'The new faces of Old Colony' - prepared for journalism class DPI-651 at the Kennedy School of Government (awaiting possibly publication) - Fall 2009

At this year’s Old Colony Thanksgiving lunch, there sits a mix of mainly black and a few white families discussing recipes for pumpkin pie. They are straining to be heard over a roaring karaoke machine, the site of a cluster of young children singing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Samantha Juliano, who has lived all eighteen years of her life on the projects, is washing up in the kitchen, and telling her friend about a stabbing that took place outside her first floor window the previous week. These are some of the poorest citizens in Boston.

Since its doors first opened to 800 families in 1941, the Old Colony Housing Projects in South Boston have born mute witness to many of the most explosive chapters in Boston’s history.

The buildings are brickwork reminders of the neighborhood’s bleak record of racial violence and organized crime. Today, the projects are an oasis of poverty, in an otherwise rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

For much of its history, the 873 flats in Old Colony were the undisputed property of working-class Irish-Americans. In 1988, after an NAACP lawsuit followed by a winter of violent unrest, that at times threatened to ignite racial warfare, the projects were finally desegregated.

The often tempestuous history of Old Colony will come to an end in January, as the buildings are razed to the ground to make way for a new, state-of-the-art, green public housing project. As the remaining families pack leftover desert into bags and drift out onto the street, the location of next year’s Thanksgiving remains uncertain.

Old Colony has become famous as the childhood home both of Michael Patrick Macdonald and James, “Whitey” Bulger. The former is an anti-gun activist whose award winning autobiography, ‘All Souls: A Family Story From Southie’, hit the bestseller charts in 2000, shocking America with the scenes of public executions, drug dealings and racially motivated mobs, which have become synonymous with the projects. The latter is a notorious South Boston mobster, who is currently number two on the FBI’s Most Wanted List – second only to Osama Bin Laden.

Today the projects are a maze of squat, three-storey brick blocks, home to 3,000 occupants. The streets are punctuated by broken playgrounds and overflowing dumpsters, and littered with empty vodka bottles and weeds. Described by the mayor’s office as “the most physically distressed” public housing project in Boston, the seventy-year-old buildings are scarred by deep cracks, choked with weeds and flared with black singes from long extinguished fires. From the northern tip of the projects, looking up Old Colony Avenue, you can see the skyline of Boston’s Back Bay. On a clear day, from the south of the projects, you can look out over Old Harbor Beach to Thompson Island.

Desegregation

In August 1988 the first black families arrived on Old Colony surrounded by a swarm of police cars. It was a warm summer evening and the residents, many of which were still awake and out on the streets, watched cautiously as the new families received their keys and unpacked their belongings.

That week, fearing an explosion of violence, Boston’s cardinal issued a six-page plea for peace to be read out at all eight of South Boston’s parish churches.

That same month, the recently reelected mayor Ray Flynn was shouted down by 500 angry residents, as he put forward the case for integration. By doing so, he had forever lost the political support of his own neighborhood.

Meanwhile the letters page of the South Boston Tribune had been bursting for weeks with dark threats of racial bloodshed. On 3 December 1987 an anonymous letter admonished the mayor and warned of carnage: “You might have the police force, the national guard, or even the army and you might spill blood. But unlike a lot of other residents I don’t mind losing a little blood for our children to make sure they get what is theirs: the housing and the neighborhood.”

But, perhaps because residents feared a repeat of the busing violence of 1974, or perhaps because the wealthier families of South Boston, who had traditionally shunned Old Colony, refused to mobilize their support, the projects integrated peacefully.

Tracy Fitzpatrick, Jimie Carlins and Chanel Owens are sharing the same table at the Thanksigivng lunch. Together, they are three women who represent the face of Old Colony in 2009.

Tracy, 36, is one of the few remaining Irish American South Boston natives. Wearing a baggy grey hoodie emblazoned with the word ‘Southie’, she has two children and is looking for work so she can escape the projects: “I would always live in South Boston but I would like to go somewhere better to raise my kids.”

Jimie is an elderly African American woman from Alabama who traveled to Boston in 1964 and moved into Old Colony shortly after it was integrated. She said: “this area has improved a lot since 1991. Back then I was too scared to walk the streets but now I have found a great community. I have no family left. These people here are my family.”

Channel, also African American, is a former lobby attendant with five children who is looking for work. As the neighborhood has become more diverse in the twelve years she has lived here, her life has become immeasurably better: “When I first arrived there was still a lot of racism. I had rocks thrown through my windows at night. The tenants association would never tolerate that now. You would be kicked out.”

Most of the newest arrivals in Old Colony, however, are coming from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. In Washington Village Library, which is contained within the walls of the projects, the number of Spanish books and DVDs grows every week. The two permanent librarians, Audrey Heppanen and Elaine Sullivan, have both enrolled in Spanish classes and the children who come and go from the library greet them both with choruses of “hola!”

Zero-tolerance

When locals are asked whether Old Colony is better or worse off now than it was twenty years ago, their answer will probably depend on the color of their skin.

Helen Gretude and Lisa Rafferty moved out of Old Colony in the last five years to different locations in South Boston. Both women are Irish American and both are Old Colony veterans. They maintain that the projects are a worse place to live now than they were twenty years ago.

Helen, who lived in Old Colony for 43 years, said: “Back then it was more of a neighborhood. People wouldn’t be afraid to sit out on the hallways and everyone was always in each other’s houses. Now your would be afraid to leave your kids outside for a minute.”

Lisa currently lives two blocks away from the projects, and is resisting pressure from her children to move to Milton: “I love South Boston. But everything in Old Colony has gone downhill. I had to leave.”

This story is starkly different from the one told by the non-white community in the projects, who have mixed memories of racial prejudice in the years after desegregation. Despite the relatively peaceful process of integration, the Irish community in Old Colony have voted with their feet over the last twenty years, and the projects are now almost entirely African American, Hispanic and Vietnamese.

Susan Lenardis is president of the Old Colony Tenant Task Force, an organization almost as old as the projects themselves. She is mixed race but refuses to disclose her precise ethnic background: “I’m multi-cultural. I like to keep people guessing.” Often visibly tired and inundated with phone calls, Susan describes herself as a full-time volunteer and works for more than nineteen different organizations.

Until four years ago the board of tenants was dominated by an Irish American clique that, according to many residents of the projects, would turn a blind eye to incidents of racism. Now, a group that once organized pro-segregation protests outside the Boston Housing Association, operates a zero-tolerance policy on racism.

Susan has packed the board of fifteen tenants with representatives of the different ethnic communities that live on the projects. Sitting at the table are Irish Americans, African Americans, Jamaicans, Peurto Ricans, Vietnamese, and Italian Americans: “Sometimes it just takes a handful of people willing to stand up to a few small minded folks to make a difference.”

For Susan, a community should be about a shared sense of space, rather than a common ethnic background: “I would never criticize the proud Irish heritage of South Boston, but it takes more than wearing a shamrock or a green tee-shirt to create a meaningful community.”

A silent killer

Ask any South Boston local who doesn’t live in the projects and they will tell you the same story: the drug problem is over. The projects, which were once notorious for heroin abuse in the 80s and 90s, are now said to be clean, following a string of police crackdowns. However, the projects have since been gripped by a new and deadly drug.

Oxycotin, known on the street as ‘hillbilly heroin’, is a powerful prescription painkiller that comes in a pill about the size of penny. Since being approved by the FDA in 1996, Oxycontin has cast a dark shadow over Old Colony.

According to Susan Lenardis, addicts living in Old Colony have tried everything in recent years to get hold of this highly addictive drug. There are stories of residents smashing their knees with hammers, throwing themselves down flights of stairs and even stabbing themselves to get that much needed prescription.

Lenardis said: “Its the silent killer. Your child can be sitting in a classroom on Oxycontin and no one would know. People round here take it because it has none of the stigma of heroin – the all important difference is that you are taking a pill rather than shooting up.”

Many addicts are children or teenagers who are stealing the drug from the handbags and medicine cabinets of elderly relatives. Unlike heroin the drug is discreet, technically legal and therefore concealed from everyone living outside the projects.

Dr. Carol Boyd, who is leading research funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse at the University of Michigan said: “Because Oxycontin is legal, expensive and hard to get hold of, it has a higher status than heroin among users. Many Oxycontin addicts would be appalled at the idea of taking heroin.”

For Dr. Boyd, widespread Oxycontin addiction is the result of poor oversight on behalf of the Federal Drug Administration: “This drug is a breakthrough in the treatment of cancer pain and its vital that we have it on the market. However, when the drug was first approved by the FDA they had no risk management strategy. No system for ensuring that this new drug didn’t fall into the wrong hands."

Back in Old Colony, the problem is invisible, even to many of those who work every day in the projects. Elaine Sullivan, who has worked for more than a decade in Washington Village Branch Library, on the southern fringes of Old Colony, said: “the drug problem is okay now, much better than it used to be. The police cracked down on it many years ago.”

State legislators have been grappling with a narcotics problem that, between 2002 and 2007, has claimed 3, 265 lives in Massachusetts. This is more than forty times the number of servicemen and women from the state who have lost their lives in two overseas wars during the same five years.

Earlier this month the Massachusetts Oxycontin and Heroin Commission issued a 71-page report describing the state’s Oxycontin problem as a “serious and dangerous epidemic.” The report recommended following other states in suing Perdu Pharma – one of the largest pharmaceutical companies involved in the manufacture of Oxycontin.

Future

Development, on what many claim will be America’s first green public housing construction, is likely to begin as soon as January. The current residents of Old Colony will be moved out in stages and temporarily housed elsewhere, as the ten-year project gets underway.

The new, state-of-the-art, buildings will be better insulated, smoke-free and fitted with low-energy lighting. Currently each family is costing the city $4,000 dollars a year in heating and water. Meanwhile the landscape of the projects will change, from a sprawl of three-story low-rises to a diverse panorama of mid-rises and townhouses. Plans to explore wind and solar energy have been tentatively floated by the Boston Housing Authority.

Much of the new additional housing to be built on the projects will be middle-income rent-controlled housing. Currently the projects are entirely made up of low-income public housing, with residents paying 30% of their salary in rent.

Perhaps most importantly, in the words of Mayor Thomas Menino’s statement earlier this year, the new projects will be “architecturally integrated into the larger community.” Currently, the muddy-brown brick structures of Old Colony jar conspicuously with the forest of white and blue clapboard houses that encircle the projects. The new developments are an ambitious plan to narrow the enormous gulf of class and race that separates the residents of Old Colony from the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood around them.

Donna Brown, executive director of the South Boston Department of Neighborhood Development, claims that the new plan for Old Colony will rectify a planning decision that was flawed from the beginning: “If you look at the projects they all face inwards. Because they have no buildings facing the street they have become a city within a city.”

The money is coming, in part, from a $22 million federal grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which will be subsidized by a public-private partnership. It is a small part of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, passed by Congress in February, and will be awarded to 36 housing projects across the country. As a dire indication of Old Colony’s current state, the project received the largest of these 36 grants.

Back at the Tenants Thanksgiving lunch, the mood is optimistic. Samantha Juliano, who sits on the board of the Junior Tenants Task Force, is taking a break from encouraging a reluctant circle of elderly men to join her at the karaoke machine: “I know the development is going to take a long time but I think things are going to get much better in the future.”

While we were speaking, an ambulance pulled up outside, followed by two police cars. It is a measure of how far this community has to go that paramedics still refuse to enter the neighborhood without police protection.

These six streets were once the locus of South Boston’s heroin trade, a paradise for organized crime and the site of some of the most appalling racial feuds in America. Old Colony, as Boston knows is, is about to change beyond recognition. The projects are as much a part of Boston’s history as the State House or Fenway Park. Their history has an arc that has closely followed that of post-war America, and outlived many of the first families who arrived nearly seventy years ago.

'The Company of Strangers?' - The New Zealand Listener 10 April 2010

'Making Tracks' - The New Zealand Listener - November 2009

Decieved: How Four Oxford Students Found Themselves Marching With Terrorists In Brussels' - The Oxford Student - June 2007 (Pages 1 and 2)

(Page designed and story written by Sam Wetherell)

'As Bagdad burns, Oxford booms' - The Oxford Student - May 2007

(Page design by Sam Wetherell - article written by contributing reporters)

'How colleges track your every move' - The Oxford Student - February 2007 (front page story)

'The OUSU report that tells JCRs to break the law' - The Oxford Student (Pages 1 and 2)

'The Bursar Rent Gang' - The Oxford Student - January 2007 (Pages 1 and 2)

Interview: The Mystery Jets - The Oxford Student - May 2006

“It feels like people finally understand us”, muses guitarist Will Rees, with his feet up on the table and a battered acoustic guitar in his arms. Back in November the Mystery Jets played their first ever sold-out headlining show downstairs at the Zodiac. Six months later and they are playing upstairs, on a tour, which has seen them sell out venues as big as The Electric Ballroom and the Manchester Academy. “This tour has been the best tour we’ve done” Will continues “everything changed when our album came out”. There is a sense that this gig is even more important, with lead singer Blaine having grown up in a small village just outside of Abingdon – “when we first started we considered ourselves an Oxford band”. I ask what it feels like to be in this stage of their careers. “Its weird, for us its always been the Mystery Jets and now the Mystery Jets are coming out in public. What we did originally was just a private passion”. Clearly a lot has happened since November. A performance slot on Top of the Pops, an avenue that’s usually firmly closed to bands like the Mystery Jets was certainly an important, albeit rather disillusioning achievement – “it was fucking strange. All of my perceptions of what that show is like were shattered. There’s an MC there that makes people applaud, the audience are these kids that have been hired and all of the other artists mimed.”

With their childlike lyrics, nautical imagery, and devotion to instruments that look suspiciously like free toys from cereal boxes, the Mystery Jets trade in eccentricity, a trait which they claim is organic rather than self-conscious. “Because we’ve been together for fifteen years it’s just developed that way. Its kind of because we’re on Eel Pie island, you’re in a city but you’re also removed from it in a bubble, being on an island has a massive effect on how you live.” Perhaps this explains the band’s disillusionment with America, a market they are only just beginning to crack: “It’s hard to get a good feel out there, I’m not that eager to go again any time soon, England and Europe is what we care about, that’s our place and that’s where we’re from”. Anyone who has heard the band’s self-produced Eel Pie Island EP, made when Will was just fifteen, with its ten minute-long tracks tinged with Pink Floyd and Can, will know that in the earlier stages of their career they used to sound a lot different. I ask, with a faint note of hope in my voice, whether they will one day crack and make a ninety minute prog masterpiece. “I don’t think we’ll ever do that” Will laughs, “I’m not too fond of that stuff, there’s some bad memories there”.

As Will was speaking Henry Harrison, lead singer Blaine’s Dad and prominent band member emerged from the top floor of the tour bus where he had been napping. With his mop of bright white hair and soothing genteel accent there is an air of superiority and calm leadership to Henry. He immediately asked us if we were going to Truck Festival, where the Mystery Jets are headlining, recalling the days when “we used to walk across the fields to Truck from the village we lived in”. Outside the window of the tour bus a queue is steadily forming at the doors of the Zodiac, a sign that after nearly a decade of playing together, the Mystery Jets are beginning to attract more and more attention.

Two hours later and they are onstage, looking almost stunned by their own success. The cramped beer stained inferno of the Zodiac top floor made me feel almost nostalgic for the evening I saw them downstairs with just a hundred other people. Musically they were tighter than ever. The percussion freakout midway through The Boy Who Ran Away featuring instruments which exceed the knowledge I learnt from GCSE music, possibly the best moment in their entire career, sent concentric ripples of exhilaration through the crowd. Likewise, when the first few notes of You Can’t Fool Me Dennis drifted out from the stage it seemed as if a hydrogen bomb had been set off among the braying fans. Album tracks such as Horse Drawn Cart and Soluble In Air, which on record drift by unnoticed, were transformed into passionate and complex epics. Indeed telling stories, something which Will had previously told me was “a device to draw people in”, is what the Mystery Jets do best, and the weird ambiguity of lyrics such as “bathe me in water vapour, erase me to ashes with fire” are injected by singer Blaine, with such a passion that they imprinted themselves firmly on the audience’s memory for weeks to come.

A few hours earlier, looking fondly at Will, Henry spoke of a time when “his guitar was taller than he was”. Will, now fully grown, has just dived triumphantly into a sea of braying audience members, whose throats are still sore from singing along to every word of Alas Agnes. They may indeed be very strange, but it seems as if people are at last beginning to understand the Mystery Jets.

(No link available)

'Teenage Kicks' - The Guardian - June 2004

Original Article

Our taxi weaves its way though the Spanish town of Gijon, ferrying us to the opening night of Paul McCartney's 2004 European tour. Outside, the sky is grey and overcast, the weather humid. Inside the cab, however, a terrible frostiness has descended. It began when we passed an advert for tonight's show. "So is that what Paul McCartney looks like, then?" I asked, pointing to the vast poster of a jowly middle-aged man brandishing a guitar. This perfectly innocent question did not receive the response I expected. My companion, Guardian rock critic Alexis Petridis, frowned, repeated it very slowly as if he thought I was joking, then nodded. Since then, Alexis's entire conversation has consisted of three words: "Jesus", "Christ" and "almighty". Even the taxi driver, who as far as I knew could not speak a word of English, seems to be scowling at me in his rear view mirror.

It all seems a bit unfair: how am I supposed to know what Paul McCartney looks like? I'm 17 years old. The last time he had a top ten hit, in 1987, I was a little busy, being born. I have admired my dad's Led Zeppelin albums from a safe distance, and I once went through a phase of listening to his copy of the Clash's London Calling, but I have never really been a fan of "old" music. Instead, like thousands of other teenagers, I have been hungrily consuming Muse albums since the turn of the millennium, but I also listen to Faithless and Massive Attack, and break up the monotony of A-levels by visiting Milton Keynes' beer-soaked punk and ska clubs to see local bands. I had a brief nu-metal phase at 14, but now I hide my pile of dusty Slipknot CDs underneath a pile of GCSE textbooks in my cupboard: at my school at least, nu-metal is now a genre exclusively for the under-12s.

I think my music taste has always been eclectic, but, until three months ago, the closest I had ever come listening to a Beach Boys album was when I wrestled Pet Sounds from the arms of a tipsy middle-aged woman at a New Year's Eve party in 2001. I thought that Kraftwerk was a low budget German airline and that Abbey Road was John Leslie's ex-girlfriend.

This apparently makes me the ideal candidate for a socio-cultural experiment the Guardian are out to conduct. At the moment the heroes of classic 60s and 70s rock and pop music are all out on tour again: Brian Wilson, the Who, Paul McCartney. They are selling tickets by the caravan-load, but no one seems certain whether they have something genuine to offer musically, or are merely surfing a tidal wave of nostalgia and passionate, almost religious, hype. My role is to infiltrate their shows and judge them on music alone. I can't be nostalgic for something I've never experienced, and while I am vaguely aware of 60s music, I'm not informed enough to know the myths and legends that surround these artists.

Which is how I ended up pacing up and down in a large empty hotel room in Birmingham, waiting to see Brian Wilson at the Symphony Hall, and wondering if the whole thing was some twisted and fantastically expensive joke. The Guardian have installed me in a room without any working electric lights. This, I felt, was taking the "back to the old days" theme a little too far. Although it's not on my A-level history syllabus, I was fairly confident they had electricity in the 60s. I sat in almost complete darkness, until Alexis rang. The light from the phone lit up the whole room. He explained that I should insert my key card in the light switch to turn them on, but other than that wasn't giving much away: "Brian should be . . . interesting, but I can't tell you any more."

I ended up sitting on my own, near the front of the stage, notebook in lap while the fans around me united behind their love of Brian Wilson. Some of them seemed to have been following him around the world ("Oh! You were at the Vladivostok concert as well! Wasn't he great?"). They sat in thin-lipped, awe-struck silence while he played, then, without fail, erupted into a standing ovation at the end of every song.

I followed suit, but didn't really know why. It was like classical music - I could kind of appreciate it, without necessarily enjoying it. It sounded nothing at all like the music that is around today, and for that matter the music I grew up with. Surfin' USA and Barbara Ann were inoffensively catchy, but the second half, which Alexis informed me were songs from an album called Smile, seemed pretentious and simple to the point of being childish. There was a boring a cappella section. I clearly wasn't the only one that felt this way: up in the balcony I could see a family of four. The mother, the father and the older sister had their arms outstretched and their eyes closed. But the youngest son, who looked about 11, was sitting on his seat, arms folded, evidently trying his best to pretend he was anywhere other than in the presence of Brian Wilson.

I knew how he felt, and after the gig I was ready to mention this to Alexis. He, however, seemed to have undergone a kind of religious experience during the concert. He looked a bit red-eyed, and before I could say anything, he launched into a monologue about Wilson that began a few metres outside the Symphony Hall and showed no sign of ending even after the hotel bar had closed. Smile, I learned, was a lost masterpiece, a product of Wilson's tragic LSD-fuelled genius. He made numerous threatening references to someone called Mike Love, who I soon learned was both the Beach Boys' lead singer and "the biggest wanker in the history of music". As far as I could gather, he was the biggest wanker in the history of music because he shared my views about Smile. I went to bed, exhausted from the effort of biting my tongue.

A few days later, the Guardian called me on my mobile during a school lunch break, telling me to hightail it back to Birmingham to see Diana Ross. The friends I was with were suitably impressed, because it meant I would miss a politics mock exam. They didn't seem bothered about Diana Ross.

The audience at the concert were visibly saner than Brian Wilson's fans. The central stage was surrounded by legions of middle-aged couples, gay men and youngish-looking student types with anoraks and glasses. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised.

Years of half-hearing fragments of songs like Baby Love in shopping centres and on adverts meant that the music was instantly familiar. She interacted with the audience, which was an improvement on Brian Wilson, who spent most of his time fixing his fans with a worrying reptilian stare. At one point she walked calmly out and started not just greeting, but actually hugging them. She was so thin I worried that her body might well crumble into dust the moment someone touched her. The stewards had to hold back those with the greyest anoraks and the squarest glasses from throwing themselves at her feet. Alexis was unimpressed. "It's like a bloody royal walkabout," he said. "I'm going to the bar."

Twenty-four hours later we went to see Kraftwerk at London's Royal Festival Hall. The time between the two was spent losing my railcard, writing two English essays and meeting Tony Blair, who had paid a brief visit to my school. I had only dropped in to assure everyone that I hadn't undergone a life-changing experience in the presence of Brian Wilson and would soon be leaving school in order to play the maracas in the Polyphonic Spree.

Kraftwerk was the only act in the line-up that I had never heard of. I imagined them to be a slightly experimental yet middle-of-the-road German rock band, consisting of blondish men in their late 40s singing in hopelessly falsetto voices. Alexis bumped into another rock critic he knew before the gig started, who assured me that Kraftwerk were in fact "German folk music". Alexis thought this was very witty, which I took to mean that it wasn't true.

Meanwhile, I noticed there were about 10 leathery men in the crowd for every one woman. Even when the four eventually appeared on stage, some part of me still assumed that this was some crazy experimental deviation, and that they were about to wheel in a sparkling drum kit and some glittery guitars. But they didn't, and they were brilliant. Watching them stand, poker-faced, swaying almost undetectably from side to side, while singing, "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" instilled a kind of hypnotic glee in me. Some of the songs were comedic masterpieces. Tour de France sampled the heavy breathing of cyclists, and was performed in front of a cinematic back-drop of white Aryan legs pumping furiously at pedals. The combination of homoeroticism with the band's black suits and stern demeanour made the gig feel like a German Funeral Directors' Union annual Christmas party, which was getting slightly out of control. For once, Alexis and I seemed to agree that a gig was fantastic.

One revision-packed month later, I arrived at the Royal Albert Hall to see the Who. I was hopelessly early, the show was a benefit gig for the Teenage Cancer Trust and after a few minutes of conversation with an ingratiating steward it became painfully clear that she thought I was a patient. Eventually, two middle-aged blokes emerged on stage under biblical spotlighting. Their first song, Who Are You?, was a primitive howl. The balder of the two (who had made the interesting decision to wear wraparound sunglasses) treated his guitar like a musical punch-bag, while the singer bounded around the stage, stopping occasionally to take a sip from a cup of tea. I had never knowingly heard a song by the Who until that moment, and it completely blew me away. It was heart-wrenching, belligerent rock music, authoritative and powerful, but at times almost paradoxically tender. I began to empathise with the droves of middle-aged fathers and (to a lesser extent) mothers, who put on the My Generation album for their children and order them to appreciate it. "Listen to that class, son!" By the final guitar solo, a bald fortysomething man a few rows in front of me was in floods of tears, and a few rows behind a be-dreadlocked 20 year old in a singlet had his eyes closed and his head raised to the ceiling, conducting his own silent prayer for another encore.

It never came, but my Who experience at least was far from over. The next day, the Guardian had arranged to have my photo taken with the singer, Roger Daltrey. Outside the dressing room there was time for more confusion over whether or not I had cancer, which did nothing to make me feel any less awkward about meeting a rock legend who I wouldn't have recognised in the street the day before. As it turned out, he was charming. He agreed with me about the Beach Boys' Smile and gave me a free ticket for that night's charity show, featuring the Stereophonics ("Get this boy a ticket now!"). When I told him, even Alexis seemed impressed, at least until I got to the bit about the Stereophonics ticket, which he said sounded more like a punishment than a present. I was beginning to wonder if the Guardian's rock critic knew anything about music at all - the concert was brilliant.

Another month passed between the Who and Paul McCartney in Spain, the perfect amount of time to perfect my nonchalance. "Oh yeah," I'd say to friends and teachers, "the Guardian are sending me off to Spain next week to see Paul McCartney." My friends would snort with laughter. "One man sitting on a stool playing an acoustic guitar for three hours!" they said. "Have fun with that."

By the time we reached the football stadium Alexis's mood had recovered somewhat from the incident in the taxi, and I began to feel some of the infectious excitement sweeping the arena. While waiting for McCartney to come on, I learned the Spanish for "hot dog" (bocadillo) and noted that we were apparently the only people in the stadium who weren't eating sunflower seeds.

Sir Paul finally arrived on stage at the rebellious hour of 11. The first few Beatles songs he played reminded me of the problem I had with the Beatles stuff I'd already heard. They sound like a middle-of-the-road American/English rock band. As I seemed to be the only one that wasn't in floods of tears during The Long and Winding Road, I couldn't help but think of all the people who would donate their kidney to be in my seat, and, not for the first time on this project, felt like a bit of waste of space. The feeling intensified when Paul dismissed his band and whipped out an acoustic guitar. One-man-and-his-acoustic-guitar music always sounds the same to me, whether it's played by Paul McCartney, or by a drunken uncle at three o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day. I went for a bocadillo.

But then things got much better. He launched into a string of amazing songs, beginning with Back in the USSR, and ending with Helter Skelter. He conducted mass sing-alongs to Hey Jude and Yellow Submarine. It was 1.30 in the morning by the time The End drew to a close and Paul walked off, holding his acoustic guitar aloft in a gesture of defiance. I couldn't be entirely sure what he was being defiant about but I was feeling rather defiant myself. I had learned many things on my Big Musical Adventure. Not only could I now pick out both Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney from a 60s music identity parade, but I also now "own" (and by that I mean illegally downloaded) a copy of both Revolver and Abbey Road. I know that dance music was invented by men who look like German supermarket managers, and that, regardless of whether or not he is actually the Biggest Wanker in Rock Music, Mike Love should keep at least 100 miles away from Alexis Petridis at all times for his own personal safety.

But my world view hasn't really changed. I still think that music from the 60s and 70s sounds like a less evolved, rather slapdash version of the music made today, like the first draught of an essay done at three in the morning. And although I enjoyed the Who, Kraftwerk and Diana Ross live, listening to any of their albums has since proved a rather muted experience. But music is always hard to appreciate the first time you hear it, and I would happily revisit any of the gigs and wouldn't turn down a two-week trip to the 60s either, if, of course, Brian Wilson was in a different hemisphere. And as for next New Year's Eve, will I continue to sabotage any middle-aged attempts to play Pet Sounds? The answer, I'm afraid, is yes. But I might be tempted to suggest some Kraftwerk instead.

'Outrageously Lovely, Me?' - The Guardian - October 2003

Original Article

Reading The Boy by Germaine Greer is rather like finding out you have a particularly nasty form of necrotising fasciitis. There are a number of stages that one goes through.

The first, and most memorable, is to pass out with laughter. To me, the idea that boys are in any way "beautiful" is the funniest thing I have heard since The Young Ones. As a 16 year old, I have spent a great deal of time looking up and down the list of suitable words to describe people my age. "Undignified" was in there, and I think I saw "greasy" somewhere near the top. But "beautiful" definitely didn't make the cut. Unfortunately, I could hardly describe my body as beautiful. Prepubescent and teenage boys wear baggy clothes for a reason, and I know looking down in the shower isn't one of my favourite activities.

The second stage is that of mild disgust. Personally I can't help but think of the legions of be-macintoshed dirty old men, rubbing their hands together at the thought of the publication of this book. I certainly couldn't see myself buying it, at least not without having paranoid ideas that the cashier is pressing the button marked "silent alarm" under the table.

But the final stage is, of course, acceptance. There is something to be said for The Boy (and something beyond "urrrgghhh ... naked? boys? really?") Perhaps the discomfort I feel in being scrutinised in this way is telling because this is the way that we (and by "we" I mean the male population of the planet) have been looking at the other 50% for the past three million years.

My one problem is that it all seems a little too Just William for me. Greer seems to have a scarily strong faith in the niceness and innocence of boys - "outrageously lovely" she called us in one interview. This is just not true. Between the ages of 10 and 16, boys are about as innocent as Myra Hindley's evil twin.

And also I can't help but ask myself the question: what would I do if my mother bought this book? I would probably run away from home and join the circus (or the Conservative party). This is not the kind of book that should be innocently resting on coffee tables throughout Great Britain.

This morning, when I slid out of my bed at 6:35am, I did not exactly feel like one of Michelangelo's cherubs, nor did I feel "outrageously beautiful". But I must admit I am rather flattered that Germaine Greer thinks I am.

'Blood Sweat and Revision' - The Guardian - August 2003

Original Article

After two years of coursework, homework and pretty much every other kind of work possible, followed by months of blood, sweat and revision, followed - finally - by the fear and tears of the GCSE exams themselves, I can sit back and await the crushing disappointment of finding out on Thursday that I didn't do that well after all.

But as it turns out, according to most of the country's media, it was all a big waste of time anyway. And it was easy, apparently. Sitting in a very hot exam room, eyes streaming with hayfever, trying to write coherently about the Liberal health reforms at the turn of the century (something I didn't even know was part of the GCSE syllabus until a week before the exam) is too easy, they say. But last year around 5% of all GCSE students failed to pass a single exam.

There are few things more important than getting good GCSE results, and one of those things just happens to be getting good A-level results. Last week's plan was to get bright kids to skip their GCSEs and move straight on to AS-levels. This is the kind of plan that I would naïvely have thought a good idea at the tender age of 14. I would have picked a bunch of subjects that I am not actually very good at, and proceeded to fail all my exams through lack of practice.

Furthermore, I would have been cut off from all my friends and surrounded by people taller, brighter and more, let's say, "chemically experienced" than myself.

Yes, there are lots of problems with GCSEs, but pretending they can be easily skipped is really not going to help. For a start, those 11 or so letters you work so hard for do actually mean something in the wider world - no CV should be without them, for example. More importantly, the long hours and the scary exams and the coursework deadlines (which make a lovely whizzing noise as they zoom by) give you the practice required to deal with AS-levels.

But that is not the only reason why moving so-called bright kids - whatever that means - straight to AS-levels is a bad idea. At the age of 14, I had just finished my Sats, and had the intellectual diversity of one of those green things living at the bottom of my grandma's pond. I had never written an essay in my life, my knowledge of world history came mainly from watching Knightrider, and my knowledge of geography from the Simpsons (where is Springfield?).

I would have had no idea what AS-levels to choose, because I had never actually done any of the subjects I was choosing from. I would probably have chosen something really stupid, like maths.

But yes, there is some - and by some, I mean a lot of - lingering resentment among teenagers about GCSEs. If you were to take away the swearing and the bad grammar, and infuse a little public school into the conversations my friends and I have on this subject, you would probably hear "I think that the current system is far too exam-based" in there somewhere. And to be honest, it's true.

I'd like to say at this point, before you start drawing up reports and disbanding exam boards and creating "three-year plans" (yes, that means you, Charles Clarke), that I'm not proposing anything radical. Just a gradual shift, over a number of years, to a more coursework-based system, would make me happy. Perhaps some subjects, especially English and music, could be entirely based on continual assessment. Just a thought.

Nobody revises just the right amount for their exams. Kids either bury their heads in the sand and pretend the exams are one long terrible dream that they are sure to wake up from (and subsequently do no revision and fail); or, like me, they do way too much revision, and stupid things such as cancelling holidays to Italy against the wishes of their parents. It is this exam pressure that helps turn us into the quiet, dysfunctional members of society that we have the reputation of being.

Because the drama of our GCSE exams was contained in one month in 2003 - a date that, back when we were doing coursework, seemed so far away (sigh) - the idea that this essay/composition/ experiment/Roman villa actually counted was very hard to believe. Lots of my friends didn't believe it, and treated it like a normal piece of homework, something to be ignored and lied about.

But perhaps all this media fuss just before the exam results is a good thing. Somehow, all the hype about how futile GCSEs really are has a soothing effect. Maybe if I believe it was all a lie, and that GCSEs don't actually matter at all, in a few days from now, I'll be less inclined to pack my bags, run away from home and spend the rest of my life living underneath a rock in Sweden.

'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stoned' - The Guardian - July 2003

Original Article

"What?" said Hermione blankly.

"I said, I think we ought to talk about all this sexual tension between us," Harry replied while calmly rolling his second joint of the evening. Today was his first day back at Hogwarts comprehensive for the supernaturally challenged after the long summer holidays. Due to recent government cutbacks, Dumbledore had been forced to pawn all of the elaborate furniture in the Gryffindor common room for heating money, so they both sat on the floor. The small, powder-blue room smelled of rising damp and cigarette smoke.

"What the fuck do you mean sexual tension, what are you talking about man?"

"You know I'm just playin' girl," said Harry scratching himself with his wand. "Anywayz, we like, better go to class, McGonnagall says that if we miss any more of her classes we'll be suspended."

They walked along the corridor, trying to avoid the blotches of fresh chewing-gum stuck to the floor. The red blotches of cheap modern art along the corridor rearranged themselves to spell out the words "Do you like scary movies?"

"Trying out for Quiddich this year Harry?"

"Nah, they cancelled the tryouts coz of all those people who died playin' last year."

They walked into the classroom and took their usual places next to Ron, who was carving a skull and crossbones into the wooden desk with his compass. Fortunately, Professor McGonnagall was late due to a recent wave of tube strikes.

"OK children," she said, "Today we are going to learn how to make money out of thin air and deposit it all in a high-interest account in Switzerland."

"If I see another wand I swear I am going to turn myself into a lizard and live under a rock for the rest of my life," announced Professor Flitwick as he slumped down on the staffroom floor (the furniture having been pawned to pay for this year's textbooks). "You know, I never wanted to teach magic. I wanted to play keyboards."

"Well, the outlook's pretty grim folks," said Dumbledore, "a botched privatisation job on the Hogwarts Express means we have to send all the kids here by coach next year, the divination exams were printed with four unanswerable questions and Hagrid went on another bender and threw up in the furnace."

"It gets worse, I'm afraid," said Professor Lupin brandishing a copy of that day's Daily Prophet. The headline read: "SHAME! Dumbledore sexed-up case against Voldemort in internet downloaded dossier!"

"I knew that would come back to haunt me," Dumbledore said, pulling tufts out of his beard.

"Let's sue them, it's all the rage these days."

Harry took a deep, long drink of a Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Bacardi Breezer, smuggled into school in an empty butterbeer bottle.

"I am so bored," groaned Ron. "Harry, let's use your invisibility cloak to sneak into the girls' changing rooms again."

"Nah."

"Well, why don't we get your Firebolt broomstick and use it to break into muggles' houses through the chimney?"

"Nah."

"D'you ever think about the future, Harry?"

"Now, why would I go and do something like that?"

"Well, you know, we have no GCSEs, no IT skills, we'll be lucky to get janitorial work," Ron mumbled over the illegal copy of 50 Cent, which was playing on the cheap Gryffindor common room minidisc player.

"I always assumed that I'd be doing party tricks for kids or something, like a paid clown or shit."

"Where's Neville? I haven't seen him for, like three weeks," said Ron, hastily changing the subject to something less depressing.

"I heard he was killed in a broomstick drag-race. That's, like, the third person this week."

"Don't be thick, mate, that's a ruddy stupid idea, he's probably just gone home for a bit."

"Thick? Mate? Ruddy? Why the fuck are you talking like some character in a children's book, Ron?" Harry asked opening a balsamic vinegar-flavoured bottle of Bacardi Breezer.

"I dunno, it was as if someone else was, like, putting words in my mouth," Ron said, laughing.

"What the fuck've you been smokin' boy coz I want some," chortled Harry.

"Let's go for a walk. Hermione, you comin'?"

It was one o'clock in the morning and the corridors of Hogwarts were empty save for Harry, Ron and Hermione. If it wasn't for the distant noise of traffic coming from the M1, the school would have been silent.

"So what d'you guys think about this Voldemort stuff?" asked Hermione.

"Fuck that, right. If I see The Dark Lord, I'd just smack 'im one. It's that easy," Harry said, kissing his knuckles.

"You're pathetic, you know that?" said Hermione, laughing. "I hear the ministry of magic is falling to pieces over it all," she continued.

"Now why would we care about the ministry of magic?" said Ron and Harry in unison. But this didn't stop Hermione.

"Personally, I think that the ministry should be disbanded and some kind of magical king should be put in place instead." Hermione had just spent all summer actively campaigning for a group called the Federal Union for the Creation of a Kingdom (or FUCK).

"You know what?" said Harry, walking.

"What?" said Ron, who was also walking.

"I don't give a shit," said Harry, continuing to walk. The three of them walked in silence. Eventually Harry spoke: "I think it's weird how, like, the last four years of life have been pretty similar... I mean, it starts with me getting pissed off with the Dursleys and doing some sort of magic which I then get in trouble for, then I end up at school, after a couple of hours where it looks like I might not make it, and get involved in some sort of trouble that reveals itself fully in the last couple of days of the term. It's almost as if I'm living in a repetitive series of books or some shit."

"Don't be an idiot mate, that's a ruddy lousy idea," said Ron, walking.

Time passed and summer slowly turned into winter. It wasn't long before the Hogwarts multi-storey car park and the asbestos-lined mobile prefab huts behind the Quiddich pitch were covered in a thin layer of snow. Ron's father, Mr Weasly, was arrested for benefit fraud and Ginny was put into foster care. The Death Eaters, working directly for the Dark Lord Voldemort merged with the Countryside Alliance and marched through the streets of London, and the second-richest woman in the UK (whoever she is) sued Walmart for selling a copy of her new book four minutes before it was due to be published.

Harry felt like he'd just missed a step going downstairs. He had just taken a very long toke on an extra-strength magical joint. Just then his mobile then went off.

"Whassssuuupppp!" He screeched into the handset.

"Oh fuck off, Harry," said Ron from the other side of the room, "that whaassup thing is, like, soooo book two."

"That was Dumbledore," said Harry, sticking his middle finger up at his Nokia 8210, "he wants to see me."

Dumbledore had been moved to a new office. It was a small, unimposing room at the end of an uncarpeted corridor furnished only by an Ikea desk and chair set, and a faded Rothko print brought for £5.95 at Tate Modern.

"It's halfway through the year, Harry, and I know that you are aching for this year's end of term showdown with - who is it this year? The Grand Inquisitor? But there are more important things at stake."

"Like what?" said Harry through a mouthful of chewing gum.

"Like your OWL exams Harry. By April, when all of the madness usually unfolds, you'll be revising 14 hours a day. You'll have to if you wish to get more than a D."

Harry sat back in his chair and thought. The silence that followed felt like it lasted for days, but couldn't have really lasted more than 20 seconds.

"Don't you think it's a bit weird, all of this?" Harry said at last.

"All of what?"

"Well, the whole works. I mean wizards? Witches?... Are we really supposed to believe that I can alter reality with a wooden stick?" Harry said, taking out his wand. "Or that 90% of the population of the planet is completely unaware of this fact. I mean, why aren't we like, using our magic to feed starving people, sort out the NHS and create a better world?"

This time it was Dumbeldore's turn to sit back in his chair and think, creating a second long silence. This one was even longer than the first, and nearly a minute passed before Dumbledore finally said: "Good point."