Tania interview on the Richie Allen Radio Show 01.06.2021 also live show from late 2020 at comedy unleashed

"Director, Paul Tickell, relives the trials and tribulations of getting the definative Punk film made, Arena: Punk and the Pistols. Featuring, eventually, interviews from all the key players who form the Origin of the Species. Twenty years on it’s strange to read some of this correspondence with its pleading wheedling tone. But along with unrelenting doggedness that’s what it took to obtain interviews from the major actors in the international drama of punk rock. Originating out of the suburbs of London and a tiny shop on the King’s Rd, it went around the world - several times. With a Pussy Riot here and a fashion show there, the phenomenon is still being acted out and its legacy fought over. Over two decades ago BBC Arena entered the fray by taking its inspiration from what is still the best and most comprehensive book about punk, Jon Savage’s ENGLAND’S DREAMING. Part of its argument was that first and foremost there were the Sex Pistols and then came the rest – bands who, however great their attributes, were mere camp followers in the whole mad, bad and dangerous punk parade. ‘God save the Sex Pistols’, as the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs intoned after singer Johnny Rotten had split for Jamaica and the band hit the buffers, the reverberations adding to the Pistols’ mythology. The Arena documentary would have been nothing without the participation of the Sex Pistols and their manager Malcolm McLaren and his partner in fashion-crime Vivienne Westwood. But it was hard getting the different parties to agree to be in the same film after they’d fought each other in court like cats and dogs - like warring gods if you consider the psychic battle conducted in the minds of McLaren and the now former Rotten, John Lydon. Riding the storm of these dark energies was the main reason that the film took four years to make. Research and shooting began in summer 1991 but transmission was not until late summer 1995. Originally the Arena had been an independent commission, Wall to Wall for the BBC, but it had to be brought in-house. Independents like Wall to Wall are not structured to deal with the vagaries and whims of feuding punks and their managers, whereas the BBC at that point in time could accommodate a stop-go production policy. Over those four years I would be employed for a few weeks here, a couple of months there – mainly in the cutting-room but also finally filming John Lydon in LA. I think that he rather enjoyed our courtship. We met several times before he agreed to his interview – most uproariously when he put away 18 bottles of super-strength Duvel lager in Fred’s in Soho. I kept pace - just. On another occasion it was about a few streets away in the Moscow. My last memory before the Great Blurring was of an intense discussion in the gents between myself, Lydon and a waiter. About what I do not know. I left them to it. Like the cajoling fax and letter correspondence and like all the telephone calls in those pre-computer days, the drinking had to be done: by any means necessary to get the prize – an interview with Lydon for a film for which he knew McLaren the enemy would be in too. It was all worth it. The other feature length documentaries about punk are one-sided: THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE is very much from McLaren’s point of view, THE FILTH AND THE FURY Lydon’s. PUNK AND THE PISTOLS has its own axes to grind – like deriding the Clash’s faux macho stance - but it does show the differing sides to the Sex Pistols story and leaves it to the audience to decide. The film has had an afterlife at film festivals in its uncensored form. At the instigation of Michael Jackson, Controller of BBC2 who four years previously as Head of Music and Arts had actually commissioned the film , cuts were made just before transmission. One of these related to the very first Sex Pistols t-shirt: a naked boy smoking. By the 1990s this image – never prosecuted in the 1970s like some of the other Sex and Seditionaries t-shirts - was regarded as paedophilia, important piece of documentation or not. Although the film has never been repeated, gobbets of it are routinely served up in other documentaries about punk. It’s annoying that some of these use extracts to promote the very mythologies which the film explodes. Appropriately outlaw as it sounds on his CV, McLaren never ever managed the New York Dolls but that didn’t stop his TV obituarists from repeating the myth while cannibalising those parts of the film which say the opposite. The Arena used a lot of archive which, familiar now, had never been seen before, such as the Pistols at the lesser Trade Hall in Manchester. Tracking down and clarifying ownership of this footage was almost as arduous as nailing Lydon. Individual Buzzcocks plus their management past and present had to be consulted and their signatures secured along with that of a long-lost cameraman in Australia"...... https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/1kW4srYb5ngmL4L1l4TrgHf/punk-and-the-pistol

Performing on The Old Grey Whistle Test 5th of February 1980 Voice:John Lydon Guitar/Synth:Julian Keith Levene Bass: Jah Wobble Drums: Martin Atkins

Freedom Convoy Demonised – CIA-colour revolutions celebrated Gavin O’Reilly since the 22nd of January, despite receiving no mainstream media coverage whatsoever, thousands of Canadian truck drivers and their supporters embarked on a Freedom Convoy throughout the world’s second-largest country. A mass-protest in response to the Canadian government’s decision to widen their already authoritarian Covid measures by mandating that truck drivers re-entering Canada from the United States, the world’s largest land-border and a vital component of the Canadian economy, have to be fully vaccinated – vaccine passports being a key step towards the Digital ID system as envisaged by Klaus Schwab’s concept of the fourth industrial revolution, with the World Economic Forum chairman previously highlighting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as one of the group’s ‘young global leaders’ during a 2017 conference. With the Freedom Convoy converging on the Canadian capital Ottawa on Saturday however, the week-long media silence on the protest disappeared only to be quickly replaced by widespread mainstream media condemnation, with the use of likely agent provocateurs leading to the protest being widely lambasted, in lockstep, as ‘far-right’ and ‘fascist’ by corporate-owned outlets. The irony of the Convoy being against the very fascist concept of the fusion of state and corporate power via the use of vaccine mandates being lost it would seem. This condemnation by the mainstream media of a genuine working-class protest against public officials working on behalf of corporate interests however, lies in stark contrast to their recent response to CIA-engineered regime change operations, masquerading as ‘human rights protests’ and which involved the use of genuine extremists, receiving the full support of the corporate media whilst doing so. Less than three weeks prior to the Freedom Convoy setting off on its initial journey, protests against rising fuel prices in Kazakhstan rapidly escalated into extreme violence, resulting in the deaths of 18 Kazakh security services members in the space of four days, including two who were decapitated. This lead to the Moscow-led CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organisation) being deployed into the central Asian nation at the request of Nur-Sultan in order to quell what was a clear attempt at a colour revolution in line with a May 2020 policy document published by Neoconservative think tank, the RAND Corporation – which outlined regime-change in Kazakhstan as a means to destabilise neighbouring Russia in turn. This attempt at regime change in Kazakhstan, countered by the CSTO in less than two weeks and who subsequently withdrew from Kazakhstan afterwards, came amidst a time of increased tensions between Russia and the West, with Moscow being accused of planning an ‘imminent’ invasion of neighbouring Ukraine since the end of November. Kiev itself was subjected to the 2014 Euromaidan colour revolution, launched by the CIA and MI6 in response to then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s November 2013 decision to suspend an EU trade deal in favour of pursuing closer ties with the Kremlin, and like the colour revolution attempt in Kazakhstan, also involved the use of extremist elements such as the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, who would go on to wage war on the pro-Russian breakaway Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the East of the Country. Six years later, in August 2020, this regime-change script would again play out again in Russia’s sole European ally, Belarus. Following the re-election of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, an attempt to topple his government (later confirmed as such in a recorded Zoom meeting by US NGO the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)) was launched by the West. Minsk being a long-time target for the regime-change lobby owing to its close proximity to Russia, its nationalised state industries, and possibly the most pertinent factor, Lukashenko’s refusal to impose the same Covid measures on his country that have been put in place worldwide to help implement the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset initiative. Despite the ensuing violence caused by these three regime-change operations however, they all received widespread coverage and support by the Western mainstream media, each being portrayed as human rights protests standing up to repressive regimes – a stark contrast to their coverage of the Canadian Freedom Convoy’s protest against the corporate class holding even greater sway over public life worldwide. * from offguardian