Miners Strike: (4) Mansfield (5) Soul Deep

On Monday 14th May 1984 some of us from our Miners Support Group at Kent University went on the Kent miners' coaches up to Mansfield for a big demonstration. I remember Jack Collins, the Kent NUM leader and sometime Communist Party militant, was on our coach. Sadly he was to die from leukemia just a couple of years after the strike, in 1987. 

Despite being in Nottinghamshire, where many of the miners did not join the strike, there was a good atmosphere on the demonstration until right at the end when we were waiting to get on the coaches home. We were standing by an ice cream van when out of nowhere a police horse came charging along the pavement scattering people in all directions. Someone got knocked over and was lying on the ground - I am not sure they'd even been on the demonstration. A line of police on foot followed up behind and a big group of miners and supporters formed up to confront them. My friend Tracy got some amazed looks as one of the few women in the thick of it as she stood at the front taunting the police.  Soon bottles and bricks were flying, and the police charged. The buses back to Kent left soon afterwards but the clashes continued. 88 people were arrested, of whom 55 were charged, some with the serious offence of riot - though they were to be acquitted after a lengthy trial when cases came to court. The police claimed that 40 of their number were injured; there were certainly plenty of casualties on our side too.

 

Advert for the Mansfield demonstration in The Miner, 9.5.1984

The following account of Mansfield comes from Bobby Girvan, and was published in Raphael Samuel, Barbara Bloomfield and Guy Boanas (eds.), The Enemy Within: Pit villages and the Miners Strike of 1984-5 (London: Routledge, 1986): 

'I think it was 14 May, it was a sunny day and we went down to Mansfield and it was a lovely carnival atmosphere if you like, it was brilliant. The thing that got me, the television cameras were there, there were a few drinks and that and singing and that. Arthur Scargill come on. We were told to get back to the buses pretty early, cos the one driving the bus wanted to go. But the thing about it was that the camera started setting up when half the people had gone and we went walking up the road towards the bus and the bus had gone and we were sitting on a grass verge and then I seen something and I couldn't believe it cos I'd had a few drinks and it was like watching one of these science fiction movies, like a dark cloud coming over the place. You just saw the police coming out of the streets from every... you hadn't seen a policeman all day ... on horseback, they were just getting anybody. It was pandemonium!

And they were getting nearer and nearer to us and I thought, What's going to happen? Some of us went running down the road to see what the trouble was and I went to speak to this copper to see what were happening. One of them got me against the wall, another policeman grabbed him and asked him what were happening, and he says, oh he's all right this lad is. This copper went and stood with some of the women so they wouldn't get hit because they were just going mad. I see policemen get on buses, pulling people off, knocking hell out of them with sticks. As I went down the road I kept ducking and diving out of the way. I see a young schoolgirl coming round the corner with a satchel over her shoulder and a horse went flying by and knocked her flat. I went to pick her up and got kicked on the shoulder as a policeman were running past hitting people. And as I got up near the crowd there was people chucking stones and that.

I never felt so frightened or so angry in my life when I seen what I seen. You've got horses, then policemen, then people chucking bricks and from what I could see in the middle of it, three or four, probably six policemen kicking hell out of a youth of probably 17 or 18. He managed to stagger to his feet and his face was covered in blood and that and one of them ... it was like one of these African executions, he got his stick out about a yard long and whacked him across the face with it and the ambulance men was angry and was effing and blinding to the police and they had to put that young lad in an oxygen tank for about 20 minutes before they even moved him and I've never seen a sight like it. And I never thought I would pick up a brick in anger but that day I did. I was totally disgusted with what the police were doing. I'd heard things that they'd do. I'd seen one or two incidents on the picket line but never anything like that'

Here's another account left as a comment to this post:

'The police were itching for trouble and as the march and rally had been a good humoured peaceful day they were frustrated that they were given no reason to start any. Their frustration finally got the better of them outside the Dial pub in the market place. The police just started to wade into anyone drinking there (many were nothing to do with the Rally) knocking pint pots out of their hands then telling them to drink up as their drinks fell to the floor. This in turn caused angry words to be exchanged as tempers were raised. The ones who had attended the Rally started to walk back towards Chesterfield Road to get their buses home along with a few local striking miners. Some of the police were kicking peoples heels as they were walking along and trying to goad them. Just across the road from the Evans Halshaw garage on Chesterfield Road, the bait was taken, the crowd turned on their tormenters and a few police were attacked and knocked to the floor. This gave the police there the opportunity they wanted, and they steamed into anyone there, lashing out with their truncheons and cracking heads. But some of the marchers there, were made of sterner stuff and they stood their ground. A pitched battle then ensued with casualties on both sides. The fighting, in between short lulls must have gone on for an hour or more. Some of the local striking miners were still fighting running battles with the police a long time after the buses had left. The 55 charged with riot were acquitted, not one policeman was charged with any offence after all the brutality they had dished out'.

Mark W, one of those arrested, also left a comment:

 'I was one of the Mansfield 55, over twenty of us in a small cell in Hucknall police station, charged with riot and affray, yep I was worried, I did grab a police inspector around the neck because he had me mate by his neck, however as two coppers grabbed me i went quiet and spent over 48hrs locked up, i saw a lot of abuse of power over the 12 months. power to the people'.

'Battle in the Streets - rampaging miners and police fought a pitched battle in a busy street yesterday. Mothers with young children were caught up in the violence. Stones and bottles were hurled as police horses charged into the crowd...The flare-up in Mansfield, Notts, followed the biggest demonstration yet in support of the minder strike, now in its 10th week. The demo, which attracted more than 15,000 strikers passed off peacefully. But when the pubs shut two hours later, the violence began/... One police man lay unconscious on the lawns of a Baptist church. Fifty yards up the road one miner, Jim Edwards from Lanacashire, was stretchered out, also apparently badly hurt. His friend, Tom Keen, said: 'We were walking towards our coach when we were suddenly charged by a police horse. Jim was forced into the side of a bus and collapsed' (Daily Mirror, 15 May 1984).

From Socialist Worker report of Mansfield demo (19/5/1984): 

'On Monday a massive number of trade unionists marched through Mansfield in the heart of the Nottinghamshire coalfield. Miners from every coalfield in the country including Nottinghamshire were there… the ,arch ended with a rally at which Jack Taylor, Dennis Skinner and Arthur Scargill spoke. Arthur Scargill was wildly applauded when he said ‘Thatcher was successful in the Falklands but she will lose this battle’.

Under the heading 'police riot', Socialist Worker included a couple of eye witness accounts:

‘Groups of miners were standing around with the police trying to provoke them. Scuffles broke out and the police baton charged the miners, forcing them off the car park where they were waiting for their coaches. Mounted police drove some demonstrators half a mile down a road, lashing out at anyone who got in the way'

‘I saw coppers smash a guy against a coach. He fell to the ground and was jumped on by three policemen, crushing him. More police came round to prevent the crowd rescuing him but eventually they went because he was lying unconscious with the crowd shouting “you've killed him”'

The aftermath: police torture in Rainworth

On the evening of the Mansfield demonstration a group of Yorkshire miners were violently assaulted by police in the nearby mining village of Rainworth, as documented in the book 'State of Siege: Miners' strike 1984 - politics and policing in the coal fields' by Jim Coulter, Susan Miller and Martin Walker.

'Mansfield or its environs was a dangerous place to be if you were a Yorkshire miner on that evening. Squads of officers were out looking for blood to avenge any injuries which their comrades might have received in the fight. Twenty men from Frickley colliery in Yorkshire volunteered to stay in Nottinghamshire after the rally'.

Later that evening  some of the these miners left the Rainworth Miners' Institute Club and were walking down the road in the direction of the nearby Robin Hood pub when they were set upon by police as described in these accounts:

Miner One: 'Suddenly there was running and shouting and I thought some police officers were coming for me but they went for the man who was in front of me. They started pushing him one to the other and then threw him to the floor and then began jumping on him. I stood there shocked and stunned. I could only watch because this was the worst manifestation of evil I have ever witnessed; four or five police officers bullying a man and enjoying it. I have seen violence before but this was sheer sadism [...]

The next thing I knew was that the Inspector who I had spoken to outside the club came up to me and said to his rank of uniformed thugs, "We'll have this bastard next!' and also perhaps "Give him the special treatment". I remember two or three police officers coming up to me casually, grinning. They seized me and frog marched me to the rear of the transit van. They put me on the ground in a prone position, with my arms out in front of me, my hands handcuffed tightly. From then on began the most traumatic experience of my life. A truncheon was brought horizontally from the back over my head, in front of my eyebrows and across the bridge of my nose. My head and torso were the levered up from the ground with the truncheon. Some kind of foreign body was inserted into each nostril and stuffed up my nose with what I assumed to be a ball point pen. I think that the foreign body was paper of some kind; throughout my stay in the police station I was constantly picking largish crumbs of what I thought was dried blood or matter out of my nose. The truncheon was then placed under my nose and this was used as a levering point instead of the bridge of my nose. I was lowered back to the ground and my back was jumped on several times, rhythmically so that the air in my lungs evacuated explosively every time that my back was jumped on. This created the effect that my body was being used as a bellows. I remember thinking at the time, in a detached manner, how organised it was; not a bit spontaneous and that they must do this quite often, and must be confident of getting away with it. Finally my head was turned sideways to the ground and something soft like a cloth was put under it, then someone jumped on my head. I was then thrown bodily into the back of the transit and I believe that two other men were thrown in on  top of me. I couldn't breathe and I struggled to get out from under them'.

Miner Two: 'I was standing on my own on the pavement. One police officer ran at me, he came from the back of me and put his truncheon across my throat, holding it at both ends and pulled on it. I was pushed from behind across the road to a van. I was gasping for breath. I was thrown into a van on the floor with the truncheon still around my neck. I was face down on the floor and he had one knee in the small of my back. He said something like, "put your hands behind your back bastard". I did that and I was handcuffed. After I had been handcuffed and the officer had taken the truncheon from my neck he hit me hard with it twice, once on the right hip, once on the right shoulder.

 
Miner Three: 'The officers ran across the road, a number of them were holding truncheons. Two officers ran towards me; they held me by my arms and hair, one of them grabbed one of my legs. I struggled because I had done nothing wrong and I was being assaulted. As I was carried to one of the vans, halfway across the road, a third officer came up and hit me violently on the back of the head with a truncheon. My scalp was split by that blow and I began to bleed. I did not struggle after that. 

Another of the miners, aged 24, had just left the Robin Hood when he saw what was happening to his mates. He was next to be attacked: 'We were standing outside the chip shop eating when we saw the rest of our lads being attacked by three vans loads of police officers [...] I was eventually pushed on to a seat still handcuffed; the two PC's sat behind me and began swearing at me then nudging me. I stood up to try and move to the front of the van away from these two. One grabbed me by the hair and pulled me forward over the seat. I was then dragged out of the van and thrown to the floor. I was circled by officers who began kicking me on the body and one kicked me in the face. My lip was cut on my teeth when this happened and my left eye began swelling. I was very frightened and I began shouting at them to leave me alone. I was then picked up and dropped onto a metal fence round the edge of the pavement; one officer was pushing down on my neck and forcing me to lift my feet off the ground. This meant that all my weight was on my stomach across the fence and I couldn't breathe. One P.C. then pulled a sticker from my cardigan ('Support the miners. NUM Stop Pit Closures) and said, "What's this fucking rubbish"; he then folded the sticker up and pushed it  my left nostril and pushed his finger up my nose to push it further up. The two officers stood talking almost conversationally to each other and began kneeing me in the face in turn. After a while an Inspector came over and said, "'Has he quietened down yet?''

Needless to day it was the miners not the police who ended up being being charged with a variety of offences from Breach of the Peace to Assaulting a Police Officer. The book's authors noted 'Torture is the same the world over... Such organisation and method though needs training and these processes must have been practiced'.

'Mansfield 55: Up against the law' badge

Also from Socialist Worker - a debate about sexist slogans being chanted by some on the Mansfield demo:

(Socialist Worker, 9/6/1984)

[post updated 16/4/2023 with SW material, sourced from Splits and Fusions archive]

More Music of the Strike: The Council Collective - Soul Deep (click for Youtube)

Soul Deep was a 1984 benefit record for Women Against Pit Closures recorded by The Council Collective - essentially The Style Council (Paul Weller and Mick Talbot) plus friends including D.C. Lee, Dizzy Hites, Junior Giscombe, Vaughn Toulouse, Leonardo Chignoli and most remarkably former Motown singer Jimmy Ruffin, whose father had been a miner in the US.

The song starts 'Getcha mining soul deep with a lesson in history, There's people fighting for their communities, Don't say their struggle does not involve you, If you're from the working class it's your struggle too. Weller criticises the TUC, bemoaning 'as for solidarity I don't see none' before concluding with a stirring chant of 'Strike Back, Fight Back, Let's Change That, No Pit Stops, No Closures, We want the truth, we want exposure NOW!'

According to John Reed's biography, Paul Weller: My Ever Changing Moods (2005), Paul Weller delayed the release after a taxi driver driving strike breakers in Wales was killed by a concrete block dropped on his car from a bridge. Weller donated some of the royalties to the taxi driver's family as well as to the strikers.

The B-side of the record was called A Miner's Point - an interview with two miners undertaken by Paolo Hewitt.

Klezmer

Klezmer, Book One: Tales of the Wild East (First Second, 2006) is a graphic novel by Joann Sear following a group of musicians in their wanderings through pre-World War II Eastern Europe. Among other things it made me want to read more about the history of Odessa, another of those early multicultural port cities like London and Marseille.

It includes an appendix with the author's reflections on klezmer:

' True to the idea that you're better off practicing useless activities than doing harm, I put my memories into klezmer songs. They're better off there than elsewhere. Those are Jewish voices, but they don't speak only to Jews. I think back about Shostakoviich, who for years carried around in his suitcase his Opus 79, 'On Jewish folk poetry'. And each time Stalin or the others would forbid him to present it. I think about Isaac Babel, whose short stories on Odessa were scattered, banned, lost. I love that mad project they had, of getting people to like the Jews.

I think human populations need friendship. When men sense that they are not liked, they invent the blues or Gypsy music or klezmer. That's how they make their condition understandable to others. Their language then reaches out to everyone and from within the most self-constrained communities rises a universal song. Extending a hand to a neighbour is a momentous thing in fact. The fact that klezmer is still played today, and with such gusto, and with so many non-Jews on stage and in the audience - which is great - says that plenty of people are willing to carry a bit of Jewish memory on behalf of the Jews. And as a result, klezmer is no longer music that is played by Jews for Jews. That gets us out of the realm of folklore; we all dance together while drinking up a storm, we have fun. From a personal standpoint I ask for nothing more'.

Not totally convinced about the blues or klezmer coming about to communicate outside of communities, I think that's probably a secondary function, but I like the idea of the notion of 'universal song' being able to extend across boundaries.

International Times Archive

There's a fantastic archive up now for The International Times, the famous UK underground paper of the 1960s and 70s. It includes scans of every single page, and is free text searchable. I know I'm going to be trawling through this for months to come.

The cover above is from no.9, Feb-March 1967, and seems to show somebody being blown away by some cosmic force with the speech bubble saying 'When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake' (a quote from Plato beloved of Jacques Attali).

Inside this issue there's an article on some hostile reportage of the scene, including a great quote from an article by one Michael Vestey in a publication called London Look: 'London isn't swinging any more, its raving mad. At least when scenes like this can happen in the name of 'freedom of expression.' Usually these raves are harmless. But "happenings" like this — pictured last week at the Round House, the'cultural' centre in Chalk Farm — are shocking. Before children, designer Mike Lesser stripped naked and rolled sensually in coloured jelly. Overall, from the lighting effects and the awful sounds created by the groups, the atmosphere is oppressively psychedelic, creating the feeling that one is intoxicated by LSD without actually having taken it." Apparently the journalist in question had been asking questions like 'Do you have public sexual intercourse at your raves?' only to be told that 'the Round House was too cold'.

Battle of the Beanfield

There was a very interesting Time Team TV programme last night summarising the latest research on Stonehenge, specifically the Stonehenge Riverside Project and the theories of Mike Parker Pearson. Essentially Pearson argues that Stonehenge and the nearby Durrington Walls prehistoric site were part of a common complex joined by the River Avon. The huge amount of feasting debris found at Durrington suggests that it must have been a gathering place for large numbers of people - possibly even some kind of ritual/festival site.

Knowing so little about what people actually did there, let alone believed, it is fanciful (if tempting) to draw a direct connection between the neolithic and the free festival held at Stonehenge in the 1970s and early 1980s. But what we do know is that if the ancestors had attempted to gather there several thousand years later they would have faced the full might of the Wiltshire Constabulary.

In the Guardian yesterday, Andy Worthington recalled that it is exactly 24 years since The Battle of the Beanfield:

'Exactly 24 years ago, in a field beside the A303 in Wiltshire, the might of Margaret Thatcher's militarised police descended on a convoy of new age travellers, green activists, anti-nuclear protestors and free festival-goers, who were en route to Stonehenge in an attempt to establish the 12th annual Stonehenge free festival in fields across the road from Britain's most famous ancient monument. That event has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

In many ways the epitome of the free festival movement of the 1970s, the Stonehenge free festival – an annual anarchic jamboree that, in 1984, had attracted tens of thousands of visitors – had been an embarrassment to the authorities for many years, but its violent suppression, when police from six counties and the Ministry of Defence cornered the convoy of vehicles in a field and, after an uneasy stand-off, invaded the field on foot and in vehicles, subjecting men, women and children to a distressing show of physical force, was, like the Miners' strike the year before, and the suppression of the printers at Wapping the year after, a brutal display of state violence that signaled a major curtailment of civil liberties'.

(full article here; Andy has also written about it at his blog)

Footage of that day (especially in the film Operation Solstice) still makes me shudder - it's the sight of power off the leash, police arrogant enough to know that they can beat up defenceless people in front of TV cameras without having to worry because they know their political masters have given them the green light to do what they like:



(you can watch Time Team's Secrets of Stonehenge at 4oD for the rest of the month)

Mawazine Festival Stampede

Tragedy last weekend (23 May) at a festival in Morocco (full story at BBC News):

'At least 11 people have been killed in the Moroccan capital Rabat, following a stampede at a world music concert. Some 40 were injured when a wire fence collapsed at the Mawazine festival. The incident happened on Saturday night, when some 70,000 spectators were packed into the Hay Nahda stadium to see Moroccan singer Abdelaziz Stati. The nine-day-long event has featured such international stars as Kylie Minogue, Algerian rai singer Khaled, Alicia Keys and Stevie Wonder...

The festival was drawing to a close when the stampede occurred. Shortly after midnight on Sunday morning, thousands of spectators hurried to leave and a wire fence toppled over. According to police, five women, four men and two children died in the ensuing crush.

Governor of Rabat Hassan Lamrani blamed the stampede on an attempt by some concert goers to rush out of the stadium by jumping security fences. "At the end of the concert and despite the existence of seven gates, a group of citizens decided to go over the metal barriers to have a quick exit," Mr Lamrani said. But one of the dozens of concert-goers injured in the crush told Reuters news agency police were partly responsible for the incident. "The doors were closed by the police and we were forced to leave the stadium from some places not destined for this purpose. The police did not intervene".'

Simon Broughton at Songlines was at the festival, and puts across a positive perspective:

'...Most of the concerts are free. I was just there for the last four days of the nine-day festival, but it has a line-up unmatched by few festivals anywhere in the world. International artists included Kylie Minogue (no thanks), Sergio Mendes, Solomon Burke, Alicia Keys and Stevie Wonder; world music artists included Fanfare Ciocarlia, Amadou & Mariam, Khaled, Eliades Ochoa, Ska Cubano, Faiz Ali Faiz, Buika, Ojos de Brujo, Alim Qasimov and more It was predictably the Moroccan performers that attracted some of the biggest crowds – the most extraordinary I saw was female chaabi singer Daoudia who played a violin Arabic style, propped on her knee, and sang songs, with a back-line of men on frame drums, that drove her audience into a frenzy. It was these Moroccan gigs that elicited the wildest reaction in the crowds too, and on the final night, Stati’s concert was relocated from the centre of town to the Hay Nahda football stadium bcause of the huge crowds he was expected to draw. Despite the shadow of the tragedy, my overwhelming memory of Mawazine is of thousands of people enjoying music of every kind'

Independent Electronic Music Festival in Rome

I am doing a talk in Rome in a couple of weeks (Saturday 13 June) as part of an Independent Electronic Music Festival. It's happening at the Forte Prenestino Occupied Social Centre. I don't know too much about it yet but it appears to be a weekend of minimal techno/breakbeat (line up here), with talks from contributors to Datacide (apart from myself including Christoph Fringeli, Hans Christian Psaar and Alexis Wolton). I will be riffing around the article on dance music history I wrote for Datacide and talked about in Berlin last Autumn. Anyway if you're in the area, come and say hello.

Turkey: State bulldozers Roma Settlement

The destruction of a Roma area of Istanbul once famous for its music and dancing:

'Anti-riot police supervised this final phase last week of the demolition of Sulukule, a neighborhood on the European bank of Istanbul once home to a vibrant community of musicians and artists whose rhythmic songs and belly dancing served as the city's musical heart.

Similar scenes have been repeated across the country as municipalities, supported by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), drive home a programme of urban renewal, destroying ramshackle and often unsanitary housing in favour of new tower blocks, often many kilometers (miles) outside localities.

But the demolition of Sulukule caused controversy as it razed an ancient community of Rom gypsies who can trace their history in the suburb back to Byzantine times. "A big thank you to the municipality," said Celep, who is unemployed. Thanks to them I will sleep on the street with my wife, my new-born child and the four-year-old. We have no where to go."

.... local activist Hacer Foggo of a group called the Sulukule Platform estimates that closer to 5,000 people, the bulk of them members of the minority, are being displaced, and all to benefit the ruling party and its allies. "Who is going to buy the houses that they will build here? It will be the profiteers, those close to the AKP," she said. "The idea is to expel the poor from the city centre and put the rich in their place."

Turkish media reported a few months ago that several AKP members and figures close to the party were allegedly among the prospective buyers of the new houses. Foggo said the resettlement will break up a community that has survived through centuries thanks to a tradition of solidarity and mutual aid. "Here at least everyone knew each other, the rent was very low and the local grocer always gave you credit," she added.

Sulukule welcomed generations of residents from other parts of Istanbul who came for music, booze and belly dancing before a ban in the 1990s by conservative governments shut its colorful neighbourhood taverns.

...It means the end of a millennia of history, according to British researcher Adrian Marsh, a specialist on the Roms of Turkey. Sulukule was the oldest known settlement in the world of Nomadic Roms, said Marsh, first mentioned by a Byzantine scribe in 1054. His writings speak of "Egyptians" living in black tents along the fortress walls and eking out an existence thanks to their belly dancers, fortune tellers and dancing bears, Marsh said.

After Constantinople -- as it was then known - fell to the Turks in 1453, Sulukule's dancers and musicians became fixtures of the opulent nights at the Ottoman court. "Demolishing Sulukule is not the same as demolishing just any other gypsy slum, the way it happens all over Turkey and Europe," said Marsh."It is the annihilation of the memory of an entire community."

Source: AFP 18 May 2009; see also this report at Rroma.org

A Night at Rampart

An eclectic night of music at RampART Social Centre in Whitechapel last weekend (Saturday 16th May). I started off in my Half a Person punk-folk-persona playing a few covers with mandolin (including Angelic Upstarts’ Who Killed Liddle Towers, Hefner’s The Day That Thatcher Dies and Crass’s Do they owe us a living) plus a few of my own numbers.

Next up was Double Negative, violin/xylophone/sax (?)/bouzouki combination. Somebody told me to expect Brechtian sea shanties, but I’m not sure that quite captured their sound, they had a pleasing John Cale-like drone going on with the bouzouki/violin combination and they did a stretched version of Ewan McColl’s Dirty Old Town.

Just when you thought it was going to settle into an evening of four course string instruments, up came Femii with an r’n’b PA, including an encore where he got his girlfriend on stage – thought she was going to sing along or dance but actually she just sat down while he sung her a love song.

Then John Eden (Uncarved) had us all dancing to a dancehall set, including that great Heatwave General Levy/Lily Allen mash up (Mad LDN).

Anyway the musical and social mix was all good, like similar squatted projects around the world Rampart -pictured below - sometimes struggles with the contradiction between a language of community inclusion and a reality of tending to be a hang out for a particular sub-cultural scene (typically youngish, white, child-free, activists with ‘alternative lifestyles’). Still at least they have managed to keep something going in the face of serious pressure, particularly a violent raid by taser-wielding police in the aftermath of the G20 protests last month.


The Visteon Dispute

All of this was in aid of the ex-Visteon workers fighting for better redundancy terms having lost their jobs at the car parts factory in Enfield, north London. Along with workers at Visteon factories in Belfast and Basildon they were told with minutes notice that the company had gone bust and that they should go home and expect minimum redundancy payments. At Belfast and Enfield they occupied the factories, while at Basildon they picketed the plant.

Their’s has literally been a Post-Fordist struggle, as the Visteon factories were previously owned and directly managed by Ford. The workers transferred to Visteon had been promised that they would retain their Ford terms and conditions, including redundancy terms that were considerably more generous than the statutory minimum, and this was at the heart of the dispute. In the end Ford has agreed to underwrite an improved offer to the ex-Visteon workers, and the dispute has now ended with them considerably better off than they were at the beginning. So, some kind of victory – though far short of keeping their jobs.

But the Visteon speaker at the Rampart benefit also gave voice to some frustration, since not all workers would benefit equally – the staff being on three separate types of contracts according to when and how they were employed. Whereas in the Ford(ist?) period, huge numbers of workers employed by a single firm could secure common terms and conditions, the break up of such companies into smaller firms has resulted in a fragmentation of conditions, so that even people in the same workplace can be paid differently for the same job - and be paid different amounts if they get made redundant.

Vietnam: Karaoke, Ecstasy and Dancing

'HO CHI MINH CITY — It is early evening and another night of singing has begun in earnest at Style Karaoke, a plush club where high-flyers in Vietnam's commercial capital come to let off steam. Music blasts from behind the glass doors of the small rooms where groups gather to sing and, as the rhythm takes hold, to dance. And that, the communist government says, is the problem. It wants to ban dancing at karaoke bars in what reports have said is a bid to limit drug use.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism posted the proposed ban on its website last month and invited public comment on the move, its latest attempt to clamp down on lawlessness at the popular singing venues.
But at Style and other neon-lit clubs on Su Van Hanh street, the heart of karaoke entertainment in the city formerly known as Saigon, the proposal is dismissed as unworkable.


"I think it's not feasible because these people who go to karaoke want to relieve their stress," says Dang Duy Thanh, the gel-haired manager of Style. "If we just force them to stay there singing without feeling comfortable, that's not right".

Le Anh Tuyen, head of the culture ministry's legal department, reportedly sees things differently. Tuyen, who five years ago warned that karaoke was linked to prostitution, was quoted by the VietnamNet news website last month as saying the drug ecstasy would be used in karaoke rooms if dancing was not banned. "Ecstasy always goes with wine and music," he said. "In my opinion, karaoke is a cultural activity which is always latent with social evils'.... Tuyen told VietnamNet the government has statistics about the use of ecstasy at karaoke bars, but the report gave no data. "I'm sure the real number of cases is higher than in our statistics. Evils will not be prevented without banning dancing," he was quoted as saying. "In our country, karaoke often goes with ecstasy and prostitution."

... "It's not right to ban us from dancing in karaoke clubs," said one K-T customer, who arrived with a laptop bag on his shoulder. "Maybe they should ban dance bars where they have prostitutes. If they just make a general ban on dancing in karaokes, it's not reasonable."

"It's impossible" to ban dancing, says Dang Duc Han, standing in a T-shirt, his arms folded, outside the Karaoke 64 club he manages. "If people feel in the mood they will dance", Han says as customers ride up on their motorcycles, and a child with a toy bicycle brushes against his leg. In 2006 Vietnam banned alcohol in karaoke bars - but in practice drinking continues - while a year earlier it stopped issuing licences for bars, karaoke parlours and dance halls. Earlier draft legislation even called for karaoke clubs to be shut down, after Tuyen said many served as brothels. In his interview with VietnamNet, Tuyen admitted inspectors were not able to check karaoke clubs very often and said "people themselves must obey the rules".

More here: AFP, 18 May 2009

Taliban in Ohio

'Teenager Tyler Frost has been suspended from his US Baptist school for breaking strict 'no dancing' rules by attending his girlfriend's prom, in a situation reminiscent of the film Footloose. Officials at Heritage Christian School in Findlay, Ohio, had warned 17-year-old Tyler that he would be suspended and prohibited from attending his graduation if he went to the dance over the weekend with his girlfriend.


Tyler said he didn't think going to the dance was wrong even though his fundamentalist Baptist school forbids dancing, rock music and hand-holding... However, he signed a contract at the beginning of the school year promising he would refrain from the activities, and it came to haunt him when he asked his principal to sign a permission slip to let him attend the prom.

"(Word I might be suspended) kind of caught me off guard," Frost said. "I was kind of shocked that he was going to take that drastic of a measure." . Tyler's principal, Tim England said: "When the school committee ... set up the policy regarding dancing, I am confident that they had the principle of fleeing lustful situations in mind ... should a Christian place themselves at an event where young ladies will have low-cut dresses and be dancing in them."


(full story: Telegraph, 13 May 2009)

Chris Gray

Stewart Home notes the passing last week of Chris Gray: 'Chris is probably best known for his brief membership of the Situationist International and being one of the key figures in the Notting Hill (west London) based King Mob. Chris was the editor and translator of the first English language anthology of French Situationist texts Leaving The 20th Century: The incomplete works of the Situationist International (1974), a book that over a long period was to have an enormous impact'.

Gray is sometimes credited with an unintentional role in the conception of The Sex Pistols. According to The End of Music, a text written by former King Mob members Dave and Stuart Wise, 'Chris Gray had the idea of creating a totally unpleasant pop group (those first imaginings which were later to fuse into The Sex Pistols)'. The Chris Gray Band never seems to have got any further than some graffiti around London, but arguably this notion may have been one of the influences on Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid in their involvement in punk.

I tend to agree with Stewart that the notion of The Sex Pistols as situationist prank or recuperation is overplayed, although both Reid and McLaren were involved in the late 1960s London radical milieu in dialogue with the situationists and American groups like Black Mask - a scene in which King Mob were the most significant pole. What is certainly true is that the idea of punk as a straightforward 1976 year zero revolt against the previous 'freak' counter culture is a myth - with many of the key players previously involved in the harder edge of the pre-punk underground (not just Reid and McLaren - think about Joe Strummer and the Elgin Avenue squatters). In this sense at least punk did owe something to the likes of Chris Gray and the other late 60s/early 70s malcontents of Notting Hill and elsewhere.

Spain: Moroccan Migrants targeted in Disco Raid

'The SOC –SAT union in Almería has accused the National Police of racism in raids which took place in El Ejido on Saturday, which ended with 70 immigrants faced with deportation orders from the country. The union describes the operation as repressive and completely disproportionate, and allege violence and aggression on the part of the police in the raids which took place, mainly, they say, against citizens from Morocco. Europa Press names the sites as a disco in Santa María del Águila, the Poniente hospital and two central streets – Calles Almería and Manolo Escobar.

SOC-SAT reportedly claims it to be part of a state policy to blame the immigrants for the crisis and unemployment affecting the country. There were concerns also of a minimum target which may have been set for deportation orders from Spain. The union said it will send a report to the Andaluz Ombudsman, and has announced a protest demonstration for a week this Friday, the 22nd May.

(Source: Typically Spanish, 13 May 2009)

Disco Police in Thailand

'Deputy Chief of Pattaya Police Police Sub-Lieutenant Sutham Choasritong and about 30 police officers raided the Hollywood discotheque located on Pechtrakul Road, Central Pattaya, in the morning of 26 April. There at this famous night spot, officers stopped the revelry and detained 500 customers, both Thai and foreigners. Officers then made both an identity check and urine test on a number of suspect people. It turned out that only 8 people proved drug positive and were taken away for further questioning' (source: Pattaya People)

In a similar raid at the same venue in 1998, all 600 people present were required to give a urine sample for a drugs test.

Dancing in Lahore

'Lahore is a city that has to fight for its cultural survival. The growing influence of the Taliban, although hundreds of kilometres to the north-west, has been mirrored by a more insidious, creeping attack on culture throughout the country. On Jan 2, the bullet-ridden body of Shabana Gul, a dancing girl, was dumped in the centre of Mingora, the north-western district of Swat’s main town.But the growing cultural conservatism has had more subtle reverberations.In December, Lahore’s High Court barred the graceful and elaborate dancing girls, who first developed in the Moghal courts 400 years ago, from performing in public, on the grounds that they were too sexually explicit.

A group of theatre owners challenged the ban, which forbade the girls to dance barefoot and ordered them to cover their heads and shoulders, and won an appeal in court in March.A cultural promoter, said the ban on dance – known as the mujra, and which officials attempted to ban during the 1980s – is a symptom of a more dangerous trend in Pakistani society.“If the government engages in moral policing, it gives vigilantes licence to do the same. It fuels intolerance and de-secularisation by violence and intimidation and opens the door to extreme jihadi Islamic movements,” he said. In March, the High Court barred two female singers from recording new albums after ruling that they sang sexually explicit lyrics'.

Full story in the National, 17 May 2009; see also CNN 3 May 2009.

Paris Commune 1871: Dancing in the Debris

On this day in 1871 (the 16th May) there was a unique party in Paris during the days of the Commune. The occasion was the destruction of the Vendôme Column Column, built in to celebrate the might of Napoleon’s imperial forces. The Commune issued a decree pronouncing that the Column was to be abolished since it was ‘a monument to barbarism, a symbol of brute force and glory, an affirmation of militarism…’

And so it came to pass that the column came crashing down (pictured below). Louis Barron, an eyewitness/participant recalled: ‘This colossal symbol of the Grand Army – how it was fragile, empty, miserable… The music played fanfares, some old greybeard declaimed a speech on the vanity of conquests, the villainy of conquerors, and the fraternity of the people, we danced in a circle around the debris, and then we went off, very content with the little party’.

For Kristin Ross, this ‘attack on verticality’ was symbolic of the ‘horizontal’ nature of the Commune itself, characterised by ‘antihierarchical gestures and improvisations…extending principles of association and cooperation into the workings of everyday life’.

Sadly the forces of empire and order were soon take their revenge, massacring up to 25,000 supporters of the Commune in the streets of Paris.



Source: Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988).

Free Parties

First whiff of summer and for many people it's time to head out to the fields to party.

May Day (Friday 1st) in North Wales saw a party at Dorothea quarry, Talysarn. A police helicopter was scrambled and police set up road blocks to limit access to the site, but two sound systems did manage to keep going until Saturday morning when they were seized by police.


Last Saturday night hundreds of people partied on farmland off the A28 in Chilham, Kent, before police closed down the party on at 5 am the next morning. There was also a party at a farm near St Neots in Cambridgeshire, prompting complaints from the farmer that police failed to close it down.

In Somerset last month, near Wellow, party goers were attacked by heavies with dogs, presumably acting on behalf of landowners. One said: "Four men with four Alsatian dogs turned up and pushed over our sound system and speakers.We told them we would leave immediately but they started dragging people from cars and setting the dogs on people dancing. I saw a young girl being dragged across the floor with the dogs attacking her. It was disgusting. What sort of grown man would beat up a 16-year-old girl?". Another witness was a mother: 'Gael, who accompanied her son and his friends to the party to ensure they were safe and had a lift home, said: "My own son was dragged through the window of my car by these men. "The young people who were at the party were not doing any harm. They were simply dancing in a field with their friends. The music they were playing wasn't excessively loud; I could still hear my own music I was playing in the car over it. They are good kids who want an alternative to standing around on the streets drinking. They organise the parties because there is no other form of entertainment for them locally."'

Visteon Benefit

This Saturday there's a benefit for the Visteon workers at the Rampart Social Centre (15 Rampart Street, London E1). Music includes a set from John Eden (Uncarved) and I will be doing a few songs in the guise of shambling mando-folk-punk project Half a Person.

The workers at Visteon occupied the factory in Enfield on Wednesday 1st April. The previous day, in a 6-minute meeting, they were told that the European company, with plants in Belfast, Basildon and Enfield, was going into administration and that they could come and collect their possessions the next day, with no wages due. They are continuing to maintain a 24-hour picket outside the factory. A deal is being offered, but there are outlying concerns so the struggle continues. For more details and information on how to help out, visit: http://visteonoccupation.wordpress.com/

Dancing Questionnaire (15): Piotr from Warszawa

Our first dancing questionnaire from Poland:

1. Can you remember your first experience of dancing?
I was probably 6 and had rhythmic lessons in kindergarten I went to. I was told (or my mother was) that I had no sense of rhythm and cannot attend the lessons. Actually I didn't enjoy them because I was a very very very calm (and even sad) child. The second one is when I was on a wedding of my parents' friends and I was dancing with a girl my age (I was 7 or 8) to a Polish wedding music - it's called disco polo (keyboard melodies and pre-programmed rhythms + cheap folk melodies and sentimental lyrics). The third time I was 10 - and I went to a summer camp and I was dancing to stuff like Ace Of Base, Guns'n'Roses, Metallica (slow dance to "Nothing Else Matters") - basically early 90's eurodance and rock stuff popular in Poland.

2.What’s the most interesting/significant thing that has happened to you while out dancing?
Nothing at all, just pure physical joy. Recently I noticed I'm a better dancer and am more open to sounds when completely sober than after 5 or 6 beers, however I have a feeling of absolute joy and fulfillment while being on booze and hearing Fleetwood Mac "Everywhere". I just can't help it ;) . I never did any drugs to dance.

3. You. Dancing. The best of times…
Many times. Moshing to Polish pop-punk bands in the age of 15. Joe Strummer tribute nights after he died in 2002 and dancing like mad to all rockabilly stuff put between Clash songs Moshing like mad to Pixies in 2004 in Berlin. Indie-pop parties in Warszawa few years ago. Hearing Fleetwood Mac "Everywhere". Hearing MIA "Jimmy". Hearing "You Spin Me Like A Record" and "Last Night The DJ Saved My Life". House party in a club in Prague from about 7 to 10 in the morning after a night of wandering through the city (my friends took xtc I was just on alcohol) .

4. You. Dancing. The worst of times…
Anytime when you act as if you are having a good time and for whatever reason you keep pretending

5. Can you give a quick tour of the different dancing scenes/times/places you’ve frequented?
1990's - eurodance, Spice Girls, Babylon Zoo, Scatman John, Chumbawamba, George Michael, Michael Jackson - this is what we were dancing to in our school parties.

1999-2002 - rock and punk, mainly live music in Warszawa, not caring about danceability of the music I listen to and bands that I watch

2004-2009 - internet era: indie gone electro gone BLOG HOUSE gone dubstep, bassline and even hiphop or ironic eurodance etc. (everything melted together), started going to clubs in 2004 when I began earning money, before I didn't go to clubs on weekends; sometimes I choose more strict styles - go for a techno show, when the guy like Redshape from Berlin comes but usually local DJs blending many styles

6. When and where did you last dance?
Last Saturday in an awful (from musical point of view) place called Klubokawiarnia in Warszawa - they play very bad housed-up versions of biggest dance hits like Blue Monday or rhytmically numb housed up r'n'b (you have 4x4 + r'n'b vocals), and all djs play almost the same set and cannot really mix well. Awful place, but my friend from London came and she chose this club.

Picture of clubbers at Klubokawiarnia by Twisted Karolina at Flickr

7. You’re on your death bed. What piece of music would make your leap up for one final dance?
Probably I could pick something more energetic, but "One For The Heads Who Remember" by Skream seems appropriate.

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

Fahrenheit 451

Contemporary debates about the social impact of personal music devices were anticipated in Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1953. Many years before the Sony Walkman, let alone ipods and music playing mobile phones, Bradbury imagined a world in which most people permanently wear 'Audio-Seashells'.

Montag, the novel's main character rejects them, but his wife is plugged in day and night: 'In her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk coming in'.

It is a world in which books are banned and Firemen have been redeployed to track them down and burn them (Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature book paper catches alight). In this context, Bradbury presents the Seashells as part of an apparatus of mind numbing distraction along with the 'Four-wall televisor' (a living room with a screen on all walls) and an endless diet of sports and light entertainment. This apparatus prevents critical thinking, communication and anything but the most superficial relationships between human beings: 'the walls of the room were flooded with green and yellow and orange fireworks sizzling and bursting to some music composed entirely of trap drums, tom-toms, and cymbals. Her mouth moved and she was saying something but the sound covered it'.

Oskar Werner and Julie Christie in Francois Truffaut's 1966 film version

Montag's fireman boss justifies the system to him as one that has smoothed out all social contradictions: 'If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides of a question to worry about; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.... Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy'. Against this, 'A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it."

Ultimately the distraction proves fatal, the city's inhabitants engrossed in soap opera and music as the bombs down on them.

For me the critique of information vs. thought certainly has some validity, but I've always been uncomfortable with the familiar complaint that people are spending too much time enjoying themselves with 'trivial' pleasures (often made by men against women as is largely the case in F451). Yes, there's something disturbing about people turning a blind eye to the horrors and atrocities around them, though equally it is true that many of these horrors have been perpetrated precisely by men who have rejected the domestic and the intimate in pursuit of higher 'ideals', heroism and power. Maybe the world would be a better place if Hitlers, Stalins and their ilk were content to spend more time dancing to the radio.

The elitism that such a stance implies is apparent in Bradbury; at one point he refers to 'The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority'. I would have thought the dictatorship of a minority is at least as big a problem.

There's also a fear of music at work here, a fear of being engulfed, invaded, penetrated by sound: 'A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness'. Sounds like my idea of a good night out!

Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program

Ras G hails from South Central Los Angeles via outer space and seems to be consciously placing himself in the afro-futurist tradition of Sun Ra and George Clinton.

Last year Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program put out an album called Ghetto Sci Fi with tracks including Beyond the Sky, Afrikan Space Rhythms and Sign Me Up, with its double-edged sample at the beginning about the requirement for all aliens to register with the National Space Administration.

Last month he put out another album, Brotha from Another Planet. Nice review at Bama Love Soul which should whet your appetite: 'you would most likely need an extraterrestrial being to translate some of the sounds he manages to construct/deconstruct..but definitely in a good way. At first listen you begin to hear influences of the unpredictable free jazz styles (though not a jazz album) of Sun Ra, Coltrane, and Horace Tapscott, the heavy, in the red, Dub bass drops of King Tubby, and undoubtedly the dustiest, dirtiest drums of hip hop peers J Dilla, and label mate Flying Lotus. Add randomly scattered static, scratches, vocal samples from various films and records, crazy left and right pans (especially if you listen through headphones) and you are ready for some serious space traveling'. Check out Alkebulan from the album here - a video with lots of clips from Sun Ra's Space is the Place.

Still finding my way around all this, but all I've heard so far sounds great. There's an interview with him here (where he sings the praises of London bass including dubstep and grime):

Ayman Udas: a Singer Murdered in Pakistan

'A rising musical star was allegedly shot dead by her own brothers in the conservative city of Peshawar in Pakistan last week after she had appeared on television. The murder of Ayman Udas, who was in her early thirties and newly married, has shocked the city’s artistic community because it symbolises a backlash against women and cultural freedom in an area that is increasingly dominated by Islamic fundamentalists.

As a singer and song writer in her native Pashto, the language of the tribal areas and the NorthWest Frontier province, Udas frequently performed on PTV, the state-run channel. She won considerable acclaim for her songs but had become a musician in the face of bitter opposition from her family, who believed it was sinful for a woman to perform on television.

Ashamed of her growing popularity her two brothers are reported to have entered her flat last week while her husband was out and fired three bullets into her chest. Neither has been caught' (Sunday Times, 3 May 2009 - full story here)

Lola Montez and the Spider Dance

Lola Montez (1821-1861) lived a short but interesting life. Born Eliza Gilbert in Ireland, she reinvented herself as 'Lola the Spanish Dancer' on the London stage in 1843 before spending time in Paris, Munich, Switzerland, San Francisco, Australia and New York - attracting lovers and scandalous stories along the way. She became particularly known for her Spider Dance, which involved her shaking imaginary tarantulas out of her clothes and stamping on them. It was evidently loosely based on an Italian dance (perhaps linked to tarantism). This short description of her is taken from The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old West by Dee Brown (1958):

'No western stage performer ever equaled the glamorous Lola Montez in creating an aura of seductive mystery and exquisite scandal around her personality. Whether or not Lola was an actress is debatable - she was more in the class of modern burlesque queens - but the dubious legends of deli­cious sinfulness which she deliberately spread abroad and carefully nourished have spun down through the years until they are a part of the fabric of western history.

With her sensational spider dance, Lola burst upon San Francisco like a bombshell, making excellent copy for the newspapers with stories of her many marriages and her claim that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron. Offstage she dressed in the Byronic mode, wearing black jackets and wide rolling collars. Bronze-skinned, blue-eyed, she made a striking appearance strolling along the San Francisco streets, with two greyhounds on a leash and an enormous parrot upon her shoulder. She constantly smoked small cigars, forced her way into gambling saloons forbidden to women, and played tenpins with any male daring enough to take her on.

"A tigress," said one newspaper writer, "the very comet of her sex." Lola's celebrated spider dance shocked and titillated her audiences; the spiders were ingenious contraptions made of rubber, cork, and whalebone. She gave a spectacular bene­fit for an audience of San Francisco firemen, and they show­ered the stage with their fancy helmets and almost smothered her with enormous bouquets of flowers'.

Franklin Rosemont: Mods, Rockers and the Revolution

Robber Bridegroom (Surrealist London Action Group) notes the passing this month of Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009), Chicago-based 'poet, artist, historian, editor, and surrealist activist'. Rosemont was active in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also known as the wobblies). The following is an article he wrote for The Rebel Worker (no.3), published by the IWW in Chicago in March 1965 - ahead of its time in rejecting the sniffiness of many leftists towards pop music. Many more articles from The Rebel Worker and its London counterpart Heatwave can be found in the excellent Dancin' In The Streets!: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos In The 1960s which Rosemont edited with Charles Radcliffe.

Mods, Rockers and The Revolution

Wobblies and other true revolutionaries are much less interested in the vague longings of college professors and Nobel prize-winners for a "better world" than in the day-to-day struggles of our fellow workers- not only the direct strug­gles against exploitation by the bosses, but the struggle to live some sort of decent life against all the obstacles presented by a society divided into classes. Thus it is essential that we concern ourselves not only with the job situation and economic questions but also with more "superstructural" anthropological factors: working class culture.

In this connection, the significance of rock'n'roll, and popular adolescent culture in general, has for too long been ignored. That rock'n'roll is one of the most important working class preoccupa­tions (among the young, at least) is clearly evident. That it has been ignored by the "left" press is additional testimony to the isolation of the ‘socialist’ intellectuals from the class in whose name they so often enjoy speaking.

Certain unfortunate souls, including many of traditional "left" ori­entation, have attempted to deny that rock'n'roll is really a working ­class phenomenon, even suggesting that it is imposed (!) on working-class adolescents by Madison Avenue, etc., as a form of exploitation through cheap talent, record sales and juke-boxes. To them rock'n'roll is a sign only of the "decadence" of contemporary capitalist society. They can neither take it seriously as a form of music nor see in it anything other than a possible "reliever of tensions" which they feel might better be expressed in more constructive activity. Thus Marshall Stearns in The Story of Jazz, thoroughly puts down rock'n'roll as a form of music but claims that by offering "release" to anxious kids, it actually contributes to the decrease of juvenile delinquency. This uneasy, patronizing anti-rock'n'roll "theory" is, amusingly enough, shared by Stalinists, lib­erals, Presbyterians, conservatives and bourgeois sociologists.

We must have done, once and for all, with this kind of evasive excuse-mongering, and look at the situation as it really exists. Rock'n'roll must be recognized not only as a form of music (which, for its players and its listeners is clearly as "serious" as any other) but also as an important expression of adolescent preoccupations.

As music, rock'n'roll is certainly ‘primitive’ but this must not be assumed to mean that it is therefore inferior. No one is less able than musicologists and other prisoners of academic limitations to situate this problem in its proper context. For the importance of rock'n'roll lies not only in the music itself, but even more in the milieu which has grown up with it, characterized above all by delirious enthusiasm, a frenzy which is no stranger to tenderness, and which undoubtedly appears scandalous to the easily-outraged watchdogs of bourgeois morality.

Much could be said for the influence of rock'n'roll on the emer­gence of a new sensibility (intellectual as well as erotic and emotional). Much could be said, too, of its unconscious quality, which, with its roots in speed-up and automation (and thus in the class struggle) lends to its "subversive” aspect. For rock'n'roll is, more than anything else, a latent cultural expression of the age of automation. Indeed, a study of the psychoanalytical and anthropological implications of automation might well make rock'n'roll its point of departure. Witness the fact that almost all of the most popular rock'n'roll groups are from the most intensely industrialized and highly-automated cities: in the United States, Chicago and Detroit; in England, Liverpool, where one out of every fifteen "Liverpudlians" between the ages of 15 and 24 now belongs to a rock'n'roll group.

The best of the new groups - Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, The Jewels, The Velvellettes, The Supremes, Mary Wells (all from Detroit), and The Kinks, The Zombies, Manfred Mann and, of course, The Beatles (all from England)- have brought to popular music a vitality, exuberance and rebelliousness which it has never seen before.

The Beatles are the most successful group in entertainment history. Their flippant replies to interviewers; their wild, raucous behavior; their riotous and insulting sense of humor remove them far beyond the pale of ‘respectable entertainers’. Their first movie, A Hard Day's Night, will remain one of the greatest cinematic delights of 1964, a lone cry of uninhibited freedom and irrationality in a cold desert of "seri­ousness" and pretentiousness.

The legendary quality, which can almost be called mythical neces­sity, of The Beatles, has not failed to attract the critical attention of some perceptive commentators. Consider this judgment from the pen of Jean Shepherd, who interviewed The Beades for Playboy maga­zine (February 1965):

‘In two years they had become a phenomenon that had some­how transcended stardom or even showbiz. They were mythical beings, inspiring a fanaticism bordering on religious ecstasy among millions all over the world. I began to have the uncomfortable feel­ing that all this fervor had nothing whatever to do with entertain­ment, or with talent, or even with The Beatles themselves. I began to feel that they were the catalyst of a sudden world madness that would have burst upon us whether they had come on the scene or not. If The Beatles had never existed, we would have had to invent them. They are not prodigious talents by any yardstick, but like hula-hoops and yo-yos, they are at the right place at the right time, and whatever it is that triggers the mass hysteria of fads has made them walking myths. Everywhere we went, people stared in open­-mouthed astonishment that there were actually flesh-and-blood human beings who looked just like the Beatle dolls they had at home. It was as though Santa Claus had suddenly shown up at a Christmas Party’.

Another British group, The Rolling Stones, has risen to popular­ity more recently, bringing with them a more disquieting, more sin­ister, more violent attitude into the rock'n'roll arena.

It is in England where the adolescent revolt (of which rock'n'roll is only one constituent element) seems to have assumed its largest proportions. In England the kids are categorized into two "tenden­cies": Mods, fashionably (often bizarrely) dressed, and who are asso­ciated with motor-scooters; and the Rockers, who prefer black leather jackets, blue jeans, and motorcycles. In both cases the boys wear their hair long, considerably longer than in America, and (according to a New York Times writer from Britain) "the word in London and Liverpool is that male hair is going to get longer and longer." The girls' hair is usually straight and worn down to the middle of the back.

The hair itself deserves comment, particularly since hair is growing longer in the United States as well as in England and elsewhere in Europe. The social implications of hair fashion have been inadequately studied, if studied at all. Some psychologists and sociologists have confined them­selves to brief, unexplained remarks on "sexual confusion”, "identity problems," and the like, which help very little. Others, it is true, have gotten a little closer to the heart of the matter. Thus the New York Times writer referred to above mentions that "sociologists, always a pessimistic lot, look on our jungled tresses and prophesy a future filled with indul­gence and rebellion." For it is an undeniable fact that short male hair has always been a characteristic of submission to authority. The police, pris­ons, army, schools, and employers are all in agreement in insisting on short hair and regular haircuts. Also, crew-cuts are the symbol, almost, of Goldwater conservatism. Before making unfounded judgments on the "identity problems" of today's kids, one might consider the problems of a culture so obsessed with keeping male hair short.

The riots and brawls of the Mods and the Rockers have also called attention to another aspect of the youth revolt: that rock'n'roll represents the only mass protest music today- another reason why it deserves the sympathetic appreciation of revolutionaries. The most pop­ular jazz has entcrcd the colleges and become respcctable. The most important developments in jazz during the last few years (Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Roland Kirk, et al.) are hardly known outside a small audience of connoisseurs. It is useless to point out that jazz is, musically, ten thousand times better than rock'n'roll; that's not the point. The audience for contemporary "classical" music is even more limited.

As for "folk" music and its derivatives (country-and-western, bluegrass, etc.) these have become the official expressions of today's college fraternities. (Real folk music is primarily of historical inter­est.) Those unhappy souls of the traditional "left" who try to pre­tend that the "folk revival" has some sort of revolutionary content rellect only their sentimentality and intellectual superficiality. I do not mean to imply that there's not much that is beautiful and impor­tant in the folk tradition, and certainly it deserves serious study. But it can no longer be assumed to have anything to do with the working class. At any rate, workingclass kids are bored by it. Like it or not, what today's workingclass kids are listening to is rock'n'roll.

The rise of the Mods and Rockers indicates to some degree a rise of young rebellion everywhere: the" new youth" of Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, etc. Inevitably, this has provoked innumerable journalistic scare-stories about "new parent-teen crises" in Sunday supplements throughout the world. Such articles contribute nothing of importance to the understanding of the contemporary adolescent, though they do shed a little light on the problems and preoccupations of adults. Repressed adults, attempting to understand younger people, often merely project their own problems onto the kids.

Many parents, for instance, afraid of participating in uninhibited dancing, approach the question with the presuppositions that there is something wrong with this kind of dancing, and that it must be rooted in some deep emotional anxiety. I do not mean to say that rock'n'roll dances are expressions of "freedom" (the lack of physical contact berween dancing partners is especially problematical). But we cannot advance one step in our understanding of these problems if we begin by saying that the kids are wrong.

There can be no doubt that the present development of rock' n' roll, and the milieu of young workers in which it thrives, is more con­sciously rebellious than it has ever been before. To be revolutionary, of course, is to be more than rebellious, for a revolutionary viewpoint necessarily includes some sort of alternative. And popular adolescent culture is pregnant with revolutionary implications precisely because it proposes alternatives- however crude and undeveloped they may be- to the ignoble conditions now prevailing.

Songs like "Dancin' in the Streets" by Martha and the Vandellas and "Opportunity" by The Jewels show that the feeling for freedom and the refusal to submit to routinized, bureaucratic pressures, are not confined to small, isolated bands of conscious, politically "sophisti­cated" revolutionaries. Rather, they are the almost instinctive atti­tudes of most of our fellow workers. Presently these feelings are to a great extent repressed, and sublimated in bourgeois politics, television, baseball, and other diversions. It is our function as disrupters of the capitalist system, and as union organizers, to heighten consciousness of these feelings, to encourage rebellion, to do all we can to liberate the intrinsically revolutionary character of the working class. Rock'n'roll, which has already contributed to a freer attitude toward sex relations, can contribute to this liberation.

There is no use being overly romantic about all this. I do not, for example, think that adolescent hangouts and record hops will provide fruitful recruiting grounds for the One Big Union; at least, not right away.

And for my part, I vastly prefer the more raucous rhythm'n'blues - songs sung by ghetto Negro groups - to the lukewarm, diluted sounds promoted in teen-celebrity magazines and on American Bandstand.

But what revolutionaries must consider is that many younger work­ers - rock'n'rollers - are discontented with existing society, and are seeking and developing solutions of their own. If traditional revolutionary politics hasn't appealed to them, it's probably because these politics haven't been as "revolutionary" as their protagonists like to pretend.

We in the IWW are not tied to narrow theoretical traditions and immovable dogmas. We are rising today because we are free to seek new solutions and develop new tactics to meet new situations. If we are going to keep growing, we will have to turn more to the problems of younger workers. It might be noted that jobs most common to kids (stock work, filling-station work, store clerking, etc.) are almost completely unorganized, and offer us a splendid opportunity to chan­nel the "youth revolt" into a consciously revolutionary movement.

In any case, we cannot go on assuming that the rock'n'rollers are a helpless, ignorant, reactionary mass; that their problems are not our problems; that they are somehow "irrelevant." We must recognize that the rock 'n 'rollers, too, despite the hesitations of" socialist" politi­cians, are our friends and fellow workers.

Derek Jarman: gay clubbing in the 70s and 80s

In his 1984 autobiographical text Dancing Ledge, Derek Jarman wrote about gay clubs in London and New York in the early days of AIDS:

The dungeon redoubts of the gay world are its clubs with names like the Asylum, the Catacombs, the Mineshaft. The gay Heaven is also deep underground; though the 9th Circle is above. Exotique foreign names abound - Copacabana, La Douce. Down in the dungeons the inmates shout themselves hoarse against the disco music and lasers, which furthers a delicious alienation. This world eschews the overground reality which rejects it, and seeks perfection in an ideal favoured by low lights, denim, leather and the rest. Signs are important - rings on fingers and limp wrists are replaced by running shorts and vests, work-out muscles and moustaches. These in turn fall to the Haircuts.

The next day, as I look down from my window in the sunlight on Charing X Road, I see these drained, pallid faces of the night on their way to the YMCA; the fetish for 'health' the guilty reverse of the night before. Today the gay liberation march winds past. This has an air of festival. Two immaculate pink nuns with moustaches neat as clipped box take the prize. A 'lady' in a ball-gown drops out and rests languidly on the City of Westminster salt bin in front of St Martin's... A pink balloon escapes and circles high in the blue sky.

In the Mineshaft, New York City, the microbes take a Charles Atlas course - and a famous and very old man drifts past quite in the pink and into the shadows. I make a mental note of a 'decent' retirement age - but know I won't bring myself to put myself out to grass. We all know these habits arc possibly damaging, but you pays your dues and takes your chances. In Ron Peck's film Nighthawks I played a very creditable cruiser, so lost in myself I burnt my fingers instead of the cigarette.

Usually self-preservation prevails and I'm home by two. The disastrous late nights are wrought by the unattainable barmen whom the wicked managements spread like jam.

I know the arguments against all this and am certain they have their own fair share of the truth. But I live and work in a single room which I share with some books and large sheets of blank writing-paper; so unless I make some foray into the night I could spend twenty-four hours alone

... In the dungeons pure anonymity prevails and the opening line is much more likely to be, 'Can I get you a drink?' - vodka with ice: much more comforting. And what else? Well, dressing is Fancy Dress. Down here this COUNTS. It's the real test of a person's sexual orientation - the styles forged in the dungeon slip over into the world outside. But here they are a code - the jeans with that exact-tear, the leather jacket and white T-shirt. Why not go to Heaven in a suit and tie? In the Mineshaft they turn you away for wearing aftershave. Elsewhere, a dress is OK, but the suit and tie of the real world is for punters with stuffed pockets. The HAIRCUTS buy theirs second-hand.

I consciously adopt the denim/leather look most nights. I'm assured I don't look like a clone. I have a phobia about moustaches like some people have for spiders - I couldn't conceive of touching one.

Back in 1965 La Douce opened its doors on Friday evening and closed them early on Monday. We danced through the weekend 0n purple hearts. Those without a bed slept in the Biograph Cinema before starting out again.

Drugs are never far from the scene. After the hearts came Acid and quaaludes; then amyl, and something called Ecstasy. Someone always managed to roll a joint in a dark corner, and dance away into the small hours. It's certain that nobody who had taken the steps towards liberation hadn't used one if not all of them. The equation was inevitable, and part of initiation.

Now, from out of the blue comes the Antidote that has thrown all of this into confusion. AIDS. Everyone has an opinion. It casts a shadow, if even for a moment, across any encounter. Some have retired; others, with uncertain bravado, refuse to change. Some say it's from Haiti, or the darkest Amazon, and some say the disease has been endemic in North America for centuries, that the Puritans called it the Wrath of God. Others advance conspiracy theories, of mad Anita Bryant, secret viral laboratories and the CIA. All this is fuelled by the Media, who sell copy and make MONEY out of disaster. But whatever the cause and whatever the ultimate outcome the immediate effect has been to clear the bath-houses and visibly thin the boys of the night. In New York, particularly, they are starting to make polite conversation again - a change is as good as a rest. I decide I'm in the firing-line and make an adjustment - prepare myself for the worst - decide on decent caution rather than celibacy, and worry a little about my friends. Times change. I refuse to moralize, as some do, about the past. That plays too easily into the hands of those who wish to eradicate freedom, the jealous and the repressed who are always with us...

... Raids on gay clubs follow different patterns. The last full-scale raid that I was involved with, in the mid-seventies, closed down the Gigolo in the King's Road. Saturday night, the place is packed to capacity. In the darkness at the far end people are making out. One tall, very handsome boy wades into the throng. He seems oblivious to the attention his presence is causing. He doesn't have a hard-on. I give up and stand at the bar. Three minutes later, whistles. It's a police raid. At the back the unreceptive one is in a fist-fight with a couple of leather boys. The panic is so great that I am carried at least ten feet by the surge of the crowd. Quick thinking: I empty my pockets deftly. We wait for hours in silence while each customer is given a body-search... they know they've got you, this riff-raff in uniforms. The Gigolo is closed down for ever after ten years'.

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)

Dark Side of the Club

The Dark Side of the Club is an exhibition of clubbing and music photographs by Jamie Simonds now showing at the Gowlett pub in Peckham. There's some great shots, I particularly liked this one of a pirate radio operator (Kool FM I think) in action on an Aldgate rooftop.

Dancing Ledge

Are there many dancing places in the landscape? Obviously there are many places where people have danced in the open air, but what about places that actually have a dance-related name? Dancing Ledge in Dorset is one such place. Situated on the Isle of Purbeck a couple of miles south of Langton Matravers, it is a place created by quarrying. The removal of stone has created a flat surface next to the sea likened to a ballroom dancefloor, hence the name.

Not sure how often people have actually danced there - it is a bit of a climb down the rocks - but in 'Old Swanage: Past and Present' (1910), W.M. Hardy mentions a picnic and dancing on the ledge with music from the Swanage Brass and Reed Band and 'a plentiful repast, consisting of lobster tea, salad and liquid refreshments'.

Derek Jarman was very fond of this place, calling his autobiography after it and filming parts of The Angelic Conversation and his punk movie Jubilee there. At the end of the latter, Queen Elizabeth I and John Dee walk at the Ledge, the queen declaring: 'All my heart rejoiceth at the roar of the surf on the shingles marvellous sweet music it is to my ears - what joy there is in the embrace of water and earth'.

Songs about dancing (6): Out on the Floor

From 1965, this Northern Soul classic by Dobie Gray has been an anthem for many years for some of the most committed dancers ever to have graced a dancefloor. There is something incredibly joyous about this song, to actually be out on the floor while listening/dancing to this record is such a buzz, a perfect beautiful loop - listening to 'on the floor' a joyous song about dancing while dancing joyously on the floor to the song...

'I am on the floor tonight, I feel like singin'/ The beat is running right and guitars are ringin'/ I'm really on tonight and everything swingin' / The room is packed out tight, light at the door/ I Get My Kicks Out On The Floor' (full lyrics at the excellent awopbopaloobopalopbamboom (from where I also sourced the scan of the label).

Hillsborough 1989

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, when fans of Liverpool FC were crushed at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield. The fans were caged in by metal fences and as a result were unable to escape on to pitch when the crush developed. 96 people died. The Manic Street Preachers later recorded a song SYMM - South Yorkshire Mass Murderer - perhaps not one of their best efforts musically or lyrically, but expressing the sentiment that the disaster was not an 'Act of God' but was caused by the actions of the police and football authorities. A better song is the Liverpool epic Does this Train Stop on Merseyside by Amsterdam, which refers to the disaster with the lines: 'Yorkshire policemen chat with folded arms, people try and save their fellow fans' (Christy Moore has also recently recorded this song).

The following article was written by Jeremy Seabrook immediately after the disaster. Unfortunately much of it still rings true today, not just for football but in terms of the way the wider 'leisure industry' processes crowds for profit - see for instance deaths from fires in nightclubs.

'We were like animals in a zoo' - Jeremy Seabrook (Guardian, 17 April 1989)

Hillsborough has now become yet another placename to add to those that make up the by-now voluminous gazeteer of wasted human lives. Already there has been talk of "learning the lessons of Hillsborough"; but if the lessons of Bradford, Heysel, Manchester Airport and the Herald of Free Enterprise had been even half absorbed, this most cruel visita­tion might have been avoided.

What all these have in common is that they arose from the processing of people through time or space for the sake of experiences provided by the entertainment, holiday and sports industries; as such, they touch upon one of the central purposes of the economy in its most benign guise - that of leisure society. This, it turns out, is dedicated to the necessity of making as much money out of people as possible, in this instance, by making them pay - some, alas, with their lives ­for the privilege of standing for two hours in what are nothing more than overcrowded cages.

Because these experiences are associated with pleasure, it is easy to disregard the dangers, whether these are the use of unsuitable material in the manufacture of aircraft seats, insecure and overloaded ferry boats, or football grounds that prove to be deathtraps. It is only when things go wrong that some deep insight is granted us into the true value placed on human life by the purveyors of entertainment, escape and fun to the people.

"We were like animals in a zoo," said one man afterwards. It was a zoo in which the watchers were primarily electronic: the cameras of the media, the police videos and computers, represent a vast investment in the paraphernalia of surveil­lance, which could monitor every anguished moment, but do absolutely nothing to help. What a contrast this prodigious outlay of money presents with the absence of life-saving equipment. The doctors present testified that there were no defibrillators, and that the oxygen tents were without oxygen; but the presence of all the media hardware ensured that the spectacle of football was swiftly transformed into a spectacle of a quite different genre.

The carnage – how sad that the hyperbole of football writing becomes hideously appropriate – raises intently political issues. Those who insist upon referring to the incident as though it were an Act of God, a sort of natural tragedy, betray only their interest in concealment. The very public display of their humanitarian concern merely masks its absence in the more fundamental matter of preventing the gratuitous squandering of young lives.

Football is perhaps the only remaining experience in our social life where passion - and partisan passion at that - is engaged. Nothing could be further removed from the other characteristic crowd scenes in our society: the people shuffling through the shopping malls, for instance, are self-policing, introspectively concerned as they are upon the relationship between individual desire, money and the prize to be purchased; remote too from pop concerts, where the shared focus of cathartic emotion is funnelled on to a single person, and its ex­pression is without conflict.

But football continues to reach something which neither of these possesses - the pas­sion of locality, and of places once associated with something more than football teams. That Liverpool should have been connected twice with such un­bearable events is perhaps not entirely by chance. For the great maritime city, with its decayed function rooted in an archaic Imperial and industrial past, sport now has to bear a freight of symbolism that it can scarcely contain.

The energies of partisan, mainly working-class male crowds remain, as they always have been, the object of great anxiety and suspicion to their betters. These energies are perceived as perhaps the last vestiges of the turbulence of the mob - unruly, defiant and unpredictable - in a society where all other public passions have been tamed.

The forces released by football provide a glimpse of collective power that has been successfully neutralised in the rich Western societies; a suggestion that such passion could possibly be harnessed to social and political endeavour rather than sublimated in sporting conflicts.

Apart from the sight of the inert young bodies stretched out in the sunlight, perhaps the most chilling images were those of the anguished faces pressed against wire fences. They looked as if they had been taken from the iconography of repression of authoritarian states, and they evoke something quite other than the idea of sport. They bore the tormented expression of those in prison camps; indeed, many spoke of "the terracing that had become a prison", the inevitability of disaster within those reinforced enclosures, where the grisly facts of the quantity of pressure they. were calculated to withstand was conveyed with scientific precision.

We can only guess at what unwanted and redundant human powers are being con­trolled in the use of all this apparatus of containment; what frustrated visions and cancelled dreams are being policed, what doomed alternative use of these energies is being fenced in, sifted through the mechanistic click of the turnstiles. What an irony is the Government's obsession with identity cards in this context, when it is precisely a sense of identity that so many are trying to reclaim in these conflicts between geographic entities that have become, physically, interchangeable. For what now differentiates Sheffield from Nottingham, Manchester from Liverpool, Bradford from Leeds, with their homogeneous housing estates, the sameness of their shopping centres, the identical service sector economy?

There remains also an old class prejudice in the treatment of those who must be systemati­cally humiliated in the pursuit of their afternoon's pleasure. "We are treated like animals," some said afterwards; and in their words is an echo of how Government ministers had described them at the time of earlier disasters. The very idea of "fans" is a humbling social role, a diminishing and partial account of human beings.

Indeed, there could be no greater gulf than that created by the exaggerated adulation that the stars and heroes receive - the inflated transfer fees, the publicity, the column inches and admiring TV interviews - and the abasement and inferiorising of the fans, punters or consumers. The players are mythicised, whisked upwards into an empyrean of fame and celebrity, in which everything they do or say is reported, no matter how trivial; in the process they become remote from their votaries and followers, who are kept in their place as effectively as they once might have been through the mysteries of breeding or station. Part of the process of erecting the infamous steel barriers is connected with enforcing this separation: the pitch is inviolate, the fans must remain content with the wall poster, the autograph, the fantasy.

Already, the aftermath of these tragic disasters has taken on the aspect of a known ritual: the Prime Minister arrives, prayers are offered up, shrines are set up at the scene of the accident, and a fund is opened. It means that these inadmissable horrors have become part and parcel of our social life; they have become familiar. Once again, the real lessons are likely to be that the public enquiry will be a vast exercise in concealment of the true relationship of these unnecessary tragedies to the necessities of what are no longer amiable Saturday afternoon pastimes but are part of a remorseless machine for making money; how fitting that the advertising hoardings had to serve in place of absent stretchers.

More: see the Hillsborough Justice Campaign; there's also a couple of good articles by Merrick at Head Heritage, one summarising the Hillsborough events and the other comparing the policing of football fans with the recent G20 protests.