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The Monocle Daily
Europe considers whether Gerhard Schröder should act as a mediator in Ukraine war peace talks
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- [00:00]
Andrew Muller
You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first
- [00:02]
Phil Tinline
broadcast on the 11th of May, 2026 on Monocle Radio.
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Andrew Muller
Is Russia running out of steam in Ukraine? Can the UK's Prime Minister climb out of his present abyss? And has reality irretrievably overhauled? Satire. I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. Hello, and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Terry Stiasney and Phil Tinline will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from the author and musician John Robb about his new memoir, recalling how punk rock ruined his life. Spoiler, it didn't. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle. D. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Terry Stastney, political journalist and author of Believable the Misfits who Fought Churchill's Secret Propaganda War. And Phil Tinline, journalist, documentary maker and author, most recently of Ghosts of Iron Mountain. Hello to you both.
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Terry Stiasney
Hello.
- [01:18]
Phil Tinline
Hello.
- [01:19]
Andrew Muller
As we have seamlessly intimated, you both have books to flog, so let's get it over with. Terry, you first. What's your book about?
- [01:27]
Terry Stiasney
My book is about how the British government essentially created a lot of fake news during the Second World War to try to lower enemy morale, and this involved creating deliberate lies, and which I argue was genuinely generally not a particularly good thing for them to be doing.
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Andrew Muller
Are you doing, or have you recently been doing any public events associated with this?
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Terry Stiasney
Yeah, the public events, yeah, I've got quite a few. A few things coming up. I'm actually doing a couple of events this week at the Fleet Street Quarter Festival, which is a fairly new literary festival which, as you would guess, is in and around Fleet Street. And I'm going to be talking to people who've written books about the Cambridge spies and about empowering women. So slightly different subjects there, but just as interesting.
- [02:10]
Andrew Muller
Phil, you have also been doing and are doing public events, because I think the paperback of yours is coming up. And listeners, all jokes aside, I have read actually both of these books and they both are terrific. So what have you been working on or what are you doing?
- [02:23]
Phil Tinline
So I was at Jesus College, Cambridge last week for an event about actually discussing power, but partly talking about conspiracy theories, which relates to me book, as well as some podcasts and another radio station which shall of course be nameless. And I've been writing various things as well, including an article for the Times that may come up at some point.
- [02:43]
Andrew Muller
Well, yes, conspiracy theories are a subject to which we shall return later in the show, but we begin in Moscow and the aftermath of a Victory Day parade, which could probably have been an email. The event was somewhat less awe inspiring than usual due to a lack of availability of tanks with turrets still attached and probably quite well founded concerns about the liberties which might have been taken with proceedings by Ukrainian drone operators. Possibly. Relatedly, President Vladimir Putin subsequently speculated that Russia's so called special military operation in Ukraine, now in the 51st month of its 72 hours, might be coming to an end. It is unclear whether he meant this as the conflict might be coming to an end or as if I tell my fellow citizens to strap in for another four years of this, it could all get a bit. Nicholas II Phil, which of those seems more likely, do you think he is thinking, this is going nowhere, I need to find a way out of it, or I just don't want to say out loud I don't have a way out of it.
- [03:41]
Phil Tinline
Well, far be it for me to suggest that not everything Vladimir Putin says is driven by the utmost sincerity.
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Andrew Muller
Phil, get out.
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Phil Tinline
I can't see what his basis for this is unless he's going to surrender, which I think is highly unlikely. So it seems just a sort of slightly pointless thing to say. I mean, vaguely responding to the kind of brief ceasefire and Trump leaning his way, but it doesn't really seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.
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Andrew Muller
Terry, is he basically just playing for time? Because he is in that situation And I think honestly most people, most of our listeners, most of all of us, if with admittedly less dramatic consequences, probably have had an experience of something in their lives where they've just thought this is going absolutely nowhere. It's all been a ghastly balls up. However, I can't find a way out of this and maybe if I just plow on something or break for me,
- [04:32]
Terry Stiasney
I think he's possibly thinking that, you know, this has gone on a long time, he is not getting any further than he thought thought he might. He is, you know, economically in a lot of trouble and yes, you can try and sustain everything as Putin will do for as long as he possibly can and as fiercely as he possibly can. But I think you might have just looked around and thought, well, hang on, I'm having to ask Ukraine not to kind of send drones over my victory parade. Perhaps this isn't going as well as it could be. And maybe thinking, you know, I'm in potentially quite a bit of trouble Here
- [05:03]
Andrew Muller
on that subject, Phil, I mean, President Zelenskyy, since becoming president of Ukraine, has been pains to act more like a president and less like the comedian and satirist he once was. But he did allow himself to have a bit of fun with this. He did issue a proclamation solemnly giving his permission for President Putin to attend the Victory Day parade, which I'm sure he enjoyed doing. And he's in. Lord knows he's entitled to a chuckle after all this time. But does something like that actually, could it be said to be furthering the war effort in any respect?
- [05:36]
Phil Tinline
Well, I think it's not going to make a huge difference to war effort, but I think in terms of morale, in terms of exuding confidence, I mean, I think, you know, much more generally, we have slightly. Politicians often slightly lost the knack of just making the weather and exuding confidence, even when their back is against the wall. And actually back is not totally against the wall either. But I think seeing a bit of that is rather good. And it's also genuinely funny. And I think that also is underrated in politics.
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Andrew Muller
Well, on the subject of genuinely funny, Vladimir Putin suggested as a possible mediator, the former German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. Listeners, Terry is already shaking her head with her eyes closed. This is not a serious suggestion, is it?
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Terry Stiasney
It is not. It's not one that's going to fly. I mean, I clicked on the article about this, which had a headline of Putin wants a former German Chancellor to be some kind of a negotiator. I know it's Schroeder. It's not Merkel in a million years, is it? It's like Gerhard Schroder is absolutely so close to Russia. He has worked on Nord Stream, he has worked for. Has prom. He has worked for Rosneft, you know, a completely conflicted man. And he's, you know, Putin is obviously putting up someone to whom you know, the EU will instantly say, absolutely not, over my dead body. I mean, Kayakala saying that, no, this would not be wise. I think she's trying to sort of sound as diplomatic as possible. And, you know, the Estonian foreign minister say, well, he plays in Putin's team. You know, we're not having this. But maybe the idea, maybe it's a bit of a negotiating stance, is that if you put up somebody completely unpalatable as a negotiator and everyone says no to that, perhaps they've accepted the idea that there could be some European person as a go between, you know, maybe that's the, the plan.
- [07:13]
Andrew Muller
George Galloway is not going far from his phone, obviously. No, I, I was going to say, Terry, there's a, there's a, there's something about the art of headline writing there, because on the one hand, you can't get everything in a one line bullet point. Fine. And it's obviously technically true to describe Gerhard Schroeder as a former German chancellor. The, the phrase risibly compromised could possibly have been shoehorned in there somewhere. But is there still, though not the problem, Phil, that there's not really anybody who could mediate? Because as far as we understand the situation, there is nothing to mediate. Putin is obviously not going to walk away from this unless he's got something he can claim as a victory. Ukraine has said over and over and over and over again that it won't budge on its territory, that is its 1991 borders. And as you also have intimated, Ukraine kind of feels like it has the wind at its back at the moment.
- [08:08]
Phil Tinline
Yes. And I mean, I've talked to journalists who've been to Ukraine, talk to people about this at points when it was looking darker than it is currently. And the sense that they were getting was that Ukrainians were absolutely in a kind of hard eyed, resolute, chin out way, just going to kind of keep fighting or saying that they would. So I think, no, the idea that they're somehow going to kind of get bored of it or capitulate is absolutely for the birds. So the meat grinder continues. I mean, there is absolutely no budging on either side. I mean, if it's going to reach a resolution, I think it's unlikely to reach it through talks or the help up by someone as absurdly compromised as Schroeder or anybody else. I mean, something else is going to have to snap.
- [08:46]
Andrew Muller
Well, on that subject, Terry, I mean, I do think a lot about, in terms of what Phil was just saying, a conversation I had last year in Odessa with the Ukrainian MP Oleksi Goncharenko, who I did ask, how much longer can Ukraine and Ukrainians keep doing this? And he just looked at me and said, what choice do you think we have? Which I think is an underrated analysis of the situation. But are we also perhaps learning here that both Ukraine and Europe are starting to absorb, and this may be wishful thinking, but nevertheless that maybe the US walking away isn't going to be quite the disaster that everybody anticipated that it would?
- [09:23]
Terry Stiasney
Yeah, it could be. And I think one of the interesting things that has shifted is that after Orban lost the election in Hungary, that has then freed up a lot more of the European funding for this. And Europe is. I know we feel like we've been saying this, Andrew, for years. Europe's going to really get its act together. They're really going to work together to try to do something about this. Okay. It's taken a while, it hasn't really happened. But I think they are now realising that we cannot rely on the United States to be backing us up here. And as you say, this is existential for Ukraine. They can't just give up and they can't walk away from it.
- [09:54]
Andrew Muller
Well, here in the United Kingdom, vultures continue circling over Downing Street. Something of the scale of the unpopularity of the Labour government of Prime Minister Sakir Starmer was demonstrated by last Thursday's local elections, which went badly for Labour in much the same way that charging could be said to have gone badly for the Light Brigade. Labour lost nearly 1500 council seats across the country, mostly to the Insurgent Reform UK and Green Party and Control in Wales, where Labour has governed in some shape or form, essentially forever. Rumblings to the effect that Sir Keir should go are therefore increasing in volume, which today he attempted to talk over with a speech. More on the speech shortly. But, Terry, first of all, as the designated political journalist at the table, you have to help us here. Where is the needle? Is Starmer merely embattled or is he actually beleaguered?
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Terry Stiasney
I think he's definitely beleaguered.
- [10:47]
John Robb
Beleaguered.
- [10:47]
Terry Stiasney
I think if you've got at least 58 of your own MPs saying you should go, that's into beleaguered territory.
- [10:52]
Andrew Muller
I wish we had a beleaguered klaxon. I invite listeners to imagine a klaxon. Phil, what do you think? Would you say beleaguered? Not merely embattled?
- [11:01]
Phil Tinline
Yes. I mean, I think the really big sound effect you need is when it gets to 80 MPs, right. Because that's the point at which leadership challenge becomes more formally possible.
- [11:09]
Andrew Muller
I don't know what the next step past beleaguered is.
- [11:12]
Phil Tinline
Endangered. Hanging by a thread.
- [11:15]
John Robb
Finished.
- [11:16]
Andrew Muller
Unemployed.
- [11:20]
Phil Tinline
Yeah. No, I think it looks very, very bleak indeed. And what's also striking is who some of the people are who have said this. I mean, you know, Josh Simons, for example, who is head of Labour Together, was seen as being one of the founders of the Starmer project, effectually had been a minister until recent unfortunate events. But even he coming out at the weekend and saying, this has got to, got to change. I mean, I Think, you know, this is not an ideological thing. This is a performance issue. And that is much harder to come back from. I think.
- [11:50]
Andrew Muller
I mean, Terry, on the subject of coming back, are his present numbers, which I do not. Not recommended reading for the squeamish actually turnable around the bull. Recent figures from YouGov, 70% of those polled say he's doing badly, 22% say he's doing well. And the I think Starmer is doing well has never gone higher than 36%. And that was basically five minutes after he was elected.
- [12:17]
Terry Stiasney
No, I don't think at this point he might cling on yet for a few months if the potential challengers don't get their act together or decide not to go ahead and overthrow him at some point. But the problem is that so many of the Labour MPs, who are not just the usual suspects, as Phil's saying at this point, were saying when I went round on the doorstep, one of the big problems that people were saying is, I hate Keir Starmer. I won't vote Labour again until Starmer is gone. And I think once that has settled in and you know, they are losing votes to the Greens, which has ended up meaning that reform has got more seats. It's not necessarily a straight switch from people voting labor to voting reform, but that people who might once have voted labor are now thinking, no, I'm going to put my vote elsewhere to one of the. To one of the other parties. You know, that is really hard to turn around. And we've seen it right across the country in this last week.
- [13:12]
Andrew Muller
I mean, is there. Is this indicative of a wider trend, perhaps? Phil, There has been a lot of talk in recent months about the difficulties of incumbency. Nobody seems to like their governments. This is in the democratic world. And does that reach a point at which those democracies essentially become ungovernable?
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Phil Tinline
I mean, that's certainly a danger of that. I think we've spoken before about the combination of social media making, debating and thinking through structurally, what's actually wrong with the country and what really needs to be done in combination with there being a great deal wrong. Anyway, ever since the financial crash, a lot of people's pay has basically been flat. There's been all sorts of economic pains and stagnation to deal with, the countries in huge amounts of debt and so on. If you can't then have a sensible conversation about that in the public domain, then it becomes very intractable. So, yeah, I think it is a very deep problem. I also think, though, that There is something about the way that we focus on, which is perfectly reasonable at one level, as we're doing here. But there is something about the way that this ends up always being focused on personalities, that the solution is then a new personality. And the second they're in, you know, the kind of David Cameron you with the future one's clock starts ticking and actually we need someone who's going to fundamentally change the weather by it being, by both being a really kind of, you know, transformative personality, but also bringing with them a really, really clear, vivid image of the country they're trying to build. And we haven't had that for a long time.
- [14:39]
Terry Stiasney
Yeah, I think one of the things that we thought that Starmer might be good at was actually, you know, sort of boring managerial competence and just getting things done and going through the process and being a details guy. But he seems not to have been good at that at all. Not to have been good at project management, not to have been good at relating to his own backbench MPS and convincing them, and definitely not good at selling a vision of what the government was there for and what they were trying to do. And that's why this speech today, trying to have a reset where you say things like, you know, the incremental, you know, it's no use just being incremental. It's not a grabbing, you know, slogan. It's not something. I can't even remember it now from this morning. So, you know, how's that going to convince people on the doorstep?
- [15:21]
Phil Tinline
I mean, it sounded like a plan for a speech. It sounded like, well, we need to show that we're going to do all of these things. Don't just go out and say them.
- [15:27]
Terry Stiasney
And it was sort of showing the workings of this. It was like we need stories, not spreadsheets.
- [15:31]
Phil Tinline
Well, yeah, tell us all that.
- [15:32]
Terry Stiasney
Put a story in. Yeah, exactly. There was no story.
- [15:34]
Andrew Muller
But Phil, I mean, a lot of Starmer's pitch was a kind of a riff of a, A, A somewhat antique sitcom joke at this point that we will not make character an issue because our candidate does not have character. But, but that was always the idea that, you know, you could just sort of have him on in the background. The country would get competently run and you'd never have to hear from the occupant of number 10, which after the preceding years would hopefully be a massive relief to all concerned. But are we learning that that that base, your basic managerial competence just doesn't fly anymore? That whether you like it or not, people do Expect at some level to be entertained by whoever is.
- [16:13]
Phil Tinline
Well, I don't even think it's rising to the bar of entertainment. It's just basic politics. It feels like what they've tried to do is government without the politics. Which just leaves you with administration, meaning appointing Sue Gray, a former civil servant, to play the kind of crucial role which didn't work out. If you just try and do the paperwork correctly and stick to the rules, that's not politics. The great mistake was encapsulated the moment he went into number 10, where he said, we're going to govern with stability rather than dogma. Well, actually, dogma is what brings stability, because then the civil service know which direction you're going in. They don't have to run to you for every decision. And investors will come in behind you, too, because they've got a sense that you're going to stick the course, you know, if you just try and do it purely through stability. For what purpose?
- [16:54]
Andrew Muller
Just finally, on this one, Terry, I mean, a lot of the names that are about to come up, I suspect may be unfamiliar to some of our audience, but this is nevertheless the Prime Ministership of the United Kingdom, which is a reasonably important job on the global stage. The other issue facing Labour is, it's one thing to say the person at the top should go, but by definition, you then have to have an idea about who to replace them with. There are three obvious frontrunners. There are Angel Rayner, who still has overhanging tax issues. This is the former deputy Prime Minister who had to quit because of those tax issues. Sorry. Also, polling suggests voters don't like her very much, even if the Labour Party membership does. Wes Streeting, who nearly lost his seat to a Gaza activist at the last general election, and Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, who isn't even an mp.
- [17:41]
Terry Stiasney
Yes. And this is really difficult. And this is why, you know, we're seeing this kind of hesitation over who could challenge, you know, the Prime Minister, because Andy Burnham can't at the moment, as you say, he's not an mp. He's trying to find a way back to Westminster. And there's various sort of elephant traps in that. Not least that the current. The Labour National Executive won't let him stand down as mayor of Manchester because they don't want to have an election for that as well, which they might lose. He would then have to win a by election in a place that has probably just voted for reform or Green councillors. And people are saying, oh, well, he could overcome that because he's so popular. Yeah, not necessarily in a in a by election, you know, other people talking about Ed Miliband coming back as leader, somebody who, you know, lost a general election years ago. There isn't an easy option. And as you say, the people who are most palatable to the Labour Party aren't necessarily most palatable to the voters more broadly.
- [18:32]
Andrew Muller
Well, to the United States, where heartwarming tales of bad things happening to bad people, which is and we've done the math good have been in depressingly short supply in recent years. One cheering exception to this dismal rule has been the misfortune visited upon Roly poly foil hatted blowhard Alex Jones, whose media empire, infowars was bankrupted by lawsuits brought by the families of the Victims of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, which Jones loudly insisted was a hoax. Venerable satirical newspaper the Onion is now attempting to buy infowars online presence for purposes of mischief, prompting obvious questions re whether anyone, least of all InfoWars, established audience of mouth breathing neckbeards would notice. Phil, are there here echoes of the Iron Mountain hoax as described in your excellent book Ghosts of Iron Mountain, in that it describes a satirical hoax cooked up by clever lefty liberals who worked for a magazine called Monocle and was taken seriously by seething right wing weirdos?
- [19:39]
Phil Tinline
Yes, I think I agree with you about that. Except he's going the opposite direction. I should say that Alex Jones has the Onion rather have now actually acquired infowars. So we shall see if they manage to convince their or to show the audience that when they lampoon the conspiracy theories that people have been watching for years that they're actually doing a lampoon, they're not just making those conspiracy theories even more outrageous. As you say, the precedent report from Iron Mountain being taken far too seriously for a very long time, including today in some quarters by the far right, because it told the story they wanted to hear about. These supposed, you know, iniquitousness of the of the people in Washington, you know, does rather suggest that people may not, you know, get the joke.
- [20:21]
Andrew Muller
I mean there is a problem as well here, though, isn't there Terry, that the politics of today, does it make satire actually more difficult? Because by way of illustration, these are some recent headlines from the actual Onion, which has long been one of my favorite publications. But we have RFK Jr sucks measles vaccine out of Infant and Trump ratchets up rhetoric against Satan Snoopy. I recommend the latter to our listeners. In particular, it has Trump describing Snoopy as, among other things, a disgusting floppy eared loser.
- [20:55]
Terry Stiasney
Yeah, this is the problem. It's so hard to tell what is a real story at the moment and what is some kind of. So my one, my example of this today, which appears to be a real story in real newspapers, which is this 15 foot gold statue of Donald Trump which is being covered in gold leaf and put up somewhere, I think in a golf course in Florida after a massive argument about who owned the statue, where it was going to go. You know, it's the most unflattering statue of Donald Trump, whereas his sort of gold leaf trousers are very crinkly and his belt is straining. I thought that that can't. Someone's just made that from. From AI. That that isn't a real thing. And as far as I can establish, it is a real thing. But it is really easy to believe that it isn't and that somebody has just put this out as a, as a way, as a sort of satirical piece of performance art.
- [21:41]
Andrew Muller
I mean, my own frame of reference that, Phil, is that regular listeners to the Daily will know that every Friday we do assemble an ideally humorous review of the week's news, sort of riffing on stranger or odder stories and listeners, believe me, I check and triple check and quintuple check every single one of them, just. Just to be sure. Did this actually happen? Because a lot of the time, as Terry suggests, you just. The first thing you think is like, oh, come on. And then you think, nope, that's real. That happened.
- [22:12]
Phil Tinline
Yeah. And the awful thing about this is that this can work to the, the favor of the disinformer, to the conspiracy theorists, because in the end, if you're blurring the bounds between fact and fiction, it works against, you know, democracy, because democracy sits on a bed of shared trust in truth. I mean, just on the gold statue thing, I mean, there was this extraordinary case last year of somebody making what they wanted to be a sort of satirical clip of this sort of Gaza turned into this sort of gaudy tourist resort incomplete with a statue, gold statue of Donald Trump. And he, he just retweets it as though it's an excellent thing. And at that point the satire just wilts.
- [22:48]
Andrew Muller
I mean, but hasn't that always been the problem with satire, Terry? Does it actually ever really damage its targets? Or is it more about comforting those who are laughing along with it in doubtless somewhat smug and superior tones?
- [23:02]
Terry Stiasney
I think it's a Peter Cook line, isn't it? Remember all those amazing Berlin Weimar Republic cabarets and how much they did to prevent the rise of fascism. So I think that is a thing that people have always thought, but interestingly, and going to bring my own book back into this as well. So I looked at, you know, disinformation and how they spread. People spread disinformation. And what worked, what was most successful is exactly what works now. It's, you know, if you spread rumors about what's in people's food that, you know, some people are getting too much of it or it's poisoned in some way or it's bad for you, people will spread that rumor. If you spread a sex scandal about people in power, that will spread. If you spend, you know, rumors about typhoid going around or people's health, that, and that is exactly the same playbook that works now. And even back then, during the Second World War, they realized that when they were creating the kind of the source of these rumors, they had to just create something that was believable enough that if you were a German submariner or whatever you're saying, well, I believe that it was a genuine message from the German government so that they didn't get in trouble, but they knew perfectly well that it wasn't. And everyone else knew perfectly well that it wasn't. But that was the way to get the message across in a plausible manner.
- [24:11]
Andrew Muller
Well, arguably relatedly to the latest developments in humankind's progress towards outsourcing, what remains of our capacity for thinking to machines even dumber than we are. It says here that the audience of lifestyle publisher Sheer Lux are up in arms following revelations that four influencers recently recruited by said platform do not as such exist. Gigi, Eden, Ream and Brooke are AI generated avatars who dispense counsel on beauty styling and related disciplines. They are not the first artificial influences. Millions of of your fellow citizens already gurgle regularly at such hallucinations on their phones as they commute to the jobs they will eventually lose to AI. At least until such time as their employers absorb some bracing lessons about how one tends to get what one pays for. Phil, question though. If the up in Arms audience had not been told that these influences don't actually exist and were AI generated hallucinations, would anyone have noticed? Noticed?
- [25:10]
Phil Tinline
Well, it's very hard to say, but certainly looking at the pictures, they do look, at least at a glance. And it depends how closely you examine your Instagram feed, I guess they do look very convincing. This of course, being the problem. As we've just been talking about, the boundary between facts and fiction has been blurred. For a long time, and it's always been a problem, but we've now made a machine to make that something that everybody can do. So what's striking about it, though, I thought, looking at some of the response, is how to be slightly pious for a second, how morally serious. It's, you know, there is actually a genuine sort of sense of moral outrage as well as just a kind of aesthetic ick about this, which, I mean, I'm writing a piece at the moment about whether we're beginning to see a sort of concerted anti AI populism begin to emerge in the uk, as I think you're beginning to see in the us and it's striking how many different groups this is making really quite morally cross.
- [26:02]
Andrew Muller
And yet, Terry, as we have learned time and again through history, and certainly as the online realm has demonstrated, price and convenience tend to trump pretty much everything else. People will take something worse if it's free and it's easier than the difficult and expensive thing. This is going to be a thing for fashion, advertising and related areas, isn't it? Because seriously, is there a meaningful difference between a photo of an actual human model, which has been, you know, and this is a human model who will have been made up and styled before the picture was taken and subsequently touched upon in process afterwards? Is there a real difference between that and something you've just generated entirely out of pixels?
- [26:46]
Terry Stiasney
Yeah, I mean, I tend to think a lot of real influencer influences are kind of fake anyway. I mean, you look at them and you just think, this is. You have such an implausible lifestyle, you have an implausible face, you have an implausible body, even if you are an actual real person. But I think, you know, the influencers themselves, even the real ones, we've already seen that change. I mean, you don't now. I mean, I. I grew up, I'm the daughter of a photographer, and, you know, we had, you know, models come to the studio with photography. So many of those jobs have gone or have been completely changed because people are doing their own photos, they're doing their own retouching, they are modeling themselves, essentially. So this is just. It's sort of the end of a process that has changed things. And yeah, I think it probably will be everywhere. And, yeah, it's probably is going to put a lot of people out of work and, and. But that process has already started.
- [27:33]
Andrew Muller
I mean, that moral outrage, though, Phil, that you were discussing and that populist backlash against AI is that. Do you see the beginnings there of something that's going to become enough of a mass movement that it's going to make any difference or this will this be the 21st century of a few, you know, determined eccentrics smashing up factory machinery with billy clubs?
- [27:57]
Phil Tinline
I think it's, I mean it's obviously a total guess but my kind of hypothesis, what it's worth at the moment is it's likely to end up somewhere between the two. If you think about the way that this stuff has gone in the past. You think about for example, I remember going to Shanghai in 2013, going to interview a very high end Italian architect whose job was taking old pre communist buildings and zhuzhing them up in a very sophisticated and expensive way for basically the city elite. And that gave them kudos, the sense that something was old and real and dated back that was something that had elite sort of significance I think, I suspect, and this may not be totally bad news for this building, I suspect what we'll see is for a certain portion of the public a return to a real premium being on somebody having written something, maybe things being in print on shooting, maybe shooting in celluloid but certainly a point being made out of shooting real human beings. You're already seeing Spotify talking to government officials about putting sort of no AI stamps on things. The problem is that for the vast majority of the population it'll be pro slop. And so that's the sort of, the real sadness here is that something like the BBC was created, which Terry and I both spent time working for for a long time. You know, the point of the BBC was to have something that had decent quality for everybody. So I don't think that, you know, all the things we're worried about disappearing are going to go completely, nor do I think it's going to be a tiny, tiny bunch of cranks. I think it's going to become an elite thing. I think that's where the problem will sit.
- [29:28]
Terry Stiasney
Exactly. I think it's going to be like, you know, like bread. It's going to be the artisanal sourdough to everybody else's. Sort of sliced white.
- [29:34]
Phil Tinline
Right, exactly. Packed with enumers.
- [29:35]
Andrew Muller
Well on that kind of metaphor that you're certainly not going to get from ChatGPT, Terry Stiasney and Phil Tinline, thank you both for joining us. Finally on today's show, 50 years ago, exactly, a discerning few of London's in crowd, certainly far fewer than the several hundred thousand people who would later claim to have been there would have been anxiously clutching tickets for tonight's show by the Sex Pistols at the Hundred Club. Within months punk rock would upend popular culture and with it the lives of millions who might otherwise have gone on to do something far more respectable and far less interesting. Among them was a Blackpool teenager who would be inspired to carve out a decades long career as a journalist with Sounds and Melody Maker among others. And musician with the Membranes and Gold Blade, John Robb, who recalls an eventful journey in a new memoir entitled Punk Rock Ruined My Life. I spoke to John at Midori House earlier and began by asking whether there was a particular moment for him him when punk rock changed everything.
- [30:35]
John Robb
It was probably more in little increments. You could. You saw this thing coming. I mean glamrock has sort of finished in 75 so there's about this a long time in your teenagers a whole year. Well there wasn't really any music you liked. Then they start looking at music papers and so you could start reading about these other bands. I had no idea what they sounded like pre Internet couldn't google it. These just gigs in London. It just didn't exist in the north of England any of this stuff. But I like what they look like. The occasional pictures intrigued by it and then of all places and this is so Blackpool. The first time I heard a record was Ice Skating where we always hang out when we're 15. There's nowhere else to hang out like you couldn't go in the pub and youth clubs are super naffs. I mean nice skate is pretty enough in it but. But they played Anakin UK and they played the Damned and they played the
- [31:19]
Andrew Muller
Ramones well known ice skating soundtracks well
- [31:22]
John Robb
the rest of his Northern Soul. So actually they were playing really good tunes in it and it was pretty violent as well. It's pretty scary place to be because if you fell over in the ice the hard kids would kick you with the ice skates. It was a violent time, one of the 70s. So I heard these records and I didn't instigate and buy them but I thought wow, they amazing. It took a bit to work out what they were. So again in small drips, you know now when you watch documentaries or films about punk, you know people come punk overnight don't. Yeah.
- [31:46]
Andrew Muller
This is why I asked.
- [31:48]
John Robb
This is what I'm trying to put the book really what the crux of what the book is about is this. It's the thing that punk. Most punk books are written for the inner circle in London which was great. I know all them people and they're like Robin Hood aren't they, you know, it's like the mythologized brilliant stories. Aren't they part of British culture but for 99 of people got into politics, punk, it was different. It's growing up in these really terrible backwards small towns. We couldn't get trousers that weren't flared. You had to stitch in your trousers. Where I had to do my own
- [32:15]
Andrew Muller
ears for all that. The title of the book is. Is Punk Rock Ruined My Life. I mean it clearly didn't. You find something in there that just seems to absolutely liberate and animate you and it kind of makes you think. From reading the book, you seem like somebody all of a sudden thinks, hang on, I can do anything. And then you go on to pretty much do everything. You become a. A musician and a journalist and who knows what else. Was that something that you otherwise not have happened? Had you not heard the Ramones While
- [32:39]
John Robb
ice skating 100 I think it was so empowering the message we got from punk. We probably misinterpreted it because we read the music papers and people talk about diy, anybody can do this. So we thought, wow, I could do this. But I didn't realize that being in a band took some kind of talent as well, you know, so. So no matter what people say about the Sex Pistols, they were really good musicians, they could really play. So if you're a 15, 16 year old kid and my drummer was 13, we were just kids. Most punk bands were teenagers, never played guitars before. We didn't have to tune them. We put the machine heads in a row, but we still did it anyway. We, we thought this doesn't sound like music, but we'll get on stage and we'll still get up and play. And to me that was a revolution in punk. And there's a lot of political aspects of punk, but I think the most powerful revolution punk was this empowerment of outsiders. Really. People already felt a bit outside, you know, normal English life or whatever it was at the time, but felt a lot and had a lot of things to say. Suddenly there's a way of expressing it even though you didn't understand the tools of expression.
- [33:36]
Andrew Muller
Were there other things bubbling in the background before the music though? I mean, you mentioned in the book the influence of the Goon show and your band the Membranes later record a song called Spike Milligan's Tape Recorder. Where do you see the trajectory that links the Goons, the Sex Pistols and the damn Dett Owl?
- [33:52]
John Robb
Well, it's in there, isn't it? Because Spike, Spike Milligan was an anarchist really, he was kind of like some crazy older hippie anarchist. One of the Goon show was really important. It's embedded in lots of British pop culture thought. When you write books, you know, there's always a thing that bands are a cross between this and that. Just two things. Think it's much more complex than that. It's a melting pot of ideas in it. So for us growing on Blackpool, we. We like George Foreman. He was part of our thing in the background musical. The echoes of decayed music halls are in our thing as well. Spike Milligan's in there as well. All that stuff is part and parcel of it. It's not just because the thing is, people now, they. They edit their history. Don't they go. They go, well, I was a massive Stooges fan. You go, stooges are really hard to hear in the 70s. Really difficult to get an Iggy. I was aware of who he was because every week one of the music papers used to do a little thing about Iggy Pop living in Berlin. And I thought, he's a really intriguing person. But I never really heard his records, you know, because you're only into the charts. You didn't know things existed beyond the charts. I didn't know there's a music underground. I was cursed to be in there forever, but I didn't know he actually existed. I thought everything went to number 40 and after that there was nothing. You know, the great thing about punk and what a lot of people forget is it was popular music. It was pop music, wasn't it? The Pistols had a number one album. You know, nowadays people go, oh, you know, Vinnie, Bang. The charts, they sold out. But that was not an aspect of punk. It was. All those bands were actually on Top of the Pops. And that was game changing. When you're really far away, it's all right in London because you can go to whatever venues around time, see these bands or go to mild Convivian Shop. But we had none of that. We had once a week Top of the Pops and mate, just be one punk band on there. And that was like manna from heaven for us.
- [35:27]
Andrew Muller
The book does span, to be clear to our readers, a very long period. You end up fronting at least two bands, forging a long career as a journalist, during which. And, you know, I speak from experience, if you go into business as a music journalist, you are opening yourself up to all sorts of bizarre things happening. You have. I think you were the first person to interview Nirvana in this country. You have Dinosaur junior making a video in your garden. Although, again, speaking from experience, what impressed me more about that was that you got J. Mascus to utter more than six syllables in your direction. I mean, that's an extraordinary accomplishment. But that relationship between the music press and the music, tortured, adversarial, etc, though it sometimes was. Does it strike you that that still exists in any meaningful sense? And if it doesn't, are we missing something?
- [36:13]
John Robb
No, I was never an adversarial writer, though I was more of a fanzine writer. I was the key there is fan. And I was a fan of music. And I was also fascinated by how other people created stuff because I could never work out to do it myself, probably. So when I meet someone like Jay Mascus, it's not. I don't get the syllable conversation. We just talk about music and the records. I tried well, because 70s music, press and going into the 80s and that period, it had that reputation. The journalist was out to get the bands. The bands will climb up. But I would walk in there and no one ever told me how to be musical. So I just figured you go and talk to people about they made records, you loved or made music you realized or done a giggy scene was really mega. And you just want to understand how they did it. I'm sure I was doing it completely wrong, but that's the only way I knew how to do it. And things. I was never. I didn't go in the room to try and catch them out. That was not my thing. And then they trusted me because of that. And then they actually told me far more interesting things, I would think personally, then they wouldn't clam up, basically because. Because also because I was in a band. And I think bands, bands that all know each other, they all generally do trust each other.
- [37:14]
Andrew Muller
That's the punk rock approach right there, I guess. I mean, there is a lot more besides that we unfortunately do not have time for. I. I did want to ask, in closing, just to play us out on. If you just wanted to pick one tune from your own catalogue, either by the Membranes or Goldblade or whatever else, and briefly introduce it.
- [37:32]
John Robb
Spy Moving's tape recorder.
- [37:33]
Andrew Muller
Hope you say that.
- [37:35]
John Robb
Yeah, it's the only one you got.
- [37:38]
Andrew Muller
That was John Robb speaking to me earlier. John's book, Punk Rock Ruined My Life is available now. Playing us out are the Membrane with Spike Milligan's tape recorder. And that's all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Terry Stiasney and Phil Tinline. Today's show was produced by Tom Webb and researched by Josefina Astradenegla Gomez. Our sound engineer was Elliot Greenfield. Mandra Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks. Thanks for listening.