South East of the Thames Border Infection Mix

Last week I took part in Border Infection, an event at Goldsmiths in New Cross themed around borders, migration and creativity. My contribution was to lead a radical history walk/talk around New Cross and Deptford. In the evening there was a party at the Amersham Arms, with the highlight a great DJ set by Ges-E and Osmani Soundz from Nasha records (Eastern-flavoured bassism). I also played a set, in effect a soundtrack after the fact to the walk, featuring music linked to the area - specifically stuff that could be placed on a loose South London bass continuum from 70s reggae to current UK funky. Here's my selection:

South East of the Thames Border Infection Mix - Neil Transpontine (download full mix here)

1. TT Ross - Imagine: released on Dennis Harris's Lovers Rock in 1978, the label that named a whole genre of soulful reggae. The label was based in Harris's studio at 13 Upper Brockley Road, SE4.

2. Johnny Osbourne -13 Dead: this and the next four tracks all relate to the 1981 New Cross Fire, when 13 young black people died in a house fire at 439 New Cross Road.

3. Sir Collins and His Mind Sweepers - New Cross Fire: Sir Collins - or Charlie Collins -was involved in the famous Four Aces club in Dalston. His son was DJing at the New Cross party and died in the fire. I have added a sample from a BBC news report in January 1981.

4. Roy Rankin & Raymond Naptali - New Cross Fire (1981): I have added a sample of Sybil Phoenix discussing racism in late 1970s and the setting up of the Moonshot Club in New Cross, youth club for young black people and scene of mass meetings in the aftermath of the fire.

5. Linton Kwesi Johnson -New Craas Massahkah.

6. Benjamin Zephaniah - 13 Dead and Nothing Said.

7. Mad Professor & Jah Shaka - Gautrey Road Style. The Mad Professor had his Ariwa studio at 42 Gautrey Road, SE15 in the 1980s. Jah Shaka was based in New Cross.

8. Brown Sugar - I'm in love with a Dreadlocks - another release on the Lovers Rock label from 1977, written by John Kpiaye, guitarist at Dennis Harris's studio, with Dennis Bovell as sound engineer. Brown Sugar included singers Kofi (later a solo artist) and Caron Wheeler (later of Soul II Soul).

9. Brinsley Forde - Can't tek no more of that - the sound of the closing scene of the great reggae sound system film Babylon, shot around Deptford and Brixton in 1979.

10. Dizzee Rascal - Can't tek no more - he's from East rather than South East London, even if his career took off via a Deptford studio, but since this track from last year's Tongue'n'Cheek album samples Babylon it's on the list.

11. Southside Allstars - Southside Riddim - this and the following two rap tracks offer a gritty realist take on South East London life, doing their bit to undermine gentrification by reminding everybody that the area has gangs and violence as well as estate agents!

12. Tinie Tempah - South East of the Thames

13. Blak Twang - Dettwork South East

14. Controlled Weirdness vs. Excentral Tempest -South London Bass/South East: my mix combining South London Bass by DJ Controlled Weirdness with South East, a rap by Excentral Tempest (now Kate Tempest).

15. Kyla - Do you Mind: a bit of an obvious funky anthem I know, this comes via Digital Holdings, the New Cross studio used by producers Crazy Cousinz. There's a continuity between Lovers Rock and UK Funky I think, expressing the soulful current of London bass culture as the flipside to the dread, beat an' blood current.

16. Leslee Lyrix - a short extract from the 1983 Ghettotone vs. Saxon sound system clash at Lewisham Boys Club, featuring Leslee Lyrix as Ghettotone MC. In his other guise as Dr William (Les) Henry he has published an essential book about sound system culture, What the Deejay Said: A Critique from the Street. Overlaid on this are samples from a short film, Voice for the Voiceless, made by some Goldsmiths students in 2008, with Les Henry and Les Back discussing the significance of sound systems and specifically nights in the Crypt at St Pauls in Deptford. I had a small role in this film, mainly supplying them with the soundtrack after a drink with the film makers in the New Cross Inn.


Voice for the Voiceless Uploaded by nickstreet83.

[the sound quality on the mix is variable, some of it ripped from vinyl and cassette and then thrown together on Audacity, but hope you'll agree that the content is all good... Also posted at Transpontine. Previous Agitdisco mix here]

Kenneth Anger - Invocation of My Demon Brother

Struggled through the rain today to catch the very last hour of the Kenneth Anger exhibition at the Spruth Magers Gallery in London. It was small, but definitely worth the effort. The main focus was a continuous showing of his 1969 film Invocation of My Demon Brother. Described by Anger himself as an '“an attack on the sensorium”, it is a collage of rapidly shifting colours and imagery - ritual scenes, tattoos, Hells Angels, Anton LaVey, Marianne Faithfull, Lenore Kandel, semi naked bodies, troops jumping out of a helicopter - all set to a minimalist noise soundtrack from Mick Jagger, who is glimpsed briefly at The Rolling Stones '69 gig in Hyde Park.

Inevitably there are versions on Youtube, but if you do get the opportunity to see it on a large screen do take it as the impact is much stronger.



The exhibition also featured prints of stills, including this one of Marianne Faithfull as Lilith in his film Lucifer Rising:


... and this one of Anais Nin as Astarte:

Dancing at the Peckham Experiment

Here's an interesting chapter in London dancing history - a dancehall in a groundbreaking health centre in South London. The Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, South London (1935-50) has been seen by many as a precursor of the National Health Service. Some have argued though that it was in fact more radical than the NHS, including the anarchist Colin Ward who sadly died last month. He reviewed the main book about the Centre (Being Me and Also Us: Lessons from the Peckham Experiment by Allison Stallibrass) in New Statesman and Society, September 29th 1989, and indeed recalled his own visit there for a meeting of the London Anarchist Group. For him the Peckham Experiment was an exercise in mutual aid and self-help preferable to the top-down bureaucratic model of the NHS. The building still stand in St Marys Road, but has been converted to flats. Here's his review:

Kenneth Clarke expostulated to a radio interviewer the other day: ‘We’ve never run the health service as some kind of workers’ cooperative.’ More’s the pity, I would say. But the real tragedy is that we have never run a health service, only an illness service. By stressing the word health, I don’t mean preventive medicine. I mean the pursuit of the conditions for personal, family and social well-being. There was one unforgettable experiment in this direction, and it died with the foundation of the NHS. This was the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham.

For people like me, curious about the preconditions for resourcefulness and independence, it was a verification of our deepest convictions. The founders were a husband-and-wife pair of doctors, Innes Pearse and George Scoot Williamson. In 1938, they wrote about their Family Health Club: ‘It seems that ‘a sort of anarchy’ is the first condition in any experiment in human applied biology. This condition is also that to which our members most readily respond…’

It began much earlier, in 1926, when after welfare work in south London they concluded that most urban dwellers were so ‘de-vitalised’ that babies were born deficient in health. To study the characteristics of health they devised the idea of a family club, to be joined on two conditions, first, that the whole family must join; and second, that families must agree to a periodic medical examination.They started in a small house run as a club until 1929. The next step was to raise the money from charitable trusts to move to a purpose-built family club big enough to be self-supporting from subscriptions. By 1935 they had raised the cash and built the Pioneer Health Centre, designed by Sir Owen Williams. It was glass-walled inside and out, as the Peckham biologists needed to observe what members actually did. The centre of the building was a swimming pool, and there was a theatre, a gymnasium and a children’s nursery on the ground floor, with dance halls, a cafeteria, a library and medical rooms.

It ran from 1935 to 1939, and after the war from 1946 to 1950. It ended in 1951 after all efforts to get it adopted by local authorities or the NHS had failed. Since ‘health centres’ had become part of official doctrine after the National Health Service Act of 1946, the directors approached the Ministry of Health to incorporate it into official provision.

They failed for five reasons: first, it was concerned exclusively with the study and cultivation of health, not with the treatment of disease; second, it was based exclusively on the integrated family, not on the individual; third, it was based exclusively on a locality, it had no ‘open door’; fourth, its basis was contributory (2s 6d – 12 and a half pence – per family per week), not free; and fifth, it was based on autonomous administration, and so didn’t conform to the NHS structure.

The centre died but the idea did not. Pioneer Health Centre Ltd still exists and in the past ten years has ensured the republication by the Scottish Academic Press of all the old Peckham reports. The same publishers have just brought out, at £7.95, a new study called Being Me and Also Us: Lessons from the Peckham experiment. The author is Allison Stallibrass, a Peckham veteran and author of that modern classic of child development, The Self-Respecting Child.Her book is fascinating from several points of view. First, she has sought out people who were members as children or young parents and gathered their recollections of what the place meant in their lives. It is an enormously impressive testimony. Second, she shows how ahead of their time the Peckham pioneers were.

They were founder members of the Soil Association and took on a farm to ensure that members could buy nutritious bread, milk and vegetables and to provide holidays in the sun. Fifty years later, old Peckham hands remember that delicious bread. Third, she demonstrates how the preoccupation with the family was not a limiting, but an enlarging, factor. Members gradually accepted all the children as part of the family, while children and adolescents related to all the adults.Finally, she asks and ventures answers to the question: could we replicate the experiences of Peckham today? The original building cost about a fifth of the typical super-cinema of the period, though it was expensive to run. A modern equivalent would be far more useful in any community than the standard local ‘leisure centre’ which caters for a narrow band of the population and has no links with the ideology of self-catering, health-counselling, personal and social autonomy.

I only went there once, in 1949. I listened to Scott Williamson wittily addressing a meeting of the London Anarchist Group, and I visited Innes Pearse when she retired to Argos Hill windmill in Sussex. I never realised until I read this book that they must be considered as the truly creative figures in 20th century social medicine.

See also: Anarchism and the welfare state: the Peckham Health Centre by David Goodway:

'A different age group had caused mayhem on the opening of the new Centre in 1935, when the building was still uncompleted and much of the equipment intended for the children had still to arrive. Each day after school there was an invasion by crowds of kids, aged from seven to sixteen, who ran along the long open spaces and up and down the staircases, screaming, committing minor vandalism and making thorough nuisances of themselves. All the adults urged strong disciplinary measures - all except Williamson, who insisted that order would eventually be implemented by the children themselves as they responded to stimuli provided for them.

To this end [Lucy H.] Crocker was taken on the staff with the brief to resolve the problem. She was to discover that unsupervised children were excluded from the two places in the building, the swimming-pool and the gym, they found most appealing. Her solution was to develop a 'ticket system' whereby children could gain access to a preferred activity on obtaining a signed chit on each occasion from a member of staff cognisant of their physical abilities. This necessitated the children's continual interaction with an orderly, rational adult society and was found to foster responsibility, apparatus being returned to its designated place without request. 'The child is quick to respond to a mutually sustained order in society', as Pearse and Crocker were to put it. Within eighteen months of the reopening the screaming and running were no more and 'there were at last signs of order', Crocker recalled: 'not the quietness due to external discipline but the hum of active children going about their own business'.

This handling of the rowdy schoolchildren exemplifies the fifth condition on which the 'Peckham Experiment' depended: the maintenance of autonomy, autonomy not just for the adults but for their children also. Williamson and Pearse had no doubt that as biologists studying the human organism they had to deal 'with free agents', for 'any imposed action or activity becomes a study of authority, discipline or instruction...not the study of free agents plus their self-created environment'. In 1938, possibly foolhardily, they spoke warmly of 'a sort of anarchy', believing that 'a very strict "anarchy"...will permit the emergence of order through spontaneous action...' But although Williamson spoke to the London Anarchist Group on several occasions during the 1940s - chaired by John Hewetson, the GP editor of Freedom - he objected vehemently to the paper's coverage in 1951 of the announcement of the winding-up of the Centre (articles for which Colin Ward was primarily responsible), and which pointed to its anarchist, indeed revolutionary, nature. Williamson proclaimed: 'I am not an anarchist, nor do I believe in anarchy - not even the Kropotkin type'.

In truth, Williamson seems like A.S. Neill, the progressive educationalist, to have been an anarchist in both theory and practice, while denying he was one. Frances Donaldson (whose husband Jack was to manage the social floors in the Centre until they were running smoothly) had this to say about his remarkable disposition:

"...his lack of paternalismas far as this is humanly possible, was complete. He was not interested in how people should behave, or in how they might be made to behave, but only in how they did behave in any given circumstance...this made for a kind of democracy in the Centre which I doubt has ever been seen anywhere else...He had a rooted objection to the leader in society, regarding him as someone who pushed around the human material he wished to study in spontaneous action, and who exerted the force of his personality to drive more ordinary people out of the true of their natural behaviour into activities unsuited to them and which they half-consciously disliked. "

So while the 'health overhauls' enabled individuals to learn what they might be suffering from, the doctors did not direct them what to do, allowing them to make informed, autonomous choices. A visitor, who learned from Williamson that a man had 'a most dreadful hernia', asked why then had it not been treated and was told: 'It's his hernia. It's up to him when he wants to get it fixed up'. The condition of autonomy goes far to explain why the people of Peckham regarded the Centre as their own, filling the building with their autonomous activity. Clubs were formed and run by their members for a great range of pastimes, including camping, badminton, boxing, fencing and tap-dancing, while skills would be shared in, for example, dressmaking, woodwork, first aid and choral singing.'

The Pioneer Health Foundation site, which has lots more information, states that the polished cork tiles covering the floors were ideal for dancing, and that 'Amongst the many who made the most of it were the teenagers, freed at last from the streets, using the whole building intensively, exploring the whole community, and visibly thriving on it. The whole edifice used to rock on Saturday nights when the Long Room was packed with dancers, of all ages, dancing to the strains of the Centre's own band, directed by a most energetic member, a bookmaker by profession' (Jack Donaldson).

Photos from Pioneer Health Foundation - not sure when they were taken, I am guessing 1940s. Cross-posted from Transpontine on account of the dance content.

Hot Stuff - Alice Echols on Stonewall

I haven't got hold of a copy of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture by Alice Echols yet, but there's a very interesting interview with her at Salon. Here's what she has to say about the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York:

'In some ways, it's not surprising that the Stonewall Inn became the birthplace of what many people consider the modern gay liberation movement: It was a dancing bar. The Stonewall had two dance floors, and it was unusual because most bars in New York City did not allow gay men to dance. The one in the back was often filled with black men and Latinos, and the jukebox was soul. There was a lot of getting down on that dance floor, and that led to a kind of sexual expressiveness.

There's this great quote I have in the book, that at other bars you could only get into the longing for a particular person -- and think, "Oh, he's cute" -- but you couldn't do anything about it. At the Stonewall, the dancing forced a kind of physical intimacy and, I think, gave the men there a sense of wanting more and yearning for more, which then got expressed in the Stonewall Riots.

It's very telling that when the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance started up in New York, one of their key activities was to organize dances where many of the movers and shakers of the disco world were first exposed to disco. I think it's very hard to disaggregate dancing from protest. Dancing is a protest especially from men who were surveilled and harassed. That's one of the reason why disco featured music that didn't stop. You didn't want it to stop, because that in itself was a kind of rebellion...

Once gay bars became decriminalized, the mafia pulled back somewhat and you saw these different venues cropping up, like private clubs. Dancing became a part of what Richard Goldstein calls the "psychic intifada." The music was so damn loud that the reticence and inhibition that characterized the gay piano bar could no longer be had. You had to dispense with the chitchat, which led to greater sexual explicitness'.

Stars Campaign for Inter-Racial Friendship: rock against racism in the 1950s?

Jazz musician John Dankworth died last month. As this BBC film from 1959 shows, one of his early achievements was to chair the Stars Campaign for Inter-Racial Friendship, founded in 1959 to combat the activities of the White Defence League. As well as Dankworth, members of the campaign included Cleo Laine, Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan (looking very like a young Billy Bragg), Humphrey Lyttelton, and folk singer Karl Dallas.



As described at Love Music Hate Racism, Colin Jordan's White Defence League later merged as part of the first British National Party in 1960, with Jordan's former comrade John Tyndall later going on to form the National Front and then the current BNP. Jordan, who was once jailed for trying to burn down synagogues, was later the fuhrer of the British Movement leading a motley crew of neo-nazi skinheads to nowhere in the 1980s.

Digital Economy Bill

If you haven't wised up about the Digital Economy Bill going through the UK parliament, you should do so quickly.

Whatever you think about the ethics of file sharing, this music & film industry inspired legislation represents an attempt to bring in some dangerous powers. It proposes disconnecting people from the internet for alleged file sharing, without even a trial where people can contest what they are accused of. In cutting off broadband access to the many people who may use one connection, it also amounts to a form of collective punishment. It also proposes blocking offending websites, a power that would no doubt be used to censor the internet. Finally open wi-fi would be threatened, since whoever was providing it could be held accountable for the actions of those using it.

As for the ludicrous attempts to suggest that downloading is killing music, let's just remember that people have been making music, and indeed making a living from making music, for thousands of years. The period in which a significant but small proportion of musicians have made the bulk of their living from the sale of recordings has lasted only about 50 years. Maybe that is changing, but the capacity to make, perform and disseminate music is arguably stronger than ever. Music isn't going away, even if the record industry in its current form seems to be.

Anyway there's lots of material about the Bill at the Open Rights Group site. They have called a Stop Disconnection demonstration at Parlimament on Wednesday, 24 March at 17:30. For a good rant, see Penny Red's A State-sponsored book burning parade:

'This is a vile, vituperative piece of legislation, driven by corporate lobbyists and blithely ignoring public interest. It's a Faustian pact between a dying government and antique, anti-innovatory music and publishing industries who are as terrified now as manufacturers of illuminated manuscripts were in 1455 when they got their hands on the Gutenberg Bible and saw the page turning on a world of easily-exchanged ideas that they could not monetise or control'.

African clubs in Israel

Interesting short article about African clubs in Israel:

'On a chilly Friday in a basement on a graffiti-lined street, about 100 African men and a handful of women move to upbeat, deep-voiced Nigerian music. Red and green disco lights swirl overhead. Bolli Impanem wears a red-and-white soccer jersey as he flits between dance floor and DJ stand.

“I don’t go to Israeli clubs,” says Mr. Impanem. He moved to Israel in 2000 from Nigeria to play soccer for Hapoel Beer Sheva, a pro club, but stayed when he married a Dutch woman. "Somebody slapped me once at a club and it was embarrassing.... So I made a place for me to dance.”

Israel’s African population numbers about 20,000, although no exact figures exist because of illegal migration. First, Ghanaian migrant workers came in the 1980s, followed by other laborers. Today most Africans in Israel are asylum-seekers from Sudan and Eritrea...

... Impanem’s basement disco is camouflaged. The heavy metal front door is down a staircase at the back of a nondescript, fluorescent-lit driveway. For Nelone Key, a South African without working papers, the basement is a place to forget about his frustrations, such as not finding a job despite a university education. “I just like to dance sometimes,” he says.

Full article: Christian Science Monitor, 16 March 2010.

Musicians Deported by UK Border Agency

The campaign is continuing against the points-based immigration system restricting artists visting the UK (discussed here before) is continuing. The Manifesto Club Visiting Artists Campaign handed in a petition at 10 Downing Street this week against the system, signed by 10,000 people amongst whose names I recognised Sukhdev Sandhu, Michael Moorcock, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Charlie Gillett, and, fantastically, Arthur Brown, God of Hellfire.

They have also produced a dossier, Deported: Artists and academics barred from the UK which highlights many cases, including the following:

'Gabriel Teodros, USA, hip-hop artist: Statement from Gabriel Teodros: “I was invited to the UK by a university to perform and participate in an academic conference, and was detained for eight hours at London-Heathrow before being sent back to the States, for reasons that were unclear. This has personally cost me thousands, ruined months of plans, and your own border agents could not even answer questions regarding your laws. I may tour the entire world but will never fly back into London. These laws are a wall so many artists & educators can not find a way around, the arts and culture in your country will suffer.”

' The Pipe Band, Pakistan, pipe musicians. Members of the Pakistani pipe band – due to perform at the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow – were unable to attend when their visa applications were rejected. The World Pipe Band Championships at Glasgow Green is said to be worth an estimated £7 million to the city economy. SNP MSP for Glasgow Anne McLaughlin called on the UK government and Border Agency to reverse their decision. “The Pipe Band are international ambassadors and Glasgow’s Pipe Band Championships is an international celebration. This kind of decision gives Scotland a bad name and shows up the shambles within the UK Border Agency.”'

'Taisha Paggett, USA, dancer and choreographer: A member of collective Ultra-red, visiting the UK to participate in a workshop (legally a ‘business visitor’), was advised by another member who had become aware of confusing new legislation, not to say she was an artist. She followed her fellow member’s advice, but Immigration became suspicious. Searching her luggage, they found a copy of the email with the fellow member’s advice printed out, and deported her from the UK for deception with no right to return for ten years'.

Park Lane Squatters

Article in the Observer magazine at the weekend (14 March) about the people behind last month's party at a squatted mansion in London's Park Lane:

'On Thursday 11 February, 3,000 revellers descended in numbers normally only seen at festivals to a derelict Mayfair mansion in Park Lane. They had been invited by the party's organisers, CTL (it stands for whatever you want it to: "call the landlord", "come to life"), to sample the high life of decadent parties and seven-storey mansions normally reserved for the very rich. The ensuing chaos reached new heights of madness when the Metropolitan police riot squad turned up and proceeded to charge at the crowd outside before storming the building and chucking the last dregs of excited youth back on to the street' (full article here).

The sympathetic article contrasted with some of the shock horror stories in the tabloids at the time, such as the Daily Mail: 'Riot police raid £30m Mayfair squat after 2,000 people show up to Facebook party 'gone wrong'... the 'perfect tenants' decided to throw the most destructive party possible. After advertising a 'Night of Mayhem' on Facebook, hundreds of drunken revellers turned up at the address - on the corner of the appropriately named Dunraven Street'.

Taking over empty buildings in this way has a long and honorable history in London, from the 'Wild Beatnik Parties' of the 1960s, 1980s warehouse parties and the free party movement of the 1990s and beyond.

Shame though that the Observer article had to reproduce the usual stereotypes about most squatters: 'the majority of the collective is middle class and educated to high levels; they all have other places they could be. They are not the typically greasy, uneducated and unwashed junkie face of squatting. They aren't homeless either. These are young people disillusioned by the choices society asks them to make'. The whole tone seems to suggest that nice, arty middle class squatting is morally superior to people taking over empty buildings out of mere need. And just because most people putting on parties or occupying buildings for housing aren't media darlings or the sons and daughters of the chattering classes doesn't mean that they are 'greasy, uneducated and unwashed junkies'.

Lesbians banned from Mississippi Prom

A school in Misssissippi has cancelled its prom dance rather than allow a lesbian student attend with her girlfriend. Here's the full story from the ACLU, 11 March 2010:

'The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit today against a Mississippi High School that has canceled prom rather than let a lesbian high school student attend the prom with her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo to the event. In papers filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi, the ACLU asks the court to reinstate the prom for all students at the school and charges Itawamba County School District officials are violating Constance McMillen’s First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

“All I wanted was the same chance to enjoy my prom night like any other student. But my school would rather hurt all the students than treat everyone fairly,” said McMillen, an 18-year-old senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi. “This isn’t just about me and my rights anymore – now I’m fighting for the right of all the students at my school to have our prom.”

Today’s filing comes after Itawamba County School District issued a statement yesterday saying they were canceling prom, following a letter from the ACLU and the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition demanding that they reverse their decision. McMillen said that before that happened, school officials had told her that she could not arrive at the prom with her girlfriend, also a student at IAHS, and that they might be thrown out if any other students complained about their presence at the April 2 event.

“Itawamba school officials are trying to turn Constance into the villain who called the whole thing off, and that just isn’t what happened. She’s fighting for everyone to be able to enjoy the prom,” said Kristy Bennett, Legal Director of the ACLU of Mississippi. “The government, and that includes public schools, can’t censor someone’s free expression just because some other person might not like it.”

In today’s legal complaint, the ACLU asks the court to reinstate the prom for all students and charges that the First Amendment guarantees students’ right to bring same-sex dates to school dances and cites cases holding that other parties’ objections don’t justify censorship. The ACLU also said that the school further violates McMillen’s free expression rights by telling her that she can’t wear a tuxedo to the prom.

“It’s shameful and cowardly of the school district to have canceled the prom and to try to blame Constance, who’s only standing up for herself. We will fight tooth and nail for the prom to be reinstated for all students,” said Christine P. Sun, Senior Counsel with the ACLU national LGBT Project, who represents McMillen along with the ACLU of Mississippi.

You can show your support at the Let Constance Take her Girlfriend to the Prom facebook group, to which more than 100,000 people have signed up.

Absurd rave trial drags on in Italy

So you went to a party when you were a student four years ago - and now you're having to sit in a court room facing prosecution as a result. This is the absurd situation in Italy, where the court room in Varese was packed out last month for the latest hearing for 113 defendants charged in relation to a party held at Caldè near Lake Maggiore in June 2006.

Around 500 people, many of them students, attended an unauthorised 'rave party' held in and around old furnace buildings on private land near the shores of the lake. The police set up roadblocks and stopped people as they were leaving the party, as a result of which the 113 were charged with complicity in aggravated invasion (trespass) of the land.

Local papers have queried the use of the court room associated with Mafia trials, noting that in 'this case this case, however, the defendants are normal young people of Varese and surroundings. The trial has been adjourned again until June 2010.

Source: VarezieNotizie, 26 February 2010 ; Varese Laghi 25 February 2010.

Girls who are boys who like boys to be girls

'Nine men dressed in women's clothing were arrested on New Year's Eve in the discotheque of a Manama, Bahrain, hotel and charged with public debauchery, the United Arab Emirates' Gulf News reported this week. Police reports cited by the paper said the men were "heavily made up and wearing provocative outfits" while soliciting fellow patrons. The reports said the men were from different Arab countries but did not specify their nationalities. The paper noted that Bahrain has been seeking to crackdown on perceived homosexual behavior, which is illegal in the Persian Gulf nations, by introducing tougher immigration measures and prompt deportations'.

(Los Angeles Times, 6 January 2010)

'The UAE government has launched a campaign against what it describes as masculine behaviour among women. Under the slogan "excuse me I am a girl", it has launched a series of workshops, lectures and TV programmes. The aim, the UAE authorities say, is to help women avoid what is seen as "delinquent behaviour". That is how the social affairs ministry in the emirates describes what would in some other societies be known as homosexuality or transvestitism. Officials from the ministry told the local press that "masculine behaviour" among young girls was first spotted in special care homes. There were no studies available that describe the extent of the phenomenon in the rest of the Emirati society, they said, but it is believed to be common in girls' schools.

A social worker in charge of the campaign, Awatef al-Rayyes, was quoted as saying that this kind of behaviour could be attributed to a number of causes including the unfair treatment of wives by their husbands and lack of mixing between the sexes. This, she said, could lead to girls feeling more secure in the company of other girls and some may adopt the male role by having their hair cut short or by putting on a man's voice'.

(BBC World, 12 March 2009)

Freddy's: a Brooklyn bar facing demoltion

If one threat to music venues is over-regulation through increasingly onerous licensing laws, another is gentrification. As land and property values rise, spaces of conviviality (pubs, bars, clubs) are often swept away by developers to be replaced by upmarket residential and retail buidings. In London, the clearest example is The Foundry in Shoreditch, facing demolition to make way for a hotel.

City of Strangers notes a similar case from New York, where Freddy's Bar in Brooklyn is facing demolition to make way for the huge Atlantic Yards Development. City of Strangers 'started hanging out in the very late 90’s, when I still lived in Fort Greene. It was nice having a good bar in walking distance. In those pre-hipster days, there weren’t many bars in Brooklyn with found video loops broadcast on a TV over the bar, or that played the whole Velvet’s Banana album or the Ramones or 80’s British punk. The back room featured everything from hardcore to experimental jazz'.


If the developers get their way, 16 high rise buildings will soon replace not only Freddy's but a whole neighbourhood, including many pesky low rise buildings with controlled rents. Freddy's patrons - some pictured below -have threatened to chain themselves to the bar to block its eviction.

Telepathic Fish

When the ambient scene emerged in the early 1990s, I was somewhat ambivalent about the notion of whole clubs dedicated to low tempo electronica. It might have been perfect for winding down after a night out, or even for taking a breather from the dancefloor in a chill out room, but perhaps not for someone who habitually spent time in such rooms impatiently tapping feet and demanding 'can we go and dance again now?' The first such club night I went to was at Jacksons Lane Community Centre in Highgate - I think it might even have been called the Ambient Club (anybody else got any recollection of this?). The ex-punk in me bridled at a club with most people sitting down on mattresses round the outside. But you sit down too, relax a little and hey... it's not so bad!

One of the first series of dedicated ambient nights started out in South London courtesy of a collective who styled themselves Telepathic Fish. In his book 'Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds' (1995), David Toop recalls:

'Telepathic Fish grew from... origins as a small squat party to a growing public event with its own fanzine, Mind Food. "It's like being in someone's living room", Hex/Coldcut 'Macpunk' Matt Black said to me in October 1993 as we watched somebody step around the inert bodies, the dogs on strings and the double baby buggies, carrying a tray of drinks and eats. On that occasion, held in Brixton's Cool Tan Arts Centre, Telepathic Fish ran from noon until 10 p.m. on a Sun­day. You could buy Indian tea and cheese rolls (the latter constructed in situ with a Swiss army knife) from a low table set up in one corner of the main room. This looked for all the world like a 1960s' arts lab: bubble lights, computer graphics, Inflatables, sleepers, drone music, squat aesthetics.

My first and foolish action was to sit on a mattress which has been out in the rain for a month. For half an hour, only professional interest keeps me from screaming out of there in a shower of sparks but then I relax. No, it's fine. This is ambient in the 1990s - the 1960s'/70s'/80s' retro future rolled into a package too open, loose and scruffy to be anything other than a manifestation of real commitment and enthusiasm. Tel­epathic Fish was started by a group of art students and computer freaks - Mario Tracey-Ageura, Kevin Foakes and David Vallade - who lived together in a house in Dulwich. Later, Chantal Passemonde moved into the house, shortly af­ter the parties had begun. Kevin was a hip-hop fan, David liked heavy metal and Chantal listened to the ambient end of indie music: Spacemen 3 and 4AD label bands such as This Mortal Coil. There were no shared musical visions; simply an idea that the environment for listening to music could be different...

For the first party, held in the Dulwich house, six hundred people turned up through word of mouth and Mixmaster Mor­ris DJd. Then they planned a May Day teaparty. The fliers were teabags. Mixmaster Morris wanted a German ambient DJ, Dr Atmo, to play at the party, along with Richard "Aphex Twin" James, a recent addition to Morris's wide circle of friends and fellow psychic nomads. "We realised that the whole party was going to be too big for the place we were going to have it," explains Chantal, "which basically was a garden, so we rushed around. Morris knew some people and we found this squat in Brixton, which was run by these completely insane people. Just real squattie types, right over the edge. It was from Sunday tea on May bank holiday and people just turned up in dribs and drabs all through the night. We got Vegetable Vision in to do the lights. We ran around and got mattresses from on the street round Brixton and we had some of my friends do­ing the tea. We made lots of jelly and there was plenty of acid about. That went on for about fourteen, fifteen hours, with people lying around. That was the first proper Telepathic Fish, May 1st, '93".

So, the first party was in a house in East Dulwich (anyone know where?), the second in a squat in Tunstall Road, Brixton, and then there was at least one at Cool Tan, the squatted ex-dole office in Coldharbour Lane, Brixton. I went to many parties in that place, but don't think I was at that one.

Mixmaster Morris was living in Camberwell at the time (may still do for all I know), he put out a track with Jonah Sharpe called Camberwell Green. He was also involved in the mid-1980s with running a club called The Gift in New Cross - where was that?

(cross posted from my SE London blog, Transpontine)

Dancing flashmob riot in Berkeley

Last week in Berkeley, California, a flashmob dance party on the University ended up in a riot as students protesting against cuts in education funding took their party off the campus and into the streets.

According to Occupy California: 'In Sproul Plaza of UC Berkeley, hundreds gathered for a dance party that began around 10pm on Thursday, February 25. At the peak of the party (around 12am) the 250 people dancing surrounded the loudspeakers as together they moved farther into campus'.

After temporarily occupying a vacant University building, the mobile party moved off campus and into surrounding streets: 'Some 500 people were present, a combination of observers and protesters. The dance party continued to rage on as more and more people took the intersection, by now at least three hundred. Then without a clear reason, the police began to descend on the people in the streets. Some ran to the sidewalks to observe from a distance, others stood their ground, refusing to move. The police pushed people with their batons, the protesters pushed back and some were caught in the middle. Then an officer grabbed a woman at random and smashed her head to the ground... What had started as a dance party and occupation quickly turned into a direct confrontation with the police, whom had been following the protesters through out the night'. Shop windows were smashed and some bins set alight.

The context is an ongoing movement of student occupations and demonstrations across California prompted by cuts in education funding and increases in tuition fees.

A Cultural History of Night

From 'The Minotaur & the Maze: A Cultural History of Night #1' by Darran Anderson:

'Night might well be just technically the period of time when the sun is below the horizon. Yet it is also another vast transformed world, one which has its own vast and myriad culture; in poetry alone, the Aubade and the Alba (shared odes between lovers who must be tragically separated at dawn), in music the Nocturne (a rhapsody of, and for, the night). For all their beauty, these forms do little to describe to us what the night truly is, what this curse is that afflicts us at the dimming of every day?

In a sense, night is another frontier, alongside space and the ocean depths, that we’ve yet to truly tame. We may have mapped the entire landmass of the earth with GPS but controlling the hours after sunset eludes us. We may throw up a 24-hour garage like some outpost of civilisation or lines of streetlights but they are merely train-tracks through savage country. The nocturnal walk through the streets, familiar by day but changed utterly by night, can be a disconcerting experience. The dark brings out the undesirables that dare not show their faces in the cold light of day. “All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal” in the words of that gentle misunderstood soul Travis Bickle. That is its curse and its glory, when buoyed by the dutch courage of drink we choose to embrace it and join the ranks of the damned. “Most glorious night!” Byron wrote, himself no stranger to hedonism, “Thou wert not sent for slumber!”'

Full article at 3am magazine

Dancing & Drumming at Lahore Sufi festival

Lahore Journal: Mystical Form of Islam Suits Sufis in Pakistan (New York Times, 25 February 2010)

'Thousands of Muslim worshipers paid tribute to the patron saint of this eastern Pakistani city this month by dancing, drumming and smoking pot. It is not an image one ordinarily associates with Pakistan, a country whose tormented western border region dominates the news. But it is an important part of how Islam is practiced here, a tradition that goes back a thousand years to Islam’s roots in South Asia.

It is Sufism, a mystical form of Islam brought into South Asia by wandering thinkers who spread the religion east from the Arabian Peninsula. They carried a message of equality that was deeply appealing to indigenous societies riven by caste and poverty. To this day, Sufi shrines stand out in Islam for allowing women free access.

In modern times, Pakistan’s Sufis have been challenged by a stricter form of Islam that dominates in Saudi Arabia. That orthodox, often political Islam was encouraged in Pakistan in the 1980s by the American-supported dictator, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Since then, the fundamentalists’ aggressive stance has tended to eclipse that of their moderate kin, whose shrines and processions have become targets in the war here.

But if last week’s stomping, twirling, singing, drumming kaleidoscope of a crowd is any indication, Sufism still has a powerful appeal. “There are bomb blasts all around, but people don’t stay away,” said a 36-year-old bank teller named Najibullah. “When the celebration comes, people have to dance.”

Worshipers had come from all over Pakistan to commemorate the death of the saint, Ali bin Usman al-Hajveri, an 11th-century mystic. Known here today as Data Ganj Baksh, or Giver of Treasures, the Persian-speaking mystic journeyed to Lahore with Central Asian invaders, according to Raza Ahmed Rumi, a Pakistani writer and expert on Sufism. He settled outside the city, a stopover on the trade route to Delhi, started a meditation center and wrote a manual on Sufi practices, Mr. Rumi said... (full article here)

Shanghai Roller Disco

Interesting article from Shanghai Daily (10 February 2010) on roller disco dancing in Shanghai:

'The world has moved on from roller-skating disco, that oh-so-1980s fad immortalized in the film "Xanadu," but in China, dancing on wheels is gaining speed thanks to the nation's masses of migrant workers. While wealthy executives in trend-setting Shanghai would never be seen indulging in something so passe, roller disco is the entertainment of choice for the tens of thousands of migrants working in one of China's most expensive cities.

Most of these modern fans are in their 20s, too young to remember the craze that swept the United States some 30 years ago, and their ardor proves that disco is not dead. At Xinxiang roller-skating rink, the city's first and biggest roller disco, hundreds of migrant workers turn up every night to meet friends, listen to music and skate in a rink slightly bigger than a basketball court."When we first started 15 years ago, the people who came here to skate were local youngsters," says Yang Yong, one of the floor managers of the rink. "As the country started its economic reform, a lot of workers from other provinces came to the city, and now some of these migrants are also coming here for recreation and exercise."

... Roller disco started to become popular in China in the 1990s, but largely lost its appeal at the turn of the century, forcing hundreds of rinks across the country to close down. But in Shanghai, the migrant workers have helped keep the Xinxiang rink, and dozens of others, in business. Relocated to Lanxi Road last year from Anyuan Road in Putuo District, the 500-square-meter rink continues to attract a steady flow of migrant workers, who would spend the whole night there rolling to relax and recharge after a tiring day. Opening hours run from 1-5pm and 7 pm-1am. The afternoon hours are mainly for locals and students while the night hours are almost dominated by migrant workers. "More than 80 percent of our patrons at night are low-paid workers, that is about 400 people," says Shanghai-native Wang Hongsheng, the rink's manager. "They can roll to midnight."

One of roller disco's main attractions is affordability: with most workers earning between 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan (US$146-292) a month, having fun isn't easy in Shanghai. Entrance to the skating rinks costs a maximum of 18 yuan and renting four-wheeled skates costs 5 yuan with no time limit, while a normal charge in other roller-skating rinks in Shanghai is about 40 yuan per hour. As a matter of fact, migrants don't have to rent skates and roll. "They can come in, buy some beer, hang around, dance to the music, have some small chat, and make some new friends here," Wang says.

Crowds of migrant workers were speeding in circles skillfully on roller skates, with the ear-deafening pop music pouring from the loudspeakers. On the dance floor some were really shaking it in high spirit .Most of the migrant workers in their 20s come from the country's poor areas and didn't get much education. But they're eager to integrate into the metropolitan life like their urban peers. "I like meeting new friends here. We're young and we can go dancing, clubbing and anything just like other (urban) young people do," says 21-year-old Xiao Fang from Anhui Province. The girl, wearing heavy makeup and dressed to the nines, has been in Shanghai for three years and works in a nearby bathhouse."This place and the people here make me feel quite comfortable," she says as she sways to the music...'

(full article here)

My Agit Disco mix

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

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



Tracklisting:

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

Introduction

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

UK Decay – For my Country (1980)

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

Karma Sutra – Wake the Red King (1985) download

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

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

No Defences – Keep Running (1985) download

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

Bikini Kill – Rebel Girl (1993)

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

Chumbawamba – Fitzwilliam (1985)

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

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

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

Planxty – Arthur McBride (1973)

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

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

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

McCarthy - The Procession of Popular Capitalism (1987)

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

Joe Smooth – Promised Land (1987)

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

Atmosfear – Dancing in Outer Space (1979)

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

Roteraketen – Here to Go (1999) download

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

Metatron – Men Who Hate the Law (1993)

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

Lochi – London Acid City (1996)

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

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

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

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

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

Afrikan Boy – Lidl (2006)

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

99 Posse – Salario Garantito (1992)

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

The Ballistic Brothers – London Hooligan Soul (1995)

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

From this moment, Twitter ends and tactics begin

Earlier in the week it seemed that every other tweet from the twitterers I follow was telling the world to #saveplasticpeople. In quickly disseminating news of the threat to close the London club, this was an exemplary case of new media communication. Naturally a facebook group was also set up for people to immediately express their solidarity.

But then what? There is a sense that all of this virtual politicking often goes nowhere. Breathy accounts of how twitter was going to bring down dictatorships have been replaced by more sobre assessments of the resilience of well organised regimes confronted with slacktivism and what Annabelle Sreberny has termed the 'mousy solidarity' of clicking on petitions. Communication might be an essential part of developing social movements, but communication alone does not constitute a movement. Clouds of tweets and facebook posts can vanish as rapidly as their meteorological counterparts.

So where does that leave us in relation to something like saving a club like Plastic People from closure? If, as Gramsci would have it, the art of politics begins with an analysis of relations of force, a starting point would be to consider in more detail who our opponents are, what are their weaknesses, where the immediate battleground is to be found (e.g. when and where are decisions made). At the same time, we should consider who our allies are and our actual and potential strengths.

But Gramsci also famously distinguished between the 'war of manouevre' and the 'war of position'. The former refers to the immediate fighting on the battleground, the latter to the wider struggle to mobilise across society to achieve political ends. In relation to Plastic People, the quick war of manoeuvre might be appropriate for the urgent task of dealing with the pressing threat from Hackney Council and the local police, but the war of position is necessary to shape the context in which such decisions take place and to confront the wider criminalisation and over-regulation of forms of musicking and dancing. Is it possible to move beyond just complaining about individual club closures and mobilise a movement that can challenge the whole basis on which they happen - including the notions that music and dancing require the advance approval of the state (licensing) and that the 'war against drugs' and crime should be waged on the dancefloor?

This might seem like a fantasy, but in the mid-1990s there was a significant movement in the UK against the anti-rave measures of the Criminal Justice Act. Mass demonstrations might not have stopped the law, but they did strengthen the whole free party scene so that when the law came into effect it was not able to vanquish a highly-motivated and organised culture. More recently in New York there has been a campaign against the clampdown on nightlife that has included open air parties outside the Mayor's house, with people chanting 'dancing is not a crime'. If grime is being driven out of the public sphere in London, can't we bring grime en masse to City Hall? As Reclaim the Streets demonstrated in the 1990s, sound system + truck + crowd = all kinds of possibilities.

All of this would require communication, yes even using twitter and facebook, but also the harder slog of organising, mobilizing and taking action with our bodies as well as our virtual selves. In relation to Plastic People, there do seem to be signs that physical people are prepared to do more than just tweet with, for instance, suggestions of a meeting to set up some kind of 'Friends of Plastic People'.

(sharp eyed situationist-spotters will have noticed that the title of this post is derived from Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life: 'from this moment, despair ends and tactics begin').

seOne club closes

With the future of both the Ministry of Sound and Plastic People seemingly in jeopardy, news comes of one of London's largest clubs biting the dust. SeOne, based in the railway arches by London Bridge, issued a statement yesterday:


"It is with great sadness, that I must inform you that ‘seOne London’ ceased trading on Monday Afternoon, 22nd February 2010. After eight long, hard and exciting years, seOne London has fallen victim to the recession and hard times felt in nightclubs all over the UK. I would like to thank all the promoters, DJ’s, clubbers, staff, suppliers and anyone who has worked and partied in these now Legendary railway arches. seOne London 2002 – 2010"


seOne could hold up to 3,000 people but of late had seemingly found it difficult to fill other than on Saturday nights. Among other events it hosted Moondance raves and Torture Garden nights. In its previous incarnation as the Drome it hosted Ken Campbell's legendary 22 hour epic The Warp in 1999.

The club achieved a certain notoriety amongst tobacco addicts for its policy of charging smokers for a wristband in order to access an often overcrowded caged smoking area (later replaced with a bigger area accessed by smokers having to supply their thumbprints). In common with other venues in the area, its license conditions required it to impose a policy of not letting people in without having official photographic ID such as a passport or driving license, scanned and kept on computer by the venue. I am sure many people would feel reluctant to pass over this personal information to god knows who, and now the company has gone out of business you do wonder what happens to all this data.

All of this followed the shooting dead of 24 year old Erol Davis inside the club in October 2008. While quite rightly we should be concerned about blanket restrictions on clubs being imposed by the authorities, let's also not forget those macho idiots with guns and knives who are wasting lives as well as ruining nightlife.

Plastic People under attack

Following yesterday's story about the threat to the future of the Ministry of Sound, news that another London club is in more immediate danger: Plastic People in Shoreditch.

According to a new facebook group, Keep Plastic People Alive, 'THE POLICE ARE TRYING TO SHUT DOWN PLASTIC PEOPLE. There is a notice outside the door saying there are 2 reasons why the Police want to take the license away. 1/ PREVENTION OF PUBLIC NUISANCE 2/ PREVENTION OF CRIME AND DISORDER. Plastic People have until the 11th March to appeal'. Hackney Council have apparently received an application relating to the club from the police under the Licensing Act 2003 to 'review premises on prevention of crime and disorder and public nuisance basis'.

This would seem to follow on from a police/council visit in December. The Hackney Gazette (16 December 2009) reported:

'Some of Shoreditch's trendiest hotpots were rapped this week in a joint Christmas crackdown from Hackney Council and Hackney Police. A new team of officers - known as JEDI - discovered evidence of cocaine in the female toilets and DJ booth of Plastic People in Curtain Road. Seven clubbers were also turned away from Hoxton Pony in Curtain Road and Cargo in Rivington Street after testing positive for drugs whilst queuing .And officers discovered problems with health and safety and noise levels at Elbow Room on Curtain Road.

Both Plastic People and Elbow Room have said they will work with the council to improve their standards of safety. Cllr Alan Laing, cabinet member for neighbourhoods said: "Pubs and clubs in party areas like Shoreditch, have a responsibility to the community who drink in them and the people who live around them. Through our joint enforcement efforts, we are sending out a clear message that those that fail to comply with the law will not be allowed to continue pedaling a raw deal in Hackney".

There is incredulity amongst regulars about the club being singled out. As one person testified on facebook: 'I have never, ever seen any trouble at Plastic People, it has always had the soundest crowd and atmosphere, once I dropped my wallet on the floor, asked at the bar at the end of the night on the off chance someone had handed it in and a complete stranger walked over and handed it to me, still with all cards, money etc ... in it, testament to the kind of lovely people who go to Plastics. These allegations are utter bull shit! This is an amazing venue, with the best sound system in London, that supports amazing music. If Plastic People is shut down it will be a travesty'.

With the Foundry in Shoreditch now scheduled for demolition there are concerns that having done the job of making the area fashionable, clubs and bars are beginning to be displaced by gentrification.

Ministry of Sound under threat?

South London club the Ministry of Sound is objecting to a proposed building development which it claims could threaten its future. As part of the regeneration programme for the Elephant and Castle area, developer Oakmayne is planning a 41 storey block, to include 335 flats, next to the club.

According to an article in Southwark News (18 February 2010):

'Lohan Presencer, Ministry of Sound CEO, fears placing so many residents in an 'enterprise quarter' for businesses will force his club to pack up and leave. He said: "The bottom line is we are very fortunate to exist in a non residential area. If there are 300 residential apartments directly opposite the Ministry of Sound, and if any one of those residents had any issue with somebody outside their apartment at three or four in the morning they could legitimately complain to the Environmental Health Officer.They could take that to a licence committee and challenge our licence. If our licence is challenged and it has a sufficient lobby behind it, regardless of our history here, we could lose it."

A report by Southwark Council officers regarding the plans confirmed this. It stated 'The MofS will therefore be open to enforcement action under the nuisance provisions of the Environmental Protection Act'.'

Misery Unsound

Personally I have always been decidedly ambivalent about the Ministry for its role in pioneering the 1990s superclub phenomenon, with incessant branding, VIP lounges, and multiple mechanisms to fleece punters. In their case too, there were stories of dubious competitive practices. A court heard allegations in January 1999 that the Ministry had sent an undercover team with newspaper reporters to try and prove evidence of drug dealing at arch rival Cream in Liverpool (Mixmag, Feb 1999). And we've mentioned here before that in 1995 they hosted the police launch of an anti-drugs campaign on the back of a stage managed police raid on Club UK days before.

Then there's the dodgy political connections. MoS was set up by old Etonian James Palumbo, son of the property developer Lord Palumbo. He hired his cousin James Bethell (the 5th Baron Bethell) as Managing Director, a Tory activist who worked for Conservative Central Office in the 1997 election and later stood unsuccessfully as the Conservative candidate for Tooting in the 2005 election. Palumbo hedged his bets though in 1997, lending Labour's Peter Mandelson a chauffeur-driven car during the election.

Still nobody can deny it's been an important club for dance music for nearly twenty years, and like most people who have been out dancing in London in that time I've had some memorable nights there. I particularly remember going there shortly after my daughter was born. The look on the bouncer's face when my partner had to explain what the breast pump in her handbag was for was priceless.

There doesn't seem to be an immediate danger of the club having to close, but they are right to identify that there is a medium term threat. When the warehouse was converted to a club in 1991, it's neighbours were civil servants in office buildings that were empty at weekends. An influx of residents, particularly the kind of well-connected wealthier citizens who know how to get their own way, would doubtless result in complaints and attempts to restrict the club's licence.

There is a broader issue here of how nightlife in cities tends to flourish in economically marginal zones, such as abandoned/converted warehouses and railway arches. As land values increase and areas are gentrified, these spaces are squeezed out along with the musicking/dancing cultures they sustain. We have already seen this happen around Kings Cross in London, and similar developments have been noted in Paris. Will South London's clubs around the Elephant, London Bridge and Vauxhall be next?

Update, November 2013: this row is still rumbling on. Southwark Council refused the development planning permission, but London Mayor Boris Johnson has called the decision in - which means that he takes the power away from the local council to decide whether or not it goes ahead. Decision is due this month- so the Ministry is crawling to Johnson with this hideous superhero image... Of course Johnson is another old Etonian like James Palumbo (who is still Chairman of the Ministry of Sound group).

More proof of Palumbo's political promiscuity - on top of his previous Tory and Labour links outlined above,  last month he was made a Liberal Democrat life Peer ( 'Baron Palumbo of Southwark') on the back of donating more than £700,000 to the Liberal Democrats. Yes he now has political power in the House of Lords without a single vote being cast for him thanks to making money from people dancing. That's democracy folks...

Southwark Clubbing History

Excellent article by Tim Burrows in the Daily Post (5 February 2010) on the clubbing history of Southwark. There's even a helpful map for the South London disco tourist. Among the places featured are:

- the Royal Oak, Tooley Street (demolished to make way for the Hilton hotel) - the location for Nicky Holloway's pre-acid house Special Branch soul/disco nights in the 1980s, where Danny Rampling, Pete Tong and Gilles Peterson also DJed.

- Dirtbox warehouse parties in Tooley Street (where Hay's Galleria now stands) put on by Phil Dirtbox with DJs including Jay Strongman and Rob Milton.

- Shoom - Rampling's early acid house night, held in the Fitness Centre on Thrale Street (Southwark Bridge end).

- Clink Street - home to the RIP parties in 1988, legendary hooligan house: 'Chelsea fans and Arsenal fans would warily eye each other up but later on they’d be having a right good chat and dance, just chilling, which was obviously due to the ecstasy' (Mark Easton).

- Jacks, 7-9 Crucifix Lane - still going, this was the venue for Andy Wetherall's Sabresonic parties in the mid-1990s.

- Cynthia's Robot Bar (later Club Wicked, now Astria), 4 Tooley Street - location for 21st Century Bodyrockers, electroclash AcidHousePunkRock nights in 2002.

Much of this activity took place amidst the ruins of dockside industry, but before the developers moved in. Until the 1960s, the Pool of London between London Bridge and Tower Bridge was a thriving dock, but it was all over by the end of the 1970s. The article quotes Rampling: “It was rundown. The whole south side of the river was a series of closed warehouses and industrial units, so it was like a ghost town after dark. But the night spots that sprang up drew people into the area from far and wide.” In this supposed wasteland, London acid house and rave culture was born.

The Daily Post is a temporary free newspaper linked with the Red Bull Music Academy, a month long series of musical happenings with its HQ also on Tooley Street.

More on the Met and Grime

Following on from last week's post on the policing on funky and bashment in London, here's an excellent article by Dan Hancox on the impact of the police clampdown on grime in London's clubs. This is still very much in effect, to give one example quoted by Dan:

'in August 2009 Urban Affair at the Indigo2 was shut down, deemed ‘high risk’ because their 696 paperwork had the dates of birth for two artists missing. The organisers had booked an allstar cast of performers, headlined by Wiley and Tinchy Stryder, forked out for tens of thousands of flyers and a cross-media advertising campaign, and were offering to put on a supplementary £4,500 worth of airport-style security to assuage any safety concerns. Legally, there was even plenty of time to resubmit the form with the missing details included, but the venue, panicked by the Met’s interference, had already taken the decision to cancel. It’s bureaucracy as a weapon: blunt, stupid and pretty terrifying, piles of paperwork used to bury license holders, to browbeat them into just not bothering with grime'.

All of this is having an appreciable impact, so that 'the music’s never been more popular, nor harder to hear in public':

'Thanks to downloadable mixes and internet radio, the London underground has been broadcast to the world in the last few years. But while this democratisation is a good thing, in London itself underground black music has been forced into the private sphere, away from the clubs. Grime was always meant to be club music: inheriting its BPM from garage, it was that bit too fast to simply be the British hip hop. Yet in 2010, the music has been relegated from clubs to be heard mostly through the pale grey beehive of PC speakers, or in the solitary isolation of headphones. In this context, common experience, enthusiasm and debate occurs globally on internet message boards, but not communally, locally, in the bars and clubs of the capital. Grime has been banished from real, physical London'.

The full article was published in Daily Note, 11 February, a free newsheet linked to the Red Bull Music Academy.