BLASTS FROM THE PAST

Alan Averill on three lessons he’s learned from history

THE FOLLY OF WAR

“My grandparents essentially brought me up because my parents were both working full-time. My grandfather was in the RAF in WWII and my grandmother was in the WRENS. The life lesson that my grandfather taught me was that the Germans didn’t hate the soldiers they were fighting. They understood that they were all doing the same thing. A recurring theme in Primordial is that sense of anonymous loss, that statistical loss of young men sent to their deaths.”

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

“Last year I went to the killing fields in Cambodia, and one thing I found fascinating was that Pol Pot was educated in the Sorbonne in Paris. He was part of the French Marxist intelligentsia and wasn’t working class at all. He returned to Cambodia and was courting this woman who then went off with a quite well-known Cambodian singer. Heartbroken, he went out into the forest and plotted his revenge, and in four years, nearly four million people died. So I was struck by that butterfly effect idea; man has heart broken by It Girl in 1970s Cambodia and plots revenge, which in turn leads to the death of millions of people.”

NATIONAL PRIDE

“There once was a time when I would definitely have hung an Irish flag over the speakers in every country, but by my late 20s I really couldn’t stand behind everything that the flag represents. All the child abuse scandals were coming out in the 90s, so it seemed to represent an element of institutional abuse that I couldn’t support. That debate changed my views on some of the chest-beating, flag-waving elements of nationalism that I may have subscribed to 20 or so years ago. There are so many grey areas and complexities.”