Punk's Dead

'Punk's Dead' is a book of photographs by Simon Barker (Six), with an exhibition of some of the photos at Divus Temporary, 4 Wilkes Street, London E1 until July 7th.

Jordan

'In 1976, when I moved into the St. James Hotel in London, I bought myself one of the cheapest pocket cameras available. Fully automatic, with no controls or settings, it just required a simple slot-in film cartridge. An idiot could use it - and I did. | I knew I did'nt want to be like other photographers, so I chose never to take a black and white photograph or focus the camera. Subconsciously I concentrated on the women and artists at the heart of what would later be known as 'punk' in London. 

Women such as JORDAN, SIOUXSIE, DEBBIE JUVENILE, TRACIE O'KEEFE, ARI UP, POLY STYRENE and NICO . Artists and writers such as MALCOLM MCLAREN, HELEN WELLINGTON-LLOYD aka HELEN OF TROY, BERTIE MARSHALL aka BERLIN and DEREK JARMAN. The book PUNK'S DEAD is a product of that camera and those times - my family album covering the years 1976 to 78. The photos you see in it were all unplanned, spur of the moment shots taken by myself for myself and, up until now, with never a thought given to publication. In over thirty years, they have only been seen by a handful of close friends. I used to think they weren't good enough to show people. Now I think they are almost too good'

Adam Ant

Derek Jarman with Derek Dunbar

Some great pictures, and also due recognition of some of the queer/arty underground links of that early London punk scene (e.g. Derek Jarman's Butlers Wharf parties), something largely passed over in the recent BBC punk nostalgiafest.

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London (1978): Gay Clubs

From the NME Guide to Rock & Roll London (early 1978), a guide to the Gay Scene starts with a warning: 'a note to all you guys 'n' gals, cuties 'n' chickens, rent boys 'n' muscle men, leather lovers 'n' sock eaters: REMEMBER British Law permits homosexual activity in PRIVATE between two consenting adults of 21 and over. Any sexual contact in public is forbidden'. Places mentioned include:

- Bang Disco, The Sundown, 157 Charing Cross Road 'a good mixture of gays and punks';

- Gateways, 239 Kings Road, SW3  'Women only'

- Louise, 61 Poland Street, W1

- El Sombrero, 142-144 Kensington High Street, W8

- A & B Club, 27 Wardour Street, W1

-  Escort, 89a Pimilico Road, SW1.

- Maunkberry's, 57 Jermyn Street,W1

- Mandy's, 30 Henrietta Atreet, W1

- Napoleon's, 2 Lancashire Court, New Bond Street, W1

- Oscars, 4 Greek Street, W1

- Festival Club, 2 Brydges Place (off St Martin's Lane), WC2

See also:

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London 1978: Disco
NME Guide to Rock & Roll London: Reggae

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London (1978): Disco

From the 1978 NME Guide to Rock & Roll London, the section on Disco compiled by LeRoy Z. Jefferson, with listings and reflections on the music in London clubs:

'The thing to remember is that Southern Soul is a whole different ball game from the much- publicised Northern brand. In the North, the more obscure '60s foot stompin' scene still dominates, around London it's mainly imported flash funk and deep soul from the likes of Earth, Wind & Fire, The Commodores, Slave, Cameo, Parliament and Pockets, plus a side order of reggae and thankfully just a smattering of android Euro-Disco (Baccara and Amanda Lear) and New York aural soft-porn (Andrea True Commection)'.

The legendary Crackers (201-203 Wardour Street W1) gets a mention. I had no idea that it was the place that hosted the Vortex punk club on Mondays and Tuesdays. Bar prices are given: 50p for lager, 40p for whisky, 27p for coke.

Also mentioned is a forthcoming All Day National Soul Festival on Easter Monday (March 27 1978) at Tiffany's, Brighton Road, Purley (near Croydon), with DJs Chris Hill, Greg Edwards, Robbie Vincent and Chris Brown.

Other places listed include:

- Chelsea Drug Store, 49 Kings Road SW3
- Columbo's, 50 Carnaby Street W1
- Fangs, Praed Street W2
- Fouberts, Fouberts Place W1
- Global Village, Villiers Street WC1 (replaced by gay club Heaven later in 1979)
- Hatchetts, 67a Piccadilly W1
- Hombre, 78 Wells Street W1
- Kareba, 63 Conduit Street W1
- Le Kilt, 60 Greek Street W1
- Saddle Room, Park Lane W!
- Samantha's, 3 New Burlington Street W1
- Speakeasy & Speakearly, Oxford Circus
- Sundown, Charing Cross Road W2
- Thursdays, 36 Kensington High Street W8
- Tiffanys, Shaftesbury Avenue W1
- Upstairs at Ronnie's, Frith Street W1
- La Valbonne, 62 Kingly Street W1

See also:

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London 1978: Gay Clubs
NME Guide to Rock & Roll London: Reggae

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London (1978): Reggae

The New Musical Express Guide to Rock & Roll London was a cut out and keep booklet given away with the NME in ealry 1978 - my copy is not dated, but it advertises a forthcoming event coming up at Easter 1978.

I'm going to scan it and put some of it up over the next few weeks, starting with this guide to reggae venues and shops in the capital at that time. The listed venues include Dougie's Hideaway Club in Archway N18, Club Noreik in Seven Sisters Road N15 and the Bouncing Ball Club (43 Peckham High Street SE15), the latter offering 'Good Bar, plus hot Jamaica patties. Spacious club with congenial atmosphere, featuring top-line JA and UK reggae acts, plus some soul. Admiral Ken Sounds'.

Reggae record shops included Hawkeye in Harlesden, Daddy Kool (Tottenham Court Road), M&D (36a Dalston Lane E8), Greensleeves (Shepherds Bush), Dub Vendor (Clapham Junction market - which survived in the area until last year), Third World Records (113 Stoke Newington Road N16) and Tops Record Shop (120 Acre Lane, SW2) - 'Front Line rock at Tops, the leading South London dub stop stockists of all current reggae releases, plus R&B and doo-wop albums, soul imports, and a fortnightly shipment of JA pre, specialising in Techniques (JA) and Clintones (US) productions'.

See also:

NME Guide to Rock & Roll London 1978: Gay Clubs
NME Guide to Rock & Roll London 1978: Disco

Grayson Perry on punk and performance

Grayson Perry's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl' (2007) is his memoir of the period before he became a successful artist, as related to his friend Wendy Jones.

Perry recalls growing up in 1960s/70s Essex with a taste for dressing up in women's clothes, before moving on to study art in Portsmouth and early 1980s performance art in London. He's a bit older than me, but like me and many others he was first exposed to punk as a paper boy:

'One Sunday morning I was delivering the newspapers when I saw the front cover of a supplement with a photograph of punks at a Sex Pistols concert. I was amazed by it, I though, 'Fucking Hell" This is good!'. I decided there and then I wanted to be a punk rocker'.

He went to see bands like The Vibrators, Boomtown Rats and Crispy Ambulance in Chelmsford, and attended the infamous debacle of the 1977 punk festival at Chelmsford Football Club, headlined by the Damned. The event was a flop with Perry opining that 'the most punk rock thing of the whole day' was when the scaffolder, furious at not being paid, began dismantling the stage while the bands were still playing.


A punk leather jacket included by Perry in his exhibition
last year at Manchester Art Gallery
(photo from http://ohdearthea.tumblr.com/)


After leaving college in 1982 he moved to London where he was part of the post-New Romantic/Blitz kids scene. He lived in the basement of a squat in Crowndale Road next to the Camden Palace, with Marilyn (soon to be a short-lived popstar) living upstairs. Perry 'used to go to the Taboo nightclub in a black suit with skin-tight Lycra trousers and a jacket two sizes too small... I put sunburn-coloured make-up on my face and left white rings round my eyes, like ski goggle marks... And I had a tail. It was a stiff, furry dog's tail'.

He also got involved with the Neo-Naturists, a performance art troupe who performed naked with paint on their bodies. They played at places like Notre Dame Church Hall (Leicester Square), Heaven, the Camden Palace. the Fridge (Brixton) and an anarchist centre:

'we were booked to do a Neo-Naturist performance in Brixton at the Spanish Anarchists Association, which was similar to a working men's club, an extremely anachronistic place that had become somehow hop because of punk's associations with anarchy. As it was May Fiona though we should do a Communist, May Day-themed cabaret. Cerith [Wyn Evans], Fiona, Jen, Angela and I all had identical Communist uniforms body painted on to us with khaki paint and we decorated oursevles with big red five-pointed stars... There were around a hundred anarchists in the audience as well as some punks and they all hated it, not one of them clapped, the room was dead quiet'.

I think Perry may have got two different places mixed up here - the 121 centre in Brixton opened in 1981, but the Spanish anarchists' place was Centro Iberico (421 Harrow Road), a squatted school where various punk gigs and other events took place (incidentally producer William Orbit started out with a studio here). The Neo-Naturists site mentions them playing a 1982 May Day event at 'Spanish anarchist centre, Harrow Road' so assume this was what Perry remembered (maybe he went to 121 another time).


Photo from the Kill Your Pet Puppy archive



Festivals Britannia

Finally got round to watching 'Festivals Britannia' a documentary about the history of the British festival scene first broadcast on BBC4 in late 2010. For anyone familiar with this history there were no great revelations as it trod the familiar path from the Isle of Wight 1969 to Glastonbury to Windsor to Stonehenge to Castlemorton 1992.

What lifted it was the film footage of these events and an excellent range of interviewees including many of the key figures in the different phase of the 20th century counter culture. Jazz ravers Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball recalled the 1950s jazz festivals, the later remembering 'you couldn't have a rave up in a dancefall. You had to walk across a floor and ask a girl to have a waltz or something, but if you were in a field you felt free'.

The Beaulieu jazz festival in Hampshire started out in 1956. In 1960, simmering tensions between modern and trad jazz fans sparked off the so-called Battle of Beaulieu with fans impatient to hear some Acker demolishing a BBC TV tower. A contemporary newspaper reported: 'Jazz succumbs to the Hooligans'.  In the same period the annual Aldermaston 'Ban the Bomb' marches became what free festival veteran Sid Rawle termed 'a festival on the march'.

The late 1960s free concerts in London's Hyde Park were described by Roy Harper as the high point of the hippie moment, a time when 'everything seemed to be bright and in the process of awakening' (Roy Harper).  On the Isle of Wight, the 1970 paying festival famously ended up with those outside storming the fence so that it was opened up for free on the final day. Festival organisers and Mick Farren who was on the fence storming side were interviewed, but the best quote was amongst a selection seemingly from a series of Isle of Wight residents engraged by the 'invasion' of the area by 600,000 mostly young people:  'If you have a festival with all the stops pulled out, kids running around naked, fucking in the bushes, and doing every damn thing that they feel inclined to do I don't know that's particularly good for the body politic' (all delivered in an impeccable upper class accent - I assume this was never broadcast at the time)

Windsor 1974 - 'Hippie PC Flees Pop Fury'
(from the excellent UK Rock Festivals site)

In the early 1970s the first Glastonbury festivals were followed by the emergence of the free festival circuit, most notably the Windor Free Festival. Closed down in a major police operation in 1974, the next year the Government offered a disused air force base at Watchfield in Oxfordshire as an alternative - but a state-sponsored 'free' festival with police on site was not quite the same. Among those recalling this period on the film were Nik Turner and Stacia from Hawkwind and Penny Rimbaud from Crass.

The free festival scene was dealt a severe blow with the mid-1980s crackdown on the Stonehenge Festival and the Convoy - everybody should have to watch the bullying gratuitous violence of the police in the so-called Battle of the Beanfield to understand the state of virtual social war in the mid-1980s, with the Government giving its forces free reign to bash miners, travellers and other 'enemies within' with impunity (sometimes feels like we are heading into a similar period).

The outlaw tribes, disenchanted and disenfranchised needed to find other places to gather, and Glastonbury had relaunched in the 1980s as paying festival raising money for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Farmer and festival organiser Michael Eavis reflected that 'we were just anti-Tory really, we were on a crusade to take on Maggie and to fight the oppression and it was very effective'. Through much of the 1980s it wasn't that hard to sneak into the festival for free, but increasing pressure from the Council and the police required stronger fences and more security.

By the early 1990s the survivors of the free festival scene were joining up with the new sound system culture, as described by Mark Harrison from Spiral Tribe and Rick Down (Digs) from DIY Sound System. The huge 1992 Castlemorton free party/festival prompted the Government to introduce the Criminal Justice Act to clamp down on 'raves'.



The programme ends with the increasing dominance and prevalence of commercial festivals in the noughties. But there is some evidence that this boom has peaked, with the Guardian asking recently 'Have we fallen out of love with the great British music festival?'. I don't think the desire to gather under the skies with thousands of like-minded music lovers has changed, but more and more of us can't really afford to spend the cost of a holiday on a weekend, especially if that weekend has to be spent in a highly corporate fenced-off enclosure.

Portugal 1974/75: Radio and Revolution

In April 1974, left leaning military officers overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship and ended its colonial wars in Africa. For the next two years Portugal was in turmoil, with workers taking over workplaces and many hoping to push the revolution further. The radio stations were one of the key sites of struggle, in particular Rádio Renascença.

The Revolution Started with a Song by John Hoyland (Street Life, November 1 1975):

'3 am, April 25 1974. By prior arrangement with the rebel Armed Forces Movement (AFM), a DJ on Lisbon's Radio Renascenca plays 'Grandola, Vila Morena', a popular song of the day whose possible subversive meaning had escaped the censor's ears. The song is a signal for a military uprising that, with scarcely any opposition, overthrows the Caetano Government, and brings to an end 50 years of fascism in Portugal. The next day, the people pour into the streets, and give the soldiers red carnations. The soldiers stick the flowers in their guns...'

Tuesday August 26 1975

A visit to Radio Renascenca (RR), the radio station that the workers took over from its owners, the Catholic Church. As well as broadcasting news of workers' struggles and discussions with workers and peasants, it plays a lot of good music — including the best rock music in Lisbon — and has an hour a day in Spanish, beamed across Portugal towards Spain. A couple of the workers describe the history of their struggle to take over the radio station from their bosses — how the AFM sent a unit of COPCON [a military organisation] to hand RR back to the Church, and how the occupying workers broadcast a call to the people of Lisbon to help them — with the result that thousands of workers gathered outside the building to defend it, the COPCON soldiers refused to obey their orders, and in the end the AFM was forced to ratify the occupation.

The workers — both young guys, one of them with extremely long hair — go on to say that they are currently linking up with all the Lisbon Workers' Commissions, with the idea of forming a city-wide co-operative that would control the radio-station, and also finance it. "Then we won't have to take any more advertisements, not even from the nationalised industries." (At the moment a radio talk on the concept of Popular Power and the Class Struggle is liable to be disconcertingly interrupted by a bleep and a jingle for Seven-Up.) Before the April 25 coup, Radio Renascenca was on the air six hours a day, whereas now it's 24 hours a day. "We're the same number of workers, so we've multiplied our work-load by four. But you have to. The situation changes here so fast, each hour in Portugal is like a day. Since the coup, we feel as if we've lived through about 30 years . . ." In spite of this, they seem very sprightly and determined people. But they aren't particularly optimistic: "Lisbon is a red island in a sea of reaction. We don't think the conditions for revolution exist in Portugal yet. Nor is there a party that could carry it through. In our view, the parties here' are still too concerned about their own power, and not concerned enough about the needs of the workers'.'



Portugal: the Impossible Revolution by Phil Mailer:

'The radio station had been owned by the Catholic Church. Gradually, during May, the workers concerned had taken it over, disliking the line being pushed. Their communique of June 6 outlined what was at stake: "The complete history of our struggles at RR would bring together arguments and documents which a simple communique' cannot hope to do. When our story is written many positions will become clearer, as will the ways in which they relate to the overall politics of the country. The Portuguese people will then be able to judge the counter-revolutionary politics of the bosses, the immoralities of all sorts committed in the name of the Church, and the many betrayals carried out by capitalist lackeys in our midst. In their latest delirium the Management Committee (i.e. the Church) completely distorted our struggle and attacked the MFA. Of 127 lines, 73 were devoted to denouncing the government...

When they speak of the violent occupation of the radio station they forget to mention that the only violence was when Maximo Marques (a member of the Management Committee) attacked one of our comrades, who didn't respond to the provocation... The management argue that we are a minority of 20, whereas 30 would be more correct. Radio Renascenca is a private company owning a radio station, a printing press, a record shop, two cinemas, buildings and office blocks, etc. In the station we are about 60 workers. The management say we are trying to silence the Church's mouthpiece, and prevent it from reaching a large section of the population. If by this they mean we are trying to silence fascist voices, they are right. Words like truth, justice and liberty lose all meaning when they come from the RR administration. We remember the time when the priests managed the station and censored encyclicals, Vatican texts and even the Bible (!!) We propose that the management show their concern for liberty by supporting the current liberation of RR, now in the service of the workers and controlled by the workers. The workers of RR, June 6, 1975".

The struggle at Radio Renascenca was widely supported. The options were fairly clear: to side with the Workers' Committee or with the Church. Vasco Goncalves and other members of the Revolutionary Council decided to hand the station back to the Church. The decision was bitterly opposed by some 100,000 workers. A demonstration was held on June 18 at which Lisnave and TAP workers stood outside the gates and warned that RR would only be returned to the Church 'over their dead bodies'. 400 Catholic counter-demonstrators had to seek refuge in the house of the local Patriarcado. The determination of the workers caused the Revolutionary Council promptly to reverse steam. It found a way out: to decree the nationalisation of all newspapers, radio stations and television networks'.

In November 1975 the station's radio transmitters were blown up, effectively closing the station down before it was handed back to the Church in December.

Remembering Bloody Sunday 1972

On  January 30th 1972, the British state killed 13 unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Derry (a 14th died as a result of their injuries a few months later). The dead, who included seven teenagers, were:

John (Jackie) Duddy (aged 17)

Patrick Joseph Doherty (31)

Bernard McGuigan (41)

Hugh Pious Gilmour (17)

Kevin McElhinney (17)

Michael Gerald Kelly (17)

John Pius Young (17)

William Noel Nash (19)

Michael M. McDaid (20)

James Joseph Wray (22)

Gerald Donaghy (17)

Gerald (James) McKinney (34)

William Anthony McKinney (27)

John Johnston (59)

The Bloody Sunday massacre of 30 January 1972 came after four years of popular insurgency in the north of Ireland, sparked by the civil rights marches of 1968. The immediate lead up to the day was described in the text  'From Bloody Sunday to Trafalgar Square' which I had a hand in producing following the 1990 London poll tax riot:

"What became known as Bloody Sunday then has often been, and frequently still is believed to have been, an act of undisciplined slaughter perpetrated by blood-crazed Paras. This assumption though is wrong and to a large extent lets the British establishment off the hook. By assuming that soldiers "ran amok" it puts the blame on individual soldiers who pulled triggers and killed people. Bloody Sunday was a planned, calculated response to a demand for civil rights, designed to terrify organised protesters away from protesting. It fits easily into the catalogue of British involvement in Ireland as a quite logical and even natural event" (Fred Holroyd, ex-British Army Intelligence Officer.)

In August 1971 internment without trial was introduced. On the tenth, Operation Demetrius was launched. 342 people were arrested and nine people killed by troops. In this period experiments in sensory deprivation torture were carried out on some people arrested, with the aim of psychologically breaking them. With hoods placed over their heads, they were made to stand spread-eagled against a wall balanced on their fingertips. They were kept like this for four or five days, being bombarded with white noise and beaten if they moved, denied food, drink, sleep, or access to toilets. At intervals they were taken up in a helicopter and thrown out while just a few feet off the ground having been told that they were hundreds of feet up (they were still wearing their hoods).

In protest at internment, a rent and rates strike was organised which attracted the support of some 40,000 households. By October this had escalated to non-payment of TV, radio, car licences, road tax, ground rent, electricity, gas and hire purchase (this a good idea that we should imitate- after all why stop at not paying the poll tax?). In response to this crisis the Payments of Debt Act was passed, allowing debts to be deducted directly from benefits- no doubt our rulers remembered this idea when they dreamt up the poll tax.

The introduction of internment was accompanied by a 12-month ban on all demonstrations. Despite this, on January 30 1972 tens of thousands of people attended a demonstration in Derry. The state's response to this act of defiance was a cold-blooded massacre. CS Gas and water cannon had already been used by the time the Parachute Regiment came onto the streets and opened fire on the crowd. The Army claimed that they were returning fire, but forensic tests on the 14 people killed showed that none of them had had contact with weapons and no weapons were found anywhere near the bodies'.

The official Bloody Sunday Inquiry eventually concluded in 2010 that the dead were innocent. But for years, the authorities attempted to hide the truth, with an earlier official investigation (the 1972 Lord Widgery report) including all kinds of smears and false claims that the soldiers had come under attack from gunfire and bombs. The fight for the truth was carried on for years by the victims' relatives and their supporters in the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign.

1990s Bloody Sunday Marches in London

For many years the main mobilisation of the Irish solidarity movement in Britain was for the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march each January. I went on these marches in the 1990s, they typically attracted between two and five thousand people and started or finished in a north London area with a high Irish population like Kilburn or Archway.

Report of 1991 London Bloody Sunday demo from An Phoblact, 7th February 1991. The march went from Kilburn to Hyde Park, stopping at the Paddington Green police station in Edgware Road, notorious as the place where many people were taken after being arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Speakers included Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four who has been framed for bombings in the 1970s and released after a long campaign in 1989.

Report of 1991 demonstration - Troops Out, March 1991

A feature of the Bloody Sunday marches was that the far right (BNP etc.) often mobilised to oppose them, so that in the pubs and streets surrounding the demonstrations there would be skirmishes between anti-fascists and racists. In 1990 for instance, three Anti Fascist Action (AFA) members were jailed after notorious Nazi skinhead Nicky Crane was dragged out of a taxi in Kilburn in the vicinity of the Bloody Sunday march.  The biggest trouble was on the Bloody Sunday march in 1993, when hundreds of fascists attempted to attack the march at the assembly point in Hyde Park and then again along Edgware Road. 376 fascists were arrested before the march made it to Kilburn where the speakers included Gerry Duddy, whose brother Jack was killed in 1972. 

1993 flyer for march called by Bloody Sunday March Organising Committee
(Troops Out Movement, Irish in Britain Representation Group, Women & Ireland Network,
Black Action and the Wolfe Tone Society)

Report of the 1993 Bloody Sunday March in London 

(written at the time by European Counter Network, London)

'On Saturday 30 January 1993 around 2000 people took part in the annual Bloody Sunday march in London. The march commemorates the day in 1972 when 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by British paratroopers in Derry in the north of Ireland.

This year the British National Party and other fascist groups had announced their intention to stop what they called an "IRA march". For weeks before the march they leafleted football matches and other venues in an attempt to mobilise support.

On the day more than 350 fascists were arrested by the police, although only five were subsequently charged. The police delayed the start of the Bloody Sunday march, supposedly because of the fascist presence along the route. Eventually the march organisers informed the police that the demonstration was going to start, whether the police allowed it or not. At this point the police backed down and made no further attempt to stop the march.

As the march made its way from Hyde Park to Kilburn, small groups of fascists made occasional pathetic attempts to attack and provoke the march. However nobody was injured, and no demonstrators were arrested.

At the rally at the end of the march there were a number of speakers. These included the brother of one of those killed on Bloody Sunday, a speaker from Sinn Fein, Jim Kelly from the Casement Accused Relatives Committee (whose son is serving life imprisonment in relation to the killing of two soldiers at a Belfast funeral in 1988), and a speaker from the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism who compared the situation in Ireland to the rise in fascist attacks in Germany and elsewhere'.

Report from Troops Out, March 1993. Speakers on 1993 London Bloody Sunday demo included Jim Kelly of the Casement Accused Relatives Committeee, Unmesh Desai (Campaign Against Racism and Fascism), Ken Livingstone MP, Mick Conlon (Sinn Fein) and Gerry Duddy whose 17 year old brother Jack was shot dead on Bloody Sunday

1994 demo leaflet

The 1994 London Bloody Sunday demonstration

Report of 1994 demo with speakers including Ken Livingstone MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP and Hossein Zahir of Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (from An Phoblact, 4 February 1991)

1998 London demo flyer

1998 demo in London

Martin McGuinness speaks in London on 1998 Bloody Sunday demo

Bloody Sunday March in Manchester 1995

In 1995 the national Bloody Sunday march took place in Manchester. I noted at the time: ‘The march went well, it was as big as any of the recent London ones (about 2000), and there were four flute bands from Scotland. Two of them were right next to each other which made an amazing soundclash especially when we stopped under bridges'. There were clashes between AFA and fascists in the Clarence pub and along Oxford Road.

'Justice for the Casement Accused' banner in Manchester - an infamous miscarriage of justice case in Belfast.



Derry 1992: the twentieth anniversary 

In Ireland, one of the biggest remembrance mobilisations was in Derry itself in 1992 on the 20th anniversary. I was there and wrote this report for the 56a Info Shop Bulletin (May 1992):

'My first real taste of the British military presence came when the bus bringing us from Blefast was stopped at an army checkpoint outside of Derry. Troops boarded the bus, with one soldier walking slowly up the bus pointing his rifle at the heads of passengers.  In Derry itself the 'security forces' were keepong a low profile (by Irish standards), presumably because of the large international press presence. A low profile involved three helicopters in the sky, armoured police land rovers following the march and heavily armed RUC officers overlooking the route.

The march, organised by the Bloody Sunday Initiative, came at the end of a week of events in the city on the them 'One World, One Struggle' to mark the anniversary of the massacre. Thousands of people marched from the Creggan Estate, through the Bogside and into the Guildhall Square in the City Centre - the planned destination of the 1972 demonstration. As well as contingents from different parts of Ireland, there were supporters from Britain, Germany and elsewhere. A huge 50-foot long banner proclaimed 'We are the people of struggle, ours is the culture of chnage'. Relatives of those killed in 1972 marched at the front, and pictures of the dead were carried by marchers, as well as being displayed on murals along the route). At the end of the route a large crowd listened to speeches from Gerry Adams and Bernadette McAliskey.

Young children threw bottles and stones at the police vehicles (already colourfully decorated by paint bombs), but apart from this traditional local custom there was no trouble. However on the way back to Belfast, a window was smashed in our bus by Loyalists. Two people had to go to hospital to have their eyes examined for glass injuries. Within ten days of the demo three people had been killed by an RUC officer at Sinn Fein's Falls Road offices in Belfast, and five more people had been killed by a pro-British loyalist gang in a bookmakers shop in Belfast's Ormeau Road'.

Relatives lead the 1992 Derry march

So is Bloody Sunday now only of historic interest? No, it is a reminder of the murderous ruthlessness of the establishment when it thinks it may be losing. Prime Minister Edward Heath and the top brass of the army sent the soldiers in that day, and none of them were ever held to account. And in these times when we are supposed to believe that all soldiers are 'heroes' and to welcome the army without question into our schools and our streets, we should not forget that one of their historic functions is to kill civilians when the police lose control.

Bernadette McAliskey told the 1992 rally: ' I remember coming down that hill on that day 20 years ago. People were thinking "What can they do to us?", we are still here after internment and after gassing. But Billy Gallagher said to me "There will be murder in this town before the day is out'. And there was... On that day we knew real, naked fear for the first time. When the bullets were fired, people dived to the ground and crawled away like dogs in fear of their masters... Something else, an innocence died on Bloody Sunday. It was then that we realised that governments kill people'.

Sunday Bloody Sunday

The best known song referring to the events is U2's somewhat ambivalent Sunday Bloody Sunday. John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded a different song with the same name on their 1972 album Some Time in New York City:

Is there any one amongst you
Dare to blame it on the kids?
Not a soldier boy was bleeding
When they nailed the coffin lids

Bloody Sunday (This is a Rebel Song) by Hot Ash (1991):

At the Free Derry Corner the slaughter began
Some people fell and some people ran
Our civil rights banner was stained bloody red
At the barricades there they shot three people dead

[post updated 10 June 2022 with additional photos - I have donated photos, leaflets etc. to the Mayday Rooms archive, who are collecting material related to the Troops Out Movement and related Irish solidarity organisations].

More posts on Ireland

The Hunger Strike, the Irish War and an English Town: Luton 1980-81

May Days in Dublin 1994

Time for Peace, Time to Go: demonstrations in Belfast, Dublin and London 1994

Winston Riley (RIP) and Stalag 17

Reggae producer Winston Riley died this week. Plainly not everybody liked him:

'Winston Riley, an innovative reggae musician and producer, has died of complications from a gunshot wound to the head. He was 65. Riley died Thursday at University Hospital of the West Indies, where he had been a patient since November, when he was shot at his house in an upscale neighborhood in the capital of Kingston, his son Kurt Riley said Friday. Riley also had been shot in August and was stabbed in September last year. His record store in Kingston’s downtown business district also was burned down several years ago. Police have said they know of no motives and have not arrested anyone'.

But you've got to love the man who produced this...



...and this:




...not to mention this...


Stalag 17

Riley's Stalag 17 Riddim has been used as the basis for these and countless other reggae, dancehall and indeed hip-hop tracks (see for instance list at Jamaican Riddim Directory). I believe the original Stalag 17 track, recorded by by Ansell Collins and produced by Riley, dates from 1973. Riley himself put out a compilation album of versions called Stalag 17, 18 and 19, and later there was a tribute album Stalag 20, 21 and 22.

An intriguing question is why the orginal instrumental track was called Stalag 17 in the first place. Clearly it took its name from the 1953 movie about US prisoners of war in a German camp during World War Two; the film in turn taking its name from a real POW camp at Krems in Austria.

I suspect that the name simply reflected the continuing importance of World War Two in popular culture in that period. In England, children in the 1960s and early 70s grew up on a never ending diet of war movies and no doubt it was similar in Jamaica, from where thousands of people had left to fight in the war. Other Jamaicans had travelled to work in US factories and farms during the war - incidentally some of them being detained in camps and punished for 'breaking contracts', a policy that led to a 1945 riot by 1,000 Jamaican and Bahamian workers in Camp Murphy in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Of course The Skatalites had previously covered the theme tune to another war movie, The Guns of Navarone, getting a UK hit in 1967. Later, in 1978, The Clash reworked the theme tune from Stalag 17 - Johnny Comes Marching Home - as English Civil War.

Anyway, there's a sweet irony in the name given by the Nazis to a prison camp being appropriated by people they would doubtless have regarded as 'racially inferior' for not just one track but a whole sub-genre of African Caribbean music.

Billboard obituary here

New York 1977: when the lights went out

The Trammps' disco classic The Night the Lights Went Out (1977) commemorates an actual historical event in that year - the New York blackout. In The Trammps' account this was an occasion for sex in the unlit darkness:

Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City (I wanna know, I wanna know)
Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City

Don't you know that I was making love
(She was making love)

I remember on the 13th of July
The only light was the light up in the sky
New York had black-out for 25 hours or more
And nobody really knows the reason why...

Politicians said it was a pity
But that was the night they call it love city
So I took my lady by the hand
And led her to love me, love me, love me!

Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City (I wanna know, yeah)
Where were you when the lights went out
In New York City



But sex wasn't the only thing on New Yorkers' minds - the power cut also prompted mass looting. John Zerzan celebrated this aspect in an article published in the Detroit-based radical paper Fifth Estate (August 1977):

New York, New York

“Amid All the Camaraderie is Much Looting this Time; Seeing the City Disappear”, Wall Street Journal headline, 15 July 1977

The Journal went on to quote a cop on what he saw, as the great Bastille Day break-out unfolded: “People are going wild in the borough of Brooklyn. They are looting stores by the carload.” Another cop added later: “Stores were ripped open. Others have been leveled. After they looted, they burned.”

At about 9:00 p.m. on July 13 the power went out in New York for 24 hours. During that period the complete impotence if the state in our most ‘advanced’ urban space could hardly have been made more transparent. As soon as the lights went out, cheers and shouts and loud music announced the liberation of huge sections of the city. The looting and burning commenced immediately, with whole families joining in the “carnival spirit”. In the University Heights section of the Bronx, a Pontiac dealer lost the 50 new cars in his showroom. In many areas, tow trucks and other vehicles were used to tear away the metal gates from stores. Many multistorey furniture businesses were completely emptied by neighborhood residents.

Despite emergency alerts for the state troopers, FBI and National Guard, there was really nothing authority could do, and they knew it. A New York Times editorial of July 16 somewhat angrily waved aside the protests of those who wondered why there was almost no intervention on the side of property. “Are you kidding?” the Times snorted, pointing out that such provocation would only have meant that the entire city would still be engulfed in riots, adding that the National Guard is a “bunch of kids” who wouldn’t have had a chance.

The plundering was completely multi-racial, with white, black and Hispanic businesses cleaned out and destroyed throughout major parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Not a single “racial incident” was reported during the uprising, while newspaper pictures and TV news bore witness to the variously coloured faces emerging from the merchants’ windows and celebrating in the streets. Similarly, looting, vandalism, and attacks in police were not confined to the City proper; Mount Vernon, Yonkers and White Plains were among suburbs in which the same things happened, albeit on a smaller scale.

Rioting broke out in the Bronx House of Detention where prisoners started fires, seized dormitories, and almost escaped by ramming through a wall with a steel bed. Concerning the public, the Bronx District Attorney fumed, “It’s lawlessness. It’s almost anarchy.”

Officer Gary Parlefsky, of the 30th Precinct in Harlem, said that he and other cops came under fire from guns, bottles and rocks. He continued: 'We were scared to death... but worse than that, a blue uniform didn’t mean a thing. They couldn’t understand why we were arresting them'.

At a large store at 110th Street and Eighth Avenue, the doors were smashed open and dozens of people carried off appliances. A woman in her middle-50s walked into the store and said laughingly: “Shopping with no money required!”

Attesting to the atmosphere of a “collective celebration”, as one worried columnist put it, a distribution center was spontaneously organized at a Brooklyn intersection, with piles of looted goods on display for the taking. This was shown briefly on an independent New York station, WPIX-TV, but not mentioned in the major newspapers. The transformation of commodities into free merchandise was only aided by the coming of daylight, as the festivity and music continued. Mayor Beame, at a noon (July 15) press conference, spoke of the “night of terror”, only to be mocked heartily by the continuing liberation underway throughout New York as he spoke.

Much, of course, was made of the huge contrast between the events of July 1977 and the relatively placid, law-abiding New York blackout of November 1965. One can only mention the obvious fact that the dominant values are now everywhere in shreds. The “social cohesion” of class society is evaporating. New York is no isolated example.

Of course, there has been a progressive decay in recent times of restraint, hierarchy, and other enforced virtues; it hasn’t happened all at once. Thus, in the 1960s, John Leggett (in his Class, Race and Labour) was surprised to learn upon examining the arrest records of those in the Detroit and Newark insurrections, that a great many of the participants were fully employed. This time, of the 176 people indicted as of August 8 in Brooklyn (1,004 were arrested in the borough), 48% were regularly employed. (The same article in the August 9 San Francisco Chronicle where these figures appeared also pointed out that only “six grocery stores were looted while 39 furniture stores, 20 drug stores and 17 jewelry stores and clothing stores were looted”). And there are other similarities to New York, naturally; Life magazine of 4 August 1967 spoke of the “carnival-like revel of looting” in Detroit, and Professor Edward Banfield commented that "Negroes and whites mingled in the streets [of Detroit] and looted amicably side by side....”

The main difference is probably one of scale and scope — that in New York virtually all areas, even the suburbs, took the offensive and did so from the moment the lights went out. Over $1 billion was lost in the thousands of stores looted and burned, while the cops were paralyzed. During the last New York rioting, the ‘Martin Luther King’ days of 1968, 32 cops were injured; in one day in July 1977, 418 cops were injured.

The Left — all of it — has spoken only of the high unemployment, the police brutality; has spoken of the people of New York only as objects, and pathetic ones at that! The gleaming achievements of the unmediated / unideologized have all the pigs scared shitless'.

Rock Against Racism Documents, 1979

Rock Against Racism was a significant cultural force in Britain during the late 1970s, mobilising some of the best punk, post-punk and reggae bands of the periods to perform and publically condemn the far right National Front (predecessors of today's British National Party).

Here's a few RAR internal documents from 1979 (click to enlarge). First up is the RAR constitution: 'RAR is rockers against racism and the shit conditions that create it. We are against the National Front, the British Movement, all racist politicians and racists everywhere. We are for multi-racial roots unity, forward sounds and militant gigs. We are politically and financially self-supporting but we gig with anyone who shares our aims… Although we are called ‘Rock Against Racism’ we support the struggle against other forms of oppression. There is no way we will allow women, gays or Irish people to be put down or made the butt of dumb jokes from a RAR stage. While RAR is a deadly serious political message, we are also a bunch of loonies dedicated to keeping Britain Dayglo’.




Organisation was based around ‘RAR Locals’ sending delegates to an annual Dub Conference, as well as RAR Quarterlies. National co-ordination was by an elected ten person 'RAR Central'. Obviously one risk was that local groups using the RAR brand would not adhere to the values of the movment - the consitution stipulates that 'RAR Locals must keep the faith with RAR tradition of good gigs, militant entertainment and a fair deal to fans'.



This November 1979 internal newsletter includes a report of a quarterly ‘RAR remix’ conference held in London, with 50 delegates.

It gives an idea of some of the practical concerns, such as dealing with Councils and commercial agents for bands when putting on gigs. RAR developed a Standard gig contract to deal with this that ‘protects you against being ripped off and will give bands confidence in your organisational abilitiies’.

In 1979, the Dance and Defend tour had included 20+ gigs ‘as a response to the police riots in Southall, West Brom and Leicester’ (all involved clashes with police on anti-National Front protests). The biggest event was ‘Southall Kids are Innocent’ at the Rainbow in London, two nights featuring The Pop Group, Misty, The Ruts, Pete Townsend, Aswad, The Enchanters, The Members and The Clash.

Some RAR Locals had put out records as well as putting on gigs ‘Tyneside record sold out… Alternative Paisley Mk. 1 nearly sold out and Stevenage RAR EP sold out almost’. Groups were also being formed in other countries ‘Active RAR groups across Canada, USA, Sweden, Norway, West Germany, Belgium and Holland’ .


RAR Central put people in touch with each other who wanted to start a local group. When I was at school in Luton in this period I wrote off to RAR for information, and got this letter back:




I knew absolutely nothing about putting on gigs and didn't get any further with Luton RAR. But I did start to get involved with going on anti-NF protests, which was the start of a great adventure...

The letter was signed Irate Kate, who I now know to have been Kate Webb: 'In 1977 I dropped out of college and started working for Rock Against Racism. I was seventeen and called myself (I wince at the thought) Irate Kate. I began as a volunteer but soon became RAR’s first paid worker and the youngest member of its national executive... I left RAR in 1981 as the central collective was tearing itself apart over differences about the way we should proceed (an argument, as I recall, between becoming more corporate and professional, or returning to the grass roots and staying outside the mainstream – and inflamed as these things often are by personal animosities). I had organised a benefit with UB40 at the local fleapit in Brixton; sensing RAR had run its course, and wanting to get into film, I went to work in this cinema, then known as The Little Bit Ritzy'.

Kate's brief account at her blog New Mills has links to some other RAR resources, but as she notes there's still a lot about that time that has never been properly documented.

See elsewhere: Deptford RAR poster from 1978; Lewisham '77 (site on the anti-NF movement in SE London).

Promised Land

Last week in Iowa, Michele Bachmann launched her bid to become the Republican candidate in the nex US presidential election. On the Tea Party far right of American politics, she has a long, lamentable history of anti-gay and anti-abortion activism not to mention whitewashing the history of slavery.

As she made her way to the podium in Waterloo at the weekend 'Elvis Presley's Promised Land belted out'. Well the notion of manifest destiny and Americans as the new chosen people is a hardy right wing trope, and at one level there is a connection between the idea of the Promised Land and the American frontier.

But we cannot leave the Promised Land in the hands of US Conservatives. The name itself derives of course from the Book of Genesis where God promises Moses the land of milk and honey, not a metaphysical utopia but the actual land of Israel. Over the millennia that tribal foundation myth of a people in the prehistoric Middle East has taken on a universal appeal, holding out the hope of a better world somewhere, some place, some time

It's hardly suprisizing that Bachmann chose Elvis Presley's version of the song, rather than the original by its black songwriter. When Chuck Berry sings it there is no doubt that the songs works on at least two levels. On the surface it is simply a description of a journey from Norfolk, Virginia to California, part of the 1950s/early 1960s mythologisation of travelling across the USA (Route 66, Highway 61, On the Road).



But at another level, the journey retraces a moment in the mass migration of black people from the segregated Southern states. Surely it can't be a coincidence that he 'bypassed Rock Hill' where in 1961 Freedom Riders had been beaten for fighting against racism on Greyhound buses. And at the time Berry was writing the song in prison in 1962/63 Birmingham, Alabama was the front line of the civil rights movement - no wonder the narrator can't get away quick enough once 'stranded in downtown Birmingham'.

A few years later, Martin Luther King brought the Promised Land into the heart of the struggles of the period. In his final speech in 1968 during the Memphis sanitation workers strike, King famously declared: 'I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop... And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land'. The next day he was murdered.



It is this semi-utopian Promised Land that Joe Smooth (and Anthony Thomas) sings of in the early Chicago house classic: 'Brothers, Sisters, One Day we will be free. From Fighting, Violence, People Crying in the Streets... as we walk, hand and hand, sisters, brothers, we'll make it to the promised land'



In Bruce Springsteen's take on this, from the 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town, the Promised Land features only as a hazy image of a better life. The singer professes 'I believe in the Promised Land' but he is unclear about what or where this is. It is simply the negation of a life spent 'Working all day in my daddy's garage', a place that can seemingly only be reached on the other side of the destruction of all that stands:

'I've done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart...
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down'.



(see also Springsteen's Thunder Road with its line 'Oh-oh come take my hand, Riding out tonight to case the promised land').

In its Rastafarian and Garveyite inflection, the Promised Land is firmly located in Africa. Dennis Brown's 1979 song, produced by Aswad, pictures Africa as a land of abundance and freedom: 'There's plenty of land for you and I, By and By, Lots of food to share for everyone, no time for segregation in the Promised Land'.



Dennis Brown's song is the starting point for last year's 'Land of Promise' by Nas and Damian Marley. This is a track that bring the Promised Land song cycle full circle, dropping the names of American states just like Chuck Berry but comparing them to African places: 'imagine Ghana like California... Lagos like Las Vegas'.



Speaking from Africa, Nigerian reggae singer Majek Fashek wonders whether the Promised Land is to be found anywhere in the world as it stands: 'Promised Land is not America, is not Asia, Promised Land is a state of mind, Promised Land is a state of mind, Promised Land is not Europia, is not Africa, Promised Land is a state of mind, Promised Land is a state of mind':



So Michele, leave the Promised Land well alone. You wouldn't recognise it if you found it.

(OK just one more... I love Johnny Allan's 1971 cajun verson of Berry's song, which I always associate with the late great Charlie Gillet thanks to whom I first heard it)

Smash Hits Disco Chart September 1979

Getting totally addicted to Like Punk Never Happened: Brian McCluskey's Smash Hits Archive. Whole issues of the late 1970s/early 1980s UK pop magazine scanned in for you to browse at your leisure. So much stuff in there: photos, lyrics, gig listings, charts. Just the disco chart alone will keep me going for months.

So here's the disco chart from September 20 1979 (click to enlarge), complete with BPM for all you DJs. Looking at it they seemed to define disco rather broadly - reggae gets a look in with Matumbi and Eddie Grant. Could call it a black music chart, though Ian Dury and Roxy Music also feature. Guess it's all music that might be played in a disco, which is fair enough. Anyway The Crusaders' Street Life was number one, with Sister Sledge, Donna Summer, Earth, Wind & Fire and Rose Royce all present and correct, among others.



Have a dig around in Smash Hits and let me know what you find - there's treasure in there of all kinds (post-punk, disco, reggae, pop...)