Revolution Read online

  This book is a work of nonfiction based on the life, experiences, and recollections of the author. In some limited cases, names of people or places, dates, sequences, or the detail of events have been changed.

  Copyright © 2014 by Russell Brand

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom by Century, a division of The Random House Group, London. This edition published by arrangement with Century, a division of The Random House Group.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Apostrophe S Productions, Inc.: Excerpt from Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers. Used by permission of Apostrophe S Productions, Inc.

  Noam Chomsky: Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, America’s Real Foreign Policy by Noam Chomsky. Reprinted by permission of Noam Chomsky.

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Excerpt from Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, copyright © 1952 and renewed 1980 by Sonia Brownell Orwell. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Brand, Russell

  Revolution / Russell Brand.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-88291-7

  ebook ISBN 978-1-101-88292-4

  1. Social movements. 2. Social action. 3. Social change. 4. Political participation. 5. Income distribution. 6. Brand, Russell, 1975—Political and social views. I. Title.

  HM881.B73 2014

  303.48′4—dc23 2014031985

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Jacket design: One Darnley Road

  Jacket photograph: Dean Chalkley

  Jacket lettering: Shepard Fairey

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  You Say You Want A Revolution

  1 Heroes’ Journey

  2 Serenity Now

  3 One Hand Clapping

  4 Top Right Corner

  5 Is Everybody In?

  6 Tiny Problems In Infinite Space

  7 A Few Rotten Apples

  8 I Am An Anarchist-a

  9 It’s Big But It’s Not Easy

  10 Ich Bin Ein Monarch

  11 A Pair of Dames And A Double Slit

  12 Within You, And Without You

  13 Spider-Man On Line One

  14 Get Money Out Of Politics

  15 Spectacular

  16 On Earth, As It Is In Heaven

  17 War! What Is It Good For? Capitalism. Obviously.

  18 U’KIP, If You Want, We’re Awake

  19 Piketty, Licketty, Rollitty, Flicketty

  20 Submarine

  21 Checky The Phone

  22 “Corporacide”

  23 Co-Operate

  24 Plug Me In

  25 Give My Regards To The Basket

  26 Conversion?

  27 Es Mejor Morir de Pie …

  28 Stick Your Blue Flag

  29 Granma, We Love You

  30 Manifest Destiny

  31 Be the Change

  32 Help Me, Help You

  33 Worth Voting For?

  For The Benefit Of The Tape

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Prologue

  You Say You Want A Revolution

  JEREMY PAXMAN IS BRITAIN’S FOREMOST POLITICAL INTERVIEWER. He is fierce, not in a pugnacious way, like a salivating pit-bull; no, like a somnolent croc, eyes above the surface, knowing you will make a false move, waiting. Then snap, thrash, roll, you’re finished. He eats home secretaries for breakfast, shits chancellors, and wipes his arse on prime ministers. In five minutes’ time I will be interviewed by Jeremy, on our nation’s foremost news analysis show, Newsnight.

  That’s why I’m on my knees now, in the toilet of the lobby of the Landmark Hotel. Praying. “God, please make me a channel of your peace.” The first line of the St. Francis prayer, popularized by Mother Teresa, bastardized by Margaret Thatcher, and cherished by those of us who have fallen through the cracks and floated ourselves back up with crack.

  I just want to be a channel of the peace. The peace exists; I don’t need, thank God, to create the peace. All I have to do is become open and the peace will come, the peace is already there. Mother Teresa, one could argue, is a testimony to the principles outlined in this prayer; through service she conquered the lower, selfish drives that serve survival and the ego, and become a tool of a Higher Purpose, or God. Margaret Thatcher’s case is less clear. What God she was serving in her systematic destruction of the values of our country as she jived in the brilliantined shadow of Ronnie Reagan is a mystery. But as she stands, newly elected and spattered by fore-boding rain outside Number 10, it is the St. Francis prayer that Maggie recites:

  Lord, make me a channel of thy peace;

  That where there is hatred, I may bring love;

  That where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness;

  That where there is discord, I may bring harmony;

  That where there is error, I may bring truth;

  That where there is doubt, I may bring faith;

  That where there is despair, I may bring hope;

  That where there are shadows, I may bring light;

  That where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

  Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted;

  To understand, than to be understood;

  To love, than to be loved.

  For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.

  It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

  It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life.

  Amen.

  Now, I don’t think she belted out the whole thing there and then, but you don’t need to be Jeremy Paxman to see that Margaret Thatcher somewhat strayed from the sentiments outlined in this prayer.

  She didn’t bring much love to the miners of northern England. She wasn’t that forgiving to the Argentinian sailors on the Belgrano. There was very little harmony among the poll-tax rioters and the police. You get the idea. So I suppose the prayer is not infallible; in the wrong hands it can evidently become a mantra for self-centered nihilism.

  That isn’t the prayer’s fault, though. For me it is a code that attunes my mind to its natural state: union, connection, oneness. In the Creole ramblings that I offer up in the frantic lavatorial incantations that precede the interview—some Vedic chants, yogic murmurs, and even some Eminem lyrics—what I am trying to do is to connect, transcend, get out of myself. That is what I’ve been trying to do my whole life—get out of myself, get out of my mind, get out of Grays, get out of the feeling that I’m not good enough, that I’m alone, that I’m never going to be happy or loved, and I’ve tried to do it in a multitude of ways, always with the same outcome.

  I’ve greeted a cavalcade of gleaming false idols like a jam-jar native, prostrate before the great white master. As a little boy, chocolate and television were deities to me; I sat on my knees before that goggle-box in spellbound devotion, the Penguin sacrament ritualistically devoured (nibble chocolate coating first, scrape center with teeth, then eat biscuit). As a teen with porn, I was locked up mute like a Trappist in that bathroom, flagellating with stifled wails. With drugs and alcohol, I made the pilgrimage to any bridge or corner and made my donations in the penury my God demanded. Then came fame, where I studied like Augusti
ne and voyaged like a Jesuit. I was a zealous devotee to every prophet of the panoply, and none brought anything but pain and disillusion. Only when salvation was offered did I become circumspect; only when the solution became available did I examine with a skeptical eye.

  When I necked five-quid bottles of vodka, I did not read the label. When I scored rocks and bags off tumbleweed hobos blowing through the no-man’s-land of Hackney estates, I conducted no litmus tests. As I sought sanctuary in twilight cemeteries entombed in strangers’ limbs, I barely even asked their names.

  But, when the true dawn came, when the light rose, when I felt the fusion, I had no faith; I had questions. How do I know this is real? What if it doesn’t work? How can I, after everything, just trust and let go? I still have questions, and in the inquisitor’s chair in the suite-cum-studio of the Landmark hotel, so does Jeremy Paxman.

  “So …” he says, in a voice so intoned with sarcasm I wonder whether it will come out of his nose, “how, if you think people shouldn’t vote, are we going to change the world?”

  “Through Revolution,” I say.

  “You want a Revolution?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You believe there’s going to be a Revolution?” He shunts the question at me like a billiard ball.

  “Jeremy, I have no doubt,” I reply.

  Jeremy has been round the block a few times and has sat across from every johnny-come-lately mug with a cause and a plug who has had the gall to crop up on his show in the last twenty years. He looks me up and down—the hair, the beard, the ridiculous scarf.

  “And how, may I ask, is this Revolution going to come about?”

  Now, that is a very good question; it’s a question that a far less skilled interviewer than Jeremy Paxman would lob at you. But this isn’t a far less skilled one—it’s Paxman. And not just Paxman; it’s my headmaster, it’s the arresting officer, it’s the people at work, friends, relatives, well-wishers, and bystanders. “How will this Revolution work? How can we change the world? How can we change ourselves? Can we really overthrow the corrupt and the powerful, not just the corruption in society but in ourselves?”

  Well, I know the answer’s yes. And as for the more complicated aspects of that question, well, I may not be Margaret Thatcher and I’m certainly no Mother Teresa (except we agree on condoms), but I’ve given it some thought, so, here we go, sit down and strap in.

  1

  Heroes’ Journey

  THE FIRST BETRAYAL IS IN THE NAME. “LAKESIDE,” THE GIANT shopping center, a mall to Americans, and “maul” is right, because these citadels of global brands are not tender lovers, it is not a consensual caress, it’s a maul.

  After a slow, seductive drum roll of propaganda beaten out in already yellowing local rags, Lakeside shopping center landed in the defunct chalk pits of Grays, where I grew up, like a UFO.

  A magnificent cathedral of glass and steel, adjacent, as the name suggests, to a lake. There was as yet no lake. The lake was, of course, man-made. The name Lakeside, a humdrum tick-tock hymn to mundanity and nature, required the manufacture of the lake its name implied, just to make sense of itself.

  For me, though, as a teenager, this was no time for semantic pedantry but one of inexplicable rapture. I couldn’t wait for Lakeside to descend, to make sense of the as-yet-empty lake, to fill my life as surely as they’d fill that lake, to occupy my mind as surely as they’d occupy that barren land. I couldn’t wait to go to Lakeside. The fact that I had no money was no obstacle to my excitement at the oncoming Mardi Gras of consumerism. Lakeside seemed like the answer, that’s for sure, but what was the question?

  What kind of void can there be in the life of a thirteen-year-old boy that requires a shopping center to fill it? Why would a lad growing up in Essex in the eighties have a yearning to shop that would be a more probable endowment of one the gals from Sex and the City?

  Joseph Campbell, the cultural anthropologist who I’ll be banging on about a lot in this book, said, “If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.” In medieval societies, the biggest buildings were its churches and palaces; using Campbell’s method, we can assume these were feudal cultures that revered their leaders and worshipped God. In modern Western cities, the biggest buildings are the banks—bloody great towers that dominate the docklands—and the shopping centers, which architecturally ape the cathedrals they’ve replaced: domes, spires, eerie celestial calm, fountains for fonts, food courts for pews. If you were to ask the developers of Lakeside or any shopping center what they are offering consumers (formerly known as “people”) they’d say, “It’s all under one roof”—great, a ceiling, and, more importantly, “choice.” Choice is the key. Apparently, then, what excited me as a bulimic Smiths fan and onanist was the possibility of choice, and for anybody to be stimulated by the idea of choice, the precondition must be a lack of choice. Which is a way of saying a lack of power, a lack of freedom.

  I’m not inferring that we need to revert to a medieval culture, by the way, all bubonic and snaggletoothed with shabbily bandaged hands, chewing on a turnip, genuflecting in a ditch as a baron sweeps by on horseback. If we’ve learned anything from Blackadder, it’s that history was a shit-hole.

  What I believe is that we’re only just beginning to understand the incredible capacity of human beings, that we can become something unrecognizable, that we can have true freedom, not some tantalizing emblem forever out of reach. Not weary compromise and nagging fear.

  I used to believe in the system that I was born into: aspire, acquire, consume, get famous and glamorous, get high and mighty, get paid and laid. I saw what was being offered in wipe-clean magazines and silver screens, and I signed up. I wanted choice, freedom, power, sex, and drugs, and I’ve used them and they’ve used me.

  “Why would you be satisfied with the scraps of fame and fortune, of sex and distraction?” asked a fellow recovering drunk that I was chatting to in New Orleans. He was well tanned—in an overly literal way, the way leather is tanned—his skin coarse and lined, his beard gripped his face like a furry fist. His shirt had faded stains and rings, like coffee-cup marks on an old map. He looked like a man who had lived, who’d had long nights and fistfights, but his eyes were as clear as his words.

  “Money, fame—those are the crumbs,” he said, brushing the words away with his thick forearm. “I want to be at the banquet.” At this last he looked up and smiled. Then he strolled off with brutish majesty to do volunteer work with the plentiful New Orleans homeless. In retrospect, his departure was melodramatic, like a grass in a police drama swanning off after a midnight subterranean confab with his cop handler, maybe grinding out a fag, then leaving—why don’t they ever say, “Well, I better be off, then; toodle-oo,” like normal people?

  The most positive thing about being a drug addict is that it calcifies your disillusion; someone else, also a drunk—I’m starting to think I spend too much time listening to these lushes—said to me, “Drugs and alcohol are not our problem, reality is our problem; drugs and alcohol are our solution to that problem.” That’s a very smart way of putting it.

  The same impulse that made Lakeside seem a good idea to me also made heroin seem like a good idea. That might seem like a radical corollary to offer, but it isn’t. When I was a kid in Grays I was aware of an emptiness, a sadness, a nameless sense of disconnection, so when it was suggested by a local paper, a local politician, a mayor or whatever, that Lakeside might be the answer, I suppose I thought, “Yes, Lakeside might be the answer.” Given that I subsequently went on to become addicted to anything that could be cooked, snorted, or swallowed, it seems Lakeside’s palliative qualities were at best limited. Perhaps I’m an extreme case. But isn’t that all addiction really is, “an extreme case”?

  Aren’t we all, in one way or another, trying to find a solution to the problem of reality? If I get this job, this girl, this guy, these shoes. If I pass this exam, eat this p
izza, drink this booze, go on this holiday. Learn karate, learn yoga. If West Ham stay up, if my dick stays up, if I get more likes on Facebook, more fancy cookbooks, a better kitchen, cure this itchin’, if she stops bitching.

  Isn’t there always some kind of condition to contentment? Isn’t it always placed in the future, wrapped up in some object, either physical or ideological? I know for me it is, and as an addict that always leads me to excess and then to trouble.

  Do you feel like that? Are you looking for something? It’s not just me, is it? Do you sometimes feel afraid, self-conscious, lonely, not good enough? I mean, you’re reading this, so you must want to change something.

  Don’t leave me out on a limb, all vulnerable and exposed. Are you reading this on a yacht, through your Ray-Bans with, I dunno, a pair of glistening Russian sisters and a gob oozing with lobster juice as the sun shines down on you and the sisters smile up at you? And even if you are, especially if you are, is it working, behind the salty tang and priapic pang, is it real, is it real, is it like God is holding your hand?

  I mean, I’ve tried decadence too. I lived in a Hollywood mansion, I went to the Oscars, I hosted big dos.

  In 2002, at two weeks clean, in a Bury St. Edmunds B&B on Christmas Eve, watching TV, perched on a single bed with my mum, both of us with the glum cordiality of an A&E waiting room—shell-shocked smiles and no hope—if some twinkling superficial fairy had flown in and said, “You’ll be taking your mum to the Oscars in a few years, don’t worry,” I’d obviously’ve been surprised (I mean, a fairy), but what would’ve been incomprehensible to me would’ve been the veracious addition from the ethereal intruder that “Oh, by the way, you’ll both find the Oscars fucking boring.”

  Lakeside is a local parish; Hollywood is the Vatican. I wondered how the other parishioners had fared when I went back to Grays recently. I wondered whether Lakeside had delivered for the people I grew up with, the people I left behind, the people I was running from; I wondered if they got their choice, freedom and opportunity.