Future of the Left: Falco vs The Middle Class

If you’ve ordered the new Future of the Left album from the band’s website and received the legitimate MP3s in the meantime, we salute you. If you’re waiting for the actual physical release to savour one of the albums of the year, even better. But if you’ve illegally downloaded <i>Travels With Myself and Another</i> and are feeling a bit smug about it, frontman <b>Andy Falkous</b> would like a word with you

Feature by Andy Falkous | 25 Jun 2009

It surprises me that there’s even a debate around illegal downloading really, because it’s rather cut and dry for me. I can understand people taking something that they can get for nothing rather than paying for it, but what I can’t understand is people trying to justify it. By all means, if you’ve got away with it, take yer loot and run, but please don’t try to justify it to me.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, and I think I’ve discovered a way to defeat the pro-downloading argument. It’s to accuse everybody involved of being middle class. That is the best way of doing it, because nobody wants to be called middle class, and I speak as the son of teachers.

It just strikes me that it’s such a middle-class notion to believe that music should be available for free. To believe that, you probably come from a well-off family anyway. You just don’t get that way of thinking with people who are raised in environments where things have an actual worth, where a pound is a lot of money or where an income is valued and used for essentials as opposed to being broken up for a series of exotic foreign holidays.

It’s only middle-class hobby-band twats whose parents work in high finance who can afford to countenance music as a hobby when they put all of their time and effort into it. I’d like to see somebody sit down and try and have a conversation with a young Oasis about why their music should be given away for free and how they should just do it for the love of it. They’re not going to have that debate with them are they? Because they know they’re going to get headbutted.

I think that’s basically the best way; that reverse middle-class guilt is the thing we’ve got to play on in order to stop illegal downloading. Somebody sent me a link to this one particularly pathetic song that this Swedish guy had written in support of the torrent site Pirate Bay. It’s basically a song about how all music should be given away for free and believe me, if my music was that bad... well, I wouldn’t give it away for free. I’d lock it in the cupboard or send it into space in an Ellis rocket.

We have to try and take the debate away from an exciting word like ‘pirate’ which implies so much more of a forward, exciting, glamorous and brave role than simply what is in effect, theft.

But there you are.

Travels With Myself and Another is out via 4AD on 22 June.

http://www.futureoftheleft.com