'The dust came first. Donald Maitland noticed it as he rode back in the taxi from London Airport, after waiting a fruitless forty-eight hours for his Pan-America flight to Montreal. For three days not a single aircraft had got off the ground... The great passenger terminus building and the clutter of steel huts behind it were clogged with thousands of prospective passengers, slumped on their baggage in long straggling queues, trying to make sense of the continuous crossfire of announcements and counter-announcements' .
The opening passage of JG Ballard' s The Wind from Nowhere put me in my mind of the recent grounding of aircraft as a result of the dust cloud from a volcano in Iceland. In this novel, the problem is a terrible, accelerating wind that sweeps across the whole world, ultimately levelling most of the built environment while the survivors cower underground.
This was Ballard's first novel, published in 1962 (I have been reading the Penguin edition, pictured, first published in 1967). He later disowned it as 'hack work', but there are some familiar Ballardian themes - chiefly his evident pleasure in describing the collapse of civilisation. For instance, in the chapter 'Vortex over London': 'Nelson's Column was down. Two weeks earlier, when the wind had reached ninety-five mph, a crack which had passed unnoticed for seventy-five years suddenly revealed itself a third of the way up the shaft. The next day the upper section had toppled, the shattered cylindrical segments still lying where they had fallen among the four bronze lions... As they turned into Charing Cross Road Marshall noted that the Garrick Theatre had collapsed' etc.etc.
New York gets it too: 'Apparently New York is a total write-off. Manhattan's under hundred-foot waves, most of the big skyscrapers and office blocks are down. Empire State Building toppled like a falling chimney stack. Same story everywhere else. Casualty lists in the millions. Paris, Berlin, Rome - nothing but rubble, people hanging on in cellars'.
How much do the origins of music owe to cattle? I was prompted to think about this when reading 'The Storr: unfolding landscape' (edited by Angus Farquhar) a book documenting an ambitious 2005 public art project staged on the Storr mountain on the Isle of Skye by nva (a group with their origins in Test Department).
The event seems to have involved a nightwalk around the mountain with various light and sound happenings - seemingly including the sounds of ancient horns. Hence the book includes an essay by ancient musical instrument expert John Purser, Paths of our Ancestors, which discusses their significance:
'there were much older instruments belonging to the peoples who herded cattle in Ireland and Scotland - the beautiful curved bronze horns from the Bronze Age itself, of which many still survive. The orginals - some still playable - are derived in form from the horns of cattle and can reproduce the sounds of cattle among other things. They date from three millennia ago and, with their accompanying rattles shaped like a bull's scrotum, they carry with them a fertile memory of a great herding culture...
Besides being able to imitate the sounds of cattle, bronze horns can also convey a sense of fear or of magic - sounds which relate to the mythology of the cattle, in to which much that is magical is woven. That deeper sound world which is shared by all living things, in which the sounds of warning, or enticement and allure, have some strange commonality beyond analysis, will carry to you the sounds of our ancestors, human and animal, from deep in their throats. Listen in silence and you too may, in imagination, follow those paths where human and animal, reality and myth, meet without embarrassment in natural companionship'.
The notions of the horn section remains at the heart of soul and jazz, even if the instruments no longer resemble their animal ancestors. But the name itself is a reminder that some of the earliest musical instruments were made from cattle (from actual horns, and in the case of drums from the skin of cattle), partly in imitation of the sounds of these creatures. Later bagpipes too were made from animal skin, as well as the belly of some stringed instruments.
I was reminded of some of the primeval power of music last week, and indeed of Test Department, when I came across this lot in Glasgow's Buchanan Street. Clanadonia are self-styled 'Tribal Pipes and Drums band', and they do make a fearsome sound.
'Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them. The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations... which driver is not tempted, merely by the power of his engine, to wipe out the vermin of the street, pedestrians, children and cyclists? The movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment' (Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: reflections on a damaged life, 1951).
Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars
Here in my car
I can only receive
I can listen to you
It keeps me stable for days
In cars
(Gary Numan, Cars, 1979)
'I was in my car and a couple of men in a van swerved round me, pulled up in front, got out and were clearly going to give me a bit of a hammering, trying to get me out, kicking the car and screaming and shouting. I was pretty scared, locked all my doors and ended up driving on to the pavement 'cos I couldn't go anywhere, people obviously leaping out of the way because I was in a bit of a panic. Cars is just a about feeling safe in amongst people in a car, cos no one can get to you in your own little bubble' (Gary Numan, quoted in BBC documentary Synth Britannia (2009). The narrator described the song as 'part eulogy to JG Ballard and part tesimtony to living in 70 s London').
'The cars that fill the streets have narrowed the pavements, which are crowded with pedestrians. If they want to look at each other, they see cars in the background, if they want to look at the building across the street they see cars in the foreground; there isn't a single angle of view from which cars will not be visible, from the back, in front, on both sides. Their omnipresent noise corrodes every moment of contemplation like acid. Cars have made the former beauty of cities invisible'
Tibetan singer Tashi Dhondup is reportedly serving 15 months hard labour after being arrested by the Chinese authorities for his 'subversive' songs. According to Free Tibet: 'The 30-year-old had been hiding in Xining, Qinghai province, after the authorities had banned his music. Tashi Dhondup had also been arrested in 2008 after the release of his previous CD, and was released in February 2009.... The 30-year-old was reportedly arrested at gunpoint by four police officers in a restaurant in Xining as his wife held onto a police officer's leg in an attempt to prevent the arrest. Like many Tibetans in detention, there are fears for his welfare. Tashi Dhondup was born into a nomadic family in Sarlang, a town in Yungan county, Malho prefecture in Qinghai province. He had also been detained between September 2008, accused of releasing songs containing 'counter-revolutionary content'. His song 'The Year of 1959' was singled out as an example of this. He was beaten by police over a seven day period'.
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.
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.
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, IrationSteppas, Abashanti and JahTubbys.
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... chacha 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.
Is there a more obscene media spectacle at the moment than British newspapers like the Daily Express whipping up people to rally round BP (see for instance this front cover from June 11th)?. On the one hand, Obama is criticised for calling them British Petroleum when they have rebranded themselves as plain old multinational BP (British Polluters?); on the other we are told that the British Government should do more to defend them because of their importance to the British economy. It may be true that a collapse in BP's share price will hit pension funds, but that just highlights the absurdity of older people's incomes being at the mercy of the market lottery. Of course other oil companies are just as bad, and indeed governments all over the world, including Obama's, are deeply involved in their activities.
Shortly before the Gulf of Mexico explosion, there was a protest against another BP operation - the strip mining of a huge area of the Candadian wilderness in Alberta to extract oil. The International Day of Action on the Canadian Tar Sands on 10th April was marked in London with a 'Party at the Pumps' at Shepherds Bush Green BP Petrol Station. Using a tactic developed in the 1990s Reclaim the Streets parties to outwit the police, people gathered at Oxford Circus tube station, most of them unaware of the location of the protest. They followed a few people with flags on to a train, who signalled with a whistle blast at Shepherds Bush station that it was time to get off. Meanwhile an advance party had occupied the petrol station forecourt.
More than a hundred of people took part in the four hour long 'Party at the Pumps', dancing to live music from the Rhythms of Resistance samba band, the Green Kite Midnight ceilidh band and the Bicycology sound system
Meanwhile, in Casanare, Colombia, workers have been occupying a BP plant in a wages dispute. According to the Colombia Solidarity Campaign (6 June 2010):
'There has been an upsurge in workers and community protests against BP in Casanare since the beginning of 2010. Workers at the Tauramena Central Processing Facility (CPF) starting 22 January went in strike supported by USO, the National Oil Workers Union of Colombia. On 15 February riot police brutally attacked the picket line, sending three workers to hospital. Demonstrations and popular assemblies in support of the stoppage took place in Tauramena and surrounding villages from February onwards. The USO union and many different community sectors came together to form the Movement for the Dignity of Casanare. The strike ended after 30 days when BP promised talks...
On 21 May workers involved in construction operations in the Tauramena installation entered into occupation demanding: a wage increase; the establishment a wage scale; due process in disciplinary decisions; and labour guarantees for the workers. On 2 June army forces entered the plant and at time of writing are harassing the workers, who stay overnight chaining themselves to plant equipment so that they cannot be dislodged'.
In the past activists opposing BP in Colombia, whether on environmental or workplace issues, have been killed by right wing death squads.
BP started out as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in 1909, after oil was discovered in Iran. It was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1935 with the British Government taking a controlling interest, and the British Petroleum Company in 1954. It notoriously played a role in the 1953 military coup which overthrew the MohammedMossadegh as Prime Minister after his government voted to nationalise AIOC. As Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, summarised in a recent interview : 'the oil that fueled England all during the 1920s and '30s and ’40s all came from Iran.... Every factory in England, every car, every truck, every taxi was running on oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which was projecting British power all over the world, was fueled a hundred percent by oil from Iran'.
All over the world, pubs and bars are full of people watching the World Cup, drinking, singing, celebrating, commiserating. On this particular day I would like to remember some people who went out to do the same during a previous competition and never came home.
On 18 June 1994, people were watching Ireland play Italy in the Heights bar/O'Toole's, Loughinisland, a small village in County Down in the North of Ireland. Two masked gunmen from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force burst in and opened fire, killing six men: Eamon Byrne (aged 39), Barney Green (87), Malcolm Jenkinson (53), Daniel McCreanor (59), Patrick O Hare (35) and Adrian Rogan (34). Five others were injured:
"It was in the second half of the match about 10.20 pm and Ireland were leading 1-0 when the two UVF assassins entered the small bar. There was one available entrance and exit and having effectively trapped their victims inside, two members of the death squad started to fire their automatic weapons. Survivors recounted how the masked UVF men moved from one person to another shooting each between two and five times before running out of ammunition. More than 30 shots were fired from the two assault rifles with almost every bullet striking someone at point blank range... On leaving the bar, one of the UVF death squad was heard by one of he survivors shouting 'Well done boys, good job'" (An Phoblact/Republican News, 23 June 1994).
I am still digesting the rich fare served up by GayatriChakravortySpivak and Fred Moten at last week's Black Skin, White Marx? event at Goldsmiths in New Cross, with ingredients including Gramsci, Adorno, Kant, Marx, CLR James, Huey Newton, Orlando Patterson and Frank B. Wilderson. One thing that stuck in my mind was a quote from Du Bois which Spivak mentioned, and which I have subsequently tracked down in full:
'the immediate problem of the Negro was the question of securing existence, of labor and income, of food and home, of spiritual independence and democratic control of the industrial process. It would not do to concenter all effort on economic well-being and forget freedom and manhood and equality. Rather Negroes must live and eat and strive, and still hold unfaltering commerce with the stars' (Dusk of dawn: an essay toward an autobiography of a race concept by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, 1940).
I have no reason to think that Du Bois was really thinking about space travel here, but the linking of a project of emancipation to a sense of the cosmic prefigures the Afro-futurist myths of Sun Ra and George Clinton that I have discussed here previously in the context of the Disconaut Association of Autonomous Astronauts.
A contemporary example of this is the work of Flying Lotus, bringing a post-hip hop sensibility to the cosmology elaborated by his aunt Alice Coltrane among others. From his latest album Cosmogramma, here's Galaxy In Janaki:
The title clearly references Alice Coltrane's track Galaxy in Turiya, from the 1973 album Reflections on Creation and Space (Turiya is a Hindu term for the experience of pure consciousness; Janaki is a name for the Hindu Goddess Sita).
Of the latter's work KodwoEshun wrote: 'Jazz becomes an amplified zodiac, an energy generator that lines you up in a stellar trichotomy of human, sound and starsign. Alice Coltrane and [Pharoah] Sanders are playing in the rhythm of the universe according to star constellations transposed into rhythms and intervals... Astro jazz becomes a sunship upon which the composer-starsailor travels' (More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, 1998) .
In the past couple of years there have been several albums aiming in some way to reflect on life in early 21st century London. Think The Bug's London Zoo or NitinSawney's London Underground (both 2008) or even, on a more historical tip, Madness's The Liberty of Norton Folgate (2009).
Dusk and Blackdown's Margins Music is very much in that lineage. As Martin Clark/Blackdown told Woofahmagazine: 'We pretty much noticed that all the music we liked from the city, from UK garage to jungle/d&b, to dubstep and grime, came from the rougher edges not the safe centre'. With this in mind, the album explores particular sonic territories associated with specific zones of the capital, from the East/North East London grime heartland to 'Croydon, Streatham, Norwood and Norbury: the places where dubstep was born'. But of course margins refers not just to geographical areas, but to socially marginalized people and spaces, 'strange hidden studios, night buses, deserted overland stations, squat parties, council estates, Iranian corner shops, Bollywood tape shops' (Woofah #3, 2008).
Although the album was released in 2008, it feels like a project in progress. Starting out with a series of 12" single releases in the second half of the noughties, followed by the album, then a remix album by Grievous Angel, they are now taking it several steps further with live performance.
I went along to their first night last Saturday at the Albany in Deptford. Must admit I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I tend to be sceptical of attempts to render electronic music as live performance - sometimes just a guy standing on a stage behind a laptop in which case you think 'why bother?', sometimes a horrendous jazzification whereby perfectly good samples are reproduced by live musicians suggesting a crisis of confidence, as if 'authenticity' requires 'real musicians' noodling away.
But for this show, Dusk and Blackdown got the balance just right. Not cluttering the stage with lots of musos, but foregrounding the live elements that really added something, in this case the voices of Farrah and Japjit, and live percussion from Renu (plus Dusk and Blackdownthemeselves and keyboard player Bobbie). Another key ingredient was the visuals masterminded by Jonathan Howells - a mix of old London newsreel (some great shots of women dancing), Bollywood and contemporary urban shots of lots of the capital's postcodes.
What makes Margins Music particularly ambitious is its recognition of the South Asian musical influence in the great London soundclash. With everything else that is in Dust and Blackdown's mix, this could easily result in a kind of tepid fusionism. But they are sufficiently grounded in London bass and beats (DJing on Rinse FM etc.) to be able to bring in these desi flavours without creating a bland mish mash.
To create a sonic space in a studio in which disparate social, musical and cultural elements are brought into play is one thing. To create a physical space in which people with different backgrounds and experiences come together in a single continuous performance is much harder. Margins Music Live managed to pull this off, with the South Asian themed opening shifting into Trim's grime verbal gymnastics towards the end.
It was a respectable crowd for a first live performance, but a bigger audience and the increased confidence of having a glitch free debut behind them could lift Margins Music Live from really good to another level. So if you get the chance, check this out with gigs this week in Brighton and Manchester and follow ups in Reading and Kendal. Details here.
A while ago I went to a talk by the great radical historian Peter Linebaugh on 'The Invisibility of the Commons' . In the course of it he compared the two 19th century songs, John Henry and General Ludd's Triumph, as reflecting two approaches to work - suggesting that maybe one had historically been more typical of the US working class and the other of the working class in England.
In the former American song, the railway bosses' introduction of a steam-powered hammer to replace human labour is viewed as a challenge by Henry the 'steel drivin' man', who works hard to demonstrate his superior power even at the cost of his own life - he beats the hammer only to die as a result. An assertion of the dignity of labour at one level, but also a willingness to compete with mechanisation by voluntarily intensifying work:
John Henry told his captain Lord a man ain't nothing but a man But before I'd let your steam drill beat me down I'd die with a hammer in my hand
Here's Mississippi Fred McDowell's version:
In the latter English song about the Luddite movement, the introduction of machinery in the cotton industry is responded to not by workers working themselves to death, but by them sentencing the machines to death through sabotage:
Those engines of mischief were sentenced to die By unanimous vote of the trade, And Ludd who can all opposition defy Was the grand executioner made.
And when in the work he destruction employs, Himself to no method confines; By fire and by water he gets them destroyed, For the elements aid his designs.
Here's a version by The Fucking Buckaroos (personally I prefer the version by Chumbawamba, but it's not on youtube):
Admittedly, on the basis of these versions, John Henry is a better song, even if it's not a better strategy...
'Dancing, when poor human Nature lets itself loose from bondage and
circumstances of anxious selfish care: it is Madness'
Image: Untitled (Dancing Madness) painted in the 1970s by the Egyptian artist Hamed Nada (1924-1990); quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge - he wrote these words in his notebook in 1804 during a trip to Sicily, where he had been watching (and possibly dancing with) the young opera singer Anna-Cecilia Bertozzi at public balls - they may have had an affair (source: Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1998)
Looking through some pictures I realized that I never got round to posting on my trip to Rome last year to take part in Electrode09 - Independent Electronic Music Festival. As it was one of the highlights for me of the last year, I do want to document it. So hot off the press and nearly a year late (it took place on 12-13 June 2009) here's my report.
(flyer - click to enlarge).
The venue was the very impressive Forte Prenestino Occupied Social Centre, a former military base left abandoned until it was squatted in 1986 (bit of history here). It's a huge site, with two big outdoor arenas, and lots of rooms coming off various tunnels seemingly built into a hillside. The food and drink were excellent - unlike in any squat I have been to in in the UK, there was a selection of very nice wine! (in fact the venue has hosted whole Critical Wine events).
The scene before the party started:
My contribution was to take part in a panel of Datacide magazine contributors talking on aspects of 'CulturaElettronica e Controcultura', based on the similar event held in Berlin in Autumn 2008. As usual at these kinds of events, most people don't turn up until late for the music so it was a more select audience for the talks, but still worth doing. Christoph Fringeli talked on Hedonism and Revolution, Hans Christian Psaar on Kindertotenlieder for rave culture, and Alexis Wolton on Tortuga towerblocks: pirate signals in the 90s (yes, the Nightingale Estate in Hackney was mentioned in the city of the Tiber). My talk developed ideas from my article on dance music history I wrote for Datacide, but looking more specifically at the Hardcore Continuum debate and some its deeper historical roots (will post the talk sometime).
The music was mainly on a techno/minimal tip, it was OK but for my taste there were too many live sets consisting of a bloke fiddling around with a lap top and twiddling nobs, though Antipop Consortium at least had some presence. Personally unless there's something to see or the music's really good, I would generally rather have a no nonsense DJ set.
We were reliably informed by our London in exile translator that there was another squat where happy hardcore was to be had, and she was about to promote Rome's first UK Funky night. As it was, the only bit of that which got aired over the weekend was when I played a bit of Perempay with Maxwell D from the stage, in order to illustrate the convergence of reggae MC, soca and disco/house strands with their respective social histories of carnival and contestation. Or something.
Anyway I had a dance obviously, seem to remember bouncing up and down to some Thomas Heckmann.
Electrode2010 is taking place soon at the same venue (June 11-12), so if you're in that part of the world you might want to check it out.
The movement against the M11 linkroad in Leytonstone (or Leytonstonia as we termed it then), North East London, was one of the more inspiring struggles of the mid-1990s. In particular, Claremont Road was squatted and turned into a protest site for the best part of a year before being evicted by the police in 1994's 'Operation Garden Party' The street was demolished, but like at Newbury in the same period the defeat of the immediate movement was also some kind of victory - by increasing the costs of road building these struggles led to other road projects being shelved.
The Channel One TV programme below from 1994 includes the classic line: 'Claremont Road was notorious among locals for its psychedelia, squatters and new age travellers. But everyone living in this time warped street of the 60s knew the rave had to end sometime'.
There was a strong overlap between this scene and the free party scene - both united in the movement against the Criminal Justice Act which criminalised raves and protest. I remember, for instance, people from Claremont Rd showing a film at Megatripolis, the techno/trance club at Heaven.
The 'Just Say No' flyer reproduced here (click to enlarge) is from a benefit party I went to for the M11 campaign held on 2 April 1994 at Arch 21, Valentia Place, Brixton (one of the railway arches between Loughborough junction and Brixton). The party was put on by Sunnyside 'with the boundless co-operation of the conscious club'. Some good dancing I recall and good conversation. As a bit of a househead I was always quite glad to go to a free party where the music was a bit broader than just acid-tekno, much as I loved some of that too.
The flyer includes the words 'the eco-consciousness is rising, carry the vision out into the mainstream of society, keep it sweet, keep it right, remember this is a peaceful fight'. This alludes to the bitter arguments in the anti-CJA/roads movement at that time between the 'fluffy' pacifist faction and the 'spikey' riotous faction. Up until this point I had been politically inclined to the the 'spikey' side, but despite rejecting the absolute pacifism of some 'fluffies' I came to appreciate that tactically they were sometimes achieving more than those 'spikies' who seemed to want to kick off a confrontation at every opportunity regardless of the terrain, balance of forces or risks for those around them. Anyway there were some lovely people in the anti-roads movement (as well as some casualties), and nobody can say that they didn't have a go. Some dark times ahead perhaps, so learn the lessons well.
Courtesy of Pops (Sentinel Design) and Wayne Anthony, some classic acid house footage from July 1989. It starts off with a Biology rave in Watford, but after about 3:15 minutes the action switches to Clapham Common with people dancing in the sunlight.
The Common was the scene of a few parties in this period. Test Pressing has reproduced Whose Smiley Now? an article about it from The Face (August 1982), written by Sheryl Garratt:
"'Mental, Mental, Let's go fucking mental!' There were stories last year of people dancing to police sirens, traffic noises, anything to stretch the Summer of Love out a little longer, but never before have I seen people dancing to a generator. It started when a sound system was set up on Clapham Common on the Sunday morning after a Saturday all-nighter, the party simply carrying on in the middle of this South London park. Word spread, and the following week clubbers truned up for a repeat performance. 1,000 people danced their Sunday away on the grass while police took souvenir snapshots from nearby buildings.
When the same thing happened one week later the police took a more active part and refused to allow the sound van onto the common... Towards the end of the afternoon the heroes of the day arrived. These were the people shouldering a hired generator and a home stereo, bringing much of the crowd to its feet in anticipation. The generator all but drowned out the music, but the chants were loud, the atmosphere hot, and with a few hundred people packed protectively around the sound source, the police retreated, with a hail of bottles and cans following amiably in their wake. Surprizingly (but given that no-one was doing any real harm, sensibly), they didn't return. 'It's only a matter of time' said one obvserver with relish, 'before there's a riot'."
I wasn't at these 1989 parties, but I was on Clapham Common on Sunday April 30th 1995 when a 3,000 strong march against the Criminal Justice Act ended up there. There was a May Day festival in progress there with bands and marquees, but neither the police nor the festival organisers (the GMB union) were keen to allow the United Systems anti-CJA rig on to the Common. It pulled up alongside the park, and we danced on the grass. I came across some photos from that day by David Minuk, an American visiting London at the time:
The precise details of what's going on in the Tivoli Gardens area of Kingston, Jamaica are still unclear. But it is already established that at least 44 civilians have died in a massive police/army operation to arrest alleged gangster Christopher "Dudus" Coke. Doubtless some of the dead are unofficial soldiers in some gang or other; doubtless too many are entirely innocent. Meanwhile residents of the area are trapped in their homes, some without food, water or medical care.
In the poverty-stricken parts of Jamaica off the tourist trail, people have long since been caught up in the crossfire between the interlocking miltia of the 'security' forces, gangsters, and the main political parties. In May 1997 for instance, three women and a six year old child were shot dead by state forces in Tivoli Gardens (see Amnesty International report). In July 2001, at least 20 people died there in a similar operation.
Tivoli Gardens has an important place in musical history. Aside from its role in reggae and dancehall (including the weekly Passa Passa street parties), it gave its name to a whole genre of UK drum and bass: 'The term "jungle" first emerged on a Rebel MC sample in 1991. This terms is associated with an area of Kingston, Jamaica, called Tivoli Gardens, known as "the Jungle" and frequently cited in"yard tapes" (Les Back, New ethnicities and urban culture: racisms and multiculture in young lives, 1996).
Here's a couple of old classics, sadly still relevant.
From 1978: U Roy - Peace & Love in the Ghetto:
From 1976: Junior Murvin - Police and Thieves ('in the street, scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition').
Went to an event at the 195 Mare Street squatted social centre in Hackney last weekend. Very interesting film and short talk from someone involved in Gurgaon Workers News about workers struggles in the Gurgaon Special Economic Zone in India.
The building itself was quite impressive, a spacious but run down Georgian mansion that was most recently the New Lansdowne Club (a working men's social club I believe). The party after the talk didn't really get going while I was there, some interesting chat notwithstanding. But I did get to hear this great reggae track:
I'd like to dedicate this to the memory of Romano Alquati, who died last month at the age of 75. Despite very little of his work being translated into English (as far I can find), Alquatti was very influential, through his involvement in Italy with Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) and Classe Operaia (Working Class), in formulating notions of workers autonomy, class composition and workers inquiry which were central to the development of Operaismo, a Marxist current stressing self-organisation and working class power as a motor of social development.
In my street in New Cross last week, somebody left a pile of books outside for passers-by to help themselves to. So it came to pass that over the weekend I got round to reading Kathy Acker's 1988 novel Empire of the Senseless a mere 20 odd years after it came out (though I did read her Blood and Guts in High School back in the day).
The novel is set in an alternative then-present; Reagan is US president but life is the worst aspects of that time intensified. In scenes in New York and Paris (among other places), we are shown a world of despair, addiction, disgust and violence. It is a dystopia without redemption -the interpersonal relations between characters are marked by abuse, rape and loathing. The best that its main protagonist Abhor (half woman/half robot) can achieve by the end is this realization: 'I didn't as yet know what I wanted. I now fully knew what I didn't want and what and whom I hated. That was something'.
Class war is taken for granted - at one point she describes the use of sonic weapons to kill the poor:
'In the white noise the cops arrived so that they could kill everybody. Round revolving cars emitted sonar waves. Certain sonar vibrations blinded those not in cars; other levels numbing effectively chopped off limbs; other levels caused blood to spurt out of the mouths nostrils and eyes. The buildings were pink... The cops' faces, as they killed off the poor people, as they were supposed to, were masks of human beings. And the faces of the politicians are death'.
The promises of liberty and democracy are mocked:
'New York City, my home, Liberty... Liberty, shit. The liberty to starve. The liberty to speak words to which no one listens. The liberty to get diseases no doctor treats or can cure. The liberty to live in conditions cockroaches wouldn't touch except to die in'.
And:
'These days the principal economic flow of power takes place through black-market armament and drug exchange. The trading arena, the market, is my blood. My body is open to all people: this is democratic capitalism'.
Still, it is a class war without hopeful outcome - in Paris the impoverished and oppressed Algerians stage a successful revolution, but nothing much changes, the cops still think they rule the streets.
At one point Acker seems to describe her method - an attempt to move beyond the language cut ups that she employed in her earlier work to a strategy of transgression:
'That part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let's call our 'unconscious' Since it's free of control, it's our only defence against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement, prison.
Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language which normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.
What is the language of the 'unconscious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: pretend it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus, an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of a language or languages which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes'.
Twenty years after this, transgression as radical strategy seems equally exhausted. Yesterday's taboos are all over the internet and the TV. Still there's no doubt that Kathy Acker's premature death in 1997 silenced a powerful and radical voice.
Kathy Acker (1947-1997)
- she dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist
At 240 Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park in North London there is currently a semi derelict pub. Before it closed it was known as the George Robey (and before that The Clarence Tavern) and was for many years an important music venue, particularly known for punk gigs. You can even download a 1983 set recorded a the pub by anarcho-punk band Omega Tribe at the excellent Kill Your Puppy.
Club wise it was probably best known for Club Dog, which brought the free festival/squatter spirit indoors from the mid-1980s and became one of the first places where that scene, with its psychedelic and world music vibe, began to cross over with the emerging rave scene. In 1996 the pub briefly became the Powerhaus, part of the Mean Fiddler group, and then closed down.
My main memories of the place are of a club called The Far Side, which I went to a few times in 1994/5. It was one of those places where DJs and sound systems from the squat/free party scene played, like the Liberator DJs . I've just scanned in a couple of spacey flyers which give a feel for it -'Get over to the Far Side - revel without a pause - spinning trippy trancey techno, delightfully deep house and pleasurable progressive for your entertainment'. The flyer for September 1994 (below) also has the topical Fight the Criminal Justice Bill slogan at the bottom.
September 1994 flyer
Frankly my memories of all the places I went to at that time tend to blur a little, but I do recall some great music and searching for a bagel round Finsbury Park before getting the first train back to Brixton the next morning.
Some good stuff in comments, particularly liked this one: 'I played there a few times, twice with a band called Spirithouse and then as a live electronic techno/house duo supporting the Mad Professor at the Club Dog 6th Birthday bash. The Robey was the nearest venue to us on Green Lanes, we'd walk across Finsbury Park, drop some acid, neck two cans of brew and show our UB40s for discount entry. We got to know Bob and Mike and blagged a gig and got paid £50. TBH we would have probably paid that to play there!' Flyer for said night below (1992 I think).
Thirty years ago this week... Ian Curtis, 15 July 1956 – 18 May 1980. An industry of Manchester retro-mania and Killers cover versions still can't numb how radical Joy Division sound even today. Here's the famous 1978 first TV appearance, introduced by Tony Wilson.
'To the centre of the city, where all roads meet, waiting for you'
Love this story... a protest for better conditions for San Francisco hotel workers (including healthcare), featuring a flashmob in a hotel lobby performing a version of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance (retitled Bad Hotel) accompanied by the Brass Liberation Orchestra.
According to San Francisco Indymedia, on Saturday May 8th 2010, 'many LGBTQ folks held a picket and protest in San Francisco's Union Square, and the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, to show solidarity for the hotel workers who have been forced to work without a contract since August 2009. The protest, which featured music and dancing, also is calling for a boycott of the hotels that have failed to give their workers equal opportunity... San Francisco's annual Gay pride is approaching and many queers stay in hotels when they visit, so the local GLBTQ community is asking them to join the boycott, so workers can be treated fairly and equally in San Francisco. There are also a few GLBTQ folks who work for those hotels or corporations. So if, or when you come to San Francisco don't want to get caught in a bad hotel. The protest was sponsored and held by' "One Struggle One Fight" and SF Pride at Work/HAVOQ'.
In our search for the origins of rave, we have previously looked at the revivalist and trad jazz scenes in London from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The 'ravers' of the later period were looked down on by the early mods, with their taste for cool, modern jazz and by jazz musicians like George Melly who mocked their dancing. So I was delighted to get a post recently from someone in that scene putting the alternative view. Here's Terry Monaghan's account:
'Just a quick note as someone who danced in the 1950s off and on the Aldermaston Marches - I'd like to defend the dancing against some of the derogatory descriptions by the likes of George Melly, who even in much later life would not tolerate dancers from distracting audiences while he was performing.
'Skip-jiving' (sometimes abbreviated to 'trad') during the second phase of the music was in fact quite skilled and far from clumsy. At the culmination of the 1961 Aldermaston March for example there was a massive trad band ball at the Lyceum Ballroom which is the first time I saw a dance floor pulse in time with the music. The collective feet all hitting it at the same time, and with the special force of skip jive that consisted of a steady skip step, resulted in the necessary stomp effect. I'd never seen a floor move up and down a good two inches before. It was funny seeing the regular teds standing on the sidelines utterly amazed at this variety of unkempt enthusiasts pounding away so enthusiastically.
The 'out of time' jibe comes in my opinion from musicians who have difficulty in keeping a steady rhythm given their natural tendency to speed up, particular on the British scene where they seldom attached much importance to a reliable rhythm section. Thus while it was true at that Lyceum gig that the tempo's of the dancers and the musicians began to separate - depending on which band was playing, the fault in my opinion largely lay with the bands. Having had much more experience of this kind of thing in later life, and the ability to make comparisons with dancers and the musicians from Harlem's former Savoy Ballroom, it seems safe to suggest that a mass of dancers who are able to fall collectively into one rhythmic groove keep excellent time. Bands have to be attuned to respect this, and back then of course few of us had a clue about what we were really doing. The Lyceum was, and is, a very stable building, but in other locations the kinetic energy generated in this way physically collapsed ballrooms resulting in considerable death and injury tolls. No danger of that these days, everyone seems to be out of time with each other!
It seems to me that there is a parallel between what happened in this period with what happened with dance music in the early 1990s. Namely that one fraction embraced 'cool', 'sophistication' and 'intelligence' and looked down on the 'ravers' - but who had the best parties?
