Being called mad is a compliment!
The body is just a hologram and many world leaders are lizards working for a secret cabal – some 27 years after THAT Wogan interview, David Icke will air his still controversial views in a Dublin show next week. So it’s probably a good thing that he belie
TRY as he might to dispute the conventional meaning of reality — of which much, much more later — arch conspiracy theorist David Icke admits that for him life has never been sweeter.
Next Friday he will perform to a packed house at the Helix Theatre in Dublin, a mere 18 months or so since he last mesmerised his Irish fan base with his chilling and perhaps eye-opening cornucopia of theories that career through every facet of, well, real life.
From his familiar riffs against climate change, Silicon Valley — which he dubs the Devil’s Playground — and the evils of the Bilderberg Group to his take on newer memes like mobile phone addiction, the fascism of political correctness and transgender politics, the 66-year-old public speaker has an all-encompassing view of the world. The icing on his towering cake of ideas is — perhaps conveniently for his career — the idea that reality is but an illusion.
His Dublin gig kicks off his new European tour called Everything You Need to Know and it ties in with his equally empowering-sounding book Everything You Need to Know But Have Never Been Told.
The appetite for his work is replicated wherever he goes today, he claims in the affable and courteous manner that disguises the burning intensity of his world view.
Whether in Washington or Belgrade, the reaction to him is always the same: a sell-out show — with truth-seeking admirers drawn to his revelations about how we are in the grip of a ‘gathering Orwellian nightmare’ — soaraway booksales and matching merchandise.
Not surprising, given how his shows can last a mindboggling ten hours, though his Dublin gig is of just four hours’ duration.
He talks incessantly, moving seamlessly from one pet theory to the next, spouting esoteric New Age rhetoric one minute, quoting from an approved specialist in, say, electromagnetic radiation the next.
Ultimately everything feeds into his grand narrative of how the reality we experience is very limited, only really a hologram that sinister and malevolent beings are manipulating for their own ends.
David Icke wouldn’t be human — although typically he also has an offbeat view on what that entails — if he wasn’t gratified at how his stature has grown since the 1990s when he was either dismissed as a headbanger or criticised as a snake oil salesman who was brainwashing gullible people and tapping into our primordial paranoia.
In 1991, he announced on Terry Wogan’s chat show that he was the son of God, or of the Godhead, sent to tell the world that the end was nigh. Dressed in a turquoise shellsuit, he cut an intense and harried figure as he warned of how natural calamities from earthquakes to floods would destroy the planet.
The audience laughed uproariously at his off-the-wall prophecies, with the late Wogan taking an uncharacteristically cruel cut at his solemn guest, pointed out that the audience were laughing at him, not with him.
It was a devastating comedown for the then 39-year-old who up to that point had been a respected BBC broadcaster and a well-known face on Grandstand, the popular sports programme.
‘It was like I was banging my head against a brick wall, I sometimes wondered if there was any point to it,’ he recalls from his home in the Isle of Wight about the darkest period in his career. ‘But now I know I’m getting through to people, I’m getting the information out there. I’m in a good space and it’s a good feeling seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.’
It’s not just the numbers of people flocking to his shows that make the difference — it’s their background too. ‘I get people in the audience who wear suits and carry briefcases. They tell me that my theories make more sense to them than anything that they’ve been told before,’ he says.
Icke’s apparent rising stock in the professional class clearly gives him satisfaction. The turning point in his journey from object of derision to pillar of the conspiracy theory community came after 9/11. ‘It was a watershed,’ he says.
His view that the attacks were an inside job was hardly original but seemed to be a salve to the confusion and fears that multiplied in the aftermath of the attacks.
He gained a cult following and suddenly there seemed to be more strings to his proverbial bow than peddling far-fetched nonsense about the royal family being lizards and the earth being controlled by a cabal of shape-shifting reptiles who had all sorts of devious ways of keeping the rest of us subdued.
But if professionally things have never been better, his personal life is also on an even keel. His second marriage fell apart some years ago amid claims by his American wife Pamela Leigh Richards that her husband had begun to suspect her of also being a shape-shifting alien.
‘I have no partner or girlfriend, I have no interest in that stuff any more, that part of my life is over,’ says David today. He has four adult children, three from his first marriage and he doesn’t talk about his youngest child, his daughter from an extra-marital relationship. His sons Gareth and Jaymie live in Derby and manage the busy David Icke industry while daughter Kerry lives around the corner from his apartment on the Isle of Wight.
To counter allegations that he was earning millions and living it up in a stupendous mansion with a Rolls Royce outside, Icke he uploaded a YouTube video of his modest bachelor apartment and his saloon car.
Although he denies it, on some level he cares what people think of him. It might be the outcome of his long years as a performer delivering uninterrupted monologues or his messianic convictions but it can be hard to interrupt him when he’s in full flight or to pin him down precisely on some of his beliefs.
For instance he says that medicine treats patients in only two ways, with the scalpel or with drugs supplied by ‘big pharma’. ‘It’s totally myopic because in reality the body is an electro-magnetic information field so it should be treated as if it is a hologram of that information rather than a solid physical entity,’ he says.
Excellent, I say, so how do we go about deciphering our holograms for, say, curing cancer? David launches into a spiel about the paranormal, virtual reality, something called biocentrism but nothing concrete about his third way.
Finally he says: ‘I’m not going to tell people to do anything. We are drowning in people telling us what to
‘The physical world is just an illusion’ ‘I know I’m getting through to people’
do. I’m just giving people the information, what they do with it is their own affair. I’m just saying, here’s another way of looking at that. There’s a lot of power in that, it’s absolutely fantastic and when people are given it they often say to me, “hold on a minute, that makes sense”.’
His early ideas, which helped turn him into a laughing stock, are never far from the surface. It’s not long before he remarks how influential figures from the Queen Mother to George Bush Sr to David Rockefeller — who he claims are or were lizards and members of the secret cabal that controlled the world — enjoyed or are enjoying remarkable longevity.
‘Look at the ages they live until. Is that a coincidence or do you think they are getting treated differently to the rest of us?’ he laughs.
His earlier prophesy about how the earth would come crashing to an end in 1997 never, thankfully, came to pass so I ask him if ever in almost 30 years, he was wrong about anything or if subsequent developments debunked any of his theories? ‘No,’ he says decisively. ‘I have said nothing over the last 30 years that I would debunk. But I am now a lot more widely read so I have put a lot more meat on the bones if you like.
‘I have always said that the physical world is an illusion and that the body is just a vehicle to experience this reality.
‘Reality is just an experience. Talk to people who have had neardeath experiences and they say that when they leave their bodies, they still see something, but what they see is a completely different reality. The body is just a focus of attention, that is all, and our bodies limit the frequency bands of what we can see and hear. We are trapped by our bodies. When we die we reach “The True Eye”, which is a state of consciousness without body or form.’
Thirty years ago he was just going about his regular business until he ‘suddenly started feeling a presence around me all the time’. In March 1991, he visited a psychic who told him that he would ‘become a figure on the world stage and that I would face enormous opposition’. Most of us might be either freaked out or amused by such a fate but David doesn’t seem to have been too perturbed.
‘Something said to me go with it and do you know, even though I endured historic levels of ridicule after the Wogan show, I never regretted it.
‘I realised that the worst thing I could do is mess up one short experience in this reality. I realised that being called mad by an idiot is a compliment.’
Having devoted his life to helping people become aware and awake, should he not enter politics, the one arena where people can really use their powers of persuasion, to improve society? ‘That’s a complete myth,’ he fires back. ‘Politics is a waste of a life.’
He stood in a by-election in 2008 after David Davis resigned in protest against moves to, as he saw it, restrict civil liberties.
‘Davis said that a bill which extended the detention time for terror suspects without charge was an example of Big Brother so I just used the election as a platform to show that his Big Brother was only a little sister to my Big Brother. I’m glad I did that as I got a lot of information out there.’
Happily he only received 100 or so votes. ‘I said on my campaign leaflets that I didn’t want people to vote for me, that I only wanted to tell them what was happening. I was aiming for no votes but obviously some people didn’t realise that and voted for me even though the last thing I wanted was to be elected into politics.
‘We live in a rigged political system, there’s no choice in it and anyone who genuinely is trying to make a difference finds themselves the target of a massive campaign to undermine them.’
While he has a remedy for overturning the political system, he typically stops short of describing how it would happen in practise.
‘People need to get off their backside and start demanding what is right. Stop blaming politicians. I’m a great believer in the Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela approach — non violent, noncooperation. If someone comes out of Leinster House and says “we’re doing this” and enough people say “we’re not doing it”, then it stops. Political power is only the level of acquiescence we give to the political class. Don’t cooperate with your enslavement, don’t cooperate with your tyranny.’
Is it lonely at the vanguard of conspiracy theories? ‘That’s a very good question and no, I’m not lonely. I have been living alone for 11 years and when I’m not away on tour I spend about 95 per cent of my time alone and I love it, my mind can go where it wants to go. Why can’t people enjoy their own company?
‘I’m very happy with my life. I daydream all the time, that’s where I get my insights I think. I walk a lot and I go into cafés a lot to read and have a cup of tea without distraction. It’s the simple things that give me pleasure.’
And complex ideas, evidently.
‘I’m just giving people information’