Olly the Octopus

why_participate Hello everyone: I am Olly The Octopus Super Super; the über-hip magazine recently asked 'Is protesting cool?' Am I a protest singer? Well I've sung at a few protests... I'm definitely no-hippie, I prefer to think of it as satire, but I do like to sing about things in a clear and undiluted way... OK so you might have heard of me before...how come? Well, I got on national News at 10 back in November 2008 when I hijacked Boris Johnson’s first mayoral assembly in Bromley, singing my song ‘London’s New Mare’ to a mortified, booing audience of Boris fans before being bundled out by the police. I was on the Channel 4 news and CNN in March singing my song 'Fred Goodwin's Pension' outside the RBS building in Bishopsgate, London, too. City AM, the financial districts' free morning newspaper picked up on this song when I posted it on youtube. Channel 4 asked me to come down and do an interview at the 2009 g20 protests on April 1st for their noon show (SORT IT OUT!!! -watch the video on my myspace and you'll see what I mean), and while I was there I played a gig with the legend Billy Bragg as well as Get Cape Wear Cape and Kate Nash which NME featured in their 8th April issue. My first stunt was in the UK headquarters of the Church of Scientology, which I infiltrated to sing my song ‘The Scientologist’, before again being bundled out, this time by irate Scientologist zealots. That one was for John Sweeny. Ironically this stunt got me a wee bit of a cult status, and the Anti-Scientology protest mob; ‘Anonymous’ have adopted the song as their theme tune, blasting it out at protests around the world. Thanks guys! My Youtube ‘Video Nasty’s’ series has blossomed into a minor YouTube phenomenon too, rivalling for sheer popularity ‘my cat fell behind the sofa’ and ‘my camcorder footage of Lindsay Lohan on the red carpet at a premiere’ and you can see my musings cropping up in columns for Subba Cultcha, Future London Underground and eARmusic fanzines as well as my Blog: http://ollytheoctopus.blogspot.com and Twitter http://twitter.com/ollytheoctopus Year of The Tiger? Nonsense, 2010 is the Year of the Octopus.. /