Drinking and rambling with Carey Davies

A week ago I reported the arrival of Carey Davies in Pig Island, via a circuitous route that included the paddy fields and discos of Indochina and the Bohemian inner cities of Australia. Carey, a member of the new-look, anti-Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain, studied EP Thompson at Sheffield University before becoming a journalist and singer-songwriter. He may have succeeded in putting some distance between himself and his colleagues on Britain's fractious far left, but he has not been able to shake off some of his more polemical detractors, as the comments box under my last post shows.

Late last Wednesday night, in the aftermath of several frenetic games of badminton, a few of bottles of cider, and a viewing of the classic '70s sci fi epic Zardoz - imagine Sean Connery in a red jockstrap playing Zed the Destroyer - I submitted Carey to an interview which rambled across subjects as different as far left acronyms, the role of drugs in politics, the role of the Iraq war in politicising Britain's young people, a jam session with a member of Kiwi rock royalty in a Communist Party flat, the solo work of John Lennon, the solo writings of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and the post-industrial wonderland that is twenty-first century Sheffield. You can listen to the interview, which I've broken into two parts, here. (Skip that first part if you want to avoid a tenderly mocking discussion of the alphabet soup of acronyms which constitutes the British far left.)