Wednesday, March 22, 2006

DON'T BE SHALLOW, CHIDES THOM

Thom Yorke has been expressing his disappointment with people flogging on tickets for his date at Koko on Ebay:

"Might I suggest that those selling their KOKO tickets on eBay for stupid money gives a contribution... say 30 percent of their proceeds, back to Friends Of The Earth, for whose benefit we are all doing this show. Seems only fair, unless you're a shallow____, don't you think?"

Shallow underscore seems pretty mild, considering. We'd have gone with cunt, ourselves.

At the same time, Yorke has discretely been making it known he knocked back an invitation to chat with Mr Tony Blair:

"Luckily, in the end the decision was kind of made for me.

"There's this whole thing going on at the moment with Blair and the nuclear thing.

"This all started kicking off about two or three weeks before I was supposed to meet with Blair, which I was not happy about anyway for obvious reasons, ie Iraq.

"It was, 'If we could just have a meeting beforehand where we could go through how it would proceed...'

"It was like talking to Blair's spin doctors. It was all getting weird. It was just obvious there was no point in meeting him anyway, and I didn't want to.

"That was the illest I'd ever got. I got so stressed out and so freaked out about it. Initially when it came up I tried to be pragmatic. But Blair has no environmental credentials as far as I'm concerned.

"I came out of that whole period just thinking, I don't want to get involved directly, it's poison. I'll just shout my mouth off from the sidelines.

"It's a nasty business. It's up to people with pure integrity who know what they're talking about, like Friends of the Earth."


So... interestingly, he had been fairly happy to meet with Blair (which, of course, will always look like an endorsement even if it's never intended as such) and may well have done had nuclear power started not swimming back into vogue. This seems to suggest a potential nuclear power station is more upsetting for Thom than an actual war, which is curious.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Friends Of The Earth and Thom are reduced to the usual "It's a terrible business and they're bad people" when tickets appear on Ebay. If they couldn't see that was the obvious conclusion to blindly selling them to the general public in one go then how can they see what's best for the earth? They made less than 900 tickets available (in a 1500 capacity club) without any restrictions (they claim they tried by putting max 2 tickets per transaction ffs). Surely they could have made more money auctioning off the tickets themselves, holding a competition, a raffle, or even just offered them to FOE members first as a way of preventing ebay touts. Weak excuses are what govenments are for, not those who seek to change things for the better. - Elvis

Anonymous said...

but surely the re-introduction of nuclear power is worse than a war in the long term... especially from FOE's perpective, which, we must not forget, Thom was representing when he made this statement.

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

Ah, Chris... there's no easy way of answering that mathematically.

For example, how do you account for the extra terrorist deaths caused by the occupation of Iraq against the fatalities amongst nuclear power station workers?

The point is more that "well, Iraq, mysterious undeclared loans, ID cards, rendition flights, torture, an inability to condemn guantanamo, a return to selective education, the public finance initiative, all that's fine. But nuclear power? That's going too far..."

Anonymous said...

...That was the illest I'd ever got...

Oh, for fuck's sake Thom, get a grip. Some kind of dilemna over meeting that insincere opportunistic bastard created a hazard to your health? Why on Earth do you think you got an invitation? You don't think that Blair was actually interested in aything you had to say, do you? Rather than, ooh, I don't know, attempting to attach himself to you for some sort of cache.

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