“If this were a dictatorship it’d be a heck of a lot easier.
Just so long as I’m the dictator…”

Choose Tory, choose Liberal, choose Labour!
Choose you own fuckin’ jailor!
Democracy… you’re havin’ a laugh, innit?
They’re only in it to win it.
Can’t take another failure to acknowledge
What everybody already knows:
That’s the way it goes.
Everybody knows, that’s the way it goes….

Government by consent they tell me,
Well I don’t give mine.
Government by the mediocre pack, the grey,
the dead-from-the-neck-up party hacks.
Public schoolboys kissing arse.
Democracy, I wouldn’t wipe your arse with it.

Democracy…. Mediocracy…. A lawyer’s trick.
Every four years they choose their moment and offer you a little bite.
Then you get sentenced to Democracy of the Westminster kind.
No, not government by the tabloids or self-obsessed tv, Democracy!

Devoid of the honesty to admit that public opinion is the shit,
the lies they print between the tits and panty shots
and the lying banners of the red-rag tops. Democracy!

The first to go is freedom of speech.
I’m told I can’t complain or criticise
because I have defamed the memory of those who died.
Apparently granddad did his bit for this so-called Democrashit.

Yeah, right!

All those drafted Johnnies who didn’t go Over The Top
were consequently lined up and shot by their own side.
That’s how much your country loved your Dad,
I’ll not kiss your fucking flag!
Democracy, I wouldn’t wipe your arse with it.

And always you’re told to keep a hold of nurse
for fear of finding something worse.

Democracy, the so-called least-worse option.
An adman’s nightmare, can you imagine the pitch?
“The least-worse margarine”, man that’s a bitch!

Is that really the best we can ever get?
Accept what they call the best we’ve got?

And never try to better it except, of course,
through the gradualism of lying manifestos.
Small wonder that my cynicism grows
until I long for the day when nobody shows up for this sham anymore.

Choose Tory, choose Liberal, choose Labour!
Choose you own fuckin’ jailor!
Democracy… you’re havin’ a laugh, innit?
They’re only in it to win it.

So tick a box, or phone a friend, vote by mail
and indulge in the smug pretence that somehow it just might arrive.

Democracy, I wouldn’t wipe your arse with it.

There is an imbalance of opportunity inherent in cash, the rich have access to more of the world than the poor. Many people are obsessed with money, the ‘creation’ and acquisition of wealth in-and-of itself. This is, of course, an illusion – the actual value of money is a flexible agreement within a society mediated by the shifting tides of the economy. When that agreement of trust is compromised the ramifications can be substantial. Witness the recent crash in world markets, leaving this country, and many more, with unimaginably large debts, created in our name to prop up ‘the banking system’.

I started a campaign of subtly defacing currency about two years ago. Using a custom ink-stamp and UV ink, I have been tagging all the money that passes through my hands. To date, that’s now well into the thousands of pounds. The stamp itself is invisible, until illuminated under a blacklight – commonly used in this country to check for counterfeit notes.

This work is really about how we use these pieces of paper as markers of our passage through time. We spend to live, and live to spend. Each note we hand over gets us a little closer to death…

Here is the latest, House Husband.

UPDATE YouTube objected to me using Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Star Spangled Banner’, and muted my video. The version you see above now features a shardcore original also called Burning Bush [click to download mp3]

I made several Bushfingers between 2005 and 2006, and of course the infamous ‘paint your own bushfinger’ video.

I also made a video for it, because, well, why not?

Download MP3

to tide you over, a lighthearted video remix of marilyn manson.

business as (un)usual shall be resumed shortly.