at the end of the world

sean has been in touch;

'Fascinated by the souf London slavery case. When I first heard they followed some sort of weird political ideology I thought "oh, let them be Maoists, please...."

Yes! They are indeed Maoists!  - Power comes from a bucket and mop! We sing for the future!

Formerly from a Brixton squat, no less....Isn't that the plot of a novel by Doris (farewell then) Lessing...?'

in the light of the escaped maoists horsemouth went and watched a documentary about the villa road squatters of the 70ies and 80ies. horsemouth broadly liked the people both back in the day and in the aftermath of their commitment to radical politics. broadly it all seemed very positive and horsemouth can only contrast unfavourably with his time among a later generation of squatter punks in hackney. the point (horsemouth supposes) is  that, unlike the maoists, they had had the chance/ misfortune to move on.

as usual horsemouth is horrified by some of the people the media found to interview - this from the bbc website; 

'Professor Dennis Tourish, from the Royal Holloway University of London, said followers of Marxism often committed their lives to their beliefs. "They develop a number of organisational rituals of which communal living is one," in this he is correct. but Professor Tourish is (to quote Royal Holloway's website) 'Deputy Head of the School of Management (Academic) and is a Fellow of the Leadership Trust Foundation. His main research interests are in leadership, leadership effectiveness, leadership development and organisational communication.' horsemouth finds it slightly worrying if a professor of management has been studying maoist groupuscles (what was he hoping to learn there?). but on second thoughts he probably hasn't been studying them at all - he's probably just a rent-a-quote. 

Steve Rayner, on the other hand, a professor at Oxford University, studied the particular maoist group involved for a wider 1979 PhD thesis on leftwing groups (PhD, Anthropology, University College London, 1979  Dissertation Topic: The Classification and Dynamics of Sectarian Forms of Political Organization: Grid/Group Perspectives on the Far Left in Britain), and said the group was the "clearest case of far-left millenarianism which I have encountered".  http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1349448/1/D32160.pdf

once upon a time horsemouth was a rent-a-quote. it is the thing he is probably the most ashamed of having done. on the other hand he found living communally merely annoying - like many of his generation as soom as he could return to living in isolation and alienation he did it. 

the interesting thing was that while some of the ex-villa road-ers continues to call for revolution, many had now accepted that revolution was far away (which is pretty much horsemouth's position).

on the subject of the millenium horsemouth was interested to see an album cover suggesting that  'at the end of the world' there will be keith harris, orville and cuddles. horsemouth suggests this is way scarier.

anyway, let's give the last words to sean,

Kind of surprised Horsemouth rates Fahey more as a cantankerous old git than a guitar player; his prickliness was indeed admirable, but.....  isn't it really his guitar playing that sets him apart? There are plenty of argumentative arseholes out there, many at least as capable as Fahey, but they can't play....