A couple of free festivals I went to in north London's Finsbury Park back in 1996. Not sure of the date of the first one - 'Festival of Environmental and Global Rights'/Big Sexy Festy Party - but flyer says 'bank holiday weekend' so assume it was either in August or perhaps May. The party included Dub Tent, Free Party Stage, House Zone and Chill Out Zone. The map also shows Beer Tent and Shambala, the latter a party crew who used to put on nights I went to in Brixton at Taco Joe's in Atlantic Road railway arches. 'The Prisoner' magazine was running the acoustic stage - a free music listings zine which also covered anti-Criminal Justice Act and environmental protests. The same crew put on a similar event on Hackney Marshes in the following year.
Programme notes say: 'The first Free Festival for a long time.. Collective participation in an outdoor event of this nature can only strenghten community relations and fight the spread of racism and oppression of all minority groups. The inner city areas of London have been neglected over the past 17 years of Tory rule. We must stop the environmental degradation of our local areas for the generations to come... Everyone has the right to a life, everyone has the right to Party!'
In the same place in June 1996 a more traditional Finsbury Park Festival with a twist. Alongside various community dance and music acts there was the Big Chill electric picnic with Calcutta Cyber Cafe/Talvin Singh, Big Chill founder Pete Lawrence, Nelson Dilation (sometime Whirl-y-Gig DJ), and Global Communications (Tom Middleton & Mark Pritchard). All this and a string quartet playing 'Little Fluffy Clouds'.
In 1993 the far right British National Party achieved a breakthrough in the East End of London when one of its members was elected as a councillor on the Isle of Dogs in Tower Hamlets. This was a period of racist murders, including the killing of Stephen Lawrence not far from the BNP HQ in Welling, SE London. The BNP still had a street presence in East London too, selling papers on Brick Lane.
It was also a period of mass opposition to the far right, one of the largest manifestations of this being the 'Unite Against Racism' demonstration called by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) on 19 March 1994. Around 50,000 people took part in the march through the East End, from Spitalfields to London Fields. This was part of a wider mobilisation that among other things led to the BNP losing their council seat in new elections in 1994.
As has been confirmed in the Undercover Policing Inquiry, anti-racist groups were infiltrated by undercover 'spycops' who dutifully reported on everything that moved. In July 2024, the Inquiry published a series of reports seemingly written by Trevor Morris who had infiltrated the Socialist Workers Party and Anti-Nazi League using the name Bobby Lewis (HN78). This includes an assessment of the SWP/ANL's planning for the TUC march, in the context of which it is mentioned that David Bowie had recently made a donation of $1000 to the ANL. Thus we have the unusual billing at the end of the report where the list of 'Special Branch References' - usually referring to people/organisations of interest to Special Branch - is headed by David Bowie and followed by Anti Fascist Action, the Anti Nazi League, Newham Monitoring Project and several Turkish revolutionary organisations reported to be joining the TUC march.
During the 1970s of course Bowie's brief apparent flirtation with fascist imagery had been one of the instances that prompted the formation of Rock Against Racism, but his subsequent actions show that he decisively moved on from that time. Doubt if he had a Special Branch file (I believe that the letters n/t next to his name stand for 'no trace' in their records), but who knows?
The 'Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990' exhibition at Tate Britain (2024) included a great collection of zines and printed ephemera from the feminist movements of that period. Included in one of the display cases were issues of Shocking Pink magazine alongside punk/post-punk records from bands including X-Ray Spex, Au Pairs and Mo-dettes. Sadly my friend Katy Watson, who was involved in Shocking Pink, is not here to see this but as a sometime queercore/punk DJ she would no doubt have been delighted to be in such company. Shortly before she died in 2008 I interviewed Katy about her life, including in this section about her memories of being involved in Shocking Pink and other zines including Outwrite and Bad Attitude, all in the context of living in Brixton in late 1980s and 1990s. Katy first moved to London in 1988 after finishing University, her first home being a rented room in a house in Kennington next door to future Labour Home Secretary Jack Straw! Soon, as she recalls, she was getting involved in feminist publishing...
Outwrite
'The best thing about this time was that I used to work as a volunteer on this newspaper called Outwrite, a feminist paper which I really admired. It was very lesbian and I was thinking about my sexuality at that point. It was really big on international news, they had a very international collective from all over the globe. I thought it was wonderful, but unfortunately it closed down during that year.
After a year or so I ended up living in Brixton. That was the place for me. For the first time I felt ‘I am at home here’. I really liked it, there was a big alternative profile, a big anarchist scene, a big squatting scene, a big lesbian scene, and suddenly not having a job became a very good thing. I was signing on and realized I had plenty of time to hang out with my friends, drinking tea, yakking on and watching daytime TV but also to do political stuff which I got more into at that time.
Troops Out
I was involved in the Troops Out Movement quite early on when I lived in London. I worked on their magazine, Troops Out. I was also part of organizing an Irish arts exhibition and film festival. The art exhibition we tried to put on through Southwark Council initially and that lovely publication the South London Press ran a front page news splash saying council funds IRA film show and the Council very bravely shut the thing down. We managed to transfer over to Lambeth and had the exhibition in the basement of the recreation centre, not the most accessible high profile place, but we put it on and it did have some really good art work in it. We had a weekend film festival at the Ritzy cinema with various political Irish films, some really good stuff. Some of it was not very subtle but some was much more exploratory – I wouldn’t call it straightforward Irish republicanism but something in that area.
I went on the Troops Out delegation to Belfast and stayed with a family, it was shocking and frightening to find yourself walking past soldiers with their guns. It did feel pretty besieged.
Shocking Pink
I started working on this magazine called Shocking Pink, which at that point had an exhausted collective who really wanted to palm it off on someone else. Me and my friend Vanida took it on to quite a large degree. It was based in squats, and was a young women’s magazine. It was supposed to be an alternative to magazines that were around at the time like Jackie and My Guy which were all about boyfriends and getting your make up right, whereas this was feminist and had a good lesbian profile as well, which definitely was a big pull for our readership. We used to get lots of letters from isolated lesbians from all round the country. They found it a real lifeline when they felt isolated at school and stuff like that.
I really liked that magazine. I liked the way it worked. We had a kind of no-editing policy - if we wanted to put something in we just put it in wholesale. We didn’t put everything in, we were selective about what we put it in, but very open. It meant that we put in heaps of stuff which individuals on the collective might never have agreed with and thought was rubbish, it made it very varied and quite strong for that. It made the collective meetings and collective process of putting it together quite light and quite fun because we weren’t sitting round saying ‘what news issues do we need to cover‘. We were just saying ‘OK what articles have we got typed up on the computer, what cartoons have we got, is this enough to fill a magazine yet?’, and then when it seemed like it had built up quite a lot we’d shove it all together and have these big press weekends. First of all it had to be typeset, which we did late at night in this friendly typesetters’ office. I first started learning typesetting which led ultimately to the layout and subbing work I did later on. I really took to it, I really liked the whole world of newspapers and magazines.
I learnt how to use the typesetting machine, it was a beautiful old machine, very difficult to use and user-unfriendly compared to the DTP that was going to come in a couple of years later but the results were really beautiful. We’d come up with lovely long columns of beautiful quality typeset articles - galleys - ready to stick down in our mad collagey style that we had at Shocking Pink. Then we’d all spend a whole weekend spending 16 hours a day sticking it all together, doing lots of art work round the articles.
It was loads of fun as a collective experience, there were lots of volunteers who’d all come out of the woodwork at that point and join in. Just generally around Shocking Pink it made it into a little gang. There was another woman called Louise who I guess was the third main person in the collective apart from me and Vanida, a lovely person who used to do our music reviews - a good little punk. It was just fun being in a gang. After a new issue came out we’d go round selling it, even selling outside Brixton tube station just like the SWP would with their paper, or else we’d go the easy route and go to lesbian pubs and sell it there because it was easy-peasy selling it as a dyke thing, We’d go on demos with it and flog it. It was such a sort of positive publication it was very easy to promote it, you didn’t feel like you were forcing anything difficult or worthy on people that they are less keen on sometimes.
Shocking Pink’s office shifted from a couple of squats, and we managed to get ourselves a huge big room at the top of 121. We had to fight with one of my flat mates, Alex, who wanted it for Class War but we managed to just swing it by claiming that we should have more women in the building!
The poll tax riot
We went on that really huge anti-poll tax demo [31st March 1990] - it was absolutely vast with about half a million people on it or something like that , the one that turned into a riot in Trafalgar Square. There were lots of little poll tax riots going on all over the country at that point, quite a busy political time with quite an anti-Thatcher focus. We went on that big demo with our stacks of Shocking Pinks, selling it, and it was a mad demo. It had all the lefties and anarchists and all the trot groups but also Tories in big flowery hats, it was a sunny day, it was like people were out for a big picnic partly as well.
And then in Trafalgar Square it just turned into a riot with police horses and people chucking loads of stuff. I’d met up with my poor sister who absolutely hates that sort of thing. Of course I was totally thrilled that there was a riot. We were sitting by some landmark and I would say ‘I’ll see you in ten minutes’ and I’d go and try to riot and chuck things into the crowd. I was a really awful rioter because I couldn’t throw very well so I ended up throwing things on the heads of the people in front of me which was not a lot of help to anybody. I’d do that for a bit and then I’d go back and check on my sister who was completely stressed out about the whole thing, and then I’d go and try and riot very ineffectively a bit more. It was an exciting time when you just felt that a lot was happening and I do personally credit that particular riot with bringing down Thatcher- there’d been lots of riots, but that one was big, there were huge buildings in Trafalgar Square set on fire and it went on well into the night. That was a very good time.
Squatting in Brixton
I moved around loads when I was living in Brixton. Some of the time I was living with these friends right in the middle of Brixton in Rushcroft Road, which felt like quite a crazy place. I lived in this very nice co-op for a while, but everyone was always arguing. Then I moved into a squat for a year and a half - I had the world’s easiest squatting experience, we had electricity and I wasn’t there at the point when they actually opened it up and did all the hard work, I just moved in and said ‘Oh will this be my bedroom then?’, and painted it nice colours! It was quite together it wasn’t one of those disaster squats full of hopeless types, it was quite organized and sensible, it was very sociable and very pleasant.
I really enjoyed squatting, it was very much part of the Brixton anarchist scene, very connected with the 121 bookshop. I lived in a squat in Saltoun Road, then later lived in flat back in Rushcroft Road with Rosanne and Atalanta and about ten pets - cats and dogs.
After a bit I decided that since Shocking Pink was a young women’s magazine I was maybe getting a bit old for it, it was supposed to be for teenagers and I was beyond that so I left.
I was working part time, I’d done a course in typesetting and DTP and started working on TV Quick. I was doing lots of writing, working on my first novel, unpublished to this day!
The Wild Women’s Weekend
I went to the Wild Women’s Weekend [in May 1990], it was in a squatted former council housing benefit office in Brixton, next to the George Canning pub [later Hobgoblin and now Hootenanny] and also unfortunately next to Brixton’s rather anonymous Tory headquarters. It doesn’t have the name on it - they wouldn’t dare, just a bit of blue paint. I think it was them who were instrumental in eventually getting the place shut down. It was this lesbian squat for quite a while, well not exclusively lesbian but quite lesbian.
All that dyke scene in Brixton did dissolve fairly quickly in the 1990s because the squatting laws got harsher, and all the gentrification started and Brixton just became too hard and too expensive to live in, but at the time that squat was a fantastic achievement. The Wild Women’s Weekend was absolutely amazing, women coming from all round the country and probably abroad as well. There were loads of workshops, sort of practical workshops like bike maintenance, lots of discussion groups, and obviously good parties in the evening. That was a very fine achievement.
Bad Attitude
A couple of years on I got Bad Attitude together, it was really me that motivated it because I was still sort of hankering after the days of Outwrite because I so admired their international news perspective, and I thought ‘we need that”. We went through quite an arduous process of fundraising for it, galvanizing a collective, sending out loads of letters appealing for people to take out advance subscriptions and we managed to buy ourselves this tiny apple mac to lay it out on. Shocking Pink had folded by that point, and Bad Attitude took on the office and took on some other people involved. We had Vanida, and Sam my old flat mate, Rosanne and lots of other people who came and went'.
(The loose transcript above doesn't completely follow the audio interview here as it was edited from a number of different taped conversations).
A feature of the 1980s and 1990s in England was officially sponsored free music festivals, usually one day affairs supported by local councils or other organisations such as trade unions. One such event was the Left at the Pier Festival held on the seafront at Brighton as a 'festival to celebrate public services' and sponsored by Southern and Eastern Regions of the Trades Union Congress and the Workers Beer Company.
The bands playing at this festival would have been familiar at many summer festivals in this period, including Dreadzone, Tribal Drift, Bhundu Boys, the Oyster Band, Co-Creators and Transglobal Underground. I remember seeing the latter two on a hot afternoon, with a big screen showing action from the World Cup then taking place in the USA. I was staying in Brighton at the time taking part in an international conference (AIDS Impact: Biopsychosocial aspects of HIV Infection).
Bad Attitude was a London-based radical women's newspaper that ran from 1992 to 1997. It was put together by a group of women (mostly friends of mine) operating for much of this time from an office in the anarchist squat centre at 121 Railton Road, Brixton. The paper was an ambitious project, aiming for high production values and international coverage while having no funding and no paid staff. Unsurprisingly it eventually ran out of steam but not before many great interviews, news stories and other articles.
The story of Bad Attitude is told in some documents in the 56a infoshop archive, which also has a collection of the paper. The first document is a letter promoting Bad Attitude to potential sellers (bookshops etc). It promises that it will be 'wicked, witty and wild' and 'will inherit and expand the success of Shocking Pink and Feminaxe - members of the collective worked on both these publications... with a mission to overthrow civilisation as we know it Bad Attitude will put blander publications in the shade'. Distribution was handled by Central Books, originally set up in the 1930s to distribute Communist Party publications.
Five years and eight issues later the collective issued a 'Bye Bye Bad Attitude' letter to subscribers.
'BA brought a class struggle, anti-state approach to feminism that is scarce in any nationally distributed publication, and we managed to have few laughs along the way. It was something worth fighting for! But life is change and the core of BA members have moved on in different ways — in some cases, out of London. Lack of enough money and lack of energy have re-inforced each other, though our low overheads have enabled us to carry on longer than others.
Most imporant, we're feeling the knock-on effect of changes in the benefits system. It's no easy to sign on, keep going with the odd earner on the side and devote yourself virtually full-time to a project like BA. With wage cuts, pressure on low-rent housing and squatting and all the other survival hassles, it's also become more difficult to live on part-time employment. This has made it difficult to find new collective members who can make the commitment to a regular publication on the scale of BA... Still for the overthrow of civilisation as we know it'
The group hoped that others would pick up the torch and with this in mind they 'How to produce a feminist magazine or how we did BA' with various practical points and 'advice from burnt-out baddies': 'Don't be over-ambitious. When we started as a bi-monthly. we roughly kept to schedule for a year. We also got ill! In retrospect. this sense of burn-out hung over the rest of the time we published. even as we went to quarterly. to bi-annual. to....non-existent. It's better to start off with a publishing schedule you know you can stick to without giving up the rest of your life.
At the same time, photocopies won't get the word out. Printing an attractive. well-produced publication makes it more accessible to those who don't already have a determined mission to read extremist tracts. And remember partially-sighted women will be interested too in what you've got to say. Try and get as many people as possible involved from the very beginning. We started off as a group of five or six, with the idea of involving more women when we published. But women coming in often didn't feel quite the same commitment. even though we tried to work out ways of including new volunteers. When we were overstretched we got stuck. We didn't have enough women to work regularly and train new volunteers which made it difficult for new women to get involved. which meant we didn't enough of us to open the office. put out the paper and train volunteers...and so on'.
Bad Attitude benefit party during Hackney Anarchy Week 1996, held at the Factory Squat in Stoke Newington (more details of the Week at Radical History of Hackney)
Bad Attitude stall at Pride, Brockwell Park, 1993 - with Rosanne Rabinowitz (left) and Katy Watson
A few flyers and memories from my many nights out in Brixton, 1994/95:
The Duke of Edinbugh on Ferndale Road SW9, with its large garden, was often the starting point for a Saturday night as it was here that we would gather to find out where parties were happening and then head off afterwards to some bus garage in Hackney or wherever. In the age before mobile phones this involved people running down to the phone box and calling a free party phone line where they would leave a message saying where to go. Sometimes there was dancing in the pub itself too - this flyer for a 'Warmin' Up Mix' with 'deep underground house and garage' from DJs Zeki Lin, Igor and Brian.
There were loads of club nights at the Fridge on Brixton Hill at this time - gay club Love Muscle and various trance nights (Return to Source etc.) as that emerged as a separate sub genre. X-ClaimNation Co-op was I believe a split away from Megatripolis, the Thursday night psychedelic/techno/trance club held at Heaven. Not sure they lasted too long in that form but I went to the opening night at the Fridge at the end of May 1995. Like Megatripolis the music was supplemented with stalls offering massage, face painting, smart drinks etc. Bit too much flute playing for my taste at the time, but hey.
Club 414 at Coldharbour Lane was a longstanding Brixton nightspot, run I think by Louise Barron and Tony Pommell from the 1980s through to 2019. Nuclear Free Zone was associated with the Liberator DJs so very London acid techno sound, that club night itself was still going 15 years later (2009). This flyer is from November 1994, 'future-techno-trance' from Liberators, Cloggi, Phidget etc.
Chris Liberator and Cloggi again at this Rub Harder night along with Chiba City Sound System, a December 1994 benefit for Crisis at Christmas. Venue was Taco Joe's, a two-roomed railway arch (no.15) on Atlantic Road. This was a great little venue, basically a Mexican restaurant that turned into a club until it lost its licence. Basement Jaxx started out there, with their first night in October 1994.
Shambhala Sound System also put on nights at Taco Joe's, this one in January 1995
The former dole office on Coldharbour Lane closed in 1992 and was soon squatted for parties. The original crew who occupied it were evicted but then it was resquatted by the Cooltan collective. Think this party was in August 1995: 'rave in your face and all over the place with Offshore, Megabitch (all 3 of them), Erase, Medeema, Apple B, Foetal, Ian (disorganisation). Cold taps turned on. Rave on. Hardhouse, techno, jungle'. Unusual for people in this scene to still be using the word 'rave' by this time. 'Cold taps turned on' is a reference to the dubious practice in some commercial clubs of turning off cold water taps in bathrooms so that people had to buy overpriced water from the bar. Bar proceeds were often down as people on other 'refreshments' weren't that interested in drinking alcohol.
1994 marked the 25th anniversary of British troops being sent on to the streets of the north of Ireland, and there were demonstrations in London, Belfast, and Dublin on the theme of '25 years - time to go, time for peace'.
London, 13 August 1994
In London the Troops Out Movement and other groups including the Irish in Britain Representation Group held a march from the park by the Imperial War Museum. Black balloons were released to mark the dead of the conflict and a coffin taken to Downing Street labelled 'Britain's War: 25 years - 3400 dead'. Around 3,000 people took part.
A sticker for the demo
Black balloons released over Westminster
'Troops Out' magazine, August/September 1994
Belfast, 14 August 1994
In Belfast the next day there was another demonstration, with thousands of people converging on City Hall in parades from all parts of the city. The largest contingent came from West Belfast, where 'The march proceeded to the Whiterock Road where the Ballymurphy section of the march joined them. Several of the visiting delegations were with this section of the march. There were contingents from Noraid, from the Basque country, from Italy as well from the Troops Out Movement and many other solidarity groups' (An Phoblact, 18 August 1994). Speakers at the end of the march included Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams.
'Falls/Clonard: 25 years of resistance' - mural in Dunville Street off the Falls Road in Belfast
'Free the Ballymurphy Seven' - the campaign in support of seven young men who were arrested following a bomb attack on an army patrol in 1991. They were charged on the basis of 'confessions' obtained under duress in Castlereagh interrogation centre. Eventually all were acquitted but not after spending several years in prison.
'Cheering marchers say Britain Must Go', An Phoblact, 18 August 1994
Dublin, 20 August 1994
The march in Dublin on the following Saturday 20th August was one of the largest pro-republican rallies there since the 1981 hunger strikes. Over 10,000 people took part in what was billed as a parade and pageant rather than just a traditional demo. There was street theatre and more than 54 floats highlighting current and historic issues. The Wolfe Tones played to the crowd gathered by the GPO, and of course there were various republican flute bands including the Spirit of Freedom, Sliabh Dubh, Gleann an Lagain and Tom Smith.
The Angel of Death leads the march
'Get out of my sight!'
A float highlighting Fermanagh/Monaghan border posts
'Guth na mBan' singing 'Something inside so strong'
The Dublin and Monaghan bombs in 1974 killed 33 people and were planted by the Ulster Volunteer Force with the knowledge of British intelligence
At the GPO
'Slán abhaile' (Safe Home)
An Phoblact, 25 August 1994
A summary of other Time to Go events including in Derry, Crossmaglen, Newry and around the world (An Phoblact, 18 August 1994)
1994 was a key turning point in the conflict. The year before Gerry Adams and John Hume had launched the Irish Peace Initiative, and then on 31 August 1994 the Irish Republican Army announced a ceasefire. After several years of a stop and start process the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Easter 1998, paving the way for demilitarisation and prisoner release.
Anyway that was a busy week for me, rushing from London to Belfast then travelling around Ireland towards Dublin. Stopping off in Sligo for a banging house club night in a hotel back room full of people celebrating on the day of their Higher exam results. Where was that I wonder?
[I recently donated some photos and papers to the MayDay Rooms in London for their archive of Troops Out Movement and related materials. If you have anything you can share with them get in touch with them. This post is one in a series where I contextualise this material with my recollections]
'Time for Peace, Time to Go' (I did think this photo might have been from Dublin, but seems it's actually Albert Square in Manchester, so this must have been on the Bloody Sunday demo there in January 1995)
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