St Pauls Uprising, Bristol 1980

One year after the election of Margaret Thatcher as Conservative Prime Minister, the uprising in the St Paul's area of Bristol in April 1980 was the precursor to the inner city riots that swept the country in 1981. The riot was sparked by a police raid on a cafe in the context of broader conflicts about racism, black sociality and licensing laws. In the ensuing uproar police cars and a Lloyds Bank were set on fire. 134 people were arrested, 88 black and 46 white so it is misleading to describe it as a 'race riot' (as the media tended to label such events at the time) even if police racism was a major factor. Remarkably, in the most serious trial arising from the riot, the jury failed to convict 16 people charged with 'riotous assembly'. The collapse of the trial in March 1981 was followed a month later by rioting in Brixon and then the wave of summer uprisings. 

The first document is an extract from the book Uprising! The Police, the People and the Riots in Britain's Cities by Martin Kettle and Lucy Hodges (London: Pan Books, 1981): 

 'St Paul’s is an area to which black people from all over the city come for parties, shebeens (illegal drinking clubs) and to play ludo, dominoes and pinball machines at the Black and White Café, the premises where the spark for the riot was lit. They come because there is nowhere else to go. Much of the activity is perfectly lawful and, even where it is not, it involves behaviour such as illicit drinking and cannabis-smoking which does other people no harm. If the district is the focus for black social life in the city, the Black and White Café in Grosvenor Road, the ‘frontline’, is its nerve centre. When the riot broke out, it was the only black café (it,is in fact run by a black and white husband—and-wife team) which had not been forced out of business for contravening local authority health regulations or for similar reasons. But it had had its licence to sell alcohol removed. A seedy joint created out of the ground floor of a terraced house, the café was of great importance to the black community. It was the only bit of territory they had left and they were prepared to fight for the right to do what they liked there... 

 What brought hundreds of black and eventually white Bristolians up against the law on 2 April, 1980, a day when the schools closed at midday, was a police raid on the Black and White Café. This had happened many times before but serious violence had never broken out though it had in London in connexion with the Mangrove and Carib clubs). On the Second, as the occasion become known, thirty-nine policemen armed with search warrants for drugs and illegal consumption of alcohol moved in; the majority were to go into the café and the rest were to be held in reserve...

 What they could not have known was that tension was high in the Black and White that day. There was much talk about a St Paul’s youth who had been arrested on ‘sus’ in London and was appearing in court the following day. Young blacks were angry about the ‘police harassment’ and talked of going to London to protest. At about 3.30 p.m. the officers, the drugs squad in plain clothes and the rest in uniform, raided the café. They searched the place and questioned the twenty customers, searching some of them as well. Bertram Wilks, the café’s owner, was arrested and taken away in handcuffs, protesting loudly, to be charged with possessing cannabis and allowing it to be smoked on his premises. The police found large quantities of alcohol, including brandy, vodka and 132 crates of beer which they proceeded to load into a van in front of a growing crowd outside. 

The loading took a long time because there was so much liquor. As each crate was humped into the van, the crowd grew more restless, and when the van left a bottle was thrown, but there was no real violence as yet. A man complained that his trousers had been torn by a police officer in the café, an allegation which was later canvassed as the reason for the riot, and drugs squad officers made a run for it clutching their booty. This was what really seemed to annoy the crowd. ‘Let’s get the dope, let’s get the drugs squad,’ they are reported to have shouted. Missiles were thrown in earnest at a police car and at officers, and the riot had begun. 

The violence spread quickly: officers outside the café took refuge inside under a steady hail of bricks, bottles and stones from the crowd of black and white youths which had grown to about 150 (others were looking on) on the grassy area opposite. The police radioed for help and at about 5.30 p.m., two hours after the raid began, reinforcements arrived, assembling down one end of Grosvenor Road and marching down the road to rescue their besieged colleagues. This was a hazardous operation, with officers coming under a terrific barrage and being forced to take cover under crates and behind dustbins. It was the start of the really serious violence. As a black prostitute told the Sunday Times: ‘They came down the road, left right, left right, like they were on parade. They had dogs with them. When they came in front of the café, we let them have, it.’ The mistake the police may have made was to try to impose control with too few men. The marching column contained only 100 police and, on this interpretation, was a positive incitement to the angry crowd.,, Defence counsel at the riot trial months later suggested that the police had provoked the crowd by their military- style tactics. The police said, in turn, that they hoped this show of strength would disperse the crowd. It did no such thing'.

 

The second document comes from The Leveller magazine in 1980, a very radical piece from a member of its collective who later became... well I won't spoil it, read it first before you skip to the end to see who wrote it: 

'Just when it had become fashionable for world-weary, elitist, metropolitan lefties to claim that class struggle was somehow ‘old-wave’, the Bristol race riots have put it triumphantly back on the political agenda in its most classic form - urban insurrection. The riots confirmed that the front-line is still where it has always been, which is not in animal liberation groups or whatever happens to be the current O.K. cultural preoccupation. The front-line is located where people are in struggle; where working people under all types of pressure, racism, capitalism in crisis, clash with the forces of the state. The riots are probably the most politically progressive thing that will happen all year. 

But because they are difficult to assimilate into conventional political thinking they run the risk of being dismissed as almost a sideshow. The ‘New Statesman’, at a loss as to quite what to say about them, chose to say nothing at all. Paradoxically the state probably has a clearer idea of their significance than the white left establishment. Social workers, vicars, race relations officers, local councillors — in other words the whole structure of social control - wrung its collective hands and wailed ‘How could this have happened in Bristol, it had such good community relations?’ Someone ought to tell them that the race relations industry has increasingly little to do with the reality of life as it is lived by most black people and as such is not a barometer of anything, still less a cure or even a palliative. 

They could try asking black people from St. Pauls. They are scathing about ‘community leaders’ who are unknown to the community, black social workers who are primarily concerned with holding down their jobs and the local Community Relations Council. This body has allegedly been involved in deals with the police which would involve handing over lists of names of rioters in return for police promises to confine prosecutions to names on the list. In parliament politicians tried to incorporate the riots into their own sterile Westminster games. Labour MPs blamed Tory policies for the riots, ignoring not only the fact that Geoffrey Howe and Willie Whitelaw are carrying out monetarist and law-and-order policies which were initiated under Denis Healey and Merlyn Rees, but that the Labour party record on fighting racism is just as bad as the Tories.  The extra-parliamentary left has followed its traditional opportunism towards black struggles. At the march commemorating the anniversary of the death of Blair Peach the ANL [Anti Nazi League]— ever sensitive to fashion — had a black youth from Bristol on the platform. 

 The response of the state to Bristol has been more considered. It is clear that the other big city police forces are very cross indeed with the Avon and Somerset force for failing to stand and fight it out in St. Pauls. The Metropolitan police — in a novel exercise in community relations — has called in key black activists to warn them against following the Bristol example. The significant thing is that the people of St. Pauls were able to hold it for five hours against the police, not just because they technically outnumbered them but because a whole system of police control, which includes surveillance had broken down. They won’t be caught like that again. The lesson of Bristol for the police is not only the need for bigger and better SPG type units in all the big cities but the need to strengthen the whole submerged infra-structure of police control: surveillance, phone-tapping etc. 

Black people in St. Pauls dislike talk of the riots as a defeat for the police. They say the police victory is only just beginning. Over a 140 people have been arrested on charges connected with the riots — the first batch of them came up in court on May 1st. It seems there will be extensive use of conspiracy charges and the community is having great difficulty co-ordinating its defence because of the lack of grass-roots organisations and committed lawyers in Bristol. 

 The riots have had interesting reverberations within the black community as a whole. My mother is a black working class lady nearing 60. Eminently respectable and conservative-minded, she was pleased and excited by the ITN film of policemen running away from black youth and said firmly: ‘It shows they can’t push us around any more’. The riots politicised my mother and others like her and the state is well aware they posed a direct threat to its power — the more so because they were entirely spontaneous. But those on the white left who won’t learn the lessons of Bristol and insist on incorporating what happened into their own world-view may well find that the revolution happens without them'. (The Leveller, no.38, March 1980 - written by Diane Abbot, later Labour MP)

   

So what about music? There is actually a direct line between the Bristol riots and the Bristol music scene that exploded later in the 1980s and early 1990s. Quite a few people from that scene were amongst the estimated 2000 on the streets that night. More to the point the riot carved out a social space in which music flourished. According to the excellent Port Cities: 'In the early 1980s competing ‘crews’ like The Wild Bunch (who later became Massive Attack), 2Bad, City Rockers, UD4 (Roni Size’s brother) and FBI Crew were battling it out on home-built speaker systems, modelled after those in Jamaica in the Caribbean. The Wild Bunch became legendary for their much-attended parties at which their music sets combined punk, reggae and Rhythm and Blues. They played at local events, such as St Pauls Carnival and in disused or empty buildings in or close to the St. Pauls area. After the St. Pauls riots in 1980, the police avoided the area, which made such gigs possible'. Clifton Mighty, brother of Ray Mighty of 'Smith and Mighty' fame, was one of those acquitted in the riot trial (though he was still facing hassle from the police twenty years later).

 

Eadweard Muybridge

Earlier this year I went to the Eadweard Muybridge photography exhibition at Tate Britain. Of particular interest to me are his studies of dance. 'Woman Dancing (Fancy)' is from his 1887 Animal Locomotion series. An early photographic documentation of the dancing body, it features Kate Larrigan (a 'Danseuse from New York' as he described her). For an animated sequence of these photographs, see here.

The Edweard Muybridge is on at Tate Britain in London until January 11 2011.

Night is not an object

"When [...] the world of clear and articulate objects is abolished, our perceptual being, cut off from its world, evolves a spatiality without things. This is what happens in the night. Night is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses, stifling my recollections and almost destroying my personal identity. I am no longer withdrawn into my perceptual look-out from which I watch the outlines of objects moving by at a distance. Night has no outlines; it is itself in contact with me and its unity is the mystical union of the mana. Even shouts or a distant light people it only vaguely, and then it comes to life in its entirety; it is pure depth without foreground or background, without surface and without any distance separating it from me." (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945)

Isn't this quality of night part of what makes people interact differently after dark? The light reinforces our sense of separate identity, watching the world from our personal lighthouse, the dark begins to dissolve it.

Photo by Anthony Rahayel at Picable, taken at BO18 club in Beirut. Quote sourced from Documents.

Some more DayX3 Music Notes

I know it seems trivial to focus on the music played in the recent riotous demonstrations in London and elsewhere against education cuts, student fee rises, and the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance for low income 16 to 18 year olds. Still plenty of other people are commenting on every other aspect of it, and for me what protest sounds like in 2010 is as important as what it looks like.

So having already written on some of the sounds on the December 9th demonstration and the Battle of Millbank, here's some more notes on the subject.

- Dan Hancox has put together a 2010 Riot Playlist of tracks he heard being played in and around Parliament Square on December 9th. Tinie Tempah, Rihanna, Princess Nyah and Sean Paul all feature, while in the comments others add Rage Against the Machine (Killing in the Name of) and Polynomial-C by Aphex Twin. Dummy mag has turned this into a Spotify playlist.

- I've noted previously that the Star Wars 'Imperial March' theme, also known as the Darth Vader tune has cropped up several times in the current movement. I've been down to the Goldsmiths occupation a couple of times in New Cross and couldn't help but notice that some of the people involved had put together a short film using guess which tune?



- Another track I heard being played at the demo on Thursday was Liar Liar by Captain Ska. It was being played from the fairly dismal National Union of Students bus on the embankment (footage here). It is an explicitly anti-cuts anthem, is this what Dan Hancox had in mind in his recent call to arms for musicians to make some noise about the cuts?:

Strictly Scum Dancing Stopped by Police

Last weekend SkumTek's Strictly Scum Dancing free party was stopped by police on an industrial estate in Enfield. The press release issued by the police stated : "At 2300 on Saturday we attended a premises on a trading estate regarding a possible illegal rave being planned. Three people were arrested and a sound system was taken. Subsequently about 800 people attended and we dispersed the crowd." (BBC News, 5 December 2010)

But other accounts suggest it was more chaotic than this implies. According to the Enfield Independent:

Riot police clash with Enfield warehouse ravers (Monday 6th December 2010)

'Police officers were pelted by fired-up ravers furious their illegal warehouse rave was shut down prematurely. Officers visited the abandoned warehouse on an Enfield industrial site, in Lincoln Road, at 11.30pm on Saturday night after a tip off that hundreds of young people were gearing up to party.

It is believed the rave was put together by a rave group called Scumtek which organises guerilla dance events dubbed Strictly Scum Dancing, spread by word of mouth and on the internet. One reveller broadcasted the event on the web, stating: "London ravers! Strictly Scum Dancing from Scumtek is happening now in Lincoln Road, Enfield...if the Old Bill says it's off, it's not".

Up to 300 turned up and more than 800 people were said to have been turned away before even getting to their destination. As officers tried to move the party-goers along, a small group started throwing bottles and rocks at the police near Great Cambridge Road. Enfield police were inundated with calls from frightened residents from Percival Road as small groups of the ravers sat on cars, setting off alarms and drinking alcohol, leaving behind their cans and beer bottles.

Neighbours who live near the scene said it all started to "turn nasty" around 2am when police arrived in riot gear. They claimed 100 young people were penned in by officers, in Main Avenue, and were charged by officers in a bid to force them along. Many of them fled into a nearby housing estate and down side roads with small groups lingering in the area until 4am. A total of 12 people were arrested for public disorder, three people were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and a sound system was seized'.

Was the police operation pay back for the recent high profile Holborn Halloween party, which the police were criticised for failing to stop? Both were organised by SkumTek, and in the days leading up to the Enfield party, police raided the homes of people they believed to be involved, seizing computers, phones and other equipment. On this occasion, the police seemed to have got the upper hand, although many people made it on to another squat party that night in Hackney Wick (Smeed Road) afterwards.

Lots of discussion about all this at Party Vibe and Facebook. Much of it the usual armchair moaning - 'they shouldn't have organised a party in Central London last time'/'they shouldn't have organised a party so far out of Central London'; 'They shouldn't have put it on Facebook'/'Why can't I find out what's going on?'; 'You kids should have been there when the parties were much better in 2000/1995/1988/1066' etc. etc. Putting on parties like this is a risky business, nobody can guarantee that it will always work out and maybe some of the moaners should try putting one on themselves.

On the other hand it is important to acknowledge that there are some real problems that the scene has to deal with - mostly not the fault of party organisers - such as people being mugged at parties and other stupid behaviour. Somebody reported that on the bus back from the Enfield party they narrowly missed being injured by a brick coming through the window thrown by another disgruntled would be party goer. Still if the Enfield party had been allowed to go ahead, maybe there wouldn't have been any trouble.

Here's some footage of last Saturday night, with the crowd beginning to face off to police behind makeshift barricades. Funny how the Holborn events were front page news but something like this happening just a few miles north is more or less ignored by the media:

Panic on the Streets of London

Not going to attempt to comment on today's epic events in London, with the Government voting to increase student fees amidst riotous scenes, with the Treasury, Supreme Court, Oxford Street shops and Prince Charles's car all coming under attack. Many people injured by riot police charging in with horses and batons.

For now just going to post a few photos and report what I saw. At lunchtime crowds came down the Strand and into Trafalgar Square then on to Parliament Square.

As this sound system came into Trafalgar Square it was playing Damian Marley's Welcome to Jamrock and Tribe called Quest 's 'Can I kick it?'. People were bouncing up and down. Then I heard it playing Benga and Coki's Night.

Interestingly the BBC's Paul Mason has written today of the 'Dubstep rebellion':

'The man in charge of the sound system was from an eco-farm, he told me, and had been trying to play "politically right on reggae"; however a crowd in which the oldest person was maybe seventeen took over the crucial jack plug, inserted it into aBlackberry, (iPhones are out for this demographic) and pumped out the dubstep.

Young men, mainly black, grabbed each other around the head and formed a surging dance to the digital beat lit, as the light failed, by the distinctly analog light of a bench they had set on fire. Any idea that you are dealing with Lacan-reading hipsters from Spitalfields on this demo is mistaken.

While a good half of the march was undergraduates from the most militant college occupations - UCL, SOAS, Leeds, Sussex - the really stunning phenomenon, politically, was the presence of youth: bainlieue-style youth from Croydon, Peckham, the council estates of Islington' .

(though while there was certainly dubstep being played, as Dan Hancox notes on Twitter, the sounds of grime, rap and bashment were also prominent: 'they banned grime from the clubs, now THERE ARE 300 KIDS RAVING TO POW IN PARLIAMENT SQUARE' (Lethal Bizzle's Pow).

I also heard another sound system entering Trafalgar Square playing John Lennon's Working Class Hero!

There was the usual percussion...

... and the not so usual bagpipes:

Later in the evening on the Victoria Embankment there was what seemed to me to be an attempt to use music to pacify the crowd with a National Union of Students bus playing music and then telling people to disperse. Bizarrely they had hired private stewards (SFM) who were blocking the road to stop demonstrators heading down to the House of Commons where a line of riot police were guarding the entrance to Parliament Square near to Westminster Bridge. People pushed past the stewards who got very aggressive - two of them shoved me as I walked through afterwards.

A couple of hundred then formed up at the police line, including this trumpet/guitar duo who were playing 'A message to you Rudi'.

I went round to Trafalgar Square having heard that there was an occupation going on at the National Gallery. Then around half past seven a crowd surged across Trafalgar Square and there was an attempt to set alight to the big Christmas Tree - no doubt inspired by the burning of the tree in Athens during the December 2008 riots.

The crowd of several hundred started going up Charing Cross Road and then on to Oxford Street. The police had totally lost control, in fact they were nowhere to be seen with the exception of a couple trying to keep up. People were blocking the road with rubbish bins etc. and on Oxford St there was lots of chanting outside the shops targeted recently in the UK Uncut campaign - Vodafone and Topshop closed their doors. But I didn't see any windows smashed. I doubled back down Oxford Street where another crowd had emerged by Oxford Circus, with police pouring out of vans. This time the main Topshop window on Oxford Street had been broken, and 'pay your tax' painted on it.

Although by now police had formed across the road, they didn't seem to know what to do. Oxford Street on a Thursday night before Christmas is full of shoppers and tourists and it wasn't easy to tell who was standing around excitedly watching and taking photos and who was a protester. Every so often the police would surge forward and shoppers, tourists and protesters would scatter, then another stand off started.

Topshop in trouble

More on Occupations and Dance Offs

In the last month a sustained movement against austerity has emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Since the student demonstration/riot in London on November 10th there have daily protests, meetings and occupations in towns and cities all over the UK. I have found myself wandering down Whitehall surrounded by hundreds of school students on an unofficial demonstration, seen students training for direct action in the occupied library of my local university (Goldsmiths) and swapped ideas with people from Brazil, Italy and Greece in a Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination workshop at the Arts Against Cuts weekend. I have been at a public meeting of 500 people cheering a 15 year old talking about organising a walk out from his secondary school.

What has been impressive is the innovation and the rapid circulation of struggles. A group of school students from Camden School for Girls visited the occupation at University College London - today 100 young women have occupied Camden School for Girls. As far as I know this is the first occupation of a school in London for more than 30 years! (anyone know differently let me know).

A 1977 Occupation

The most recent school occupation I have come across was from 1977: ''Sixth formers at Wanstead High School, east London, occupied their common room and front hall yesterday in protest against education cuts. 'We have a lot of support in other schools and our teachers are sympathetic' Richard Boyes, aged 17, a reprsentative at the school of the National Union of School Students, said". The occupation followed a 12 day occupation at the University of Essex "against Government increases in tuition fees" (Times, March 19 1977).

Sheffield Occupation dance off

Reported previously on the occupation dance offs in Oxford and UCL. Here's another one from the occupation at Sheffield University:



Next chapter tomorrow, with the call to Shut Down London on the day Parliament votes on student fees.

Classic Party Scenes (6): Warriors, 1979

When Walter Hill's film The Warriors was released in 1979, there were fears that it would lead to an explosion of gang related violence. Watching it today the violence seems mild and indeed it seems incredibly camp, as leather vest-clad street gang the Warriors make their way back home to Coney Island fighting off other equally implausibly-dressed New York gangs along the way.

Musically my favourite scenes are those featuring the radio DJ who broadcasts a coded commentary on the gang battles with lines like 'All right now for all you boppers out there in the big city, all you street people with an ear for the action' before playing Nowhere to Run as a threat to the Warriors.

Then there's the scene where the Warriors are enticed into the club house of The Lizzies, an all-women gang who promise 'Let's party a little, get something going'. You don't need a PhD in queer studies to work out that Lizzies suggests 'Lezzies', with women dancing together to "Love Is A Fire" by Genya Ravan. Of course the welcome is a trap and as the women pull out their weapons a hapless warrior shouts 'The chicks are packed'. The film is loosely based on an ancient Greek story, so The Lizzies also stand for the Sirens.

Update: As mentioned in the comments, a sample from the film features in the mid-1990s house track Can You Dig It by Mark the 909 King (sample kicks in at about four minutes):

The Can You Dig It sample comes from a speech by gangleader Cyrus early in the film, where he calls for the gangs of New York to unite and take over the city:

This speech is also sampled in Can U Dig It? by Pop Will Eat Itself

Fight the Imperial Forces

So many student protests in the UK in the past couple of weeks that I can't keep up, let alone follow what's happening in Italy and elsewhere. Which is a good sign I think.

On Tuesday things were moving so fast that when I turned up at London's Trafalgar Square the whole demonstration had moved on unexpectedly through the snowy streets of the West End. On the previous Wednesday in Trafalgar Square there was an amazingly lively crowd, with lots of school students and others climbing all over Nelson's Column. We headed off down Whitehall and within half an hour most of the crowd were surrounded by police where many remained 'kettled' until late in the evening. But not deterred, less than a week later a few thousand were braving the freezing cold to demonstrate again. Interesting times.

Plenty of time to ponder this significance of this later on, for now just a few more notes on the musical aspects. There were a couple of small 12v sound systems on the 24th November London demo including this one, which was playing hip hop when I saw it - to be precise Modern Day Slavery by Joell Ortiz/Immortal Technique.


Lots of other music and dancing going on. Here's students dancing during the occupation of University College London (UCL):



And here's students dancing in the occupied Radcliffe Camera Library at Oxford University:

But what is the tune of the of the movement so far? Unexpectedly one contender is from the soundtrack of a film made in 1980. On this week's protests GdnEdinburgh noted: 'Student protesters are singing the Darth Vader tune as police move in to guard the door at the Scottish Parliament'. Meanwhile on the same day in London, Tanya Gold reported: 'We gather at Trafalgar Square at 12 and run. The protesters say they do not want to be kettled like last week in Whitehall. And so the students, a block of teenagers with a sound system that plays the Imperial March from Star Wars, run under Admiralty Arch and into the Mall, then past the Treasury and into Parliament Square'. Two weeks previously on the first big student demonstration in London, Luke Young from Swansea posted on Twitter 'Students on this bus hummed the Darth Vader imperial march as I walked past earlier. They will feel the force later' .

The Imperial March, aka the Darth Vader theme, was composed by John Williams and first featured in the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Fights Back. Coincidently Irvin Kershner - the director of the film - died this week.

The ultimately successful fight of the Jedi against the Empire is now an established myth for rebels everywhere. The Fight the Imperial Forces image below comes from Alec Empire's 1994 album Generation Star Wars.

World AIDS Day: Piccadilly Palare 1991

Today is World AIDS Day, a day for everyone to reflect on the ongoing global health disaster that is HIV/AIDS. For me personally, a time to remember my time in the 'AIDS Wars' as a HIV worker and sometime activist in the early 1990s, when prejudice was at its height and medical treatments were in their early stages. A time too to remember those who haven't made it through, like 'Jane', one of the founders of Positively Women who I met at a World AIDS Day event I helped organise and died not long after.

On World AIDS Day 1991 (or to be precise, the Saturday before - November 30th), I took part in a demonstration at Piccadilly Circus. It was quite small - probably only about 100 people - but fairly lively, featuring the famous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence radical drag nuns. People sat down in the road and chanted, among other things, 'we're here, we're queer, we're not going shopping' before the police piled in.

The following report by Nicola Field was published in the magazine Mainliners (for drug users with HIV), Issue 18, January 1992:

'On November 30th I went along to a peaceful demonstration in central London marking this year’s World AIDS Day. Organised by the London AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), the London Bisexual Women’s Group and the National Union of Students, the demo aimed to draw attention to the scandalous lack of information surrounding treatment, healthcare and safer sex/ drug use in this country. The action was interrupted by a violent and brutal attack by the police - more of this later...

Anyway, it was good to gather together in Piccadilly, around the statue of Eros. the Greek god of love, and inject a bit of sanity and reality into the chaos of Christmas consumerism. Quite a few passers-by hung around to read our leaflets. Wildly warpainted Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from Britain and the US looked brilliant and kept everyone buoyant as a number of people spoke to the crowd about the need to fight back against ignorance, hatred, censorship and intolerance. What stuck in my mind was an American activist forcefully reminding us that we have to take drastic direct action, targeting the institutions which control our access to information and new treatments. Alison Thomas of the London Bisexual Women’s Group told how the media went to Moral Town after the death of Freddie Mercury: as you probably know, Freddie was accused of being a ‘vigorous bisexual’ (!), of living a depraved lifestyle - because he loved men and blamed for his own illness and death. She demanded that the government ensures we are given proper information about safer sex so that we can make our own choices. The number and gender of our partners is irrelevant when it comes to HIV prevention, so long as we take care not to exchange blood, semen and vaginal fluids.

After the speeches the crowd decided we needed to make a bit more impact and so we started an impromptu march down Haymarket, determined to make as much noise as possible about the fact that we and our friends and lovers are being sentenced to death by poor healthcare and education. I was about to plunge into the centre of the crowd, which had stopped the traffic by sitting in the road, when I was suddenly shoved aside by a flying policeman. Reeling against the railings, I watched in amazement as uniformed bully-boys charged in droves, their faces contorted by fear and hate, down to where the protestors chanted ‘People with AIDS under attack -fight back!” Motor vehicles, filled no doubt with good citizens devoting themselves to the sacred ritual of shopping, beeped and shuffled forward. One bus drove inexorably into the crowd, acting as a convenient battering-ram for the police. People were snatching their loved ones out of the way. Like a drowning woman I saw my life flash before me and I recalled my part in supporting transport workers’ actions against low pay and poor safety standards. Where is that solidarity now? Is AIDS not a working class issue? Six police vans had by now screeched on to the scene at breakneck speed.

Now we all knew that the police were out to break up the demo without so much as a moment’s dialogue. Things moved very fast. Officers began shoving marchers on to the pavement. Many people were grabbed and wrenched from their friends and thrown violently into the back of the vans. A woman came towards me crying. She had just watched as a man was handcuffed from behind, thrown face down on to the road screaming and his head repeatedly smashed on to the tarmac. I and others stood helplessly and horrified by the side of the road, terrified to move as officers barged about arresting people brutally and sadistically. One man was arrested for a1legedly swearing at a vanload of police. As he was thrown like a sack of potatoes into the van, five or six policemen hurled themselves on top of him. We stood crying out as the door slammed shut and the van sped away. I myself was too scared to take photographs, fearing violence. I wish I had been brave enough; I wish we as a community knew how to fight back.

Twelve protestors were arrested, others assaulted, many more were hurt and bruised and everyone was terrorised. The attack was nothing more than a legal exercise in bashing the ‘queers’. At a time when murders of lesbians and gay men are reaching persecution proportions, it makes you wonder whether violence against lesbians and gays, Black people, drug users and people with HIV and AIDS will ever be treated seriously as crime. It’s particularly ironic that this event took place whilst ‘leaders’ of the lesbian and gay communities are trying to meet with the Metropolitan Police to appeal to them to protect us.

But the police arrest us for showing love and affection in public, for standing up for our rights, for trying to show people what we are suffering, and for trying to warn the public about the dangers of HIV infection. They shut us up, no questions asked. So when I read that we should explain to the police what we are going through, and ask for their help, I say: Who’s fucking listening?'

See also World AIDS Day: we salute the disco dead (1) and World AIDS Day: we salute the disco dead (2).

(top two images from 1991 flyer; bottom two from Mainliners January 1992 - click on images to enlarge)

Reclaim the Night, London 2010

This site celebrates the pleasures of the night, the possibilities of nocturnal encounters on the dancefloor, the sense of liberation in the hours not ruled by work. But of course music/dance scenes are not utopias, specifically they are not always places where women can leave behind harrassment, rape and violence - a point highlighted by the gang rape of a 16 year old at a rave in Canada in September and the rapes at Latitude Festival in England in July.

In her remarkable piece The Night and Danger, orginally written as a speech for a Take Back the Night march, Andrea Dworkin wrote:

'We women are especially supposed to be afraid of the night. The night promises harm to women. For a woman to walk on the street at night is not only to risk abuse, but also--according to the values of male domination--to ask for it. The woman who transgresses the boundaries of night is an outlaw who breaks an elementary rule of civilized behavior: a decent woman does not go out- certainly not alone, certainly not only with other women--at night. A woman out in the night, not on a leash, is thought to be a slut or an uppity bitch who does not know her place. The policemen of the night - rapists and other prowling men -have the right to enforce the laws of the night: to stalk the female and to punish her. We have all been chased, and many of us have been caught... We must use our collective strength and passion and endurance to take back this night and every night so that life will be worth living and so that human dignity will be a reality'

Since the mid-1970s, women in different parts of the world have staged Reclaim the Night/Take Back the Night demonstrations against violence against women - not simply protests but an assertion of the right to be safely on the streets after dark. London Feminist Network have been organising larger and larger annual marches since 2004, and in in central London last Saturday night around 2000 women took part in the Reclaim the Night march. There's a report at Women's Views on News.

1995: Police close down Bank Holiday Raves

Going to be doing some posts about the anti-rave Criminal Justice Act and the 1990s free party scene. 15 years ago the Act had become law and people were waiting to see how it would pan out. As we now know, with years of partying since, the CJA did not manage to stop free parties let alone shut down dance music, but it certainly made things harder. The following article was published in Squall, a magazine from the time that covered squatting, festivals etc.

'Police Shut-Down Free Parties (Squall, Summer 1995)

Police shut down two Bank Holiday raves at the beginning of May, without resorting to the Criminal Justice Act.

Attracting more than 3,000 people over the VE day Bank Holiday weekend, one of the raves featured sound systems Virus, Vox Populai, Jiba, Oops and Cheeba City. United Systems (US) organised the party at a disused RAF base near Woodbridge in Suffolk. Jim, a spokesperson from US, was at the event when police arrived: “I heard one of the poiice officers say, ‘We’re sorry we’ve got to do this but we’ve got orders from above’. The previous night they’d come on site to ask us to turn the noise down and we adhered to that and struck a deal where they were going to leave us alone and we agreed we’d pack up Monday evening. We were miles from anywhere and weren’t in anyone’s way at all. But at two ‘o clock on Monday afternoon they arrived on site to shut us down.”

The police confiscated tens of thousands of pounds worth of equipment from all the sound systems present including Cheeba City’s 6K rig and their vehicles. However, as the CJA can only be used at night, the officers on site had to satisfy themselves with Public Order legislation to enforce the shutdown. Arguments between officers and several of the organisers ensued and four arrests were made.

US contacted Peter Silver, the solicitor who successfully defended the 23 people arrested at Castlemorton Common in 1992. Within two weeks all confiscated equipment had been returned

An event happening near Bangor the same weekend, featuring sound systems Transient and Babel, suffered exactly the same fate. Again in the middle of nowhere, the event was attended by up to 1,000 people over the weekend. Just after midday on Monday officers arrived to close the party down. Again organisers allege that the pollee said they were happy for the event to go ahead but they’d had orders from above. No arrests were made at the Bangor gig and although sound equipment was confiscated it was returned shortly afterwards.

A growing number of people on the free-party scene do not view these events as coincidental. There is a belief that, even where no public nuisance has occurred, local police officers are coming under increased pressure from the Home Office to eradicate unauthorised events'.

Funk the Royal Wedding, 1981

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

See also:

Northern Carnival Against Racism 1981 - The Specials and More

Rock Against Racism documents 1979

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Blinded by the Light - memories of racism and job cuts in 1980s Luton (including the Luton Youth Movement)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

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'.

The Battle of Millbank

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:



* Advice for those at risk of being arrested at the November 10th Defence Campaign

Updated 16 November:

* 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.

Dancing at the country club - F.Scott Fitzgerald

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)

Beyond the Implode/Uncarved Anarcho-punk Podcast

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.