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1999 Lifehouse interviews part 5
Subject: PT Radio 5 i/v (part 1)
transcribed by FionaP in Dec 1999
I: Can you tell us the plot or some of it?
P: Yeh the plot is - about ... a family living in sort
of fairly rarefied
times, not quite like today perhaps - in an extreme -
extremely exaggerated
view of the world today where - where theres a
terribly polluted world
around them and - they are farmers, they live up in
the North of Britain and
their daughter runs away from home, shes a teenager
and she runs away from
home and the story is really about the father
searching, going down to
London to find his daughter, and it turns out that
what shes doing is shes
going to attend a rather subversive music event which
is a pirated event
which is being run outside the main organised,
Government-controlled, media.
I: mmm
P: In other words outside the auspices of (puts on
posh voice) the BBC
kind of thing. But this isnt meant to be about the
BBC, this is meant to
be about the Internet, this is mean to be about the
Grid, about world media,
this is meant to be about - you know, and Im not
citing them as enemies in
any sense, but theyre good examples: people like Ted
Turner or Bill Gates
or Rupert Murdoch, the people that control the media
network that controls
the world.
The idea was when I was - in the seventies when I was
younger - I foresaw
what - today - what - the way that we live and the way
that satellites and
cable and everything else would connect the world up
and I was worried that
we would forget how to have fun.
I: So when people meet up do they actually meet or are
they on a computer?
P: In the story what happens is that you - that you -
you simply follow the
characters as the converge on this concert, you dont
hear the concert.
I: Is it a concert on the Internet - on the Grid?
P: Yeh
I: Right which is ...
P: .. but people have to show up to it too.
I: Ah
P: .. there have to be some people at the concert and
some people on the
Grid.
..
I: Why did it take 30 years to come about?
P: You know, I dont think its really taken 30 years
to come about. I
havent been, you know, waiting 30 years for this to
happen. I think if -
if anything has changed its simply that time - events
have caught up with
the idea. You know, when I first mooted the idea to -
to Universal
Pictures, they gave me the money to make a film but ..
the whole story was
based on the notion that computers, this is in 1971,
that computers would
link the - link the world with entertainment which
would then become more
than entertainment, it would become, you know, a kind
of life narrative
which would start to interfere with peoples spiritual
development and would
start to make everybody the same - this was my fear...
I: mmm
P: .. everybody would become the same.
I: Right
P: And er - and of course in 1971 if you look back
there was no such thing
as a computer - there were computers but they were as
big as the Houses of
Parliament, you know, and what they would do is they
would go (computer
voice) Hello and it would take, you know - do you
know what Im saying?
I: I do, yes.
P: And whats happened today is that - and also that
people were kind of
saying a time when the world is interconnected by
computers? Preposterous.
http://www.igtc.com/archives/thewho/1999/Dec/msg00211.html
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