, I was grasping at stuff and saying: “this is interesting”. And it is interesting. It’s really interesting. Not through morbid fascination, but because I found myself in the middle of a religion and I didn’t realise it was a religion. And it was only when I came to look at the edges of that and possibly think about asking questions that I became acutely aware of the actual foundation itself and how it does not [picks words with care] how it will not put up with any inquiry whatsoever.
So, I mean, these days, I’ve moved away from that [laughs] – I’m not looking at that; but in the meantime, I’ve been talking to some very interesting people about that subject and, as I say, that’s informed me. So, that led me to think that I know some things about stuff now and, so as not to fuck things over irredeemably, I think I’ll just move on, if you don’t mind, and I’ll keep writing music and do what I do.
Obviously, one issue is that it seems to have threatened to overshadow the music – and certainly it threatened to overshadow things nine months ago… I don’t know how things have emerged since then because I tend not to look too much at other people’s reviews, because I don’t want to get influenced… but it has been difficult, I guess, to be able to reset in that way?
Oh yeah. It’s quite a different thing altogether. I’ve had to step back into the DIY position, so everything is being done on a shoestring of what I had left and what I could scrape together. I haven’t got the big machine of the record industry label behind me any more to do that kind of stuff. So, I’m handling a lot of this kind of like press myself. I’ve always talked to people, but I’m basically having to sit down, write to people and stuff like that.
It’s been quite interesting because, so far, it’s been notable there have been a lot of people who aren’t willing to say anything at all, so it’s interesting because I suppose there are other people looking and asking if it’s something that they can even talk about now and it’s like, “well of course it bloody is!” If you need to take the focus away from this and look at what you’re dealing with, which is music, and lyrics and ideas. And also put everything into context because, unless we grow up properly, and start to observe what’s happening to us and our relationships with one another, through this social media structure, then we’re knackered. Because it’s not going to get any better than this. We need to stop doing this, we need to stop crucifying one another for not towing the line, basically.
It’s an interesting thing. When I first got the email, I took a moment to think about it and it’s an interesting reaction because I’ve always believed discussion should come first, and I didn’t see myself as being censorious.
I remember that you pointed that out at the time, which is why I said, “you need to realise that this says more about your perception of yourself at a given time”, and that’s quite right – it means we have to be self-reflective. What do we want? Because all of us are shaping the world as it is at the moment and if we keep on allowing things to be chipped away at in this manner… this is just one tiny little incident, but the more this kind of thing happens, the less of a voice we have, the less of a society we have and the less human we become as a result of that too.
Again, it comes back to that original discussion we had on the importance of being able to hear opposing views and to recognise them, even if it’s only to say: “that’s crap – it doesn’t reflect me or what I think at all”. To hear the viewpoint, I think is important, and the thing that concerns me more about the nature of censorship is that you can’t make people’s beliefs change by wishing their views out of existence. If someone’s inherently racist or sexist, or whatever -ist you wish to put on it, those feelings don’t go away just because it’s not spoken, it festers under the surface. You could argue that what we’ve seen in America with the election and what we’ve seen in the UK with Brexit reflects that – a lot of attitudes that I thought had disappeared are still there, but because they weren’t discussed, they’ve been held under the surface and re-emerged. For me, that’s more problematic than hearing an issue in the first place and being able to discuss it.
I agree with that. I think that, most importantly, what it does when you silence people or stop them from having a voice, is that you create a deep resentment. And that resentment will manifest in an ugly form at one point if it keeps on going on. When a person cannot be heard. As you say, if something’s ridiculous, then you can shout and argue with one another, or have a discussion. You can have a debate. And that’s all good. If a position is irredeemably indefensible, then it’s going to be quite obvious from going through that process. It’s not about the humiliation of that person for their point of view. It’s about finding what is right in between these polarised ideas. And it’s neither one individual nor the other winning, and that’s the problem we have now, it’s about winning and being on the “right” side.
I always maintain that the idea of discussion is the creation of something new from two opposite points of view. You can have a middle ground in the centre where the exchange of views themselves will give birth to something that is neither one nor the other, but a unique third entity, which will allow for the continuation of an idea, but changed by nuance. It’s… I don’t know if I’m putting this quite right, but the creation of the third thing is important and it doesn’t belong to either party, it’s a creation in its own right. It’s the generation of the very human process of debate itself and I think that’s very, very important.
What drew me into trouble, I the first place, was that I found that people who had opinions, which were unpopular, were not just being silenced or criticised or censored… they were being locked up and they were being locked up here in Europe, in Prison for periods of… well, four years, for a 94-year-old woman. And that really hit me somewhere deep down in my gut. I don’t care what a 94-year-old says about anything, this is someone that’s still alive at that age and has lived a hell of a life and there’s no reason in the world that I can think of that you might put her into prison. We might say we’re not going to listen to her, that she’s an idiot or a senile old bat or whatever, but don’t lock somebody in prison, because it’ll create a huge undercurrent of resentment, especially from people who would say it’s wrong… but we can’t say that it’s wrong without censure. That’s the situation that we live in. So, you take away people’s power to say “this is wrong” – political prisoners in Europe is not a good thing. If you can’t talk about a subject without fear of censorship, you create a block of energy and deep resentment, which will manifest in one way or another.
To a large extent, I agree that nuanced debate is important, although I think the case to which you are referring – Ursula Haverbeck – is problematic because the four years she received was as much to do with the threats she was sending – as I recall, she wrote a direct threatening letter stating that Pogroms would return, which is a highly contentious issue in Germany… and also the four years came about because she escaped custody… so it’s not as clear cut as “just” freedom of speech, there are a lot of facets to her particular case. Sylvia Stolz, is a little different and seems to reflect more the censorious nature of the discussion, because she was arrested for making a case in criminal court…
She was put into jail, again for four years, for trying to present evidence on behalf of her client, as a lawyer in a court of law. If that doesn’t say something quite profound, then I don’t know what does.
Well, it introduced me to a concept of law, which I hadn’t covered before – Manifest Obviousness – but I’m not sure that the situation is as clear cut as being jailed for speech – Ursula Haverbeck, for example, engaged in unrepentant threat against those who had criticised her in the past as well.
Yeah, that’s an opinion too, and that’s fine. For me, it’s just that the whole thing resonated very badly because I thought that Germans, they’re drowning in this self-hatred and guilt generations on from the events themselves. The idea that the sins of the fathers should repeatedly be visited on the sons and daughters is, for me, unjust and I don’t see it having any value whatsoever, other than the usual one – it’s supposed to be a deterrent. But I think that when you’re treated with that kind of derision as a people, it will cause great resentment, which is a psychological wound, which will find its place somewhere along the line, I don’t quite know how.
I suppose it comes back to the point I made earlier about the nation-state. There’s a chap called Geert Hofstede, who argued that the nation-state (or national culture at least) is the collective programming of the mind so, from that angle it’s logical (if not defensible) that the nation-state will seek to silence anything that digresses from the contemporary narrative.
Yeah. Yeah, I suppose so. But, again, there’s this thing about consent too. We never seem to have been asked for our consent for any of these initiatives, which are taken on our behalf and, of course, we are contractually bound into this society once we’re born and have a birth certificate, but we never get a say in that. So, it’s not something that you can retract. All you can do is to try and look at it through the political lens and try to vote one way or the other to try and change things for another position altogether. But we’re subject and that’s the human condition, isn’t it?
We’ll end up discussing the Social Contract in a minute… but I’m aware I’m taking up much of your evening. I guess that this search for truth and this idea of, I suppose, not allowing voices to go unheard, plays into the tumultuous and cinematic in scope music that is reflected on the record.
Yeah, I hope so! I hope that the events themselves are infused in the music. It’s re-energised everything that was already there and pushed it up a couple of notches, because there’s more of an immediacy to it and the authenticity of this, is something that is a lived experience, rather than an intellectual exercise, that you can look at as a third party.
So, I’ve gone through this (on purpose) and I will continue with that – Unrepentant, absolutely, and dogmatic about the whole thing because I think that there’s a value here, if I’m able to give a little bit of hope to even one person that people needn’t have to put up with this kind of censorious stuff in their lives. You should have a right, no matter how quiet your voice is, you should have a forum where you can express an opinion without anything happening to you. And the injustice, really, of the whole dog piling thing, which is where a group of people start to involve one another to be more and more destructive towards an individual and they don’t seem to care about the consequences whatsoever.
And I’ll illustrate that – most recently I had somebody pop up on the Facebook page and made a statement… and you know, I’m just trying to put things across like “I’ve made some music, here’s a video” and this person said: “well, I’m only interested if you still deny…” So, I wrote back and said “well, listen, OK – you’ve made an accusation here on a public forum, are you prepared to back that up in any way whatsoever because it’s libellous?”
And it is actionable, that sort of stuff. Of course, I wouldn’t do that because that’s not my bag. But I wanted people to reflect upon the situation and ask themselves questions like: “how did you come to these conclusions without having any information whatsoever?”
Because I’ve been stoically quiet about everything since that time. I released one statement, which was to say the way I perceived the world at the time – from being a rat in a corner basically, being attacked by everybody and attacking back. Since that time, I’ve kept my mouth shut and I’ve just watched and learned and observed the nature of human beings and how they do things and how they’ve coalesced into these groups. Again, because they seem to be afraid to have any opinion that stretched the imagination of anyone with whom they’re immediately entangled.
Do you see, through the interactions you have now, a more hopeful, dialogical society emerging? Is that something to which you’d like to point the way?
I would like to, but I don’t really see it, no. I don’t think it’s happening at all. I think we’re degenerating all the time. It really pains me to say that because I would love to be able to say that there’s something aspirational and great and that there’s some way that we could redeem ourselves as human beings by getting some notion of who we actually are. But I think it’s going in the opposite direction and, with the intrusion of AI and all that kind of stuff…. Our harvesting as human algorithms, basically.
Cynically, I have to look at that and say that I don’t see a great deal that’s worth pursuing anymore. It’s all about, perhaps, just finding people that still have some lights on and being able to talk there, because your circle is going to be decreasing all the time. We really are living in the Kali Yuga – we’re going into a stage where we’re interfacing with technology and the humanity is being leaked out of us. I hate saying that because I don’t want to be a black pill person at all. I don’t like that stuff. I want to say there’s something good to aim for. I think that all that we can aspire to is to keep on reading books; keep on taking to people and no matter how much that dilates, and how much your social circle shrinks and all the rest of it – don’t worry about that. The fact that you’re still alive and you’re still interacting as a human being with other human beings is going to become like a rarity in thirty years’ time. I’m concerned, especially now, over the last year, I’m very concerned about where we are.
And yet it’s weird because there are aspects of social media, particularly within the field of music, both as musicians and writers, that are so important. We just couldn’t reach the audience that we can now – I’m very aware that the writing that I do, and the fact I’m talking to you, is purely through the technology that we have. But, at the same time, I think I have a healthy scepticism, and certainly the social communities that build up online seem to be increasingly driven by a fairly scary pack mentality that is certainly threatening in a number of ways, and it’s worth stepping away from it all from time to time for sure…
I suppose if I distil this experience a bit more as well, the future becomes very insular through necessity. But also, I found once again that the constant reference point for me is nature itself, so there were times when I was melting down… things were happening little bit too quickly and it was a little bit scary… what I would do is to walk down to the shore here and watch the animals. I watched the creatures, watched the tide come in, looked at the trees, looked at nature as it is, and I keep on coming back to this. In everything by Tau Cross, there’s this kind of plaintive idea about the end and the resolution is in nature itself – in the observation of nature, because there’s nothing untrue there. There’s nothing which is deceptive. There’s nothing which is manufactured, or which is false – it just is itself, and there is no necessity to define good and evil in nature because these are just our projections onto it as sentimental creatures trying to anthropomorphise nature for our own use.
So, it is always my companion. And, if I need to find out what’s true, then you’re quite right there will come a time when I need to switch everything off; just switch it ******* off because it’s poisonous – the constant deluge of things. Maybe not forever… I mean I’ve done that thing where I get off Facebook for a month or so, but I cannot run a business without email. Everything is getting faster and faster and faster and so we’re not finding ourselves with any quality free time much anymore. We’re just inundated with information and with this constant need for response, but always in a very shallow and vacuous way. You know, we’re just running businesses and running ourselves as businesses, where we’re representing ourselves through these corporate ideals. And we need to step back… we really do need to step back to start thinking once more about putting together a good library of physical books, building a fire, sitting down with a good bottle of wine or whatever and reading a bloody book and learning things for ourselves rather than being told all the time. So, that’s kind of been my solace at this time. If I had to go through that **** again, I’d just turn it all off and that’s it and I’m out.
So, my last observation is that, for me, the last song on the album feels like a return to the earth – I really like that it feels like a cleansing after such an emotional and visceral roller coaster.
That’s really insightful, actually, Phil. It only occurred to me, re-doing this. And it’s just an acoustic track – there’s nothing artificial there at all, it’s just instruments and voice and there’s something genuine about that. To be able to finish off, again, with this more reflective thing and to say that it’s been a big journey and that we’ve been through these tumultuous landscapes and ideas – everything resolves in the sunset over a field of grain in Devon or Cornwall or whatever. For me, personally, it does. There’s something absolutely vital and nurturing about that space that I couldn’t achieve through anything but that. It’s not just imagination but you have to have been there.
