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The Savage Eye

Lily Savage has been urging revolution in the UK, and she may well have a point

Eamonn McCann, 25 Nov 2010

We should listen to Liverpool’s Leftist leader Lily Savage.

Paul O’Grady was chattering on his Channel 4 talk show when the question of budget cuts came up: “The budget, you know, is alright if you’re not young, old, unemployed, working or on benefits. We should take to the streets. We should be vocal in our fight against oppression. We should let them know that we are not taking these draconian cuts lightly. We should fight for the rights of the elderly, of the poor, of the sick, and of the little children. Vive la revolution!”

What sensible person could disagree with that?

How do you trash a chandelier?

Charlie Sheen, star of the so-sexist-it-can’t-really-be sexist US hit comedy series Two And A Half Men went on a coked-out rampage in a New York hotel in the course of which, according to the Guardian, “a chandelier was trashed”.

How? Did he short-circuit its wiring with a fire-extinguisher? Pelt it with bottles from the mini-bar? Trampoline on the bed to grab hold and swing across the room like Tarzan of the Apes?

Reminds me of the last trashed chandelier story I know of, recounted by Keith Richards (although not in his just-published piss-poor autobiography Life.) Mickser arrived back in a Toronto hotel from a tryst with Margaret Trudeau, wife of Canadian premier Pierre, to find the room reduced to tatters and ruin and a young woman dangling from tinkling clusters of crystal and light as she swayed in an elegant arc across the ceiling while a gallimaufry of Stoners and assorted hangers-on whooped and hollered demented approval.

“Oh no!” gasped the rubber-lipped, slim-hipped sultan of strut, fluttering his hands wildly, evidently distressed, “Not the chandelier, please, not the chandelier!”

It was then that I realised Jagger wasn’t really rock and roll.

It was more recently I cottoned on to Keef.

Bring back Wee Willie Harris.

Returning over the mountain at an ungodly hour on a hellish night from seeing the National Theatre of Scotland’s sensational Black Watch again, we were stopped at a checkpoint outside Drumahoe. A stern-faced police-woman thrust her head into the car: “ID, please.”



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Eamonn McCann

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