We live to tread on Kings

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long,
If life did ride upon a dial's point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
An if we live, we live to tread on kings

William Shakespeare - Henry IV, Part I (1597)



Charles Windsor, who's at the door?
At such an hour, who's at the door?
In the back of an old green cortina
You're on your way to the guillotine

Here the rabble comes
The kind you hoped were dead
They've come to chop, to chop off your head

Hundreds of bound big business men
Hacks from The Sun, military men
So many rich men weep in despair
On and on into Trafalgar Square

Here the rabble comes
The kind you hoped were dead
They've come to chop, to chop off your head

These once peaceful streets
The scenes of revenge you had not wished to see
Revenge is so sweet to those who have never known anything sweet

McCarthy - Charles Windsor (1987)



God save the Queen
the fascist regime,
they made you a moron
a potential H-bomb.

God save the Queen
she ain't no human being.
There is no future
in England's dreaming

Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need.
There's no future
there's no future
there's no future for you

God save the Queen
we mean it man
we love our queen
God saves

God save the Queen
'cos tourists are money
and our figurehead
is not what she seems

Oh God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God have mercy
all crimes are paid.

When there's no future
how can there be sin
we're the flowers
in the dustbin
we're the poison
in your human machine
we're the future
you're future

God save the Queen
we mean it man
we love our queen
God saves

God save the Queen
we mean it man
there is no future
in England's dreaming

No future
no future for you
no fufure for me

Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen (1977)




Tear me apart and boil my bones
I'll not rest till she's lost her throne
My aim is true my message is clear
It's curtains for you, Elizabeth my dear

The Stone Roses - Elizabeth my Dear (1989)



Jewels drip red and I don't sound proud
Treason is ambition, I want dead procession
All we got unholy left-overs of a compromise
Leaving us like butterflies trapped in frost

Ceremony rape machine
Love wont corrode you
Ceremony rape machine
Love wont corrode you

England's glory lives on in world wide genocide
So celebrate buchenwald as her majesty's heir
Now an obsolete face on a currency of illusion
No matter what we own we can't buy freedom

Throw myself against you cos you ain't frail
Underneath silk riches sixty six million giving slaves
This needle of religion's gonna rust my skin
Tear out and exit obeyance of created sin

Faces pressed at gates of anniversary torture
Without these fake images we'd never bow down
Don't need this history but we still accept
Conscripted into a past that invents our guilt

Manic Street Preachers - We Her Majesty's Prisoners (1992)

(see also the Manic Street Preachers' song song Repeat -'Repeat after me, f*ck Queen and Country... Death sentence heritage, Repeat after me, Death camp palace, Useless generations, Dumb flag scum')



Class War - Better Dead than Wed (1986)

A few suggestions for your anti-Royal wedding party - other suggestions welcome!

See also: Funk the Wedding 1981; Repeat After Me, F*ck Queen and Country. K-Punk has a great 1983 quote from William Burroughs: 'What hope for a country where people will camp out for three days to glimpse the Royal Couple? Where one store clerk refers another as his 'colleague'? ... God save the Queen and a fascist regime ... a flabby, toothless fascism to be sure. Never go too far in any direction is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole stinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top...' (more here)

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.

1980 & 2010: screwing the poor

Courtesy of 56a Info Shop in SE London, I have recently had access to an archive of radical publications from the early 1980s, in particular The Leveller, a London-based 'independent socialist magazine'. So I'm going to start a new series called 1980, highlighting things that happened 30 years ago. There are quite a lot of similarities between 1980 and 2010, not least the fact that in both cases in the UK, a Conservative government had recently come to power and was implementing a programme of public spending cuts amidst rising unemployment. So there's plenty of food for thought for the present in looking back.

2010

So here we are in 2010, with the multi-millionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announcing a new campaign against the poorest people in the country: benefits claimants. According to the BBC today:

'The government has set out a series of measures to tackle benefit fraud, as ministers spend the weekend finalising spending cuts. The steps would mean anyone with three convictions could forfeit their rights to benefits for up to three years...

Mr Osborne said state aid had "to go to the people who need it, and people who pay for it these days are going to demand no less". Under the new scheme every welfare offence - no matter how minor - would mean an immediate fine of £50. The government is promising to share more data with credit reference agencies to find patterns of offending. It is also recruiting 200 new inspectors, creating a mobile task force to go into areas with high rates of fraud and check every claim individually. The strategy, to be unveiled on Monday, will use hi-tech data tracking techniques between government offices and credit reference agencies'.

1980

Here's a report of something very similar, an article written by Tim Gopsill published in The Leveller, no.36, March 1980:

'Any doubt the Tory leadership might have had about Reg Prentice’s reactionary credentials must now be dispelled [Reg Prentice was a former Labour politician who switched to the Tories]. Chosen as Minister of State for Social Security to direct the attack on unemployed people and single parents, he has undertaken the task with tremendous zeal. On February 13 he announced a ‘new clampdown on scroungers’, a programme of breathtaking savagery against the Tories’ favourite target, the poor.

Margaret Thatcher knew how well Prentice was qualified for the job. He has a vast experience and proven ability in the field of fraud, having arguably deceived more honest Labour voters than any other politician. And like his mythical millions of scroungers, he has lived off the back of the taxpayer and the state for many years.

The ‘clampdown’ is not on scroungers at all. In co-ordination with the rest of Tory strategy, it is on working and unemployed people’s living standards and organisation. It is scapegoatism on a huge scale, making the poor pay for the failures of capital. And it is a strengthening of the apparatus of the state to this end. It is the same story as the new laws to break the unions, the cuts in housing, education, health and social service expenditure on the one hand, and the increase in resources allocated to police and military expenditure on the other.

Prentice announced the appointment of more than 1,000 extra staff to tackle ‘fraud and abuse’, which he predicted would save £50 million of the estimated £200 million to be lost over the coming year.

Before we consider the real facts, a few more figments from Prentice’s fevered brain. This figure of £200 million, which picked up a good deal of publicity, where did it come from? Embarrassed DHSS officials, under pressure, while maintaining that of course you can’t, by definition, produce a figure for something you know nothing about, concede the following: (You aren’t going to believe this) that big retail chains and other companies handling large amounts of money regularly reckon to write off 1 to 2 percent of turnover to theft. And that’s it: Prentice got his officials to work out what was 1 per cent of the estimated £19,000 million to be paid out by the DHSS in 1980-81, rounded it up to a headline-grabbing £200 million, and gave it out as the scroungers’ swag…

More than half his new staff will be extra Unemployment Review Officers — 530 new UROs, more than doubling the present establishment of 447. These men and women are not at all concerned with fraud. Their job is to stop the long- term unemployed (people who’ve been jobless for six months) receiving the benefit which is their perfect entitlement.

UROs are armed with quite an arsenal. They can cut benefit or stop it altogether if they consider claimants fail, without justification, to find work. They can send them to Assessment or Re-establishment Centres (workhouses). They can initiate prosecutions for failure to maintain oneself or one’s dependents. These powers do not often have to be used. Their threat is usually enough to achieve the aim of getting a claimant off the books — whether to some low-paid non-union sweatshop, or into a limbo without income, or petty crime, they don’t care...

The next biggest increases in personnel are to be new Fraud Officers and Liable Relative Officers — 170 of each. The Liable Relative (LR) operations are already the heaviest harassment squad in the business, with 2,034 officers nationwide. Their job, quite simply, is to get hold of people (usually deserting fathers) who are considered to be responsible for dependent relatives that are receiving benefit, and extort money from them.

Again, there is no ‘fraud’ involved. The common picture is of a husband who has left the home. The wife and child need supplementary benefit (SB) to survive, and while one department is grudgingly paying this out, the LROs are despatched to find the errant father. He is presented with a bill for the benefit paid, with the sanction of prosecution for failure to maintain his dependents. The mother is cajoled to prosecute or give evidence against him for failure to pay maintenance. In many cases, the father may be poor, or have acquired a new home and dependents; either way he can’t pay much, and it helps no-one to prosecute; no-one except DHSS officials with their fanatical determination not to pay benefit.

Claimants’ Union activists around the country are reporting a recent upsurge in enthusiasm on the part of LROs, with cases of men being presented with bills for years of benefit, running into thousands of pounds.

The other classes of new staff are the Fraud Officers, and 100 more Special Investigators. The SIs are the elite fraud detectives; they are the scum of the earth. They are the ones who rise with the dawn to sit outside the homes of women claimants to spot a man coming out to work. They are the collectors who can convert tittle-tattle from nasty neighbours into cases for the courts. They work a lot with the police, and with employers, for the majority of their cases are ‘working and drawing’ — that is, unemployed claimants or dependents who are found to be supplementing their state pittances by taking jobs. Not usually comfortable, established jobs with tax and insurance deducted of course, but casual ones: seasonal agricultural work, window-cleaning, decorating, odd jobs. These cases made up 55 per cent of prosecutions for SB fraud in 1978-79, and 69 per cent of Unemployment Benefit (UB) fraud.

What the DHSS’s ridiculous figures for projected savings (50 million out of estimated fraud and abuse losses of £53 million) mean is that every claimant will be under suspicion. How else can all estimated fraud or abuse be eliminated? It has already been policy for two years that every case proved will be taken to court. This explains the prosecution statistics (hold your breath, comrades): In 1976 there were 19,000 prosecutions for benefit fraud. In 1977-78: 26,000. In 1978-79: 29,147.

The conviction rate was 98 per cent. To put these facts into context, compare the zeal with which government is pursuing fraud of two other kinds that should be comparable — that are comparable, if truth can be admitted in Thatcher’s Britain: income tax evasion, and under-payment by employers...

So same old rhetoric about 'scroungers' and punitive measures against people just trying to get by on very low incomes, sometimes by knowingly or unknowingly getting round the rules. Still maybe something reassuring about the fact that after 30 years or more of endless persecution of the poor, the state apparently still finds itself in the same position.

And here, by Crass from the same period (from 1978 to be precise), is the only possible response to the Osbornes and Prentices of this world. Do they owe us a living? Of course they do...

Dancing Questionnaire 21: John Eden

Happy summer solstice, June 21st and here's the 21st completed Dancing Questionnaire from John Eden of Uncarved, Woofah and many other adventures.

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?

I can't really, unless you count doing the hokey cokey at parties or 'music and movement' at school as a child. I have rubbish co-ordination, so never had much confidence for physical things like football or dancing.

We did have some school discos when I was about 10, but I seem to remember running about with mates rather than dancing. It was a nerd's life from then until my mid teens.

I found it a lot easier to hang out at parties talking bollocks in the kitchen or arguing over whose tape got played on the stereo (which I think is how many people ended up being DJs 'in the olden days' - a love of music and a fear of making an arse of yourself dancing).

I eventually overcame most of my reservations about getting on down with a combination of teenage drinking and going to places where nobody seemed to mind if you were gyrating like a short-circuiting C3PO. I'm never going to win any medals for my dance skills, but it's been an incredibly important part of my life.

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

Er, I dunno. None of the significant things in my life have happened whilst I've been dancing. This is probably because I try to get completely lost in it all and remove myself from the outside world.

I guess I'm often 'working through' stuff in the back of my head without realising it, and then having a chuckle at myself for being so serious and then realising that whatever it was just didn't matter all that much anyway. I'm also a fan of those little conspiratorial smiles with complete strangers.

More concretely, the plan to do the fanzine which became WOOFAH hatched out of several nights on the Plastic People dancefloor at the sadly missed BASH - an incredible reggae/grime/dubstep night run by Kevin Martin (The Bug) and Loefah (DMZ).

On a less positive note, someone was once sick into the hood of my hooded top whilst I was dancing, which seemed quite significant at the time.

Oh and the first Gulf War broke out while I was dancing to Psychic TV at the Zap Club in Brighton, which killed the mood somewhat.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times

Reclaiming the Streets on the Westway [film below from 1996 - one of my favourite days too, Neil]. Fatboy Slim playing all night in the small room at The End. Watching the sun come out from behind the clouds at the Big Chill. Any of The Bug's sets at BASH.

There's a lot I can't remember, the hundreds of amazing nights out with friends that are little chapters in the larger story of a social relationship... it's never just about the dancing, it's the mad conversations, getting ready, random things happening on the way home, the whole night.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times...

I got really drunk at drum 'n' bass night PM Scientists (Farringdon, circa 1997) and fell over the MC whilst he was in full flow. That didn't go down very well.

Seeing bouncers pound some poor guy's head against a wall in Cyprus. Moody junglists telling people off for dancing 'in my space'. Euro-crusties killing the vibe with a two hour acid techno set in someone's kitchen.

Homophobic MCs on my favourite soundsystem (which to be fair to them they sorted out sharpish),

Casualties. Realising that, tonight John, YOU are the casualty.

I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to every single person whose feet I have trodden on, or whose drink I have spilled in the course of my adventures over the years.

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

Mid 80s - Flailing around ripped to the gills on cider at various punky gigs.

1988 - first acid house moment, first time in a nightclub.

Late 80s/early 90s - lots of gigs/clubs by aciiiieeeed converts like Psychic TV, the Shamen, Megadog, the odd squat party here and there. Oh and The Torture Garden fetish nights, which were a bit of an eye-opener. Also some goth/indie nights (I blame my housemates). This covers the first few years of me moving to London so I was going out a lot.

Mid 90s - the Tribal Gathering festivals. A brief flirtation with the early stages of Goa trance with Return to the Source at the Brixton Fridge. Then drum 'n' bass, plus things like Dead by Dawn at the 121 Centre.

Late 90s: falling headlong into Big Beat and an increasingly all-consuming obsession with all things dub, culminating in some truly inspirational moments under the influence of soundsystems like Jah Shaka, Iration Steppas, Abashanti and Jah Tubbys.

Early to mid 2000s: I went to a few nights organised by folk on the UK-Dance.org discussion list. Since then the only game in town has been BASH, really. I've occasionally enjoyed grime/dubstep nights like Dirty Canvas, FWD and the squatted 'House Party' events. For a while my main source of dancing was at kids' discos... cha cha slide..
.
Late 2000s: A few years ago I got tired of regularly being the oldest bloke in the room at dubstep/grime nights. Since then I've gravitated more towards smaller reggae/rocksteady/ska clubs like Tighten Up and Musical Fever . These attract an impressively diverse age range and are always great - everyone is serious about the music, but generally not at the expense of having a good time.

6. When and where did you last dance?

I had a drunken stagger recently at a mate's birthday party in Camden (this mate, in fact). Jah Shaka at the Dome in Tufnell Park was the last time I had a proper session. That was back in May and did me a power of good.

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

I would probably attempt to nod my head to Hopeton Lewis' 'Take It Easy', but throwing off the respirator and waving my zimmer frame in the air like I just don't care is probably reserved for 'Drop Top Caddy' by Aphrodite and Mickey Finn.

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).

Malcolm McLaren: malevolence, subversion and style

'I was born Malcolm McLaren just after the war in 1946, a war baby, a baby boomer as my generation's come to be known, born on the cusp of change in a culture of necessity when you only consumed what you needed to survive; but by the dawn of the 1960s I arrived in a culture of desires when you only consumed what you didn't need to survive. My story is a story of greed, power, malevolence, subversion and with it heaps of style. To be frank it is the history of pop culture, albeit a personal and subjective one, that has taken up more than 50 years of my life and times'.

'The band's greatest moment may have been in 1977 during the Queen's Silver Jubilee. There was to be a Royal flotilla that would proceed down the Thames as the sky erupted with fireworks. I decided to create our flotilla with our own fireworks. We hired a boat. Funnily enough the boat was called the Queen Elizabeth and departed from Charing Cross Pier at about 6:30 in the evening. As the Sex Pistols played its version of God Save the Queen, loud, raucous, rude, our flotilla passed beneath the Thames bridges and the band's supporters swung from the lamposts, dropping pots of yoghurt I remember, cheering like mad groups of artful dodgers. I was arrested. Our portrait of the Queen with a safety pin through her nose was printed in the papers, and God Save the Queen became a best selling record. Even though it was banned not only from the radio but from most conventional consumer outlets'.

(say what you like about Malcolm McLaren but that Silver Jubilee moment was such a breath of fresh air. A rare, and entirely successful intervention against the dreadful royalist consensus of 1977. I was at school at that time and it was a real thrill reading about the exploits of the Pistols as I went about on my paper round. At a time of patriotic street parties and ubiquitous union jacks it felt like somebody was screaming NO, and the success of the record showed that they were far from being alone. Quotes from Malcolm on his BBC radio programme From the Forties to the Noughties. South Londonists see also Malcolm McLaren in New Cross).

My Agit Disco mix

Stefan Szczelkun asked me to put together a selection for his Agit Disco series of mixes of political music. You can read my effort at his site as well as previous mixes by the likes of Simon Ford, Stewart Home and Tom Vague. I recommend that you spend some time browsing the whole site and its related blog.

The mix might not win any prizes for DJing, for a start there is no consistent sound as it covers everything from folk to techno via punk. But I can guarantee that there's some stuff here that you won't have heard before - some of it from old cassette tapes of stuff that has never been released.



Tracklisting:

1. UK Decay – For my Country (1980)
2. Karma Sutra – Wake the Red King (1985)
3. No Defences - Keep Running (1985)
4. Bikini Kill – Rebel Girl (1993)
5. Chumbawamba – Fitzwilliam (1985)
6. Hot Ash - Bloody Sunday – This is a Rebel Song (1991)
7. Planxty – Arthur McBride (1973)
8. Half a Person – The Last of England (2006)
9. McCarthy – The Procession of Popular Capitalism (1987)
10. Joe Smooth – Promised Land (1987)
11. Atmosfear – Dancing in Outer Space (1979)
12. Roteraketen – Here to Go (1999)
13. Metatron – Men Who Hate the Law (1993)
14. Lochi – London Acid City (1996)
15. Galliano – Travels the Road (Junglist Dub Mix) (1994)
16. Roy Rankin & Raymond Naptali - New Cross Fire (1981)
17. Afrikan Boy – Lidl (2006)
18. 99 Posse – Salario Garantito (1992)
18. The Ballistic Brothers – London Hooligan Soul (1995)

Introduction

I’ve spent many years cogitating on the politics of music and the music of politics so wasn’t quite sure where to start with an Agitdisco mix. So I’ve decided to loosely follow an autobiographical thread of tracks that I associate with politically significant moments in my life.

UK Decay – For my Country (1980)

I grew up in Luton, where UK Decay were the best of the first wave punk bands. ‘For My Country’ is an anti-war song clearly influenced by the First World War poets (Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est in particular). I was at school when this came out and getting involved in politics for the first time, helping to set up Luton Peace Campaign which became the local branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, resurgent in the face of plans to locate Cruise nuclear missiles in Britain.

Karma Sutra – Wake the Red King (1985) download

In the mid-1980s I was very involved in the anarcho-punk scene in Luton. Political songs were ten a penny in this milieu, but I guess more significantly the singers (mostly) really meant it – there was no real separation between ‘entertainers’ and ‘activists’. The people going to gigs, forming bands, doing zines, were the same people going hunt sabbing and on Stop the City. At that time I seemed to spend large parts of my life in the back of a van, between gigs, demos and animal rights actions.

The main local band in this scene was Karma Sutra. For a little while I took my Wasp synthesiser down to their practices but it didn’t really work out, so I never played with them live. However, this demo tape version of their track Wake the Red King has my rumbling synth tone at the beginning. The title refers to Alice in Wonderland, I can’t make out all the lyrics but it sounds like the kind of situationist-influenced diatribe they specialised in – they later released an album, Daydreams of a Production Line Worker.

No Defences – Keep Running (1985) download

When people think about anarcho-punk they often have in mind lots of identikit sub-Crass/Conflict thrash punk bands. There was plenty of that – and some of it was really good – but there was also quite a lot of musical diversity, from more melodic humourists like Blyth Power to mutant funksters like Slave Dance. One of the most interesting bands on the whole scene were No Defences, who as far as I know never released a record apart from a track on a compilation album. They were mesmerising live, delivering monotone litanies of abuse and rage over sophisticated time signatures. I saw them at squat gigs in London (including at the Ambulance Station, Old Kent Road), and they came to Luton to play at a hunt sabs benefit gig we put on at Luton Library Theatre, also featuring Chumbawamba. This track was recorded that night (30.5.1985). – ‘we don’t live anywhere, no sense of being in the world…’

Bikini Kill – Rebel Girl (1993)

I was lucky enough to see some of the great post-punk women-led bands live, including The Slits, The Raincoats, Essential Logic, Au Pairs and the Delta 5. The feminism and sexual politics of that time have had a life long influence on me. Ten years later, these bands started getting their critical dues again with the birth of the Riot Grrrl and Queercore scenes. I used to go and see my late friend Katy Watson (of Shocking Pink and Bad Attitude feminist zines) DJing at London queercore clubs including Up to the Elbow and Sick of it All. Bikini Kill were the key US Riot Grrrl band: ‘when she talks I hear the revolution…’.

Chumbawamba – Fitzwilliam (1985)

I was living in Kent when the 1984-5 miners strike started and helped set up a Miners Support Group linked to strikers at the three local pits (now all closed). I was also in Ramsgate in 1985 on the day the Kent miners voted to return to work, ending the strike. It was an intense year for me of pickets, demonstrations, collections and many, many arguments. Chumbawamba played an important role in swinging the anarcho-punk scene behind the strike – initially some people had the ludicrous line of ‘why should I support meat eating men working in an environmentally unsound industry?’. Fitzwilliam describes the end of the strike in a Yorkshire mining village – ‘it won’t be the same in Fitzwilliam again…’ This song was released on ‘Dig This – A Tribute to the Great Strike’. Some years later, I was involved in the Poll Tax Prisoners Support Group (Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign) and we threw a party at our Brixton flat for a couple of people acquitted of charges relating to the 1990 poll tax riot – one of them an ex-miner from that part of Yorkshire.

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

I went to Derry in 1992 and took part in the demonstration to mark the 20th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when 13 people were killed by British troops. This song, from the 1991 Hot Ash album Who Fears to Speak, is about that event. At the start of this track there is a recording of the Jim O’Neill/Robert Allsopp Memorial Flute Band from New Lodge Road in Belfast. I was involved in the Troops Out Movement and prisoner support at this time and went on lots of Irish marches in London and Belfast. There were always flute bands on the march, giving rise to one of my pet theories (which may have no basis whatsoever) that there is a connection between the popularity of bass drum-led republican and loyalist flute bands in N.Ireland and Scotland and the popularity of bass drum-led variants of electronic dance music in these places (e.g happy hardcore and gabber in the late 1990s).

Planxty – Arthur McBride (1973)

Around this time I started to learn to play the mandolin, and began taking part in music sessions in pubs playing mainly Irish and some Scottish tunes. This was a new kind of collective music making for me, more fluid and inclusive than a band format, with less of a boundary between performers and audience – but with each session having its own unwritten rules of operation. The first song I sang on my own, at a party near Elephant and Castle, was the anti-recruiting song Arthur McBride. I learnt it from the version recorded by Planxty on their 1973 debut album. I saw Planxty play in Dublin in 1994, at a big May Day festival to mark the 100th anniversary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

Half a Person – The Last of England (2006) - download

… from here it was a step to writing my own songs. This is a demo version of a little anti-nationalist ditty I have performed a few times, most recently in my ‘Half a Person’ guise at a benefit last year for the Visteon workers at Rampart Social Centre.

McCarthy - The Procession of Popular Capitalism (1987)

I enjoyed the indie-pop jingly jangly guitar scene in the second half of the 1980s and had some great nights at the Camden Falcon, a music pub at its heart. There was little in the way of explicit politics, although the cultivation of a ‘twee’ subjectivity also represented a refusal of ‘adult’ roles of worker/housewife/consumer and (for boys) of macho posturing. Bands like Talulah Gosh were later cited as an influence on the Riot Grrrl scene. McCarthy weren't really part of that scene but they had a similar sound combined with the much more overtly political lyrics of Malcolm Eden. This song is a typically Brechtian tale of penniless pickpockets and wealthy ‘Captains of Industry’, the latter singing ‘This is your country too! Join our procession, that's marching onwards to war’.

Joe Smooth – Promised Land (1987)

In the early 1990s I started going to squat raves and then to a whole range of techno and house clubs. This turned my conception of music and politics upside down, along with other aspects of my life. As a result I have come to see the political significance of a musical event as arising from the relations between people rather than the content of a song or performance. So, for instance, a crowd dancing together in a field to a commercial pop record might be more subversive than an audience in a concert hall listening to socialist songs. Dancefloors and festivals can be important for the constitution of communities and political subjects, almost regardless of the soundtrack. Promised Land is a Chicago house classic that combines this affirmation of community with a hope for a better world, articulated in the religious language frequently used in Black American music: ‘Brothers, Sisters, One Day we will be free. From Fighting, Violence, People Crying in the Streets’. I once heard Chicago legend Marshall Jefferson play this track at a club in Shoreditch.

Atmosfear – Dancing in Outer Space (1979)

I was involved in the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (AAA) from 1995 to 2000. My node of the network was Disconaut AAA, and I was particularly interested in the way space had been used as a speculative playground in jazz, disco and funk, a zone into which could be projected utopian visions of life beyond gravi-capital, racism and poverty (think Sun Ra's Space is the Place or George Clinton's Mothership mythos). Atmosfear's Dancing in Outer Space is a lesser known UK disco/jazz funk classic – this is a Masters at Work remix of the track.

Roteraketen – Here to Go (1999) download

The AAA put out a Rave In Space compilation, and I contributed to this track on it with Jason Skeet (DJ Aphasic). Actually my contribution was mainly supplying the sample and the name. Rote Raketen (red rockets) was the name of a communist cabaret troupe in 1920s Germany. The sample is from Yuri Gagarin's first space flight. I have an ambivalent attitude to the US and Soviet space programmes, undoubtedly rooted in Cold War industrial militarism, but also representing a period of optimism in the possibility of the continual expansion of human subjectivity. One day community-based spaced exploration will be a reality!

Metatron – Men Who Hate the Law (1993)

I was involved with various projects at the 121 Centre in Brixton in the 1990s, and regularly attended the Dead by Dawn nights in the basement playing some of the hardest techno and breakcore to be heard anywhere. Again it was the crowd, the conversations and the antagonistic sonic attitude that constituted the music’s political dimension rather than any lyrical content. Praxis records was the driving force behind the night, this track is from Christoph Fringelli’s Metatron EP, Speed and Politics.

Lochi – London Acid City (1996)

There was a cycle of struggles in the 1990s UK that encompassed the anti-road movement (Twyford Down, Claremont Road, Newbury…), squat parties and Reclaim the Streets. The soundtrack was often a particular variant of hard trance/acid techno associated with the Liberator DJs and Stay Up Forever records. This track was the scene’s ultimate anthem, I believe it was the first record played on the famous Reclaim the Streets party on the M41 motorway in London in 1996. I took part in the party and later was involved in the RTS street party in Brixton in 1998.

Galliano – Travels the Road, Junglist Dub Mix (1994)

The various radical movements of the early 1990s coalesced in the campaign against the government’s Criminal Justice Act in 1994, which brought in new police powers to deal with protests and raves. The high point was a huge demonstration/party/riot in London’s Hyde Park, which I documented in a Practical History pamphlet at the time, ‘The Battle for Hyde Park: Radicals, Ruffians and Ravers, 1855-1994’. This track is from an anti-CJA compilation album called Taking Liberties.

Roy Rankin & Raymond Naptali - New Cross Fire (1981)

In the last few years I have been doing a lot of research into the radical history of South East London. This has included helping put on the Lewisham '77 series of events commemorating the 30th anniversary of the anti-National Front demonstrations, and marking the wider history of racism and resistance in the area. A key historical event was the New Cross Fire in 1981, in which 13 young people died. This is one of a number of reggae tracks about the fire, demonstrating how sound system culture functioned at the time as a means of alternative commentary on current events.

Afrikan Boy – Lidl (2006)

… today that alternative commentary is still alive in grime. I was involved for a while in No Borders and became very aware of the experience of those living at the sharp end of the regime of immigration raids, detention centres and forced deportations. Afrikan Boy, from Nigeria via Woolwich, gives voice to that experience on this track, as well as shoplifting adventures in Lidl and Asda!

99 Posse – Salario Garantito (1992)

I have been influenced a lot over the years by radical ideas and practice from Italy and have visited a few times, most recently last year when I took part in the Electrode festival at the Forte Prenestino social centre in Rome. I first visited in the early 1990s, when I went to the Parco Lambro festival in Milan and visited Radio Sherwood in Padua. 99 Posse are an Italian reggae band named after the Officina 99 social centre in Naples; the title of this song relates to the autonomist demand for a guaranteed income for all, working and unemployed. It comes from a compilation tape called Senza Rabbia Non Essere Felice (Without anger, no happiness) put out in around 1992 by the Centro di Communicazione Antagonista in Bologna.

The Ballistic Brothers – London Hooligan Soul (1995)

Released in 1995, this is a look back over 20 years by the Junior Boys Own posse. It’s their history rather than mine, but there are several points where it overlaps with my own… house music, Ibiza, ‘old bill cracking miners heads’, ‘The Jam at Wembley’, ‘A poll tax riot going on’.

ATV: 1978 interview

Alternative TV were one of the few signficant early British punk bands to to eschew the obvious music industry route of signing for a big label - indeed they avoided retricting themselves to the 'punk brand' and took various left turns into more experimental music and free festivals. In this November 1978 interview from the radical magazine The Leveller, Mark Perry of ATV - who also edited the famous punk zine 'Sniffin Glue - expounds on his DIY philosophy with Deptford Fun City records, EMI and class

Click on images to enlarge - I haven't transcribed the whole thing, but here's some sections:

How is it done at Deptford Fun City?
With ATV we go in and produce the record ourselves, cut it and get it pressed. That way, it you do it wrong it's all your own fault. I sit down and design the cover. We get the photos taken, nick a SLADE sticker. We organise and distribute the ads - all dwon the line. It's all about doing it yourself.

I don't worry about anything. Record companies make you worry, come up and say, 'Look I don't think there's a single there lads'. So you get these 18 year old kids going mad trying to make a hit single... and they've signed for five years.

Tom Robinson says he signed with EMI because he wanted to reach the largest possible audience.
We get to 5000 people on Deptford Fun City. Directly to them -crash. The profits come right back to us and we put it into the next record. We don't own oil wells and all that. Tom Robinsom sells 20 -30,000, making profits for EMI, which I don't think is a good thing. The people who really wanted it would've bought it anyway. You don't know what dastardly things people like EMI are into.

Why have you never done a Rock Against Racism gig?
There's a lot of bands doing it and I don't think it needs ATV. In the end it's down to if you enjoy a RAR gig and I never have. What we did enjoy was the SUS benefit in Deptford. SUS - the campaign against the vagrancy laws - was a little thing run by the blacks in the community. RAR's more of an organisation ... I went on the march, but didn't fancy the gig [Carnival]. What they're doing's great. But RAR needs a wham-bam, Generation X type band. And we're not like that. A band can't change the world. And I still think there'd have been a fair few there at the Carnival without any bands. No, playing for nothing and selling albums cheap are the positive productive things you can do for people.

And that's why you did the free tour with Here and Now, the squatter/hippie band from Ladbroke Grove?
Yeah, we went on the tour. They did 30 dates, we did 15 of them. They did us a good turn by organising it and we did them one by making an album of it, 'What you see is what you are', with them on one side and us on the other. It was funny like when we played at Stonehenge, quite a few punks came along and were really freaked out standing next to these long-haried hippes. Another free concert we did there were three bands - all playing for nothing -which isn't bad. This kid comes up to me 'What you playing with this bunch of hippies for? Why don't you play down the club?" I said 'Look you've saved a quid aint' you? Have a couple more drinks'.

You chose the name Alternative TV because that's what pisses you off more than anything, the brain-softening mass media?
Power is in the hands of those rich enough to buy it, especially in culture. Because if everybody was involved we'd all do it so much better. Look at kids in school bashing around in the music room, playing great music on cymbals and all that. Then when they get out of school, with all the trash put out on the radio, they forget about the music room. I think it's a shame. I played xylophone, violin, trombone at school. I'm still like that now. So-called hip kids are all guitarists - that's all they do. They play All Right Now, play solo just the way it is on record.

No, most people with the arts thing in their bonce know nothing about life, use it to buy white powder. The people who need it can't get it. I really hate Harpers & Queen - they went all through punk and decided it was finished. Five pages on my life and I hated those bastards. They don't know what it's all about. They're living in Chelsea with their rich Daddies. If they lived up the road from Mullins, a big factory in Deptford, with their Dad watching ITV, buying the Mirror and Sun ... They don't know about things like people having to find a flat, your Dad getting chucked out the docks 'cos the docks have closed.

Where do you live?
With my Mum and Dad in Deptford, where I was born.

Dancing Questionnaire (16): Kevin, The London Nobody Sings

The Dancing Questionnaire series has been slightly dormant of late, so I've invited a few people to have a go - though anybody is welcome to participate. Next up is Kevin from Your Heart Out and The London Nobody Sings, the latter an excellent blog featuring a daily song about London. One of the things I like about people's answers to these questionnaires is the connections that emerge - how people at different points in their life journeys cross paths in particular places (not necessarily at the same time), or enjoy similar tunes at opposite ends of the earth.

I haven't met Kevin, as far as I know, but like many of the respondents, I am sure we have shared a dancefloor sometime. In Kevin's case I am wondering whether we might have bumped into each other, literally, at The Camden Falcon in the indie pop heyday (remember seeing Jasmine Minks there) or perhaps more recently on one of my occasional visits to How Does it Feel? in Brixton. Anyway here's Kevin's Dancing Questionnaire:

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
Yes, there was a scout hall near my home in Bexleyheath which held a weekly disco for several years. This was for primary school kids, and as it was '73-'75ish there was lots of Gary Glitter, Suzi Quatro, Hues Corporation, George McCrae etc. Wonderful. Still remember winning a copy of Ken Boothe's Everything I Own for being best dressed one week.

Suzie Quatro - she so invented punk

2. What's the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
I remember particularly a few years ago going to a Labour Party event in a stately home/hotel in North Wales in a work capacity, and while everyone was networking a few of us went to dance in another hall where a DJ was playing some old soul tracks more or less to himself, and after a while the guest of honour sneaked out (a Welsh Assembly minister) and joined us, literally dancing round her handbag. Beautiful summer evening, and it just suggested music as a common bond, overcoming boundaries, making friends, no words needed ...

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
Probably 1980s going to see underground pop groups like the June Brides, Jasmine Minks playing to horribly small crowds but having a whale of a time dancing with abandon.

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
I really feel uncomfortable in large crowds with flashing lights (unsociable so-and-so). I have particular unpleasant memories of a Ramones gig at The Lyceum where the punks all seemed to be 7 foot tall and were slam dancing madly. It just seemed horribly macho and boring.

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you've frequented?
Well, Alan McGee's Living Room, Dan Treacy's Room At The Top, Bay 63 were regular haunts in mid-'80s. Later put on own events with live groups/old soul discos etc in West End pub function rooms, then into the '90s becoming obsessed with drum 'n' bass/Mo' Wax trip hoppy stuff though only occasionally getting to places like the Heavenly Social due to shift work patterns. More recently outings seem to be confined to '60s soul type events.

6. When and where did you last dance?
Around my living room, waltzing to a Ewan MacColl song.

7. You're on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
Candy Skin by the Fire Engines.

All questionnaires welcome - just answer the same questions in as much or as little detail as you like and send to transpontine@btinternet.com (see previous questionnaires)

Southall 1979

30 years ago today, on the 23 April 1979, the far right National Front were planning an election meeting in Southall, West London. The mainly Asian local population mobilized against this incursion in an area where racist attacks had included the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar three years previously. Workers went on strike and the local community, supported by anti-racists from elsewhere blocked the main road.

The police - in particular the Special Patrol Group (forerunner of today's TSG) - used horses, batons and vans against the crowd and clashes continued into the evening. 350 people were arrested, and many were injured. Most tragically, Blair Peach (pictured)- a socialist teacher from New Zealand - was killed by police.

Reggae band Misty in Roots, who came from the area, were involved in setting up People Unite, a community centre. On the day the building was used as the anti-fascist HQ and it was stormed by police, wrecking the building and beating up those inside. Clarence Baker, the manager of Misty, was so badly injured that he ended up in a coma. Police smashed up a sound system and other equipment.

Jack Dromey from the Transport and General Workers' Union said: 'I have never seen such unrestrained violence against demonstrators ... The Special Patrol Group were just running wild.' No police officers were ever charged for their actions.

Punk band The Ruts were also involved in the People Unite collective and released Jah War, a song about the events on the People Unite record label. The lyrics include the lines: 'Hot heads came in uniform, Thunder and lightning in a violent form... Clarence Baker, No trouble maker, Said the truncheon came down, Knocked him to the ground, Said the blood on the streets that day'.

The Ruts and Misty also played at the 'Southall Kids are Innocent' benefits organised by Rock Against Racism in July 1979 at the Rainbow in London, as did The Clash, The Pop Group, Pete Townshend, Aswad, The Members and The Enchanters.

See also:

Blair Peach, Southall and the Rasta Folk Devil

Dave Renton's account of the events

John Eden on Reggae and the National Front

Blue Murder: songs about police killings (including songs about Blair Peach)

Blue Murder

Following the death last week of Ian Tomlinson after being assaulted by police at the London G20 demonstration, I guess I'm not the only person whose mind wandered to the Angelic Upstarts classic 'The Murder of Liddle Towers' (1979). The answer, for those who don't know the song, is 'Police Killed Liddle Towers'.

Liddle Towers was a 39 year old electrician and amateur boxer from Gateshead who was arrested outside the Key Club in Birtley (Northumberland) in January 1976. He told people that the police 'gave us a bloody good kicking outside the Key Club, but that was nowt to what I got when I got inside'. A few weeks after being released from custody he died of his injuries. An inquest into his death recorded the notorious verdict of 'Justifiable Homicide'.

The Upstarts sang: 'Why did he die, or did they lie? I think he's dead, so a doctor said / He was beaten black, He was beaten blue / But don't be alarmed, it was the right thing to do / The police have the power, Police have the right / To kill a man to take away his life / Drunk and disorderly was his crime / I think at worst he should be doing time / But he's dead / He was drunk and disorderly and now he's dead' .

Sex Pistols producer Dave Goodman released a record called 'Justifiable Homicide' on the same subject in 1978, apparently with Paul Cook and Steve Jones from the Pistols playing on the track.

The Tom Robinson Band dedicated their 1979 album, TRB Two to Mrs. Mary Towers, the mother of Liddle Towers. The song Blue Murder on this album goes: 'Well they kicked him far and they kicked him wide / He was kicked outdoors, he was kicked inside / Kicked in the front and the back and the side / It really was a hell of a fight... / He screamed blue murder in the cell that night / But he must have been wrong cos they all deny it / Gateshead station - police and quiet/ Liddley-die... / Lie lie lie diddley lie /Die die die Liddley die'.

The Death Song for Alfred Linnell 1887

Liddle Towers was not the first or the last person to die at the hands of the police to be commemorated in this way. Way back in 1887, Alfred Linnell was killed in clashes with police during the Bloody Sunday demonstration n London's Trafalgar Square (pictured below). William Morris helped carry his coffin, and wrote the Death Song to raise money for Linnell's family: 'What cometh here from west to east awending? / And who are these, the marchers stern and slow? / We bear the message that the rich are sending / Aback to those who bade them wake and know / Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay, / But one and all if they would dusk the day'.

Kevin Gately 1974

In 1974 Kevin Gately, a young student, was killed in Red Lion Square, London, during an anti-National Front demonstration. Gately is mentioned in a song called Spirit of Cable Street by People's Liberation Music, featuring Cornelius Cardew and recorded in 1976: 'Now at Red Lion Square the people fought with bare hands / Like their parents did down at Cable Street / Keep alive the fighting spirit of Kevin Gately / Brave anti-fascist fighter. / Unite in the spirit of Cable Street'.

Blair Peach 1979

30 years ago this month, on 23 April 1979, socialist teacher Blair Peach died at the hands of the police Special Patrol Group during anti-National Front protests in Southall, West London. Linton Kwesi Johnson recorded a track 'Reggae fi Peach' on his 1980 album Bass Culture (there is a dub version of this track on the album LKJ in Dub; Basque band Negu Gorriak have also recorded a version as Reggae Peachentzat).


The lyrics include the lines 'Everywhere you go it's deh talk of the day /Everywhere you go, you hear people say / ... ah deh S.P.G. dem a MURDER-AH, MURDER-AH / we can't let dem get, no furder-ah / because dem kill Blair Peach, deh teacha dem kill Blair Peach dem dogs 'n bleeders / Blair Peach was an ordinary man / Blair Peach him took a simple stand / 'gainst deh fascists and dem wicked plan / so they beat him till him life was gone'.

There is also a 1979 song by Mike Carver called Murder of Blair Peach, while the track Justice by The Pop Group mentions both Peach and Gately: 'Who killed Blair Peach? / Political prisoners caught at Southall / And tried by kangaroo courts / A man had to have his balls removed/ After being kicked by the S.P.G. / It doesn't look like justice to me... / Who guards the guards / Who polices the police / What happened at Red Lion Square / Who killed Kevin Gately'.

Colin Roach 1983

Colin Roach died from gunshot wounds at Stoke Newington Police Station in 1983, with many people reluctant to believe the police version that he had shot himself. Benjamin Zephaniah wrote a poem which starts ' Who killed Colin Roach? A lot of people want to know /Who killed Colin Roach? dem better tell de people now, /what we seek is the truth, youth must now defend de youth /Who killed Colin Roach? tell de people now'.

Sinéad O'Connor's Black Boys on Mopeds also refers to the death (without naming Roach) - the sleeve of her album 'I do not want what I can't have' includes a picture of Colin and thanks to to the Roach family. The song includes the line: 'England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses. It's the home of police who kill Black boys on mopeds'.

Bad Attitude - music reviews from radical women's newspaper (1995)

Bad Attitude was a 'radical women's newspaper' published in the early 1990s from 121 Railton Road, Brixton (among other things, home to the famous Dead by Dawn speedcore nights). Some of the women involved it had previously been involved in the young women's zine Shocking Pink, including my late friend Katy Watson. Here from issue 7 (1995) is one of Katy's music columns.

Welcome to my second review column of punk/indie women's bands. I'm pleased to say that this time a much higher propor­tion of them are independent/DIY bands, rather than on major labels, which I think is something worth supporting. Once again, I've only mentioned things that I found reasonably enjoyable. Is this a good idea? I don't know. Maybe you'd like to tell me.

So first off it's time to get your leopard-print bikinis on and... Spend the Night with the Trashwomen! For this is the title of my most highly recommended LP of this issue. It's by the Trashwomen, as you might guess, and is entirely wonderful. The style is garage, as in Sixties-style surf songs, a little like the Cramps, only belting along at about twice the speed and very cheaply produced which makes it seem even more rough'n'ready'n'fab. There are quite a few instrumentals and their lyrics are mainly along the lines of love, sex and dates, except for the self-explanatory 'I'm Trash'. So not a night out with Sheila ]effreys (not that I've anything against her). Several songs are complete classics, to my ears. It came out last year and I don't even know what made me buy it. I can only think it was the hand of the Goddess. (On Estrus records) And now it seems they have a favourably­reviewed live LP out....

Also in garage area though slightly more punky is a 4-track EP Punk or Die by Pink Kross, who are three girls from Glasgow. 'Doll core', apparently. The first track 'Drag Star Racing Queen' is a real cracker. I loved it. Catchy, thrashing, tuneful, fast, with lyrics either winning or daft, depending how you're prepared to take them. The other three tracks aren't as wondrous, but who cares when the first one's so brilliant? (Bouvier)

36C (LP) by Fifth Column, a Canadian dyke band. The first song, 'All Women are Bitches', is a classic, one of the best things I've heard this year - a powerful and catchy piece of pop-punk. But after that I found the others a let-down. The tunes are good, the singer has a fine voice and the lyrics are feminist, but it's all much slower. On the other hand if you appreciate melodic guitar songs this is good stuff. Personally I wish I'd just bought the 7" of 'All Women .. '/Donna'. (K records)

Alien's Mom (3-track 7") by Tribe 8. A San Francisco dyke band, much thrashier than the above. The title track is an OK thrash-punk tune with likeable lyrics about a woman leaving her husband for another woman. As for the drippy B-side - some things are best kept to ones therapist. I like Tribe 8 a lot, but this isn't the best I've heard from them. (Outpunk)

Out punk Dance Party (compilation LP). A variety of mainly north American dyke and queer bands from hardcore punk to one rap number. It gets off to a great start as a house beat familiar to any gay club-goer is wiped off the turntables with a satisfying needle­screech, but the tracks themselves are vari­able. Includes a good 'un (though not new) from London's own Sister George and I found the CWA rap story pleasantly amusing, plus a couple of the boys' bands a pretty good. However, though this could have been the definitive queercore comp, only half of it is up to scratch. (Outpunk)

You're Dead (4-track 7") by lovable young­sters the Frantic Spiders. I think this is their first record (?) and in their letter they say "this is very old and not indicative of the rousing live experience that Frantic Spiders are famed for". This may be, but all the same it's not bad. It's punky pop at a good pace, quite clear-sounding and there's a funny metaillic sound to the guitar, like slide guitar wthout the slide, which is also good. 'Retard' is the most memorable song, but don't they know it's not nice to call people that? (Weirdness).

American Thighs by Veruca Salt (LP) The most mainstream-indie of this issue's reviews. It sounds very much like The Breeders, ie US alternative pop-rock, tuneful, female vocals, expensive production, loud bits... quiet bits ... To be honest this is a bit too slow and mild to be my cup of tea, but I can see it's not bad, the guitars have a reasonable grind and if you like that sort of indie e stuff, you could well like this. The single, Seether, taken from the LP, is fairly lively and rockin'. (Both on Hi-Rise/Minty Fresh).

Suck (4-track 7") by Witchknot : I sup­pose this is roughly in the vein of hardcore but it has the unusual addition of a fiddle. They're six women from Bradford and I'd describe it as being something like a cross between the Dog Faced Hermans (one of their favourite bands, it seems) and the Au Pairs. Political lyrics, a strong vocalist and a fairly dissonant sound. And can you beat 'Pianist Envy' for a song title? (£2 (payable to D Taylor) from Witchknot, PO Box 169, Bradford, W Yorks BD7 1YS.)

I also got hold of records by a couple more all-women bands (both from the US) though I don't know how recent they are. 7 Year Bitch are feminist punksters whose EP Anti­disestablisbmentarianism (the longest word in the English language - don't say you don't learn anything here) is pretty good fast polit­ical hardcore, though the lyrics are stronger than the tunes. 'Dead Men Don't Rape' is an obvious crowd-pleaser. (Rugger Bugger) I also found a split single called Can We Laugh Now? with Thatcher On Acid on the other side. Musically this is good, though paradoxi­cally the lyrics are a bit irritating. (Clawfist)

Also worth checking out are US dyke band Team Dresch. Basically this is a little too gentle for my taste, but more mellow types might like it. I got a 3-track 7"; 'Hand Grenade' and 'Endtime Relay' are good, melodic guitar pop with a nice catch to them, a little dreamy­sounding. The other song 'Molasses in January' seemed painfully slow to me, but on the whole I'd recommend it. (Kill Rock Stars)

At the other end of the scale are Delicate Vomit, an all-women punk band from Newcastle. In case you hadn't guessed from their having 'vomit' in the name they are towards the hardcore end of punk. I haven't got a record to review, but the one song I heard sounded interesting.

DIY Punk Singles

From the mid-1970s there was an explosion of independent music labels that coincided with the birth of punk. Some of these labels were one off do-it-yourself affairs- perhaps a band putting out one single on their own label and then disappearing. Others, like Rough Trade, became reasonably substantial businesses - with all the contradictions that implies in trying to steer an alternative course in a capitalist market. Still, at the very least the independent labels provided an outlet for some interesting, innovative and challenging music that the big labels would never have touched - as well as for quite a lot of rubbish that would never have seen the light of day if the band/label had ever sought a third-party opinion on the quality of their work!

There are some good websites and music blogs trying to document this eruption of 7 inch vinyl creativity. Most are seemingly compiled by people digitising their old records and scanning the sleeves (the latter are great social historical artifacts in their own right) and sometimes the vinyl itself in various glorious colours.

45 Revolutions is the blog linked to the bible for this kind of music - 45 Revolutions by Mario Panciera, an encyclopedia aiming to be the definitive guide to punk, mod, powerpop and new wave singles issued in the UK and Ireland from 1976 to 1979. The book itself is nearly 1200 pages long and covers 3000 singles.

Killed by Death Records covers a slightly broader time scale and demonstrates that the post-punk DIY single phenomenon was not limited to the UK, Ireland, America and Australia- the site includes lots of Swedish examples too.

Always Searching for Music has more of the same (but also some 1980s stuff) with a 1977 French example from Warm Gun.

Worthless Trash is good too, perhaps more power pop than punk-centred with stuff mainly from UK and Belgium.

Punk 77 is not a music blog with MP3 files, but does exactly what is say on the tin with lots of information about UK punk bands from 1976 to 1979.

You need to check these sites regularly, as music files are often only available for a limited period of time (though the pictures and text are still interesting on their own). Warning, this can be very addictive - I have spent the last week listening to 1977 classics from the likes of The Dils ('Class War' and 'I hate the rich'), The Nosebleeds ('Ain't been to no music school') and Some Chicken ('New Religion').

Dance and Social Fantasy

The following extracts are taken from an article ‘Dance and Social Fantasy’ by the sociologist Angela McRobbie, published in the collection Gender and Generation, edited by McRobbie and Mica Nava (London: Macmillan, 1984). McRobbie has written a number of works about popular dancing and was groundbreaking in taking dancing seriously – a few years later, once academics had started taking ecstasy, they all seemed to be writing about it. I particular like her focus on what goes in people’s heads – the fantasy element - as much as on how their bodies are moving.

Her observations seem to be largely based on late 1970s/early 1980s discos and clubs in Birmingham and London, but much of what she says surely still holds true. The timing of this writing is significant though, as it demonstrates that some of the changes sometimes lazily attributed to some 1988 acid house/ecstasy year zero – such as the increasing participation of men in dancing as a pleasurable end in itself – were already being commented on several years beforehand.

For women and girls, dance has always offered a channel, albeit a limited one for bodily self-expression and control; it has also been a source of pleasure and sensuality. Even though it has often been directed towards men, the spectacle of women dancing has been linked unambiguously with female pleasure...

Dance’s status as a prime vehicle for sexual expression for women... is by no means a simple function of dance. Rather it carries a range of often contradictory strands within it. There is, on the one hand, the social pressures which direct little girls towards dance as a suitably feminine form of leisure. And dancing here is linked with being pretty, graceful, controlled and an object of admiration. But this conformist role does not deny the way dance carries enorm­ously pleasurable qualities for girls and women which frequently seem to suggest a displaced, shared and nebulous eroticism rather than a straightforwardly romantic, heavily heterosexual 'goal-­oriented' drive.

As a purveyor of fantasy, dance has also addressed areas of absolute privacy and personal intimacy, especially impor­tant for women and girls. And there is I think a case which can be made for forms of fantasy, daydreaming, and 'abandon' to be interpreted as part of a strategy of resistance or opposition; that is, as marking out one of those areas which cannot be totally colonised. Dance and music play an important role in these small daily evasions, partly because they are so strongly inscribed, in our culture, within the realms of feeling and emotion. They are associated with being temporarily out of control, or out of the reaches of controlling forces. Thus we have the experience of dance being linked, linguistically, with the onomatopoeia of the letter F: Saturday Night Fever, Fame, Flashdance - as though, with a quick slip of the tongue, to move rapidly to fever, frenzy, feeling.

Dance and fantasy

Dancing seems to retain at its centre a solid resistance to analysis. So deeply have we absorbed its rules and its rituals - the preparation, the mirror, the anticipation, and of course the dancing - that somehow we avoid subjecting all this to the scrutiny of analysis. Even the simplest of conventions have eluded sociological comment. One of the most obvious of these might be the way in which a girl or a woman going to a disco or dance alone is deviant. This does not hold true for men or boys. Where in general they may also go out dancing in groups, to go alone is in no way remarkable. But for girls it means a great deal more. It is a sign either of having no friends, or of being on the look-out and therefore morally out of line.

The second convention which marks out the different experience of dance for men and women lies in the strength of its attraction as a pleasurable activity. Up until very recently dance has been inextric­ably linked with femininity, which has made it either an ordeal or something faintly ridiculous for men to show more than a fleeting interest in. There are a whole string of literary, cinematic, and sociological accounts which offer ample evidence of this. These have shown how men have seen dance as an unfortunate pre-requisite to courtship. Mungham (1976), amongst others, has described how men at the dancehall he studied, would stumble clumsily from the bar towards the end of the evening to strike an often ungainly pose on the floor and to survey the mass of dancing girls.

Recently, as dance has become more popular among men, its connotations of cissiness, triviality or silliness are rapidly disappearing. Men can now demonstrate sophisticated dancing styles with expertise and pleasure without inviting criticism or disdain from their male peers. Black (Afro-Caribbean) culture has done much to bring about this change, with the massive increase in dance technology ('ghetto-blasters’ and walkmen, hi-fi’s and sound systems, 12" singles and pop videos) and dance music style (funk, rap, disco, soul, lovers rock, and pop), advertising its appeal and facilitating its spread. Most new dance styles have come out of black youth culture, with men tending to take up the most spectacular gymnastic and acrobatic variations. Leroy, one of the main charac­ters in Fame, exemplifies this exactly. He started off as a rough street boy who loved to dance. Then, in true Hollywood style, he gradually became the school hero, a kind of hip head boy who will always see justice and goodness prevail. In his dancing, however, he displays a combination of sexy masculinity with controlled half-­balletic, half-gymnastic movements.

There are a few other more general points which can be made about the conventions surrounding dance culture at the present moment. The most important of these is the way in which dance can no longer be reduced simply to the level of promising or providing sexual opportunity. For girls and women it has always been an absorbing and pleasurable activity in its own right. And often, despite the pressures of romance, girls have been content quite simply to dance. The most important shift has been that men are now beginning to participate in dance in a less sexually frantic way; they too have taken up its narcissistic, auto-erotic dimensions, and its features which are predicated more on patterns of friendship than on its possibilities for sex or romance.

But even if it does not have to lead to romance, dance still affords the opportunity for fantasy. Like the cinema, the dancehall or disco offers a darkened space where the dancer can retain some degree of anonymity or absorption. This in turn creates a temporary blotting-out of the self, a suspension of real, daylight consciousness and an aura of dream-like self-reflection. Where the cinema offers a one-way fantasy which is directed solely through the gaze of the spectator towards the screen, the fantasy of dancing is more social, more reciprocated. This is because it allows simultaneously a dramatic display of the self and the body, with an equally dramatic negation of the self and the body. This latter works through the whole structure of the dance-floor. The crowded mass of bodies, the insistent often trance· like disco rhythms and the possibility of being at once there and not there.

Dance evokes fantasy because it sets in motion a dual relationship projecting both internally towards the self and externally towards, the 'other'; which is to say that dance as a leisure activity connects desires for the self with those for somebody else. It articulates adolescence and girlhood with femininity and female sexuality and it does this by and through the body. This is especially important because it is the one pleasurable arena where women have some control and know what is going on in relation to physical sensuality and to their own bodies. Continually bombarded with images and with information about how they should be and how they should feel, dance offers an escape, a positive and vibrant sexual ex­pressiveness and a point of connection with the other pleasures of femininity like gelling dressed up or putting on make-up. But how exactly does fantasy function amidst the semi-darkened space, the mirrors, corners, music and alcohol?... (I should add that since my sources are predominately heterosexual these fantasy scenarios make no claim to represent gay or lesbian experience).

The first is possibly the most obvious and relates to the absence or presence of the object of desire. The presence is awaited, antici­pated, and then acted upon through the use of mirrors, the positioning of the body within his gaze. This allows the dancer to have one partner in fact and another in fantasy. His absence too can generate fantasy-structures based round loss, around what might have been, and of course around a possible future presence, and thus with what it might still be like. Equally, concrete loss of this object of desire can precipitate the fantasy around suffering and pain so familiar in the pages of Jackie. To see him disappear with somebody else! To catch him in an embrace with someone else! To be left alone, to dissolve in tears! And then slowly to plan - to get him back, to find somebody else, to play hard to get, or simply to wait!

It is in terms of these small theatrical tableaux that so much of women’s culture can be made sense of. The last dance, the waltz, dance as memory, dance as sexual expression. Like all fantasies, dance signifies in these contexts as something to be lingered on, referred back to repetitively and imagined as future pleasure. This means remembering precisely minute details or dress and appearance, another seemingly trivial, but nevertheless stubborn and recurrent feature of women's experience. Dance and the excite­ment of going out dancing, retains a special place in the female memory for the very reason of its dispersed, fluid and often ambiguous pleasure.

This is particularly the case for working-class women for whom getting married, settling down and having children marks such a decisive break in their patterns of leisure. Many of the young working-class mothers interviewed by Dorothy Hobson recalled with nostalgia and more than just a hint of regret the days when they were able to go out dancing whenever they felt like it (Hobson, 1978). What they said had a particular poignancy because as married women their desire to go out occasionally to a disco was inevitably destined to be misconstrued by their husbands as a desire to go out on the town with the idea of picking someone up. Neither did the husbands welcome the notion of their wives being the object of other men's gaze.

From getting down to getting home

While the private aspects of dance, the self absorption and the fantasy might have a special place in the rituals of dance culture, it would be quite wrong to pay less than equal attention to its more explicitly social dimensions. And the observations I offer here focus on precisely those more material and concrete actions which characterise dance. Generally I am restricting these comments so that they refer, not to all kinds of discos, but rather to two fairly typical 'scenes'. These are 'respectable' city discos frequented by young single people usually under twenty-five-years-old and for whom Saturday night dancing, though extremely pleasurable in its own right, is still nevertheless a stop-gap between youth and settling down. My other area of interest is what could be described as the subcultural alternative. Here I argue that what this 'scene' offers is a suspension of categories, there is not such a rigid demarcation along age, class, ethnic terms. Gender is blurred and sexual preference less homogenously heterosexual, but I'll expand on this later.

There are a number of features which recurred so frequently during the time I was researching these mainstream discos that they seem worthy of comment. The first of these hinged around the problem of how to combine the enjoyment of dancing with the real prospect of romance, and two features here seemed to take on a special significance. These were the maintenance of some notion of 'respectability', and the minimising of the danger of sexual violence. Each of these were grounded in a real fear of assault by a stranger (i.e. a dance partner) on the way home from the disco and this fear resulted in a set of codes relating to 'getting home'. Basically this meant not accepting the offer of being 'seen home' by someone unknown, no matter how 'juicy' he was. In the discos I visited it was customary instead to suggest a mid-week date as though to prove his 'real' rather than fleeting interest. This was a practice adhered to by the majority of girls attending city discos regularly. To ignore this code or to break the rules not only put oneself at risk but also the other girl or best friend who would have to find her way home herself. This was seen as a kind of betrayal of trust and could result in the end of a friendship. Indeed, the city late at night, and the lonely suburban streets held great fears for these respectable girls and also for their parents who would frequently give them the taxi fare home rather than have them walk the streets. Even then the evening frequently ended with one girl 'stopping over' with her friends. In every way this meant that a Saturday night's dancing was more expensive and more perilous than it was for their male peers. And whilst in one sense their mothers' advice about taking care and not accepting a lift home in a strange young man's car is an excellent example of feminine good-sense, often its other side was offered implicitly as a solution and was actively advocated as such by the mother. This was simply to find a reliable steady boyfriend whose company would make unnecessary these costly and time-consuming practices. And such a partnership would also mark the end of dangerous jaunts into the city centre dancehalls. But these mothers too regretted the loss of their own dancing days, and so their advice was also tinged with sadness, and offered, if not reluctantly, with some cynicism.

Still, if in contrast to the fun and excitement of the earlier part of the evening, these difficulties seemed more like a headache, they certainly were not sufficient to keep anybody at home. Apart from the dancing itself, these straighter, more ‘respectable' discos provided a forum for a number of other games and rituals. Many of these were played by the girls at the expense of the boys. First they would set out to chat up a couple of lads and get them to buy, or 'con' them into buying, a round of drinks, then disappear rapidly with the gin and tonics, into the ladies. Some minutes later they would slink off in the opposite direction. The next strategy was a little more demanding. Here two friends would pretend that they were French and working as au pairs in Birmingham to improve their English. This allowed them the pleasure of masquerade; their temporary identities as French or Spanish returned them to the narratives of schoolgirl fiction where the 'Mam'zelle' was allowed to be extravagant and extrovert in all kinds of ways. These games also entertained a fantasy of travel and a desire for something else, somewhere else. And following this it is not surprising that the other favoured fantasy was to pretend to be either a model or an actress, or to be terribly 'posh', living in a large house in Sutton Coldfield with horses and a swimming pool.

In subcultural, or more specifically, punk discos, the rules were quite different. Ideas of being cool and of being seen 'posing' were internalised to the point of becoming automatic response. Yet strangely this was balanced out by the girls in fact being allowed to act much more extravagantly without being penalised. Thus where respectable girls fearful of losing their reputation or of losing their way home would restrict their alcohol to a couple of drinks early in the evening, punk girls would frequently go out with the objective of 'getting smashed'. In every way they were more fearless than their straighter peers. Less time would be spent here on traditionally 'chatting up' boys and more emphasis was placed on dancing, drinking or simply hanging around talking. Frequently there would be, in discos like these, large groups of people who all knew each other. This minimised the problem of getting home, and anyway having chosen to take up a subcultural identity implicitly meant also being deviant enough to gladly wander through the streets at all hours, drunk or sober, in groups or in pairs; as though to be punk was to refuse to be intimidated into submissive femininity. This did not make dancing unromantic or lacking in fantasy. It is more that the nature of fantasy was displaced into all those precious gestures of sub-cultural lifestyle: into style (wearing the right clothes at the right moment); into the pleasure of being illicit or deviant, or at least of entertaining this self-image; into dancing in the right way to the right kind of music.

Punk, new wave or 'alternative' clubs do not preclude the idea of romance. It could even be argued that the 'alternative' dance circuits are more romantic, certainly more utopian, than their more respectable equivalents. This stems from the core desire at the heart of the subcultural discourse, that it will not stop. It may get boring but nonetheless the choice has been made and the associated lifestyle has become rooted. It is not that subcultures seek to prolong adolescence or singleness but rather that they seek to overturn the relations marking out singleness as a short period of excitement before real life, hard work and settling down sets in. Which is to say that what a subculture like punk expresses is a breaking with such normative definitions and expectations altogether. This has a definite effect on the aura of the 'alternative' or punk disco. It takes out all the edge, the slightly desperate quality which Mungham (1976) describes in his study. Gender in his Mecca halls is tantamount, where in The Tincan, The Duma, The Hacienda, The Camden Palace, or wherever, it is either parodied through perversity, taking up the earlier shock effects of punk and parading them (as in leather-night at The Batcave or The Mudd Club), or else it is simply subordinated to the music. One way or another it is nothing to get frantic about - class, race, and sexual preference are all at once there but not there. Punk might be risky. it might represent a stepping out of line, but on the dance floor and on the road home it inoculates the girls both against some danger by giving them a sense of confidence, and against the excesses of sexual discrimination by giving them a lifestyle which adamantly refuses the strictures of traditional femininity.

Photo from The Batcave (early London goth club in Meard Street, Soho, opened 1982)