I have to drag myself away from dontstayin.com too many times to mention, my concentration span being one of a goldfish that’s just moved to Amsterdam with a severe addiction to Haze number one. I force a couple of cold cans of coke down my face and assure myself I’ll replace them before my housemate gets back. Sitting down to write I realise I have a choice between being conservative, or expressive. I think you can tell which one I went for.

Alas, however, my digression! On with the words, jacK!

Internet poker pays the bills, although I get to suck out more times than a French whore with false teeth. The money is so inconsistent it’s not really a career and I wonder at times where my next bottle of absinthe will be coming from. These are the plights of life I have to deal with, such is my curse. The more lucrative tournaments seem to run late into the night and this means a 7.30 bedtime is often applicable. 7.30 in the AM of course.

All these late nights leave me drained and fuzzy the following day. It‘s sometimes almost as bad as having a real job. Today was such a day. I’m walking down the road wondering if I’ve got what it takes and my phone vibrates in my pocket. I let it ring for a few moments as I’ve not had sex for quite some time now and this brings a faint smile to my face.

Let me insert a nice parenthisis here, as the editor said to his secretary. Just to pad out the article and all, of course; naturally I still get hounded by recruitment agencies that somehow believe that I’m a sellable quantity. It’s true. As you can see by my recent articles I do very well at interview. It’s just holding onto the damn job that seems to give me a problem. Apparently they expect me to turn up on time and shit. I don’t really know how the rest of the world manages. I’m usually pretty short on the phone, it’s not because I dislike telephone sales people - au contraire, I’ve done a lot of it myself. I just don’t think people should waste their valuable time trying to sell someone like me.

My mind is a castle, impenetrable. I am safe there from all marketing attacks. As long as I have my Stella, Nike trainers, Marks and Spencer ready meals, coca-cola and X-box 360 (complete with Grand Theft Auto available for £29.99 from this website here) no advertising can ever penetrate my mind.

So back to the frottage of the vibrating mobile. I manage to disengage from my automatic lover and answer the phone. It’s Huck, a recruitment agent from London who’s found out I’ve got experience in selling IP and networks. He asks me the usual opening questions trying to qualify me into a sales box. There’s something though I like about this guy, I’m far more seduced by the sound of his voice and his soft cell technique than anything he’s saying. I don’t know why (perhaps I’m just lonely) but I explain I can’t take a job in London, and just like when I’m on the phone to the Samaritans, I begin to recite the story of what I’m up to right now. I tell Huck about my articles and work on dontstayin.com and to my surprise he says “I’ve got someone you should interview” - he begins to tell me about his friend Bobby Friction.

So, you great uneducated lot, who is this Bobby Friction, I hear you ask? Bobby (not his real name) is a DJ for both the BBC’s Asian network and Radio One. He’s won the Sony Gold Award for Broadcasting and is part of an infamous duo alongside Nihal. He’s not just a pretty face behind the decks however, with a background in journalism and performing arts he’s been taking his proactive ideas to the streets.

Sitting down and just accepting things is not his forte, as he’s created a couple of documentaries that deal with the brutal topic of racism in this country for Asian communities. Unafraid and armed with the sword of common sense he’s even used film to stand up to the BNP. You simply need to scratch the surface of what this guy’s about to understand he’s very different to most people on any scene.

So I do my usual thing of convincing people to take part in the interview, and the date we set for the interview comes round quicker than it takes a peperami to dissolve in quicklime. We go through the usual debacle and heart wrenching disappointment that only National Express rail services and raking up child abuse cases can bring. I’ve booked photographer Marc-de-Groot for the day and he’s meeting me in The Heavenly Social just off Oxford Street - we meet and find out that Bobby’s running a bit late so I down a beer and we head off to meet the man in Euston station.

Finally after an afternoon of juggling times and getting together we meet. Bobby’s a larger than life character in an orange t-shirt with a couple of bags on wheels ala your grandmother. We shake hands and its smiles from the offset. I ask him what he’s been up to and he explains that he’s been sorting out his mum and dad’s travel insurance like a good Sikh boy; we laugh and de Groot lays on the charm.

We nip out of Euston and get to a pub. The general verdict as we’re pushed for time is “this’ll do” and we find a bench to sit on. I offer to get the beers in as ever and Bobby elects for the summertime classic of a “Stella Top” (yes they really are paying me to viral it up in this article) and I go for a watery Budweiser as I believe it will increase my chances with women. We sit down and begin.

Just to start with, how did you get into DJing, first of all?

It wasn’t like I wanna be a DJ. I studied political art at university, and I was a very angry young man. It was like there’s nothing cool for young British Asians. We’re more interesting, aren’t we? It was the early nineties. I wanted to record and document our people in this country. I did all this stuff like Ghandi with a machine gun on a Union Jack, women with their breasts out, with machine guns breaking out of a Mosque. I always seemed to be obsessed with people with machine guns back then.

"Music is life and love,
and is the only unique thing that
God has given us"

Then I came back to London and saw Talvin Singh. I went to my first gig and thought this is where everyone like me is going. It was like you lot have been Mods, you’ve been Skinheads; this is something akin. Its so British, its about fashion, art and music. I jumped massively into it, in a really bad way. I was like the Face from Quadrophenia, the cool guy who visually represents the scene.

Just going back to something you said before, you said you were an angry young man. Can you tell us what you were so angry about?

Racism, British Asians in Britain at the time. I just felt there’s nothing for ‘us’. I’m a cool young dude, I’m into great music, in fact I’ve got something more than everyone else who thinks they’re cool because I like classic Indian music, I’ve got the whole canvass of Bollywood. I felt like why can’t I make Pop art? Why can’t I talk ironically about that? And also, what about racism? What’s going on?

So was it like you didn’t have a mouthpiece for your views? It seems to me that you’re saying you had all this stuff to say but there was nobody listening?

It felt like nobody’s listening, because Asians aren’t allowed to be cool! They’re not allowed to make Pop art. I’d literally go to clubs in London (and I was very cool, very arty and I had a lot to say) and I’d feel there was this white middle class cool establishment, stroke music, stroke just cool people who just said “you’re one of those, aren’t you? You’re one of those Asians, oh, that‘s nice, isn‘t it?” I remember my feeling at the time wasn’t “you white bastards getting at us every day”; it was much more focussed on the middle classes and the bourgeois.

You know what’s funny when you say that to me, I’m white and I felt exactly the same way. Not that I’m complaining but, I never had the backdrop of a distinct racial identity to fall back on. I just raged endlessly against that machine.

Obviously when you do get older you put a lot of that rage down to hormones. You can put all that rage down to being a kid, but at the time it’s the most important thing to you in the world. At the time it’s almost nuclear in its power within you. You just think “Ahhhhh!” So straight up, I wanted a voice. So going back to what I said before, I was like the Face from Quadrophenia. Then I realised the Face in Quadrophenia does nothing, he ends up doing fuck all, he means nothing.

Yeah, he ends up with Jimmy nicking his bike and throwing it off a cliff…

This is one of my favourite questions and I ask it over and over again, but it’s because I feel its so relevant. Where do you think the spirit of dissent in music and in particular youth culture has gone? Why has everybody gone from being so interested in youthful rebellion to being so interested in lining their pockets. Everyone wants to be a superstar, everyone wants to be an X-Factor winner…

Well, you’ve just said it. You’ve mentioned X-Factor, you’ve mentioned people wanting to be a superstar. That’s because youthful rebellion, or rather all the things that demarcated youth have been bought within the capitalist system. Rebellion itself is now a great commodity that does nothing more than sell trainers. It even sells teen soaps on the Disney channel! That whole idea of youthful rebellion that we thought would last forever (which is bollocks) actually only started in the 1950’s. The idea of the teenager, and the idea of teenagers owning the idea of the teenager, that’s all gone because capitalism bought into it, and now it owns it.

You need money to operate in this society. You actually need to totally suck the man’s cock to even get your music heard; during the late 60s and early 70s you could get your music out there without touching the man’s bum. It’s impossible now. The man is everywhere. The man works for the BBC, there’s people there younger than me being more the man than I ever have been. So yes, the man has bought the man himself.

Do we therefore need “the man” in society?

Yes, we do need the man in society. But what do you actually mean…

I mean the big man with the big stick who not only looks after us all but also ensures we all stay in his line too…

We need the idea of the man. I also think, if you want to talk on a scientific level, the whole structure of society’s little modules has changed. What I mean by this is that on a little island it was easy to say “we’re the working classes, we’re the middle classes", and so on, now everything’s global and the whole of the west is the man, we can’t escape it. The man now is actually America, England, the west… iPods, iPhones, the rest… All the man. The only people who aren’t the man are horrible bastards who want to blow themselves up and kill loads of innocent civilians in the name of a religion.

There are millions of other people who are suffering day by day who don’t want to be blown up, who don’t really believe in religion, but can never do anything themselves. All I’m saying in the same way you had a little system in a microcosm in Britain, with a middle class and a working class, maybe that’s gone global now and we are all actually super-rich in our ideas and our relationship with the man.

Do you not think though we’ve all got a responsibility to this world and at some stage we’ve abdicated that responsibility to those who would take power from us. It’s easier for us to allow ourselves to be ruled that worry about that responsibility ourselves.

The author Alan Moore best describes it in his seminal 1980’s work V for Vendetta. He says one day the little monkeys climbed out of the trees and abdicated their power to the big monkey with the big stick and the girlfriend. Do you think this is what’s led on to us needing the man?

That’s definitely the truth. I think it’s really easy to argue that every generation has its heroes. No, there’s whole generations which are uncool, that have no heroes. That’s why when you look back now on the 60s although they were a bunch of hippies, you can see it was a revolutionary time. It was as important at 1789 and the French revolution.

"I’m too sensitive. My emotional intelligence is too high and my IQ is too low!"

So I think that human modern society, the last thousand years, of boredom, of people not wanting to be the little monkeys - has been hit by tremors. The little monkeys have all got together and said we’re not going to take it. Pinpoints of time where the little monkeys have stood up to the big monkey.

I think it’s more like one little monkey comes along and says “listen guys, it doesn’t have to be like that…” and you get a change in mindset, something that everyone can adopt and every little monkey changes the way it thinks in line with this…

I think those monkeys are still here as individuals…

Are you one of those monkeys?

I would love to be but no-one’s listening. I’m obviously living in the wrong time. (Laughs) I feel like no one is listening. I think there are always ‘those monkeys’ around, but it takes certain eras and periods for the monkey to change things. It takes the monkey plus society, plus the right time for things to explode. There needs to be the right context. I think we will, thirty years from now, look back at the 60s being as important as the Industrial Revolution, and other points like that throughout history.

OK then Bobby, I’ll allow you to drag me off my list of questions as always seems to happen to me. So going with the 60’s, do you think the scene in America, with the Weathermen, the Timothy Leary thing, do you think LSD ultimately detracted from what those groups were trying to accomplish?

Ultimately I think it detracted from what they were trying to accomplish, but at the same time without the LSD those groups may not have come about in the first place. The drugs lit the ideas then damped out the action that happened afterwards. The whole thing wouldn’t have happened without Timothy Leary, without the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test…

Do you like Timothy Leary?

Yeah I do. I really liked him when I was younger and I got into the 60s through Prince, which is a weird link. Until I discovered Prince I didn’t really like Pop. Prince made my whole life change, and because this amazing, special, angry, tosser/angel came into my life (cause that’s what he is) I got into music. He name checked George Clinton, so I listened to George Clinton… Someone says Prince plays the guitar like Hendrix, next thing I’m listening to Jimi Hendrix. Oh the album after Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day; someone told me it was Prince’s Sgt. Pepper so I’m listening to Sgt. Pepper… Through Prince I tapped into every great bit of Pop music from the 1950s onwards. He is, even though I think he’s an arsehole at the moment (and I‘m sure he‘s been an arsehole for all his life), my portal, my conduit and my angel in a purple suit.

So we’ve talked about how you got into the scene in the UK. Many people came into dance music in the UK through taking MDMA and Ecstacy. Do you think society has come to the point where people are so dislocate that they need a drug to bring them together? And if they do, and I suspect you think they do, how do we get around that?

Its just context again. If MDMA came out during the 60s I still think the 60s would have happened. It’s not like drugs create the scene, and then they’ve stopped now. Drugs have always been around. The guys in the 50s were on drugs, the guys in the 20s, the guys in Nazi Germany were on drugs! People have been on drugs in India for centuries. The drug thing in the 60s once again is simply about all the pieces of the jigsaw fitting into place at the right time.

At the moment, people are looking towards drugs to create a scene… The same people who took drugs in the late 80s and thought lets create the rave scene, well, their kids are taking the same drugs now and going “brilliant, I won’t go to work tomorrow, I’ll go to work the day after tomorrow…” They’re just using it in a different way.

I don’t know what you think but I often think that the UK, in terms of social interaction between people, is kinda a bit crap. People don’t get together freely; you go down the pub and often nobody new wants to talk to you. I don’t know if that’s a uniquely British thing but how is that going to change in this country, how are people going to become more open and receptive to each other?

I go to India and see what’s going on there, and the youth have fuck all…

(At this point a chap sitting on the next pub bench decides to take a more active role in our conversation. He turns round and shouts over “give them all hard drugs”. Bobby and I sit and collapse into laughter. We weren’t aware but it seems we have an audience)

Where was I?

Yes, where were you Bobby?

I was a sperm! So we’re in the most successful time in Britain’s history….

But there’s still a lot of discontent

But it’s not the same kind of discontent you get if you go to places like India. They’ve got people telling them they’re a superpower, where there’s a youth explosion, 60 percent of the country are under thirty years old. They’ve just about got enough to eat. That’s where the next sixties is going to happen. China and India. That’s the next superpower and that’s where the next youth rebellion is going to come from.

Well hang on; they did try it in China, in Tiananmen Square, but the Chinese government drove over the people with tanks. You know the very famous clip of the guy standing with two carrier bags in front of the tank, no letting them through.

Well, that was then. I was in college when that happened. I remember thinking this is disgusting, but that’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen in China in the next twenty years. I’m not talking about the business, I’m talking about a scene change with the youth. A change in thinking about authority, about people’s place in society and how they can change things. I honestly believe that the next revolutionary periods will happen again and they will happen in India and China.

The time of the west being at the centre of cultural and revolutionary thinking is coming to an end.

OK Bobby, people are always telling me that I’ve got a massive ego, of course, I know better. But tell me, how big is your ego?

My ego is one of those egos which is really really big when it comes to stuff I believe in. I’m like the Chinese tank in Tiananmen square, I will run over anyone who tries to get in my way. However, very tragically, my ego is very small in other areas. This lets me down, if I had a really big ego I could actually achieve everything I wanted.

Are you sensitive?

Yeah! I’m too sensitive. My emotional intelligence is too high and my IQ is too low!

What? You seem really clever to me. You seem like you could have the kind of intellect which could simply dance round the ideas of other people.

Well, I read a lot, but that’s it. My emotional intelligence is really high, I’ve realised that. They have this thing about EQ, like IQ but with an emotional quotient. It’s really important. I’m old enough now to just look round and think all my fucking life I’ve picked up the right thing, I’ve got people right, I’ve chosen the right thing, I’ve realised which people are going to get on a long time before anyone else. That’s because my emotional intelligence is really high. My IQ is really low because in the world of business and especially the music industry that I work in, I see other people running rings around me.

But isn’t that because you place your emotions before making money. I’d say all the people I know who are really good at making money simply aren’t that interested in emotions.

Yeah absolutely. I’ll give you a great example. Working in the radio industry, when I first joined Radio One, I felt like “yeah I can do anything, I can do any show, I can do any of it.” Now, other people at Radio One may have felt that, and actually managed to do it, and are doing it. The reason however I’ve not managed to do it is because I’m so sensitive, I’m seen as a bit of a wet firecracker. People don’t know if I’m just going to fizzle out or if I’m going to explode in their face. People just push me aside and that happens when you’ve got a high emotional intelligence because you’re reading into situations all the time. You’re worrying about someone you might have stamped on.

I can really relate to what you’re saying. I feel that’s very much what I’m like. Sometimes these days I simply won’t say what I think because I’m afraid of hurting other peoples feelings. There have been times in my life where I’ve been so fucked off with things that I’ve said exactly how I feel and think and everyone’s got really fucked off with me.

Everyone I know who’s doing really, really well, has never, ever thought like that. It’s a shame, but that’s why I think they’re doing so well.

Then is that not perhaps where our revolution could come in this country, we start walking away from the business, from that cult of self, the worship of the individualism, do you not think that could be where our next or last revolution comes from?

Yeah I suppose it could happen, and it would be a great revolution. It would be a quiet revolution because I don’t think anyone else in the world would really give a fuck about it. We could end up being like Iceland, just really happy with ourselves, really proud of our country, with loads of really cool things going on. A great revolution could be for inner self of the British soul.

A lot of the time I look at people and ask myself if they are really happy. I often think that people convince themselves that they’re happy, making loads of money, being the kind of arsehole who gets what they want no matter how many bridges they have to burn. I often think “but are you REALLY happy?” I think what makes people truly happy is emotional things, but sometimes it takes people to have a fall to realise that.

Yeah. I think like this too. I think people like this are incredibly emotionally stupid. In fact they’re so emotionally stupid that often they can’t even tell that they’re not happy, so it doesn’t even matter to them anyhow! They can’t feel it. They don’t have that chemical running through their brains. So in some senses they’re the happiest people on earth. Bastards.

Do you think you’re funny Bobby?

I am. Although I’m actually not a comedian, I can’t remember jokes, I’m not really even that entertaining but I do think I’ve got that “funniness” that someone who’s at ease with other people has.

OK then, convince me that you’re funny.

Bobby here proceeds to tell a joke about a nose walking into a bar. It’s not funny. I will spare you.

That’s appalling.

I told you I wasn’t any good at telling jokes.

OK then, what’s the last dream you can remember and what do you think it means?

Alright, dreams and me. I’ve kept a dream diary for the last ten years. I had a dream about September the Eleventh before it happened., which I then told loads of people. Five month before it actually happened. All of them phoned me back and said “you fucking dreamed this!” Dreams are really important to me. I dreamed about the Tsunami before it happened. Its all down there in this book.

I had a very vivid dream once. I dreamt that William Hague was giving a lecture. He was having a pint, in a pub, which was built on top of a Mosque. Then I went outside to protest against William Hague and an Irish terrorist turned up with an Irish flag and looked at me and said “shhhh.” He then disappeared and came round the corner driving a JCB. He drove the JCB into the Mosque with a pub built on top of it and he killed William Hague. This was all being filmed live and shown on Sky. Then everyone at the scene turned round to me and said “it was you” (meaning I’d killed Hague and smashed the pub).

I know it’s a tenuous link, but if you look at the dream it’s about a terrorist driving a machine into a building and then the media start hunting a community.

I dreamt that I was on the coast of India, and I saw massive tidal waves coming in, and destroy every city on the side of India. The last dream I had was last night. I’ve got to try to remember it…

I thought if you wrote stuff down in a dream diary it made your dreams easier to remember?

I know when I’ve had a predictive dream because I wake up and I’m like “what was that?” You’ve got to get it out. So the last dream I can remember… Well I had one a couple of weeks ago which I told my wife about, where I dreamt about this girl off Coronation street. You know, the one that’s going out with David Platt.

I don’t know, but go on anyway…

She’s a really young girl and she’s actually quite beautiful. I dreamt about her and I woke up and told my wife. I said “I fell in love with her in my dream, and now I think I love her…” Ever since then I’ve not been able to watch Coronation street without getting quite excited.

How does your wife feel about this?

She knows and she’s cool with it. She knows I dream about her all the time. The last political or big dream that I had was when I dreamt that I turned on the TV and China had been allowed to take over India by the UK. I remember being so shocked and scared in the dream. I was thinking that this was our civil war, I felt that it was like the Spanish civil war and it was all going off. I was talking to my friends and saying “we have to go and get the Chinese out” but they seemed to think it was all such a great thing.

With all what you’ve said I’m wondering if you think you’re psychic. Do you believe in psychic powers and do you think you possess any?

I used to think I was psychic but now I don’t. Now I just think its emotional intelligence. I used to think there were psychic powers and that there are humans who are psychic. Now I don’t think there’s an actual psychic ‘other world’ out there, some magical world where Unicorns exist and Dragons fly around. Now I just think that humans had the ability to listen to each other properly in the past and we’ve just learned to tune it out.

There’s one more dream I’d like to tell you about, but I’m pretty embarrassed about it. I dreamt it in the build up to the Iraq war.

I dreamt I was walking down this dusty desert street. There was this gate, and it had this Islamic flag on it. I looked inside, and there were loads of Hezbollah machine gunners having homosexual sex. I remember waking up and being so embarrassed; I couldn’t write this in my dream diary. My kids would find it after I die and they’d say “Dad was a raving queen!” Then I saw these pictures on the news of all these Arab bodies set out in pyramids, and that was exactly what I saw in my dream. I remember going “that’s my dream!” I used to think this was being psychic, now I just think you simply can’t explain.

If you were a Ninja, who would you assassinate, and given the various techniques of assassination available to the Ninja, how would you go about it?

You know what, and I probably won’t feel like this in six months time, I’d go back in time and assassinate all the great religious leaders. People like Mohammed and Jesus, but not just the religious leaders, people like Chairman Mao and Adolf Hitler.

Hang on, didn’t religion do some good. I mean, in the bible it says “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” - people don’t realise that before this it was probably your family, your land and I’ll rape your eye for a tooth. Hasn’t religion changed us from a nomadic people probably just interested in fucking and killing each other into a society which can actually get along with one another?

I’d still murder every head of every Religion, and I’d do it silently so it wouldn’t matter exactly how I did it. I’d do it in the knowledge they wouldn’t be able to set up their religion. This is such a cliché but I do actually believe The Iraq war is going to be seen as one of the biggest mistakes of the last three hundred years, both politically and ideologically. I don’t hate them that much but I guess I would ‘do’ Blair and Bush, not because they’re evil but just to stop the folly of the Iraq war.

How do we stop having another 7/7 in this country?

I don’t believe that it’s all young Muslims becoming radicalised because of the actions of the west. I think there needs to be change from inside the communities. I see it in a lot of immigrant parents so it’s not just a Muslim thing, you need education from the parents that hurting people is just wrong. I think the world needs to be made a fairer place. We need some honesty here, the West is oppressing the third world. It always happens with anyone in power and it always will. I think we need a double pronged attack, change the system across the world, make it fairer, but also within Islam, and all parental communities, get them to educate their kids.

One thing I’ve picked up on in interviews you’ve done in the past is that you speak about the concept of Britishness. You said people used to be just British, now they’re British-Asian, or British-Muslim etc. How do we go about building a new Britishness that embraces all people from all walks of life in this country?

That will only happen through the British Government and the British Establishment accepting it. It won’t happen because even in Australia, Canada and America, places where they slaughtered the Native American people and the Aborigines, there’s still as sense that the land could belong to anyone. The UK is the land of the white British man, and I think it’s going to be really hard to get rid of that idea amongst the elite.

This is where white British people came from, so the only way to get a new sense of Britishness is to turn around and say “alright, I don’t care if your generations go back to a time before the Magna Carta, you’re British if you’ve got a passport.”

Do you think this has to primarily come from white people?

I think it needs to come from all people, white people, black people, brown people. I think many people are quite ignorant in a way. They’re sheep. So this kind of change needs to come from up above.

I go out to India and see the same thing, people are like “but this is India, we are Indian, this is what we‘ve done and here‘s our history.” People in China do the same thing. It’s the 21st century, the global village and the internet has changed things. We need to change the idea of the nation state, the idea of physical links to earth, and the only time that will ever happen in Britain is if a radical government takes over. We need a government to say “you’re your passport and you ain’t nothing else”

I’ve always thought of Britain as great because we’ve got freedom of speech, because you can do anything, be anything, say anything and all you are is just another person, within society, and you have the same freedoms as everyone else. Why do you think that doesn’t apply for everyone, across the board, in England?

I think we’re becoming more European, we’re going “oh my God! The white population’s only thirteen percent of the world.” We look at England and say “what a great history, what a unique history.” I’m not anti-Europe but if I was an Alien I’d love to be British.

In Europe there is always this feeling that “I am French, this is the French soil” or “I am Italian and this is the Italian soil.” However, in Britain, because we have the legacy of empire with us, because we went out and did so much, because we had the mother of all parliaments, we’ve always been sort of above that. It’s now however reductive. There’s more and more people, and I hear them because I’m one of those people who will go up to people and say “what do you think about immigration?” I want to know what people think, be they Asian, white or Muslim.

The trouble is people worry too much about what their link to this place is. It’s almost an existentialist problem. Yes, it’s amazing what white people have done to this planet, but at the same time, it’s amazing what many groups have done. We need to celebrate all of it.

You’ve got to go now Bobby. Can you sum it all up for me?

Music is life and love, and is the only unique thing that God has given us. There is only one religion on this earth and it is all encapsulating and encompassing in that one thing we call music. Also, please, please, please develop your emotional intelligence and use it you angry bastards!

The interview with Bobby came to and end and I walked him back to Euston Station. We had a conversation about how the interview went and Bobby was clearly buzzed up by the whole thing. We exchanged email addresses and agreed to stay in contact as I found Bobby to be a really creative guy with loads of ideas. If he’d had more time I’d planned to do some guerrilla research on Oxford street asking people their opinions on Asian/white problems but we simply didn’t have the time.

When Bobby left I thought a lot about his name and who he is. It never really occurred to me at first but he calls himself Bobby Friction. What is Friction? It’s the place where things meet and the force that happens there. I thought this was really appropriate for Bobby. He seems to me to be all about that little grey area - the place where people don’t agree or disagree, the place people would rather not think about.

That’s what he’s all about, the thin lines where people are still discussing things, where nothing has been decided and we’re still trying to work out what the hell is going on. Bobby marches bravely into these areas without personal prejudice or preformed opinion and forces people to think. That’s admirable in this day and age where we can all turn off and watch Youtube or play Playstation 3.

We need people like Bobby to remind us that there’s different ways of looking at things and the most important thing to do is to see that.