FESTIVAL PREVIEWS FOR VICE 2011 FESTIVAL GUIDE

Glastonbury

June 22-26, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Glastonbury

Getting in may not be quite the labyrinthine task of near impossibleness it once was but Uncle Eavis’ annual shindig down on Worthy farm is sure to be full come opening day as 2012 sees the cows getting the run of the place while the partying takes a year off. Get past the shock and bore of U2 AND Coldplay both headlining and root around for the likes of techno’s new white hope Nicholas Jaar and the wonderful Omar Souleyman and come rain or shine it will be worth the trip. If there are any tickets left you can get hold of them and all other info at glastonburyfestivals.co.uk

Supersonic
October 21-23, The Custard Factory, Birmingham

Who said festivals had to be in the middle of August? The UK’s best avant-metal festival gives the plethora of summer festivals the bird and returns to the Custard Factory for another round of all things heavier than everything else in fittingly grim October. Dorset doom legends Electric Wizard head up the bill with the undercard proving typically strong and including a one off collaboration between David Tibet of Current93 and Italian trio Zu and the welcome return to these shores of Steve Moore’s Zombi project. Tickets, lineup and the rest at capsule.org.uk

Stop Making Sense
August 12-14, The Garden, Petrcane, Croatia

OK, so you could either go and drink warm Carling on a strip of mud just outside Reading one-way system and watch Muse and My Chemical Romance OR you could spend a weekend on a wooded peninsula on the Adriatic coast in a country where you can live for a week on what it costs to go to the cinema in Leicester Square. The fact that a smorgasbord of all that is currently good and exciting in electronic music, from Martyn to Floating Points via Chad Valley, will be playing is also not to be sniffed at. Tickets as well as travel and accommodation advice can be found at sms-2010.com

Hop Farm

July 1-2, Paddock Wood, Kent

Like some benign festival dictator Vince “I made Reading what it is today” Power insists on sticking his name above what has actually been a consistently great festival for the last few years as long as you were born between 1935 and 1955. Last year it was Dylan this year it’s The Eagles, Bryan Ferry, The Human League and some young whippersnapper called Brandon Flowers. Tickets are £130 for the weekend or £70 per day. Find out more at hopfarmfestival.com

Benicassim
July 14-17, Benicassim, Spain

Somehow Benicassim has sprawled into a being a marathon of a festival with four “official” days sandwiched between various pre and after parties. If six days in the sweltering Spanish sol doesn’t seem too big an ask then you get a valedictory performance from The Streets, a James Murphy solo show and Primal Scream doing Screamadelica while you’re at it. Tickets for the very long weekend are £177.50. Get those and all other info at fiberfib.com

Southwest Four Weekender
August 27-28, Clapham Common, London

For one weekend only one of London’s prime cruising spots ends up being filled with more dance music figureheads than the bar at the W hotel during the Miami Winter Music Conference. Everyone from the old order (Underworld, Digweed, Sven Vath, Richie Hawtin) to the young pretenders (Magnetic Man, Joker) will be down there so if you are in to dancing to repetitive beats don’t sleep on it. Weekend tickets are £95, day tickets are £45 and you can get those and find out more at southwestfour.com

Get Loaded In The Park

June 12, Clapham Common, London

There are now so many festivals that the fact that a band are only playing one of the damn things in London is now seen as a major selling point. If you want to be sold Razorlight as that band then look no further! Get Loaded In The Park is your one-day piss up sent from on high. British Sea Power and Babeshadow make things seem a little less bleak. Tickets are £37.50. Get those and all information at getloadedinthepark.com

End Of The Road

September 2-4, Larmer Tree Gardens, North Dorset

Along with Green Man and Latitude, the End Of The Road festival completes the triumvirate of boutique-festivals-aimed-at-Uncut-and-Mojo-subscribers-and-their-kids-wot-done-good. While it may be a whole lot bigger than years gone by End Of The Road can’t be faulted on lineup. From former Lift To Experience fella turned lonesome crooner Josh T. Pearson to Joanna Newsom to Mogwai via Wooden Shjips and a solo appearance from Gruff Rhys it’s basically good things at every turn. Weekend tickets are £145 and you can get those and find out more at endoftheroadfestival.com

The Secret Garden Party
July 21-24, Near Huntington,
 Cambridgeshire

The not so Secret anymore Garden Party has cemented itself as one of the most popular festivals of the entire season particularly amongst people who like dressing up as ladybirds and discussing recycling as opposed to watching live music. If you do find yourself there and are so inclined you could do worse than watch Blondie or Martha Reeves & The Vandellas. Tickets are £155 and available from secretgardenparty.com

Download

June 10-12, Donington Park, Midlands

Aside from Pendulum bizarrely being billed above Korn, this years Download is even more of a trip down metal-memory lane than usual. Def Leppard, System Of A Down and Linkin Park headline and elsewhere The Cult, Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister and Cheap Trick pretend the last 20 years didn’t happen. Dig deeper though and the bill yields a few gems: NOLA sludge supergroup Down make a rare UK appearance and rare doesn’t even cover a show by Danzig, which is probably worthy of admission alone. Weekend tickets are £155 and day tickets are £82.50. Get those and anything else you need to know at downloadfestival.co.uk

HUDSON MOHAWKE INTERVIEW FOR THE CREATORS PROJECT MAGAZINE

Hudson Mohawke is an enigma. His music runs the gamut from hip-hop, to garage, to funky, to house and back and again. A child of the 90’s he quietly absorbed the manifold dance influences of that decade and has consistently reconfigured, reworked and re-imagined them in new and wildly varied contexts.

As part of the Glasgow based Luck Me collective, 24 year old Hudson Mohawke (Ross Birchard to his mum) has been part of an emerging vanguard of young, talented and musically aware pioneers who have dictated where UK bass music is headed for the next decade.

As a DMC finalist at the tender age of 15 and one of the youngest signings to the prestigious Wrap Records label in its history his future is brighter than most. While the immediate reaction of the uninitiated Hudson Mohawke listener continues to be “what the fuck is this?” the contented converts simply ask, “where the fuck will this go next?”

The Creators Project Despite: Despite Ding and performing all over the world you continue to keep your roots in Glasgow.
Hudson Mohawke: Yeah, I’ve lived there my whole life. My Dad was actually from LA weirdly but for whatever reason that remains unclear he moved all the way from LA to Glasgow.

Your music is near enough impossible to classify. What did you listen to as a kid?
The first thing I guess I really obsessed over was crappy chart pop music. This was when I was about 6 or 7 and I would religiously collect compilations of chart dance music.

When did you first encounter underground dance music that wasn’t Top 40 bound?
I got in to hard UK rave music when I was maybe 11. Things like rave-y gabba and hardcore by people like DJ Sy and Seduction and Scott Brown that you would listen to on tapes that came in these huge tape packs. There was a rave seen in Scotland at that point but I was so young that I had no knowledge of it even existing so I didn’t really have any context to place all this music in but I was just so in to the music and loved it so much that I didn’t really stop to think about things like that.

When did you start DJing?
By that point I’d got my first pair of crappy belt drive turntables and I was also buying 12” records so I started making mix tapes of all this rave music that I had been listening to and buying. I would then sell them at school.

Where did you buy records back then? Were there specialist rave music shops in Glasgow at that point?
Not that I knew of. I just used to buy records in the Glasgow HMV. It had this amazing vinyl floor that was almost like a separate shop that had great stock and was basically as good as an independent record shop. It’s gone now.  It was in that HMV actually where I saw my first DMC video.

Was that what led you down the turntablism road?
Totally. There had been some scratching in the rave music that I had been listening to but it was more for effect and really fast without much technique. Watching the guys who were battling in that DMC video was pretty amazing at that age. I’d never seen anything like that before. The video also happened to be of the year that A-Track won the DMC when he was only 15, which was the age I ended up qualifying for the UK final. I saw that he was young and doing it so that was motivating and I just got way into Turntabalism and hip hop from studying that tape over and over again.

How did you make the jump from Ding to production?
In about 1998 or 1999 I got a Playstation, which came with a program called Music, which was followed by Music2000. Using those programs was my first experience of experimenting with actually making music and production. Music2000 had this feature where you could put audio CD’s in to the Playstation and sample bits of audio tracks which was pretty amazing to me at the time. I’d be sampling little drum breaks and melody lines and making songs. I was still doing DJ battles at that point but the production began to become the focus. When my family got their first PC, in about 2001 it just used to be in the living room and I got a cracked version of Fruity Loops and that was that. 

What do you use to produce now?
I still use Fruity Loops! I have used Reason and Logic but I’ve never found a program as immediate and intuitive as Fruity Loops plus I’ve spent so many hours in front of it that I just know it so well.

When did you start playing your creations out?
Back when the PC was still just in my parents living room and I couldn’t use it all the time I’d go to this internet café about 15 minutes walk from my house to use the internet there. It was this weird sort of hippy-ish community centre place where people would hang out and they would stay open until 3am on a Friday night and there was a guy who would play records. I used to go down there with my Dad and he asked if I could play a record or two and I ended up playing out there regularly on a Friday night. That’s shut down now as well which is a shame.

How did you play your tunes out, were they cut to vinyl?
At that point I was getting a few DJ bookings but mainly off the back of the DMC stuff so I was kind of expected to play hip hop which restricted what I could play plus the technology wasn’t really there at that stage to play mp3 audio out. I used to record stuff from the PC to minidisc and then plug the minidisc straight into the mixer with an audio cable if I wanted to play any of my own stuff.  In about 2004 though I started to really focus on production in the same way that I had focused on Ding and turntabalism up until that point. Production just became this all-consuming thing. I’d get home from school and just be doing it all night.

Was there a scene in Glasgow at that point?
When I started making stuff there was no real scene and I used to post stuff online on forums and pretend not to be me and see what the reaction was. I’ve never really felt that I make particularly far out music but a lot of the reactions that I got then and even now have tended to be a bit like “what the fuck is this?” There were a lot of good club nights in Glasgow but everything was quite segregated. And we could not have played the stuff we were making at those kind of nights so a couple of guys called Dominic Flannigan and Martyn Flynn as well as myself and a few others started a night called Lucky Me at a tiny bar called Stereo that held about 60 people.

How did you come up with the name Hudson Mohawke?
When I started posting tracks up online I knew that I would really have to come up with a name so myself and a friend had a competition to try and send each other the most ridiculous name possible via text message and Hudson Mohawke was the stand out.

How did the Warp deal come about?
A few people in Glasgow had a few of my tunes early on and they’d been playing them at after parties and stuff and one of the guys that works at Warp is a Glaswegian. He’d heard the tunes and really liked them so took them into Steve Beckett at Warp and just hassled him about it and it went from there. It was a label I had a huge amount of respect for but it seemed like this huge beast of a pinnacle so far above anything that I could achieve that I had never even really considered being involved with it.

Is it weird being on a label with such a sense of dance music history?
I’m a huge Boards Of Canada fan so it was crazy being on the same label as them.  I was initially totally over the moon but after it settled the reality of the situation was filled with far more pressure and weight of expectation than the dream. I wasn’t sure that I could put myself up there next to all of those artists without doing something new and exciting and different but after all the panic I had a realisation that they had approached me because they wanted me to do what I wanted to do. If you look at any of the great albums in the Warp catalogue I am pretty sure that Aphex or Autechre didn’t sit there thinking “I’m going to make a classic album”, it’s just how it happens. You can’t over think things; it’s best to just do what you do. 

GODFLESH INTERVIEW FOR VICELAND.COM

Hello Justin, what prompted the decision to re-convene Godflesh after all these years?

Hellfest were the catalyst for this reformation; they tried desperately for a number of years to get Godflesh to reform for that festival. It took some time for me to even consider it and go as far as asking Ben Green to do it. He responded so positively that it was inspiring and this prompted me to consider it too, and leave all the baggage behind.

What was it that made you specifically choose Hellfest and Supersonic as the scenes of Godflesh’s return?

They are two very exciting festivals, and Godflesh did not in its career, do that many festivals so they make for an interesting environment for Godflesh to play in. My only concern is volume levels these days are so controlled and minimal that it is impossible for GF to achieve the heights that it once did via suffocating volume, which could be possible all those years back.

Was the decision to play Supersionic a nod to your Birmingham heritage?

In some ways, yes. The organization begind the festival believe in Godflesh but the band only really played Birmingham frequently when it first formed. We barely played there after 1991!

Who else comprises the live lineup or is it just yourself and GC Green?

It is exactly as Godflesh was originally intended to be, and was for most of its existence: GC (Ben) Green, myself and machines.

How does it feel playing Godlesh material to audiences after almost a decade?

In some ways it has been bizarre. Largely we're playing to audiences who never saw Godflesh in the first place. That makes it all the more exciting though. It's hard now to say what Godflesh was after such a long break of almost 10 years. That is a longer period than Ben and I played together as Godflesh in the first place.

Is there any intention to record new Godlesh material?

There is some intention, but in practice it is a big question. I don't like expectation, since generally the larger the expectation the bigger the disappointment. I have new Godflesh riffs and ideas, but I have had for some time, even before the reformation. I am just unsure as to whether it should be considered seriously or not.

Will this reunion have any affect on the operations of jesu and your other ongoing projects?

No, not really. It's timely, due to the fact that I took some time off from releasing a lot with jesu at the rate I had been. There was a glut of jesu releases and eased back. For the last year or so I've been slowly writing the new jesu album, which is finally being recorded throughout this winter, aiming for a May 2011 release. So in some ways I have been able to let jesu take a back seat for now.

Has working on projects like Jesu and Final in the interim period affected how you approach the Godflesh material after all these years?

In some ways, yes. I haven't spent the last 8 years plus performing very aggressive or brutal material. Going back to the Godflesh sound required reaching back to those emotions, which was not in the slightest bit hard, it was just a case having to get to grips with performing in that context again. It took me some time to adjust to the way jesu would perform relative to Godflesh performances.

What can people expect from Godflesh’s show at Supersonic?

The Godflesh show that we always hoped to perform more often when we last existed; projections and minimal/maximal brutality. It should be every bit as claustrophobic as Godflesh was intended to be in a live environment.

FLATS RADAR FEATURE FOR NME

“People need to stop listening to Gang Of fucking Four” intones Dan Devine, rail-thin, tousled hair street urchin ring leader of the most excitingly raw and visceral mess of a band currently plying their trade in London. “Half a decade of raping the same record? Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand came out five years ago and people still think it’s acceptable to trot out an angular guitar riff and a dance-y bass line with a disco beat. It makes me fucking sick..”

Dan may be more than a little opinionated but fortunately Flats deliver the goods to back up the bluster and they formed a few short months ago intent on remedying the musical ills of the last 5 years. “We couldn’t see a single band out there that represented the things we wanted from a band so we came up with a sort of manifesto that we haven’t deviated from. The songs have to be fast, short and heavy and the vocals have to involve me screaming as loud as I can.” 

Do Flats consider what the manifesto has produced punk rock in essence? “Someone asked me if what we play is three chord punk and I said: “nah mate, it’s six chord punk”. I was taking the piss but it’s not a bad description of what we do: punk with something extra” says guitarist Luke Tristram. “Basically” continues Dan, when me and Luke lived together we bonded over Swans and Arab On Radar and these girls we lived with were always throwing parties and all these emaciated male model freaks would turn up. We’d stick on some Arab On Radar and they’d all leave. I want Flats to be the musical of equivalent of sticking Arab On Radar on the hifi and clearing the room of all the cunts so only the people who get it are left. That actually happened the other day when we supported Mark Ronson.”

Sending Mark Ronson fans running from the hills aside Flats aren’t lacking in ambition: “By the time we release an LP I want us to have 40 original  tracks. I hate bands that re-release the same track 20 times then release it again on their album. Fuck that, just get it out. For all we know this could all be over this time next year but if I’ve put out six records by that point I’ll be happy”. Considering the calibre of what they have already produced so should you.

FORD & LOPATIN NEWS PIECE FOR NME

When cosmic drone-synth explorer Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) and ex-Tigercity bassist Joel Ford fulfilled a childhood dream late last year of forming a synth-pop duo the last thing they imagined would hamper the project would be a face-tatted ex-affiliate of 50 Cent.

However, the pair have had to loose the Games moniker that served them so well on last years exceptionally excellent That We Play EP on advice from their label. 

Mexican Summer, which is home to the pairs’ newly minted Software imprint, advised Ford and Lopatin that the Games alias could possibly kick up a stink with Interscope-signed thug rap aficionado The Game who has recently switched to being known as just plain old Game.

“We were told Game was a little too close for comfort,” bemoans Lopatin over the phone from his new studio HQ in the bowels of the Mexican Summer complex in Brooklyn, New York.  “It was kind of a pre-emptive strike to avoid the legal muscle of Interscope as opposed to us having the guy beat down our door yelling at us to cease and desist thank God. That would not have been good”.

With the Games alias cruelly swiped from their paws Ford and Lopatin have decided to become known as, well, Ford & Lopatin.

“We actually wanted to come up with another band name but nothing felt as comfortable as Games for me so we figured we might as well just be ourselves. We’re definitely more Kruder & Dorfmeister than Hall & Oates though”.

Channel Pressure, the highly anticipated Ford & Lopatin long player is due on the seventh of June and Daniel couldn’t be happier to be releasing it via the duo’s own imprint: “We see Software more as a production imprint than a label per se. Mexican Summer have some amazing studio facilities in Brooklyn that they have been kind enough to give us the run of to work on both our own material and with other bands. After the F&L LP and the next OPN LP we’ll initially be focusing on smaller 12” and EP releases for folks like Sleepover and Laurel Halo but if the right artists come along we’ll be looking to release LP’s as well in the future.”

Here’s hoping that release schedule is not cut short by enraged gangster rappers or major label lawsuits.

COMPUTER MAGIC SXSW LIVE REVIEW FOR NME

Computer Magic
Malverde
14:00
18/03/11

Danielle Johnson may be a New York native but as Computer Magic her wistful and adorably endearing synth-pop may as well have been made for a woozy Austin afternoon a-top a breezy balcony to accompany slowly slipped margaritas in the sun.

Playing the White Iris Records party in support of her debut EP on the label Danielle took a rapt crowd through six mini-electro operas all of which could potentially be 2012’s synth anthems of love and loss.

While the Computer Magic material that has thus far been made freely available via Danz’s website has possessed a wonderful fragility at times bordering on glacial the songs took on a new life fleshed out live by a skilled band including dexterous drum accompaniment from Adam Green/Lightspeed Champion sticksman Chris Egan.

All eyes however could not help but be drawn to Danielle’s central performance, calmly eeking out melodic synth-lines from behind a petite organic while delivering powerfully understated vocals redolent of Kimya Dawson, another great observer of life’s little intricacies.

Beware Danielle’s deceptively coy and cute appearance, a monstrous talent lurks therein. 

Yemen Feature For Vice V8N5

This is a piece that I wrote the intro for. My colleague Bruno Bayley conducted the interview which I re-produce here just because it's really interesting.

HELL ON EARTH

Yemen has never been the most peaceful corner of the Arab world. Situated in the southernmost tip of the Middle East, just across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, it is the region’s poorest country. It is also one of the more heavily armed Arab nations: it is estimated that there are more than 60 million guns in a country with a population of 25 million. That’s two and a bit guns per person in case you can’t do the math.

The country’s only constant is civil war. Despite supposed unification in 1990, Yemen remains divided between the traditionalist north and the separatist south. But even by its own warring standards, things have been going a little bananas since 2004.

Yemen’s local squabbles, both separatist and sectarian, have, in fact, got so bad that they are threatening to destabalise the entire region. Everyone from Saudi Arabia to Iran, Egypt and Jordan have got involved and started lining up to back sides.

An ongoing conflict in the north of the country between Sunni Yemeni forces and Shiite Houthi insurgents has been bolstered by an independence movement in the south, led by rebel Yemen army militias disillusioned by the northern-based government. Among the leaders of the southern separatists is one Tarik al-Fadhli.

A veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad who fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, al-Fadhli and his supporters have been accused of wanting to establish a separatist, extremist Islamic state in southern Yemen. Since allied clampdowns in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it has long been suspected that southern Yemen is a key training centre for Islamic militants.

That belief was confirmed on Christmas Day last year when it was revealed that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who attempted to bring down a Northwest Airlines Airbus A330 over Detroit, received both his weapon and training from al-Qaeda cells operating in Yemen.

Publicly claiming responsibility for the attack, AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) asserted that it had been prompted by US air attacks on supposed militant targets in the region. This led to an escalation of western-masterminded attacks and AQAP retaliation recently culminating in the recent suicide attack on the British ambassador to Yemen in late April.

While the world’s media continues to train its sights on Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has silently opened up a third theatre in a war on terror that looks about as likely to end as their old favourite, the war on drugs. We decided to speak to Brian O’Neill to find out what’s up in a country with lots of guns, no natural resources and escalating wars both civil and international. Brian used to write and take pictures for the Yemen Observer so it’s safe to say that he knows more about the place than you.

VICE: How did you become so interested in Yemen? It’s not exactly a country that regularly features on A Place In The Sun.
Brian O’Neill: I have always been interested in the Middle East, I studied in Cairo and even in the Arab world and the world of Arab scholars, Yemen was always this exotic backwater. A strange land. As a younger person that appealed to my sense of exotic adventurism. As I studied it more and looked at its political, demographic and economic trends and its history I began to realize that this country was going to become really important really soon. Its systems were falling apart, its institutions didn’t really hold and there was a growing threat of Al Qaeda. It seemed clear that this country was not going to stay anonymous for long.

The coverage of Yemen in mainstream media seems quick to condemn the place as going to hell in a handcart. Can it really be that bad?
In some ways, and this might be because I am a contrary bastard, I tend to think people are underplaying the story. Almost every economic, climatic and demographic problem that a country can face, Yemen is facing. 50% of the population are under the age of 15 so there will be a generation of young men growing up without jobs or opportunities. I think the story that is most important however, and one that the media is not concentrating on the way it should, is the impending water shortages. By 2020 the capital could well be out of water and within the next decade we could have millions of people without water.

How did this water crisis come about? We’re guessing it wasn’t a case of too many people leaving the sprinkler on.
There are a lot of natural factors, but the main cause is that in the 60s and 70s the UN got involved in the way that Yemen collected its water. Those methods mainly consisted of collecting rainwater and storing it. The UN said, “don’t do that, its not going to work” – even though it had worked for thousands of years – and instead encouraged themto tap into the underground water tables. This quickly became a matter of whoever was richest digging the deepest and draining water for their own use. The inherent corruption in Yemen combined with the good, but ultimately misplaced, intentions of improving water collection by the UN has drained the water tables much faster than anyone could have imagined.

Aside from a potential complete lack of H2O what are the other major issues being overlooked by the media?
The rebellion in the south for a start. Obviously the Christmas bomber got everyone focused on AL Qaeda, and they are extremely important globally, but they are not massively important in terms ofYemen itself. There are two domestic rebellions going on, one in the North and one in the South. The one in the North got more attention initially because when the world started looking at Yemen in the wake of the bombing attempt there was still open fighting going on, which is exciting for the media. In that war the President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, dubbed his last battle ‘Operation Scorched Earth’ which was exactly what it sounded like. There was carpet bombing, villages being razed and hundreds of thousands of refugees.

That doesn’t sound so good. How about in the South?
The Southern issue was more political than anything. Yemen used to be two separate countries until 1990: North Yemen and South Yemen. The North had been a democratic state and south a Marxist state. The two unified in 1990 because they were both broke. There was a lot of tension, and a civil war between the North and South in 1994 which the South lost. President Saleh used a lot of Jihadis in that war who had just returned from fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and after they won he let the Jihadis sort of take over and rule the South.

So it became a little Jihadi colony?
Well, the people of the South were very much colonized and oppressed by their own countrymen. In 2007 there was a movement for more rights, but since then Saleh has cracked down again and it’s an open call for secession. It looks like they are lurching back towards civil war and that is the issue more than Al Qaeda. By focusing on Al Qaeda we are ignore the broader and more dangerous issues in Yemen. Our overriding interest has to be to keep Yemen from falling apart. By focusing on Al Qaeda we could actually accelerate Yemen’s breaking up and if the country breaks up it will become an incredible safe haven for Al Qaeda.

How deep has Al Qaeda sunk its tentacles into Yemen?
They are very involved in everyday Yemeni life but certainly not in the central government and mainstream of Yemeni politics. In fact they have pretty much declared open war on the central government. They have focused their efforts on infiltrating the tribal system on a local level by marrying into tribes and gaining local bases of support. Their numbers belie their strength. There are only 2-300 AL Qaeda in Yemen, but they are smart and patient and have been getting stronger over the past few years. It is interesting to contrast Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, al-Zarqawi’s group. Their goal was carnage, so it was inevitable that people in Iraq would turn against them, but Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula has not really made any attacks in Yemen or on the Yemeni people. So, though people might not actively support them, or agree with everything they say, at least they aren’t killing anyone. Unlike the government, who are.

What sort of poverty levels are we talking about in Yemen?
It’s Sub-Saharan-esque. In almost every poverty and developmental standard it is usually in the bottom five or ten countries in the world. There are not a lot of jobs, the economy is mostly based on oil, and that is running out.

Everywhere seems to be running out of oil. Is Yemen’s case more pressing?
It’s more dire than most. They never had that much oil to begin with as they are stuck at the shit end of the peninsula. Most of the oil is concentrated in the South, so the political situation there makes it much harder for the central government to get any money from the oil. In Yemen, every issue ties into at least two or three other problems that make it harder to solve.

There are also problems with piracy right?
Yes, and it’s getting worse. For a while it was concentrated off Yemen’s Western coast, close to Somalia, but now we are seeing a lot more piracy around the South, near The Port of Aden. I think what is interesting is that Yemen is so much closer to Somalia than it is to the Arab heartland. We tend to see things too simply. We connect Yemen with the Middle East, but culturally it is far closer to Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Ethiopia. When you see similar paterns of piracy in Somalia and Yemen, it makes sense, crime often follows the same links as culture.

What form of piracy is this? Is it the kidnapping and ransom type you hear a lot about in Somalia?
It’s mostly for ransom. But then you have a lot of smuggling routes that follow the same lines as the piracy routes. I think the smuggling of arms and drugs is more of a threat than actual ransom piracy. Yemen is a hub for international crime. It is geographically ideally suited to smuggling arms into war zones in the horn of Africa, drugs up through Saudi Arabia and it’s a major route for arms supply to terrorist groups.

Is there any meaningful effort being made by the West or international organisations to try and avert any of these impending disasters.
There have been a lot of conferences and there is the Facebook group sounding ‘Friends of Yemen’ who have meetings and talk about helping. We will see if that actually comes to anything but historically these talks don’t.

If things were to continues as they currently are how long do you give Yemen before it becomes a totally failed state?
I would say it could very easily happen within a year.
Would a total collapse make the country and even better base for Al Qaeda operations?
The huge fear is that the autonomous tribes now have connections with Al Qaeda, and they can use their safe-havens, without any government interference, to strike abroad. Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula needs space, but also some structure, and Yemmen’s tribal havens can provide both. They have already shown themselves able to strike at the heart of Saudi Arabia, and the fear is that a Yemen that can no longer harass them would be a country where the Saudis, or even worse, the West, feels they need to intervene militarily. That would make Afghanistan look like a cakewalk.