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I grew up on the South coast of England in Dorset, rural enough to be lovely in summer, suburban enough to be a bit of a hicksville place socially. I was a born again Christian till I started work in a Supermarket bakery at the age of sixteen and was saved by sex drugs and rock'n'roll though not in that order as I was a bit shy.
When I left school I went to Art College in Bournemouth which had a great alternative scene that spread into the beautiful countryside in summer. Pre-rave, you would often find the multi media sound and light shows which were the embryo of the outdoor illegal rave scene. I spent a lot of time riding a motorbike everywhere with whichever girlfriend.
When I was nineteen I moved to Brimingham to study Theatre Design. College life was great as (common in art colleges) women outnumbered men by five to one. I had a great life renting cheap houses off the Pakistani Muslims in Sparkhill and bartending in the evening in the middle of a great scene which centred around Mosley, south of the city where rastas used to do some legendary "blues parties". I also played guitar in a band called The Vegtable Gonads, hugely influenced by the US metal/funk and grunge scene. I remember thinking music in the UK was tepid and contrived in comparison with the notable exceptions of Cardiacs and Levitation.
I moved to London in 1991-2ish (?) which I hated as I was living in the middle of Kings Cross where smackheads would use our staircase to shoot up when the fuckhead students downstairs didn't close the door properly. Things got better when I started squatting.
In 1993 I was pretty much "born again-again", this time into psy-trance, firstly at the word of mouth TIP parties, later at the more commercial Return to the Source on the Holloway rd. I bought a load of synths, drum machines and hooked them up to an Atari 520ST. I managed to play at a couple of friends parties though I could never finish anything to a releasable standard.
I think I took acid every weekend in 1994, the nineties was making the sixties look like the fifties. There was genuinely a magical feeling around psytrance in those days I will never forget, though this was dimmed as I started to meet the sort of people who promoted trance parties in London who would use my psychedelic backdrops some of which are online here .
In 1999 I finally made it to India where I stayed for 14 months, taking in Pakistan as well. I loved India, the hardcore Islamists in Pakistan hated me. They all called me a "Malung" which I found out was their name for someone who was dirty, laughed, had no god, and smoked dope all day. I thought they were refering to the Indian "Sadhu" rarely seen on that side of Pakistan since partition. I have since found out that there was a whole "malung" culture in Afghanistan which is totally different.
I had been carrying an electric guitar, a mini-marshall amp and a multi effects pedal called an AX-1G around Asia which I managed to get working for 2 days in six months. In a flash of inspiration after getting thrown out of a Vipassna Meditation retreat in Jaipur I went into Ajmer and swaped the lot for an 800 ruppee cardboard sounding Indian acoustic which I started playing acoustic-trance on with my bracelet.
Back in London I carried on squatting where I left off, though with gradually less and less enthusiasm and would often be involved in Squat parties and Squat art-shows. It was very hard to keep a positive vibe going from place to place and although I managed to brighten up a couple of times doing Vipassna properly in Hereford squatting was burning me out.
As we slipped towards war In Iraq in 2003 I knew that mentally the whole thing could suck me under, being a bit of a sensitive soul so I kicked against this by filming what I could in London, firstly with the Kids in Parliament Square and a couple of weeks later outside Finsbury Park Mosque . The government were saying that we should "Reach out to those who might be tempted by extremism" so I thought Finsbury park would be a good place to start.
What started as a bit of a laugh turned into a three year saga, with various attempts to get my work to TV. An intro to all this is summarised here on Socialist Wanker . More detail is in the archive of my blog, Malung-TV-News
My Youtube movies are atwww.youtube.com/malungtvnews
These days I am less into Psytrance or filming and jam a sort of improvised psy-punk with The Impossible