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February 01 2026
Mat making headlines © Mat Amp Mat making headlines © Mat Amp

In a world increasingly being torn apart by hate and division, choose love. Looking back to move forward, thoughts by Mat Amp 

Jesus H fucking Christ almighty, what an insane few months that’s been. Reality, it seems, has made the art of parody redundant. I mean, the leader of the free world wouldn’t be out of place if he actually appeared in an episode of Spitting Image. So much so that the makers of American cartoon South Park stuck an actual photo of his face on a cartoon body.

In the show’s latest series, Trump has been shacked up with the devil, who is having his butt baby. According to the show, the devil was created with a tiny arsehole so that he could never be impregnated and give birth to the antichrist. Unfortunately for human kind, Trump has the tiniest penis in the world, allowing him to inseminate the devil.

For most of the series, the big T is wandering around with his tiny prick out whilst ironically acting like a giant bellend – it is some achievement. It’s often been said that the US can only truly take the piss through animation, but this is next level.

It’s next level because it has to be. To be funny in this way, South Park has to be more ridiculous and obscene than reality itself and right now that is a very tall order indeed.  

Why am I talking about this poor excuse for an old man’s scrotal bag anyway, you may, with absolute justification, ask?

Well, partially, it’s because I can’t resist commenting when the equivalent of a zoo full of escaped animals is set loose in a munitions factory. I mean, It’s hard not to just point and scream when a giraffe leg is flying through the air. But it’s more than that.

In the ‘90s, there was a genuine feeling of hope in the air, as people embraced progressive change. Okay a lot of it, I mean a lot of what I saw at least, was fuelled by buckets of MDMA, but it felt like we were changing the world for the better, no matter how it was being achieved.

And it was a lot fun. This week someone sent me a Whatsapp message of a headline we created in the Ham & High gazette. “2,000 ravers are left alone for fear of riot,” read the Monday headline. The article was about a party we hosted in Highgate in the late ‘90s. By that time, the Criminal Justice Bill was in place and running a huge soundsystem outdoors was not something you could easily get away with. But we had it on good authority that the police, busy with Notting Hill Carnival, were turning a blind eye to non-violent crime. Add to that the fact that punters could only access the address through phone numbers on the tickets we sold after midday on the date of the party, and we knew the filth would have an absolute logistical nightmare busting it.

As it was, they issued environmental health notices every couple of hours, which were promptly torn up and returned to sender. The party rumbled on into the next day.

The house backed on to Highgate golf course, which gave the golfers of north London a visual and aural treat as they chipped on to the 18th green. There were still hundreds of hardy souls grooving to Detroit house and techno under the tripped-out blinking arc lines and strobes, as the first golfers came over the hill.

What happened at this point is embedded in my mind as one of the most hysterical acts of defiance I’ve ever had the absolute unbridled delight of witnessing. At the time, the Teletubbies had just hit the airwaves, so a couple of party-goers thought it would be amusing to run up the hill towards the golfers, skipping like teletubbies and singing the theme tune as the huge sound system boomed in the background.

Whilst the police had decided the party was out of bounds, they couldn’t handle this flagrant disrespect for the grand old institution of golf, so they gave chase. It still remains one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen, regardless of the fact I’d dropped a couple of pink Calis and hadn’t slept for a few days.

And so it was: 2,000 ravers were left alone. I don’t think in anybody’s mind, except the public reading that paper on Monday, there was a genuine fear of riot. What made me laugh at the time is that you’d have more chance of finding a riot at a Wednesday afternoon meeting of the W.I. in Wimbledon Library (the Women’s Institute, in case you’re wondering).

The parties we put on were about connection and letting people express themselves. People embraced it because they realised that sitting in judgement on others was no fun and that love isn’t a finite thing. The more love you give the more love there is.

There was inevitably part of the party ‘movement’ that became politicised, but that was a response to the heavy-handed crackdown on the free party scene. The knee-jerk response from authorities saw a raft of the dumb type of legislation that lawmakers pass when they are shitting their pants because they have no idea what is happening. Action, reaction – the basic physics of revolt.

But as time has rumbled on, divisions have deepened. And although this country is a lot more progressive than it was when I was a kid, it has never felt so polarised. People from the right, threatened by progress, blame ‘humourless’ leftie liberals for what they call cancel culture, whilst the left have taken the bait and weaponised their academic education to preach about pronouns and the like.

And I promise you, I get it. I get that some people don’t want to be defined by their gender and I’m more than happy to live in a world where people choose the pronoun they would like to represent them. What gets me is the lack of understanding when people don’t want to do that, when they don’t understand why that is important. That doesn’t make them bad people, it just means they hold a different opinion about things.

I think that is a difficult thing for us to consider because we have stopped listening to each other. Instead of understanding that people are most often the sum of their experiences, we are too quick to judge.

The result is a world in which nobody is listening to anyone else. We all know what is right and damn the other.

In my experience, it’s a better place to live when we are looking at the positives in each other rather than looking for someone to judge and blame.

Don’t get sucked in to YouTube channels that tell you to blame ‘others’ for the state of our world. Fuck that narrative. The only people to truly blame are the ones in power. Fight it – fight the power, not the people.

Don’t believe the hype and don’t take sides. It’s only a war if they set us against each other, so my advice is fuck the system, fuck Trump and fuck all the troublemaking click-hungry hatemongers on social media.

Make Love, Not War. 

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February – March 2026 : Progress

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