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If I could be locked down in a rock star home – the kind we’ve been glimpsing this year via social media – it would contain Matt Bellamy, Tom DeLonge, B.o.B., George Clinton, and Jim Corr as the live-in landlord. We’re talking Conspiracy House. A mansion stuffed with alien watchers, kabbalah mystics and exposers of shadowy one-world power cartels.
How brilliant would that be? Imagine the wild nights spent crushing up red pills to snort lines of pure TRUTH, watching G10 footage frame by frame to spot the sideways lizard eyelids flicker or dismantling your iPhones to find the nanobots that plant subliminal psychic orders forcing you to sign up to Amazon Prime. There’d never be a dull moment, grilling the in-house Alexa for a confession of her CIA involvement, trying to catch the secret mind control vapours released when you prick a ready-meal and rewiring a stack of Wiis into a quantum processor you hope might punch a hole clean through the simulation code so you can speak directly to the programmer, like some kind of 12th dimensional techno-Karen.
And here comes Ian Brown, snogging the postman, kicking the barricaded door down and gobbing in the iodine purified survival tanks shouting, “NO LOCKDOWN NO TESTS! NO TRACKS! NO MASKS NO VAX!” (which is what he recently said on Twitter). Further tweets pointed a finger at Bill Gates, who according to tinfoil-hatters brewed up Covid in his secret underground laboratory – a Laboratoire Genocidier, if you will – and unleashed it on the world in an evil plot to reduce the number of people who can buy his softwa… doh!
Now, conspiratorially-minded pop stars have always been the best to hang out with. Every quote is paranoid gold, every story full of mystery and intrigue and, Jesus, have they got the best drugs.
We want our stars to be a little bit crackpot and open to outlandish philosophies; they’re superhuman beings with the mystical ability to emotionally manipulate people from afar using only a laptop and a kazoo, so it’s only natural they’d also be able to communicate psychically with extra-terrestrial races or instinctively see through complex global military plots to destroy enemy economies with undercover black ops codenamed Operation Gender Reveal Inferno. They’re jacked in to something higher than us, where the music comes from. They’re magic.
The pandemic, and the vast number of online quack theories around it, has naturally swollen their ranks. Madonna recently informed her 15 million Instagram followers that a vaccine had already been produced but was being kept from the public. In recent interviews I’ve had generally sane and sober musicians question how strange it was that Covid emerged just in time to influence the US election. Wiz Khalifa even expressed the idea that 5G towers are capable of spreading the virus, presumably unaware that the only contagion that scientists have ever confirmed to be spread by radio wave is Lewis Capaldi.
Which is all good fun until it starts putting actual lives at risk. In normal circumstances, the only advice from Ian Brown you’d act on would be where to get the most effective auto-tune apps, but in the middle of a crisis where a life-changing bad decision is just one Thrinder tap away, high-profile voices can have an amplified effect. A new study claims that over 75 percent of shop workers have been abused for asking customers to socially distance or wear a mask; some have even been spat at. In April, it was reported that up to a third of Americans will refuse any vaccine. Even if you’re prepared to face Covid bare arsed at a Smash Mouth gig with an immune system as pure as the driven snow, this isn’t the time to be encouraging all the other idiots to do likewise.
The coronahoax brigade claim that the Covid ‘plandemic’ is an imaginary scam perpetrated by (checks notes) every single doctor in the world in order for Bill Gates to get a surveillance/population control chip into everyone’s arm, possibly primed to induce cardiac arrest the second you become too poor to afford the new Xbox.
“#researchanddestroy”, Brown suggested, so I did, and found that the microchip theory largely stems from false stories spread by Christian anti-abortion groups and far-right activists about Gates funding projects to test dangerous contraceptives and tetanus vaccines on women and children in Africa to suppress population growth. Lesson: if someone comes at you with a Covid vaccine that has to be administered through a needle the width of an Um Bongo straw, run a mile.
It’s always been a quibble of mine that, while it still costs a couple of grand to buy a computer that can fit my entire Magnetic Fields collection on it, even Bill Gates could supposedly afford eight billion microscopic nano-spies. And if he’s so keen on knowing where I am post-pandemic, it’s far cheaper to just assume I’m in the nearest pub. Honestly, Bill, we’ll all be in the pub. For for ages. Just come down, you snoopy bastard.
The NO MASK part of Brown’s argument is particularly idiotic. Yes, the coronavirus molecule itself is small enough to pass through a mask, but they’re clearly effective in catching most of the droplets the virus hitches a ride on. Word is that David Blaine is in training to become the first person on earth capable of coughing out pure Covid.
So while it might be amusing to watch Ian Brown get caught up in the Infowars, for Christ’s sake don’t entertain any of his nonsense. Mask up, stay at home, get your jab when it arrives and hopefully we might beat this damn thing in less time than it takes The Stone Roses to make a sub-par second album. Don’t believe the TRUTH.
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