Beyond 1984: why I’m listening to George Orwell

One of the great things about touring in the age of audio books, is that you can use your time driving between gigs, with nothing more to concentrate on than other half-tons of steel and rubber hurtling down ‘Smart’ motorways at suddenly varying speeds, to really binge on reading.

I’d long been meaning to expand my knowledge of George Orwell. I’m pretty familiar with his better, or at least better known, essays and I have of course regularly scaled his Two Last Peaks, Animal Farm, and 1984.

I’ve read Animal Farm so often that it has become a sort of catechism, and if it had a tune I could probably sing it right through. It’s a little hand-grenade of a nursery fable which so enraged both the British Left who still had hopes for the Soviet ‘experiment’, and the British Establishment, who would really have rather gotten their nose-holding coalition with Stalin out of the way before George started accusing him of being a perfidious pig.