[billybottle]

Inspired by the original Don’t Just Vote power trip, Billy Bottle & The Multiple have a new touring show for 2016, The Other Place. More details at: http://www.billybottle.co.uk/the-other-place/4592286231

Do hope to see you at one/some of these tour dates to continue the conversation...

For the original backstory please enjoy the blog below. (Tip - start at the bottom first!).

Best wishes

Billy, Martine and Brother Ed x

[billybottle]

It’s official - The Power has been delivered to Westminster by milk float in the shape of a bottle. 

Thanks to everyone we met along the way, all the people who shared their stories, people who met us at stations, fed and housed us, sang and played with us. It’s been real.

Now it’s time to watch the results come in, regroup and have some soup. Then, tomorrow... well, you know what to do.

[billybottle]

You know what it day it is! It’s the day we vote. It’s the day when we deliver The Power to Westminster. So here’s the route we’ll be taking and the places we’ll be stopping to play along the way.

We rendezvous with the famed milk float at St Pancras and our first stop will be at King’s Place. From there, we head down to Exmouth Market, Fleet Street, St Pauls Cathedral, the Royal Festival Hall and Roots & Shoots - an inner city eco-training centre in Lambeth.

Finally, at 7pm, we’ll make our arrival at Parliament Square, circling the square seven times in the milk float before we disembark and perform the ritual of Delivering The Power to Westminster.

Come and join us! We’ve put times along the way, hopefully these will work out. We look forward to seeing you.

[billybottle]

Today we vote. We do what we can to influence the mix of MPs that will be making their way to Westminster. But we don't let anyone tell us that democracy ends at the ballot box, that we've played our role for the next five years.

We didn't get democracy by voting for it. We got it because people came together and questioned the idea of how the world works that everyone who thought of themselves as powerful took for granted. We got it because people came together and organised, taught themselves, spread the news from below. We got it because people risked their lives and sometimes lost them, or went to prison.

This isn't another pious argument for how grateful we should feel that we have the right to put a cross in a box on a ballot paper today. If there's one thing that's clear from all the voices we've heard on our journey over the last seven days, it's that democracy is broken today in ways that aren't going to be fixed through the ballot box. We don't know how it's going to be fixed, we're not sure anyone else does, but it starts with people coming together and questioning the assumptions of everyone who thinks of themselves as powerful.

Today we vote. We use the ballot box, not to build utopia but to limit the damage. And then, tomorrow, and every day after that, we get on with the uncertain process of regrowing a democratic culture from below. Because that is the only place that it has ever grown from.

Vote like it matters. Act like it doesn't.

[billybottle]

Here it is, the route for our last day travelling eastwards, Wednesday 6th May... We've made our way from our home on the farm in Devon through all these different worlds and now we're running into the sea. So, before we turn for Westminster, it's time for a little circuit of the other end of England, the Kent coast, the cliffs of Dover, Deal and then the Isle of Thanet - Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Margate - where Nigel Farage is fighting to go to parliament for UKIP. Then we follow the curve of the coast round to Herne Bay and end the day at Whitstable.

So join us, if you can, as we wind our way through the last day of the election campaign. As always, the times we'll be hopping off the train at each stop are marked on the map.

[billybottle]

The other deficit

Five days of rushing slowly across England, thirty-five railway stations, thirty-five high streets or marketplaces or seafronts – and still there’s more of all of this to come. One song, over and over and over again.

We’re starting to get an inkling of what it might be like to be a politician, making the same stump speech at every stop on an endless itinerary. But we are not trying to convince anyone. If you’re trying to convince anyone, you don’t go out dressed like this.

Each time we get off the train at a new place, we find ourselves sniffing the air, sensing for clues as to what it is like to be getting on with your life in a place like this. And the clothes, the music, the harmless foolishness of our little gang seems to open up a line of contact, so that within twenty seconds people are talking to us about their lives.

In Brighton and Lewes, the air smells green, and then we cross some unmarked threshold and in the next few towns another reality takes over. Listening to the way people talk, we find ourselves starting to understand why they are drawn to UKIP, not because the facts or the arguments add up, but because in this reality it could sound like they make sense.

Repetition is boring. Repetition is endlessly fascinating. Keep repeating something beyond the point where it starts to get slick and sometimes you break through to another level you didn’t know was there. The song is the same in every place and in every place it is different. The events that run into us take us by surprise.

In Trowbridge, we started playing and police came running round the corner. There had been a theft of a piece of meat from a shop. A shopkeeper came running towards us, she thought we were just shouting in the street, shouting like a thief. Well, we were shouting in the street. A few minutes later, Bill was listening to the story of a man who had been homeless for twelve years as he talked about his father’s addiction and how he died. At the end, there would have been no point in words. The two of them stood there in the street, holding each other, crying.

The song is the same in every place, but something changes, grows, deepens. Maybe what we’re doing is charging up the song, like we have to keep charging our phones whenever we get a few minutes near a socket. All of these encounters, conversations, stories are charging up this song we started out with and the song is carrying them.

Tomorrow, we head out east from Canterbury and loop through the constituency of South Thanet, the closest we will have come to any of the big stories of this election. Who knows, maybe we will bump into Nigel Farage and sing for him. (We nearly got to sing for Caroline Lucas in Brighton on Monday night.) That’s a thing about singing for people, you can do it in a way that is nothing like an endorsement and nothing like an attack.

Then, on Thursday, we arrive in Finsbury Park to pick up the milk float and drive it down into the heart of London.

We’re going to deliver The Power to Westminster.

When we started saying that, it was a joke, but as we kept joking about it, the thought deepened on us. We’re still figuring all of this out as we go along, finding out what we’re doing by doing it, but it’s starting to seem like this journey culminates in an ironic ritual: the delivering of The Power to Westminster, to remind the politicians that The Power doesn’t belong to them, not really, not on polling day, or even on any other day.

The Power is loaned to them by the people, and they can hardly dare to acknowledge how grudgingly that loan is made, how overdue the repayments have become.

This is the other deficit, the one that no one is making pledges about, and someday the people may call in the loan.

[billybottle]

Snatches of The Power as it makes its way Westminster-wards.

[billybottle]

Wow, is it Day 5 already? 28 stops behind us, another 21 ahead of us... so here is the route for today, Tuesday 5th May. We’re setting off from Brighton this morning and calling in at Lewes, Eastbourne, Bexhill, Hastings, Rye and Ashford, ending up in Canterbury.

So look out for our little gang of pilgrims riding the rails and rocking up on high streets, marketplaces and seafronts along the route. As usual, the times on the map show when we should be arriving at each stop, so you can even come and meet us off the train!

[billybottle]

What kind of Power would you actually want to have?

All along this journey, we’ve been feeling an aching gap between the cold anger, disillusionment, exhaustion that nearly everyone we talk to has when they talk about the political system and something else, something that doesn’t come so easily into words, but is a kind of faith in people, in people’s ability to muddle through, to somehow go on making life work, finding opportunities for kindness in the middle of all its absurdities.

Maybe this all has something to do with what we mean by power? A friend of ours, Anthony McCann, talks about the idea of a ‘politics of gentleness’. Watching the news about this election, gentleness and politics don’t really seem like words that belong together.

But what he says is that when we think about power, we usually think of it as the ability to manipulate, control or dominate other people. And since those are all pretty nasty ways of treating people, and since most of us don’t actually want to treat people in nasty ways, that way of thinking about power makes it something we wouldn’t want to have, which makes us powerless.

So what if there were other ways of thinking about power? What if there were other kinds of power that exist, all the time, so much part of our everyday lives that we take them for granted? Anthony talks about power as “the ability to vary the experience of oneself or others”. As an example of this gentle power, he talks about what it’s like to be a parent holding a small child. Maybe like the mum in this photo, holding her daughter’s hand as they cross the street, outside Cloth Road Arts in Trowbridge (stop #16 of 49).

And maybe it’s this kind of power that people feel, that they have some kind of trust in, even if it’s not easy to give it words? And maybe this is The Power that we ought to be taking to Westminster?

[billybottle]

On Saturday, as we travelled up through Somerset, Chee joined us with her camera and filmed lots of our adventures and encounters. Here are a few of the conversations we got into along the way. There's lots more on our YouTube channel!

[billybottle]

And here we go with the route for Day 4 of our rolling conversational democratic jam session, Bank Holiday Monday, 4th May... We leave Southampton first thing tomorrow and potter along the south coast to finish the day in Brighton.

As usual, we've posted the times we'll be arriving at each station, in case you'd like to come along and meet us, like these students did in Southampton tonight... Amazing!

[billybottle]

A tune that this country is humming under its breath

When you travel slower, the country gets larger.

Stopping off at so many places along the way, Exeter is a really long way from Newton Abbot, Bristol is a really long way from Exeter. You realise that each of these places is a world, the world of the people who live here and do their best to make life work in the conditions in which they find themselves.

Seeing news clips of the party leaders climbing out of helicopters or stepping off intercity trains, it feels like they are whizzing up and down a different country, a smaller country, a country where most of the places we are visiting don’t matter very much.

Travelling up through Somerset yesterday, we got off the train at Highbridge & Burnham-on-Sea and went looking for a spot to play. At the Boathouse Cafe, we asked where we could find the centre. “Well, this is the centre!” said Denville. And the way he said it, it felt obvious: at this moment, this cafe, this table at which he was sitting, this was the centre, so this was where we were going to play.

A few times over the first two days, we’ve found ourselves playing at cafes like this, and they do feel like centres, places where people come to be human together, to eat breakfast, drink a cup of tea, hang out, talk about what’s going on, acknowledge each other’s existence. It’s like they are centres of power, but a different kind of power to the one that the politicians are fighting for.

Every conversation we have is different. But there are echoes that keep coming back, that keep coming back.

People start off curious and cautious. They see us coming a mile off, the technicolor outfits, the huge #dontjustvote stickers on our instrument cases. Sometimes they recognise us off The Voice.

They want to know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and that means we have to keep asking ourselves those questions, figuring out the answers as we go along.

They want to know what we’re selling, what we’re trying to persuade them of, and we tell them really we just want to start conversations, to meet people, to find out what’s going on in this country now, what this election actually means.

When they start talking to us, they usually start with a flat statement, something definitive. “I never vote.” “They’re all the same.” “There’s no point, is there?” But as they realise we’re actually interested, the way they talk changes, something else comes out. You can hear how much they care.

Everyone we meet feels disillusioned, disengaged, disenfranchised. They all feel like they’re not being heard. A lot of them aren’t voting. Yet they also believe that we as people do have power, they just can’t see a route to change that goes through the ballot box.

We’re not pretending we’ve got any answers. We’re definitely not pretending that wearing fluourescent tights and playing a song in the street is a way to change things. But it’s a way in, a way to start meeting people, catching little snatches of a tune that this country is humming under its breath, that nobody’s quite remembered the words to yet.

Yesterday afternoon, we found ourselves in the Refresh cafe in Bedminster, so deep in conversation, we had to run off at the end to catch our train. As we left, we could hear Simon calling after us. “Without small cogs, the big cogs ain’t gonna work!”

[billybottle]

So many great conversations on Day 2... Here are some snatches of Billy talking to Dave who we met when we played next to his food stand in Taunton, our first stop this morning.

[billybottle]

The #dontjustvote crew reached Bristol at the end of Day 2 and guess what was waiting for us...

[billybottle]

Before we go to bed, here’s the details of our route for tomorrow, Sunday 3rd May, which is none other than Day 3 of our rolling democratic jam session. We’ll be setting off from Bristol in the morning and turning south-east at Bath, stopping all along the way to Southampton. 

The times on the map are when we’re due to arrive at the stations along the route. At each stop, we’ll be looking for somewhere to play and looking for chances to get talking to people. 

Come and meet us off the train and be part of our adventure as we wind our indirect way towards Westminster, taking The Power with us...

[billybottle]

How much of The Power have you got?

Along this winding journey towards Westminster, we’re talking to people about who has The Power - on polling day and every other day. One way of looking at this is to see how much your vote is worth.

In some of the constituencies we’ll be visiting, the outcome of the election is so certain that your vote is almost worthless. In others, everything hangs in the balance and every vote counts.

Before you decide what to do with your vote on May 7th, check out the Voter Power website - stick in your postcode and it will tell you about the constituency you live in and how much of The Power you have.

[billybottle]

We chatted to Denville and his son Laurence at the Boathouse Cafe in Highbridge.

Denville hadn’t voted for ages. Just got out of the habit, he said.

Laurence said all the parties have something different, but not one of them has something he could totally agree with.

We talked about how it would be in a perfect world.

Denville said for it to be perfect, we’d all have to be Christians and change would have to come from the heart.

Highbridge, stop #10 of 49