Mark Devlin's new book, No One's Dad's a Plumber (Musical Truth Volume 4), argues that popular music’s leading figures are frequently products of elite, often military‑intelligence family bloodlines rather than ordinary working‑class backgrounds. Devlin presents recurring patterns: fathers who were high‑ranking military officers, diplomats, intelligence operatives, Freemasons, or civil servants, with few exceptions. He uses case studies and archival TV appearances to show early exposure on camera as a pathway to fame. Specific investigations focus on five electronic dance music figures — Pete Tong, Judge Jules, Paul Oakenfold, Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) and Carl Cox — as “gatekeepers” elevated by family or institutional facilitation. Devlin highlights links such as Norman Cook and Keir Starmer attending the same school, Judge Jules’s LSE law background, and instances where public‑school networks promoted rave culture.

He contends the rave/acid house era was steered by establishment elements: mass ecstasy use, digital rhythms and occult imagery served as social‑engineering tools to divide generations and experimentally influence large groups. Devlin extends this thesis to broader celebrity culture, describing “lifetime actors” — prominent entertainers used to disseminate political and cultural messaging. He raises concerns about artist replacement (alleged replacements of Kanye or Madonna) that obscure authorship and about how the industry protects powerful figures, citing scandals involving R. Kelly, Afrika Bambaataa, Tim Westwood and allegations against Sean “Diddy” Combs.

The book explores occult and ritualistic practices in music history (Crowley, Kabbalah, ritualized performance) and links ritual sex‑abuse allegations to alleged misuse of influence. Devlin also addresses current threats beyond music: geoengineering/“chemtrails,” AI’s takeover of creative production, 5G and transhumanism. He urges public awareness — encapsulated by the phrase “look up” — and announces his attendance at related rallies and a summer‑solstice talk in Oxford. Throughout, Devlin uses archival footage, family‑lineage research and cultural analysis to argue that popular music often functions as a vector for elite social‑engineering agendas. Devlin emphasizes documentary evidence, interviews, and archival clips to support his claims, urging readers to critically reexamine popular narratives about talent, meritocracy and celebrity by tracing hidden networks of privilege, institutional influence and symbolic programming mechanisms.

Transcript follows:

Host: [Music] Hello and welcome to The Schism. This podcast is all about critical thinking, deconstructing the nature of reality, and trying to uncover the truth about the world we live in, society, who we are, and where we come from. [Music]

Host: Hello and welcome to The Schism. I'm joined, as always, by my co-host Adam.

Adam: Hello everyone.

Host: And today we have a very special guest on the show — author and researcher into the dark side of the music industry, Mark Devlin. Mark, thanks so much for joining us.

Mark Devlin: Hello, guys. Good to be back.

Host: Well, we've had you on the show quite a few times already, so we're not going to go into your history because people can look up the previous episodes if they want to hear more about that. But we do want to talk to you about your new book, the fourth installment of your Musical Truth series, that has a rather interesting title: No One's Dad's a Plumber. So, yeah — we wanted to get you to unpack that title a little bit for us and talk to us about why you chose to do this book right now.

Mark Devlin: Sure. So, No One's Dad's a Plumber is a conversation starter. It's been designed to be that. And already it's shown itself to be so because I've had people say, "What do you mean no one's dad's a plumber? That's ridiculous. My mate Dave down the road — his dad's a plumber." But the point here is not to say that there are no plumbers in the world. It's with specific reference to the music industry because this book follows on from the three previous volumes in my Musical Truth series. One of the aspects of my research, which has been consistent throughout these books, comes down to where many of these public figures — these icons, these heroes, these cultural characters who are served up to us — come from. The key to that question so often lies in the area of family bloodlines: generational family bloodlines that go back many ages. We find new expressions of these same families getting ushered into positions of extreme prominence. It doesn't have to be as a rock star or a musician. It could be as an actor, a TV presenter, a politician, a business leader, a lord mayor, a judge — any kind of position that gives them influence over large numbers of people and whereby they can help to shape and mold culture and the direction that human society moves in.

Mark Devlin: So music — popular music — has definitely been a part of those agendas, and we find many musicians, rock stars, who come out of these same families who I contend have been handed their careers on a plate. They've been facilitated for them. I'm not making that claim with regard to every famous musician. Some clearly do make it on their own terms, or at least get their careers started through showing some skill and talent, but many of them get into those positions because of the families that they come out of.

Mark Devlin: One thing I would have expected to find very early on in my research into the music industry, when you look at the dads of prominent band members, is regular working-class jobs — like lorry driver, builder, plumber, docker, construction worker, whatever it is. But you don't find that, or you very rarely find that. The father of Mark E. Smith of The Fall was a plumber, so I give him a pass. But other than that, what you do find is plenty of Freemasons, plenty of lieutenant colonels, admirals, generals, high‑ranking military personnel, CIA agents, diplomats, civil servants. If it was just one or two you could make a case for coincidence, but when you see it happening again and again, if you're going to be mature about it and apply critical thought, you have to come to the conclusion that something is going on. A trend, a pattern is starting to emerge and it goes beyond the realms of just the way it goes.

Mark Devlin: This became clear to me very early on in my research and this latest book is reinforcing that same point with new information that I've not presented before. So that's what this book is really. I chose that title to just get some tongues wagging and get people talking about it. But it's Musical Truth Volume 4, by any other name. And it's taking these same dynamics that I've previously revealed, but adding new data to it to reinforce the points.

Mark Devlin: So it's family bloodlines. It's military intelligence connections to famous music artists. It's darker cult symbolism and ritualistic stuff that we find in music shows and videos and promotional photos. It's frequency and vibration that's getting stripped into recordings. It's social engineering — the deliberate degeneration of specific genres through social engineering. I shine the spotlight specifically on hip‑hop again in this book because that's the world that I came out of and I know a lot about it. And I've got a section at the end which I've titled "The Gatekeepers," and this is specifically to do with electronic dance music. I've singled out five DJs — very prominent DJs in the electronic dance music field — and done a deep dive on each of them to investigate exactly where it is that they came from and how they've become as successful and as prominent as they have over and above all other competition.

Host: Which five names are those?

Mark Devlin: The five names are Pete Tong, Judge Jules, Paul Oakenfold, Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim), and Carl Cox. Anyone into electronic dance music will either get extremely irate and mad and hurl four‑letter words at me for besmirching the legacy of their heroes, or they might find that there are some interesting points there that they've not considered before. And anyone that's not into electronic dance music should read those chapters because it's not about the music or that specific genre. These serve as case studies of how these people get selected and how they get elevated over and above all other competition.

Adam: Those are actually five very prominent names. I mean, you've listed off probably the five biggest there, at least in Britain.

Mark Devlin: Yeah — at least out of Britain. Yet they all have one thing in common, which is the fact that they were ushered to success compared with a very niche industry like electronic dance music. Not compared to the size of the pop world, but why is it these five figures became so prominent in the positions that they found?

Host: Exactly. Well, the case of Fatboy Slim — Norman Cook — is interesting because it turns out that he attended Reigate School just south of London. At the time he attended, he was a fellow student alongside Sir Keir Starmer, and the two of them learned cello together. They took music lessons. I've got a quote in the book from Norman Cook where he says that for a time it looked as if things would turn out so differently and it looked as if Keir Starmer was going to become a musician and embark on a career in the music industry, and that Norman Cook himself may well have been ushered into the world of politics. I think this is what happens early on with many of these chosen ones. It's already been decided that they're going to be ushered into the public spotlight in some way, but early days it's not necessarily been decided exactly how.

Mark Devlin: Another trend I explore is how those that will go on to become famous seem to get some early exposure on TV for two reasons. It gets them used to being in the spotlight, being interviewed and being on camera, and it gets the public used to their names very early on so that when their careers take off, they're already semi‑familiar. I've got some video interviews that I show in public talks. One involves a young David Robert Jones, who would become David Bowie. In 1964 when he was 17 he was on an episode of the BBC Tonight Show with Cliff Michelmore and he's introduced as a representative for "the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long‑Haired Men." Of course this is complete nonsense — it's just a way of getting him interviewed. A few years later he invented the persona of David Bowie, came out with his single "Space Oddity," and his career took off.

Mark Devlin: There are other examples. There's a clip from The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night (1964) where the camera pans around the crowd and picks out a young boy, 12 years of age, on camera for a few seconds. It turns out to be a young Phil Collins before he became famous as the drummer in Genesis and later as a solo artist. What are the chances that in this Beatles movie we have a 12‑year‑old lad who would go on to become one of the biggest music stars of his generation?

Mark Devlin: I've got examples from America as well. There's footage of a young Jim Morrison prior to him becoming the frontman of The Doors. This was 1964 also, and he appears in a commercial for the State University of Florida in his college blazer with short hair — clearly an acting gig. The following year, 1965, he emerged fully formed as this iconic poster child for the counterculture generation in America as the frontman of The Doors: grown hair, shirt off, drugs, drinking, exposing himself, pushing the whole sex, drugs, and rock‑and‑roll lifestyle. Jim Morrison's father, as many people know, was a Navy admiral who was involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, so Jim Morrison is the son of military intelligence, as were many others coming out of Laurel Canyon.

Mark Devlin: Frank Zappa was another example: his father worked on biological weapons research out of the Edgewood Arsenal military base. Pretty much every major musician that came out of that Laurel Canyon counterculture scene had a father directly connected to the military, usually in a high‑ranking role. I have early footage from 1963 where Frank Zappa appears on The Steve Allen Show; like Jim Morrison he was collegiate and scholarly looking, in shirt and tie, introduced as a novelty act who plays bicycles as a musical instrument — nonsense, again just a route onto television before he became a leading light in that counterculture scene.

Adam: You mentioned Keir Starmer earlier. You have an episode from Kilroy in 1989?

Mark Devlin: Yes — the Kilroy chat show with Robert Kilroy‑Silk. On an episode from 1989 they interviewed Judge Jules. It's a young Judge Jules and he's talking about the emerging acid house and rave scene in the UK. On the same episode, Kilroy interviewed a young, pre‑fame Keir Starmer. He's not mentioned by name, but you can tell by the voice and mannerisms. He's talking about civil liberties, personal rights and freedoms. It's striking, given his later career: head of the Crown Prosecution Service and his actions regarding cases like Jimmy Savile.

Host: Reese brought up a point earlier and I think Mark would like to tackle this. These artists — they come from families of military backgrounds. Do you think the father, for example, knows he's going to send his son into the music industry because of the position of intelligence he sits at? Do you think they're chosen for the families that they are in? Sometimes musicians and actors might need natural talent — can you breed star quality into someone, or are they just guided into whatever role suits the plan?

Mark Devlin: I can only speculate like anyone else. I think it's a number of different scenarios. There may be individuals that show skill and talent early on and at that point it's decided to usher them into a career in music. Other times they may possess natural talent for showmanship or expressing themselves creatively; David Bowie is a good example of someone highly creative who might have become either an actor or musician and then became both. Jim Morrison seemed to possess interests in magic and the supernatural, which he channeled into poetry and songwriting. In other instances they are sent to foundations and institutes to get the best possible training — money is no object if it has been decided that a person will be a prominent artist. They are given the very best in the field and when they emerge they're ready and often the best in their field. People often say controlled bands write the best songs, work with the best producers — of course they do because they get access to these things by virtue of family or selection by social engineers. They become the best in their field because it's been facilitated.

Host: There's a phrase "lifetime actors." Is that yours?

Mark Devlin: That term was coined by Joe Atwill, author of Caesar's Messiah. He and others explored culture creation — genres, fads, trends — and argued that when movements sweep up large numbers of people, they are rarely grassroots; they're often socially engineered by think tanks like the Tavistock Institute, the Frankfurt School, or universities like the London School of Economics. Judge Jules and Mick Jagger are examples of LSE graduates who rose to influence. A lifetime actor is someone in the public eye — an A‑lister — who can be used to deliver messaging. Their role is to build a fan base so they can deliver political or cultural messages that the masses then absorb from a trusted, liked figure. Whether pushing climate narratives, LGBTQ/transgender ideology, transhumanism, or technological futurism, celebrities help carry those messages quickly and effectively. Their celebrity role is incidental to the social engineering function they serve.

Adam: I can't imagine Keir Starmer as a musician.

Host: Or Fatboy Slim as prime minister.

Adam: Was Judge Jules called "Judge" because of a link to convincing the police? How did he get the nickname?

Mark Devlin: He studied law at LSE. His real name is Julius O'Riordan? — his professional name is Judge Jules. He studied law and then went into promoting warehouse raves and acid house parties. He apparently would be put out front to convince the police that a warehouse party was private for his university friends and not a paying event. Because he was middle class and white and respectable, police allegedly accepted that; if they'd stuck Norman Jay out front — who is Black — it might have been a different outcome. Judge Jules is a moniker he took on. Norman Cook's real name is Quentin Cook, and he deliberately chose Norman to sound less posh. He even said early on he wished he'd come from a working‑class family — he wanted to be more "man of the people" than the upper middle‑class background he had. Keir Starmer, his school chum, later embraced leftist politics. Perhaps there's an ideology trotted out at Reigate school — who knows.

Mark Devlin: I think the acid house rave scene in the UK in the late 1980s may have had humble beginnings, but it was very clearly steered early on in desired directions. When ecstasy pills arrived en masse, coinciding with big open‑air raves during the so‑called Second Summer of Love (1988), the scene was hijacked by elements of intelligence. Many public‑school boys promoted raves; Tony Colclough, Jeremy Spencer and others did acid house raves specifically for public‑school boarders. So that scene wasn't as working class as we've been led to believe and it was steered by establishment elements.

Host: For what purpose? Similar to the '60s counterculture to get people to tune out?

Mark Devlin: There are parallels. The '60s LSD influx, much of which flowed through CIA channels, drove a wedge between generations and spawned the sex, drugs, rock‑and‑roll ethos. The acid house phase in the '80s also seems to have had social engineering aims: dividing generations, experimenting on large groups of young people with mind‑altering drugs while using sound and visuals. The music shifted to electronic rhythms produced by drum machines and synthesizers — a step away from analog toward digital. Rave visuals often displayed occult and secret‑society imagery: all‑seeing eyes, pyramids, alien symbolism, and other sigils. As raves moved indoors to licensed superclubs like Ministry of Sound, Gatecrasher and Cream, environments were easier to monitor and surveil. Many ravers reported feeling watched. I think these events were used as experimental labs to observe what happens when large groups of young people commune under those conditions: drugs, rhythm, visuals, and community.

Mark Devlin: Those elements — plant medicine (then), ecstasy (later), rhythm, and communal dance — are primal and have been present throughout human history. Moby observed that if we were a few thousand years ago we'd be around a tribal fire with a shaman tapping out rhythms; plant medicine and communal dance are the same in essence as modern raves and clubs. Social engineers update the methods but exploit the same human propensities.

Adam: Something happening now — Kanye West has been putting out very controversial music with extreme messages. If it's catchy, people will still sing along. Thoughts?

Mark Devlin: Kanye is not easy to work out. There have been replacement Kanyes put out — artists being replaced is a claim people make often; some artists have been replaced. With Kanye, at least one replacement has been presented. That muddies the waters. Sometimes the messages in recent Kanye material are not from the original Kanye. Replacement artists complicate analysis. There have been replacement Madonnas, too — different Madonnas at different times. This sometimes appears to be done partly to make investigative work difficult and partly to mock the masses: if the press labels an obviously different person as "Madonna," the masses will accept the label. With Kanye, some of his prior sincere messages were framed as incoherent rants; that led to damage control and steps to demonize him.

Host: This reminds me of Michael Jackson — public character assassination when artists become thorns in the establishment's side. Examples: Michael Jackson, Prince, George Michael.

Mark Devlin: Yes. When artists are a problem, they can be marginalized, smeared, or worse. With obvious threats, it's too obvious to eliminate them physically now, so the tactics include making them appear crazy or repellent. The Diddy case will force some mainstream confrontation with the music industry's darker side, but I suspect only low‑level figures will be sacrificed while higher‑level names remain protected.

Adam: You mention Diddy (Sean Combs). He seemed untouchable.

Mark Devlin: He appeared untouchable — he acted untouchable. There are allegations he ran an Epstein‑like operation: mansions, parties, alleged filmed activities used as leverage. He probably thought he had protection. When the feds raided his mansion and arrested him, he must have wondered where his protection went. Many figures you think are friends will disappear when trouble happens.

Adam: There was footage of Diddy with Jay‑Z at a "black billionaires" event, Jay‑Z looked concerned. There's a secret society called The Boule mentioned in hip‑hop circles.

Mark Devlin: There is discussion of elite networks among Black businessmen and artists — mention of The Boule and a Forbes‑style rich list in hip‑hop. Historically, names like Diddy, Dr. Dre and Jay‑Z have been among the top. Where all of that goes is unclear.

Mark Devlin: The hip‑hop world has been disillusioning for me. I used to be immersed in the culture — DJing in the 1990s — and I was naive. Time exposed the dark side. Figures like Tim Westwood now have allegations. Afrika Bambaataa, once revered, was accused in 2016 of molesting boys, and more people have come forward. R. Kelly faced serious allegations and convictions; those stories revealed a pattern of alleged sex‑cult activity, pimping, and abuse. Allegations to Diddy and others are still being investigated; some may not result in prosecution, but the reputational damage is significant.

Adam: Some stories are ritualistic — Cassie and Diddy-related rumors — and some acts like urination on young people (in R. Kelly's case) point to ritualism.

Mark Devlin: Sexual ritualism and sex magic have historical precedents. Aleister Crowley wrote about sex magic: harnessing the energetic intensity of orgasm to manifest intent. Reports of bodily excretions in ritual contexts align with descriptions of sex magic where nothing is excluded. When you see patterns across artists and allegations, ritualistic elements are worth considering. Dave Grohl, for example, described doing a ritual to "summon" the spirit of John Bonham to channel his drumming. These kinds of occult or ritualistic practices appear again and again: Bowie with Kabbalah, Jimmy Page with Crowley, John Bonham with intense, trance‑like drumming. The very successful ones often dabbled in ritual or occult practices; it appears woven into the industry's fabric.

Host: Before we get too deep into the occult, you were going to speak at an upcoming rally in Hyde Park, London, but now you're not speaking?

Mark Devlin: I'm going to be in attendance, but I'm not speaking. I have an event in Oxford on June 21st (the summer solstice) that I committed to months ago, so I have to dash back. At the Glasgow event last year I spoke about geoengineering and what it tells us about the psychopathic nature of the elites. I don't remember being asked whether I consent to having the skies pumped full of chemicals, or whether I'm okay with the lifegiving properties of the sun being blocked. Those chemicals reportedly contain nano‑particulates of metals like aluminum, barium and strontium. Aluminium in particular has been linked to Alzheimer's, dementia and other neurological issues. Researchers not funded by vested interests conclude these properties are present in what's being sprayed, colloquially "chemtrails" but officially "geoengineering." They've now admitted to experiments in geoengineering and claim they're blocking the sun to combat climate change. Climate change is a major social‑engineering operation; geoengineering is being used to justify more restrictions, more taxes and control.

Mark Devlin: The London event on June 21st (organized by Matt Landman) is drawing attention to these issues. I'm hoping for a large turnout, similar to the big rallies in 2020–2021 during COVID. Since 2022 numbers at such events have faded and complacency has set in. People think things are "back to normal," but the agenda is regrouping and will return in another guise — climate‑change narratives and geoengineering as a repackaging of COVID‑style control.

Adam: It's definitely stepped up around COVID. In the last 12 months skies have looked criss‑crossed everywhere.

Mark Devlin: Exactly. Some folks have noticed the increase. There are also examples of chemtrails being digitally inserted into old footage or children's cartoons — conditioning kids to accept the criss‑crossed sky as normal. The arrogance to dim the sun on behalf of everyone is a eugenic, psychopathic mindset. People like Bill Gates have publicly pushed ideas about dimming sunlight. Ridiculous acronyms also appear: there's a patent whose acronym reads "SATAN." They leave clues, often veiled in symbolism. For many, this is the greatest threat — the combination of geoengineering, AI, 5G and transhumanism.

Mark Devlin: AI is already writing songs and books. It's dominating content creation. Young people love convenience, so AI and digital tech are hard to turn back. I recently caved and got my first smartphone — years of burner phones before this — and once in, it's hard to step back. Tech will be the hardest to resist because it's convenient and pervasive. The challenge is to get more people to look upward and notice what's being done.

Adam: You were going to speak at Hyde Park —will you attend?

Mark Devlin: I'll attend. I might not be speaking, but either way I'll be there. If I had a banner it would simply say: "Look up." With arrows pointing to the sky.

Host: Have you missed rallies?

Mark Devlin: Yes. I've never been to one like the big COVID rallies before; they had a powerful atmosphere. I hope the geoengineering rally recaptures some of that.

Adam: There's a lot of cognitive dissonance around chemtrails. Some people believed in COVID but won't look up at the sky. It's baffling — they just don't want to face it.

Mark Devlin: People often avoid looking because it might force action or change their worldview. They prefer to keep ignorance.

Host: We also wanted to ask about Katy Perry going to space.

Mark Devlin: That was obviously fake. If you ask me, why Katy Perry of all people, not a qualified astronaut and not military? It looked staged. They went to great lengths to show how fake it was — door popping open the wrong way, blatant errors. I think they run these stunts to measure the reaction of the masses: to see how many will buy it, to track social‑media comments and monitor gullibility. There's often ritualistic symbolism tucked into these stunts: phallic rocket imagery, occult sigils, the ringing of bells, inverted symbols, butterfly imagery (Monarch program symbolism), and more. So it's an experiment and also a ritual.

Host: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a chemtrail? Is it Katy Perry on a giant space...?