Jez: Look Mark, I’m a musician, in case you’d forgotten. Yeah? I answer to a higher law. The law of “if it feels good, do it”.

Mark: Oh, that’s a great law isn’t it? What’s that, Gaddafi’s law?

Jez: It’s the musician’s law. Colonel Gaddafi could not lay down a bass hook, Mark. That should be clear even to you!

[Peep Show Series 3 – with thanks to Bandshell on Dissensus for the quote and for inspiring this post]

Hopefully Gaddafi will be gone by the time this post goes live. I certainly won’t miss him, but I will grudgingly admit that he brought a certain erratic charm to international politics.

In the eigties and nineties fascist idiots like Nick Griffin and Blood Axis’ Michael Moynihan fell for this charm, distributing the Colonel’s Green Book – seemingly in the belief that he was a profound thinker.

fascist loons Nick Griffin and Derek Holland pose under a Gaddafi portrait in Libya

Griffin actually went one step further and headed off to see Gaddafi in the hope that he’d be able to tap him up for some funding for the National Front. Apparently this didn’t come to anything (unsurprisingly!), but the episode is certainly worth remembering now that Griffin has gone pseudo respectable and rabidly anti-Islam.

More enjoyable by far were the punks who recognised that Gaddafi’s charm was more about his flamboyant mentalism than any insightful philosophy.

God Told Me To Do It were a Hackney-based band would be universally recognised as being rubbish, were it not for their genius sense for the controversial and a neat turn in slogans. Their artwork was liberally reproduced in Vague back in the day and they were notorious for winding up the po-faced.

Having used the Colonel’s image on a few flyers, the group noticed in 1986 that the Libyan Embassy in London was temporarily  vacant, presumably in the aftermath of WPC Yvonne Fletcher being shot by one of its occupants whilst policing a demonstration outside…

[All GTMTDI images found via Kill Your Pet Puppy.]

Gaddafi also makes an appearance alongside some “loony left” tabloid bugbears in Stewart Home‘s black-humoured “Kill” which is available on the classic Stewart Home Comes In Your Face CD. The tune was later re-versioned as “Islam Uber Alles” by Blackpool psych-punk legends The Ceramic Hobs, but here is the original in all its dumb boot-stomping glory:

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More recently (and less interestingly), MIA has described Gaddafi as “always being one of my style icons”, and Asian Dub Foundation made an opera about him.

Here’s hoping that Libya will shortly become “the land of the free” and with that Gaddafi will become history.