'Pay no poll tax' posters like this one graced many a window during the anti-poll tax movement. This particular one was produced in March 1990 by Community Resistance Against the Poll Tax, a group based in the South London borough of Lambeth. The address given on the poster is 121 Railton Road SE24 - home of the 121 anarchist centre and, as discussed here previously, the Dead by Dawn parties.
There were many political tendencies within the movement, with debates and disagreements about the way forward. In Lambeth there were actually three borough wide groups - Lambeth Against the Poll Tax (Labour left and Socialist Workers Party); Lambeth Anti Poll Tax Union (dominated by 'Militant', now the Socialist Party) and Community Resistance Against the Poll Tax (which included anarchists and assorted non-party activists). The key political difference was the first two (LAPT and LAPTU) placed a great emphasis on lobbying the local Labour council not to implement the poll tax, which Community Resistance dismissed as naive. At the time this leaflet came out the Council had in fact just agreed to set the poll tax amount for Lambeth despite a riotous demonstration outside the Town Hall.
Here's the text from back of the leaflet: Fight the poll tax The demonstrations at town halls in March have shown just how much anger there is against the poll tax. It’s obvious that, no matter what anyone says, mass non-payment is becoming a reality. The reason is simple – millions simply can’t afford to pay, millions more don’t want to. But we can’t defeat this horrible new tax without organisation. All over the place you meet people who are saying “I’m not paying, I don’t care what they threaten me with“. This is great, but in a few months time any of these people could have been worn down by the massive campaign of lies that there will be in the media about how many people are paying, by well-publicised threats of court action by councils, by council snoopers hunting for those who haven’t registered, by the feeling that perhaps they will be among the unlucky few that the council has got the resources to chase up. No doubt there will be no shortage of ‘advice’ available from central and local government about how to tighten our belts to pay our poll tax and how to claim the pathetic rebates that are on offer. Any of us could become “waiverers” if we remain isolated. We can’t expect “friends in high places” such as councillors or MPs to fight the tax for us. It’s up to us. Labour Party leaders call it “Maggie‘s tax“ but the real position on it was recently summed up by the shadow environment secretary, Bryan Gould, who said “we say pay the bill. However difficult and unpleasant and objectionable it may be..". The experience of Scotland, where the tax has been introduced a year earlier, has shown that Labour councils are just as enthusiastic about sending in the bailiffs against non-payers as their Tory friends are. But in Scotland people have resisted, there has still not been a single successful “warrant sale“ of non-payers possessions. This is because the bailiffs have been physically resisted by large crowds. Community Resistance against the Poll Tax is a group of people who live in the Brixton/Clapham/Stockwell/Vauxhall area. We are trying to break down isolation and support anybody who refuses to pay. We intend to resist the councils, the bailiffs and the media liars. We don’t want people to be martyrs who suffer for their principles. If we are organised it will be the implementers of the tax who will be sick with worry, not us. Lots of things could happen in the next year or so. They could get rid of Thatcher , they could call a general election… anything to make people think “we don’t have to fight now, things will be OK“. But we can’t feel safe until this evil tax has been made completely unworkable and the government and councils give up trying to implement it. We want to: 1. encourage as many people as possible not to pay. We will do this by means of public meetings, street stalls and the distribution of leaflets and newsletters to keep everyone informed. We have already been doing this kind of thing for well over a year. We need as much information as possible about what the councils are up to. If you know anything interesting… Get in touch! 2. encourage the formation of other local anti-poll tax groups. If you know someone who is thinking of setting up a group in another area put them in touch with us. We can help with organising public meetings, getting stuff printed etc 3. organise well-publicised acts of mass defiance against the tax, such as burning payment books 4. Exercise disruptive pressure against offices involved in implementation of the tax by means of demonstrations, pickets and occupations. We would also like to put similar pressure on employers who deduct payments from the wages of employees refusing to pay the tax, as the courts can require them to do. 5. Make links with workers who are in a position to directly disrupt implementation, either through open strike action or just through being “difficult". If you work locally in the workplacess involved in poll-tax implementation (e.g. DSS, council, company supplying services to the council…) and you think there is some potential for resistance or you think you can feed us useful information, come along to one of our meetings. You will be very welcome. 6. Do anything else we can think off to frustrate the tax. We hold meetings on alternate Wednesdays at Clapham Baths, Clapham Manor Street at 7:30 pm. The next few meetings are on the following dates: 4th April, 18th April, 2nd May, 16 May. We also sometimes have a public meetings at other venues in the area – look out for flyposting. We are not paying [as stated here, Community Resistance held meetings in Clapham; they also held regular cafe nights at the community cafe in Bonnington Square, Vauxhall. Original leaflet A4 printed on white paper] More on the poll tax:
I am going to be giving a talk on the 'Poll Tax Rebellion - 30 years on' as part of the Datacide #18 magazine launch event on Friday 21 February 2020 at Ridley Road Social Club, 89 Ridley Road. London E8 2NH (with followed by music courtesy of Praxis and Hekate - details here)
Next up in the Poll Tax Archive, a leaflet from early 1991 giving advice to people being taken to court by Lambeth Council for non-payment. By this time millions of people were behind in their payments or had not paid at all since the poll tax was introduced in April 1990 (in England & Wales, a year earlier in Scotland). People were being taken to court in their thousands for non-payment and the strategy of the anti poll tax movement was to try and delay the process by making court cases last as long as possible.
This St Valentine’s Day – massacre the poll tax!
Lambeth Council are taking poll-tax non-payers to court on this day. When Southwark did the same 1000+ people turned up and court cases were abandoned. Let’s do it again!
February 14th, from 9:30 am Camberwell magistrates court
Stop the courts, stop the poll tax
As well as waiting to see what arrives in the post on February 14th, many of us will have something else to worry about on that day. For by way of a Valentine’s Day present, your caring Lambeth Council has chosen this date to begin dragging poll tax non-payers through the courts. If you are one of the unlucky ones to have been included in the first batch of summonses there is one vital rule: don’t panic – you are not alone!
Lambeth are keeping pretty quiet about how many people have actually paid their poll tax round here. However City Limits magazine recently (January 24) suggested that only 13% of locals have paid up. Nationally up to 14,000,000 still haven’t paid, while in Scotland non-payment rates are rising in the second year of the poll tax there.
If you have been summonsed it is important that you go to court and contest the liability order (the order that the court makes saying you are liable to pay the full amount of the poll tax). When you turn up at court there will probably be council officials trying to persuade you to pay up instead of going through with the court case. Ignore them or waste their time by asking them lots of questions and then still refusing to pay. When you are called to go into court demand a personal hearing – this is your right. You should also ask permission to have somebody with you to give you legal advice and help (your poll tax group should be able to supply one of these “McKenzie’s friends”).
Going into court is an intimidating experience for anybody, but remember this is not a criminal matter. It is just the same as if you get taken to court for other debts (e.g. rent, credit card bills). In court you will not be in the dock as the accused instead you are entitled to ask questions of the council official in court. You could ask such questions as:
– can you prove that I am on the poll tax register? (If your name or address has been spelt wrongly you could ask about that)
– can you prove that I have been billed? Who posted it? When?
– Can you prove I have received a reminder? Etc.
– can you explain why my rebate application has not been dealt with?
- what is a liability order?
It is highly likely that the court will ignore your objections – the rules are made by the rich, just like the poll tax. But we want to make it as difficult as possible for them. If nobody turns up, the court will just rubber stamp liability orders and process thousands of us in one day. If we turn up and demand that our cases be heard individually, cases will have to be adjourned and it will take ages for them to get through. If enough of us turn up we might be able to stop the courts altogether.
In January Southwark Council summonsed 5000 non-payers to appear at Camberwell magistrates on one day. Nearly all these cases had to be adjourned after over 1000 turned up in court. Police were called after these defaulters refused to budge from the court building and fire alarms were set off.
Remember the council can’t start the next stage of collecting the poll tax until it has got a liability order against you. Once a liability order has been made out against you the court will write to you asking for details of where you work, how much do you earn, etc. After you have filled it in the council decide what to do next. They might try and get your employer to deduct it gradually from your wages, or the social to deduct it from your dole (they cannot deduct it in one lump sum). Whatever they threaten can be resisted however. At North Middlesex Hospital for instance, staff in the wages department have decided to refuse to deduct the poll tax from nurses' wages. And all over the country bailiffs have been sent home empty-handed after being confronted with pickets.
As a last resort, having tried everything else, the council can try and get you put in prison (this has only happened in one or two cases so far). If you’re not prepared to go to prison, you can always back down at the last minute. In fact at any stage if you feel too threatened you can pay up (if you can afford to) – there is no point of no return. The aim of the anti poll tax movement is to make collecting the tax as difficult as possible – not to create martyrs.
Even if you haven’t been summonsed yet, you still turn up on the 14th and show your support for those who have. You will be able to see what’s involved and be better prepared when your time comes.
(I remember giving this leaflet out at Brixton tube station. Can't recall source of the film noir image - anybody recognise the actor/film?) The leaflet mentions the crowd at Camberwell Magistrates Court summonsed for non-payment by Southwark Council on 14 January 1991. Here's a report of this from Socialist Organiser (23 January 1991) by a member of Nunhead Anti Poll Tax Union:
Sad to hear recently of the death of barber Andy Haralambous (1/06/1944 - 09/10/2018). For ten years from the late 1980s, Andy cut my hair regularly at his barber's shop at the bottom of Tulse Hill, Haircut Sir? In fact he cut my hair very regularly, as it was short and in need of constant attention. Andy was famous for his flat top haircuts at a time when this was the coolest hair style in town.
I'd had my first a few years earlier at Cyril's in Canterbury, where I was a student. That first time, around my 20th birthday, I didn't even know what it was called, I had to point at some passing rockabilly rebel and say 'like that'! Not long after I started going to regular Thursday night sessions put on by Whitstable rockabilly band The Keytones at The Tankertons Arms there (this would have been 1983/84). I gravitated towards punkier hair styles for a while, including a short lived mohican, but within a few years I felt the call of the full flat top again.
In the 1980s, the flat top and variations of it were not confined to 1950s revivalists. There was the whole psychobilly scene wtih gothish elements and various post-punk short back and side merchants from Kirk Brandon to Morrissey. There was a black hip hop version, and let's not forget Grace Jones. In the pre-rave warehouse party/rare groove scene, there were flat tops aplenty and it was the haircut du jour of young gay London (including many lesbians as well as gay men).
When I moved to Tulse Hill Estate in Brixton in early 1987, I needed to keep my flat top sharp to go with my black Levi 501s and DMs for nights out at The Fridge and elsewhere. Andy was the local barber. But he was well known beyond the local area for his flat top skills - I remember him being mentioned in either Time Out or The Face, or possibly both, as doing one of the best flat tops in London. People came from far and wide. Like many London barbers, Andy was from Cyprus, like most barbers from wherever he enjoyed regaling his captive seated audience with his views on the state of the world!
Some Haircut Sir handiwork
In the ecstasy fuelled 1990s long hair made a come back, but there was no going back for me. There might have been some colouring added at times, but it's short back and sides for life (well for as long as I have hair) even if I now have a not-so stark number 3 at the sides. I moved to New Cross in '96 and my regular trips to Andy's faded out. Nowadays I head to KRS Barber Station in Brockley where the clippers are wielded by barbers from the Turkish side of Cyprus. But Haircut Sir? is still going strong in SW2, where Andy passed on the business to his children.
So long Andy and thanks for the haircuts.
update: thanks to Andrew Brooks on Twitter for reminding me of Andy's standard introduction when somebody entered the shop - 'Cup of tea? Kettle’s there. Help yourself'. Of course if you did make one the etiquette was to offer one to Andy and anybody else queuing.
Brixton has seen many parties, but none quite like the Reclaim the Streets event on Saturday 6th June 1998 when thousands of people brought traffic to a standstill by partying in the main road without the permission of the police, Council or anybody else.
Reclaim the Streets brought together the politics of the road protest movement with the sounds and energy of the free party scene to stage a series of spectacular actions from the mid-1990s onwards, basically involving a crowd of people turning up, blocking the road and occupying it for a party. It started out in May 1995 with a party in Camden High Street and another north London party in Islington's Upper Street in July 1995 (I remember dancing to a sound system mounted in an armoured car there, which I think belonged to Jimmy Cauty of KLF). The idea soon spread around the country and indeed internationally.
In one of the biggest actions, 6,000 people took over part of the M41 Motorway in West London in July 1996 with sofas and sound systems, and this was followed by a party in Trafalgar Square in April 1997. By this time the focus of RTS had widened out from roads to posing bigger questions about the use of social space and linking up with other movements - the Trafalgar Square action came at the end of a march with sacked Liverpool dockers.
The challenge for 1998 was how to keep one step ahead of the police now that the basic tactic was well known. There was also some dissatisfaction amongst RTS activists about simply continuing with parties that erupted suddenly but disappeared just as quickly leaving little behind except memories and a sense of the possibility of a different way of life.
The agreed way forward was to try and organise two simultaneous parties in different parts of London, and to attempt to root the parties more in what was going on in the areas concerned. Whether the parties succeeded in linking with that elusive notion of 'local communities' is debateable, but they did involve a broader strata of local activists with knowledge of their patch and connections to the kind of resources needed to make the parties happen.
The planning meetings for the South London party were held in a squatted social club in Kennington (now North Lambeth Housing Office, 91 Kennington Lane SE11 -pictured above). Sometimes there was no electricity and we talked by candlelight. At other times we met up on the roof of the building in the open air. We broke up into groups, each responsible for a particular aspect of the party. I was in a group focused on organising activities for children. One sub group was responsible for selecting the location, something that was supposed to be kept secret from everybody else until the day of the party to keep the authorities guessing. In this way too the Wednesday night planning meetings could be open to all comers without worrying about all the details becoming widely known.
'calling all Systems; pedestrians, cyclists, Road Ravers and road ragers, workers and shirkers, dreamers and schemeers, unhappy shoppers, happy shoplifters, kids, crusties, punks and prophets, the young at heart. Let's take back our streets'
The publicity called for people to meet at noon outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, and several hundred people were there at the appointed time. Most party goers only knew that the party was to take place somewhere in South London. The expectation was that there would be some chasing around to get to the location – for the M41 Reclaim the Streets party in 1996, people had assembled at Liverpool Street on the other side of town and been directed by tube towards Shepherds Bush.
This time though a game of double bluff was being played. In the road opposite the Town Hall two old cars crashed into each other in a pre-arranged manoeuvre to halt the traffic, a flare was let off and a few people immediately stepped into the road. After a moment’s hesitation, the crowd pushed past the police into the road, with another staged car crash at the other end of the high street blocking traffic in both directions.
'Roadblock- street party brings Brixton to a standstill' (South London Press report, June 2018)
As we had our small children with us, we ducked into a Brixton market cafe for a bit figuring that if there was going to be trouble it would be in this period of getting set up. There was no trouble though, and we now know that the police must have known all along that the party was due to take place in Brixton, as one of the key organisers was an undercover cop, Jim Sutton (real name Jim Boyling). In fact he had been part of the group which had selected the location. I remember he asked if I could drive one of the vehicles for the fake collision - I guess you could call that potential entrapment though I declined as my priority on the day was to keep my kids safe.
Within a short time the party was in full swing. The whole stretch of Brixton Road from the Fridge down to beyond the tube station was full of people instead of cars; Coldharbour Lane was also traffic free down as far as the Atlantic Road junction. Climbers had scaled the lamp posts and hung enormous colourful banners across the street – my favourite read ‘Under the Tarmac Flows the River – Dig Up the Effra’, referring to the lost river now flowing beneath Brixton. Others read ‘Cars my Arse’ and ‘Against Tube Privatisation’ (tube workers were due to strike the following week). There was a huge figure of a woman – the poster and flyer for the event had featured an image from the 50s movie ‘Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman’ showing said woman lifting up cars. Another climber got a big cheer for putting a plastic bag over a CCTV camera. A red, green and black RTS flag flew on top of McDonalds.
dancing on a Brixton bus stop
People danced to a sound system set up in a van at the junction of Acre Lane. Down by the tube station there were two more sound systems, one playing ragga and the other, a cycle-powered effort, spluttering out techno. A live music PA was set up in the road outside Morley’s store. Over the next few hours it featured an all-women punk covers band (a highlight for me was ‘Teenage Kicks’), Steve Prole, Headjam, Painful and various others. On the other side of the road there was a big acoustic jam, with drums etc. There was lots of random activity, including juggling and people playing chess on the road.
A sand pit in the road was the centre of the children’s area. As Past Tense recalls, police officer Jim Sutton/Boyling had pulled the trolley of sandbags to the party from where they had been stored earlier in the week in a local squat. My partner was working as a childminder at the time, so she pulled together lots of arts and crafts materials from the South London Children's Scrap Scheme, a recycling project based in Consort Road SE15 (it closed down later that year, after which it was squatted as the Spike). We had loads of gold shiny card which we made into big conical hats, and some gold fabric which was used for costumes. We hung up children's art work from washing line strung between lamp posts. There was a paddling pool, and children were also playing in the fountains outside the library which were overflowing with bubbles - I remember seeing Jerry Dammers (ex-The Specials) round there.
The flyer had promised to ‘transform our Streets into a place of human interaction, a dance, a playground, a football match, the sharing of food, an exchange of free thoughts’. And that’s pretty much what happened, with up to 5,000 people partying on until about 9 pm.
The police mainly kept themselves at the edge of the party, with only five arrests, one of a fire eater for allegedly breathing flames too near to the police…
'Techno blips and booming bass rocked the van carrying the system while people danced all over the area. Before long a veggie burger stall had been set up opposite a banner proclaiming the South London Clitoral Liberation Front. Traffic lights that had temporarily lost their purpose soon became pretty useful as party podiums, one of which became the throne for a naked reveller wearing only a pair of red pants on his head' (report in DJ magazine, June 21 1998)
Documents
RTS Press release:
'Two streets in London were reclaimed for parties and the people shortly before two o'clock today. By mid-afternoon the crowd near Seven Sisters station had grown to over 5000 people and a similar number partied in Brixton. The parties finished at about 9pm. At the time of writing (10:30 pm) about 300 people remained outside Brixton Town Hall, listening to two groups of drummers in the almost-Mediterranean promenade atmosphere of a warm summer evening. Police continued to appear relaxed, and this time avoided the mistake of sealing off people's exit routes.
In North London, someone set fire to two old cars after the end of the party. RTS would point out that these were our cars, obtained to block the road, and that some of the most "aggressive" acts of which we are aware during the day were the enthusiastic reduction of these same cars to scrap, by a group of five- and six-year-olds.
As the smell of exhaust returned to the streets of Brixton, a participant commented "The whole of Brixton has been here with a real sense of community." Let this be a premonition of a time when the present conditions of our lives will be no more than a memory'.
RTS South London Street Party stickers
Leaflets produced for distribution in the Brixton party - I had a hand in writing and designing both of these, which were printed at the 121 Centre in Railton Road SE24. One leaflet focused on the impact of traffic on children: 'Reclaim the streets for children
The streets used to be a place where children could run around, play and hang out with their friends. Today children are taught that the streets are dangerous and that they should keep off them. More and more children are being brought up like battery chickens - living most of their lives indoors, except when they are being driven around in their parent's car between home, school, the supermarket and short bursts of supervised play.
The biggest problem is that the streets are dominated by cars. In the UK, the number of vehicles on the road has increased from 8 million in 1960 to 24 million and rising today. When a fast moving lump of metal hits a child's body there's no contest. In the last 20 years, 200,000 children have been killed or seriously injured by cars, two-thirds of them while walking or cycling. Instead of removing this danger from our children, we remove our children from the danger - by keeping them at home. Cars are choking children
South London suffers the worst pollution in the UK, and it is having a major impact on children's health. Vehicle pollutants like nitrogen dioxide can trigger asthma attacks and other breathing problems, while others can cause cancer and heart problems. Noise-related stress builds up for the thousands of children living next to busy roads. Driving children everywhere is no protection - pollution levels are often higher inside cars, and of course there is still the risk of a crash.
Faced with this dictatorship of the car, it is not surprising that parents and carers want to keep their children at home. This in turn can create other problems with children's physical, social and emotional development. Many children get less exercise than they need, because they rarely walk or cycle very far. They are also denied the chance to learn to do things for themselves by mixing with other children without being constantly watched over by adults. Curfews for children
As the streets empty of children, and increasingly of adults too, they become seen as an alien and threatening place. Fears of crime and of strangers become exaggerated out of all proportion. Where children do continue to hang out on the streets they are portrayed as a problem. In some places, police have already enforced curfews for children, giving them the power to drive kids off the streets even if they aren't doing anything illegal. New Labour's Crime and Disorder Bill will extend this power to police across the country.
Reclaim the streets
If we want to break this cycle we've got to start reclaiming the streets. Reclaim the Streets parties are about taking a piece of car-infested tarmac and turning it into a free space where we can dance, play and for once live and breathe easily. They show what life could be like if people had control over our streets and over our lives. Come along to the South London party on June 6th 1998 - bring your kids, your friends, your friends' kids... There will be a children's play space as well as sound systems and live music'.
The second piece of RTS South London 'agitprop' was a folded A4 sheet called 'South London Stress South London Street Party Special'. It included a list of contacts of an eclectic mix of groups active locally including the Crystal Palace Ecovillage (a protest camp against plans to build in Crystal Palace park), Critical Mass and South London Anti Fascist Action. The front page text read: 'Reclaim the Streets
Today Reclaim the Streets are planning to turn part of South London into a free festival zone for the day. Most non-residential streets in South London are dominated by bumper to bumper traffic with nothing much to do except shop. RTS parties are about creating our own space where we can dance, play, eat and drink - all without any money changing hands.
Space and time in South London
So much South London space is covered in tarmac, covered in cars. It’s no surprise that we suffer from the worst pollution in the UK. The building of new roads has slowed down, with the plan to destroy Oxleas Wood in south-east London abandoned because of the threat of mass resistance. Now is the time to start taking back some of the space already lost to roads.
But roads aren’t the only problem. Green space is also being enclosed to build supermarkets or, like at Crystal Place, corporate leisure centres. Meanwhile urban space is increasingly controlled, with our every move watched by CCTV cameras.
Out time too is being taken away from us more and more, as people are made to work longer hours and the unemployed are forced to take low paid jobs by New Labour’s New Deal.
Reclaim the World
A party in the road is not going to change all this on its own, but it does give us a glimpse of a different way of life. By linking up with other communities of resistance across the world we can begin to reclaim more of our space and time from a system that sucks life out of human beings and the planet for the financial benefit of a tiny minority.
Since the first RTS party in Camden in 1995 the idea has spread throughout the country and internationally. A few weeks ago (May 19th) simultaneous street parties were held across the world. In Birmingham where world leaders met up for the G8 summit, 10,000 people took over the city centre for an RTS party and protest. Roads were blocked everywhere from Toronto (Canada) to Tel Aviv (Israel), Stockholm (Sweden) to Sydney (Australia). Our time is now'.
The leaflet also included a South London radical history map, with episodes featured included the 1897 protests against the enclosure of One Tree Hill, anti-fascist protests in Bermondsey (1937), Lewisham (1977), Wellling (1993), the Peasants Revolt and the death in 1896 of Bridget Driscoll at Crystal Palace - believed to be the first pedestrian in the world to be killed by a car.
Benefit gig
The week before the party there was an RTS benefit gig at the 121 Centre with Headjam, Headache and Painful.
At the time I was part of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts and at the gig I set up my interactive space music experiment 'Sonic Soup' described below. At the street party I also put up a cardboard rocket labelled 'reclaim space': 'Reclaim the Streets, Reclaim the Stars
Autonomous Astronauts were strongly represented at the South London Reclaim the Streets party on June 6th. Following simultaneous staged car crashes at both ends of Brixton high street hundreds of people poured into the road for a day long free party with sound systems, a sand pit and much more. Disconaut AAA attached a rocket to a lamp post bearing the slogans "Reclaim Space" and "we don't need cars 'cos we've learnt to fly', the latter a line from Stevie Wonder's space utopian song 'Saturn'. One person was arrested for breathing fire too close to the police lines, illustrating the problems autonomous astronauts may face handling rocket fuels in public.
The week before the street party there was a benefit gig for it at the 121 Centre in Brixton at which Disconaut AAA set up 'Sonic Soup'. This involves a Wasp analog synth and a fostex 4-track, with each of the four tracks including a haphazardly assembled sequence of beats, loops and mutated samples from diverse sources. The 4 tracks were assembled independently so that any juxtaposition of sounds from two or more tracks is more or less accidental. The aim of Sonci Soup is to explore some of the range of possibilities offered by music in space, randomly combining sound sources from different parts of the universe, slowed down, speeded up and twisted around by variable gravity fields. In anticipation of the free collective practice made possible in autonomous communities in space, passing voyagers are encouraged to push buttons and turn switches to help mix the ingredients in the soup.
On this occasion the crowd at this mainly punk gig were mostly reluctant to join in, even when the equipment was put on the floor in the middle of them (this contrasted with the more open-minded revellers at the "I didn't do nuthin" party in the same venue last year). Nevertheless some of the less technophobic did step boldly forward, and there were the usual interesting sound clashes. These included Judy Garland singing "Fly me to the moon" over an Alex Empire backing track, a Todd Terry remix of a Yuri Gagarin speech (fading into Hawkwind chanting "space is deep it is so endless") and William Burroughs talking about "future travellers who are ready to leave the whole human context behind" over Deadly Buddha vs Sun Ra "Strange Celestial Road".
Parts of Sonic Soup were also used recently in a AAA radio programme put together by Inner City AAA on London Musicians' Collective temporary radio station' (from Everybody is a Star! no. 3, Summer 1998, newsletter of Disconaut AAA).
See also:
Past Tense post - as well as an earlier version of my text above, this includes more reflections on the role of Jim Sutton
Brixton Buzz post - lots more photos, including this one of the sandpit:
20 years ago - on 2 August 1997 - the second Summer Rites lesbian and gay free festival was held in Brixton's Brockwell Park. Coming just a few week after Pride, which had been held not far away in Clapham Common, the programme declared 'In no way is the event a rival to Pride but rather a compliment, an addition, a festival where London's lesbians and gays can have their own party'. The main organisers were Kim Lucas and Wayne Shires, the latter of whom also ran Substation South, recently opened as a gay club in Brighton Terrace in Brixton.
The first event took place a year earlier in Kennington Park. I don't remember too much about it apart from seeing Gina G - the Australian singer who sang for the UK at the 1996 Eurovision song contest in Oslo. But I did record in my diary:
'August 3rd 1996: Summer Rites in Kennington, a lesbian and gay free festival for London. Drum and bass in the Queer Nation tent, a mixture of pumping house and eurotrash in the Love Muscle tent, one minute it was hard trance and the next it was Gina G ('oo ah just a little bit') with paper confetti raining on the dancers to deflate any techno boy seriousness. The inevitable
cheesy cover versions too, including a terrible/wonderful Oasis cover that sounded as if it was off the same production line as Berri’s sunshine after the rain. The DTPM tent was heaving, almost but not quite as frenzied as its effort
with Trade at Pride' [I think there had been a DTPM/Trade tent at Pride shortly before]
Front cover of the glossy 36 page programme
Running order on main stage at Summer Rites 1997
In Brockwell Park 1997 the main stage featured live acts such as Jimmy Sommerville, David McAlmont, Ultra Nate and Barbara Tucker, introduced by comperes incuding Amy Lame, Divine David, Rhona Cameron and Graham Norton.
The park also included some big dance tents put on by some of the main LGBT clubs at that time, including Love Muscle (regularly held at the Fridge in Brixton), DTPM (hard house night at The End), Popstarz (the gay indie club held at the Scala in Kings Cross), FIST and Queer Nation (the last two both at Substation South, the former a fetish/techno night and the latter known for its more soulful house and garage sounds).
Brockwell Park site plan
From my diary: 'thousands were partying at Summer Rites. What the 'rite' was for wasn't entirely clear, but it later transpired that William Burroughs and Fela Kuti died on the same day, so we could call it a farewell rite for them. We toured around the various tents dancing to the different sounds. In the Popstarz tent they played Blur 'Song 2'... but we left on hearing the dreadful Meredith Brooks 'I'm a bitch, I'm a lover' dirge. The DTPM tent was big and busy with housey beats, Love Muscle was a cheesefest, but we spent most time in the FIST tent where pumpin' techno was the music of choise'. The programme lists the FIST DJs aas Smalls, Graham D, EJ Doubell and Karim.
We had our young kids with us, aged 10 months and five, the former dancing on our shoulders, the latter 'fascinated by the scantily clad podium dancers - a toplesss woman with netting over her face and a man in a minute metal kilt. 'Why are they showing their bottoms?' he asked'.
Queer Nation after party at SubStation South, with DJs Francesco Simonit, Jeffrey Hinton and Supadon.
Rico Rodriguez, the great Jamaican ska trombonist, has died this week at the age of 80. In the UK he's best known for his work with The Specials, including playing on 1981's Ghost Town. The record famously reached number one in the week of the July riots that swept the country that year, and was actually recorded in the week of the first Brixton riot in April 1981 - a precursor to the long hot summer that was to come. The song's lyrics seemed to have anticipated the uprisings with its lines 'This place, is coming like a ghost town, No job to be found in this country, Can't go on no more, The people getting angry'. Even the video seemed with hindsight to refer to rioting, with the band throwing stones - though into the Thames at Rotherhithe rather than at the police.
During the Brixton riot, The George - a pub with a racist reputation on the corner of Railton Road and Effra Parade -was burnt down. A new pub, Mingles, was built to replace it and unlike its predecesor was predominantly an African-Caribbean bar. In the early 1990s, in between his Specials stint and his involvement with Jools Holland's band, Rico used to play down at Mingles. The place was just down the road from the 121 Centre which I frequented, and a few of us went down to Mingles a couple of times to see him play. It was no big deal, just a a band playing in the pub in a low key way, but what a band. To be honest I thought at the time Rico deserved a bigger venue, but there was a sweet irony in this Jamaican musician playing in that place given its history.
In a further ironic twist, a future Jamaican musician might not be able to play in a place like this - not because of racist door policies but because of the loss of venues as a result of more affluent residents moving into the area that was once known as the Front Line. Mingles became the Harmony Bar and then La Pearl, before closing. Antic - who run the Dogstar and various other London pubs - acquired the site (82 Railton Road SE24) and applied for planning permission to develop it with flats above and a bar below. Local residents campaigned against it with a 2012 petition stating that 'We strongly feel this site is no longer suitable to be used as a pub or entertainment venue, as the surrounding streets have become more residential and it is too close to these homes'.
Planning permission was refused and BrixtonBuzz reported a press release last year that crowed 'London based construction specialists Sorrel Construction Ltd, partner with Lambeth Council to breathe much needed life into a post-riot area... Sorrel Construction Limited have recently announced their latest project working closely with Lambeth Council to dramatically transform a damaged pub on Railton Road into a series of brand new luxury flats'.
Mingles later became the Harmony Bar before closing
'Looking back – and I’ll explain later how I came to be looking back – I realise how much of my social life in the 1980s was spent at “underground” events of one kind or another... In my teens, I’d been a devotee of magazines such as Frendz and Oz with their illegibly swirling psychedelic designs and still blurrier editorial agenda. These publications represented an (open) marriage between insurrectionary politics, prog rock, fashion (loons) and porno graphics. I was interested, mainly, in photographs of Hawkwind.
That may have been the golden age of the underground, but its spikier manifestations or descendants were part of the social landscape of London in the 1980s: the squatted cafe in Bonnington Square, Vauxhall, the Anarchist Centre at 121 Railton Road, Brixton, and, of course, the ubiquitous underground parties that later morphed into raves'.
Dyer's initial take is that all that is in the past - 'Maybe new variations of such things still exist in London and I’m too old and square to know about them but, broadly speaking, the counterculture has given way to an over-the-counter culture of cool cafes and pop-ups that lend a subversive slant to one’s retail experience'.
But attending an event in New York changes his mind - 'my visit... got me thinking about the long and nourishing role the underground has played in my life. It also made me realise how easy it is to fall into elegiac mode and how important it is to resist doing so. In different forms, in spite of everything, places like this will keep popping up, unbeknown to the middle-aged likes of... me. So, as a way of combining the urge to lament and the need to affirm, we’ll close with the final words from Larkin’s Show Saturday in High Windows.. “Let it always be there.”'
I generally agree with Dyer's position, even though I think the notion of 'the underground' itself has always involved a heavy dose of self-mythologisation. Of course I was most interested in him name checking places I used to hang out at too in the late 1980s/early 1990s - Bonnington Square cafe, scene of many Community Resistance Against the Poll Tax benefit nights, and the 121 Centre (which has been mentioned many times on this blog). Dyer lived in Brixton in the 1980s, I think slightly earlier than me, and his first novel - The Colour of Memory (1989) - is a fictionalised account of Brixton dole life in that period.
Panacea was a mid-1990s zine from Cardiff ('Panacea West') and Southsea ('Panacea South').
Panacea 'future sounds collective' aimed 'to provide information distributed from the techno underground, bring quality music to your ears, and find ways of getting to best future sound parties'.
This issue (number 3) from 1995, includes articles on Jeff Mills and DJ Torah, and a round up of London techno nights, including Digital Nation at Bagleys, Kings Cross and of course Dead by Dawn: 'next Dead by Dawn will continue the party with cutting edge hardcore and hard experimental sounds to challenge the techno establishment. The next Dead by Dawn (121 Railton Road, Brixton) is on Nov 4, line up includes Torah'. I remember chatting to the Panacea crew at Dead by Dawn, nice people.
The front page mentions 'Insurrection in Hyde Park' and the issue includes a review of the pamphlet I wrote at the time about the October 1994 anti-Criminal Justice Act riotous demonstration in Hyde Park, 'The Battle for Hyde Park: ruffians, radicals, and ravers 1855-1994'.
With Datacide magazine we are planning an event at the May Day Rooms in Fleet Street, London, on October 19th 2014 looking at the anti-CJA movement and also featuring a panel discussion on the radical/techno zine scene at that time. Put the date in your diary, it will start at 2 pm and carry on into the evening with films and music (further details here soon). We would be interested in hearing from people involved in that movement/demonstration, if anyone from Panacea is out there (Arlene/Sian?) get in touch as we'd like to have you there too!
Friday night's Praxis Records party on the MS Stubnitz in London docklands was great, may write a bit more about it, but for now here's something about the label's early history and more specifically the mid-1990s Dead by Dawn parties at the 121 squat centre in Brixon (as discussed at this site before). These extracts are from 'Bread and (Rock) Circuses: sites of sonic conflict in London' by Alexei Monroe, published in 'Imagined Londons' edited by Pamela K. Gilbert (SUNY Press, 2002).
'Gabber and associated variants (stormcore, nordcore, hartcore, speedcore) all represent not just aesthetic extremism but a frantic search for an un-colonised sonic space that will prove resistant to commodification and appropriation. All are based on the testing and surpassing of kinetic-sensory-pharmacological-sonic frontiers and a reaction against ideological, economic, and stylistic taboos. At the center of this stylistic mayhem lay the Dead by Dawn nights at the 121 and the associated micro-scene centered on the Praxis label and the Alien Underground and Datacide magazines - the most comprehensive documentation of both local events and the international networks of underground parties and producers in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and beyond. The magazines are no less politicised than the information held at 121, reporting not just on the specific repression against illegal raves but on wider civil liberties issues and threats to freedom, discussing issues such as electronic surveillance, and the CIA's links to drug importation. Datacide in particular stresses solidarity against repression and has a loosely defined ideology based on communal values and the thought of Rosa Luxemburg and the Italian and German autonomist/squatter movements. Though not pessimistic and stressing the importance of cultural and political resistance, the tone of the reportage can be as apocalyptic as the sounds discussed on the extensive review pages. The works of Deleuze and Guattari, Hakim Bey, and others are a conspicuous presence, and the emphasis on theoretical activity and practical action stands in contrast to happy hardcore's pure escapism and distrust of complexity and innovation. The conceptual sophistication and political awareness of the writers, producers and those attending the events does not contradict so much as complement the music's emphasis on brutal sensuality that to the outsider seems nothing more than a soundtrack to the temporary obliteration of the self.
The 121 and the Dead by Dawn parties symbolize a twin process of stylistic and musical ghettoization, some of the most extreme sounds to have been heard in London playing to an audience of one or two hundred in an almost stereotypically bleak basement space. Though at one level it was indeed a ghetto space, anyone who attended an event at 121 will remember its unique atmosphere. In the small hours, for listeners slumped in armchairs on the ground floor surrounded by the blast of dystopic noise emerging from the basement space, the 121 could seem as hyperreal as anywhere, even without chemical enhancement. The incongruity of the location could actually feel the intensity, the awareness of being in a parallel space that was at least symbolically beyond the reach of daily commodification and oppression. The space served as a nexus of extreme sensory experience and had a unique atmposphere'.
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).
