Deptford Urban Free Festival 1995, held in Fordham Park SE14 ('Anti CJA=Freedom') |
Friday, March 08, 2024
Institute of Goa 1995 (plus Trends/Trenz in Stoke Newington)
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
My London musical/radical soundscape 2023
Reading other people's end of year lists is like listening to people talking about their dreams - occasionally interesting but mostly very much not. So this round up of musicking and political activity from (mostly) London 2023 is really for my own benefit and to document a few things which might otherwise vanish from the historical record or at least my memory.
Best gig of the year for me was Kneecap at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, a giant mosh pit in a sold out gig for Belfast Irish language rappers. Just up the road at the Roundhouse in December, Lankum were also excellent. Irish hegemony in my music tastes for the first time since the 1990s. Love the Roundhouse (also saw Big Moon there in May and a couple of years ago Laura Marling), not so keen on the cavernous Ally Pally where I saw Sleaford Mods with John Grant, but a good gig.
On a jazzier tip, loved Ezra Collective at Hammersmith Apollo in February, and Laura Misch's mellow cloud bath performance at the Peckham Old Waiting Room. Nearby at the Ivy House pub SE15, The Goose is Out continued to curate some excellent folk nights including Martin Carthy and Stick in the Wheel. They also put on a monthly singaround session where people take it in turns to stand and sing one song at a time; I sang there earlier in the year and also at Archie Shuttler's Open Mic at the Old Nun's Head. Strummed the banjo and mandolin a bit.
In terms of my own music making the highlight was taking part in the Wavelength Orchestra event on the beach in Gravesend in June, an improvisational performance where assorted musicians sustained notes based on the duration of waves (although it was low tide and they were more like ripples). I took along my old Wasp synth, my dad's bagpipe chanter and my grandad's harmonica to add to the mix.
Went out for my birthday to a Mungo's Hi Fi night at the Fox & Firkin in Lewisham, checked out my local Planet Wax record shop and bar in New Cross. Enjoyed giving a Peckham anti fascist history walk for around 30 people in October, and chatting about my own history on Controlled Weirdness' 'Tales from a disappearing city' podcast.
I always appreciate the unexpected random encounters with music in the city, like coming across an Italian hip hop collective (Hip Hopera Foundation) performing in Beckenham Place Park or bumping into morris dancers by my local pub. Loved dodging the rising tide on the Thames shore for a dark 'Noise TAZ' in the summer.
Politically I am not a super activist at the moment but do try and get myself out there in times of emergency - and with climate change, war, anti-migrant racism and transphobic 'culture wars' it feels like that is most of the time at present. Or as Benjamin put it, 'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule'.
The year started with ongoing strikes from NHS, rail workers and teachers, I popped down to various picket lines and protests. It has been hard to keep track of the endless state onslaught against refugees, including the 'Illegal Migration Act' which criminalised seeking asylum. Protest too becoming increasingly criminalised with climate emergency activists being locked up for months or even years just for walking in the road or doing a banner drop. My most sustained activity was turning up regularly to defend a drag event at the Honor Oak pub in South London from far right opposition (which I wrote about at Datacide). I got increasingly fed up with anti-trans nonsense from fellow old lefties and said so. The end of the year dominated by the massacre of October 7th and the seemingly never ending massacre in Gaza ever since - highlighted by both Kneecap and Lankum at their gigs.
Perhaps it remains true, as Frederic Jameson said, that 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism', but the neo-liberal capitalist utopia of a world united and pacified by globalised markets has vanished too. It is not hard to imagine a kind of end of capitalism as we know it, at least as a global system, replaced by endless ethno-nationalist violence and conflict for shrinking resources like water and arable land. Harder sometimes to hold onto a politics of hope for a better world, but what is the alternative?
'South London Loves Trans People' - at the Honor Oak pub in May |
Stop the Migration Bill protest at Westminster with speakers on Fire Brigades Union fire engine (13 March 2023) |
Refugee solidarity on London anti-racist demo, 18 March 2023 |
Gaza ceasefire demo blockades Carnaby Street, 23 December 2023 |
Anyway here's a slice of London's musical/radical soundscape as experienced by me in 2023:
1. Striking Lewisham teachers, January 2023.
2. Ezra Collective perform Space is the Place, Hammersmith Apollo, February 2023.
3./4./5. Extinction Rebellion demo in London, April 22 2023.
7. Wavelength Orchestra in Gravesend (OK not actually London) on beach next to St Andrews Art Centre, June 2023
8./9. Dancing in the streets in Honor Oak, defending drag event from far right opposition, 24 June 2023
10. Stick in the Wheel at at Goose is Out folk club at the Ivy House SE15, June 2023
11. Torquon on Thames Beach, Noise TAZ, 19 August 2023
12. Khabat Abas, Thames Beach Noise TAZ, 19 August 2023 (Kurdish experimental cellist)
13 Leslie, Hilly fields, September 2023 (pop up electronic performance in the park)
14. Blanc Sceol, Deptford Creekside Discovery Centre, September 2023 (acid sounds on self made acoustic instruments as part of 'Thorness and Green Man' autumn equinox performance with artist Victoria Rance)
15 Cyka Psyko - Sardinian rapper with Hip Hopera Foundation, Beckenham Place Park, 24 September 2023
16. Laura Misch in Peckham 21 October 2023
17. Palestine demo, Battersea, 11 November 2023
18. Kneecap, Electric Ballroom, 29 November 2023
19. Sleaford Mods cover West End Girls at Ally Pally 2 December 3034
20. Lankum singing The Pogues' Old Main Drag to remember Shane MacGowan at the Roundhouse, 13 December 2023.
21. Palestine demo, Carnaby Street, 23 December 2023
Sunday, December 24, 2023
'Do not play acid' - London club listings October 1988
Thursday, September 07, 2023
Stop the City, London, September 1984
Guardian: 'Police swamp City's 2,000 anarchists' |
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
Prolekult - Marx, Debord, Crass and more...
Bertolt Brecht |
Che Guevera |
Lenin |
Andreas Baader of the Red Army Fraction |
Wasn't sure of who this was - but reliably informed on twitter that its Russian revolutionary artists Mayakovsky, Malyutin and Cheremnykh in 1919 |
'No Justice, No Peace, Resist the CJB' (Criminal Justice Bill) - image from 1990 Poll Tax Riot |
Rosa Luxemburg |
Leon Trotksy |
Helen Steele and Dave Morris - the much spied upon McLibel Two |
Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party |
'Welcome to the future: let me breathe' |
Malcolm X |
Mexico Olympics 1968 |
Stephen Lawrence |
Harvey Milk |
Aung San Suu Kyi |
The Clash
|
'Chairman Gonzalo' of the Shining Path in prison in Peru |
Guy Debord - Down with the Society of the Spectacle |
Tony Blair and John Major - Zero Difference |
Paris 1968 |
Anarchist clash with police in Barcelona, before or during the Spanish Revolution (thanks to @semicoda for spotting) |
Situationist Rene Riesel - confirmed by @andrew_wilson_a on twitter |
Keith Narey, Bradford Socialist - featured on 1997 release Vuture Shoque by Logique (Kult 23). I had some difficulty identifying him, but @casperpottle on twitter recognised the photo from his local pub, The Brewery Tap in Bradford. He seems to have been a larger than life figure well known in the Campaign for Real Ale as well as Militant who sadly died celebrating Labour's victory in the 1997 general election. |
Prolekult was a sub label of Hooj Choons founded by Alex Simons and Red Jerry (Jeremy Dickens) in 1990. They put out a lot of big house tunes, notably Felix's "Don't You Want Me" (1992) co-produced by Red Jerry and Rollo. The thinking behind the Prolekult label, and the labels, is set out in the booklet accompanying the 1997 Prolekulture compilation:
Sourmash's Pilgrimage To Paradise was a good tune to kick it all off with, emanating as it did from the UK, but packing the punch of a Beltram / F. De Wulf / Orlando Voorn record. Getting off to a start like that, we'd hoped to overcome our sense of musical Europhilia and carry on signing banging home-grown material, but it wasn't to be. Of the twelve tracks included here [on the CD], three quarters were licensed from European labels, reflecting the failure on our part to consistently find the kind of material we were after here in the UK. We're not sure what that says about us, or the UK, or both ...or neither, but we like the vibe surrounding the very up-for-it free party scene that's developed over the past few years and the producers that are now emerging from this sector of the underground are kicking arse. Proper UK acid business.
When it came to adopting a name, logo, etc, for the label, as unreconstructed lefties, we turned to socialist political history for inspiration. "Prolekult" is an adaptation of the Russian word "Proletkult" which was a workers cultural organisation set up in 1907 by the socialist exiles Alexander Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky. The theory went, in simple terms, that at a time when Russia's Tsarist dynasty was at the weakest and most vicious stage in its squalid history, the Bolshevik party was to lead the political opposition, the unions to lead the economic opposition and the Proletkult the cultural opposition. Perhaps the best known work to come out of the Proletkult was the post-revolutionary films of Eisenstein (Strike, Battleship Potemkin), but within a year of his rise to power in 1921 Stalin had effectively stripped the Proletkult of any autonomy, vibrancy or relevance, turning it, as he did all other genuine bases of working class expression, into just another instrument of state power.
Obviously, none of this has much direct relevance to the records we put out as the lack of vocals involved makes overt political statement difficult ("you gotta have house" repeated a few times on Neurodancers' Wippenburg [sic] - the only vocal on the twelve tracks - isn't exactly "Blowing in the Wind" is it?) but it made a change from the cod-futurism to be found on the sleeves and logos of so many techno/trance labels and, in terms of lefty icons over the last two hundred years, we knew we had an extensive reserve of imagery to draw upon. There was also the quiet hope on our part that by using pictures of long-forgotten working class heroes we'd be making our own tiny contribution to the rehabilitation of these political giants who have effectively been written out of our history. We thought that even if the odd person here and there asked "who's that?" then the labels and imagery would have transcended their original role as mere packaging and taken on a higher role as potential consciousness-raisers (man). Unfortunately it soon became apparent that no one gave a toss about which old trot we wheeled out next and after three years and seventeen releases I can safely say that we could put Donald Duck on our next release and no one would bat an eyelid...
(if you search prolekult you can listen to all this on soundcloud, spotify and all the usual places)