Frequently during his talk at the Union on Wednesday, Brian Paddick uses the word ‘controversy’, and it’s not difficult – considering his life and career – to see why. As well as being openly gay, he was the Liberal Democrat candidate for London Mayor in last summer’s elections. He attempted to implement a highly contentious cannabis policy in his role as Police Commander for Lambeth and then became the focus
of a cannabis scandal himself. He gave evidence against the London Metropolitan Police in the Stockwell Tube Station inquiry, whilst he was the Deputy Police Commissioner to Sir Ian Blair. And then he went on last year’s run of I’m a Celebrity! Get Me Out of Here.

He is a man who everybody claims to know something about, or at least have an opinion on – a somewhat intimidating reputation to have, I feel. However, upon meeting him, he is infallibly polite, funny and charming. He describes his mayoral candidate rival Boris Johnson as ‘loveable’, and states ‘liquidised camel penis’ as his favourite eating challenge during I’m a Celebrity.

Having studied PPE at the Queen’s College, Oxford is not new to him, and ‘walking around here makes me feel like I’m at home’. He missed out on the typical student experience as he arrived here aged 22, married, and funded by a police scholarship. However, he insists with great warmth that the experience was wonderful, and that he ‘would do it all over again’.

His path to Oxford began in an unconventional fashion typical to him, as he decided to write a letter to the admissions tutor at Christ Church before he officially applied. He received a firm but polite no, but his refusal to give in became a characteristic that would reappear in the course of events in his life.

Following his time at Oxford, he went on to do a postgraduate diploma at Cambridge. However, his ‘experience of student life’ was to be compromised again as he only studied during the vacations from his police training.
Religion has played a large part in Paddick’s life – whilst a student here, he preached at St. Aldates Church to ‘punk rockers and glue sniffers’ and attempted ‘a conversion mission’ and a promotion of Christianity. However, after coming out as homosexual and ‘going from church to church’, he found that ‘at the end of every service, the vicar would always query where my wife was’. Although he is ‘still a believer’, he is no longer an active part of the body of worshippers after the continual wrong assumptions about his sexuality.

This difficulty in reconciling two seemingly integral aspects in his life – his religion and his sexuality – seems trouble him less than I would have imagined, but then again he seems to be used to dealing with inconsistencies.
His sexuality comes under constant public scrutiny and I ask him how it feels to be labelled by the media as formerly being ‘the most senior and openly gay police officers in Britain’. He describes to me an article written the day following the July 7th bombings in London. At the time he was face that represented the police in the media, however the article in question focused on his sexuality alone. This indicated the major media interest in his homosexuality, and the journalist treated it as a concern.

‘Being gay is not everything about me’, he states, although the vast majority of the public seem to treat it as if it is. In 2008, Paddick made the Pink List, an annual compilation of the most influential homosexuals in Britain, for the second year in a row. However, he states that ‘I don’t feel that I’m influential, not in the fact that I’m gay anyway’. He makes jokes throughout his speech in the debating chamber about being homosexual, and is incredibly at ease when he is discussing it with me. He briefly discusses his marriage and being open with his wife about his sexuality, marking it out as being ‘one of the hardest things I have ever had to do’.

Clearly, this is a man with a lot of emotion beneath his calm exterior, and this comes across most vividly when I inquire as to what he feels his biggest achievement is. Smiling and apologising for being ‘gushy and gooey’, he tells me that meeting his current partner, Norwegian civil engineer Petter Belsvik, and marrying him just last month is most definitely it. ‘I had to kiss many frogs to find the right one.’

He went through much media furore after his ex-lover made cannabis allegations about him, which he denies furiously, claiming that he smoked the drug on a daily basis. This story had followed the controversy surrounding his drugs policy where, as Police Commissioner, he elected to focus on ‘harder’ drugs such as heroin and issue on the spot fines for those caught with cannabis. He felt that it made sense to focus on it this way, rather than cracking down on cannabis as planned and thus straining police resources. He didn’t try to implement this policy by the book either, although he admits that ‘in retrospect maybe I should have done’, as he first discussed the policy in a London newspaper, rather than submitting it to Scotland Yard.

His frank and outspoken manner on the matter is impressive, as are his unshakable beliefs. The police shooting of a Brazilian electrician at Stockwell Tube station brought Paddick into the limelight once again and only serves to highlight just how unswerving he can be. The police emphatically declared that they believed the victim, de Menezes, to be a terrorist for 24 hours following the incident, which Paddick declares emphatically as ‘wrong’.

According to him, just hours after the event he was informed by members of the police that an ordinary Brazilian citizen and he went on to testify for de Menezes’ family in the trial. His heavy criticism of Sir Ian Blair’s events during the crisis was ‘what I feel prevented me from moving up the ladder’ in the police force into the most senior position – but he does not regret speaking out.

Paddick’s work in the police force is now over after the de Menezes crisis and although he feels he can ‘never go back’, he is moving up and on. As well as featuring in interviews and lecturing at the University of Ashridge’s Business School, he has just been offered a presenting job for a programme which will visit riot squads in different countries. Aptly named ‘I predict a Riot’, he turned it down, ‘it sounded a bit too butch for me really’. Although he has come under much public scrutiny over the years, Paddick remains unswervingly passionate and principled. He ‘couldn’t not tell the truth’ when it came to the injustice he felt surrounding Stockwell, even though it cost him dearly. ‘I greatly miss being on the beat, and actually helping people’.

He leaves me with the impression he has a lot of things he still wishes to achieve, stating matter of factly that ‘I’m not mature, except in age perhaps’. Whatever preconception you hold about Brian Paddick, be prepared to keep on changing it.

For the Love of Film returns once again – as promised!

Invaders Must Die begins with a mangled sample: ‘We are the Prodigy’. It’s helpful; the first track owes so much to Justice’s metal-dance stomping you could be forgiven for making the mistake. But then, arguably, Liam Howlett’s dance collective has been in identity crisis for over a decade, ever since the release of the seminal Fat of the Land in 1997.

Back then, the Prodigy were heroes. Unique in their ability to make listenable the mind-numbingly repetitive music of the underground rave scene, the great British public lapped them up, swooning to their inventive breakbeat and Keith Flint’s horned hair-dos. For a while, every Prodigy release was awaited breathlessly by legions of straight pop fans, pill-heads and the odd impressionable youth, like me.

Leaving teary-eyed nostalgia to one side, it’s hard to say whether this is a good album or not. Howlett’s samples/lyrics are awful certainly, with ‘The world’s on fire/it’s about to expire’ a particular lowlight. But then they were always rubbish, even if Breathe’s ‘Psycho-somatic addict insane’ did sound pretty badass to my twelve-year-old ears.

The real problem with the album is that it’s so obvious that this is a purposeful rehash of Fat of the Land, with the occasional subconscious nod in the direction of Daft Punk and Justice. It all sounds as though Howlett’s bed of money has become a little less fluffy of late, and he’s gone about getting some more in the easiest way possible.

‘Omen’, deemed by the band to be worth a reprise at the end of the album, is a decent stab at re-writing ‘Out of Space’, while ‘Warrior’s Dance’s female vocalist does OK in her attempt to dilute the barrels of nervous testosterone that fuel the rest of the album.

If you think ‘Firestarter’ represents a rebellious call-to-arms to a disillusioned generation Y, buy this album because you will love it. Otherwise, don’t bother. Liam ‘dance visionary’ Howlett should be trying harder than this.

Michael Angelakos is a pretty complicated character. Passion Pit, the band he formed just two years ago, are widely tipped for ‘big things’ this year, and yet he could hardly seem less happy. Moody and hirsute, he shuffles around the backstage area of the Bullingdon Arms before the gig, looking pretty out of place. He is something of an anomaly in this environment, failing to fulfil the typical stereotype of the touring musician. In his own words, ‘I don’t want to party man, I wish I did! Some guy just offered us MDMA? I just want to go back to the bus and sleep before the show.’

Passion Pit’s debut EP Chunk of Change grew out of six songs recorded in 2007 while Angelakos was in college in Boston, and was originally conceived as a Valentine’s Day present for his girlfriend. The music became popular among the student community and prompted Angelakos to take it more seriously. Though the music was born out of something

romantic, he is keen to underline that it is actually a pretty dark record.
It was the product of an unhappy time and he is fascinated by the manner in which the lyrical content of the album goes unnoticed by listeners, who assume it to be an exercise in sentimentality. ‘People listened to the last record and thought, oh sure, it’s pop music, it’s a love album. If you read the lyrics, this person is talking about how much of an asshole he is, and how much he wishes he could love his girlfriend as much as she loves him.’
He believes that the best pop music exhibits this dichotomy of light and dark. ‘Beautiful pop music invades your skull, it’s a powerful vehicle. A lot of the time we’re dealing with heavy subjects; thematically our music is dark. But because the vessel is sugar-coated pop music, people don’t understand what they’re receiving.’

It’s a phenomenon that Angelakos has obviously spent time thinking about; he is absorbed completely by his love of pop music, and seems to enjoy analysing what it is that’s effective about pop music in order to apply the theories to his own. It is a very scientific approach to music. ‘The idea of producing electronic music made sense to me because it’s so mathematical.’ Angelakos is known to be something of a perfectionist and has spent months in the studio trying to locate the right formulae for the band’s music. The early signs are that he has come close to success.

Angelakos started making the music that would become Passion Pit in 2007 in an attempt to lift himself out of a period of depression. ‘I needed something to help me rejuvenate myself, because I was pretty low.’ Perhaps his obsession with the dark side of music is the result of his own problems with depression; he admits that it colours everything he does. Unlikely many musicians with similar problems, he does not see music as a form of therapy, however. ‘I don’t see music as therapy, therapy is something that makes life easier, and all this just makes things a lot harder.’

Here, Angelakos underlines what makes him something of an enigma. He clearly loves music and always hoped to pursue a career in music, but now his band is really taking off, he seems unsure if he is entirely happy with the situation.

Onstage Passion Pit almost live up to the expectations which have been heaped on them by countless music journalists since the close of last year. The songs are generally excellent, often coming close, and the music throughout features a pulse strong enough to seduce the dancing feet of the most intransigent members of the crowd in the Bullingdon Arms. Angelakos admits before the show, however, that the band has played less than 50 shows together, and at times this is evident. Nonetheless the band’s debut album, released later this year, is likely to be great and should see Passion Pit justify the hype.

Things are looking good for Passion Pit, but is it making Michael Angelakos happy? ‘It’s a good thing,’ he sighs, ‘It is what it is,’ and lifting his hood over his head, he walks back to the bus to sleep before the show.