He gave a rousing sermon livelinked with our friends in New York City.

We went off to an independent coffee place called Get Coffee on Fleet Street [run by a former Starbucks employee] and recorded an interview which has since been lost to the ether of technology…. He agreed to do it again via telephone when he got back to Brooklyn. And this is our conversation for my show, The Left Bank Show, on Resonance FM 104.4.

Left Bank Show 18.11.2011 [Reverend Billy] by Resonance FM

Twenty-year-old Anastasiya Vinnikova sings the praises of her homeland with a Stalinist disco swagger. The audience nods with sycophantic gusto.

“You’re my passion, do it old-fashioned / When I was wearing a star, back in the USSR / Belorussia! Crazy and so fine….” Et cetera.

There’s a brilliant bit at the end where an all-male chorus chest-thumps in with the chutzpah of a military parade. You’d think Belarus was an isolationist throwback of a country that holds wistful memories of gulags and forced imprisonment. Oh. Wait….

As our friends at an otter-obsessed popular culture mailout have written: “how they are going to perform that bit with just a maximum of five backing people allowed on stage, we haven’t quite worked out. Then again, the Belarussian government enjoys locking up artists so much that there might only be this many English-speaking performers left in Minsk.”

Belarus is the last dictatorship in Europe. It ranks below Iran for press freedom and below Zimbabwe on human rights. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe called last December’s elections “seriously flawed”. On 19 December in Independence Square in Minsk, over 600 people were arrested in a post-election opposition rally. Over 30 prisoners are still kept in custody, denied access to legal representation and face up to 15 years in prison for “orchestrating mass disorder”.

So. Here are the lyrics to Belarus’s Eurovision Song Contest entry for 2011. Under the EBU rules, the winning country hosts the Song Contest the following year. Should Belarus win, all of Europe could be flocking to Minsk with “dangerous ideas”.

[For more information on Europe's last dictatorship, visit http://zoneofsilence.org/]

Belorussia!
Bay-bay-bay-baby [x3]

Baby I want you to know,
Soon we’ll be starting the show
Back in the history we’ll go.
Belorussia!

When I was wearing a star,
Back in the USSR,
I was as good as mama
Feel my passion.
CHORUS

Round and round we go
Born in
Belorussia!
USSR time!
Belorussia!
Crazy and so fine
Time is rushing
Everything’s crashing,
passing by.
Born in
Belorussia!

Belorussia!
USSR time!
Belorussia!
Got you on my mind!
You’re my passion, do it old-fashioned.
You and I!

Diamonds and treats of the West
Come check it out, be my guest.
You’re still remaining the best
Belorussia.

When everything will be gone,
Your name will shine like the sun.
You’re still remaining the one,
Good old-fashioned.

CHORUS

The Gluts are Gina Birch, Kaffe Matthews and Hayley Newman. Gina’s a founding member of The Raincoats, I once lay in Kaffe’s sonic bed in Aarhus, and Hayley’s a polymath live artist. They call their style “eco-electro. George Monbiot meets Lady Gaga and her twin sisters.” Whether I’ll be treated to a neosocialist knees-up or a trio of women screeching their way through their forties remains to be seen. But as a fan of pre-grrl rock punkstress tunes of the The Raincoats and having once dabbled in sound art, I’m erring on the positive.

Also on the bill are: John Jordan’s Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, The People Speak (and their Planetary Pledge Pyramid), Question Time, photographer and great Dane Kristian Buus and filmmaker Emily James. Hosted by Mikey Weinkove, people will get to take home a live-press zine, designed and printed on the spot by The Ladies of the Press.

Of course, I did not attend the demonstrations in Copenhagen. And my cynicism behind environmental pressure groups remains the same, if not reinforced by my recent trip to Haiti. This doesn’t preclude me from engaging with the issues – it just means I’ll most likely be found at the back with my arms crossed mocking the I Only Fly To India brigade. Like the middle-class art-school wanker I am.

as featured on Queen’s Absolute Greatest album

With stages like “Le Petit Maison dans la Prairie” and notice boards in French, Flemish and English, you’re a long way from Glastonbury.

Punters, bands, staff and food vendors deftly skip from one tongue to another.

Just the sort of thing to make you feel like an inadequate, monolingual English oaf.

It’s the 20th Dour Festival.

The what festival? Dour.

Four days, 85 euros, and over 200 bands on six stages.

A rainy field in Belgium where tens of thousands of young men gave their lives in the First World War.

Now 36,000 young ‘uns stomping along to the likes of Goldfrapp, Wu Tang Clan, Foals and The Notwist… and a few others you may or may not have heard of.

Dour is proud of setting more established acts alongside more ‘discoverable’ bands across many genres.

The site boasts a large NGO village that boasts everyone from Oxfam to anti-capitalist groups that still believe the revolution is coming in our lifetime.

Organisers stress that it isn’t just lip service but offers a “social dimension to having a great time watching your favourite bands”.

To this end fryingpanfire hooked up with one of the UK’s more progressive acts, Foals, to ask what these Oxford boys thought of the big wide world beyond the stage.

Affable young men. University dropouts (bar one).

Musical influences from Talking Heads to Steve Reich.

Haircuts to drive geometry teachers wild.

“We’re not overtly political but we’re products of politics,” begins the Oxford University educated frontman Yannis Philippakis.

“If you make music it’s always something political even if you make vapid glossy pop music, because that proliferates materialistic culture.”

Guitarist Jimmy Smith goes further.

“In America the news media lacks any real dialogue. It’s too isolated and a bit self-obsessed.”

“In the UK you get a broad spectrum of media from left to right, and you can consume it as you please. Online, newspapers, television.”

“There’s an objectivity and a sense of the wider world that you don’t really get anywhere else. And with the internet you can bypass all the jargon and choose the news you want.”

“We try to read as many newspapers as possible.”

“(US Presidential Candidate) Barack Obama is great. He will change the world,” continues Yannis.

“If he doesn’t win it’ll be a catastrophe.”

“What it would mean for America to have a black president will be amazing.”

“Blair changed nothing but the Labour Party. He shifted it centre right and took all the socialism out of it.”

A band with interests beyond groupies and hard drugs?

“Oh, they’re nice too. But what matters to us are our friends who don’t care what we do for a living.”

“And the music.”

“”We’ll be making music in some capacity for the rest of our lives. It’s what we were made to do.”

Tomorrow, we’ll be speaking to Dreadzone… remember them?

===

This article was originally published on Sky News Online on 18 July 2008. All rights reserved.