Hey, Rock Star Tax-Dodgers! Learn From Your Predecessors!

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Palinka (RIP)
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Hey, Rock Star Tax-Dodgers! Learn From Your Predecessors!

Post by Palinka (RIP) »

Today's rock stars show an utter like of style when they're avoiding paying their taxes. If you're a rock star and you persist in avoiding tax, at least do it in the time-honoured way.

Don't sit around in an accountant's office discussing the tax relief available on the cost of buying a dividend in a subsidiary of an offshore parent company, like some kind of square. Go and live in a south of France, with a vast coterie of hangers-on you can lord it over, like a ghastly deposed 18th-century monarch, and a drug dealer called something like Dave the Hat, whom you persist in referring to as a "mellow guy", despite substantial evidence that suggests Dave the Hat is a violent psychopath.

And, while you're there, behave at all times as if you're some kind of outlaw escaping The Man, who is relentlessly persecuting you because you're too brilliant and free-thinking and thus a terrible threat to the pathetic mores of bourgeois society, rather than, say, a bass player who is too greedy to pay his whack. Write some songs whining about being a tax exile, in the eye-popping belief that this is going to elicit sympathy from your fellow countrymen: yes, we're reduced to using a food bank, but at least we're not that poor guy who has had the inconvenience of relocating his life of non-stop luxury, drugs and shagging to Villefranche-sur-Mer.

Before you leave, don't skulk about secretly pouring money into a tax-avoidance scheme as if you're somehow embarrassed about your actions: make a big old song and dance about it, as though you're convinced it's you that has the moral upper hand.

Take a leaf out Robert Plant's book. He spent a significant proportion of time between songs at Led Zeppelin's 1975 Earls Court shows complaining wildly that "everyone" was leaving the country because of the fiscal policies of the, then, Chancellor of the Exchequer (the UK Governments' job title for the Chief Treasurer of the Country) Denis Healey, and admonishing the audience – then in the midst of an economic downturn brought about by a slump in house prices and a global stock market crash – for voting for Labour without first considering the effects their taxation plans might have on multimillionaire musicians.

You may scoff at the sheer, brazen, screw-you arrogance on display there, but it's worth noting that it seemed to go down pretty well with the audience, in marked contrast to, say, Mark Owen of Take That's quiet investment in the Icebreaker tax-avoidance scheme, which resulted in persons unknown scrawling the graffiti "FUCK OFF TAX EVADER" on the front of his south London home.

In short, this strategy is evidence not merely of greed, but of a wider malaise in popular music. Without wishing to compound the woes of the musical wing of the investors, it offers them this message: You're supposed to be a rock star, a job that brings with it certain responsibilities codified by your forebears. Start doing your job properly or I'm afraid we're going to have to advertise your position.

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE!

Exhibit One

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Exhibit Two

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This post wast précised from an article in, the newspaper, The Guardian, which was originally written by Alexis Petridis.
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