27: Feargal Sharkey: Teenage Kicks, Bobby Sands, and saving our rivers

0:28Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. Sign up to The Rest is Politics. back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans, or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash podcast. Terms apply. A KFC tale in the pursuit of flavor. The holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's$4.99 chicken pot pie. Warm, flaky, with savory sauce and vegetables. It's a tender, chicken-filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls whatever that means the colonel lived so we could chicken kfc's chicken pot pie the best 4.99 you'll spend this season prices and participation may vary while supplies last taxes tips and fees extra welcome to the rest is leading with me alistair campbell flying solo today without rory stewart who is uh logistically challenged shall we say between uh between airports but i'm delighted to be joined by somebody who you'll have heard if you listen to the rest of politics question time a few days ago uh and who has got a very very interesting history we'll talk a bit about your childhood we'll talk a bit about your career very successful career as a musician but the reason why you're on leading is because in recent months in particular you've become a really prominent and significant voice in a very very important cultural political social economic debate and that is water so welcome Virgil Sharkey.

2:07Hello Mr Camel thank you very much and thank you for the glorious praise and wise words and insight all of it completely untrue of course and I will be now I don't think you're going to be bashful and retire quietly back to my home in North London. I don't think you will, because I think there's a wonderful quote from Roosevelt who said, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Yeah. Now, I get the impression that you know a lot about the water industry, that you do your homework, you do your research, you're mildly obsessive. Damn. But more importantly, you care.

2:39Yeah. Now, I guess your character is key to this. You've obviously got a personality that you're driven and if you decide upon something, you go for it. I just want to go right back to the beginning. You ended up living most of your life in England, but how much of a Northern Irishman do you feel? I would listen distinctly because it's what created me. And it is very Freudian, but invariably tell me about your childhood. And in my case, that was quite an interesting childhood. my father was chairman of the Labour Party in Derry when there was such a thing yeah do you think by the way do you think there should be again oh I think there should be oh absolutely and that's ironically enough when my father passed away the Irish Times did this quite big obituary and even in the 1950s he spent huge amounts of time in this ultimately futile effort of trying to reach out to the Protestant community on the simple basis that everybody needed to bury the hatchet of sectarianism because the industrialists in Northern Ireland were using that division to separate the working classes, to diffuse their ability to make a cohesive, strong argument about pay conditions, holiday pay, maternity pay, housing and everything else.

3:57And it was used to exploit the working classes in both communities. Now, as it turns out, I could argue that my dad was clearly 40 years ahead of his time and trying to make that argument. And he never made the inroads to it. He was also branch secretary of his local union, the electrician's union. I'm still traumatized and probably spend years in therapy about being taken as an eight, nine-year-old child to a meeting, a union meeting. And I'm in a room with 400 other men and my father. They're all referring to him as Brother Sharky. and as a confused eight year old I'm going who the hell are these people I've never met in any of these you're not my brother you're not my uncle you're not my dad's brother I have no idea who you are why are you calling my dad brother Sharky the truth is in the Sharky family it wasn't my dad was the political powerhouse like all good Irish matriarchal families that would be my mother my mum was massively motivated about the civil rights movement massively motivated about trying to preserve of the Irish language and culture and the arts and was friends with people like Brian Freel and Shannon Casey and all kinds of people.

5:06And it was my mum who, on the morning of April the 9th, 1969, demanded that the whole family climbed into the car. The dad drove us all to the opposite side of Ireland, where as a family, we took part in the People's Democracy Civil Rights March between Belfast and Dublin, protesting against injustices to the Catholic community in Northern Ireland. So you'd have been 12? I was 10. You were 10 then, okay. 10, 11. Now, just a minute, and just on your names, we know you as Fergal Sharkey. You're actually called Sean Fergal Sharkey. Sean. Oh, bloody hell. You're called Sean Fergal Sharkey, right? And just tell us who you're named after.

5:47If anybody knows a song, an Irish song called Sean Southamgarial. Go, sing it, sing it. I'm afraid not even the Restless Politics podcast can afford that excessively modest fee. Sean South and Fergal O 'Hanlon were killed attacking a police station in Northern Ireland in January of 1957, a year before I was born. My mother, clearly without the aid of Ultrascan or other aids, clearly decided that if her newborn child was going to be a boy, she was going to name him Sean Fergal in honour of two dead IRI men. Now, what might that tell you about my mother's politics? Well, it gives me a fair indication.

6:25that she wasn't maybe as committed to the Labour Party cause as your dad. And how do you feel about that? Oh, well, listen, conversely, it's one of those things that I grew up in a household where it's extraordinary thinking about it and it is incredibly Freudian, but I hope it does answer your question. There was nights in my kitchen that the local plumber, the electrician, the housewife, the local poet, the local schoolteacher would discuss bringing down the national government in Northern Ireland. And I watched as a 10, 11, 12 year old child I watched the local housewife, electrician, plumber or electrician, school teacher Bring down the bloody government to Northern Ireland Or play a role in achieving that So I grew up in a house where, well, anything's possible The other bit, my mum organised this festival called Fish That I call him Kill Which was all about preserving the Irish language and culture and everything else So other nights there'd be people having mad philosophical arguments about the merits and disdains of how much Seamus Heaney tried to replicate William Butler Yeats and maybe he should get his own gig together.

7:30So when I reflect upon it, you just go on an extraordinary household and an extraordinary opportunity to grow up in. One extraordinary life they've led. And would you say you share the basic politics of your parents? Oh, listen, without exception. There's no way around that whatsoever. And I still have this very simple belief that society has an obligation to protect the vulnerable. And that's kind of my opening game in any game of politics whatsoever. And so when did you leave Northern Ireland? That was the early 1980s, I think, 83, 84. It'll come as no surprise that the early undertones, we tried quite hard to kind of still live there.

8:10I think we were incredibly conscious that, oh God, are we going to be that classic little band, has a bit of a hit, and that's it. You're out of there within five minutes, and the next people see of you, you're in some national newspaper surrounded by champagne bottles and lots of cash. And we tried really hard to just be those kids back in Derry. But by the early 1980s, and particularly when I was clearly focusing on going out to try and make my own records, invariably that was going to mean a move to London. And just tell me a little bit, I'm fascinated in the way bands come together in the whole creative process.

8:44I mean, just give me a flavour of what being a young, want-to-be professional musicians was like at that time. It was a completely random act of coming together where there was literally two brothers and a couple of their friends. 15, 16, 17. Oh, let's be in a band. Okay, but we've got no gear. And by the way, it doesn't matter because nobody can play anything anyway. Oh, but we need somebody that can sing because we're not any good at it. Oh, well, I know this bloke in school called Sharky. He's on all these feshes and all these Irish singing competitions. he wins loads of medals I'll ask him and maybe he'll come and sing and the first time I turned up and met the other guys that were to become the undertones little did I know that all the kit they had the guitars, the amplifiers, the drums they actually owned none of it they completely borrowed every bit of it and as it turned out nobody could play a thing so what are the chances in the big universe we all live in that five random kids with no outward talent ability or background could just come together and within two years of created Teenage Cakes.

9:52How did that work? It was literally people just sitting around going, well, I've got this tune. I've got this idea for something. What do you think? And ironically enough, we were always driven, curiously at the time, by criticism and by people going, you can't do that. See, there's more Freudian. It's just occurred to me. At the time in Ireland and around where we grew up, they were kind of tribute bands so there was a local band that could play the whole of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd absolutely not perfect and that's what they would do every Friday night was get up in a pub and they would play Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd, absolutely not perfect they looked at us and went well you can't play, yeah well you're rubbish and that would just kind of make us go and practice even more and then we realised well they can't play their own songs so you know what, we're going to write songs that we had no idea what we were doing so we just made it up as we went along and it is just one of those random acts of creativity you've been around it enough Alistair you can put five people from creative backgrounds in a room and nothing will happen it'll be the most boring hour you've ever spent of your life but you just put five different personalities in and for some own reason the way they interact and relate to each other suddenly this magic occurs and suddenly we the original idea was thanks to a guy in Belfast called Terry Hulley who ran a little record shop who let us borrow 100 quid to pay for 8 hours studio time so one week we went and spent 4 hours in the studio recording we went back a week later and spent another 4 hours mixing it by the way we had no idea what we were doing and I still to this day think I was standing there going well a bit more of the blue knob please but I've no idea what the blue knob actually bloody well does and if you've ever seen the movie and if you haven't Good Vibrations a movie it's about Terry yes that did happen we're there in the studio and everybody else we're just doing our thing and everybody else in the studio sitting there listening to Teenage Kicks being recorded for the first time just going oh my god we've never heard anything like this and we're just going yeah but we're five kids from Darien this is what we do Brilliant and you were on Top of the Pops Yeah on the night that Bobby Sands died Yeah So what did your mum think of that?

12:11Talk about your life going in a different direction. I know, listen, completely. And that's, if you now go back and look at the footage, you'll see that some of the band were wearing black armbands. Ah. See, the way you say, ah. Were you? I wasn't, but some of the band did. Right. Why did you not? This is one of the most iconic developments within the whole piece, well, the whole Troubles, was this Bobby Sands, Hunger Strike. Oh. He became a symbol. He dies. Listen, without question, unfortunately in Irish history, it was just repeating a game that had been played out any number of times before.

12:40so was it a monumental moment in Irish history yes it was and that's invariably you get into those conversations of well we can not do it and would that be a protest but they'll just put somebody else on and by the way for a three minute slot on top of the pops there'll be 50 ,000 other people out there'll take that in which case nobody even knows you've done it or do we do it and without mentioning anything to the BBC do a couple of the band turn up wearing black armbands and the BBC just film it and broadcast it they had no idea of what was going on until it was explained to them several days later.

13:13All right, Fergal, lots more fascinating stuff in your life to come after a break.

13:22How do you feel about what's going on in Northern Ireland now? I mean, you know, just track back a bit. How have you seen Northern Ireland develop? How do you feel about it now? Well, you see, ironically enough, Ireland's kind of an extraordinary place where the Republic of Ireland 30 years ago 85 % of the population of the Republic of Ireland would go to Mass on a Sunday and priests would get up in pulpits and tell 85 % of the population what to do and we would all do it so here's the thing in 30 years the Republic of Ireland became the first country in the world at a national referendum to pass equality of marriage legislation has amended the constitution not once but twice to legalise abortion and contraception and as we speak at this very moment in time has been governed by the openly gay son of an Indian immigrant and an atheist poet who was re-elected for a second term as president.

14:11Well, what the hell were you people doing? I left you alone for five minutes and look what happened. So it's true and it's part of where politics fails and it brings us back to Westminster. Is it divisive and is it an affront to democracy in the modern world that there is not an assembly in Northern Ireland? Yes, there is. That is an outrageous situation and it's one that needs to be resolved and I will point the finger both at politicians in Northern Ireland. But I might add, Alistair, if you haven't seen it, and in fact, I think at this point it should be compulsory viewing for every single politician, certainly in Northern Ireland, if not most definitely in Whitehall.

14:51Once upon a time in Northern Ireland, the first episode, there is a clear lesson and reminder that's where we've come from under no circumstances should we have any ambition to go back there. But equally, I'm afraid I have to say it, Alistair, you end up tracing the world back to Whitehall and number 10 and the complete disregard and scant regard that number 10 and this government has shown towards Northern Ireland and the people of Ireland and the future of Northern Ireland whether as part of United Ireland or not but they have just shown little if any interest if not utter disdain and disregard and again a plague of locusts in all of the houses for that.

15:29Northern Ireland is possibly on the age of going quite through a few difficult years and I would be really resentful to see that happen yeah yeah so just give us a sense of what your life is like at the moment when it seems to me every time I turn the radio the telly on they are talking about water in reality I actually had retired from life 10 years ago and that by the way is an extraordinary thing for a man to be able to say that at 55 I kind of just went that's it I'm happy to hang up my boots and I've made my contribution to life and I'm going to retire. And then by osmosis and accident, found myself engaged in something.

16:06I have a huge passion for fly fishing. I became chairman of the oldest fly fishing club in England. You've now shed most of your listeners at this point. And I suddenly realized that here was two and a half miles of river in Hertfordshire that for 185 years, A group of men and women with an interest in fly fishing had looked after and preserved and 185 years later that river was about to die. It was suffering from eutrophication. It had become nothing more than a stagnant pond. And this is a chalk stream, one of the rarest ecosystems on the planet. I, like a lot of people, thought, well, this is easy because there's a big regulator out there called the Environment Agency and Parliament set them up and gave them all these powers and control and I'll just huddle off and have a quick meeting with the Environment Agency and go, this is dreadful, you need to do something about it and I could then get on with my life.

17:04And I think it was about 10 minutes into that first meeting when my BS detector went off and went, oh my God. And then I realised that I was going to have to go and pick a big fight. It was that specific stretch of water that triggered this whole campaign. Yes, to give you a little indication of this, southern England is unique. There are about 225 chalk streams on the planet. They're a complete freak of geology. And think 50 to 75 million years ago when London was sitting somewhere off the equator and we were still joined in northern France. And there are 225, 85 % of them are here in southern England and most of them right now are teetering on the brink of extinction.

17:51because of the way we've treated them, abused them and exploited them. And the one that the Amo Magna looks after, we have been in charge of for 185 years. It is one of the last remaining places on the very age of London where you can still find a breeding sustainable population of wild brown trout. I know that seems like a silly thing to say, but let me put it this way, I suspect we might come on to it. there are within the M25 about 200 miles of river all tributaries of the Thames I have walked every single mile of every single one of those rivers not that long ago they would have been full of hundreds if not thousands of populations of trout, salmon, sea trout we've decimated all of them, we've killed them all off, we've brought them to the exit of extinction, apart from one little two and a half mile stretch in Hertfordshire, and rather curiously I thought that might be worth saving Yeah, so why haven't you saved the rest, Vogel?

18:49Well, I'm doing my best right now, which is why, fully enough, I guess we're here, where the short version is I ended up working with a charity, taking the Environment Agency pretty much to the steps of the High Court, simply to get them to do the right thing. Now, I will admit that at this point we've resolved our issues with the Environment Agency. There is more water and plentiful water going down that river than we've seen in decades. But that experience of having to put the very government agency charged and given responsibility and the legal power to oversee and protect those rivers, having to take them to court just to get them to do their job, that kind of pricked my curiosity.

19:34and as I sometimes explain it, that gave me an itch and foolishly, stupily, naively, I scratched that bloody itch and every time I scratched that itch, I just end up with an even bigger itch. So what's the biggest itch at the moment? Oh, simple fact, at a national scale, there is not a single river in England that is in good overall environmental health. Every single river in England is polluted and it's our fault. And you scale that back, most of that, or at least a large deal of it is being driven by the water industry and this is an industry that is supposed to provide water supposed to collect and dispense with an appropriate manner our sewage but as we have now discovered and I hope I may have made some small meagre contribution to help the public understand this is an industry that has made off with 72 billion pounds worth of our money from our pockets have left these companies in 60 billion pounds worth of debt now spent 7.5 million hours over the last three years dumping sewage into our rivers, decimating whole landscapes and ecologies, and has now created a situation where, believe it or not, I can't believe I'm saying it, London is now number nine on global cities most likely to run out of drinking water.

20:51We're now on a list, along with the likes of Cape Town, Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Jakarta. I should say, by the way, back to my point about nobody cares how much you know to the night, You're sitting here without a note. You kind of do seem to me to know this stuff inside out. What do you think it says about our politics that it's taken, you know, false molesty aside, it has taken you in a way to bring this to the head? Oh, well, the simple truth of the matter is we have a regulatory system that has failed. And you are right. That makes me quite furious. Within the next 24 hours, there will be yet another hearing and another select committee in Parliament calling in the chair and chief executive of the regulator, the leaders of Thames Water, and holding another inquiry.

21:38My argument is, why are we calling in the chair and chief executive of Ofwad? We need the board in there. They're the public appointees. They're the ones appointed by the Secretary of State to act on behalf of government and therefore Parliament, and indeed to then act on behalf of the general public. They're the ones that set the policy. They're the ones that set the strategy. why are we not holding those people to account for the decisions they've made on our behalf and not some helpless chief executive if you had to sort of i hate the concept of apportioning blame but if you had to apportion blame for the mess that we're in just go through the various culprits well you have to listen you have to start for me there's a very simple thing and i'm very happy and i can compartmentalize things quite quickly and simply with the water companies make an awful lot of corporate greed involved, or as Jonathan Ford from the FT refers to as the water industry is just a legalised rip-off.

22:30Absolutely. But that's why the regulators were there. And we've not got one, but we've got two regulators overseeing the water industry, Ofwatt and the Environment Agency. And both of them, and I say this as a former regulator, both of them have been the most catastrophic failure I can think of. The impact that we're now going to be faced as society is there is a catastrophic amount of money that now needs to be spent repairing the sewage system, securing London's water supply. I suspect we taxpayers and customers are going to end up picking up the tab for that incompetence. And if we have any kind of will at all to ensure that you can, as I know as a passion of yours, walk into the nearest river and go swimming in it without being confronted with the ugly underbelly of our sewage system.

23:17And I do mean wet wipes and sanitary products and contraceptives, then we now have another, even bigger amount of money to be spent. And all of it is now probably, directly and indirectly, going to be picked up by the taxpayer and by the bill payer. And all of it actually boils down to nothing more than utterly incompetent, catastrophic failure of regulation. Okay, so that says to me that you're basically saying the regulations failed, the companies are greedy. What about the original decision back in 1989, privatisation? Could you see any merits in that at the time? Well, listen, personally speaking, no.

23:53But then, as you know, I come from a socialist background. Well, here's the thing. 30 years later, England, so far as I'm aware, England is still unique in that we're the only country in the world that has an absolutely 100 % privatised water system. What does that tell you that there's not a single country anywhere else on the planet that went for that model? Clearly, there may be some kind of inherent flaw of the whole design and application of it. There's any amount of joint partnerships with local authorities, national governments, private sector, that England is the only country 30 years later with a completely 100 % private sector.

24:30And clearly it's an experiment that has catastrophically failed. And even the Financial Times said that last weekend. This is an experiment that's failed. What do you make of the current, I'm assuming Therese Coffey is the minister in charge. I'm just laughing give me your assessment there well listen the best deception I can give you is and I did it it's a badge I wear with honour and pride if you go and do have a look at my Twitter profile you see I've actually quoted on there chunters on Twitter quote in quotation marks Theresa Coffey Secretary of State for the Environment UK 2023 so that's clearly what Theresa thinks of me and my little efforts have you had any meetings with her at all no no listen I had one brief meeting four or five years ago with Rebecca Pye.

25:19And Alistair, you ask about kind of my encyclopedic knowledge of these things. I very quickly realised from my early interactions, going back four, maybe five years ago, every time I spoke to somebody from government, spoke to somebody from the Environment Agency, or the industry. And I'm trying to say this as diplomatically as I should, and maybe not as diplomatically as I really should. I quickly realized that at best I was being given a half truth if not a downright fabrication of what the reality of the event and situation was and that's why I had to go and spend hours digging this stuff out by instinct and just replicating the instinct you have as a journalist and many others you just know there's something going on here and you're just going to have to keep pushing until you find it so whenever I sit down and people go oh well it's because we've got this Victorian sewage system I'm really sorry, we may as well blame the bloody Romans for traffic jams on the M2 and the M25 We don't have a Victorian system Oh, but government's got to spend£56 billion fixing this Okay, that's over 28 years That's amongst 11 water companies That works out at£181 million per company per year To give your listeners a bit of context Just before Christmas, Thameswater declared 493.5 million pound profit in six months.

26:44Now compare the supposed government grand scheme investment of 181 million pounds a year against Thameswater's half a billion pound profit in six months. Just to put it into context. Do you feel you're making headway or do you feel you're banging your head against a brick wall? Oh, no, I'm happy to admit it. And I know some people in Whitehall find that I feel I'm being disruptive, but I'm genuinely not. I've lost control of this. Government's lost control of this. The water industry's lost control of this. If you're not aware, three weeks ago, UKOV did a poll. 69 % of voters think that the water company should now be nationalised.

27:21And if I remember correctly... Do you think that's feasible, by the way? Well, it's not because we can't afford it. You accept that it's economically pretty impossible. I think we can assume right now, and since we probably share a number of acquaintances, I think that if there is a change of administration at the next election, there's one certainty we can actually all depend upon. The economy is just in such a catastrophic state that government will be utterly focused and just trying to maintain some basic public services and functions like education in the NHS. And by the way, that nurse that needs a pay rise.

27:55Are you really going to explain to that nurse that you've just given several more tens, if not hundreds of billions of pounds of the public's money? So where does your campaign go? Oh, well, for me, it's very simple. Right now, it's all about the campaign. And right now, we have the situation where Thameswater is now teetering in the bank of bankruptcy. There are four other companies, to my certain knowledge, are not that far behind. We now have the opportunity to now start dictating the shape and future of those companies and personally speaking, I think the legislation's already there. Government already has the power.

28:29The regulators already have the power. We need now to sit down with these companies and the shareholders and the bond managers and go, here's how this works. You're going to feel a lot of pain for the next 5, 10, 15 years. But if you agree to what we're going to suggest, you will end up with successful debt-free companies facing a profitable future and it won't have cost the taxpayer a penny. So you have government control without government ownership? I'm going to give you the wherewithal for it Section 18 of the Water Industries Act 1991 Whoever drafted it Predicted this very situation And it was a very insightful judgement Theresa Coffey, the Secretary of State Could fix most of this this afternoon With nothing more than a stroke of a pen She's had that power since the day she took office The question actually becomes Why hasn't she actually used that power And that authority Ok well Theresa if you're listening You can come on and explain at any point you like And we might even get Fergal back from the show Now, you mentioned earlier that you had experience as a regulator.

29:28This is when you kind of went into the music industry. Just describe what you did. Well, ironically enough, I did go off into the music industry. I got to about 30, I think. And as I sometimes describe it, I began to have this reoccurring nightmare of waking up one day to discover I was the wrong side of 50 with receding hairline and a ponytail. Yeah, that's good. And still deluding myself that I might be back on top of the pups this week and thinking, it's not a good look, Sharky. It's really not. Grateful that I'd had the career I had. The Undertones, the thing with Vince Clark and the Assembly, my solo career, there's three careers more than most people ever get close to.

30:09So I thought, again, naively, stupidly, arrogantly, at 30, that I could make a whole career path choice jump and still end up doing something reasonably productive and interesting in life. So I went to work for record companies. Along the way, because of my fly fishing thing, I managed to contract Wiles disease, which nearly killed me, but not quite. That left me quite kind of debilitated in the mid-1990s. And again, I'm not blowing smoke in your direction, Alistair, but as it turned out, while I was recuperating from all of that, incapable of going back to work full-time, just physically not capable of it, And at the time there was a Labour government who had introduced and was beginning to implement a set of recommendations by a man called Lord Noland around the whole idea of propriety and public life and who tore apart and re-examined the whole issue of public appointees.

31:02And it was the then Labour government that actually advertised openly competitive application process for board positions on the radio authority. Now, would this also be a government that you would exempt from some of the criticisms of the commitment to Northern Ireland? Yes. Thank you. You're welcome. I can get into that one on another occasion. So you then became? I became one of the people that were responsible for regulating the commercial radio industry in the United Kingdom. So as it turns out, and I kind of, it's a bit late now, early in my little challenges, my little approach to the water industry and stuff, I clearly made quite a lot of effort to make sure that nobody actually vaguely knew.

31:43I might actually know something about regulation at the point I had worked, but it's not out there. So I would like to think that when I openly and furiously criticize the likes of Offward and the Environment Agency, I would like to think that I can do it from a position of some strength, knowledge and experience, having done that kind of job myself in the past. And then you were also CEO of British Music, right? UK Music. So how does that work? Is that about getting them the money they deserve from all the different... Yeah. Actually, again, it goes back to the Labour government. And this is not a kind of love-in for the Labour government, by the way.

32:18It's a great, great government, though. It is the way things work. Rory says this all the time, you know, Labour government was fantastic. The then Labour government had been making overtures for the music industry for a number of years, going, you know what, we obviously think the creative industry is utterly fantastic. And we want to do everything we can to try and help them out. because when it comes to music, film, fashion, design, writing, reading, the UK punches way above its own weight in the international stage and is glorially recognised and admired for the contribution it makes. So as a government, we want to try and do something to help support and make sure you're getting everything you need from a government.

32:55At the time, the music industry was full of its own warring parties and I very loosely describe it as traditionally all of the recording artists hate the record companies and the record companies all hate the publishers and the publishers all hate the lawyers and the lawyers all hate the songwriters and the songwriters all hate the managers and everybody all hates their agents and on and on and on. And I was tasked by the industry to basically put the 12 warring sectors in a room to help them develop consensus, to help them create an ambition and a vision for their own future and help them to bring that differentiation.