I went to see Luton punk band UK Decay at a rare hometown gig at the Luton Hat Factory arts centre last Saturday (8/11/2025). As expected a peak of their set was their 1980 song 'For my country' with its chorus 'for the honour, I don't ask why, it's my pleasure, my honour to die, for my country.'
The song riffs on Wilfred Owen's First World War poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est' which contrasts the reality of soldiers 'guttering, choking, drowning' in a gas attack with 'The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' ('It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country').
The poetry of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other First World War poets had a big impact on the first punk generation. Penny Rimbaud of Crass has credited Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), which set Owen's poems to music, as a key influence on his pacifism. But I think most of us probably encountered these poems in school and/or through Brian Gardner's anthology 'Up The Line To Death: The War Poets 1914–1918', first published in 1964 and reissued in a 1976 paperback edition. A lot of punk anti-war sentiments were expressed through an imagery from this time, and UK Decay's song is a good example from its lyrics to its sleeve.
This was largely an anti-heroic poetry, grounded in the lived experience of the First World War trenches and sceptical of the glories expounded by armchair generals and propagandists. How different from today when once again militarism is simply equated with heroism and few in the public eye are brave enough to question the uncritical celebration of the armed forces (see for instance the hounding of any TV presenter who doesn't wear a poppy in November). I have no doubt there have been soldiers who have performed heroic deeds - which I would define as going beyond the expected boundaries of your role and putting yourself at risk in order to save other people's lives. But nobody gets to be a hero just by virtue of their job title, and I certainly wouldn't classify shooting unarmed demonstrators in Derry in 1972 as heroic, or more recently executing unarmed captives in Afghanistan or sexually abusing women in Kenya. If it is an 'old lie' that dying for your country is an honour, it is even more of a lie that killing for your country is honorable too.
[the gig was great by the way, sometimes seeing a band many years after their heyday can be a bit sad, but in this case it felt like UK Decay managed to reconjure up a community with lots of people coming from different places to catch up with each other and perhaps with their younger, maybe more hopeful selves. I saw many people I haven't seen in the flesh for years including people from most of the Luton bands of that punk and post-punk/proto-goth period (let's say 1978-85) including Pneu Mania, Dominant Patri, Karma Sutra, Passchendale (another WW1 reference), Party Girls, Rattlesnakes etc. not to mention the legendary Switch Club]
Luton Henge Festival last month (29 July 2025) marked the opening of Luton Henge, a landscaped space featuring a circle of eight chalk stones that will serve as an outdoor venue for social and cultural events. The festival included music and dance, with Laura Misch playing her saxophone in the sunset. While I was there Bird Rave were doing their thing, dancing in feathered headdresses to classic rave tunes like 'Voodoo Ray' in bird inspired moves that they call 'dancefloor ornithology'. Anyway it was great fun.
Capoeira display
The location by Marsh House at the Leagrave end of town is significant, located as it is near to the source of the River Lea and the ancient earthwork of Waulud's Bank. It is also a place linked to Luton's subcultural history. The green barn just about still stands where Crass, Poison Girls and Luton punk band UK Decay played in 1979, and where people also put on jazz funk dances in that period (as recalled by Fahim Qureshi, see below).
I missed Crass, but it was here around the same time that I saw my first punk gig. From 1977 to at least 1984 there was an annual late summer one day Marsh House Festival. 16 year old me cycled over in 1979 and saw UK Decay and Pneu Mania, as well as 'Stevie's band', a scratch band made up of members of both bands who did a version of YMCA. Also on the bill were local rock band Toad the Wet Sprocket, Arcadaz (jazz/funk band), and acoustic singers Clive Pig and Heinrich Steiner.
'About 1500 people were entertained at the peak of the six hour concert which featured six local bands, solo singers and the White Dwarf Disco' all 'on a stage provided by Vauxhall Motors' (Luton News, 30 August 1979)
'yes, finally in the whole of desolate/boring Luton, people have finally done something positive'.
A review of the 1979 Marsh House UK Decay/Pneu Mania gig from Stevenage based fanzine 'Cobalt Hate' no.1)
I know I was there in 1983 with The Pits, Click Click (post punk electronica) and Passchendale, kind of Houghton Regis Killing Joke. In the following year my friends Luton anarcho-punk band Karma Sutra played along with their St Albans counterpart Black Mass, Harlow punk leftists the Newtown Neurotics, Snatch and Nick the Poet. It poured with rain towards the end and loads of us got up on the stage for shelter and joined in singing with Attila the Stockbroker.
1984 Marsh House Festival flyer
Marsh House was originally a farm house for Marsh Farm - the land on which the Marsh Farm council estate was built in the 1960s. In the 1990s, Luton free party collective Exodus started off on this estate and Glenn Jenkins and other people who had been involved in Exodus helped save Marsh House after it was boarded up and threatened with demolition in the 2000s. It now acts as a hub for various community projects, including a music studio.
For me, Marsh House was primarily a place where I went to summer holiday open access playschemes as a kid, charging around the ramshackle adventure playground (getting temporarily banned for stone throwing), bouncing on inflatables and playing softball by the river. I now know that some of the people who ran those playschemes were part of the local radical/alternative art scene some of whom had previously been involved with Luton Arts Lab and Reflex collective and went on to found the 33 arts centre which gave me a later education in experimental film and theatre- but that's another story.
Marsh House today
Revoluton Arts who put on the Henge festival and are based at Marsh House are a descendent of these multi-faceted efforts to make things happen in my home town. They have done some interviews with people involved in some of these past projects, interesting to hear Fahim Qureshi (who I remember from the anti-racist movement of that time), Glenn Jenkins and Linda ‘Muddie’ Farrell (who worked on playschemes and helped set up 33) talk about the River Lea and its wildlife. Guess I followed that river down to London but never stop Luton.
Bird Rave
As for the stone circle, I used to be cynical about contemporary efforts to recreate ancient looking monuments but I have seen the Brockley stone circle on Hilly Fields near where I live now become a focus in the south london park where it dates back only to 2000. At the end of the day the combination of stone, sky and people is as real today as it ever was. Build it they will come.
As I post this it is forty years ago this very night that anarcho-punk pioneers Crass and Poison Girls played in Luton, along with home town punks UK Decay on 14th December 1979. A friend who was there (I wasn't) posted the flyer on facebook. I remember the venue well enough, an old hanger next to Marsh House community centre where I went to summer playschemes as a kid. Apparently there was no power in the building so they ran an extension cable from Marsh House next door - the whole gig from one power point with the inevitable power cut at one point.
