Ari Up, The Slits and Unmediated Female Noises

Sad news about the death this week of Ari Up (Ariane Forster), former lead singer of The Slits. She was only 48, incredibly she was only 14 when she joined the band and only 15 when they set out on the famous White Riot tour with The Clash in 1977. At that time they were quite literally making a sound that had never been heard before and looking like nobody had ever looked before.

As Greil Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth Century (describing a bootleg recording of the band):

'Shouting and shrieking, out of guitar flailings the group finds a beat, makes a rhythm, begins to shape it; the rhythm gets away and they chase it down, overtake it, and keep going. Squeaks, squeals, snarls, and whines - unmediated female noises never before heard as pop music - course through the air as the Slits march hand in hand through a storm they themselves have created. It's a performance of joy and revenge, an armed playground chant' (Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces).
In 1977, Caroline Coon accompanied the band on some of the White Riot tour, taking some great photos like the one above of The Clash's Paul Simonon watching Ari do her hair. She documented it in her under-rated book '1988: The New Wave and Punk Rock Explosion':

'It is what the Slits represent, even at their least provocative, that gets up people's noses... Their earthy arrogance and striking mode of attire - an organised mess of dressed-up undress - causes adults to behave with alarming intolerance. Quite apart from being thrown out of hotels, Ari Up is quite used to being spat at by people who pass her on the street. Being refused service in coffee bars and pubs is another fact of life'.

The book includes a poignant quote from Ari: 'I want to live, and when I'm sixty I want to have green hair and spikey heels. If people hate us its because of our honesty. You have to comb your hair otherwise they think you're a mad loony or the devil. But they are living in the past'. Sadly she didn't make it to sixty, but she will be remembered for a lot longer.

Electric Eden

Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music is an ambitious, accomplished and entertaining survey of 100 years of music-making and its associated literature and counter-cultures. Its focus is on the pastoral dream of evergreen Albion, with its core the story of folk music since Cecil Sharp began collecting rural song at the turn of the 20th century. Folk’s various revivals and re-inventions are encompassed, from the use of folk themes in English classical music (e.g. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock), through the proletarian focus of Ewan McColl and A.L. Lloyd and on to folk rock and beyond.

Young is less interested though in ‘folk’ as a specific musical genre, than in the vision he sees underlying it - the use of music as a form of ‘imaginative time travel’ to the ‘succession of golden ages’ (both semi-historical and entirely fictional), found in British culture – Merrie England, Albion, Middle Earth, Avalon, Narnia. As he states in the introduction ‘The ‘Visionary Music’ involved in this book’s title refers to any music that contributes to this sensation of travel between time zones, of retreat to a secret garden, in order to draw strength and inspiration for facing the future’.

This is not a characteristic solely of what is normally defined as ‘folk music’ and he includes within it dreamy English psychedelia, and the work of later visionary musical outsiders such as Kate Bush and Julian Cope.

The stories of Cecil Sharp and Ewen McColl have already been well documented, for me the most interesting parts of the book deal with the subsequent trajectories of late 1960s/1970s folk rock and ‘acid folk’, with their infusions of both Early Music and futuristic psychedelia. As well as covering the obvious reference points (Fairport Convention, Pentangle, Incredible String Band, Nick Drake), Young gives space to many less well known artists such as Bill Fay, Comus and Mr Fox.

After languishing in relative obscurity for many years, some of these have only recently secured the listeners denied them at the time. In another form of time travel, it’s almost as if some of the albums recorded in the late 1960s/70s were set down as ‘time capsules’, to be unheard in their present but acting as a gift to the future that would appreciate them. The paradigmatic examples are of course Nick Drake, who only achieved posthumous fame when his fruit was in the ground, and Vashti Bunyan, whose Just Another Diamond Day sold only a few hundred copies in 1970s and who has only really gained widespread recognition in the last five years or so. I saw her give one of her first major performances at the Folk Britannia 'Daughters of Albion' event at the Barbican in London in 2006, alongside Eliza Carthy, Norma Waterson, Kathryn Williams, Sheila Chandra and Lou Rhodes.

Places and Spaces

Young is very good on place – both the specific landscapes that influenced particular musicans, and the spaces where music was performed. In relation to the former he mentions for instance Maiden Castle in Dorset, inspiration for John Ireland’s Mai-Dun (as well as incidentally the novel Maiden Castle by John Cowper Powys, an author with a similar take on the visionary landscape).
In relation to the latter, he mentions clubs such as Ewen McColl’s Ballads and Blues club/Hootennanay upstairs in the Princess Louise pub in Holborn (founded in 1957) and its later evolution into The Singers Club at the Pindar of Wakefield on Grays Inn Road. In Soho, Russell Quaye’s Skiffle Cellar at 49 Greek Street (1958-60), was replaced at the same address in 1965 by ‘the poky palace of Les Cousins, where the folk monarchy held court, audiences of no more than 150 were routinely treated to mystically revelatory performances. The club never got around to applying for a liquor licence, so patrons consumed tea and sandwiches in a haze of hash smoke, straining to hear the soloists over percussive effects from the cash register’. Denizens included Bert Jansch, Davy Graham, Simon & Garfunkel, John Martyn, Martin Carthy and Roy Harper.

Outside of London in the 1960s, ‘Hertfordshire was already one of the most influential hotbeds of the new folk movement outside of Soho… Herts heads keen for a lungful of marijuana and subterranean entertainment would gather at the Cock in St Albans… Down the road from The Cock brooded the Peahen, where a more traditional, MacColl-style folk-revival club was held’. In nearby Hemel Hempstead, singer Mick Softley ran the Spinning Wheel, while at the Dolphin Coffee Bar, Pete Frame opened Luton Folk Club in 1965.

There's also a good chapter on free festivals, 'Paradise Enclosed', as 'a serious attempt to stake out and remake Utopia in an English field. The temporary tented villages of Britain's outdoor festivals represented a practical attempt to live out the dream of Albion' two hundred years after the Inclosures Act of 1761 and the enclosure of common land.

Some criticisms

In a work of this scale and scope there are bound to be some factual errors of geography (Luton is in Bedfordshire not Hertfordshire) and history (Aleister Crowley was not the founder, or even a founder, of the Golden Dawn). But these are minor quibbles.

There are though a few problems with the framework Young uses for all this rich material. The chief one is its use of the term ‘Britain’s visionary music’ when it is clear that what he is describing is primarily an English phenomenon. Of course there has been plenty of folk music from other parts of the British Isles, but Young barely mentions it. In any event, it has often had a different aesthetic, concerned precisely to differentiate itself from Englishness and commemorating historical conflicts with the 'English' state from Bannockburn to the clearances (in the case of Scottish music).

Although Ireland is clearly not part of Britain, its influence on English folk is also largely unacknowledged here. Did the raucous Dubliners influence those who wanted to take folk in a more rocky direction? Did Irish rebel song envy inspire English political song (Dominic Behan was a key figure in the Singers Club)? Wasn't Thin Lizzy's Whiskey in the Jar one of the biggest folk rock hits? This is left unexplored, and arguably the greatest London folk band of all time - The Pogues - don't even get mentioned.

Young is a better musicologist than a folklorist, and while he is clearly aware that claims of an unbroken folk music tradition stretching back into the mists of time are highly questionable, he seems to want to hold on to some notion of 'pagan survivals' in folk. Despite citing Ronald Hutton in the footnotes, he disregards Hutton's findings that we know very little about the pre-Christian beliefs of the British Isles. Instead he repeats the whole Golden Bough/Wasteland mythology of ritual sacrifice as it if were fact: ‘The gods controlling these cycles needed to be appeased with sacrifices. At first, the leader of the pack, the king himself, was slaughtered before his vital energies began to die off, and a new healthy replacement was appointed in his place’.

Finally, Young does not really explore the potential dark side of all this dabbling with blood and soil. He may be right that many of those working within the folk idiom ‘have been radical spirits, aligned with the political left or just fundamentally unconventional and progressive in outlook’ – something that applies not just to the post-1950s Communist Party revivalists but to earlier pioneers such as Holst and Vaughan Williams who, as Young mentions, hung out with William Morris’s socialist circle in Hammersmith. But it is also true that this look backwards to a pre-capitalist idyll can be profoundly reactionary, and potentially very right wing. In a brief survey of current trends, Young mentions the post-industrial 'neo-folk' scene, but does not refer to the controversies over some of the neo-fascist elements involved (see the new Who Makes the Nazis? blog for more on that).

Now I've read the book (all 664 pages), I will no doubt be spending the rest of the year tracking down some of the music in it that I haven't heard yet.

(see also review at Transpontine of some of the South East London connections)

Sid Rawle: death of a free festival veteran

Sid Rawle, a key figure in the free festival movement in the UK, died last month aged 64. His activism encompassed the Hyde Park Diggers in the late 1960s, the People’s Free Festival in Windsor Great Park (1972-4), the Stonehenge Free Festival (1976-84), the Peace Convoy and the Rainbow Village camp outside the planned cruise missiles base at RAF Molesworth (1984-5).

There's a very informative post by Andy Worthington at his site about Sid's life and times. As Andy says:

'Sid played a major part in the British counter-culture from the 1960s until his death, although he is, of course, best known for his involvement in the free festival movement, first at Windsor, from 1972 to 1974, and then at Stonehenge, until the violent suppression of the festival in 1985. The author and activist Jeremy Sandford (who died in 2003) described him as “the squatter to end them all, having squatted flats, houses, commons, forests, a village, boats, an island, an army camp, Windsor Great Park".'

Read Andy's full post, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart. See also Ian Bone, Turn Left at the Bridge. Not an uncontroversial figure, he was identified by the media as a leader of the hippies and his role in attempting to mediate with the authorities earned him criticism from some quarters - stilll, nobody can say he didn't try and make the world a more interesting place.

Grassroots: another festival bites the dust

As this story from Schnews makes clear, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get permission to put on any kind of festival in the UK other than a fenced-off, high security corporate leisure event. The latest casualty is the Grassroots festival planned in Cambridgeshire. Meanwhile those who try and put on unofficial festivals are subject to the full weight of the law. The “Rave 6”, charged under section 136 following the police attack on this year’s UK Teknival (see previous report), has now become the “Rave 10” after four more people were charged.

'Yet another independent festival has been cancelled after a concerted campaign by bureaucrats, nimbys and police. The Grassroots Feastival was a small volunteer-run event due to take place in Cambridgeshire in early September. Organisers had lined up three days of revelry, from poetry to Drum ‘n’ Bass and culminating in a communal banquet replete with juggling waiters.

The Festival faced determined opposition from the very start. According to one of the organisers, Mooney, when the application process began in January the council made it clear they would do all they could to stop the festival taking place. Martin Ford from the Police licensing board went one step further and told organisers, “I’d rather put pins in my eyes than have this festival in my county.” Mooney said, “They didn’t want it to happen so they played their games. They couldn’t use legislation so instead they used dirty tactics.” The now familiar modus operandi involved heaping ludicrous demand after ludicrous demand on organisers and stalling for time to the point that the festival risked financial ruin if they pressed ahead.

After the initial consultation, organisers met monthly with the local authorities and there were six revisions of the festival’s management plan in total. Each time they were presented with ever more unreasonable conditions, ranging from heras-fencing the A11 in case of invasion by wandering partygoers who had strayed three miles over fence and field, to installing security watchtowers (with or without machine gun nests) to ensure the unruly throng of 2000 didn’t erupt in spontaneous revolution.

Each time, organisers either met the conditions or managed to argue their case that what they were being asked was beyond the realms of sanity or reason. However the killer blow came with the final application for a licence. When handing in the application, local authorities clearly told organisers that they only needed to submit one paper copy and that the pack of other relevant licensing bodies, such as traffic management and the fire brigade, would be happy with an emailed copy. At the eleventh hour of the last day they had to submit the application, organisers were then told that the licence would be refused unless all the bodies had paper copies. With no time left to do this, organisers would have had to resubmit and wouldn’t have received a decision until just days before the festival. If the licence had been refused at that point it would have spelled financial disaster for all involved and so organisers were left with no choice but to cancel.
A despondent Mooney told SchNEWS, “In some countries people welcome celebrations.” After the attacks on Strawberry Fair (see SchNEWS 715), the Big Green Gathering (SchNEWS 685), UK Teknival (SchNEWS 727) and Thimbleberry (SchNEWS 707) amongst others, it is becoming increasingly clear the UK isn’t one of them'.

Dance on 'benefits scrounger'

Predictably, the new UK ConDem government has announced the launch of a new crackdown on benefits claimants, including using private credit checking companies to snoop on the financial affairs of the sick and unemployed. Yes that's right, after pouring billions of pounds into propping up failing banks the state is going after the poorest people in the country to make them pay for it.

BBC News, the Daily Mail and others have been obediently highlighting the following clip as an example of 'benefits scrounging' - film of a man dancing whilst claiming Disability Living Allowance. Personally I think the guy's a bit of a hero, as well as a sharp dancer. Like most people bending the benefit rules to their advantage, he was just trying to get by - getting a few quid extra, but hardly getting rich at anybody else's expense.

As the court report makes clear (see below), he spent years virtually crippled with arthritis before an operation finally enabled him to have an active life, an opportunity he grasped by taking up dancing. He has spread his enthusiasm to care homes. In short he seems to have led a far more socially useful life than many other people who have got rich at other people's expense - and who don't get prosecuted or publicly denounced as a 'scrounger'. Dance on dude!



'Dancer spared jail over benefits fraud (Independent 4 August 2010)

A 61-year-old jazz dancer who fraudulently claimed nearly £20,000 in disability benefits walked free from court today. Terence Read said he was crippled by arthritis and barely able to walk but his condition improved following a hip replacement operation.

He failed to notify the change in his circumstances to the Department for Work and Pensions and officials later covertly filmed him dancing enthusiastically at a swing music night after receiving an anonymous tip-off that he was wrongly claiming Disability Living Allowance. Read, of Blackley, Manchester, was caught on camera gliding across the dancefloor and spinning his dance partner around while being cheered on by crowds of onlookers at an event in his home city.

Sentencing Read at Manchester Crown Court, Judge Rudland told him that in his case public interest was not served by imposing a custodial sentence. He was given a 12-month community order and ordered to complete 120 hours of unpaid work.

The court heard that Read had legitimately claimed for benefits for 10 years from March 1995. He suffered arthritis from the age of 25 and in the early 1990s he was virtually housebound. However, the operation on his left leg provided "instant relief" and proved such a success he was able to take an interest in his new hobby. He illegally continued to claim Disability Living Allowance between June 2005 and December 2008 to the tune of £19,915.

Judge Rudland told him: "You learned to live frugally and contentedly, going out rarely, until the dancing came into your life, which seemed to transform your joie de vivre. There is absolutely no suggestion you are a shirker who has avoided work. It is agreed that the sad fact is you were afflicted by arthritis from as young an age as 25 when most people are enjoying life with an abundance of vigour. In your mid to late 40s you were assessed as being eligible for the appropriate benefits. A time came when you undertook a hip replacement operation which had a significant impact on your mobility. Your life opened up because of the dancing and interest in the swing music of the '40s, which has a considerable following, and you became an accomplished performer on public display. I suspect over time the claim being made went to the back of your mind and it was something you took for granted. Your case was genuine at the start and then drifted into dishonesty. It is not in the public interest that you should be deprived of your liberty. You are doing good work by taking the activity (swing music) into care homes, that brings some pleasure and therapy into lives as a result of the commitment you make in that way."

...David James, defending, said his client is still affected by arthritis and before the operation had essentially been unable to move his left leg. He said the dance evenings were not a weekly event and Read went through the pain barrier as he suffered discomfort in the following days. "He is a proud man who has been humbled by his fallibility," he said. "His past was not a life, it was more of an existence"'.

Her first ball

'Her first ball! She was only at the beginning of everything. It seemed to her that she had never known what the night was like before. Up until now it had been dark, silent, beautiful very often - oh yes - but mournful somehow. Solemn. And now it would never be like that again - it had opened dazzling bright... in one minute, in one turn, her feet glided, glided. The lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel' (Katherine Mansfield, Her First Ball, 1922).

(Photo of early 20th century ballroom dancers Irene & Vernon Castle sourced from Sharon Davis - Swing Dancer)

The State and Clothes: from the Statues of Apparel to the Burqa Ban

The day before the national celebration of the storming of the Bastille in pursuit of liberty, the French government today passed a law banning the wearing of the full veil. It states that "no one can wear a garment in public which is aimed at hiding their face"; women wearing a niqab or burqa will faces fines.

Of course there is a well-founded feminist critique of women being pressured to cover their faces, but it is undeniable that some women do choose to wear such clothes for their own religious reasons. The law does not seem to distinguish between women who freely choose to wear the full veil and those who may be made to do so by others. In the latter case, it is patently absurd to prosecute somebody for something they did not choose, in the former case a fundamental principle is at stake - why should the state be able to dictate what people wear? The notion that the police will be able to arrest women on the basis of their clothing is absurd.

French interior minister Michèle Alliot-Mariez is clear that what is being imposed is not simply a dress code, but a definition of the self and its interaction with others. The simple piece of cloth is a threat to the very notion of citizenship: "We are an old country anchored in a certain idea of how to live together. A full veil which completely hides the face is an attack on those values, which for us are so fundamental. Citizenship has to be lived with an uncovered face. There can therefore be absolutely no solution other than a ban in all public places."

The notion that clothes define the social order, and therefore that the state should regulate clothing to uphold that order, is an old one. A classic example was the Statutes of Apparel issued by Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1574, which tightly defined exactly what fabrics could be worn at different levels of the feudal hierarchy. So for instance only members of the royal family could wear purple silk; 'Velvet in gowns, coats, or other uttermost garments' could only be worn by 'barons' sons, knights and gentlemen in ordinary office attendant upon her majesty's person, and such as have been employed in embassages to foreign princes' (or those above them). For women the rules decreed, among other things, that 'None shall wear any velvet, tufted taffeta, satin, or any gold or silver in their petticoats: except wives of barons, knights of the order, or councilors' ladies, and gentlewomen of the privy chamber and bed chamber, and the maids of honor'.

Today these rules look ridiculous; no doubt future historians will take a similar view of those politicians who spent time in the midst of a global economic crisis and impending environmental problems decreeing what part of a woman's face has to be visible for all to see.

General Ludd vs. John Henry

A while ago I went to a talk by the great radical historian Peter Linebaugh on 'The Invisibility of the Commons' . In the course of it he compared the two 19th century songs, John Henry and General Ludd's Triumph, as reflecting two approaches to work - suggesting that maybe one had historically been more typical of the US working class and the other of the working class in England.

In the former American song, the railway bosses' introduction of a steam-powered hammer to replace human labour is viewed as a challenge by Henry the 'steel drivin' man', who works hard to demonstrate his superior power even at the cost of his own life - he beats the hammer only to die as a result. An assertion of the dignity of labour at one level, but also a willingness to compete with mechanisation by voluntarily intensifying work:

John Henry told his captain
Lord a man ain't nothing but a man
But before I'd let your steam drill beat me down
I'd die with a hammer in my hand

Here's Mississippi Fred McDowell's version:



In the latter English song about the Luddite movement, the introduction of machinery in the cotton industry is responded to not by workers working themselves to death, but by them sentencing the machines to death through sabotage:

Those engines of mischief were sentenced to die
By unanimous vote of the trade,
And Ludd who can all opposition defy
Was the grand executioner made.

And when in the work he destruction employs,
Himself to no method confines;
By fire and by water he gets them destroyed,
For the elements aid his designs.

Here's a version by The Fucking Buckaroos (personally I prefer the version by Chumbawamba, but it's not on youtube):



Admittedly, on the basis of these versions, John Henry is a better song, even if it's not a better strategy...

... or even vote for Gloria Estefan? And why are some anarchists and socialists cheering for border controls?

Continuing our series on pop stars with a sounder grasp of migration politics than has been seen so far in the British elections, good to see that Gloria Estefan joined Saturday's May Day migrant workers demonstration in Los Angeles (see also Amerie and Shakira). The demonstration was protesting against the new Arizona laws and for regularisation of undocumented migrants. She said: 'We came as refugees to this country that gave us many opportunities... We join with you today so that they will know that we immigrants are honest, workers, to show the beautiful face that we bring to this country, always respecting the laws. If everyone looks back, everyone is an immigrant in this country... We don’t want to link the word ‘immigrant’ with ‘criminal''.

And that is good enough reason to feature Dr Beat, that great 1980s dance track by Miami Sound Machine (feat. Gloria):

There's lots of reports and photos of the Los Angeles demonstration at LA Indymedia. I've selected these two, taken by Robert Stuart Lowden, as they illustrate what is lacking not only from mainstream British political discussion about migration but from the arguments of those socialists and anarchists who now seek to justify immigration controls on some spurious 'working class' grounds that immigration undercuts wages - see for instance Paul Stott and the Independent Working Class Association. Namely the human cost of immigration controls.


Immigration controls are not a matter of turning on and off a tap, capping numbers in some cosy neutral way - 'sorry old chap, we're full today'. They are ultimately a policing function: workers dragged out of their workplaces, locked up and put on to planes, their children likewise dragged out of school. Families separated by force. Children locked up in prison. Deaths as people take risks to get round these controls - at least 87 on the US/Mexico border in the last 6 months; almost 4000 amongst people trying to enter Europe since 2002.

It may be true that in some sectors having a larger pool of labour is allowing employers to reduce wages, but the answer to that is workers solidarity not vicious border controls (what other kind are there). It is also true that many of these workers have struggled to get here at great risk, hardly flown in by capitalists. While the wages of some workers may on occasions have been undermined, other workers are earning much more here than they were at home and are also supporting families in their home countries. Also migration controls in Europe and in the US can depress wages elsewhere - since employers know it is difficult for workers to leave and therefore don't have to pay higher wages to keep workers in their jobs.

In any event it is precisely these immigration controls now seemingly supported by some former anti-fascist militants in the UK - the IWCA is the remains of Red Action - that place migrant labour in a precarious position and undermine wages (e.g. the fight by cleaners for better wages is being undermined by companies having the power to turn over strikers to the Borders Agency). The way to stop this is to fight for migrant workers to have the same rights and conditions as everybody else - this would benefit non-migrant workers too as employers wouldn't be able to play one off against the other.

Spring Free Party Season

With Spring in England in full effect, the outdoor party season is taking off. I know that some parties are an inconvenience to neighbours (though not always significantly so), but I still take some pleasure in the fact that more than 20 years after the first acid house parties of the late 1980s, and despite increasing police powers over that period, people are still taking to the outdoors to dance and party when the opportuntiy arises.

Northamptonshire rave village sealed off by police (BBC News 4 April 2010)

'A village in Northamptonshire was sealed off overnight to allow officers to break up an illegal rave. Police were called to Kilsby, near Daventry, after residents reported hearing loud music.
A police spokesman said an "effective containment" was put in place around farmland and the village, to prevent more people arriving at the rave. Officers broke up the event, made arrests and seized vehicles and sound equipment, he added'.

Rave gear to be shredded after seizure (Yarmouth Mercury, 31 March 2010)

'Illegal rave equipment worth more than £2000 is set to be destroyed after it was confiscated by police. The seized sound system will be placed into an industrial shredder at Delmonte Garage on Concorde Road in Norwich tomorrow at 3pm. Inspector Mike Brown said; “This is a clear message to rave organisers. The date is significant as it would be foolish for anyone to hold an illegal event over the Easter period.It will not be tolerated, your equipment will be seized and it will be disposed of. These events are not harmless, they cause significant disruption and cost to the rural communities they affect. For the public and landowners these actions are further evidence that we have listened to their concerns and of our commitment to stopping raves from taking place anywhere in the county.” The equipment was seized from the successful disruption of an unlicensed music event at Shotesham, Norfolk'.

Sidbury (Sidmouth Herald, 26 March 2010)

'Annoyed Sidbury residents were subjected to a sleepless night on Saturday after hundreds of people turned up to an illegal rave .Police resources were so stretched that they were unable to break the party up until 8am - four hours after the first report. Sergeant Andy Turner, of Sidmouth Police, said: "Officers attended and did their best to disperse the rave but they were unsuccessful.A lack of police resources was compounded with two serious road traffic collisions in the area. "

Around 200 ravers - some from as far away as Bristol - turned up to the party on a secluded piece of woodland called Core Copse on East Hill Strips. Music started blaring at around 1am but the first call to police was at 3.40am. Three officers went to the scene after the first report and six officers managed to shut it down at 8am. At the time of the rave police were also dealing with the search for a high-risk missing person."Saving someone's life will always take priority," added Sergeant Turner."We have shut down several raves at this location before they have started, and if it had been under normal circumstances we would have done the same this time. "Residents have our sympathy but they can be assured that we are not letting it go."

There were around six raves on the popular East Hill Strips last year and police are now looking at ways to lock them down altogether.They will be contacting local landowners, Devon County Council and other agencies to find a "long-term solution". Enquiries are continuing to find out who was in charge of the weekend rave. Details of vehicles seen at the party have been put on the police database and officers are following a number of leads. Sergeant Turner said it could be difficult to track the organisers down as it is thought different people are responsible for each event'.

Scrap the Licensing Act

Singing and making music is a universal part of human existence, found in all known societies. What could be more absurd than having to have the permission of the state to participate in it - but such is the position in England and Wales. As explained by Hamish Birchall at Live Music Forum:

'We campaign against the Licensing Act 2003, which came into effect on 24 November 2005. This legislation regulates not only the sale of alcohol in England and Wales but also the provision of entertainment, including live music. It claims to regulate live music on the grounds of public safety, prevention of crime, disorder and public nuisance, and the protection of children from harm. But this legislation is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It effectively criminalises most live performances without state authorisation. In doing so it devalues music-making, encourages petty and harmful enforcement by local authorities which in turn discourages local participation in this overwhelmingly beneficial activity.

Under the Act the mere provision of live music, even by one unamplified musician, may be a criminal offence for which the maximum penalty is a £20,000 fine and six months in prison. Even providing a piano in a bar for the public to play is a potential criminal offence - no-one need play a note. The Act favoured canned entertainment over live music: in 2005 all bars were granted automatic permission to have recorded music, which allows DJs, but the long-standing exemption for one or two live musicians was abolished. The Act kept an exemption for broadcast entertainment. This means anyone can provide MTV or Sky football broadcasts anywhere on giant screens without an authorisation under this legislation. But even putting on a small, private concert without a licence under the Act would be a criminal offence if money was being raised for good causes. Obtaining the 'necessary authorisation' may be an expensive and time-consuming process.

The Act applies to 'any place', which includes your home, garden, public streets and parks, although there are exemptions including places of public religious worship, military bases, royal palaces, and - bizarrely - moving vehicles.The government used to defend this absurd and unjust regime on the grounds that it was necessary to control public safety, noise, crime and disorder at live music events. But separate legislation addresses all these risks, and for most small-scale performances is perfectly adequate.

The government now appears to accept this argument in principle, and has promised a public consultation this spring on further exemptions for what they call 'low risk' events. But campaigning must continue if the government is to honour this promise, and amend the Act so that small, low risk gigs are exempt, and live music is accorded the respect it deserves'.

Is this absurd act actually being applied? The answer is yes, though different local authorities seem to be applying it in different ways. In St Albans, Hertfordshire, for instance the Council is taking a particularly draconian line:.

'If facilities for entertainment are provided a licence is required. Facilities for entertainment include dance floor, pub piano, karaoke machine and other musical instrument.'[St Albans Statement of Licensing Policy, revised 7th January 2008, p6, para 2.2.1]

Other councils seem to be allowing pianos without a licence as 'incidental music'.

I am glad to say that I have personally performed in, and indeed organised, a number of musical events without any kind of licence since this law came in. Let's all get out there and make some noise!

Saving London Venues: the Half Moon and the Foundry

Campaigns are currently being waged to save two iconic London venues.

The Half Moon in Putney (South West London) has been hosting live music regularly since 1963. Since that time it has seen performances by, among others, The Rolling Stones, U2, The Small Faces, Ralph McTell, Badly Drawn Boy, Richard Thompson, Kate Bush, Kasabian, The Wombats, Newton Faulkner and Mr Hudson. The current tenant has been ordered by the brewery (Youngs) to quit the pub by the end of January 2010 and there are fears that the venue could be turned into a gastro pub. Following a public campaign, Youngs are now saying they are sympathetic to music remaining in the pub but it seems that the new tenant could decide otherwise. See Save the Half Moon on Facebook for latest news.

The Foundry in Shoreditch is a relative newcomer and a different kind of venue. Not so much a music pub like the Half Moon , more of a bar with art/performance/music and various other parties and happenings. It has a squat bar ambience of the kind found in places like Berlin or Rome but rarely in London, although it is not actually squatted. Anyway it is facing demolition and replacement by a hotel - almost a text book case in the urban regeneration cycle whereby hipsters take over run down properties for low or no rent, make an area trendy, and then are displaced by corporate operators cashing in on the value they have added. The Save the Foundry campaign is urging people to comment on the planning application for the hotel - the deadline is 4th January.

Thimbleberry Festival Under Attack

Following the cancellation of this year's Big Green Gathering thanks to official pressure, another festival is under attack.

On Friday 11th December 2009 Andy Norman, host and organiser of Thimbleberry Music Festival in County Durham, UK appeared in court facing the charge that he "did permit the use of cannabis on his premises". The charge relates to alleged use by the festival-goers of cannabis at the last September festival. He has not entered a plea and is due back in court on the 5th February 2010 to face committal to Crown Court.

The charge is being brought under Section 8 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. An amendment to this Act passed by the Government in 2001 made it a criminal offence for people to knowingly allow premises they own, manage, or have responsibility for, to be used by any other person for the adminstration or use of any controlled drugs.

A conviction would doubtless be used as a pretext not to grant a licence for the festival next year, and would also set a very dubious precedent. People inhale at pretty much all festivals, so presumably the police could charge anybody organising or hosting a festival with this offence.

There is a facebook group in support of the festival.

Autumn Free Parties in England

'No arrests made as police shut down rave at rural site'
(Northampton Chronicle & Echo 13 October 2009)

'An illegal rave was shut down by police in Northamptonshire, who surrounded the encampment and trapped partygoers inside. A call was made to the force during the early hours of Sunday, following complaints about the rave near Horton. A spokeswoman for Northamptonshire Police said that when officers arrived they found "a large number" of revellers hosting the illegal party at a rural site in Yardley Chase. She added: "There were approximately 40 vehicles found on arrival. Officers sealed off all the entrants to the site and did not allow anyone to leave. Those who had already left and were attempting to return were denied entry. No arrests were made at the scene." The police helicopter was also called to the scene, shortly before 1.30am on Sunday'.

'Illegal rave in North Petherton'
(This is Somerset, 15 October 2009)

'An illegal rave in North Petherton was shut down by police within hours of starting on Saturday night. Swift action by the Avon and Somerset Constabulary ensured illegal ravers were stopped when reports were received of around 200 people blasting loud music in Kings Cliff Woods off Cliff Road at 11.30pm. Officers raced to the scene and found around 50 cars parked up. The North Gate entrance to the woods was open and the lock had been broken. The operation to close down the music and empty the site of the would-be revellers was completed by 2.30am without any problems. Safer Stronger Neighbourhoods beat manager PC Richard Tully said: "Our prompt action in tackling this illegal rave hopefully sends out a strong and powerful message to would-be organisers that we will not tolerate this kind of illegal activity and we will respond swiftly to concerns of local people.

'Up to 3,000 people took part in an illegal rave'
(Telegraph, 1 November 2009)

'Up to 3,000 people took part in an illegal rave in an old factory, according to Nadine Dorries, the Tory MP. The Mid Bedfordshire MP said the youths were playing loud music and taking ecstasy all night, while they had no access to water at the Wavendon Heath site in Bedfordshire.
"We have 3,000 kids taking ecstasy with no water and a kid could die any moment. They're still arriving in droves and there's no safety here at all, there are no toilets, there are no facilities for them", she said. "There's no safety here at all, there are no toilets, there are no facilities for them." She criticised the police for failing to act decisively.

The rave is believed to have started at about 3am on Sunday and was eventually stopped by police in the afternoon. Police later estimated that the number of ravers was between 200 and 450. A spokesman said: "We had some intelligence to suggest that a rave was planned in the vicinity of Milton Keynes/Woburn but information was too vague for us to act initially. At the point where we became aware of the location of the rave, at about 0200 GMT, it was under way with above 200 people present. Given the danger of trying to move people, some in an intoxicated state, near to a quarry in the dark and wet, it was decided it was safer not to attempt to move them but to monitor the situation." She added that there had only been three noise complaints up until 6 am'.

'Stark warning to rave organisers'
(Beccles and Bungay Journal, 30 October 2009)

'Norfolk and Suffolk police have issued a stark warning to anyone planning to organise an illegal rave in the county this weekend.There is a zero tolerance approach to such events, which are unsafe and disruptive to our local communities. They will be working closely with colleagues in Suffolk and will share information and provide additional police units to specifically target rave-goers or anyone suspected of involvement in the organisation of a rave across the two counties.

Chief superintendent Tony Cherington said: “I want to make it quite clear that we will use all necessary resources to prevent, disrupt and close down illegal raves in this county. We have issued this warning as we approach the Halloween weekend. “We will continue to take a hard line against them and seek to prosecute and seize and destroy the equipment of anyone found to be involved in their organisation. We will be putting on a significant police presence this weekend to achieve our aims.” Following the successful disruption of previous unlicensed music events, Norfolk Constabulary has again made arrangements with surrounding forces to share resources to disrupt or stop any such events.Last weekend, following a rave in the Feltwell area, over 150 vehicles were stopped and a number of arrests were made for vehicle offences and drink driving. A large quantity of sound equipment, amplifiers and music was also seized.Members of the public are also being urged to play their part and support police action by remaining vigilant over the coming days and by reporting any suspicious activity which may lead them to believe a rave is being organised...'

Rock Around the Cock (1978)

A feminist critique of rock written in the immediate post-punk period. It was published in London-based radical magazine The Leveller in October 1978.


'LINDSAY COOPER, ex Henry Cow, now in the Feminist Improvisation Group, looks at rock and sexuality:

The Sex Pistols didn't like Glen Matlock, their first bass player, because he put minor chords in his songs. Minor chords are pouffy they said. It's a crude way of putting it but then rock has never been subtle in its presentation of masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual. But no-one ever asked why the subtle, melodic changes of the minor chords should be reserved for gay men and, by implication, women

Rock has been always about sex. Jazz and blues were both originally various forms of sexual slangs. It wasn't till the sexually explicit words and beat of the blues got mixed up with puritanical country music that white music fans discovered there was more than just kissing and cuddling. It was rock 'n' roll.

Elvis's thrusting pelvis left little doubt about what he was expressing. This new explicitness brought with it a music of genuine teenage rebellion with a threat of sexual liberation which proved as potent and threatening as communism to 'straight' America. It shook up traditional sexual values, even if it didn't change them much. The sexuality of the music was very much part of the dancing that went with it.


Later, this cathartic and liberating element in dance would be lost, as sixties rock culture focused more on the superstar performer. Music and dance changed from being a substitute for sex; hip easy listening like the Eagles and Jackson Browne ­became a background accompaniment to sex.
But this concern with sexuality is not about sexual liberation. Rock remains a machismo cult, a rebellion of young men against old. Its sexual content reproduces and caricatures existing values.

Lyrics of every kind of rock music, from cock rock to teenybop, insult women and glorify dominant male sexuality:

Under my thumb, the girl who once had me down
Under my thumb, the girl who once pushed me around
It's down to me, the difference in the clothes she wears
It's down to me, the change has come, she's under my thumb
Ain't it the truth babe (Rolling Stones)

The notorious, male sexual posturing of cock rock with its pumping beat and arrogant style underpin an aggressive sexuality which often spills over into violence at concerts. You can't wipe out the memory of the brutal killing at Altamont or the uncheckable violence of Sham '69 fans
I'm not saying that women don't enjoy this type of music. For the screaming girl fans, the Rolling Stones were a lot more exciting than their fumbling boyfriends. Also the 'romance' of the hit singles may well have seemed more real than their own.

You don't have to say you love me, Just be close at hand
You don't have to stay forever I will understand
(Dusty Springfield)

It's no answer to say 'there have always been women performers'. For rock culture has always turned them into sexual objects (like Debbie Harry) or makes them , into Armatrading-type cults.

What they can do is limited. They can be singers but rarely instrumentalists; they're so good at conveying emotion but are limited musically. Their voices are invariably controlled by production techniques, geared to a market that is used to a manufactured femininity.

In a recent TV show Helen Reddy was told that she would have to have elastoplast over her nipples and shave her armpits. She refused. Panic ensued. The situation was saved by a compromise. She would wear elastoplast over her nipples but not shave her armpits.

Women performers like Dory Previn can sing about how they're pissed about by men, but never about understanding this oppression or changing it.

As elsewhere, rock shows women as idealised, unreal male-fantasy people; the all-understanding women, the dependable women, the women who won't come up with the sexual goods and so on. The range of images for women performers, accepted by the public and the music biz, is very small.

Men are allowed to be sexually ambiguous like Bowie and Jagger or downright unmasculine like Tom Robinson and Elvis Costello. But female sexual ambiguity is short on popular appeal. Only Patti Smith (and she's a poet) can get away with it. An image which challenges female stereotypes is even harder to pull off. Would we have had Poly Styrene and Siouxsie (of the Banshees) without the ­general challenge of punk?

But you can't just talk about rock's sexism in performances and record lyrics. It comes from a profit-making industry "selling people what they want", which is not in business to challenge its own existence. It can be forced to make concessions like Tom Robinson's Glad To Be Gay and Right On Sister but this is a drop in the ocean alongside the unending volumes of heterosexist records streaming off the presses.

Chris Brazier of the Melody Maker can criticise The Stranglers for their sexist attitudes but he fights hopelessly against the endless 'tit 'n' bum' ads for records and sexist articles by other writers.

So if rock is virtually about male sexuality how can it be changed? No real breakdown of rock machismo is going to happen until more women are playing music and women who work in rock aren't automatically slotted into being just 'sexy chicks'.

One optimistic sign is that over the last two years music has started to have a far greater political impact and context than it's ever had. Although experience has taught women that a rise in leftist consciousness can still exclude any awareness of sexism.

At a Rock Against Racism gig, the Fabulous Poodles started to play a song about schoolgirls. Several women objected. The band became abusive. An exchange of sharp letters ensued in RAR's mag, Temporary Hoarding. The women accusing RAR of not taking sexism as seriously as racism, when in effect there was no difference between the two. The organisers replied that the band would never have learnt how women felt if they hadn't mounted the gig and how difficult it was to ensure politically 'sound' bands.

In Europe the reaction against anglo-american cultural imperialism has produced a lot of political rock music, most of it being made independently of the music industry. The number of women musicians involved can be counted on the strings of one guitar, and the audiences are predominantly male, but the collective, unmacho approach of most of the European political groups is making more than cosmetic changes in the music and its performance.

In Sweden there is a well established political music movement which is utterly male dominated, but also an autonomous women's culture including several rock bands.

What is it, I'll rape it
(the Who)

In Italy, where mass political consciousness is high and where the left-wing parties are actively involved in putting on rock concerts, the whole context of rock performance is obviously very different. The Stormy Six, probably the most interesting of the Italian political/independent groups do at least sing about sexual politics: "This is not a political song"' they say with endearing irony, "because it's about sexual politics" and launch into a bitter rock parody using preposterous macho gestures and lyrics about monogamous romantic love.

In France the growth of an indigenous rock culture has been less consciously political and Magma, the group who virtually singlehandedly started it, presented a quasi-mystical concept of masculinity with their superman philosophy (more serious by far than the Bowie of Oh You Pretty Things) and authoritarian stage presence. Their influence is waning, but can still be felt in the Belgian Univers Zero, who see being an all-male group as a problem, but whose stern, tormented-male image is unlikely to attract many women musicians.

You'd better watch out baby
Here comes your master
(Jimi Hendrix)

But it is in women's bands that the problem of sexism and constructions of sexuality in performance are being specifically tackled. For women musicians, the choice to work in all female bands comes as much from the positive effect of working with other women as from the problems of working in mixed bands, either inside or outside of commercial music (even if you can get work you're likely to be just a token woman/sex object or -­only marginally better - token feminist).

Every woman should be
What her man wants her to be
(Marvin Gaye)

Women's bands are not negatively separatist (that's much truer of men's bands) or a refuge for the incompetent (women's music is developing fast considering that most of the performers have for obvious reasons had relatively little experience), but a way of getting away from performance being equated with sexual performance as defined by men, and of exploring different relationships between performers and between performers and audience.

The importance of a women's musical culture developing independently from the music business, however, shouldn't undermine what women are doing in commercial music and in mixed political/independent groups -the main thing is that we are now actively redefining sexuality in rock instead of hoping that the few enlightened stars would do it for us'.

Michael English (1941-2009)

Obituary of Michael English, graphic artist, who died last month. English was one half of Hapshash and The Coloured Coat, along with Nigel Weymouth. They designed some of the iconic images of 1960s UK psychedelia, including these posters for The Soft Machine, the 1967 Liverpool Love Festival and the UFO Club in London, not to mention an early ecological plea 'Save Earth Now'.

Rave magazine, 1960s: for the 'zonked-out, switched on people'

Paul Jones on the cover, 1967 + 'Fantastic Rave Offer: Boyfriends by Computer' (years ahead of its time) + 'Dolly clothes for dolly birds'

Rave was an English pop magazine started in 1964. As Jon Savage describes in a recent Observer article on '60s pop zines, Rave 'was five times as expensive as the weekly music papers, but in return you got an 80-page or so A4-size monthly, with excellent quality paper, meaty content and great photographs - by Jean Marie Perier, Terry O'Neill, Marc Sharratt and others... Rave went further and deeper with articles about Stuart Sutcliffe, the lost Beatle, a fashion round table with John Stephen and the Pretty Things, and notices about up-and-coming groups such as the Yardbirds. Photo shoots were set in (for then) unusual locations, like Portobello Road or Covent Garden, and stars including Jeff Beck were used to model gear such as PVC overcoats. Like Fabulous, Rave prominently featured young women writers. Cathy McGowan was a regular, along with Maureen O'Grady and Dawn James. However, if the ads for guitars were anything to go by, Rave also appealed to young men. Balancing teen pop with groups like the Yardbirds, the Byrds and the Who, it acquired a circulation of 125,000 by 1966'.

Peter Frampton, 1968

Monkees

Yardbirds, 1966

Jimi Hendryx, July 1967

'Rave - read by over 1 million way-in, zonked-out, switched on people' (July 1967)

There was also a 1950s US magazine with the same title.

[updated 2024 with July 1967 images=

Police Assault in Essex

Three Essex cops have been put on restricted duty while an internal inquiry is undertaken into a police assault in Brentwood, Essex last week. Video footage shows police spraying CS gas at close range in the face of a man who was already restrained and pushing women who complained on to the ground. The incident happened on Sunday September 13th near the Sugar Hut nightclub, where a big party featuring singer Pixie Lott had been cancelled due to a fire.

Archived Music Press

Archived Music Press is a blog consisting of scanned articles from the New Musical Express and Melody Maker, from 1987-1996. As you might expect, it is an indie treasure trove, but also has some interesting articles on the dance music scenes that these papers largely overlooked in their enthusiasm for every passing guitar band trend.

For instance there's this great 1996 Simon Reynolds review of Tribal Gathering at Luton Hoo, in which he surveys the myriad scenes that emerged after 'rave's Ecstasy-sponsored unity inevitably re-fractured along class, race and regional lines. The borders and divisions that rave once magically dissolved reasserted themselves. The result: a sort of balkanisation of dance culture'.

The article also features a scathing critique of the then-dominant (at least in NME and Melody Maker) Britpop sound:

'Britpop is an evasion of the multiracial, technology-mediated nature of UK pop culture in the Nineties... the symbolic erasure of Black Britiain, as manifested in jungle and trip hop...Perhaps even more than race, it's covert class struggle that underpins Britpop's anti-rave subtext: the fetishising by mostly middle-class bands of an outmoded stereotype of working class-ness, is really a means of evading the real nature of modern prole leisure. This remains overwhelmingly shaped by Ecstasy culture and the music it spawned - a still unfolding era of psychedelia based around the drugs/technology interface'.

Border Controls

The new restrictions on musicians and artists entering the UK (discussed in an earlier post) are having a predictably lamentable effect. Henry Porter has publicised a couple of recent examples - the banning of Moroccan poets Hassan Najmi and Ouidad (Widad) Benmoussa and Indonesian poet Dorothea Rosa Herliany from a poetry festival; and the treatment of Canadian singer Allison Crowe who was detained at Gatwick for 11 hours, questioned, fingerprinted and then deported because she did not have a Certificate of Sponsorship when she arrived with her band in May.

There are lots more examples in the Manifesto Club report UK Arts and Culture: Cancelled, by Order of the Home Office.