The David Icke Newsletter, October 21st, 2012 - THE ROAD TO WEMBLEY

Our David.....



The David Icke Newsletter, October 21st, 2012

THE ROAD TO WEMBLEY ...




... AND THEN WHERE?



Hello all ...


We have a football (soccer) competition in England called the Football
Association Cup, or FA Cup. It used to be a major event when I was a kid,
but it has lost its importance in the last 20 years or so to bigger trophies
played between the leading clubs of Europe.

There was great excitement among football fans when I was a boy in the 1950s
and 60s about who would 'win the cup'. There was no 'FA' necessary because
everyone knew what was meant by 'the cup'. Television coverage of the FA Cup
Final at London's Wembley Stadium used to begin hours before the kick-off
and one of the features was always called 'The Road To Wembley' when the
goals would be shown from earlier rounds of the competition to chart how the
two teams won through to the final at the national stadium.


I would be sat there from mid-morning watching every second of the build-up
and the game itself. I was always dreaming of one day playing at Wembley and
'winning the cup'. I did indeed go on to be a professional footballer, but
the nearest I came to my childhood dream was getting beaten in the first
round of 'the cup' in a game in which I had a nightmare. If I had put my
head in my hands that day I would have dropped it.

I did actually play at Wembley once in front of 60,000 people in a brief
'celebrity' game before the final of another cup competition in the 1980s,
but that was hardly the same.



This was my hometown club, Leicester City, who reached the FA Cup final at
Wembley in 1963. I remember so well watching the game on a little black and
white television as Manchester United beat them 3-1. I was eleven at the
time and football was my life then.



This is the Manchester United captain that day, Noel Cantwell, holding the
FA Cup after the win over my team Leicester City and a few years later he
was my club manager when I became a professional myself. He was a lovely
man. I would also play in the same team as another of those Manchester
United cup winners, the never-to-be forgotten Maurice Setters.

Maurice had a pair of legs so bowed that he would never stop a pig in a
passage. He was also quite small for the position that he played and a bit
overweight. So he had nothing going for him - but what a player. He showed
what the mind, determination and experience can do to more than compensate
for the downsides.



Maurice Setters, one of the many memorable characters that I played with.

Next weekend I don't quite make it to Wembley Stadium, but I'll be
physically close at least - just a few hundred yards away at the vast
Wembley Arena. There is even a football connection here, too. I had
forgotten all about it until I went for a look around the place last year
with a view to putting on this week's event.

I kept getting the feeling that I had been there before, but surely not? Why
would I? Then I saw the dressing room area and it all came back.

I left school at 15 to join a club called Coventry City, where I met Noel
Cantwell and Maurice Setters, and in my first season the club had a bit of
brain-fade when they were invited to send a team for a national five-aside
event at ... the Wembley Arena.


Every other club sent their top players, many of them internationals, but
Coventry City sent us - a bunch of 15 and 16 years olds from the youth team
and, in my case, just a few months out of school. If you made it through the
first round you qualified for the televised part of the tournament on the
BBC, but there was no chance of that.

We were drawn against Manchester City, one of the best teams of the time
with top players like Colin Bell, Neil Young and Mike Summerbee, and they
went on to win the trophy. The games that night thankfully didn't last long,
just a few minutes for each half, and we managed to keep the score down to
3-0.


All I remember is the speed of the game, it was so unbelievably fast for
someone so young, and the noise. Goodness I remember the noise from the
thousands gathered in the Arena's enclosed space. So I was well beaten on my
first visit to Wembley Arena - I am hoping for at least a draw this time.



I then also recalled commentating there once for the BBC on badminton - a
sport I knew nothing about. I presented and commentated live for hours one
Sunday afternoon at Wembley Arena just trying to sound confident and
knowledgeable while basically knowing that in badminton you hit a
shuttlecock with a racket.


I would introduce a game live in the studio in one of the Wembley dressing
rooms and then run up the stairs to the commentary box while the expert
pundit covered the time it took for me to get there. At the end of each game
I would hand over to him again while I ran back down the stairs to the
studio.


All the time I had the producer talking in my ear - a man who never made one
decision when another four or five were possible. I mean, why be decisive
and make a decision when you have so many to choose from? The fellah used to
be undecided but now he's not so sure.

It made for an unforgettable afternoon, except that I did indeed forget it
(but then the mind does tend to shut out memories of traumatic events). It's
funny how the mind holds memories in the subconscious, but as soon as the
door is opened all the details flood out about things that we had forgotten
completely just seconds earlier.


In fact, it only came to me while I was writing this that there was another
time when I presented show jumping from the Arena live and prime time for
the BBC every night for a week when the usual presenter was otherwise
engaged. Once again I knew nothing about show jumping, but I just did the
introductions and then handed to the experts.


It was on this occasion that I delivered the conversation-stopping line
while sitting down for dinner with some equestrian types - 'I'm so hungry I
could eat a horse'. I was not used to being among such people so I forgot
where I was. Didn't go down well, but, hey, tally-ho, just a turn of phrase,
don't take it literally, chaps.

Anyway, 45 years on since I had three goals smacked past me at the Wembley
Arena as a 15-year-old, I am back with different coloured hair, a few pounds
extra on board and a body no longer in a state that can dive, hit the floor,
and bounce back to its feet in an instant. Today I would get down in
instalments and be able to send you a postcard before I hit the ground.


But, like Maurice Setters, the footballer, I compensate and get by anyway.






'Whatever happened to that young chap that used to play for Coventry City?'

'Sad case - went mad, apparently.'


So here I am going back to the place that I forgot I had ever been. The
Wembley Arena was opened with the name Empire Pool for the 1934 British
Empire Games (now called the Commonwealth Games) and at first it was a
swimming pool venue, hence the name.


It has since staged major indoor sporting events and hosted concerts by many
of the biggest names in music history over the last nearly 80 years,
including the Beatles on three occasions. Only recently it was the venue for
events in the London Olympics, including the badminton (so glad I missed
it).

The night after I speak there and both expose the scale of Satanism and call
on people not to succumb to fear, Alice Cooper will be on the same stage
with his tour called the Halloween Night of Fear. As Morpheus said in The
Matrix: 'Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony'.



We ended up at Wembley after quite a search for a venue in London that could
hold four or five thousand people. We had many great years at the Brixton
Academy which holds just under 2,500 but we had to do two events there in
2010 to meet the interest and, with me now passing 60, I would rather do one
event for all the people interested rather than two or more.

We tried the famous Royal Albert Hall which holds 4,000 but they didn't seem
particularly interested and the cost would have made ticket prices far too
high. In the end we investigated the possibility of Wembley Area. It holds
12,500 and that was too big and the costs involved were far too much for
what we could handle.


I have had in mind the date of October 27th 2012 for at least a year and so
we went back to the Brixton Academy with a view to doing two events again,
one of which would have been on that day. But that didn't work because that
is their band season and there would be no seats in place.

So I decided to put everything on hold and see what happened because I have
learned from long experience that if things don't just drop into place then
it is no good trying to make them do so. Chill, and let the energy flow tell
you where it wants to go when it is good and ready.

A few weeks later Wembley Arena contacted us again. There had been a change
of management and they wanted to know if we were still interested in the
October 27th date. We said yes, but not at the price the previous owners
were asking, nor could we commit to 12,500 seats.

They offered a better deal and said the Arena could be laid out for 5,500
and 7,500. Okay, we said, you're on.



We booked for 5,500 seats last February right on the limit of our financial
possibility. I had hoped that we could possibly reach 7,500 because the
whole idea was to make a massive statement by the numbers that something was
stirring in the human psyche that could no longer be ignored by the
mainstream.

But our initial assessment of the likely interest has proved to be about
right with around 5,000 seats now spoken for a week ahead of the event and
thousands more that we hope will be watching the live streaming of the whole
day worldwide on the Internet.


That is fantastic and would have been dreamland for me a few years ago when
audiences for this information could be counted in hundreds and, not long
before that, sometimes on the fingers of two hands. But just how far we
still have to go in awakening the majority to their plight hit home two
weeks ago when it was announced that the 135,000 tickets for the 2013
Glastonbury rock festival, costing more than £200 ($320) apiece, had all
been taken in a record one hour and forty minutes.


There needs to be an incredible shift in global awareness if I am to still
be in embodiment when the collective consciousness awakens to what is really
happening in the world and to the nature of its own self and reality. But,
who knows? You keep going, do what you can, and what happens, happens. That
is how I have always worked and always will.



'Hey, chaps, I am open to anything - just make it fast ...'

A mere handful of people have made the event happen - just five in any
ongoing way, including myself. Davidicke.com webmaster Sean Adl-Tabatabai
(you can see why we call him 'Sean') has arranged the production and
technical side and Linda Atherton, my rock for more than 40 years, has made
sure the costs are kept in check. They can get out of hand very quickly if
you are not careful on something this big.

Both have pulled in all this extra work on top of everything else they have
to do every day and they have done a magnificent job together with my son
Jaymie and his Open Vision Events, my daughter Kerry and artist Neil Hague
who has a produced a lot of new images. My other son, Gareth, will be
providing much of the music.

I have spent the last three months putting together a whole new presentation
and working with Sean on how I want the event to look within the budget we
have been dealing with. The amount of work that a very few people have put
into this event for eight months has been incredible.


One of the biggest challenges of all things has been getting the music
together that I wanted. You would think that would be simple, but no. What a
palaver, as they say, and you would not believe the time and hassle this has
taken over many weeks. It has, however, been a very enlightening experience
on many levels.


We learned of the shocking figures demanded by major music corporations to
play short bursts of music even when it was released decades ago and, in one
case, the singer has long passed to another reality. Sony wanted £6,500
(more than $10,000) to play a song lasting less than three minutes and
released in 1967.

Universal wanted £5,000 ($8,000) to play Universal Soldier by Donovan, a
song released in 1965 and lasting only seconds over two minutes. I stress
that this is not the artist demanding this money, but the rights holders.


This would have been a total of £11,500 (nearly $19,000) to play music 45
years old and lasting for a total of five minutes within an event spanning
12 hours. We are talking insanity here.



Then there was the Japanese video game giant, Sega, through its British
offshoot, Creative Assembly, that  agreed a price with us for an anti-war
song that they are bizarrely using in a series called Total War in which
children and adults are encouraged to wage simulated battles and wars and
electronically kill lots of people.

Even more bizarrely, the creators of the song, which so eloquently exposes
the nature of war, sold the rights to them for this purpose. Sega and
Creative Assembly made a financial agreement with us to use the song and
then suddenly withdrew because an executive did not want 'their' music to be
associated with me - a 'controversial figure'.


There was also the little-known 'New Age'-type 'spiritual' singer on the
Isle of Wight whose music I came across many years ago now. She didn't even
get as far as talking money. She would not have her more than 20 years old
'spiritual' songs involved in the Wembley event under any circumstances
because 'I don't believe in a conspiracy'.


So now 'spiritual' music is only for those you agree with, then. Okay. It's
not what I would call spirituality, but there we go.


Next came a contact with a lawyer representing Yoko Ono who owns the rights
to some John Lennon songs that would have been perfect. But after several
days the word came back that we were not allowed to use them. Given that the
Wembley event represents everything that John Lennon spoke out in support
of, it makes you wonder why you bloody bother sometimes.


But, if you keep going and refuse to give in, the right doors will open and
somehow we have got there in the end thanks to artists who put their actions
where their mouths are. What a hassle, but what an eye-opener, too, about
many things.



Wembley is a very significant moment in my life and work. In many ways my
life since my mind exploded open in 1990-91 has been a journey to get here
and it is certainly a pivotal moment and a turning point - though to what I
am not sure yet. In fact, I am more than not sure. The future is a blank for
me at this moment.


I do everything on intuition and I usually have an intuitive feel for where
I am going, but not this time. It is like the future ends at Wembley for
now. Last year my intuition said 'yes' to almost everything and  I must have
flown some 45,000 miles around the world to Australia (and all over), New
Zealand, the United States and Europe.


I came home utterly exhausted with my health shot for a while and, once we
booked Wembley in February, I have put everything on hold except for that
and a major new book that I am two-thirds to finishing. I am usually here,
there and everywhere, but I have spent the entire year in England apart from
two talks in Hawaii in March followed by my return to Peru trip in April.


I have had many invitations to speak around the world, but I have said the
same every time - I am going to wait until after Wembley and see where we
are. I want to see the impact that it has or doesn't have in taking this
whole thing forward.


I will be going deeper into the rabbit hole in terms of information and
dot-connections than, in my experience at least, anyone has ever gone before
and with the event being live-streamed on the Internet, and available to be
seen in full for a month afterwards, the potential is there for a large
number of people to see what they are not being told all over the world.

Whether they will take that opportunity is quite another thing, however, but
all I and those around me can do is make the information available. After
that, we can do nothing more - horses to water, drinking or not drinking,
and all that stuff.



Humanity is at a fork in the road with reality-changing, or
reality-not-changing, decisions to make and so am I, really. Where from
here? I don't know and I am just waiting for the energy to move.

Getting on for a quarter of a century of airport-hotel-venue,
airport-hotel-venue, writing books and researching often 15 hours a day, and
defending my assets and works in legal battles, has been energetically and
physically battering - as well as very wearing mentally and emotionally.

And it has all been done in the face of enormous ridicule and abuse which,
while most of it leaves me untouched and unmoved, some of it is bound to get
through here and there to manifest in the frustration of trying so hard to
make people aware of their plight and what is happening around them while so
many of those same people just dismiss and abuse. Dismissal is okay, that is
their right. But why such abuse?


I remember a really telling moment in my life when I was still a kid in
short trousers at my first school. There was a production in which I played
a tree to be cut down by the prince as he rescued Sleeping Beauty. I always
got the best parts.


I and the other 'trees' in our brown trousers and green branching hats were
supposed to fall on the floor as the prince cut us down with a make-believe
scythe. But I was trying to play it for real and he never came anywhere near
me so I didn't fall. Why would I?


Everyone else did, though, and I was left standing alone amid the little
bodies of green and brown and the audience, made up mostly of parents, began
to laugh ever more loudly as I refused to fall. I guess it was preparing me
for the life that was to come!


As was the reaction of the headmistress - Miss Wilkinson - who was built
like Mike Tyson with shoulders to match (no pads necessary) in her
schoolma'am two-piece that appeared to be her only attire.


She called me out of the classroom and loomed over me like a fairy-tale
giant to inform me that I was a disgrace to the school, had ruined the play
and made everyone a laughing stock. Well, actually, I was the only laughing
stock as I recall.

I looked up at her and thought 'Why are you shouting at me - I was only
doing my best?'


That little boy is still in there somewhere and he sometimes asks the same
question today.



'Sorry I'm late, darling, some idiot tree wouldn't fall over.'

But, whatever. You just get on with it. Not to do so in current
circumstances would be unthinkable. And I will. I have said that I will keep
going with this until I drop and I shall. But what is the best way to
proceed from here? This is the question I can't answer at the moment and I
am going to let Wembley happen and see where it takes me.

I am feeling healthy and strong and I have lost 28 pounds, what we call 'two
stone' in the UK, since June. But I am pretty sure that my days of bouncing
around the world from country to country and venue to venue are over. It is
so physically punishing and not the most effective use of my energy and time
given the electronic possibilities today - at least for now, anyway - and I
am going to have to make the information travel rather than me on anything
like the same scale.

We are making a start on that with the live streaming of the Wembley event
and I am waiting to see what the response is before I make any decisions
about where I go from here. I have my most advanced book yet to finish after
Wembley but there is nothing arranged apart from that.

I have pretty much a blank sheet of paper for the first time in decades,
which is nice, but what will be written upon it I have no idea. It will, as
always, be interesting to find out - whatever it is.