ChristopherWhite.info

Current methods of producing biofuels release so much carbon that it could take hundreds of years for them to make any greenhouse gas savings, a recent study has found.

Research led by David Tilman from the University of Minnesota has shown that whether biofuels offer carbon savings depends on how they are produced. Converting heavily vegetated land such as rainforest, savannah or grassland in Brazil, the US and southeast Asia can release between 17 and 420 times more CO₂ than the annual reduction in emissions provided by using biofuels in place of fossil fuels.

Growing demand for alternatives to petroleum is increasing the production of biofuels from food crops such as corn, sugarcane and soybean, with both agricultural land and native ecosystems being converted to biofuel production. The soils and plant matter on this land are large stores of carbon, and together they contain almost three times as much carbon as is found in the atmosphere. Converting the land to grow crops for biofuel manufacture releases this as CO₂ via burning or decomposition.

After these initial emissions, there is a prolonged release of greenhouse gases as roots and branches decay. The amount of CO₂ released over the first 50 years of this process is the ‘carbon debt’ of land conversion. Biofuels made from crops grown on converted land can repay this carbon debt if the net greenhouse gas emissions generated by their production and combustion are less than those of the fossil fuels they replace, but in many cases this may take centuries.

Tilman and his colleagues estimated the time taken to repay the carbon debt of biofuels produced from various crops and habitats. They found that only two would pay off their greenhouse gas emissions in under 50 years – sugarcane ethanol and soybean biodiesel, both grown on converted Brazilian Cerrado savannah, have repayment periods of 17 and 37 years respectively.

Most repayment periods are far longer, rising to an estimated 420 years for palm biodiesel grown on converted tropical peatland rainforest, as the required drainage causes additional emissions due to peat decomposition. There is also a 48-year repayment even when converting farmland that has been under the US Conservation Reserve Program for 15 years, as such systems gradually recover their carbon store.

In fact these figures may be an underestimate, since the researchers assumed cleared land to be in a fixed state, whereas it could still be accumulating carbon. In this case, the debt would be increased by loss of future carbon storage.

The production of biofuels must release as little stored carbon as possible if they are to successfully mitigate climate change. Biofuels made from plant waste, or native perennial plants grown on abandoned agricultural land, create little carbon emissions and offer immediate reductions in greenhouse gas generation, as well as reducing the displacement of food crops that causes the price of food to rise.

However landowners may prefer land clearance that results in greenhouse gas emission if they can make a profit producing biofuels but do not receive payments for carbon management.

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RENDITION (15)
Dir: Gavin Hood
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Omar Metwally, Yigal Naor, Alan Arkin, Peter Sarsgaard
Out now, 120 mins
****
For me, one of the most jaw-droppingly horrifying moments of post-9/11 cinema is Britney Spears’ CNN interview with Tucker Carlson, as used in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. “I think we should just trust our President in every decision he makes,” she says, the blank-eyed, gum-chewing epitome of apathetic yoof.

With that in mind, Reese Witherspoon is perfect for her character in Rendition. Given that her most memorable parts to date have also largely been slightly vapid, Britney-like everywomen – Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama, Rachel’s sister in Friends – what her appearance here immediately suggests is: this could happen to anyone.

‘This’, of course, is extraordinary rendition, the euphemistic term for the practice of abducting terrorism suspects and shipping them off overseas to somewhere where inconvenient trivialities such as actual evidence don’t really matter. Or outsourcing torture, if you like.

We get a bilious taste of this as Egyptian-American chemist Anwar El-Imbrahimi (Metwally) is plucked from arrivals on his way back to Washington DC from Cape Town. He’s hooded, bundled onto a plane, and taken to an unspecified North African country to be left in the hands of their secret police, headed by Abassi Fawal (Naor), and CIA observer Douglas Freeman (Gyllenhaal). Meanwhile, his worried wife Isabella (Witherspoon) does everything she can to find out what’s happened to her husband, leading her to a confrontation with the official responsible for rendition, Corrine Whitman (Streep).

Films critical of the US government, often in the guise of its security services, are nothing new: from Enemy of the State to the Bourne trilogy, they’ve been satisfying Americans’ inherent mistrust of authority for at least a decade. It’s far less common, however, to see such a large amount of criticism of a specific administration or policy, as is happening with the recent slew of anti-Bush films. They deserve it, naturally.

El-Ibrahimi, on the other hand, doesn’t. Though much of his torture mercifully takes place off-screen, scenes of the bound, naked Egyptian being variously beaten, locked up in a tiny lightless hole and then electrocuted are still rather grim. Appropriately, Freeman becomes so uneasy with the interrogators’ methods that he intervenes, quoting Portia in The Merchant of Venice for good measure: “I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak anything.”

If a CIA officer with such high scruples seems eyebrow-raisingly unlikely, a Shakespeare-quoting one perhaps stretches the limits of credulity almost to breaking point, as though on a rack itself. But Gyllenhaal – himself a vociferous supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union – puts in an admirable performance, his portrayal of a man wrestling with his own conscience building on the same from Brokeback Mountain.

Corrine Whitman has no such qualms about sending a man abroad to be tortured, and Streep’s turn as a CIA higher-up is the kind of role the expression ‘ice queen’ was invented for – she makes Judi Dench’s M in the Bond movies appear positively cuddly. And yet, in a way, she’s also a weak link.

Her justification for extraordinary rendition is that: “There are upwards of 7,000 people alive in Central London tonight because of information elicited in just this way.” While it’s not hard to imagine that it’s commonplace to hear this kind of self-satisfied response to complaints about derogation from due process, such a facile argument does the debate no favours.

Whether information could have been gathered any other way is never considered, whether torture can ever truly be justified never discussed. If the issue were really such a no-brainer there’d be no need for Rendition ever to be made.

Yet Whitman is presented as morally unambiguous: she is doing what she believes is the right thing, in order to protect - that old canard - ‘national security’. Greater implicit criticism is reserved for Senator Hawkins (Arkin) and his assistant, Isabella’s college friend Alan (Sarsgaard), whose principles call for them to help, but who refuse through fear of being smeared as ‘Bin Laden lovers’.

Likewise, the final twist on some of the possible consequences of torture, though both unexpected and thought-provoking, is a little too knowingly clever, but at least it makes the initially confusing parallel storyline involving Fawal’s daughter make sense.

These minor gripes, however, are merely scratches on the surface of an otherwise well-polished film. Despite perhaps being over-simplistic, Rendition is an engaging and important story, and, given that it’s already being dismissed on film website imdb.com as ‘liberal propaganda’, one that will get people talking – maybe even in the Spears household.

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Meet London’s new stunt-riding teacher

Bira Nicolella pulled his first wheelie aged 24, a young guy messing around on a Honda motocross bike in his native Brazil. Twenty-five years later, he’s still riding, and in July will open his own stunt riding school in London, the first of its kind in the UK.

While other schools only teach students wheelies – and some of them only wheelie launch techniques – his new institution, simply named the Bira Nicolella Motorbike Stunt School, will also coach riders in how to perform endos, burnouts and donuts.

When his Enfield stuntground opens for business, it will be the fulfilment of a long-standing ambition for Nicolella – a school of his own in the city of his dreams.

With the growing popularity of stunt riding and the potential to attract interest from the UK film industry to get his students movie work, Nicolella is excited by the school’s prospects. Good riders are paid up to £4,000 for 40-minute shows in arenas such as Donington Park, Knockhill and Brands Hatch, while the riders doubling for Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible 2 and Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies each took home $100,000 paycheques.

“Because the sport is growing so fast, it helps riders get confidence,” says Nicolella. “This course is going to help a lot of people – and it’ll inspire stunt riders of the future.”

His journey from São Paulo to the UK has taken in three continents and one previous school, while Nicolella has changed nationality to get here, taking advantage of Italian grandparents to be able to live and work in the EU.

Moving to Europe for the larger fees and prize money available is common for Brazilian riders, including a particular inspiration for Nicolella, AC Farias, who had helped the sport grow in popularity in Brazil before leaving in 1992, later becoming World Champion in 1998.

Farias recognises the need for new riders to have an instructor, but isn’t sure that a stunt school will have many takers. “It’s good if people begin in the right way – it is a dangerous sport,” he says. “They certainly need to learn correct brake techniques. You don’t really need to go to a school, but it’s helpful to have someone to give you advice, you know? Many people don’t like to go to a school – they just want to get out and try things.”

Nicolella spent nine years learning how to perform motorbike stunts, at first mastering wheelies on his own and going to copy tricks from trial sport and freestyle bike events, eventually creating tricks of his own. After becoming proficient enough to perform, Nicolella set up his own team in 1995, the Radical Performance With Bikes. He and six other riders travelled from arena to arena all across Brazil in “a kind of motorcycle circus”, packing everything into a bus – including the bikes. The team would perform choreographed tricks for crowds of 5,000 people.

“It was like an air display team,” enthuses Nicolella. “It was something different for them. When you see bikes on the street, you see them in the right way, what they were built for. But when you see what we did it’s different – it’s very enjoyable.”

As the leader of the team, he also gained useful experience developing the choreography, as well as contacting companies to get sponsorship, the media to advertise performances and event organisers to sell shows, all of which would come in useful when he came to set up his own schools.

After six years of touring their home country, two of Nicolella’s riders, Odair Salmaro and Little Laugh, travelled to Switzerland in the summer of 2001 to compete in the European Stunt Riding Championships. Although it was their first international competition, they came third and fourth respectively. Their success bolstered Nicolella’s reputation enough for him to move to the US later the same year, where he set up his first school in Atlanta.

Nicolella ran the Wheelie School for two and half years, and although he then only taught students how to do wheelies, he claims to have helped increase the sport’s popularity in America. “I helped get many Americans into the sport,” he says. “It’s growing really fast now. There are a lot of championships everywhere.” Stunt riding has since become a staple on Sky Sports, even featuring on the channel’s advertisements, and there’s a subculture of amateur stunting on busy public roads – though Nicolella discourages this.

“The championships have been attracting more and more people into proper arenas,” he says. “I encourage riders to be safe, and to keep their audience safe – after all, if a rider shows he’s professional then his career as a stunt rider will grow.”

Bored with America, Nicolella returned to touring, travelling across Europe for a few months of 2004, as he had covered Brazil previously. He then returned to his native soil at the end of their European tour, but quickly became frustrated with the state of the sport in his homeland.

“There’s a lack of organisation there,” he says. “If you go to the US, to a freestyle motocross competition, you can see the sport is very organised. In Brazil we don’t have this organisation, although we do have other things – organised teams doing choreography.”

In early 2005, Nicolella left Brazil and travelled to Italy to finish the process of obtaining Italian citizenship that he’d begun during his European tour. Taking advantage of European Union employment laws, he immediately upped sticks and moved to the UK that November. “As soon as I had the Italian passport in my hands I came to London,” he says.

That had been Nicolella’s intention when he had originally applied for citizenship of Italy – he had harboured a desire to live and work in London for even longer than he had been riding motorbikes.

“It was a dream my whole life,” he says. “I thought, ‘I love the language, I love the people, I want to be there’. I had heard all sort of great things about the city.

“It’s going to be a pleasure to do what I know, and what I like, in a place I’ve always dreamed of living in. It’s a dream come true.” We should all be so lucky.

Classes at the Bira Nicolella Motorbike Stunt School are £160 for a one-day course, with bikes and protective clothing provided. See www.biranicolella.com for more details

POSTSCRIPT:

The opening of the school has been delayed until summer 2008

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Digital technology means anyone can produce unregulated journalism or PR from a laptop or a mobile phone. Do journalistic ethics, professional standards and regulation have a role in the multimedia future?

Only on the internet could a call for civility be greeted with a torrent of invective — and that’s exactly what happened this month. Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly, who coined the expression “Web 2.0”, dared to suggest that abusive commenting on blogs perhaps wasn’t the best way to conduct public debate, and the blogosphere, in turn, was markedly Not Pleased.

Or rather its most vocal section wasn’t — the very people, of course, at whom Wales and O’Reilly had directed their missive. But to suggest that all bloggers behave in the same way, or that “the blogosphere” is a culturally coherent space home to only one type of discussion, is a mistake.

Bloggers’ comment policies are almost as varied as their political views — even among bloggers who have found themselves elevated to the punditocracy. Tim Worstall and Oliver Kamm both started out blogging, and both regularly contribute to the Times’s comment pages, yet the former encourages debate both on his blog and across blogs while the latter has no comments section at all.

Kamm responded to Wales and O’Reilly’s proposed code of conduct by seizing the opportunity to denounce the entire medium, writing in the Guardian that political blogs are “error-strewn, insular and parasitic” and that they “tend not to enhance but to poison healthy debate”.

It’s an argument almost as old as blogging itself. Hypertext innovator Mark Bernstein warned against letting standards slip in May 2005, commenting: “Sloppiness and second-rate thinking damages the blogosphere.”

Yet perhaps they’re wrong. Individual mistakes shouldn’t damage the entire medium any more than, say, Jayson Blair’s notorious journalistic fraud on the New York Times should affect the newspaper business as a whole. But bloggers themselves are susceptible to having their mistakes revealed, and as pointed out by Frank Fisher — the most prolific commenter on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog — it can happen quickly. “Blogging isn’t just print journalism on-screen: it’s journalism plus,” he says. “It can provide sources, illustrations, and further reading and verification — and it is fast.”

This has meant the professionals having to shape up as well, of course. “Journalists like me have had to raise our game, knowing that a factual lapse will be pointed out within minutes,” admits Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. Repeated “factual lapses” — or, perish the thought, deliberate misrepresentation — can quickly kill a reputation. Amateur bloggers are at greater risk of this than professional journalists, not only because they lack much of a reputation to start with, but because of the one-upmanship and point-scoring that pervades the blogosphere, the tendency for many bloggers to act as a personal Private Eye.

Just one example is the ongoing, relatively high-profile spat between Tim Ireland of bloggerheads.com and those he accuses of censorship, anonymous comment bullying and denial of right-to-reply — in particular Tory blogger Iain Dale and the popular Paul Staines, who writes under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes. Ireland and several other left-leaning bloggers have recently created an info-site warning of Dale and Staines’ alleged wrongdoing.

A similar tactic may be useful for public relations. Professional blog consultant Jon Buscall recommends that businesses run a blog alongside their usual website. “A well-judged weblog with quality content would be an excellent way of tackling online crap written about you,” he says. “Rather than trying to deal with the boo-boys who use the net to savage people, companies and products left right and centre, a weblog would allow you to tell your side of the story.”

But there will always be those who try to employ more underhand methods. The website information-revolution.org, a campaign against Google’s dominance of the search engine market, purported to be run by a small, independent, activist-type group. But a “WhoIs” search showed it to actually be administered by Profero Ltd, the company handling the marketing for the rival Ask.com. This fact, naturally enough, was soon spread across the internet — at the time of writing, Google returns 177,000 sites referring to the connection between the two. It’s a tangled world wide web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

Because of the easy availability of information on the internet — and because there’s always someone watching — mistakes or malice don’t stay hidden for very long. In a sense, the readiness of net users to point out the cock-ups or wrongdoing of others amounts to a kind of self-regulation. Faced with this, there’s an almost Darwinian position for ethics and standards: those with them will thrive, while the rest are, eventually, left behind the herd, their credibility destroyed.

(This is the second assignment for the Reporters and the Reported module on the Cardiff diploma. See the first here. Other than the quote from Frank Fisher, I plundered the web for these.)

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How far is political journalism to blame for public cynicism and disengagement? Can longer-form magazine journalism reverse the decline in public interest in politics? Does the internet open up the possibility of better and more varied political debate? Where will magazines and magazine journalists fit in a multimedia and highly competitive world?

BBC Magazines’ next major launch will be a politics and current affairs publication, in development under the working title News Brief.

If it avoids the licence fee controversy that eventually caused the closure of their last news weekly, the Listener, in 1991, the new magazine will be seen as just as trustworthy as its highly respected parent company – an advantage in a world where political journalists are only marginally more trusted than the politicians they’re supposed to be holding to account.

Michael Bywater, a former Independent on Sunday columnist and Cambridge University classics teacher, believes this mistrust not to be due to political journalism per se but to the negative image that a certain type of reporter gives of the industry as a whole – to a failure of language that describes the ‘good guys’ and the bad in the same terms: ‘journalists’.

“Eventually, like ‘men’ in extreme feminist discourse of the 1980s, the words take on their negative connotation almost exclusively,” he says. “I spend much of my time in journalism and the words ‘Press’ and ‘media’, even to me, carry the second-order signification of a cynical wet-lipped sleazebag destitute of moral sensibility, of a narrow-eyed and decontextualised opportunist.”

Magazines, however, aren’t dealt as harsh a hand as newspapers. By being aimed at a tightly defined readership and engendering a sense of community within it, magazines enhance psychological “familiarity effects”. People and things – and publications – familiar to a person become liked to a greater degree than those which are unfamiliar – and trusted more.

But this bonding with the reader is a double-edged sword: there is a danger of simply pandering to readers’ point of view and actually discouraging debate and re-evaluation of prejudices.

The New Statesman – a flagship example of magazines’ comeback, having reached a 25-year sales high following last year’s redesign and relaunch – provides a pertinent illustration.

Responding to an Economist feature suggesting that Fair Trade foods might perpetuate poverty, the New Statesman’s Christmas issue answered: “What rot. When the champions of wealthy corporate concerns express dismay at the way you are spending your money, you can be sure you must be doing something right.”

That’s an argument, is it?

They fare little better on the web. At the time of writing, political editor Martin Bright’s blog has attracted just three comments across 10 posts, and the magazine’s columns a maximum of three each – in Kira Cochrane’s case, zero. By way of comparison, Cochrane’s three posts on the Guardian’s group blog, Comment Is Free, have 200 comments between them.

Comment Is Free stands out over most group blogs in that it has contributors of every stripe imaginable, representing a broad spectrum of opinion. They’ve gone out of their way to avoid the community model that usually applies even more to the web than it does to magazines (whether by chance or intent, site editor Georgina Henry has no prior experience of working in either medium).

However, most group blogs – both those belonging to magazines and the best of the amateur sites – follow the form of either having writers who come from the same point of view or who want to talk to the same audience. Debate is more often than not light, or provided by intentionally contrarian ‘trolls’, deliberately provoking the majority of the readership.

It’s a more extreme version of magazines’ reinforcement of pre-existing attitudes. As the disillusionment with newspaper journalism has led a substantial part of the readership to feed their interest in politics from magazines and the internet, the public may be better informed than ever, but it does little to improve the level of political debate.

Overt agendas are precisely what have opened a gap for News Brief. As it’s the BBC, it’s necessarily politically neutral overall. Former New Statesman editor and media columnist Peter Wilby believes this neutrality will mean that the new launch isn’t a major threat to his old magazine, instead providing a non-partisan publication sitting in between right- and left-wing ones.

“It would certainly mark a BBC weekly out very clearly from the New Statesman or the Spectator and, in the days of the Listener this was widely regarded as a very reasonable triumvirate,” he says. “But I’d guess The Week would have cause for complaint.”

News Brief’s target audience will be those who don’t want to know what the point of view on a particular topic will be before they’ve even read the article – additional magazine readers, some ‘defecting’ from mistrusted newspapers but not other magazines.

So the good news for magazine journalists and publishers is that they can thrive simply by doing what they’ve always done: giving the reader what he wants. But improving political engagement? “It’ll take more than a few magazines,” says Wilby.

(Feature written for the Reporters and the Reported course that forms part of the Diploma at Cardiff University. I did interview Peter Wilby, but I pinched that Michael Bywater quote from his blog.)

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Are bloggers geeks talking to themselves, a challenge to newspaper columnists, a democratisation of the media or a valuable research tool? They’re all of these, and more

Columnists were finished. Bloggers were going to kill them off. They admitted it themselves: Michael Bywater wrote on his own blog that, “I fill my Column Stomach (it’s a bit like the Pudding Stomach, but requires columnists to fill it) from the blogosphere now. The newspaper, as arbiter and distributor of Column Stomach Food, is no longer of great significance.”

And why should they be? All that’s required of a columnist is the ability to construct a coherent argument and to write entertainingly - and a willing publisher.

Now that anyone can be their own publisher, shouldn’t paid-up commentators have been lined up against the wall, a victim of bloggers’ social-democratic revolution?

It hasn’t quite happened like that. What we have instead is a tentative intercourse between pros and amateurs that affects them both - but not how anyone might have expected.

Though it took a while for newspapers to get a foot in blogging’s door, it seems to have largely paid off. The Times’s Comment Central has just overtaken Guido Fawkes as the most-visited political blog in the UK, and the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (CIF) is by far the largest group blog, with around 500 contributors.

There are two major advantages for the papers. The first is that it’s cheap. The Times pays non-staff bloggers per reader comment, while the Guardian pays £75 for direct commissions or posts that make the “Editor’s picks” - the rest are pro bono.

The second, primarily applying to the Guardian, is that they’ve stolen a number of bloggers away from their own sites, and their traffic with them. When the average web user only regularly visits five or six sites, such a protectionist policy is an excellent way of ensuring that their own is one of them.

Far from trying to compete with the mainstream media, plenty of bloggers were eager to obtain that legitimising stamp that writing for a newspaper’s site provides.

But what would this do for the high-power columnists, who have found their privileged position challenged for the first time?

One of the first comments on CIF seemed a reasonable prediction: “Is this the end for columnists? They’ll have to raise their game now that there is a free market.”

And not just a free market, but ordinary readers able to instantly challenge them for the first time: if they have a bad week, they’re going to get hammered for it.

At first, it looked like this would happen. Madeleine Bunting wrote a column on what she had learned from the blog’s readers. But others limited their engagement to telling off posters for being rude, and most refused to comment on - or even read - their own threads at all.

Guardian columnist Marina Hyde says of the reader comments, “I just think the blog has encouraged bad manners from various posters buoyed up by anonymity.”

Frank Fisher, aka “MrPikeBishop”, CIF’s most prolific commenter, naturally has an opinion on this:

“It’s fear. Fear certainly explains their reluctance to engage with readers, particularly readers who’d quickly demolish their arguments and poor research. Frequently the response is to hunker down, pull the head inside the shell and refuse to play unless everyone ‘plays nice’.”

Frank also has an prediction of the future of online comment: “Group blogs - blogazines - that feature a number of writers who either come from a similar direction, or want to talk to a similar demographic.”

Group blogs have already played a very different role.

Tim Worstall wrote a post on his blog linking both to something he’d written on the Adam Smith Institute blog and a similar post by Owen Barder, on the dangerous extension of ministerial powers in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Worstall has a particularly influential reader: Times comment editor and columnist Daniel Finkelstein, who hadn’t heard about the Bill before, but covered it in his next column, with the other papers following it up later.

So “user-generated content” works for blogs, too: Finkelstein keeps a close eye on what’s going on on the net. “Some of the people blogging are among the best informed people with specialist interests I share,” he says. “So they help me spot things I might have missed.”

As for Worstall, the blog has worked as “advertising for the brand”(a “froth-at-the-mouth libertarian”) and has resulted in a number of Times comment page commissions as well as book reviews, plus the think-tank blogging. He’s making plenty of extra money as a freelance - just as he set out to do.

“For some, it will replace the two years on f**k all wages that is the current apprenticeship into journalism, either on a local paper or as an unpaid intern on the magazines. Certainly it has for me,” he says.

The majority of blogs are written by amateurs, on whom the best words are those of artist, poet and novelist Joolz Denby: “Amateurism is another way of saying hobby, and hobbies are for people who can’t make the sacrifices.”

But when professionals get involved too, some interesting things happen, and will continue to happen. What they will be in the future, who can tell?

(Feature written for the Online Journalism Course that forms part of the Diploma at Cardiff University. See it in all its linky glory here.)

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Most people who’ve gone through university will attest that while doing exams they wished they were somewhere else. When this handful of Cardiff students come to sit their finals next summer, they’ll be wishing they were already in Canada recording their first album. Their place is booked: they just have to graduate first.

In just 18 months, indie-pop septet Los Campesinos! (Spanish for “the peasants”) have gone from a newly formed band playing in front of a handful of people in the side room of Cardiff University’s Students’ Union to the new darlings of the music biz. Last month’s gig in Clwb Ifor Bach was their final one as an unsigned act, and they’ve since signed to Wichita Recordings, home of Bloc Party.

A week later, a friend’s attic is annexed for our interview by exuberant frontman Gareth; his singing foil Aleks; drummer Ollie, redolent of The Muppet Show’s Animal; guitar duo Tom and Neil; and quiet keyboard-and-violinist Harriet. Bassist Ellen couldn’t make it, fitting in practice, gigs and interviews an all-too-common problem for a student band.

Yet it’s telling that probably the weakest song in their repertoire is a cover version (of Pavement’s Frontwards), despite having to knock out songs in whatever free time they have outside of lectures. Their MySpace declares that they “just threw a few chords together”. Is it really like that?

“Well first I do the music side of things,” says Tom. “Sometimes that comes quickly, sometimes you have to work on things a bit more – actually, it’s slowing down with newer stuff as we try to spend more time perfecting smaller details.”

“Then generally I’ll come up with some lyrics, and then one-by-one decide which ones I don’t like and change them,” adds Gareth. “Then maybe five minutes before we go on stage say to Aleks, ‘actually, can you sing this instead?’ and scare her. I have a reserve of ideas, but it all depends on the music.”

While they clearly gel on stage, Los Campesinos! have presented something of a technical challenge. Aleks has had to get “a special microphone” as she’s rather quiet, and Clwb’s soundman – now permanently working with the band – described mixing Gareth as “the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do”.

“It’s probably because I shout,” Gareth says. “In soundcheck I’m really shy and just say ‘one two’ quietly into the mic, and then I get wasted and go on stage. Oh, yeah – I had an ear infection, that might have been why!”

Songwriting and performing together is made much easier by the fact that the band are such close friends, and often socialise collectively. Nights out at the Twisted By Design event at Castle Street venue Dempseys formed the basis for their song You! Me! Dancing! – and now they hear their music played there.

“Depending on how drunk we are, we either react very enthusiastically, or very embarrassed,” Gareth says. “It’s very flattering when you see people you don’t recognise dancing to your song. And people singing along when we’re playing – it’s weird. Everything is weird.”

They’re showing no sign of letting the fame go to their heads yet, then – despite tales of having established bands over for the night. When Canada’s We Say Party! You Say Die! – whose name was adapted for Los Campesinos!’s song We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives – played Cardiff, they bunked down at Harriet’s place, after they didn’t have a place to stay.

“Well, we felt quite sorry for them,” says Harriet. “I thought they’d think I was really weird. But I asked them if they’d rather stay at mine and they were like, ‘Yes please!’.”

“It was when we were about to do our tour – four or five dates,” chips in Tom. “And the fear really kind of gripped us when we realised how hard a time they were having.”

The humility continues. One internet review of the band’s latest gig described Aleks as “the most beautiful woman in the world”. She’s having none of it. “What am I supposed to say to that?” she says. “It’s not true!” Suggestions of a potential future FHM covershoot are met with a coy look that suggests she’d actually be flattered. Officially? “We’d have to ask Ellen.”

Despite being self-confessedly a bit too nice for rock n roll, they’re not too shy to disagree with a certain star of Celebrity Big Brother, the Ordinary Boys’ Preston, who claimed in the NME last week that MySpace was “dead” – that it’s no longer a useful tool from new bands to get themselves noticed now that established acts are using it to promote themselves.

“It’s because nobody cares about his band,” claims Gareth. “We recognise 100% that we wouldn’t be here without MySpace. It’s vital, now, to any band – I don’t see how any band could make it rapidly without one at the moment, regardless of how good the music is.

“It’s a convenient way to promote signed bands as well – if I read about a new band and I want to hear them, I’ll go on MySpace and search their profile.”

And that might just give Los Campesinos! an answer to their own question. On It Started With A Mix, they ponder, “how did it come to this?” Tom has it: “Murdoch can take credit for us.”

See Los Campesinos! on MySpace at MySpace.com/loscampesinos

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Although under-publicised, glue-sniffing is as dangerous as ever — but it can be beaten with hard work

Solvents kill. They kill around 70 people every year, more than hard drugs and ecstasy combined – and they can kill first time. Last October, promising 17-year-old Cardiff schoolboy Martin Kane died after experimenting with lighter fuel. Like one in three victims of solvents, he had never tried it before.

Sylvia Dawson is determined not to let her son go the same way. Matthew, 18, has begun to withdraw from solvent abuse after two-and-a-half years. He had first experimented with glue along with some friends at school, “just for a lark” - but when they stopped, Matthew carried on.

“I didn’t know anything about it until about three weeks ago, when my neighbour saw him with his head in a bag and told me,” Sylvia says. “I hadn’t recognised any of the symptoms and when I accosted Matthew with it he was first inclined to deny anything and then he admitted that the had been on solvents for two-and-a-half years and he said he hated it, he hated himself for doing it, but he felt completely dependent, and he felt he was wasting his life.”

Matthew belonged to a tight-knit group of high-achievers at school. They were all on the rugby team, and top of their class. He’s no longer in touch with them after having to drop out. He got a job at a local carpet factory, where readily available glue added to his problem, as did solvents around the house. His father, Jack, was a builder and kept Butane gas in the garage, which Matthew sniffed - Butane is highly dangerous, and was single-handedly responsible for 52% of solvent related deaths in 2000.

Jack Dawson died, suddenly, of a heart attack, around six months after Matthew began to use solvents. It made him reluctant to admit to his glue-sniffing for fear of further upsetting his mother, and distracted Sylvia from her son’s problem.

“It stopped me from possibly noticing and asking questions, partly because of natural grief but partly because I didn’t know what an adolescent boy was like, and I thought it fitted in so well – spots, mood swings, the lot,” she says. “Looking back, the difference in his behaviour before and after was so dramatic that I shouldn’t have actually said ‘oh, that’s adolescence’ – I don’t think adolescence should be that dramatic.”

Solvent abuse wasn’t tackled by a school drugs education that Sylvia describes as “very inadequate”, nor was it included in any conversations she had had with Matthew about the dangers of drugs. As glue-sniffing is rarely mentioned in drugs campaigns or the media, Sylvia didn’t believe it was still a major issue.

“I thought it was a problem that belonged in the 60s, when you heard a lot about glue sniffing,” she says. “I didn’t realise 70 or so… children, really… die of it every year and that more die from this than die from all the hard drugs and ecstasy all together. And I didn’t realise that it could kill on the first go, so there’s no real room for experimenting. I warned him against heroin and cocaine, told him never to be tempted and he assured me that he never would be. We never talked about solvents.”

In fact, when Sylvia phoned Matthew’s school, she was told by the headmaster that they don’t cover solvent abuse as they’re so easy to get hold of that is would only encourage experimentation.

Sylvia is not convinced it’s the best way. “They’re experimenting anyway,” she says. “If they don’t know they mustn’t run and do exercise – that’s what’s killing them. That and asphyxia.” She would like to see the issue of solvent abuse tackled at PTA meetings, but the school disagrees.

Matthew and Sylvia are now working with solvent abuse prevention charity Re-Solv to help Matthew stop abusing solvents. He has left his job in the carpet factory to concentrate on getting better. He is withdrawing from solvent abuse at home, where Sylvia is happy to trust him not to start up again, though she cannot directly help him herself. “I’m not giving him any treatment particularly, but he is withdrawing in the house. My job is to give him the occasional meal and see if he eats it. I have to rely on him, and I do believe him because he was so fed up of his previous life,” she says.

Sylvia is visibly pleased with Re-Solv’s work. “They are helping a lot. You can’t have a tablet to get over the withdrawal symptoms, so all Matthew has to do is to work through the weeks without sniffing anything. Re-Solv were wonderful. They sent round a boy who had been an abuser himself at one time, and he’s now off solvents. He came and had a private talk with Matthew for about an hour and Matthew now has his telephone number and this boy is now Matthew’s mentor,” she says.

“It’s very good because Matthew can draw hope from the fact that this boy is now ok, and also encouragement from somebody who really understands what he’s going through. It seems to be working awfully well.”

Giving up solvents is not likely to be an easy process. Withdrawal symptoms can include headaches, irritability, nausea, tiredness, disturbed sleep and attention problems.

Matthew is about halfway through his six-week withdrawal period. After this, he plans to return to his academic studies – he intends to study Physics, Maths and Chemistry at college. He is aiming to eventually be a mechanical engineer.

Matthew is one of the lucky ones. He may have wasted over two years of his life, but he hasn’t lost his future.

Contact Re-Solv on 0808 8002345, or visit www.re-solv.org

(This was a practice coursework exercise; Sylvia Dawson was played by a member of CJS staff.)

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