England Made Me, III

'It's our only chance,' Kate repeated. 'We haven't got a future away from here. This is the future.'
    'Oh come,' Anthony said, 'that's pitching it strong. After all, here we are foreigners.'
    'We're national. We're national,' Kate said, 'from the soles of our feet. But nationality's finished. Krogh doesn't think in frontiers. He's beaten unless he has the world.'
    'Minty was talking,' Anthony said, 'about short-term loans.'
    'That's temporary.'
    'You mean he's had to take them already?' Anthony asked. 'Is money so close? It looks bad. Do you think we are safe here? I'm all for rats. I don't believe in any Casabianca stuff.'
    'You don't imagine,' Kate said, 'that Krogh could be beaten by us. That's all that nationality is – it's we, the hangers-on, the little dusty offices I've worked in, Hammond, your pubs, your Edgware Road, your pick-ups in Hyde Park.' Deliberately she turned away from the thought that there had been a straightness about the poor national past which the international present did without. It hadn't been very grand, but in their class at any rate there had been gentleness and kindness once.
    'It's home,' Anthony said.
    He raised his lonely small boy's face. 'You don't understand, Kate. You've always liked this modern stuff, that fountain.'

onstage with a full-size guillotine

'[In 1990] I was in and out of meetings with Russell and Lyor Cohen at Def Jam. Lyor would walk in, take off his jacket, remove his guns, and start popping pills with mineral water every other sentence. I was thinking "This guy's obviously off his head." He'd go: "Bullet, every time we drop '20 Seconds to Comply' it makes the hair on the back of our heads stand on end. We want you to be the rap version of Ozzy Osbourne. I see you coming onstage with a full-size guillotine, and a crow on your arm. We want you to cut sheep's heads off and chuck them into the front row...'

Silver Bullet, 2011


20 Seconds to Comply
Bring Forth The Guillotine

England Made Me, II

Minty turned on her; his eyes were damp and burning. 'It's not his own money. He's a borrower, nothing more than a borrower. We can't borrow because we are not trusted. If they trusted us, we should be Kroghs ourselves. He's only one of us. He has no more roots than we have. But we, we have to live within our means; the banks won't trust us; we count our cigarettes, live where it's cheap, save on the laundry, pick up pocket-money by our wits. You're too young my dear,' he said, with open malice, 'to understand these things.' He didn't like girls, he couldn't have said it in words more plainly; tawdry little creatures, other people's sisters, their hats blocking the view at Lords.