The Who – Blood and Porridge

November 29, 2023November 30, 2023

The per-Suede-er

At first glance, the pairing of the Manic Street Preachers and Suede at the concert I attended at Singapore’s Star Theatre on November 22nd seemed the musical equivalent of Neil Simon’s play The Odd Couple (1965). Famous for their left-wing politics, the Manics got together as a band while they were at a comprehensive school in south Wales and they’ve forged a sound described by their Wikipedia page as variously ‘alternative’, ‘hard’, ‘punk’ and ‘glam’ rock. The founders of Suede, on the other hand, put their band together while they were at University College London. They were influenced by David Bowie and Roxy Music and their Wikipedia page describes their music with, among other things, the dreaded term ‘arthouse rock’.

Yes, as a former London university-student, Brett Anderson, Suede’s singer, lyricist and general lynchpin, seemed to me far removed from James Dean Bradfield and the other working-class Welsh lads in the Manic Street Preachers. Which is unfair of me, as Anderson is actually the son of a taxi-driver. (Maybe the name ‘Brett’ makes me biased. The only other Brett I can think of is Lord Brett Sinclair, the posh playboy aristocrat played by Roger Moore in that dreadful / brilliant old TV show from 1972, The Persuaders.)

Still, in certain ways, the two bands are similar. Both achieved success in the early 1990s, shortly before the advent of the Britpop movement that briefly set the world – or, at least, set those excitable hacks in the English media – on fire. And instead of worshipping 1960s outfits like the Beatles and the Kinks, like the Britpop musicians did, the Manics and Suede were inspired by other things, such as the aforementioned punk rock and David Bowie.

Anyway, having experienced the Manics on the evening of the 22^nd, I then sat through an hour-and-a-half of Suede. And I was surprised. I’d never seen the band before and I’d assumed that Brett Anderson was a cerebral, aesthetic type, not given to extroversion. At least, that was the impression I’d got from interviews with him I’d read. (I also seem to remember reading an interview that he’d conducted once, with one of his heroes, Brian Eno.) So, I didn’t expect him to be the showman that he was tonight. He strutted around, dropped dramatically onto his knees, perched himself on top of the front stage lights, and a couple of times descended into the stalls, where he prowled between the stage and the barrier holding back the audience. He even went behind the barrier and into the audience. He was a pretty belligerent in his showmanship too, constantly getting the crowd going, goading them to sing along and clap their hands. This was Freddie Mercury with attitude.

The set-list was weighted with songs from their eponymous first album, released in 1993, and their most recent album, 2022’s Autofiction, which between them accounted for more than half the numbers played. Autofiction has been described as a ‘back-to-basics triumph’ and its songs slotted in seamlessly with the jagged, urgent sound of early 1990s classics like Animal Nitrate, Metal Mickey and So Young. Since Anderson is now in his fifties, with So Young he must be starting to feel like the Who’s Roger Daltrey every time he sings the ‘Hope I die before I get old’ line from 1965’s My Generation.

I was slightly disappointed that almost nothing was featured from 1994’s Dog Man Star, Suede’s second album, which is my favourite thing among their output. Mind you, the one item from Dog Man Star that was played, The Wild Ones, was certainly memorable. Anderson performed it by himself, on acoustic guitar, and made it even more memorable by preceding it with a rant at certain members of the audience who were filming the show on their phones. He pleaded: “It’s so much better if you could possibly put your phones down… Put your f**king phones down. If you want to film, go to the back. Don’t take up space out here. These people want to have fun. If you want to stare at you f**king phone, go to the f**king back. Am I right…? It just kills the gig.”

Being at the rear end, and at the very top, of the auditorium – from where the theatre’s lower level had looked so densely flecked with dots of phone-light that I sometimes felt I was flying over a city at night-time – I hadn’t been able to see precisely what Anderson was doing during his forays into the stalls. However, according to the following day’s report in the Straits Times newspaper, he’d “tussled with a front-row male audience member, demanding that he put down his device” and “leapt over the barricade… confronted those in the front section of the venue who were busy filming him… started pushing fans’ hands down, grabbing phones off them, and putting them on the floor.”

Well, good on Brett Anderson, I say. These days at concerts there seems to exist a great divide. On one side of it are folk who simply want to experience and lose themselves in the live-music performance. On the other side are numpties with one arm permanently hoicked up in the air, with a hand clutching the latest slab of technology from Motorola, Sony, Apple or Nokia, with eyes fastened on a tiny screen where tinier figures move around on a stage, with a mind focused only on getting the clips despatched to social-media platforms as swiftly as possible to show off to their ‘followers’. I know which side of that gulf I’m on. The other side can just f**k off into the sea.

Anyway, that piece of drama merely added to the emotionality and intensity of the Suede experience. The band produced a glorious clangour of noise that, thanks to the Star Theatre’s excellent acoustics, reached me and rattled me even at the very back of the venue. I still had ghostly reverberations from Animal Nitrate in my ears while I travelled home on the Singapore MRT.

This being my first-ever Suede concert, and not having heard their music for many years, I hadn’t known what to expect during the second leg of tonight’s show. But yes, I ended up per-Suede-ed.

November 21, 2022December 23, 2022

Only a few Duff moments

I’ve had a hellishly busy week. That’s why this report on Singapore’s big musical event of the month is reaching you nine days late…

It was with misgivings that I bought a ticket for the concert by the legendary – not always legendary for the right reasons – hard rock / heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses at Singapore’s National Stadium on November 12^th.

Like many things in Singapore, the ticket was not cheap and, given Guns N’ Roses’ reputation for pissing off gig-goers, I wondered if I would get anything near my money’s worth. I knew about, for example, their notorious 1992 appearance in Montreal when, thanks to both coming onstage late and leaving it early, they triggered a riot. (“Come Monday morning, the mayor was looking for apologies and fans were looking for refunds.”) Or their performance at the O2 in Dublin in 2010 when, after another late arrival onstage had angered the crowd, they played for 20 minutes, then walked off, and only returned an hour later after being strong-armed by the event organisers, by which time many fans had given up and gone home.

This year, the band was still being associated with crappy concerts. Two July spots at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London suffered from “appalling sound, everything was muffled, couldn’t hear Axl’s voice, the support act was cancelled, GNR came on real late, kept fans later, no apologies, fans walking out.” Their next scheduled gig, in Glasgow, was then cancelled ‘due to illness and medical advice’.

Meanwhile, I’m not a fan of stadium rock shows, where the venue’s scale and the distance between most punters and the stage kill any sense of intimacy. And I was not enthused about seeing a band at Singapore’s National Stadium because I’d read some complaints about it on Trip Advisor. The main gripe was that the place doesn’t let people bring food or drink onto the premises, obliging them, inside, to spend ages waiting in queues at the stadium’s vendors, where refreshments are sold at predictably high prices.

I had to work on November 12^th until six o’clock. As Guns N’ Roses were officially due onstage at seven – “Huh,” jeered a colleague, “do you really expect Axl Rose to come onstage at seven?” – I hopped on a taxi and went straight to the stadium lugging a knapsack full of important work material. This meant I had to spend a couple of minutes at a security desk outside one of the stadium’s entrances while a lady went through every nook and cranny of the knapsack, rummaging among papers, books, stationery, my (empty) lunchbox, etc., with airport-style thoroughness. But that security lady was undeniably chatty and pleasant.

Having made it inside, at about 6.50, I joined a queue to get some beer – also airport style, with lines of people threading through twisting passages formed by retractable-belt stanchions – and spent the next 20 minutes glancing nervously down into the arena and at the distant, empty stage, hoping that Axl Rose and co. would come on a little late. I also feared that the beer would have run out by the time I reached the counter, although I was reassured when a guy propelled a trolley past me, laden with crates of Tiger beer, in the direction of the vendor. Presumably much needed.

Each customer, incidentally, was allowed to buy a maximum of four alcoholic beverages at a time. If you purchased four Tiger beers – as I did, not wanting to experience that queue a second time – these came in four plastic glasses planted in an eggbox-like tray. Transporting them without spilling anything, down to my seat near the bottom of one of the terraces, required mind-reader levels of concentration. Furthermore, I had to decide where to stash those drinks when I reached the seat. The only space for them was on the floor between my feet, which meant I spent the gig reminding myself, “Keep your legs apart! Keep your legs apart!”

Most of the stadium is roofed over. Only one section of it, directly opposite the stage, is exposed to the elements. The cheapest concert-tickets were for seats in that open area but, this being the wettest month in the Singaporean calendar, I’d decided not to risk it. There’d been a downpour earlier that day and, sitting there, it was possible that whilst listening to Guns N’ Roses performing their famous ballad November Rain, you’d be subjected to November rain for real. Thankfully, the bad weather held off that evening. The show’s most expensive tickets, meanwhile, were for the pitch, which was beyond the barrier a few rows below where I was sitting. Spectators there could snuggle against the front of the stage. Also, they were enviably unconstrained by having rows of seats all around them and could dance and jump and jig around as much as they liked. Although the folk passing on the other side of the barrier, heading towards the stage, seemed to be mainly moneyed, middle-aged expats and I doubted if Axl and the gang would be looking down on much mosh-pit action tonight.

So, there I was, weary from a long day at work, jaded after waiting in a lengthy refreshments queue, worried that an accidental twitch of my foot might knock over my hard-won quartet of beers, and wondering if the evening ahead would prove to be a giant waste of money. Then, at 7.30, the lights dimmed and… The general stadium-crowd roared with excitement. The well-heeled crowd pressing against the stage-front suddenly became densely spangled with light as hundreds of smartphone-cameras sprang into action. From the speakers rushed the blood-stirring chords of It’s So Easy, a song on the first and best Guns N’ Roses album Appetite for Destruction. And on the towering screens that flanked the stage, there appeared… Axl Rose! Duff McKagan! Slash! Or as someone sitting near to me exclaimed, “Sla-a-a-a-ash!”

I’d seen footage of Axl performing a few years ago, as temporary vocalist for AC/DC, and he’d looked worryingly porky. But he’s slimmed down since then and is in decent shape again. McKagan looked admirably lean and mean. As for Slash… Well, he’s evidently been putting too much middle-age spread on his sandwiches lately, not that the excess pounds affected his guitar-playing. He and Jacob Rees-Mogg remain the only two men on the planet in 2022 who aren’t embarrassed to wear top hats in public.

While Axl, Duff and Slash loomed large on the screens, I wondered why Dizzy Reed didn’t appear on them too. Keyboardist Reed, after all, has been in Guns N’ Roses since 1990. He remained in the band after Slash, Duff, guitarist Gilby Clarke and drummer Matt Sorum quit in the 1990s, and he even stuck with Guns N’ Roses throughout the seemingly never-ending recording of the Chinese Democracy album, finally released in 2008. This was when Axl operated a ‘revolving door’ policy regarding Guns N’ Roses membership – though guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer, recruited during this period, remain in the present line-up – and, apart from Reed, the band sometimes seemed to consist of Axl ‘and your granny on bongos’. So where was Dizzy? Did he have a hump on his back or a wart on his nose that made his bandmates too ashamed to show him off? It wasn’t until halfway through proceedings that Axl announced ‘Mr Dizzy Reed on keyboards’, and the screens finally gave us a glimpse of this elusive but long-time and loyal bandmember. I snatched a picture of the moment. Here’s Dizzy!

This evening, Guns N’ Roses played 27 songs over three hours, a very pleasant surprise. Considering some of those notorious past performances, I feared I might get three songs in 27 minutes before they called it a night. The lengthy setlist did have a few drawbacks, though. It meant we were treated to the whole musical smorgasbord that is the Guns N’ Roses experience, which in my opinion contains a few lows as well as numerous highs. There were a few too many wibbly, wanky guitar solos designed to remind us that Slash hasn’t lost his musical prowess, as if anyone needed reminding. That said, it was fun when he did an instrumental workout of Albert King’s Born Under a Bad Sign.

Also, though the setlist was weighted towards their late 1980s / early 1990s stuff, with a half-dozen songs coming from the mighty Appetite for Destruction, it was inevitable that something would slip in from the long-awaited, then much-derided Chinese Democracy. I actually like the title track, which they bravely served up immediately after It’s So Easy at the start. But the same album’s Better, which came a few songs later, just sounded a mess.

And then there were the ballads. I realise that every heavy metal band in the world feels obliged to record a ballad now and again – well, every mainstream heavy metal band, as I don’t recall Cannibal Corpse ever recording something slow and smoochy to keep the ‘lay-deez’ sweet – but there is something about your average Guns N’ Roses ballad that sets my teeth on edge. Probably it’s Axl’s voice, a melodramatic beast at the best of times. When it’s emoting through the likes of Don’t Cry from the 1991 album Use Your Illusion I, for which tonight Axl donned a show-bizzy silver-lame jacket, I find it hard going indeed.

But my least favourite Guns N’ Roses ballad is the afore-mentioned November Rain, also from Use Your Illusion I, which seems to drone on forever. Two hours into the set, the song hadn’t been played, and I began to entertain hopes that I’d get through the evening without hearing it. Maybe the band would forget to play it? But no. Axl sat down at a piano and began tinkling its ivories and the bloody thing started. At this point, a large percentage of the crowd, who thought November Rain was the best thing ever, sprang to their feet and started waving their lighters, or phone-lights, en masse in the air above their heads. This made me feel like I’d suddenly been teleported into a Bryan Adams concert just as Bryan was starting to sing Everything I Do, I Do It for You (1991). At least, for this rendition of November Rain, Slash didn’t attempt to play his guitar on top of Axl’s piano, as he’d done in the song’s video.

But enough of the negatives. What of the positives? Well, there were plenty. Lots of spiffing tunes off Appetite for Destruction for a start: Welcome to the Jungle, Nightrain, Rocket Queen, etc. Though for some reason not Mr Brownstone, which, the show’s official statistics tell me, makes this the band’s first gig since 1993 that they haven’t played the song.

I was also pleased that they treated the crowd to their bombastic cover versions of Wings’ James Bond theme Live and Let Die (1974) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973). Yes, they throw all subtlety and nuance out of the window and, basically, murder both songs – but they murder them gloriously. For Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Axl put on a cowboy hat, which made me wonder if he was acknowledging the fact that Dylan originally wrote the song for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s masterly western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973).

Splendid too were their covers of the Who’s The Seeker (1970) and the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog (1969). The latter was sung by Duff McKagan with the instrumentation stripped back and it made for an impressively intense couple of minutes. Commendably, McKagan wore a Motörhead T-shirt for part of the show. Also, by coincidence, I’d just finished reading Sing Backwards and Weep (2020), the autobiography of the late, great grunge singer Mark Lanegan, in which Lanegan credits McKagan with helping to rescue him from homelessness and drug addiction in the late 1990s. An all-round top bloke, then.

And I was very happy that, for the third song of their set, they performed Slither (2004) by the underrated Velvet Revolver, the group Slash, McKagan and Matt Sorum formed with Scott Weiland of the Stone Temple Pilots during their estrangement from Guns N’ Roses.

Even with 27 songs played, it was inevitable that they missed out a few things I’d have loved to hear. They performed nothing off their album of punk and hard-rock covers, The Spaghetti Incident? (1993), which nobody in the world seemed to like apart from myself. Their boisterous version of the UK Subs’ Down on the Farm (1982), which Axl sings in a hilarious ‘Mockney’ accent, would have slotted in nicely tonight.

And I’d have welcomed a rendition of the sweary, vitriolic and exhilarating Get in the Ring, off their other 1991 album, the imaginatively titled Use Your Illusion II. Get in the Ring is basically a rock ‘n’ roll update of the Scottish poetic tradition of flyting. It contains such lyrics as “I got a thought that would be nice / I’d like to crush your head tight in my vice,” and takes aim at all the “punks in the press” who “want to start shit by printing lies instead of the things we said… Andy Secher at Hit Parader, Circus Magazine, Mick Wall at Kerrang!, Bob Guccione Jr at Spin…” If they updated that shit-list for 2022, which modern-day journalists would be on it, I wonder?

Oh well. You can’t have everything, I suppose.

As the band took the stage at 7.30 that evening, and as everyone around me went wild, it occurred to me that this was the first time in almost two years I’d been at a concert. After all the restrictions imposed by that cursed bloody virus, it felt marvellous to experience live music again. Yes, I had a massive, uplifting sense of joy and relief… Just because I was seeing Axl Rose and the crew amble into view on two giant stadium screens. Not something I ever expected to happen, but it did. Thanks, guys!

July 26, 2022

The brothers grim

From efe.com

The second half of my tuppence-worth about the current, dire situation in Sri Lanka and the shower responsible for it.

The feel-good factor generated in 2015 by the election to the Sri Lankan presidency of Maithripala Sirisena, and the expulsion from that presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, didn’t last for long. As I mentioned in my previous post, inflation got worse under Sirisena, and he soon faced criticisms that in Sri Lankan politics sounded depressingly familiar – about nepotism, corruption and bullying the media. He even managed to make the world’s headlines, and make a dick of himself, regarding Enrique Iglesias of all people. The Latin heartthrob held a concert in Colombo and some excited local ladies threw their knickers at him and ran onstage to kiss him. Such women were ‘highly uncivilised,’ declared the unimpressed president, and he called for the concert’s organisers to be ‘beaten with toxic stingray tails.’

My Sri Lankan colleagues were soon grumbling to me that the new president was as bad as the old one and that the country’s politicians, whatever their supposed political hue, were “all the same.” Their cynicism was spectacularly validated in 2018 when Sirisena tried to remove his Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe. A constitutional crisis erupted because Wickremesinghe refused to leave office. And who did Sirisena want to replace Wickremesinghe with as PM? Why, Mahinda Rajapaksa, the man whom he’d ousted in 2015.

Sirisena’s attempt to usurp Wickremesinghe failed, but the resulting governmental dysfunction surely contributed to intelligence failures that enabled the Easter Bombings in Sri Lanka the following year. Indian Intelligence had warned that the National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ) were going to carry out a terrorist attack, but no action was taken. 269 men, women and children died as a result. Sirisena’s government later had to apologise for its ineptitude. This was surely the last nail in its coffin – and the beginning of the return of the old dynasty. I remember looking at Twitter on the day of the bombings, just before social media was suspended in an effort to stop the spread of misinformation, and seeing calls for the reinstatement of ‘Iron-man Rajapaksa’ to clean up the mess.

Thus, the election later that year, 2019, was a foregone conclusion. Not that we were spared the usual dodgy campaigning. I was running another training course, this time in the northern, predominantly Tamil city of Jaffna, when the Rajapaksa roadshow rolled into town and a rally was held beside the training building. Sri Lankan politicians like their rallies, although often there’s not much correspondence between the people attending the rally and the location where the rally takes place. Accordingly, I doubt if you’d find many Rajapaksa supporters living in Jaffna, but a great crowd of people still turned up, which possibly had something to do with the dozens of buses parked along the sides of the neighbourhood’s streets. Soon, amplified voices were blasting through the walls of the training building, speechifying in praise of the House of Rajapaksa. I remember the face of one of my trainees, a Tamil Catholic priest, contorting in disgust and rage at them. (Priests had not been spared during the end-of-war massacres in northern Sri Lanka.)

From twitter.com

However, this time, it wasn’t Mahinda Rajapaksa who bagged the presidency. Getting the job instead was his brother Gotabaya, former Secretary of the Ministry of Defence and former Lieutenant Colonel in the Sri Lankan army, less flamboyant than Mahinda but no less mired in allegations of human rights abuses, media intimidation and corruption. Mahinda settled for the post of Prime Minister. Let’s not say those Rajapaksa boys are undemocratic. Meanwhile, youngest brother Basil got the post of Minister of Finance and oldest brother Chamal got the unwieldy-sounding portfolio of ‘Minister of Internal Trade, Food Security and Consumer Welfare, Mahaweli, Agriculture, Irrigation and Rural Development’. In addition, there was now a brood of younger Rajapaksas to accommodate. Chamal’s son Shasheendra became Advanced Agriculture Minister in 2021. Mahinda’s sons Yoshitha and Namal became, respectively, PM’s Chief of Staff and Sports Minister in 2020.

A word about Namal Rajapaksa, until recently seen as the family’s heir apparent, as the man who’d take the reins and ensure that Sri Lanka remained a loyal Rajapaksa fiefdom well into the 21^st century. Appropriately for a Sports Minister, he has some sporting achievements on his CV. He’d been a keen rugby player, or as local sports journalists would term it, ‘a keen ruggerite’. (I love Sri Lankan English, but I wish the word ‘ruggerite’ would be expunged from the language.) He captained the national Sri Lankan rugby team from 2013 to 2014, an honour I’m sure he got on account of his playing ability and not who his dad was. In a portent of what his family would do to the country, his captaincy saw the team get demolished 132-10 by Japan. A less funny and far darker rugby connection was, to quote his Wikipedia entry, the allegation of his ‘involvement in (the) murder and torture of Wasim Thajudeen’. Thajudeen was a fellow rugby player whom he had a feud with.

In March this year, when Sri Lanka’s economy had dropped through the floor and the population was panicking about finding fuel and paying for food, Namal lit up the country’s social media with images of himself living it up and enjoying luxury water-sports facilities in the Maldives. It doesn’t surprise me that a friend who got introduced to him at a reception described him as one the most insufferably entitled people he’d ever met.

Thus, the 2019 election resulted in the government being infested with more Rajapaksas than ever.. The great Rajapaksa kleptocracy was back on track. To keep everyone happy, President Gotabaya – ‘Gota’ – initiated sweeping tax cuts, a move that with hindsight was a wee bit unwise.

So, what could go wrong? Well, as we’ve just seen, everything.

Shortly after my departure from Sri Lanka, things got really bad. There were massive, daily power cuts. Photographs and film clips of seemingly endless lines of vehicles, queuing for hours or even days in the heat – heat in which, tragically, several people died – outside depleted petrol stations became familiar images on the world’s media. Meanwhile, protests against the Rajapaksas gathered a head of steam. The protestors, whose slogans included ‘Gota’s gotta go’, must have included many people who’d voted for the clan in 2019. Given the damage inflicted by the fertiliser fiasco, I can’t imagine even the rural, conservative, Sinhalese heartlands feeling any love for them now.

Basil Rajapaksa resigned as Minister of Finance on April 8^th. Chamal Rajapaksa, now just ‘Minister of Irrigation’, quit five days earlier. Mahinda clung on to the post of PM until May 9^th. Then, in an effort to escape resignation, he used the familiar ploy of bussing in supporters to stage a show of strength. This backfired, to say the least. He brought a mob of goons, stooges and thugs to the Prime Minister’s Residence of Temple Trees on Galle Road. The mob assured him that everyone still loved him and didn’t want him to resign. No doubt they got boozed up on free arrack as well. Then they spilled out onto the street, proceeded to Galle Face Green and attacked the anti-government protestors who’d been camped there peacefully for weeks. When the general populace saw what was happening on TV and social media, they reacted in fury and took to the streets themselves. (A timeline of the shenanigans on May 9^th is provided here by the excellent factchecking and investigatory group Watchdog, whose founders include the Sri Lankan data scientist and science fiction writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne.)

It was lucky that the country didn’t tip over into violence and anarchy then. Afterwards, Mahinda Rajapaksa had no choice but to resign. One consequence of the unrest provoked by his stunt was that the Rajapaksa Museum down in Hambantota, built with state funds and using the manpower of the Sri Lankan Navy, got trashed. Talk about karma.

After that, it was just President Gota who, politically speaking, was the last Rajapaksa standing. He didn’t depart until after a deluge of protestors invaded the presidential residence in Colombo’s Fort area on July 9^th which led to another glut of images on social media, this time of protestors enjoying the cool waters of the presidential swimming pool, lying on the presidential four-poster bed, watching news coverage of their own demonstration on the presidential TV, and so on. Allegedly, the protestors also discovered bags containing 17.8 million rupees. Even by presidential standards, that’s a lot of loose change to keep lying around the house. Gotabaya didn’t agree to resign until a few days later – after he’d got out of the country. His efforts, and his brother Basil’s efforts, to flee had a tragi-comic quality. Attempts to leave Sri Lanka using commercial flights were thwarted by immigration officials refusing to process their papers and by fears that their fellow passengers would beat them up.

However, Gotabaya has definitely left now. He flew in a military aircraft to the Maldives and from there travelled to Singapore. Yes, at the moment, he’s in the country that I’m in. Indeed, if the rumours are true about him being holed up in hotel in the Singaporean neighbourhood of Orchard, he might only be a stone’s throw away from my workplace. The Singaporean authorities are adamant that he won’t be getting asylum. While he’s here, I’m sure they won’t be taking any advice from him on how to run their economy either.

While it’s gratifying to see the Rajapaksas scuttle off like this, disgraced and despised, every Sri Lankan I’ve spoken to has insisted that they should stay in the country. They should be put on trial for their many crimes, have their corrupt ways exposed and, most importantly, be stripped of all the money they’ve looted from Sri Lanka during the past two decades. That money should be returned to the country in its greatest hour of need.

What happens next? I’m afraid I’m not optimistic. The Sri Lankan economy is now a disaster, and where there’s disaster, disaster capitalism is never far away. I can see the country being at the mercy of the IMF and having to re-structure its economy in the extreme, impoverishing, free market-worshipping manner described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine (2005). From past experience, that means the sale of public assets, with the result that the majority of people get poorer and an already-rich minority, able to take advantage of the new, rapacious economic climate, become even richer.

Meanwhile, the old Sri Lankan practice of confining politics to a small, wealthy, well-connected elite – which, come to think of it, they may have inherited from the British – shows no sign of going away. The ubiquitous Ranil Wickremesinghe, who’s served as Prime Minster six times (yes, six!) in the past, has now installed himself in the presidency, has denounced the anti-government protestors as ‘fascists’, and has sent in police and security forces to violently clear the protestors from their encampment in Galle Face. All this from a man who on May 9^th condemned the attack by Mahinda Rajapaksa’s minions on the same protestors.

From twitter.com

It’s not the removal of a few, corrupt old faces that Sri Lanka needs. it’s an overhaul of the whole, entitled, business-as-usual political system. But I wonder how much chance there is of that happening.

As the Who sang, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss…” But let’s hope Sri Lanka won’t get fooled again.