Margins Music Live at Deptford Albany

In the past couple of years there have been several albums aiming in some way to reflect on life in early 21st century London. Think The Bug's London Zoo or Nitin Sawney's London Underground (both 2008) or even, on a more historical tip, Madness's The Liberty of Norton Folgate (2009).

Dusk and Blackdown's Margins Music is very much in that lineage. As Martin Clark/Blackdown told Woofah magazine: 'We pretty much noticed that all the music we liked from the city, from UK garage to jungle/d&b, to dubstep and grime, came from the rougher edges not the safe centre'. With this in mind, the album explores particular sonic territories associated with specific zones of the capital, from the East/North East London grime heartland to 'Croydon, Streatham, Norwood and Norbury: the places where dubstep was born'. But of course margins refers not just to geographical areas, but to socially marginalized people and spaces, 'strange hidden studios, night buses, deserted overland stations, squat parties, council estates, Iranian corner shops, Bollywood tape shops' (Woofah #3, 2008).

Although the album was released in 2008, it feels like a project in progress. Starting out with a series of 12" single releases in the second half of the noughties, followed by the album, then a remix album by Grievous Angel, they are now taking it several steps further with live performance.

I went along to their first night last Saturday at the Albany in Deptford. Must admit I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I tend to be sceptical of attempts to render electronic music as live performance - sometimes just a guy standing on a stage behind a laptop in which case you think 'why bother?', sometimes a horrendous jazzification whereby perfectly good samples are reproduced by live musicians suggesting a crisis of confidence, as if 'authenticity' requires 'real musicians' noodling away.

But for this show, Dusk and Blackdown got the balance just right. Not cluttering the stage with lots of musos, but foregrounding the live elements that really added something, in this case the voices of Farrah and Japjit, and live percussion from Renu (plus Dusk and Blackdown themeselves and keyboard player Bobbie). Another key ingredient was the visuals masterminded by Jonathan Howells - a mix of old London newsreel (some great shots of women dancing), Bollywood and contemporary urban shots of lots of the capital's postcodes.

What makes Margins Music particularly ambitious is its recognition of the South Asian musical influence in the great London soundclash. With everything else that is in Dust and Blackdown's mix, this could easily result in a kind of tepid fusionism. But they are sufficiently grounded in London bass and beats (DJing on Rinse FM etc.) to be able to bring in these desi flavours without creating a bland mish mash.

To create a sonic space in a studio in which disparate social, musical and cultural elements are brought into play is one thing. To create a physical space in which people with different backgrounds and experiences come together in a single continuous performance is much harder. Margins Music Live managed to pull this off, with the South Asian themed opening shifting into Trim's grime verbal gymnastics towards the end.

It was a respectable crowd for a first live performance, but a bigger audience and the increased confidence of having a glitch free debut behind them could lift Margins Music Live from really good to another level. So if you get the chance, check this out with gigs this week in Brighton and Manchester and follow ups in Reading and Kendal. Details here.

I went along with John Eden, who beat me to getting his review up.

More photos at Blackdown's blog

General Ludd vs. John Henry

A while ago I went to a talk by the great radical historian Peter Linebaugh on 'The Invisibility of the Commons' . In the course of it he compared the two 19th century songs, John Henry and General Ludd's Triumph, as reflecting two approaches to work - suggesting that maybe one had historically been more typical of the US working class and the other of the working class in England.

In the former American song, the railway bosses' introduction of a steam-powered hammer to replace human labour is viewed as a challenge by Henry the 'steel drivin' man', who works hard to demonstrate his superior power even at the cost of his own life - he beats the hammer only to die as a result. An assertion of the dignity of labour at one level, but also a willingness to compete with mechanisation by voluntarily intensifying work:

John Henry told his captain
Lord a man ain't nothing but a man
But before I'd let your steam drill beat me down
I'd die with a hammer in my hand

Here's Mississippi Fred McDowell's version:



In the latter English song about the Luddite movement, the introduction of machinery in the cotton industry is responded to not by workers working themselves to death, but by them sentencing the machines to death through sabotage:

Those engines of mischief were sentenced to die
By unanimous vote of the trade,
And Ludd who can all opposition defy
Was the grand executioner made.

And when in the work he destruction employs,
Himself to no method confines;
By fire and by water he gets them destroyed,
For the elements aid his designs.

Here's a version by The Fucking Buckaroos (personally I prefer the version by Chumbawamba, but it's not on youtube):



Admittedly, on the basis of these versions, John Henry is a better song, even if it's not a better strategy...

Dancing Madness

'Dancing, when poor human Nature lets itself loose from bondage and

circumstances of anxious selfish care: it is Madness'

Image: Untitled (Dancing Madness) painted in the 1970s by the Egyptian artist Hamed Nada (1924-1990); quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge - he wrote these words in his notebook in 1804 during a trip to Sicily, where he had been watching (and possibly dancing with) the young opera singer Anna-Cecilia Bertozzi at public balls - they may have had an affair (source: Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1998)

Datacide Roman Holiday - Electrode09

Looking through some pictures I realized that I never got round to posting on my trip to Rome last year to take part in Electrode09 - Independent Electronic Music Festival. As it was one of the highlights for me of the last year, I do want to document it. So hot off the press and nearly a year late (it took place on 12-13 June 2009) here's my report.

(flyer - click to enlarge).

The venue was the very impressive Forte Prenestino Occupied Social Centre, a former military base left abandoned until it was squatted in 1986 (bit of history here). It's a huge site, with two big outdoor arenas, and lots of rooms coming off various tunnels seemingly built into a hillside. The food and drink were excellent - unlike in any squat I have been to in in the UK, there was a selection of very nice wine! (in fact the venue has hosted whole Critical Wine events).

The scene before the party started:

My contribution was to take part in a panel of Datacide magazine contributors talking on aspects of 'Cultura Elettronica e Controcultura', based on the similar event held in Berlin in Autumn 2008. As usual at these kinds of events, most people don't turn up until late for the music so it was a more select audience for the talks, but still worth doing. Christoph Fringeli talked on Hedonism and Revolution, Hans Christian Psaar on Kindertotenlieder for rave culture, and Alexis Wolton on Tortuga towerblocks: pirate signals in the 90s (yes, the Nightingale Estate in Hackney was mentioned in the city of the Tiber). My talk developed ideas from my article on dance music history I wrote for Datacide, but looking more specifically at the Hardcore Continuum debate and some its deeper historical roots (will post the talk sometime).

The music was mainly on a techno/minimal tip, it was OK but for my taste there were too many live sets consisting of a bloke fiddling around with a lap top and twiddling nobs, though Antipop Consortium at least had some presence. Personally unless there's something to see or the music's really good, I would generally rather have a no nonsense DJ set.

We were reliably informed by our London in exile translator that there was another squat where happy hardcore was to be had, and she was about to promote Rome's first UK Funky night. As it was, the only bit of that which got aired over the weekend was when I played a bit of Perempay with Maxwell D from the stage, in order to illustrate the convergence of reggae MC, soca and disco/house strands with their respective social histories of carnival and contestation. Or something.

Anyway I had a dance obviously, seem to remember bouncing up and down to some Thomas Heckmann.

Electrode2010 is taking place soon at the same venue (June 11-12), so if you're in that part of the world you might want to check it out.

Claremont Road 1994: 'the rave had to end sometime'

The movement against the M11 linkroad in Leytonstone (or Leytonstonia as we termed it then), North East London, was one of the more inspiring struggles of the mid-1990s. In particular, Claremont Road was squatted and turned into a protest site for the best part of a year before being evicted by the police in 1994's 'Operation Garden Party' The street was demolished, but like at Newbury in the same period the defeat of the immediate movement was also some kind of victory - by increasing the costs of road building these struggles led to other road projects being shelved. 

 The Channel One TV programme below from 1994 includes the classic line: 'Claremont Road was notorious among locals for its psychedelia, squatters and new age travellers. But everyone living in this time warped street of the 60s knew the rave had to end sometime'. There was a strong overlap between this scene and the free party scene - both united in the movement against the Criminal Justice Act which criminalised raves and protest. I remember, for instance, people from Claremont Rd showing a film at Megatripolis, the techno/trance club at Heaven.

The 'Just Say No' flyer reproduced here (click to enlarge) is from a benefit party I went to for the M11 campaign held on 2 April 1994 at Arch 21, Valentia Place, Brixton (one of the railway arches between Loughborough junction and Brixton). The party was put on by Sunnyside 'with the boundless co-operation of the conscious club'. Some good dancing I recall and good conversation. As a bit of a househead I was always quite glad to go to a free party where the music was a bit broader than just acid-tekno, much as I loved some of that too.

The flyer includes the words 'the eco-consciousness is rising, carry the vision out into the mainstream of society, keep it sweet, keep it right, remember this is a peaceful fight'. This alludes to the bitter arguments in the anti-CJA/roads movement at that time between the 'fluffy' pacifist faction and the 'spikey' riotous faction. Up until this point I had been politically inclined to the the 'spikey' side, but despite rejecting the absolute pacifism of some 'fluffies' I came to appreciate that tactically they were sometimes achieving more than those 'spikies' who seemed to want to kick off a confrontation at every opportunity regardless of the terrain, balance of forces or risks for those around them. Anyway there were some lovely people in the anti-roads movement (as well as some casualties), and nobody can say that they didn't have a go. Some dark times ahead perhaps, so learn the lessons well.

Dancing on Clapham Common, 1989 & 1995

Courtesy of Pops (Sentinel Design) and Wayne Anthony, some classic acid house footage from July 1989. It starts off with a Biology rave in Watford, but after about 3:15 minutes the action switches to Clapham Common with people dancing in the sunlight.

The Common was the scene of a few parties in this period. Test Pressing has reproduced Whose Smiley Now? an article about it from The Face (August 1982), written by Sheryl Garratt:

"'Mental, Mental, Let's go fucking mental!' There were stories last year of people dancing to police sirens, traffic noises, anything to stretch the Summer of Love out a little longer, but never before have I seen people dancing to a generator. It started when a sound system was set up on Clapham Common on the Sunday morning after a Saturday all-nighter, the party simply carrying on in the middle of this South London park. Word spread, and the following week clubbers truned up for a repeat performance. 1,000 people danced their Sunday away on the grass while police took souvenir snapshots from nearby buildings.

When the same thing happened one week later the police took a more active part and refused to allow the sound van onto the common... Towards the end of the afternoon the heroes of the day arrived. These were the people shouldering a hired generator and a home stereo, bringing much of the crowd to its feet in anticipation. The generator all but drowned out the music, but the chants were loud, the atmosphere hot, and with a few hundred people packed protectively around the sound source, the police retreated, with a hail of bottles and cans following amiably in their wake. Surprizingly (but given that no-one was doing any real harm, sensibly), they didn't return. 'It's only a matter of time' said one obvserver with relish, 'before there's a riot'."

I wasn't at these 1989 parties, but I was on Clapham Common on Sunday April 30th 1995 when a 3,000 strong march against the Criminal Justice Act ended up there. There was a May Day festival in progress there with bands and marquees, but neither the police nor the festival organisers (the GMB union) were keen to allow the United Systems anti-CJA rig on to the Common. It pulled up alongside the park, and we danced on the grass.

I came across some photos from that day by David Minuk, an American visiting London at the time:

Thanks to Controlled Weirdness for tipping us off about the film footage

Stop the Tivoli Gardens Massacre

The precise details of what's going on in the Tivoli Gardens area of Kingston, Jamaica are still unclear. But it is already established that at least 44 civilians have died in a massive police/army operation to arrest alleged gangster Christopher "Dudus" Coke. Doubtless some of the dead are unofficial soldiers in some gang or other; doubtless too many are entirely innocent. Meanwhile residents of the area are trapped in their homes, some without food, water or medical care.

In the poverty-stricken parts of Jamaica off the tourist trail, people have long since been caught up in the crossfire between the interlocking miltia of the 'security' forces, gangsters, and the main political parties. In May 1997 for instance, three women and a six year old child were shot dead by state forces in Tivoli Gardens (see Amnesty International report). In July 2001, at least 20 people died there in a similar operation.

Tivoli Gardens has an important place in musical history. Aside from its role in reggae and dancehall (including the weekly Passa Passa street parties), it gave its name to a whole genre of UK drum and bass: 'The term "jungle" first emerged on a Rebel MC sample in 1991. This terms is associated with an area of Kingston, Jamaica, called Tivoli Gardens, known as "the Jungle" and frequently cited in"yard tapes" (Les Back, New ethnicities and urban culture: racisms and multiculture in young lives, 1996).

Here's a couple of old classics, sadly still relevant.

From 1978: U Roy - Peace & Love in the Ghetto:



From 1976: Junior Murvin - Police and Thieves ('in the street, scaring the nation with their guns and ammunition').

Special Request to all the Worker: in memory of Romano Alquati

Went to an event at the 195 Mare Street squatted social centre in Hackney last weekend. Very interesting film and short talk from someone involved in Gurgaon Workers News about workers struggles in the Gurgaon Special Economic Zone in India.

The building itself was quite impressive, a spacious but run down Georgian mansion that was most recently the New Lansdowne Club (a working men's social club I believe). The party after the talk didn't really get going while I was there, some interesting chat notwithstanding. But I did get to hear this great reggae track:

Johnny Ringo (1961-2005): Special Request/Working Class

I'd like to dedicate this to the memory of Romano Alquati, who died last month at the age of 75. Despite very little of his work being translated into English (as far I can find), Alquatti was very influential, through his involvement in Italy with Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebooks) and Classe Operaia (Working Class), in formulating notions of workers autonomy, class composition and workers inquiry which were central to the development of Operaismo, a Marxist current stressing self-organisation and working class power as a motor of social development.

Empire of the Senseless

In my street in New Cross last week, somebody left a pile of books outside for passers-by to help themselves to. So it came to pass that over the weekend I got round to reading Kathy Acker's 1988 novel Empire of the Senseless a mere 20 odd years after it came out (though I did read her Blood and Guts in High School back in the day).

The novel is set in an alternative then-present; Reagan is US president but life is the worst aspects of that time intensified. In scenes in New York and Paris (among other places), we are shown a world of despair, addiction, disgust and violence. It is a dystopia without redemption -the interpersonal relations between characters are marked by abuse, rape and loathing. The best that its main protagonist Abhor (half woman/half robot) can achieve by the end is this realization: 'I didn't as yet know what I wanted. I now fully knew what I didn't want and what and whom I hated. That was something'.

Class war is taken for granted - at one point she describes the use of sonic weapons to kill the poor:

'In the white noise the cops arrived so that they could kill everybody. Round revolving cars emitted sonar waves. Certain sonar vibrations blinded those not in cars; other levels numbing effectively chopped off limbs; other levels caused blood to spurt out of the mouths nostrils and eyes. The buildings were pink... The cops' faces, as they killed off the poor people, as they were supposed to, were masks of human beings. And the faces of the politicians are death'.

The promises of liberty and democracy are mocked:

'New York City, my home, Liberty... Liberty, shit. The liberty to starve. The liberty to speak words to which no one listens. The liberty to get diseases no doctor treats or can cure. The liberty to live in conditions cockroaches wouldn't touch except to die in'.

And:

'These days the principal economic flow of power takes place through black-market armament and drug exchange. The trading arena, the market, is my blood. My body is open to all people: this is democratic capitalism'.

Still, it is a class war without hopeful outcome - in Paris the impoverished and oppressed Algerians stage a successful revolution, but nothing much changes, the cops still think they rule the streets.

At one point Acker seems to describe her method - an attempt to move beyond the language cut ups that she employed in her earlier work to a strategy of transgression:

'That part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let's call our 'unconscious' Since it's free of control, it's our only defence against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement, prison.

Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language which normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.

What is the language of the 'unconscious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: pretend it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus, an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of a language or languages which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a set of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes'.

Twenty years after this, transgression as radical strategy seems equally exhausted. Yesterday's taboos are all over the internet and the TV. Still there's no doubt that Kathy Acker's premature death in 1997 silenced a powerful and radical voice.

Kathy Acker (1947-1997)

- she dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist

George Robey: a lost London venue

At 240 Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park in North London there is currently a semi derelict pub. Before it closed it was known as the George Robey (and before that The Clarence Tavern) and was for many years an important music venue, particularly known for punk gigs. You can even download a 1983 set recorded a the pub by anarcho-punk band Omega Tribe at the excellent Kill Your Puppy.

Club wise it was probably best known for Club Dog, which brought the free festival/squatter spirit indoors from the mid-1980s and became one of the first places where that scene, with its psychedelic and world music vibe, began to cross over with the emerging rave scene. In 1996 the pub briefly became the Powerhaus, part of the Mean Fiddler group, and then closed down.

My main memories of the place are of a club called The Far Side, which I went to a few times in 1994/5. It was one of those places where DJs and sound systems from the squat/free party scene played, like the Liberator DJs . I've just scanned in a couple of spacey flyers which give a feel for it -'Get over to the Far Side - revel without a pause - spinning trippy trancey techno, delightfully deep house and pleasurable progressive for your entertainment'. The flyer for September 1994 (below) also has the topical Fight the Criminal Justice Bill slogan at the bottom.

September 1994 flyer

Frankly my memories of all the places I went to at that time tend to blur a little, but I do recall some great music and searching for a bagel round Finsbury Park before getting the first train back to Brixton the next morning.

January 1995 flyer

See also London RIP (picture of Robey today from Ewan-M at Flickr)

Update:

Some good stuff in comments, particularly liked this one: 'I played there a few times, twice with a band called Spirithouse and then as a live electronic techno/house duo supporting the Mad Professor at the Club Dog 6th Birthday bash. The Robey was the nearest venue to us on Green Lanes, we'd walk across Finsbury Park, drop some acid, neck two cans of brew and show our UB40s for discount entry. We got to know Bob and Mike and blagged a gig and got paid £50. TBH we would have probably paid that to play there!' Flyer for said night below (1992 I think).

Ian Curtis (1956-1980)

Thirty years ago this week... Ian Curtis, 15 July 1956 – 18 May 1980. An industry of Manchester retro-mania and Killers cover versions still can't numb how radical Joy Division sound even today. Here's the famous 1978 first TV appearance, introduced by Tony Wilson.

'To the centre of the city, where all roads meet, waiting for you'

(Shadowplay)

Don't get caught in a bad hotel

Love this story... a protest for better conditions for San Francisco hotel workers (including healthcare), featuring a flashmob in a hotel lobby performing a version of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance (retitled Bad Hotel) accompanied by the Brass Liberation Orchestra.

According to San Francisco Indymedia, on Saturday May 8th 2010, 'many LGBTQ folks held a picket and protest in San Francisco's Union Square, and the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, to show solidarity for the hotel workers who have been forced to work without a contract since August 2009. The protest, which featured music and dancing, also is calling for a boycott of the hotels that have failed to give their workers equal opportunity... San Francisco's annual Gay pride is approaching and many queers stay in hotels when they visit, so the local GLBTQ community is asking them to join the boycott, so workers can be treated fairly and equally in San Francisco. There are also a few GLBTQ folks who work for those hotels or corporations. So if, or when you come to San Francisco don't want to get caught in a bad hotel. The protest was sponsored and held by' "One Struggle One Fight" and SF Pride at Work/HAVOQ'.

Skip Jive

In our search for the origins of rave, we have previously looked at the revivalist and trad jazz scenes in London from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The 'ravers' of the later period were looked down on by the early mods, with their taste for cool, modern jazz and by jazz musicians like George Melly who mocked their dancing. So I was delighted to get a post recently from someone in that scene putting the alternative view. Here's Terry Monaghan's account:

'Just a quick note as someone who danced in the 1950s off and on the Aldermaston Marches - I'd like to defend the dancing against some of the derogatory descriptions by the likes of George Melly, who even in much later life would not tolerate dancers from distracting audiences while he was performing.

'Skip-jiving' (sometimes abbreviated to 'trad') during the second phase of the music was in fact quite skilled and far from clumsy. At the culmination of the 1961 Aldermaston March for example there was a massive trad band ball at the Lyceum Ballroom which is the first time I saw a dance floor pulse in time with the music. The collective feet all hitting it at the same time, and with the special force of skip jive that consisted of a steady skip step, resulted in the necessary stomp effect. I'd never seen a floor move up and down a good two inches before. It was funny seeing the regular teds standing on the sidelines utterly amazed at this variety of unkempt enthusiasts pounding away so enthusiastically.

The 'out of time' jibe comes in my opinion from musicians who have difficulty in keeping a steady rhythm given their natural tendency to speed up, particular on the British scene where they seldom attached much importance to a reliable rhythm section. Thus while it was true at that Lyceum gig that the tempo's of the dancers and the musicians began to separate - depending on which band was playing, the fault in my opinion largely lay with the bands. Having had much more experience of this kind of thing in later life, and the ability to make comparisons with dancers and the musicians from Harlem's former Savoy Ballroom, it seems safe to suggest that a mass of dancers who are able to fall collectively into one rhythmic groove keep excellent time. Bands have to be attuned to respect this, and back then of course few of us had a clue about what we were really doing. The Lyceum was, and is, a very stable building, but in other locations the kinetic energy generated in this way physically collapsed ballrooms resulting in considerable death and injury tolls. No danger of that these days, everyone seems to be out of time with each other!

It seems to me that there is a parallel between what happened in this period with what happened with dance music in the early 1990s. Namely that one fraction embraced 'cool', 'sophistication' and 'intelligence' and looked down on the 'ravers' - but who had the best parties?

Lustful pleasure-seeking in Iran

Iranian police detained 80 young men and women for "lustful pleasure-seeking" activities at an illegal concert, Tehran's chief prosecutor has been quoted. The socially conservative Islamic republic launched a crackdown two years ago on "indecent western-inspired movements", such as rappers and Satanists, as part of a widening clampdown on conduct the authorities deem immoral.

The public prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said moral security police received a tip-off that a group of people were secretly selling tickets to a live music performance. "Police entered the venue where this illegal concert was being held ... 80 boys and girls in inappropriate outfits and under abnormal conditions were arrested," he told the Iranian Students' News Agency.

He said their cases were sent to a Tehran court where the youths were charged with taking part in "lustful pleasure-seeking" activities. Alcohol had been seized, he said. Under Iran's Islamic law unrelated men and women are banned from touching or dancing with members of the opposite sex. Alcohol and narcotics are illegal in Iran.

(Source: Reuters/Guardian, 7 May 2010)

Suntanned women to be arrested under Islamic dress code (Telegraph, 27 April 2010)

Brig Hossien Sajedinia, Tehran's police chief, said a national crackdown on opposition sympathisers would be extended to women who have been deemed to be violating the spirit of Islamic laws. He said: "The public expects us to act firmly and swiftly if we see any social misbehaviour by women, and men, who defy our Islamic values. In some areas of north Tehran we can see many suntanned women and young girls who look like walking mannequins. We are not going to tolerate this situation and will first warn those found in this manner and then arrest and imprison them."

...The announcement came shortly after Ayatollah Kazim Sadighi, a leading cleric, warned that women who dressed immodestly disturbed young men and the consequent agitation caused earthquakes.

There's some info about Iranian hip hop here. Check out Dasta Bala by Deev - don't have a full tranlsation but apparently 'The song was focused at pointing out the tyranny of the Iranian government and asking people to raise their fists in protest'. Some good photos of Iranian musicians here.

Flesh and Stone: Sennett on Café Society in London and Paris

Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in Western Civilization (1994)by Richard Sennett ‘is a history of the city told through people’s bodily experience: how women and men moved, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed their noses, where they ate, how they dressed, when they bathed, how they made love in cities’. More specifically it considers how architects and urban planners have impacted on all this through their influence on how people come together and move apart, for ‘The spatial relations of human bodies obviously make a great deal of difference in how people react to each other, how they see and and hear one another, whether they touch or are distant’.

There is an interesting discussion of the changing forms of café society in London and Paris from the 18th to the 19th century:

‘Cafés on the European continent owe their origins to the English coffeehouse of the early eighteenth century. Some coffeehouses began as mere appendages to coaching stations, others as self-contained enterprises. The insurance company Lloyd’s of London began as a coffee house, and its rules marked the sociability of most other urban places; the price of a mug of coffee earned a person the right to speak to anyone in the Lloyd’s room. More than sheer chattiness prompted strangers to talk to one another in the coffeehouse. Talk was the most important means of gaining information about conditions on the road, in the city, or about business. Though differences in social rank were evident in how people looked and in their diction, the need to talk freely dictated that people not notice, so long as they were drinking together...

The French café of the Ancien Regime took its name from and operated much like the English coffeehouse, strangers freely arguing, gossiping, and informing one another. In these years before the Revolution, political groups often arose from these café encounters. At first many different groups met in the same café, as in the original Café Procope on the Left Bank; by the outbreak of the Revolution , contending political groups in Paris each had their own place. During and after the Revolution the greatest concentration of cafés was in the Palais Royal'.

Sennett argues that the wide boulevards of Paris, as designed by Haussman, encouraged cafés to sprawl into the streets, with café owners beginning to put tables outside. Two main centres of café life developed, ‘one clustered around the Opera, where the Grand Café, the Café de la Paix and the Café Anglais were to be found, the other in the Latin Quarter, whose most famous cafes were the Voltaire, the Soleil d’Or, and Francois Premier’. He suggests that outside tables fundamentally changed the atmosphere of cafés:

‘These outside tables deprived political groups of their cover; the tables served customers watching the passing scene, rather than conspiring with one another... At an outdoor table in the big café one was expected to remain seated in one place; those who wanted to hop from scene to scene stood at the bar....the denizens of the café sat silently watching the crowd go by – they sat as individuals, each lost in his or her own thoughts'.

The working class was discouraged from these boulevard cafés by the cost and atmosphere, preferring the cafés intimes of the sidestreets. The café as haven of subversive sociability was gradually undermined:

'The exterior crowd composing itself into a spectacle no longer carried the menace of a revolutionary mob... in 1808 , police spies looking for dangerous political elements in Paris spent a great deal of time infiltrating cafés; in 1891, the police disbanded the bureau dedicated to the cafe surveillance. A public realm filled with moving and spectating individuals – in Paris as much as in London - no longer represented a political domain’.
Interesting, but not sure the reality fits quite so neatly into this narrative. After all cafés remained hotbeds of radicalism in Paris for much of the 20th century - see for instance the history of surrealists, existentialists and situationists.

Lena Horne and the civil rights movement

Most of the obituaries to Lena Horne (1917-2010), who died last weekend, mention her involvement in the civil rights movement. But what is striking about her life is that she was consistently an activist during, and indeed before, a musical career that encompassed dancing at the Cotton Club, singing and acting in Hollywood musicals, and recording albums.

As Lena Horne herself recalled in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples magazine The Crisis in 1983: 'My grandmother, an early pioneer of the NAACP, taught me never to forget. The seeds of a continuing passion for black freedom and liberation were sown in those earliest childhood years when my grandmother, Cora Calhoun, took me to NAACP meetings'. Paul Robeson and WEB Du Bois were family friends.

She also recalled: 'As I travelled as a singer throughout a segregated America, countless racist acts were redressed by local chapters of the NAACP'. In the 1940s at an Army base in Arkansas, she objected to black GIs having to sit behind white Italian POWs: 'I left the hall, found the black GI who was my driver and asked him to take me to the local NAACP. The NAACP in the local town turned out to be Daisy Bates, heroine of Little Rock'.

In 1946, she became a sponsor of the Los Angeles chapter of the Civil Rights Congress (as as was Frank Sinatra). She played benefits for various left wing causes, and was active in supporting Ben Davis, the black Communist elected to the city council of New York City, representing Harlem, in 1943 ( he was later jailed under the notorious Smith Act). For these activities she was blacklisted as a communist sympathiser to the detriment of her career.

She was, for instance, denounced in Red Channels a 1950 'report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television' published by Counterattack, set up by ex-FBI agents. Lena Horne was in good company in this report, along with the likes of Leonard Bernstein, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker and Pete Seeger.

She was in the front ranks of the 1963 March onWashington for Jobs and Freedom and spoke alongside Medgar Evers shortly before he was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in the same year.

Here she is singing Stormy Weather from the 1943 film of the same name:

London clubbers 1976 and 2010

Photographer Chris Steele-Perkins has a new book out, England my England, featuring 40 years of his documentary photography, with an exhibition to match at Northumbria University Gallery, Sandyford Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne until 4th June. I haven't seen it, but will definitely try and check it out when it comes to London, opening at Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG from 18th June to 30th July. Among the photographs I've seen are some really strong dance images. This one is of dancers at the Lyceum Ballroom in London 1976 (note the guy in the background in DMs):

ⓒ Chris Steele-PerkinsChris has previously published a collection on Teds and was present at the Lewisham 1977 anti-National Front protests.

Meanwhile Georgina Cook is continuing to do what she does best, documenting club scenes and other things she comes across in her wanderings from Croydon to Paris. I particularly like this one, taken at the Londinium warehouse rave on May Day at the Ewer Street car park on Great Suffolk Street, London SE1. It gives a real sense of that feeling of wandering through railway arches at a club. Lots more of her stuff at her Drumz of the South blog and flickr

ⓒ Georgina Cook

O Music, it was you permitted us to lift our face and peer into the eyes of future liberty

Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) was a leading figure in the struggle for the independence of Congo from the Belgian Empire. He briefly became first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960 before being overthrown and later murdered by Belgian/CIA backed forces. The following extract is from his poem May our People Triumph (full poem here). In it Lumumba puts music and dance (and specifically jazz) at the centre of the struggle to be human in conditions of slavery and colonialism:

'Twas then the tomtom rolled from village unto village,
And told the people that another foreign slave ship
Had put off on its way to far-off shores
Where God is cotton, where the dollar reigns as King.
There, sentenced to unending, wracking labour,
Toiling from dawn to dusk in the relentless sun,
They taught you in your psalms to glorify
Their Lord, while you yourself were crucified to hymns
That promised bliss in the world of Hereafter,
While you—you begged of them a single boon:
That they should let you live—to live, aye—simplylive.
And by a fire your dim, fantastic dreams
Poured out aloud in melancholy strains,
As elemental and as wordless as your anguish.
It happened you would even play, be merry
And dance, in sheer exuberance of spirit:
And then would all the splendour of your manhood,
The sweet desires of youth sound, wild with power,
On strings of brass, in burning tambourines.
And from that mighty music the beginning
Of jazz arose, tempestuous, capricious,
Declaring to the whites in accents loud
That not entirely was the planet theirs.
O Music, it was you permitted us
To lift our face and peer into the eyes
Of future liberty, that would one day be ours.

... or even vote for Gloria Estefan? And why are some anarchists and socialists cheering for border controls?

Continuing our series on pop stars with a sounder grasp of migration politics than has been seen so far in the British elections, good to see that Gloria Estefan joined Saturday's May Day migrant workers demonstration in Los Angeles (see also Amerie and Shakira). The demonstration was protesting against the new Arizona laws and for regularisation of undocumented migrants. She said: 'We came as refugees to this country that gave us many opportunities... We join with you today so that they will know that we immigrants are honest, workers, to show the beautiful face that we bring to this country, always respecting the laws. If everyone looks back, everyone is an immigrant in this country... We don’t want to link the word ‘immigrant’ with ‘criminal''.

And that is good enough reason to feature Dr Beat, that great 1980s dance track by Miami Sound Machine (feat. Gloria):

There's lots of reports and photos of the Los Angeles demonstration at LA Indymedia. I've selected these two, taken by Robert Stuart Lowden, as they illustrate what is lacking not only from mainstream British political discussion about migration but from the arguments of those socialists and anarchists who now seek to justify immigration controls on some spurious 'working class' grounds that immigration undercuts wages - see for instance Paul Stott and the Independent Working Class Association. Namely the human cost of immigration controls.


Immigration controls are not a matter of turning on and off a tap, capping numbers in some cosy neutral way - 'sorry old chap, we're full today'. They are ultimately a policing function: workers dragged out of their workplaces, locked up and put on to planes, their children likewise dragged out of school. Families separated by force. Children locked up in prison. Deaths as people take risks to get round these controls - at least 87 on the US/Mexico border in the last 6 months; almost 4000 amongst people trying to enter Europe since 2002.

It may be true that in some sectors having a larger pool of labour is allowing employers to reduce wages, but the answer to that is workers solidarity not vicious border controls (what other kind are there). It is also true that many of these workers have struggled to get here at great risk, hardly flown in by capitalists. While the wages of some workers may on occasions have been undermined, other workers are earning much more here than they were at home and are also supporting families in their home countries. Also migration controls in Europe and in the US can depress wages elsewhere - since employers know it is difficult for workers to leave and therefore don't have to pay higher wages to keep workers in their jobs.

In any event it is precisely these immigration controls now seemingly supported by some former anti-fascist militants in the UK - the IWCA is the remains of Red Action - that place migrant labour in a precarious position and undermine wages (e.g. the fight by cleaners for better wages is being undermined by companies having the power to turn over strikers to the Borders Agency). The way to stop this is to fight for migrant workers to have the same rights and conditions as everybody else - this would benefit non-migrant workers too as employers wouldn't be able to play one off against the other.

Hey there Georgy Girl - RIP Lynn Redgrave

RIP Lynn Redgrave - here she is in the great 1966 London movie Georgy Girl . The soundtrack song was by The Seekers.



And here she is dancing in the 1975 film The Happy Hooker. The song is One to One by Angela Clemmons.

May Day Song and Dance - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964), lived to see many May Days as a key figure in the US workers movement for more than 50 years. In 1939, she looked back on some of the May Days she had taken part in, in an article called Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory which evokes the songs and dancing on the parades:

'Thirty-three May Days have come and gone since my activities in the American labor movement began. In memory I view them – an endless procession of red banners, flying high and wide, in the eager hands of marching, cheering, singing workers. Banners of local unions and AFL central labor councils; three-starred IWW banners; banners of Amalgamated, of International Ladies Garment Workers, furriers, pioneers of unionism for the “immigrants and revolutionists"; banners of craft unions, independent unions, industrial unions, and at lone last the CIO. Many were tasseled banners, sold and black, silver and blue, with the names, numbers and places beautifully embroidered; clean, unwrinkled banners, preciously guarded in locked glass cases in dingy halls, throughout the year – liberated to fly proudly on May Day...

Where have I been on May Day? Once it was Newark, N. J. James Connolly, leader of the Irish Easter rebellion in 1916, and I spoke from an old wagon in Washington Park. He was a poor and struggling worker, sad and serious. His daughter told me how, years later in Ireland, he smiled and sang a little song Easter morning, 1916, when he went out to die for his country’s right to be free...

In 1912, I was in Lawrence and Lowell, Mass. on May Day. Textile workers, twenty-five different nationalities speaking forty-five different dialects, celebrated their victories after the fierce strikes of the preceding winter. Banners demanded the freedom of the imprisoned leaders, Ettor and Giovannitti. After the parades came the dancing, the different sorts of music – yellow-haired Northern girls dancing in raven-haired Italians – the laughter and gayety of one race trying to learn the songs, the dances of another. I can see Big Bill Haywood in the Syrian Hall in Lawrence surrounded by workers. Smoking their strange pipe, which stood on the floor, the smoke cooled through a fancy water bowl, decorated in spring flowers in honor of Bill.

May Day, 1913, was in the midst of the Paterson silk strike. Jack Reed taught the strikers many grand songs, old French revolutionary airs and English labor songs, Solidarity Forever – the Red Flag – the Carmagnole. The bosses were trying the now hackneyed “Back to work under the American flag” gag. The strikers carried high on May Day their singing retort, “We refuse to scab under the flag!"

... After that a long period of illness, when I read longingly of May Day parades and heard in memory the songs, the cheers, the music of bands and marching feet. I thought I had seen May Days, but nothing excelled in fact or memory the May Day of 1937, when I returned to New York City. Now we marched on the West Side; and the Irish bagpipes joined the music makers. Now the James Connolly Club and the unions of Irish workers paraded. I waited long to see the happy day the Irish were not all in the ranks of the police, Irish on the marching side, shamrocks, harps, Irish songs, Kevin Barry, Soldiers of Erin – Jim Connolly, I wish you were alive to see that grand sight!

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the model for the Rebel Girl, celebrated in the song by Joe Hill

...or maybe vote for Shakira? (more on Arizona, racism and immigration)

Last night I floated the idea of voting for Amerie in the UK elections (even though she's not standing!), on the basis that her critique of the new racist anti-migrant powers in Arizona showed that she was far ahead of the bulk of the British polity when it comes to racism and immigration. Good to see that Shakira too has joined the fight, visiting Phoenix yesterday especially to denounce the new Arizona Senate Bill 1070 law:

'I heard about it on the news and I thought, 'Wow', It is unjust and it's inhuman, and it violates the civil and human rights of the Latino community ... It goes against all human dignity, against the principles of most Americans I know... We're talking about human beings here'. Shakira also made a stop at the state Capitol in downtown Phoenix, telling a group of a few hundred community members that if the law were in effect, she could be arrested since she didn't bring her driver's license to Arizona. "I'm here pretty much undocumented," she told the crowd... "No person should be detained because of the color of their skin" (Washington Post, 28 April 2010).

The law, which is due to come in to effect in July, makes it a crime to be an 'alien' in the US without specific registration documents and requires police to check people's immigration status if they have a 'reasonable suspicion' . It will also make it a crime to give shelter to undocumented migrants, or transport them. Appalling, but not so different from the UK situation where employers are required to check papers and are increasing turning people over to the Borders Agency.

Still at least in the US, the She Wolf is on the case! Interview follows - 'People are people with or without documents':

Ricky Martin also said last night “You are not alone. We are with you... Put a stop to discrimination. Put a stop to hate. Put a stop to racism.”

Can I vote for Amerie? Racist immigration controls in Arizona and UK

So why put up a video for Amerie's 1 Thing at this late stage in the day? Well it's a great track and why can't I a put up a good song at the end of the week just because I like it.

But also because I can't bear to hear any more nonsense about immigration in the UK election campaign. The only decent thing said on the subject by Gordon Brown was when he called somebody 'a bigoted woman' for her comments about immigrants 'flocking' to the country. Of course he didn't mean to be overheard, and having been crucified by the press for it, it was back to business as usual in tonight's TV debate trying to out tough the Tories about 'illegal immigrants'.

Compare and contrast Amerie's very sensible analyis via Twitter: 'Consequences of this new Arizona immigration law are fightening to say the least...imagine the precedence if this law holds firm. Think about it: you're driving to the store, movies, walking down the street with a couple friends...u get stopped... oops, u don't have any id on u. So now you're off to jail or detained till someone can come prove ur a us citizen afterall, & the fact that most people who will be detained due to "reasonable suspicion" will happen to be brown complected goes without saying'.

Well she's absolutely right: as Robert Creamer argues, 'The Arizona of 2010 Is the Alabama of 1963... the new Arizona law requires that all police officers with a reasonable suspicion that an individual might not be in our country legally, must demand to see that person's papers. It also requires that each person who has immigrated carry those papers at all times or be in violation of the law themselves... In a free society people should never have to worry that the plainclothes police officer around the next corner has the right - even the obligation - to demand to see their papers simply because they have brown skin or are chatting with their friends in Spanish, or Polish, or Italian'.

Yet seemingly few people bat an eyelid when this kind of thing happens in the UK. I frequently see joint Borders Agency/transport police operations in London, where, similar to Amerie's scenario, people with dark skins and/or foreign accents who don't have the right ticket for the bus or train get pulled over and questioned about their immigration status - resulting for some in arrest, detention and deportation. Where is the outrage?! Can I vote for Amerie please?

(first heard about Amerie's comments via Dan Hancox)

Blair Peach, Southall and the Rasta folk devil

I posted last year on the 30th anniversary of the death of Blair Peach, killed during the anti-fascist demonstration in Southall, West London, on 23 April 1979. Papers finally released today by the Metropolitan Police show that they were well aware at the time that he must have been killed by the police Special Patrol Group, but nobody was ever charged.

There's a huge amount of material on the Met's site which I haven't had time to read through yet. One things I was struck by was an internal report to the Home Office written the day after by a Deputy Assistant Commissioner at New Scotland Yard. It gives the police account of the demonstration, which was called to oppose a National Front meeting in this largely Asian area (note that the NF chose St George's Day for its provocation, just as its successor the BNP chose the same day to launch its 2010 election manifesto last week).

The report is clearly an early exercise in putting together a police narrative that justified the violence used in what was to be described as a 'police riot'. For instance, it describes the notorious police assault on the People Unite centre, in which Misty in Roots manager Clarence Baker was put in a coma, as a defensive operation:

'A group of mainly rastafarians, squatting in a house in Park View Road, threw stones and smoke canisters at police. There were a number of police injuries and it was necessary for police to enter the building . There was considerable violence from those in occupation. Truncheons were used and there were injuries to the occupants and police -including two police officers who were stabbed. A variety of missiles were used, including paint which was thrown over police. Curry powder was thrown in policemen's faces'.

Interesting to see that the report invokes that 1970s 'black folk devil' (Gilroy) , the criminal Rastafarian - armed in this case with that most Unenglish of weapons - curry powder! Writing in that period, Paul Gilroy quoted some choice examples of anti-Rasta coverage in the British media. How about:

'Scotland Yard has alerted police forces in England and Wales about the infiltration threat by a West Indian mafia organisation called Rastafarians. It is an international crime ring specialising in drugs, prostitution, extortion, protection, subversion and blackmail... They favour red, high-powered cars, wear their hair in long rats tails under multi-coloured woollen caps and walk about with 'prayer sticks' -trimmed pick axe handles. They are known to police and intelligence organisations on both sides of the Atlantic as being active in organising industrial unrest' (Reading Evening Post, 1976, cited in Gilroy).

The notion of gangsters juggling global drug dealing with organising strikes seems hilarious now, but the consequences of these attitudes in legitimising repression against black youths were serious enough: 'Ideas of black criminality... intersect with racist common sense and, in that process, provide a wealth of justifications for illegitimate, discriminatory and of course illegal police practices at the grassroots level' (Paul Gilroy, Police and Thieves, included in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, 1982).

Back to that same police report I quoted earlier we can find another example of the barely concealed racism of the period with a statement that 'the violence was mainly from Asian youths, who appeared quite often to lose complete control of their emotions'. Tied up in this is a whole discourse of over emotional foreigners, of Asian males as not quite real men (the main Cass report on Blair's death likewise refers to 'a little Indian man, bleeding').

The police might have got a bit more careful about their language, but pumped up cops from the TSG (successor to the SPG) are still a threat to life and limb as shown by the death last year of Ian Tomlinson.

More on this:


- The-sauce puts police names to some of the blacked out gaps in the documents released today.
- Chris Searle at the IRR remembers Blair Peach, recalling his earlier arrest in 1974 for opposing a racist colour bar at the Railway Tavern in Bow.
- Blue Murder - songs about police killings including Blair Peach, to which I'd like to add another. London Hooligan Soul by the Ballistic Brothers includes the line: 'Blair Peach a crying shame. The NF and unmarked police vans. Who is to blame?'.
- John Eden, an old post on Reggae and the National Front with more about Misty in Roots and Southall.

Flyer for a 1979 benefit gig at Trinity Hall, Bristol for the Southall Defence Fund and People Unite, featuring Revelation Rockers, Stingrays, and The Spics.