The ill-fated wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was announced in February 1981. Unemployment was high amidst cuts and austerity and the first of what were to be a wave of major riots had taken place - the Bristol uprising of April May 1980 setting the tone for the following year's events.
A lot happened between the announcement of that engagement and the wedding itself on 29th July 1981. The Hunger Strikes in the North of Ireland set off a huge wave of demonstrations and riots there and across the world - 6 prisoners had died by the time Chas'n'Di walked down the aisle.
Meanwhile on the streets of England, tensions between (mainly) young black people and the police erupted in Brixton in April 1981 and then in July in towns and cities across the country. On the night before the wedding, there was rioting in Toxteth, Liverpool. Chief Constable Kenneth Oxford authorised the police tactic of driving Land Rovers at high speed towards the crowd - a 23 year old disabled man, David Moore, could not get out of way and was run over and killed. Nobody can seriously maintain then that the 1981 Royal Wedding 'brought the nation together' in any meaningful way.
The following cartoon was published in socialist magazine The Leveller (no.61, 24 July 1981), showing the royal cake besieged by rioters. Prime Minister Thatcher watches from the tier beneath the royal couple, while below her a line of riot police keep guard. The bottom of the cake reads Brixton, Toxteth, Southall - scenes of major riots at the time.
Funk the Wedding
I was at school in Luton at the time and on the day of the Royal wedding went with my sister to the Funk the Wedding carnival in Clissold Park in North London, an anti-royalist event organised by Stoke Newington Rock Against Racism. From what I recall it was unexciting but hey it was some kind of statement, with a good few thousand people there. Headliners Tribesman were a UK reggae band, who incidentally made a record about another London green space - Finsbury Park. Joshua Hi -Fi was a north east London reggae sound system. Don't know anything about Movement or Monkey Business who also played that day.
'Funk the Wedding -recently formed, but very dynamic, Stoke Newington RAR have organised a mini carnival for you to dance away your wedding day blues. If you haven't been invited, or can't stomach the Chas & Di show, come and see Tribesman, Movement, Monkey Business and Joshua Hi-Fi in Clissold Park' (Temporary Hoarding, Rock Against Racism zine, August 1981)
Advert for event from Leveller no.61:
Funk the Wedding, Clissold Park (my photo):
'Guess who WASN'T at that wedding... Eight thousand turned up in Clissold Park London' for 'Stoke Newington Rock Against Racism's amazingly successful afternoon of Militant Entertainment' (Socialist Worker).
[post updated Sept 2022 with addition of Socialist Worker report; Temporary Hoarding notice added December 2022
Alan Sillitoe died earlier this year, 50 years after he came to prominence with the classic post-war Northern working class novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, first published in 1958:
'For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill...'
'Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you aren't careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death ... Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits'.
Sillitoe also wrote the screenplay of the film (released in 1960):
'I'm a fighting pit prop that wants a pint of beer, that's me. But if any knowing bastard says that's me I'll tell them I'm a dynamite dealer waiting to blow the factory to kingdom come. Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not because they don't know a bloody thing about me! God knows what I am'
'I'm out for a good time - all the rest is propaganda!'
The book and film have been endlessly mined in popular culture ever since. The Arctic Monkeys famously quoted the 'Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not' film line as the title of their debut album. The film line 'I want to go where there's life and there's people' inspired The Smiths' 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' (although the film's star Albert Finney - pictured above - refused his permission to be featured on the cover of 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now'). The Specials recorded their own take, 'Friday Night and Saturday Morning': 'When my feet go through the door, I know what my right arm is for, Buy a drink and pull a chair, Up to the edge of the dance floor, Bouncers bouncing through the night, Trying to stop or start a fight,I sit and watch the flashing lights, Moving legs in footless tights'.
After the exuberance and excitement of Wednesday's massive demonstration (50,000+) against education cuts in London, the hangover is setting in as the inevitable witch hunt is launched against those accused of taking part in the clashes at Millbank Tower, where the headquarters of the Conservative Party are located.
So far more than 50 people have been arrested, with newspapers including the Daily Mail and the Telegraph running photos of protesters and urging people to shop them to the police. I hope some of the Facebook generation don't have to learn the hard way that there are times when filming every moment and sharing it with the world can put people at serious risk. No doubt in future protests too the police will be back to cracking heads Iain Tomlinson-style, now that they have 'shown' what happens when they are expected to show restraint. Today's Observer quotes a 'senior police figure' as saying 'In the past we've been criticised for being too provocative. During the next demo no one can say a word'. You reckon? A swifter and more brutal response at Millbank might have saved a few windows, but seriously injuring students would inflame the protest movement across the whole country.
So potentially dangerous as well as exciting times ahead, but it does feel like a turning point has been reached. Two years after the 'credit crunch', and months of phony war about austerity, the reality of cuts is beginning to be felt and the opposition to them is beginning to get serious. Nobody should dismiss this week's demonstration as just a bunch of students protesting as usual - in the history of the education system in the UK there has never been a student protest of this scale or militancy.
An article in the Evening Standard by the pro-cuts Chris Blackhurst on the day after the demonstration warned: 'The temperature is rising all the time. Already, we've had strikes from the Tube drivers and firefighters, and now students are taking to the streets. More groups are likely to follow suit... Disturbingly, the scene is set for more yesterdays. The police will undoubtedly be better prepared. But that is not to say there won't be trouble or that the rage is going to disappear ('Expect more rage if the rich and poor divide gets bigger', 11 November 2011).
The Government is clearly hoping that the diffuse nature of the cuts, with different groups affected in different ways over a long period, will prevent a united movement. They are trying their best to inflame division and resentment between those bearing the brunt of the cuts. For instance claiming that attacking benefits claimants is good for ordinary workers because it is 'unfair' that some people earn more from signing on than others do for working - easily remedied by increasing wages, rather than cutting benefits which will actually tend to put downward pressure on wage levels as a whole.
In relation to the students protests, we are told that they are being selfish and that they will be the privileged of the future. Some of them may be, but many of them will be 'lucky' to find a job when they leave college. Many of those protesting this week, including some of those arrested, were actually working class 16 & 17 year olds facing the axing of the Education Maintenance Allowance, the small payment to young people from the lowest income families to help them stay on at school or college.
In any event, the current generation of students will not be affected by the planned rise in fees as they are likely to be phased in for new students. So their motives cannot be dismissed as simply narrow-self interest (not that there's anything wrong with that). As Nina Power argued this week: 'The protest as a whole was extremely important, not just because of the large numbers it attracted, and shouldn't be understood simply in economic terms as a complaint against fees. It also represented the serious anger many feel about cuts to universities as they currently stand, and the ideological devastation of the education system if the coalition gets its way. It was a protest against the narrowing of horizons; a protest against Lib Dem hypocrisy; a protest against the increasingly utilitarian approach to human life that sees degrees as nothing but "investments" by individuals, and denies any link between education and the broader social good'.
Dancing in the streets
Anyway I was at home sick during the demonstration, so had to make do with watching on TV. Like at the G20 protests in London last year, the endless looping of the image of the windows breaking was used to convey a sense of an ongoing orgy of destruction. Clearly a time limited episode of smashing things up was part of what was going on, but there was also celebration. At one point on Sky TV they showed footage of people dancing to some wobbly bass and the presenter announced 'drum and bass is playing, and the beer is open'. Yes a cycle-powered sound system was on hand, according to a participant account at The Commune: 'A sound system started playing dubstep leading to a Reclaim The Streets carnival atmosphere'
Some good footage here of people dancing, with a megaphone-wielding MC:
This film provides a good overview of the whole event - clearly the main demonstration was carnivalesque, not just the Millbank protest, with people climbing on bus shelters etc:
* Rouge's Foam has a good post on the demo, including some reflections on the music used:
'That day music stepped out of the record collection paradigm and played a role in raising morale, coordinating chants, and most importantly cohering and drawing attention to ourselves as an organised collective. Just south of Trafalgar Square as the march was starting I was near the back and still stationary, tightly packed in and shivering with hundreds of strangers from dozens of different universities. Eventually a sound system started up and boomed out Cee Lo Green’s ‘Fuck You’, a powerfully catchy, upbeat song and a perfect choice at that moment.
Recognising the sentiment we all turned, smiled, and started dancing and singing along, our eyes meeting with a strong and implicit sense of mutual understanding and agreement. There were performers on instruments too. The music of drummers and samba bands contributed to the sense of a shared mood. Outside the Houses of Parliament a student brass band were playing a characteristically old-fashioned and very English sort of music, and yet it only enhanced the atmosphere of diverse voices contributing in every unique way to one cause. By the time I arrived at the Millbank buildings, sound-systems were playing techno, dub, and if I’m not mistaken, Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’. Together with our reasons for being there, the sense of collectivity that music instilled that day was ten times as strong as that whipped up at the very best of raves, and I’ll never forget it'.
* Beyond the Implode has done a very funny riff on the line 'drum and bass is playing and the beer is open'. Wish I'd recorded that Sky broadcast, would be a great sample.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story The Popular Girl is centred around the figure of Yanci Bowman and her desire for more than the life on offer to her in her mid-Western city. It starts in the ballroom of a country club on a Saturday night, where Yanci encounters her lover Scott Kimberley for the first time:
"'Ballroom', for want of a better word. It was that room, filled by day with wicker furniture, which was always connotated in the phrase 'Let's go in and dance'. It was referred to as 'inside' or 'downstairs'. It was that nameless chamber wherein occur the principal transactions of all the country clubs in America...
The orchestra trickled a light overflow of music into the pleasant green-latticed room and the two score couples who for the evening comprised the local younger set moved placidly into time with its beat. Only a few apathetic stags gathered one by one in the doorways, and to a close observer it was apparent that the scene did not attain the gayety which was its aspiration. These girls and men had known each other from childhood; and though there were marriages incipient upon the floor tonight, they were marriages of environment, of resignation, or even of boredom... When his eyes found Yanci Bowman among the dancers he felt much younger. She was the incarnation of all in which the dance failed - graceful youth, arrogant, languid freshness and beauty that was sad and perishable as a memory in a dream. Her partner, a young man with one of those fresh red complexions ribbed with white streaks, as though he had been slapped on a cold day, did not appear to be holding her interest, and her glance fell here and there upon a group, a face, a garment, with a far away and oblivious melancholy...
Mr Kimberly suggested to Miss Bowman that they dance, to which proposal Miss Bowman dispassionately acquiesced. They mingled their arms in the gesture prevalent and stepped into time with the beat of the drum. Simultaneously it seemed to Scott that the room and the couples who danced up and down upon it converted themselves into a background behind her. The commonplace lamps, the rhythm of the music playing some paraphrase of a paraphrase, the faces of many girls, pretty, undistinguished or absurd, assumed a certain solidity as though they had grouped themselves in a retinue for Yanci's languid eyes and dancing feet.
'I've been watching you,' said Scott simply. 'You look rather bored this evening'.
'Do I?' Her dark-blue eyes exposed a borderland of fragile iris as they opened in a delicate burlesque of interest. 'How perfectly kill-ing!' she added."
(story first published in Saturday Evening Post, February 1922; reprinted in F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (pictured), Bits of Paradise, London: Penguin, 1973)
Martin C. (Beyond the Implode) and John Eden (Uncarved) have put together a great if suitably chaotic anarcho-punk mix/podcast, released on You are Hear last week (download here).
A good selection of tracks by Crass (Securicor), The Ex, Six Minute War, Potential Threat (the Hunt is on), The Apostles (Mob Violence), XS Discharge (Lifted), Flux of Pink Indians (the Ballardian 'Tube Disasters'), Polish punks Dezerter, Oi Polloi, Exit Stance (Ballykelly Disco), Twisted Nerve, Lost Cherees, Hagar the Womb (Dressed to Kill). All this and Class War's 'Better dead than wed', the anarchist group's foray on to vinyl to denounce the Royal Wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in 1986.
The Blaggers, whose Brixton Prison anthem Jail House Doors gets an airing, were certainly punky and political but were associated with Red Action/Anti Fascist Action rather the largely pacifist anarcho-punk scene (incidentally when I lived in Brixton, the band's guitarist was in my local anti-poll tax group Tulse Hill Estate Against the Poll Tax. We were also involved in fighting against some anti-abortion zealots who tried to blockade the Brixton Hill abortion clinic, the full story of which can wait for another day).
Some interesting reflections from John and Martin on the limitations of anarcho-punk ideology, particularly the dominant strand of moralism and failure to prioritise - so that meat eaters and low paid security guards were sometimes viewed as being as much the enemy as top generals and industrialists.
Some thought too on the squatting/travelling/counter culture continuum, the 'Hidden kind of connections' flowing through the Hawkwind/Stonehenge scene through Crass/anarcho-punk and later on to techno free parties. As John Eden notes 'There are people that went through that whole thing, but obviously that doesn't fit neatly into genre-specific histories'.
Colin Jerwood - Eltham's Chuck D?
One of the bands I saw most at the time was Conflict (variously at the Old Kent Road Ambulance Station, Thames Poly and the Clarendon Hotel).
Listening to Conflict's Colin Jerwood spitting out lyrics at machine gun pace on Berkshire C*nt on this mix reminded me of why I loved that band, and also put me in mind of fast chat reggae MCing or early Public Enemy. Given the lack of melody in most anarcho-punk, it makes sense in some ways to place its vocal delivery in a rap/MC continuum. As with some hip hop and reggae there's an urgency to communicate, as if those traditionally silenced in mainstream culture fear that having finally found a voice, the microphone might be snatched away again at any moment. So get the message down quick.
I guess we're entering similar times to the early 1980s, and there does seem to be a renewed interest in the anarcho-punk sounds of that period. Trying to simply reproduce the scene would be a political and musical dead end, but there's certainly plenty of noise and commitment to take inspiration from.
Not everybody who passed through anarcho-punk ended up as well-adjusted as myself. Check out the excellent Who Makes the Nazis? for the sad tale of John Cato of AYS, who seemingly moved from this scene to the extreme right. There's also a good new post there by Mr Eden again, this time on his time as a Death in June fan.
Last Saturday night's squat party in central London seems to have generated a huge amount of press interest, not all of it accurate. Scumoween was held in a multi-storey former Royal Mail parcel office in Museum Street, Holborn that has been empty for years.
There was an extensive report with pictures at the Daily Mail (sourced from Associated Press, so a bit more balanced than the average Daily Hate fare). Here's some choice extracts:
'Spooked riot police forced to retreat as 600 Halloween youths cause chaos at an illegal rave in central London
Eight Halloween revellers have been arrested after violent clashes with riot police who tried to break up an all night illegal rave. A number of officers were injured when bottles were hurled during clashes with a crowd of up to 500 youths at an abandoned former post office in central London. Police desperately battled to calm the party but most of the people went back inside the building in High Holborn and continued partying. The rave continued into the morning with deafening hard techno pumping around the surrounding streets.
Hundreds of youngsters in hooded tops - many wearing Halloween masks - crammed into the streets around the building. Police kept watch as the sun came up today and the atmosphere was friendly. Hoards of tourists have also started to flock to the scene in a bid to keep the rave going. Officers have now surrounded the eight-storey building, which is bordered by High Holborn, Museum Road and New Oxford Street, while the rave takes place.
Police were first called to High Holborn at 11.20pm yesterday. Violence was sparked when some people in the crowd became aggressive after they were asked to leave the area, police said. Bottles were hurled at officer and dozens of riot squad officers from the force's Territorial Support Group were drafted in....
A man who said he was attacked by police during the altercation revealed bruising on his thigh. The raver, who did not want to be named, claimed: 'It was the police who were being aggressive. All we came to do here is party. They wouldn't let people in and then just started hitting people. I was on the floor and they kept on hitting me'... Ravers in boiler suits, bear suits, and jester costumes, and an array of hoodies, top hats, fluorescent caps and dreadlocks, were in the road.
SamantaColetti and FlaviaPickler, from Brazil, tried to have their picture taken with some officers. The pair of experienced ravers were armed with earplugs, water and fake blood. Miss Coletti, 27, a waitress living in west London, said: 'We love it. We always go to squat parties, you never find fights, if someone is stealing or harassing girls they are told to leave, you can leave your bag on the floor and dance.' Miss Pickler, 28, dressed as a toffee apple with her face paint fading away, came on the train from Brighton where she works as a nanny. She said: 'It's very friendly, you can trust people.'
Inside the building space was dark. Some people were dancing while others were barely moving - raising fears that many may have used the rave to take drugs... "Inside were 10 different 'arenas' with 30 sound systems, and 200 DJs playing through the night and day", he said [one of the organisers]. He said this was the first such event in central London for nine years, adding: 'There will be a big resurgence of this sort of thing because of the economic situation. It's mirroring what happened in the last recession'.
Since then I've spoken to people who were there, and there's also been quite a bit of chat about it on various forums including Urban75 and Party Vibe.
Seems like when police first turned up there were already hundreds inside the building. They tried to stop other people getting in, but this just led to big crowds forming on the streets outside the police lines as well as traffic chaos in these West End streets. At this point things got quite heavy, the police used batons and tasers, the crowd raided a bottle bank for ammo. The police withdrew leaving some of the vehicles behind, some of which were damaged including a police van getting smashed up. If anything the Met's press office seem to have downplayed the intensity of the clashes. But it seems there were no major injuries on either side.
Then the party was left to go ahead for the rest of the night, seemingly it was a good one with loads of sound systems over several floors, including the large garage area in the basement that would once have been used for the post vans. Estimates of the crowd range from 1200 to 4000, certainly a lot more than 500. Rigs were apparently allowed to leave the area at the end without police interference.
There's an interesting range of perspectives by police who were there over at Inspector Gadget. Some fantasising about being French CRS-style tooled up riot cops able to steam in with maximum force, others noting that attempting to clear the building could have resulted in deaths. This comment is particularly telling:
'The bar has been set now – if we don’t get a heads up there is no way a response team could take on a couple of hundred determined people getting into a squat like that... Even with force mobilisation we would have had a problem clearing it, it would have been brilliant but messy, and no good news would come out of it. Back to the days of mass raves now, they’ve tried and won, and we’re now screwed'.
Some people have criticised the organisers for drawing attention to themselves by holding the party in a high profile area (e..g comment at Urban 75: ''What were they thinking...having it so central and posting the details all over the internet"). Possibly a party on an industrial estate in Hackney wouldn't have generated such interest, but equally out of site of the press, tourists and central London passers by, the police could have gone in a lot heavier.
David See 'was a finalist in the Music Week National DJ '77 Championship' and writer for Disco International. In 1980, Hamlyn (London) published his A4 annual style book, How to be a Disc Jockey.
When I found this book (and I literally found it in the street in New Cross), my first thought was that it would be a barrel of retro laughs. And sure some it it is very of the time -such as the sections on 'To Talk or Not to Talk' and disco cabaret (seemingly some DJs were livening up their act by doing stunts and dressing up).
But some of the advice offered is timeless: 'Discotheques, whether in the club environment or portable, serve one basic purpose and that quite simply is entertainment in a place where girl can meet boy and boy can meet boy, etc. It is a participative environment, where the dancers are as much of the total atmosphere as any other factor, yet they are also the reason why the discotheque is there and why it survives. The public must not be forgotten, and it pays the disc jockey to remember that'.
The author shows off his decks
The book is actually a fairly comprehensive guide to DJing pitched at the mobile operator travelling around with all the kit needed for a party in the back of a Ford Escort Estate. This DJ needed not only to know about cueing and BPM but also have an impressive knowledge of electronics, lighting, copyright law, insurance and much more besides. I'm not sure how many present day DJs would be able to explain Ohm's law in the way Dee does, or even fully understand a diagram like this:
There is some interesting material on DJ politics at the time. In 1974, the South East Discotheque Association was formed 'to promote the profession and art of disc jockeying', while around the same time a short-lived National Association of Disc Jockeys was formed. Then came the launch of the Disc Jockey's Federation (GB) which at the time of publication had 800 members (the author estimates this was ony 1.6% of the total, which would mean there weree 50,000 DJs). But attempts to make the DJF something like a union for DJs were seemingly floundering. The Federation had turned down an offer from the National Association of Theatrical an Kinematographic Employees to absorb it into the union. And there was tension with some of 'Britain's leading funk and soul circuit disc jockeys who not feel that they need an association', a group known as 'the Funk Mafia' inclusing DJ Chris Hill.
Crocs Phoots
The book features some good clubbing photos, all of them, including the cover shot, taken at Crocs Night Club, Rayleigh, Essex. Crocs Glamour Club, as it was also known (later the Pink Toothbrush) was an important Essex venue - and yes at one time it had a crocodile in a tank. In 1980 it hosted a regular 'Futurist night' where Depeche Mode (originally known as Composition of Sound) played their first gigs. It also hosted punk gigs (see Southend Punk Rock History)
The DJ featured on the front of the book is seemingly Crocs DJ Don Lewis. Not sure what kind of music he played, but at the Southend Punk forum somebody says that ' Don Lewis turned me onto reggae in that place'.
I went to Cafe Oto in Dalston a couple of weeks ago for a reading by two members of Wu Ming, the Italian writing collective responsible for novels including 54, Q (written under the name Luther Blisset) and the newly-translated Manituana.
At least one of the four Wu Mings was associated for a while with the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (1995-2000), the multi-dimensional politico-creative network dedicated to 'independent community-based space travel'. The premise of the AAA was for people to form their own groups (often it must be said, just one or two people) to put their own slant on the mission. Thus my node in the network was Disconaut AAA, dedicated to the use of dance music for space exploration, while electronic/industrial outfit Nocturnal Emissions was associated with AAA Kernow. Messrs Eden and Grievous Angel had their own groups, as did others in France, Italy, Denmark, Holland, New Zealand and elsewhere.
From Bologna, a later Wu-Mingster launched 'Skin Heads as Independent Travellers in Space' (SHITS). This is their launch text, published in 'Moving in Several Directions at Once! The Third Annual Report of the Association of Autonomus Astronauts' (1998). The text celebrates 'proletarian elegance' and looking sharp, a theme that recurs in Wu Ming's novel 54 (discussed here recently).
WORKING CLASS KIDS AGAINST SPACEIMPERIALISM
Only those whose boots stomp the ground will conquer the skies
by Fabrizio P. Belletati
In the name of Luther Blissett “I” announce the foundation of the SHITS (Skin Heads as Independent Travellers in Space).
Proletarians have never benefited by any space exploration programme launched by the great Powers. NASA in particular, that gigantic parasite, dissipated billions of dollars in order to take workers away from their everyday exploitation, inducing them to passively gaze at the deeds of yankee imperialism and the conquest of the “last frontier”. NASA introduced the average chauvinist redneck male as the cultural and aesthetic representative of the whole human species (in the American TV series Northern Exposure. a character named “Maurice Minnefield” effectively parodies pathetic flag-waving ex-astronauts). NASA has always attempted to militarise and commodify outer space (remember the infamous Ronald Reagan’s SDI plan).
The Associations of Autonomous Astronauts fight the present-day state, military and corporate monopoly of space travel, and exhort the oppressed of this world to build their own spaceships and get together into free communities of cosmonauts. The revolutionary proletariat has the power to expose the deceptions of the space travel establishment.
But I think that the AAA project must keep its distance from Hippie/New Age bullshit — we’re talking about class war — neither some kind of utopian-escapist plan (e.g. The Jefferson Starship Blows Against The Empire) nor some Star Trek Kennedyan dream — we’re talking about Jello Biafra’s rant Why I’m Glad That The Shuttle Blew Up.
The subcultural cross-fertilisation which originated the Skinhead style reached its peak in 1969, i.e. whilst NASA was organising and staging the first moon landing hoax. The creative clash between West-Indian music (Ska, Rocksteady and early reggae) and the Hard Mod look defines the so-called “spirit of ‘69”. We’ve got to hang on to this spirit of ‘69, and oppose it to the other, symbolised by the star spangled banner on a TV studio moon ground.
Original skinheads, suedeheads and later street punk skinheads COULDN’T GIVE A TOSS about such nerveless middle-class counterculture à la Jefferson Starship. Skinhead subculture can provide autonomous astronauts with a style and a sartorial rhetoric which break both with liberalism and hippy shit. Moreover, both the Suedehead evolution and the modernist heritage can work as stylistic North Stars and orient our efforts to an essential “proletarian elegance”. It’s a matter of self-respect: we can’t figure what clothes the inhabitants of other planets have on, but certainly we won’t go to the rendez-vous dressed like shaggy buffoons!
Skinhead Moonstomp is the title of a classic Ska anthem. That’s how we’re gonna deal with zero gravity: skipping about on a steady upbeat rhythm. Long live SHITS! Death to NASA!
Sad news about the death this week of Ari Up (Ariane Forster), former lead singer of The Slits. She was only 48, incredibly she was only 14 when she joined the band and only 15 when they set out on the famous White Riot tour with The Clash in 1977. At that time they were quite literally making a sound that had never been heard before and looking like nobody had ever looked before.
As Greil Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth Century (describing a bootleg recording of the band):
'Shouting and shrieking, out of guitar flailings the group finds a beat, makes a rhythm, begins to shape it; the rhythm gets away and they chase it down, overtake it, and keep going. Squeaks, squeals, snarls, and whines - unmediated female noises never before heard as pop music - course through the air as the Slits march hand in hand through a storm they themselves have created. It's a performance of joy and revenge, an armed playground chant' (Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces). In 1977, Caroline Coon accompanied the band on some of the White Riot tour, taking some great photos like the one above of The Clash's Paul Simonon watching Ari do her hair. She documented it in her under-rated book '1988: The New Wave and Punk Rock Explosion':
'It is what the Slits represent, even at their least provocative, that gets up people's noses... Their earthy arrogance and striking mode of attire - an organised mess of dressed-up undress - causes adults to behave with alarming intolerance. Quite apart from being thrown out of hotels, Ari Up is quite used to being spat at by people who pass her on the street. Being refused service in coffee bars and pubs is another fact of life'.
The book includes a poignant quote from Ari: 'I want to live, and when I'm sixty I want to have green hair and spikey heels. If people hate us its because of our honesty. You have to comb your hair otherwise they think you're a mad loony or the devil. But they are living in the past'. Sadly she didn't make it to sixty, but she will be remembered for a lot longer.
'Raymond Castro, a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in New York City, died in his hometown of Madeira Beach, Florida on Saturday, October 9th. He was 68 years old and is survived by his husband of 31 years, Frank Sturniolo, 50. On June 27, 1969 Castro was inside the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, on the first night of the uprising and is documented as the only person arrested that evening who was known to be gay, according to historian David Carter.
Although police raids of gay-friendly bars were sadly common at the time, on that night people fought back. As two officers were escorting Castro out of the bar, the crowd shouted, "Let him go, let him go," and he pushed against the waiting patrol wagon with both feet, knocking the two cops to the ground. He was put in the back of the vehicle and detained, but was later released without charge. He hired a lawyer to resist the charge against him in court and also his lawyer represent an arrested lesbian who was in the patrol wagon with him. Typical of his generosity, he did not let the lesbian assist in paying the attorney who represented them. That night's events, including Castro's struggle against police, gave birth to the modern gay civil rights movement...
David Carter said that all the evidence he collected about the event made him sure that Castro's resistance to his arrest, taking place in public soon after the occurrence of the evening's tipping point--the unknown lesbian who fought the police outside the Stonewall Inn and twice escaped a patrol car she was placed into--helped guarantee that the resistance to the police raid became both massive and violent, and thus had the power to become a transforming symbol of LGBT consciousness: the Stonewall Riots.
Ray visited New York City in June to celebrate the 41st Anniversary of Stonewall and attend the 40th annual gay pride parade. The New York Daily News featured his story at that time, quoting Castro as saying: "A lot of people, especially the young ones, have no inkling what Stonewall is. They think Gay Pride is just a big party. None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for 1969. I had no idea that I was going to be involved in history-making... I would do it all over again."
More on Stonewall here... history was certainly made that night.
Courtesy of 56a Info Shop in SE London, I have recently had access to an archive of radical publications from the early 1980s, in particular The Leveller, a London-based 'independent socialist magazine'. So I'm going to start a new series called 1980, highlighting things that happened 30 years ago. There are quite a lot of similarities between 1980 and 2010, not least the fact that in both cases in the UK, a Conservative government had recently come to power and was implementing a programme of public spending cuts amidst rising unemployment. So there's plenty of food for thought for the present in looking back.
2010
So here we are in 2010, with the multi-millionaire Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announcing a new campaign against the poorest people in the country: benefits claimants. According to the BBC today:
'The government has set out a series of measures to tackle benefit fraud, as ministers spend the weekend finalising spending cuts. The steps would mean anyone with three convictions could forfeit their rights to benefits for up to three years...
Mr Osborne said state aid had "to go to the people who need it, and people who pay for it these days are going to demand no less". Under the new scheme every welfare offence - no matter how minor - would mean an immediate fine of £50. The government is promising to share more data with credit reference agencies to find patterns of offending. It is also recruiting 200 new inspectors, creating a mobile task force to go into areas with high rates of fraud and check every claim individually. The strategy, to be unveiled on Monday, will use hi-tech data tracking techniques between government offices and credit reference agencies'.
1980
Here's a report of something very similar, an article written by Tim Gopsill published in The Leveller, no.36, March 1980:
'Any doubt the Tory leadership might have had about Reg Prentice’s reactionary credentials must now be dispelled [Reg Prentice was a former Labour politician who switched to the Tories]. Chosen as Minister of State for Social Security to direct the attack on unemployed people and single parents, he has undertaken the task with tremendous zeal. On February 13 he announced a ‘new clampdown on scroungers’, a programme of breathtaking savagery against the Tories’ favourite target, the poor.
Margaret Thatcher knew how well Prentice was qualified for the job. He has a vast experience and proven ability in the field of fraud, having arguably deceived more honest Labour voters than any other politician. And like his mythical millions of scroungers, he has lived off the back of the taxpayer and the state for many years.
The ‘clampdown’ is not on scroungers at all. In co-ordination with the rest of Tory strategy, it is on working and unemployed people’s living standards and organisation. It is scapegoatism on a huge scale, making the poor pay for the failures of capital. And it is a strengthening of the apparatus of the state to this end. It is the same story as the new laws to break the unions, the cuts in housing, education, health and social service expenditure on the one hand, and the increase in resources allocated to police and military expenditure on the other.
Prentice announced the appointment of more than 1,000 extra staff to tackle ‘fraud and abuse’, which he predicted would save £50 million of the estimated £200 million to be lost over the coming year.
Before we consider the real facts, a few more figments from Prentice’s fevered brain. This figure of £200 million, which picked up a good deal of publicity, where did it come from? Embarrassed DHSS officials, under pressure, while maintaining that of course you can’t, by definition, produce a figure for something you know nothing about, concede the following: (You aren’t going to believe this) that big retail chains and other companies handling large amounts of money regularly reckon to write off 1 to 2 percent of turnover to theft. And that’s it: Prentice got his officials to work out what was 1 per cent of the estimated £19,000 million to be paid out by the DHSS in 1980-81, rounded it up to a headline-grabbing £200 million, and gave it out as the scroungers’ swag…
More than half his new staff will be extra Unemployment Review Officers — 530 new UROs, more than doubling the present establishment of 447. These men and women are not at all concerned with fraud. Their job is to stop the long- term unemployed (people who’ve been jobless for six months) receiving the benefit which is their perfect entitlement.
UROs are armed with quite an arsenal. They can cut benefit or stop it altogether if they consider claimants fail, without justification, to find work. They can send them to Assessment or Re-establishment Centres (workhouses). They can initiate prosecutions for failure to maintain oneself or one’s dependents. These powers do not often have to be used. Their threat is usually enough to achieve the aim of getting a claimant off the books — whether to some low-paid non-union sweatshop, or into a limbo without income, or petty crime, they don’t care...
The next biggest increases in personnel are to be new Fraud Officers and Liable Relative Officers — 170 of each. The Liable Relative (LR) operations are already the heaviest harassment squad in the business, with 2,034 officers nationwide. Their job, quite simply, is to get hold of people (usually deserting fathers) who are considered to be responsible for dependent relatives that are receiving benefit, and extort money from them.
Again, there is no ‘fraud’ involved. The common picture is of a husband who has left the home. The wife and child need supplementary benefit (SB) to survive, and while one department is grudgingly paying this out, the LROs are despatched to find the errant father. He is presented with a bill for the benefit paid, with the sanction of prosecution for failure to maintain his dependents. The mother is cajoled to prosecute or give evidence against him for failure to pay maintenance. In many cases, the father may be poor, or have acquired a new home and dependents; either way he can’t pay much, and it helps no-one to prosecute; no-one except DHSS officials with their fanatical determination not to pay benefit.
Claimants’ Union activists around the country are reporting a recent upsurge in enthusiasm on the part of LROs, with cases of men being presented with bills for years of benefit, running into thousands of pounds.
The other classes of new staff are the Fraud Officers, and 100 more Special Investigators. The SIs are the elite fraud detectives; they are the scum of the earth. They are the ones who rise with the dawn to sit outside the homes of women claimants to spot a man coming out to work. They are the collectors who can convert tittle-tattle from nasty neighbours into cases for the courts. They work a lot with the police, and with employers, for the majority of their cases are ‘working and drawing’ — that is, unemployed claimants or dependents who are found to be supplementing their state pittances by taking jobs. Not usually comfortable, established jobs with tax and insurance deducted of course, but casual ones: seasonal agricultural work, window-cleaning, decorating, odd jobs. These cases made up 55 per cent of prosecutions for SB fraud in 1978-79, and 69 per cent of Unemployment Benefit (UB) fraud.
What the DHSS’s ridiculous figures for projected savings (50 million out of estimated fraud and abuse losses of £53 million) mean is that every claimant will be under suspicion. How else can all estimated fraud or abuse be eliminated? It has already been policy for two years that every case proved will be taken to court. This explains the prosecution statistics (hold your breath, comrades): In 1976 there were 19,000 prosecutions for benefit fraud. In 1977-78: 26,000. In 1978-79: 29,147.
The conviction rate was 98 per cent. To put these facts into context, compare the zeal with which government is pursuing fraud of two other kinds that should be comparable — that are comparable, if truth can be admitted in Thatcher’s Britain: income tax evasion, and under-payment by employers...
So same old rhetoric about 'scroungers' and punitive measures against people just trying to get by on very low incomes, sometimes by knowingly or unknowingly getting round the rules. Still maybe something reassuring about the fact that after 30 years or more of endless persecution of the poor, the state apparently still finds itself in the same position.
And here, by Crass from the same period (from 1978 to be precise), is the only possible response to the Osbornes and Prentices of this world. Do they owe us a living? Of course they do...
For those who never stop complaining that there isn't enough dub in dubstep comes news that Tectonic Recordings are releasing a whole album of remixes by Jamaican dub producer Hopeton Brown, AKA Scientist. 'Scientist Launches Dubstep Into Outer Space' is out next month,and features remixes of tracks by Shackleton, Kode9 and King Midas Sound among others (full track listing at Resident Advisor News).
Scientist first came on to my radar during my Autonomous Astronaut search for interesting space-themed music, in particular his 1981 masterpieces Dub Landing and Scientist Meets the Space Invaders. Brown was only 21 when these came out, having served a teenage apprenticeship at King Tubby'sDromilly Road studio in Kingston. Thirty years later he is still in dispute with record companies about the royalties for these and other early albums (see this interview at United Reggae). With his evident interest in extraterrestial adventures, Scientist can be claimed for the reggae wing of the 'Afrofuturist' current, with their 'projections of Africanized technology, of dreadlocks as antennae, of blackness into space and the future' (Wayne Marshall, Trading in Futures: from Rastas in Space to Dreadlocked Aliens and Back, Woofah #4, 2010).
But Robert Beckford has also linked Scientist to the African-Caribbean past:
'What I find most interesting at this juncture in the development of the genre is that Brown, who made his name at the Randy's studio, used the self-description 'scientist'. Those familiar with Caribbean religious cultures will know that this is a designation for an indigenous healer or Obeah-Myal practitioners... Brown infers that dubbing, in this culture at least, is a holistic enterprise involving mind, body and spirit'.
Beckford sees dub as healing, part of 'the pharmacosm of sound in African cultures', and further that 'dub as an act of deconstruction' involving 'taking out and bringing in' sonic elements draws on 'healing practices in Jamaican folk culture'. He describes 'the Obeah-Myal complex' as an 'African religious survival' practiced by the slaves and their descendants in Jamaica: 'Obeah involved the deployment of malignant spirits on adversaries through a variety of tactics and techniques. To combat Obeah, Myal, the good medicine, was sought. Myal medicine provided protection against the bad spirits and returned the individual and community to equilibrium' (Robert Beckford, Jesus Dub: Theology, Music and Social Change, Routledge, 2006).
A similar point has been made by Lloyd Bradley, who Beckford quotes: 'It's an ancient African medicine that splits the body up into seven centres or 'selves' - sexual, digestive, heart, brain etc. - and by prescribing various herbs and potions would, as practitioners always describe it, 'bring forward or push back' different centres: remixing, as it were, a person's physical or mental state into something very different... In the same way by adjusting the controls at the mixing desk, a tune... can be reinvented' (Lloyd Bradley, Bass Culture: when Reggae was King, Pluto, 2001).
Photo: Saturday night juke joint outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta, November 1939 - taken by Marion Post Wolcott; Lyric: Green Corn, from the singing of Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival, 1960s - (not sure of exact date).
54 by Italian collective author Wu Ming is a novel set in 1954, with a fine plot involving the mafia, secret services, communist ex-partisans in Italy and Yugoslavia, the geopolitics of the post-WW2 period and Cary Grant.
One of the themes of the book is what might be termed 'proletarian dandyism' - working class pride in dressing up and looking sharp as an assertion of human dignity and as a refusal to accept an 'inferior' social status.
Two of the characters - Grant and Tito (leader of Yugoslavia) - are seen to share this perspective, with the Cary Grant character concluding that "he and Tito had a great deal in common. Above all there was his obvious interest in matters of grooming and clothes... And then there was the fact that they had both become famous with a name other than their given name. They had both passed through different identities".
The authors put an explicit defence of dressing-up into the mouth of 'Tito': "the mirror unites the individual with the community, and its admission into proletarian houses has cemented class pride, that sense of decorum thrown back into the bosses' faces, 'We have been naught, we shall be all! We can be, and we are, more stylish than you are!'".
Pierre, another key character, is a communist bar worker who models himself on Cary Grant. He is a local face as a filuzzi dancer in the dancehalls of Bologna, a scene involving competitive displays of dancing prowess to mazurkas and polkas:
'Everyone took to the floor for the mazurka, even the women, who couldn't usually keep up with the giddy rhythms of those dances. Two or three pieces in, the rhythm started to speed up. NinoBonara's concertina, supported by bass and guitar, sounded as though it was never going to stop. By the sixth item on the programme only the musketeers of the Bar Aurora were left on the floor. Shouts of encouragement rose up from the tables, along with applause for the more complex movements... the four filuzzi followed the music each on his own, the couples parting and reforming each time the tune came round again..."
The couples in filuzzi were usually men dancing with each other. It was specifically a Bologna scene - in fact it still exists there to an extent - and there is very little about it written in English. There is, however, some filuzzi footage on youtube:
My recent hypothesis that the vuvuzela is becoming the protest instrument of choice for the emerging movement against austerity has received some independent confirmation. Bat020 spotted one on the demonstration outside the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham last weekend (pictured below):
Meanwhile from Sweden, Birdseed reports that in the anti-racist mobilisations in the lead up to recent elections the vuvuzela has 'been ever present both as assertion and as sonic disturbance (of the extreme right)'.
All of this put me in mind of Peter Linebaugh's classic article 'Jubilating; or, how the Atlantic working class used the Biblical Jubilee against capitalism, with some success' first published in the journal Midnight Notes in 1990. In this text, Linebaugh looks at how the Biblical notion of Jubilee as the periodic cancellation of debt and slavery has inspired radical movements through the ages. And he notes how this is heralded by the sounding of a trumpet:
'Jubilee. Etymologically, jubilee comes from yobel, a Hebrew word meaning 'ram's horn'. Ever since, it's been associated with music, a horn, a cornet, a trumpet, and later with singing. The cornet descends from the shepherd's cornu; the trumpet and bugle from the Roman soldier's buccina; these horns are instruments of gathering and militance. In the West Indies and the South Sea Islands the spiral conch emits a very large sound. It was used by the Tritons of ancient mythology, and by the Haitian slaves on 21 August 1791 as a call to the war of liberation in the first successful slave revolt of modern history. The first thing about the jubilee, then, is that it is heard'.
Linebaugh quote from the Bible:
'You shall send the ram's horn around. You shall send it through all your land to sound a blast, and so you shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberation in the land for all its inhabitants' (Leviticus 25:9-10)
... and from the Jubilee Hymn written in 1782 by English radical Thomas Spence:
'Hark! how the trumpet's sound Proclaim the land around The Jubilee... Now hath the oppressor ceas'd And all the world releas'd from misery!'
On the subject of radical Biblical references, good to see that in my old town of Luton, some people from the former Exodus Collective (famed 1990s drum'n'bass free party sound system) are still going strong, putting on regular parties as the Leviticus Collective.
The Turner Prize 2010 exhibition is now open at Tate Britain, with at least three of the four short-listed artists having strong musical connections.
Painter Dexter Dalwood was once the bassist in first wave Bristol punk band The Cortinas. I have a copy of their 1977 single Fascist Dictator/Television Families which I will have to get out if he wins.
The Otolith Group is a partnership between AnjalikaSagar and KodwoEshun. The latter is well known for his music writing, notably the seminal afro-futurist thoughtist classic, More Brilliant than the Sun. The former sings on some of their film soundtracks.
I don't know whether Angela de la Cruz has a secret past as a member of an anarcho-punk band or zine editor, so can't comment on any musical connections with her work.
But the final room in the exhibition is a musical work by Susan Philipsz. She was shortlisted on the basis of her piece Lowlands which involved recordings of her singing a Scottish folk song being played under three bridges across the River Clyde in Glasgow. Transposing this into the much smaller scale of a single room in a gallery is quite a challenge, but actually adds something to it.
As with many old folk songs, there are several versions of Lowland's Away in circulation. Philipsz has recorded three different versions of the song which play simultaneously from a triangle of speakers in the gallery. The effect is slightly disorienting as the three voices are singing in chorus but not always the same lyrics. Presumably in the original piece it was not possible to hear the three voices together in the same way, or to mix between them by shifting your attention or location in relation to the speakers.
The acoustics of the gallery are of course different from outdoors with the sound waves from the three speakers creating a sonic space that does feel almost tangible, as when for instance a long sustained note carves the air.
It's undeniably lovely, but I guess there will be the predictable 'is it art?' response. It is true that in some ways it is not so different from the unaccompanied warblings of an accomplished folk singer - her style is similar to the recording of the song by Anne Briggs. But there is no doubt that she has created a specific experience quite distinct from what is commonly heard and felt in a folk club or a concert setting.
The song itself is a mournful lament for a lost lover, drowned and returned as a ghost. When I am in the Tate galleries I often think of its own ghosts, of the prisoners who suffered there when the Millbank Penitentiary stood on the site and the patients in the hospital next door replaced by the later Tate extension. Hearing this song there put me in mind of an inmate in exile from the Scotland of lowlands, highlands and islands, wistfully singing to themselves in their cell 'My love is drowned in the misty lowlands...'
Here's another three versions of the song, you could even create your own version of the Turner piece by playing them all at the same time!:
Over at Datacide, Christoph has been publishing texts from Alien Underground, a great zine published in South London in 1994/95 offerin 'techno theory for juvenile delinquents'. Two issues were published before the project morphed into Datacide, still going strong albeit with a somewhat irregular publishing schedule.
Reading these made me nostalgic for that scene, encompassing Dead by Dawn in Brixton, squat parties, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, anti-CJB demonstrations and all round techno-optimism - with a combination of Deleuze & Guattari and very fast and loud beats seeming to offer a new radical line of flight from capitalism. In those days I seriously thought I would never listen to a guitar again! Well maybe it wasn't sufficient basis on its own for a 21st century radical movement, but it certainly created some interesting situations and opened up new possibilities, some of which are still being played out (in all senses of the phrase).
There's a couple of old pieces from me: a report of a London History Workshop meeting on jazz culture: 'The powers restricting “raves” in the Criminal Justice Act are not the first authoritarian response to a dance-based culture. The association of popular dancing with sex, intoxication, and black people has made it an object of moralist suspicion at various times in history. It was the jazz dance craze which swept across much of the west that was the source of both pleasure and panic in the 1920s'; and a review of the book Microphone Fiends: '"Underground” nights in expensive clubs and “underground” compilations on major record labels might be bullshit, but loads of people taking over empty buildings and creating free or very cheap space for parties on their own terms is a real alternative to the commodity culture industry. And when sound systems become the focus for a serious showdown with the cops in central London, as happened on October 9th [anti-CJB demonstration], it is clear we are no longer just talking about empty gestures of fake rebellion'.
Yup, I've been repeating myself for at least 15 years, but hey, once you've got your schtick why change it?
Cold, dark and wet in the drizzle, down by the river Thames on Friday night looking for a party. Boom boom boom - the sound of gabber in the distance, head towards it and find the sound system? No, a false trail, it's just engine noise from a passing boat.
Adjourn to the pub and try again, head through alleyways and past building sites and you're there. The cold and darkness partially dispelled by a fire on the beach, a barbecue pit dug into the sand, yes real sand in South London. You've seen pictures from the 1930s, deckchairs and sunbathing on the Thames - how many Londoners ever get down to their beaches today? But tonight some of us are, even in the absence of sun.
Old boats on the shore, relics of the almost vanished working river of docks and ferrymen. City lights across the water, banks and offices of the 'new' London. This too shall pass.
Small sound system, techno, Jill Scott, Ray Charles. Nice music but it's not really a night for dancing, more for huddling around the fire, drinking, chatting, eating - deep fried tempura freshly cooked in barbecue-heated oil. Who knew?
Full moon on one side, the river on the other, tidally creeping up the beach. It will disperse the party before the authorities will, in any case I doubt if anybody's complained. Remarkably in the early 21st century city there are still isolated spaces away from sleeping residents. Maybe for not much longer as every brownfield old industrial site is earmarked for development. Then again maybe recession will create new zones of dereliction for squatters and party goers to recycle...
A couple of weeks ago (16 September) I wandered down to the Waterloo headquarters of the London Fire Brigade, where hundreds of firefighters were staging a protest outside a meeting of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA). They were demonstrating against management proposals to impose new shift patterns - with the threat of mass sackings if they don't comply.
One thing I noticed was a new instrument of protest - the vuvuzela. The plastic trumpet beloved of South African football fans has now circulated around the world following the exposure given to it in this summer's world cup.
I saw a few firefighters blowing vuvuzelas to cheer speakers:
Seemingly back in June, firefighters staged a specific vuvuzela protest outside a similar management meeting:
So as cuts and austerity take effect, is the vuvuzela going to be the sonic weapon of choice for the strikers and demonstrators of 2010-11?
Funk the Wedding, Clissold Park (my photo):
