Showing posts with label Manchester. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manchester. Show all posts

Thursday, March 13, 2025

1976/77 Rock Against Racism gigs

Some Rock Against Racism gigs and related events from 1976 and 1977




Carol Grimes and the London Boogie Band, Matumbi and Limosine at Royal College of Arts in London; RAR disco in Walsall (Socialist Worker, 11 December 1976)


Plummit Airlines at Hatfield Poly; Special Brew and The Derelicts at Queen Mary College, Mile End; Tom Robinson Band at North London Poly (SW 29 January 1977)


RAR May Day gig a the Roundhouse in London with Aswad, Generation X, Carol Grimes and more (Socialist Worker, 30 April 1977) 

Manchester and Ealing RAR gigs, the later with Misty plus a Hackney anti-racist festival (Socialist Worker 15 October 1977)


Black Slate & Wire in Stoke Newington, Steel Pulse in New Cross + Manchester and Birmingham (SW 22 October 1977)

Hackney Town Hall  - Generation X and Cimarons (SW 13 August 1977)
  
Crew RAR with Any Trouble (SW 13 August 1977)

Brighton (including Piranhas), Maidstone, Bangor (SW 1 Nov 1977)

Bury Rock Against Racism with the Nosebleeds (SW 1 October 1977)

Newcastle and Darlington Rock Against Racism gigs (SW 1 Oct 77)

A tour of England with Bill Hampton, brother of murdered Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton, hosted by Flame (source: SW 1 Nov 1977). The latter started off a black paper linked to SWP but most ended up going their own way (see this interesting piece). The tour included a couple of socials with Silver Camel Sound System, who were linked to central London reggae record shop Daddy Kool, and Matumbi (including Denis Bovell).

Found while browsing through old copies of Socialist Worker:

see previously:

 

Tuesday, November 02, 2021

'Freedom of Movement': Anti Fascist Action on the dancefloor 1993

One way or another music was at the heart of the movement against racism and the far right in the UK in the early 1990s. Some of the heaviest confrontations, notably the fighting at Waterloo station in 1992, arose out of mobilisations against planned gigs by bands in the neo-nazi 'Blood and Honour' music scene. Meanwhile Anti Fascist Action (AFA), the most militant of the opposing groups, had its own Cable Street Beat musical arm and put on gigs and festivals.

A rare explicit intervention into dance music was 'Freedom of Movement', launched in 1993 by Manchester AFA and sympathetic DJs associated with Manchester clubs.

The aim was 'to raise awareness of fascism and encourage people at least to identify with the anti-fascist cause and get active'. The title 'arose out of the idea that the largely unpolitical dance club scene is one where black and white, and gay and straight people mix and enjoy themselves together... Under the divisive hate politics of fascism, such a vibrant and multiracial scene could not exist'.

Freedom of Movement put on a number of benefit club nights, including at Home in Manchester and the Venue, Edinburgh in December 1993, with sets from Justin Robertson, Norman Jay, Luvdup and, Flesh DJs.

Report on Freedom of Movement from Fighting Talk (Anti Fascist Action), no.7, 1994



A write up of Freedom of Movement in i-D magazine, December 1993


Norman Jay in anti-fascist t-shirt

Friday, September 28, 2012

Someday all the Adults will Die!: Punk Graphics 1971-84

'Some day all the adults will die!: punk graphics 1971-1984' is a free exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London, on until 4th November 2012.

I wonder sometimes whether anything else useful can be said about punk, feels like we have been reliving that moment endlessly for the last 30 years. Ageing collapses time in unexpected ways. At school in the late 1970s and reading about May 1968 it felt as remote to me as the First World War. Now the late 1970s feel not so far away, even if the equivalent of this exhibition in 1977 would have been a show about early 1940s style. So an exhibition like this is essentially a kind of nostalgia for some ('ooh I've got that original 7 inch of Scritti Politti's Hegemony') and ancient history for others.  

The exihibition, curated by Jon Savage and Johan Kugelberg, is less a coherent take on graphics and more a very good collection of memoribilia - zines, flyers and record sleeves. But in subtle ways it does undermine some simplistic versions of the punk story.


After Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, everyone knows about the parallels between Situationist attitude/style (if not always politics) and some strands of punk, but the exhibition shows this directly with some material from that milieu such as a King Mob poster from the late 1960s:


Likewise, and contrary to the notion of punk as a straightforward negation of the preceding period, the influence of the pre-punk UK counter culture (Oz magazine etc.) is acknowledged: 'design forerunners included the proto-pop mail art movement, counter-culture protest graphics and the underground press of the 1960s'.

The exhibition gives space to the American punk scene, with its parallel but distinct aesthetic. Who knew that Wayne County's backing band in 1976 was the Back Street Boys? Surely more interesting than the later outfit with the same name.


It recognises that punk in the UK was about much more than The Clash and The Sex Pistols, and gives due recognition to anarcho-punk - including Crass's graffiti stencils:


There are some interesting radical perspectives on music, including a remarkable flyer given out when The Rolling Stones played at the Hollywood Bowl in 1966 that hallucinates the band's music as some kind of radical rallying cry: 'Greetings and welcome Rolling Stones, our comrades in the desperate battle against the maniacs who hold power. The revolutionary youth of the world hears your music and is inspired to ever more deadly acts... We will play your music in rock'n'roll marching bands as we tear down the jails and free the prisoners'.


Less optimistic/tongue in cheek is an earnest critique of The Clash, put out by Art in Revolution in Holland in  the late 1970s: ''London's buying your crap... this is what is left of the '77 punx, a bunch of junkies and a bunch of drunks'


The zines on display are frustrating as they are behind plastic so you can only look at the covers when really you want to flick through them. The record sleeves are evocative, but you really want to listen to the music (though some of this is being played in the exhibition). The flyers and posters though don't hold anything back, or nothing that can be accessed now. They simply record a series of singular moments in history:. 

Manchester 1977: 'Punk rock rules!' at The Squat with The Drones, Warsaw (later Joy Division) and others - interesting discussion about this poster here

Los Angeles 1979: The Last and The Go-Go at Gazzarri's on Sunset Strip

Crass at Acklam Hall, Portobello Road, September 1979

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The Face Club Listings, March 1989


From The Face, March 1989, an overview of (mainly) London clubland - 'Clubland is coming to life again after the traditional Jan/Feb slump, with over 20 new one-nighters opening in the capital alone'.  Nights featured include: - 

- 'Beautiful Contradictions' - 'a collaboration between dancer Michael Clark, comedian Keith Allen and long-standing club-runner Phil Dirtbox' taking place at Wall St, 14 Bruton Place, W1.

- 'High on Hope' and 'Talking Loud, Saying Something' at Dingwalls, Camden Lock. 

- 'MFI' - garage night at Legends in New Burlington Street, W1. 

- 'Confusion' at Bill Stickers, Greek Street, W1 - 'Sunday night rave for hardcore clubbers'. 

- 'Bangs' at Busbys, 157 Charing Cross Road, WC1 'gay mixed (but mainly male) crowd dancing to an almost Taboo-like mix of pop trash, new imports and disco classics' 

Places outside of London include:  

- 'Abraham Moss All-Nighter' at Abraham Moss Community Centre, Cheatham Hill, Manchester ('bi-monthly rare soul rave'). 

- 'Club Voodoo' at McGonagles, South Anne Street, Dublin. 

- Laurent Garnier's 'Locomotion' in Rue Pigalle, Paris.

 At this point, house music hadn't become the dominant sound in London clubs that it was shortly to become - it was still just one of the flavours. The Dancefloor tracklist from Daddy Gee (Massive Attack) includes Soul II Soul and the Jungle Brothers, among others.


Sunday, March 25, 2012

Dancing Questionnaire (25): Mark, New York

Mark is 38 years old and works as an Advertising Executive in New York, following an odyssey from Tamworth and London via Sheffield.

Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

I think the very earliest was bopping around to Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ with my grandma at a family wedding reception near Walsall, but the one that really stands out is headbanging to AC/DC’s ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’ at a primary school disco in Tamworth, Staffs, where I grew up. I’d seen some older kids doing it at the previous year’s event - my first taste of youth rebellion aged 8! I remembered the names of the bands on the patches sewed onto their sleeveless denim jackets and over the next twelve months become an entry-level rocker, renting albums from the local record library and getting my own cut-off denim with patches and studs. Then eventually it was me and my mates’ turn to headbang at the disco when the token metal record was played. The DJ cut it off before the end as the teachers were concerned about potential brain damage.

What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while dancing?

Building a deeper relationship with music. I’ve devoted much of my life to music in all its forms and through dancing I enjoy exploring its qualities more deeply, amongst the thrills and spills. I remember dancing in Manchester in 1996 in the Village to ‘The Love I Lost’ by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes and suddenly realizing that the dance music I enjoyed most had a particular combination of uplifting-ness and melancholy which then set the course ahead for many years.



You. Dancing. The Best of times...

New York 2007-2010. People say dancing in New York’s not what it was. Sure, over-zealous regulation has harmed the vibrancy and scale of the club scene but this has been replaced by an amazing DIY attitude for the past decade or so. This manifests in all-night semi-legal dance parties in lofts and warehouses mainly in Brooklyn often featuring an eclectic mix of music, DJs, performance and participation. There’s a real sense of excitement for me around something genuinely underground, unpredictable, community based and musically eclectic which has totally revitalized my love of dancing. It’s as if dance music has resumed its role in the city as outsiders’ music, which is how I’ve always most enjoyed it.

You. Dancing. The Worst of times...

When I first moved to London in the late 90s I found it hard to find a scene that satisfied me. DnB was too hard and fast, House had got too cheesy, Big Beat was too beery and everything was too segmented and focused on one style of music. Maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough though at the time.

Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?

I started dancing regularly in 1987 at an under 18s discos in Tamworth at a club called the Embassy. It wasn’t really my scene though and things didn’t really take off until I discovered ‘indie’ music via John Peel and then started to make regular trips to Birmingham to indie disco nights and 60s psychedelic nights like the Sensateria at the Institute, as well as the odd hardcore rave. University in Sheffield in 1992 meant a headlong rush into house, techno, garage and funk with the poly-sexual scene around Vague [Leeds], Flesh [Manchester] and Sheffield’s Trash providing a little spice around the slightly-cheesy uniformity of the post-acid house scene up north at the time.


A move to London in the late 90s meant a hotch-potch of east-London fare – reggae, DnB, ragga, hip hop, a bit of house and the electroclash scene around Nag Nag Nag. Carnival weekend was always the highlight of the year, and I had a brief involvement with a north London pirate station. But gradually dancing died away. In 2005 the move to New York reignited it all again.

When and where did you last dance?

To a Robert Owens DJ set at Dalston Superstore, London last November.

You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make you leap up for one final dance?

‘I Want Your Love’ by Chic. The perfect combination of yearning, hope and melancholy that characterizes much of my favorite music to dance to.

All questionnaires welcome, just answer the same questions - or even make up a few of your own - and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires).

Monday, January 30, 2012

Remembering Bloody Sunday 1972

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

John (Jackie) Duddy (aged 17)
Patrick Joseph Doherty (31)
Bernard McGuigan (41)
Hugh Pious Gilmour (17)
Kevin McElhinney (17)
Michael Gerald Kelly (17)
John Pius Young (17)
William Noel Nash (19)
Michael M. McDaid (20)
James Joseph Wray (22)
Gerald Donaghy (17)
Gerald (James) McKinney (34)
William Anthony McKinney (27)
John Johnston (59)



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

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

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

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


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

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

Bloody Sunday in Leicester 1985

The first Bloody Sunday event I took part was in Leicester in 1985, called by the Leicester Bloody Sunday Mobilising Committee. The plan was to hold a march in the city, finishing at Leicester Prison to 'offer solidarity to the Irish political prisoners held in Leicestershire' as well as remembering Noel Jenkinson, an Irish prisoner who had died in Leicester prison in 1976. Following threats of far right counter demonstrations all marches in the city were banned that weekend.

On the day before there were fears of an attack by the British National Party on Blackthorn Books, a radical workers co-op in Leicester. I remember hanging out at the Bread & Roses cafe in the bookshop's basement in case they turned up. On Sunday 3rd February 1985 the Bloody Sunday march was replaced by an indoor rally at Highfields Workshop, after which people made their way to Leicester Prison where around 500 of us staged a picket. A small BNP anti-IRA protest at the prison with around 20 people had left shortly before we arrived. Another far right group, the National Front, marched in nearby Market Harborough on the day. All of this was going on in the middle of the miners' strike, with the Leicester Mercury reporting that at the Bloody Sunday rally 'Several speakers alleged that tactics used by the security forces in Northern Ireland were being used in this country against striking miners'.




As reported in Red Action (April 1985), fascists attacked a bus on its way to the demo at Watford Gap service station.

Red Action, April 1985

1990s Bloody Sunday Marches in London

Most of the Bloody Sunday marches in England in the 1990s took place in London, and I went on these. They typically attracted between two and five thousand people and started or finished in a north London area with a high Irish population like Kilburn or Archway.

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

Report of 1991 demonstration - Troops Out, March 1991


As in Leicester in 1985, a feature of the Bloody Sunday marches was that the far right (BNP etc.) often mobilised to oppose them, so that in the pubs and streets surrounding the demonstrations there would be skirmishes between anti-fascists and racists. In 1990 for instance, three Anti Fascist Action (AFA) members were jailed after notorious Nazi skinhead Nicky Crane was dragged out of a taxi in Kilburn in the vicinity of the Bloody Sunday march.  The biggest trouble was on the Bloody Sunday march in 1993, when hundreds of fascists attempted to attack the march at the assembly point in Hyde Park and then again along Edgware Road. 376 fascists were arrested before the march made it to Kilburn where the speakers included Gerry Duddy, whose brother Jack was killed in 1972. 

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

Report of the 1993 Bloody Sunday March in London 
(written at the time by European Counter Network, London)

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

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

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

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

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

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


1994 demo leaflet



The 1994 London Bloody Sunday demonstration


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


1998 London demo flyer

1998 demo in London


Martin McGuinness speaks in London on 1998 Bloody Sunday demo

Bloody Sunday March in Manchester 1995

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



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



Derry 1992: the twentieth anniversary 

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

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

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

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

Relatives lead the 1992 Derry march

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

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

Sunday Bloody Sunday

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

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



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

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



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

[last updated 6 October 2025 with section on 1985 Leicester events]