BIG COUNTRY Announce October 2025 GREATEST HITS NZ Tour
Featuring the band's de facto theme song — In a Big Country, their debut album, THE CROSSING, combined anthemic post-punk with folk-inspired guitar sounds to become the leading representative of 80's Celtic Rock. It was a surprisingly influential mix that would inspire an entirely new wave of British rock artists who openly embraced their Celtic heritage. BIG COUNTRY achieved major international success plus two Grammy nominations and for a time rivalled fellow 'big sounding' British guitar rock acts U2 and Simple Minds.
Big guitars, big drums, big checks on their shirts, BIG COUNTRY were well named!
BIG COUNTRY October 2025 Australian Tour Dates
Friday 3rd October – WELLINTON, San Fran
Saturday 4th October – AUCKLAND, Tuning Fork
Tickets
General Public On Sale: Monday 12th May, 10:00am Local
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Otago Daily Times
14 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
The fascist position on yoga
For more than a century, elements of the far right have been attracted by yoga's rigours, the author of a new book tells Miles Ellingham. Stewart Home just wanted to do a headstand. That said, one shouldn't always take what Home does at face value. Over the course of his career, Home (born Kevin Llewellyn Callan), a writer, artist and activist, has written a novel about dragging Diana, Princess of Wales's corpse around a Scottish stone circle, formed a series of anti-art movements and publicly announced his intention to levitate Brighton's Pavilion theatre. This time, though, he's adamant he really did just want to do a headstand. In 2009 he took up yoga, which was offered as part of his gym membership. Home threw himself into the practice, subjecting himself to more than 1000 classes between 2009 and 2019, many of them just down the road from the East London Tara Yoga Centre, the scene of an investigation into "bad guru" Gregorian Bivolaru, who allegedly tempted followers into "an international web of trafficking and sexual exploitation". But Home wouldn't have known about that back then. What he did know was that some of his classmates were acting weird. Home has a high threshold for weirdness, but this was surpassed when a fellow student sidled up to him and proclaimed herself a "starseed" — a sort of New Age angel-alien hybrid sent to Earth to cleanse humanity. Home was also thrown by the cult-like, authoritarian guru-student relationship of his classes, which concluded in a traditional namaste gesture of respect. He elected instead to hold his fist in the air and mutter: "No god, no guru." Home wanted to do a headstand. However, after some cursory research, he realised something troubling: so did the Waffen-SS. The opening chapter of his book Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness begins with a definition of the practice it interrogates: "The term 'yoga' refers to both a physical culture system that is slightly more than a century old and a set of religious practices whose origins pre-date those of postural yoga, though they were reinvented in the late 19th century." Home's book does not claim that yoga, with its nebulous origins, is inherently fascist, nor that all yoga practitioners are primed for far-right indoctrination. Rather, after its adoption in the west, a Venn diagram emerges. In one circle, there's yoga, Tantra, occidental Buddhism and Hinduism, New Age spirituality and basic hippydom. In the other, authoritarianism, fascism, proto-fascism, white supremacy and far-right conspiracy theory. Home wanders through the gateway between these two circles, emerging into a dark, contradictory realm where death camp guards sit in a lotus position, bare-chested Italian militiamen play catch with live grenades and "Miss Jelly Fish" is flattered without reservation. More on Miss Jelly Fish later, but first we begin with "the Great Oom". Pierre Bernard should never really have been called "the Great Oom". The title was a mistake by the New York press, which didn't know how to spell the "om" mantra correctly. Nevertheless, the name stuck. Bernard was extremely influential in the spread of yogic practices in the West during the early 20th century. He started out as a carnival attraction, gaining attention by publicly inserting surgical needles into himself. Later, he began espousing hypnotism and Tantra and, in 1905, founded the Tantrik Order in America on the West Coast. He claimed to have learned his practices from a wandering guru called Sylvais Hamati, whose existence, Home points out, is not evidenced by Bernard's biographer. Soon after founding the Tantrik Order, Bernard moved to New York, where he launched yoga classes for the ultra-wealthy elite. His disciples included the Vanderbilt heiress Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd, along with the British fascist Francis Yeats-Brown and a racist journalist called Hamish McLaurin. In 1910, Bernard was charged with kidnapping two teenage girls. Modernity rolled fascism into being. But, despite modernity, fascism needed its own mythology, so fascists looked east. Two of Bernard's disciples, Yeats-Brown and McLaurin, collaborated on a book, Eastern Philosophy for Western Minds, which traced "Indo-Aryan texts" to an ancient encounter between "highly developed" ancient Aryan invaders of "the purest possible white stock" and "a dark-skinned people infinitely beneath them on the evolutionary scale". Yeats-Brown found fame the same decade with his memoir The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which was adapted into a film — reportedly a favourite of Hitler's — starring Gary Cooper. Yeats-Brown was not the only British fascist yogi of his time. There was also the army officer Major-general J.F.C. Fuller, who is partially credited with inventing blitzkrieg warfare. According to the historian Kate Imy, Fuller studied "the Vedas and the Upanishads [and] took a deep interest in the yoga philosophy". Fuller was, for a while, a disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, although the pair fell out, Home writes, "over Crowley's indulgence in sex magic with other men". In April 1939, months before the Nazis invaded Poland, Fuller was an honoured guest at Hitler's 50th birthday, a three-hour motorised military parade in Berlin. The path to 20th-century fascism, as Home outlines, is punctuated with yoga and racist interpretations of eastern philosophy. Another example was the Italian aristocrat Gabriele D'Annunzio, often credited as the "John the Baptist of fascism" after leading the 1919 rogue annexation of the port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia). D'Annunzio, a strange narcissist, claimed to be "the greatest Italian writer since Dante". Among his proto-fascist legionnaires was Guido Keller, a manic depressive, cocaine-fuelled aviator who posed as Neptune on photoshoots and slept in a tree with his pet eagle. During the occupation of Fiume, Keller founded the "Yoga group", whose manifestos adopted the (then-neutral) swastika as a symbol. "D'Annunzio and his followers saw in Hinduism what they saw in the mirror — bold and sensuous vitality — plus an aura of eastern holiness," Mark Thompson, a historian of early 20th-century Italy, said. "This vision gave them another licence for hedonism ... Critics of the yoga industry say it peddles the same clueless 'Orientalism' and with it, possibly, the proto-fascist ideology that celebrated warriors and master heroes for real." Not long after the annexation of Fiume, Heinrich Himmler — influenced by German Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer — looked to Hinduism as an Aryan religion. According to the German historian Mathias Tietke, Himmler avidly consumed the Bhagavad Gita and later intuited its philosophy as a justification for the Holocaust. Tietke's research reportedly found that the SS death camp guards were officially recommended yoga and that Himmler even touted Wewelsburg Castle near Paderborn as a centre for "yoga exercises, meditation, Bhagavad Gita readings and yogic nutrition". According to Home, Hitler didn't appear to share the same yogic enthusiasm as Himmler. That said, one widely reproduced photograph shows his future wife, Eva Braun, in a picturesque, lakeside back bend — though whether she's explicitly practising postural yoga is "impossible to tell". Pre-1945, the fascism-yoga Venn diagram hardly resembles its traditional shape — it's just a broad circle with two slim crescents on either side. Prominent figures residing within this overlap included the Italian imperialist "super-fascist" Julius Evola (the modern far-right's treasured philosopher) and Mircea Eliade, a Romanian academic who wrote a thesis on yoga practices before throwing his weight in the 1930s behind the Iron Guard, a religious fascist movement that carried out multiple assassinations. In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco — who was not a fascist but had been forced to participate in fascism as a child — attempts to answer a difficult question: what is fascism? Eco writes that defining fascism is like defining a game: there's no single characteristic, but you know it when you see it. This, he contends, is due to an overlapping sequence of features or "family resemblances". Many of these are also applicable to new age spirituality. One is a "rejection of modernism". We see this both in the new age movement's rejection of a materialist world and in far-right traditionalists bemoaning social progress. Another is what Eco calls "the cult of action for action's sake". He describes this as the fascist belief that action is beautiful in itself, that "thinking is a form of emasculation". This almost sounds like something out of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love ("the resting place of the mind is the heart", a monk tells the book's central character). Eat, Pray, Love leads us to another of Eco's fascist identifiers: its "appeal to a frustrated middle class", which certainly applies to yoga. "If you understand being mainstream as appealing to thin white women with money to burn," Home writes, "then you can't get more mainstream in the world of modern postural practice than [the online magazine] Yoga Journal ... A 'recommended yogi reading' list on its website includes Eliade's Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. I'm still seeing this work repeatedly recommended to yoga teachers and practitioners with no warning about the fact it was written by someone active in fascist politics at the time it was composed." After reading Home's book, I met him near his old yoga studio. Home and I sat in the shade of an overhanging tree, meditative but not cross-legged upon a rock. I put it to him that if, say, ping-pong happened to have a number of fascist devotees, it doesn't necessarily make it fascist. "But what about if the guy who came up with the game of ping-pong had a bunch of fascist and white supremacist followers," he responds. "Also, ping-pong doesn't have the mystical trappings of a cult." Home argues that fascist yoga continued into the late 20th century, only in a slightly more veiled way. "A lot of the earlier fascist yogis are referred back to," he says of subsequent followers. "So even someone like Harvey Day, who is explicitly anti-racist in his books, can't resist mentioning the Aryan origins of yoga and will reference Francis Yeats-Brown and other people, and I think it's the credulity around the beliefs, it's what I describe as anti-essentialism and belief in one's own truth. Also, with QAnon and antivax stuff, you see this being discussed more." Home sees a telling similarity between the reverence QAnon adherents feel towards their saviour, Donald Trump, and the ardent spiritual devotion for Hitler displayed by the Nazis. "There's a very clear parallel between the two things," he says. Whether QAnon's "esoteric Hitlerism" is consciously borrowed or simply emerges from the same mythic structure, he continues, "hinges on research I haven't done". Travis View, via his QAA podcast, has been examining the QAnon movement since its origins in 2017. View points out perhaps the most obvious recent collision point between far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and new age beliefs: Jacob Chansley, AKA "the QAnon Shaman". Chansley became the mascot of the January 6 insurrection after he stormed the US Capitol in facepaint and a fur horned headdress. Having gained access to the Senate chamber, Chansley led the rioters in quasi-Christian prayer but, View explains, he was also fascinated by Native American mysticism and occultism. "I also think there's a broad overlap," View says, "between the hyper-individualism of the far right and new age wellness thinking. There's a distrust of, for example, public health measures and a belief that you have a moral obligation to take care of your own health entirely. This is why there's so much overlap in anti-vaccine belief; it's a far-right belief, but also something you'd see in crunchy yoga circles." Another similarity, View says, is that both camps prioritise esoteric knowledge. "If you're very deeply into spiritualism, there's a belief that there's esoteric knowledge that is suppressed and you can 'awaken' to it ... and then on the far right, they have the same belief, but it's that the media and the education system is controlled by Jews or whatever, and in order to escape this thinking, you have to awaken to the lies of society. Both promote a personal hero's journey you have to go through in order to reject mainstream orthodox knowledge." Fascist Yoga asserts that yogic postural practice and, to an extent, new age spirituality more broadly, is a natural home for people who crave methods of sexual coercion and control. People such as Frank Rudolph Young. The author, who died in Chicago in 2002 at the age of 91 (an impressive innings, if short of the 330 years that he had expected), wrote multiple books on seduction, mental domination and — you guessed it — yoga. In his 1969 title Yoga for Men Only, he claims the practice can enhance male "sex power" and "manly sex appeal". Young also identified 42 different personality types and details how to manipulate them. One example Home mentions is Miss Jelly Fish, who Young advised to "flatter without reservation ... despite her embarrassed smile". Miss Jelly Fish hails from a self-published mail-order book called X Ray Mind, published under the pen name Maravedi El Krishnar. She has a "soft, sweet voice" with a "bashful smile", the book suggests. She also "prefers isolation and the company of girls half as pretty as herself". Young also told readers to gaze into the mirror and imagine themselves possessing "incomparable mental power". Home's book is not only a useful tool for understanding a historical precedent, but it also gives context to a persistent problem: that people can excuse almost anything via their own enlightenment and that wellness is not always preached by well-meaning people or for well-meaning reasons. Just two months ago, for example, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article headed "Destroying Gaza 'with love': Israel's new YogiNazis", which featured a settler, Rivka Lafair, who Channel 4 described as "a poster girl for Israel's powerful far right". Haaretz quotes Lafair addressing "everyone who doesn't understand how it's possible to be spiritual, to teach yoga and hold retreats, while calling for the expulsion and annihilaSHon [sic] of your enemy". Her answer, the article reads, is clear: "I love my people with an undying love, and I hate my enemy with an undying hatred ... One does not contradict the other." After much consideration, Stewart Home does not recommend pursuing postural yoga. Outside his local gym, however, he triumphantly demonstrates his headstand. He prefers a tripod headstand, which is associated with gymnastics as opposed to the basket headstand recommended by yoga teachers. While he's upside down, I ask if he can feel the spirit of fascism? "No," he replies. "I've exorcised it completely by writing the book." — The Observer
NZ Herald
a day ago
- NZ Herald
Peaky Blinders creator to pen new James Bond movie
Steven Knight will write the highly anticipated next James Bond movie. Photo / Getty Images Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Already a subscriber? Sign in here Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen. Steven Knight will write the highly anticipated next James Bond movie. Photo / Getty Images Steven Knight, the creator of gritty TV crime series Peaky Blinders, will write the highly anticipated next James Bond movie, studio Amazon MGM announced today. Knight will work alongside previously announced director Denis Villeneuve (Dune) to bring the world's most famous fictional spy back to the big screen after a prolonged absence. Amazon MGM Studios acquired creative control of the 007 movies in February and has moved quickly to get one of Hollywood's most valuable franchises back into production. There has been no new Bond film since 2021's No Time To Die. Knight is best known as the mind behind violent British gangster series Peaky Blinders, which was set in industrial England at the turn of the 20th century and became a global hit.
NZ Herald
a day ago
- NZ Herald
Cigarette-lighter cameras, paralysing pens - a look inside the spy museum's den of secrets
Many of the artifacts in the vault came from one man: H. Keith Melton, a founding board member of the museum, who became one of the world's renowned spy collectors. He is not a former intelligence agent himself; rather, he made his money as one of the country's largest McDonald's franchise owners. Disguises in the vault of the International Spy Museum in Washington. Photo / Alyssa Schukar, The New York Times A condition of his donation, which he first pledged in 2016, was that the collection would eventually be moved to the museum itself, Melton said. 'To properly care for, maintain, catalogue, access the artifacts, they needed to be on the premises,' Melton said in an interview. 'You can't deal with it remotely. Artifacts need care and feeding and vigilance, and they need to make sure they're not deteriorating.' The collections team at the International Spy Museum recently opened the doors to its den of secrets, offering a reporter and photographer a look at tools of the trade that, like much of spy craft itself, are kept out of public view. There are roughly 4000 books in the vault, most of them donated by Melton. The most treasured of these is a World War II-era briefing book created by MI9, a wartime branch of British intelligence, to get Americans up to speed on its top-secret espionage innovations. It includes designs for cameras disguised as cigarette lighters, coat buttons and gold teeth concealing compasses, and maps printed on clothing. Laura Hicken, the museum's collections manager, estimated that there were fewer than 20 copies of this book in the world. Among the museum's newest acquisitions are original courtroom sketches by William Sharp, an illustrator who died in 1961. One is of Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy who operated undercover in the US for almost a decade and who was portrayed by Mark Rylance in the 2015 Steven Spielberg thriller Bridge of Spies. In the drawings, Sharp portrayed Abel as looking stressed. A mini-motorcycle that British spies could unfold in seconds after parachuting behind German lines during World War II, in the vault of the International Spy Museum in Washington. Photo / Alyssa Schukar, The New York Times 'For us, where so much of our history is told through gadgets and weapons and concealment devices, this is so incredibly personal and such an intimate look into the consequences of the things we cover,' Hicken said, referring to the sketch. The museum, which is recognised by Guinness World Records as the world's largest espionage museum, has come under criticism in the past for sanitising the unethical behaviour of spy agencies. Another set of Sharp-penned sketches is from the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were arrested in 1950 for espionage and executed in 1953. The drawings feature Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who sentenced them to death, and an unguarded Ethel Rosenberg, whose culpability has come under doubt in the last decade. The Spy Museum has also received gifts and loans from international governments. The South Korean Government, for example, lent items said to have been seized from a North Korean spy who crossed into the south. Among these is a pen that, when clicked a certain way, would have been capable of injecting a paralysing agent into an unsuspecting victim, as well as a code sheet that spies could use to communicate with someone equipped with a counter code sheet. The German Government lent an army propaganda rocket from the early 1940s. These were launched over Russian soldiers on the battlefield, where they would eject pamphlets encouraging them to abandon Josef Stalin. According to a translation, the pamphlets inside the rocket say: 'Red Army men! You will not experience peace, you will not return to your home. Stalin will not allow this because he knows that any Red Army soldier who has been in Europe will pose a threat to the Stalinist system.' Sitting on top of a large shelf is a couch that belonged to Robert P. Hanssen, a former FBI agent who spied for Moscow off and on for decades. Suitcases and radios in the vault of the International Spy Museum in Washington. Photo / Alyssa Schukar, The New York Times Hanssen died in 2023 in his Colorado prison cell. Melton also persuaded Hanssen's family to donate other items, including a suit and watches. The museum has no shortage of knives, some of which are hidden in spatulas and boots. But there are less subtle blades, including one developed by the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, to be a combat weapon. 'There are a lot of challenging elements to our collection because so much of it was meant to kill or destroy or distract,' Hicken said. 'We have powders that were meant to be tipped into gas tanks that would essentially erode the gas tank very quickly so you could disable somebody's vehicle.' Also in the vault are several items that once belonged to Tony Mendez, the celebrated CIA officer who was played by Ben Affleck in the 2012 Academy Award-winning movie Argo. Mendez was particularly known for disguises, exfiltration and forgery. One drawer in the vault includes wigs he designed and a pair of shoes with lifts inside to make the wearer appear significantly taller. In addition, there's a self-portrait of Mendez, a former board member of the museum, depicting several aspects of the Argo story, which involved Mendez's plan to rescue American diplomats trapped in Iran in 1980. 'Everything in our collection is two things,' Hicken said. 'The purse actually conceals a camera. The pen conceals a microdot viewer. The shoe has a knife in it.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Sopan Deb Photographs by: Alyssa Schukar ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
