The murky story of American “psychological operations” in the Vietnam war features many strange episodes. As told in ‘If Then: How One Data Company Invented the Future’ by Jill Lepore ((2020) this included the largely unsuccessful efforts of a private company contractor, The Simulmatics Corporation.
Set up in 1959, the company pioneered the use of computers for market research and predictive modelling. As early as 1960 they had begun developing what they termed the People Machine ‘a computer program designed to predict and manipulate human behavior, all sorts of human behavior, from buying a dishwasher to countering an insurgency to casting a vote’.
At their suggestion the Pentagon established the Hamlet Evaluation System in 1966, a massive bank of computerized data [...] compiled, updated, and analyzed, day by day, on 12,500 strategic hamlets in forty-four provinces’ in Vietnam, supported by more than 300 staff.
Simulmatics Saigon uniform patch
In Vietnam one of Simulmatics' operatives was Joseph Hoc, a locally born Catholic priest. His plans included ‘something called the Sorcerers Project, he explained, because "Vietnamese villagers believe in prophecy and the power of holy men to foretell the future." For this project he intended to circulate false magic, the way another sort of psychological warrior might circulate, for instance, fake news. Alas, "the sorcerers did not say what they were supposed to say."
Linked to this, his 'Prophesy Project' saw thousands of booklets being distributed with a prophesy that "the Viet Cong will be defeated in 1969". Unfortunately for him, very few believed it.
Another initiative, the Folksinger Project, 'involved composing new folk songs intended to "inject dislike and hatred of the V[iet] C[ong]." But North Vietnamese attacks immobilized all of Ho's folksingers'.
As uprisings spread through the United States in 1967 the company turned its efforts to riot research and prediction, using computers and questionnaires. As Lepore observes 'Simulmatics' work on riot prediction in American cities bore an eerie similarity to McNamara's giant computer program, the Hamlet Evaluation Study, which, after all, aimed to predict insurgency. In the United States, Simulmatics attempted to determine the "Mood and Atmosphere Within Riot Community" and to assign it a number ("1-Calm restrained; 2-Tense; 3-Angry; 4-Fearful,nervous; 5-Apathetic; 6-Euphoric, Carnival; 7-Friendly, good-willed; 8-Chaotic; 9-Orderly; 10-Other")'
The company was targeted by anti-Vietnam war protesters including Students for a Democratic Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which had links to the company. Simulmatics was declared bankrupt in 1970. Lepore suggests that one reason was that it’s ideas were ahead of what the technology could actually deliver in the 1960s but that its vision has subsequently been realised by corporations like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Cambridge Analytica.
'9 August 1980. Ninth anniversary of internment, and the Au Pairs are playing a free gig for the kids in West Belfast. Rock The Block - it's in support of the women in Armagh and the men on the blanket in H-Block. The band deliver a tight set, mostly songs written by singer Woods about sexual politics, roles and relationships. The audience are stunned by Lesley; they've never seen anyone like her.' (Kate Webb, in The Book of the Year, Ink Links, 1980)
The Au Pairs were one of the most interesting of UK post-punk bands, exploring subject matter rarely if ever explicitly addressed in music from the sexual politics of relationships to the abuse of Irish women prisoners (the subject of their song Armagh). Their politics was a thread through everything they did, from their guitar playing to their choice of benefit gigs. They played for Rock Against Racism (indeed were started out by people involved in Birmingham RAR), Rock Against Sexism and various other causes.
This interview is from the radical left magazine 'The Leveller' (August 7-20 1981). True to style it took place at a No Nukes Music gig the band were playing at Lambeth Town Hall in Brixton (just round the corner from The Leveller's office at 52 Acre Lane SW2).
(click image to enlarge)
Extracts from interview:
'I don't think you can have any political awareness, though, without being aware of the way women are exploited in this society; it's a patriarchal society and women are oppressed. People are so paranoid about being told that, but it just happens to be a fact, not a point of view, a fact, and an inevitable result of the way society is organised right down to the basics. Capitalist society relies on the family, and women exist for the family and for producing children. In our society anybody who's involved in production gets exploited... I just read that today! Brecht's The Mother. It's really good. I get fed up always having to apologise or to defend the argument that women are oppressed. It is a fucking fact; not my point of view, or the left's point of view. I don't know what the solution is. I don't see a solution. But I could say that if every woman in the world decided to stop fucking with men and just became separatist then you'd be forcing the issue!'
'it's not about women making it in a man's world - like Cosmopolitan is always saying that in order to be a liberated woman, to be emancipated, you've got to climb the ladder to the top. It's not about men who've set standards for success that women must follow; it's not about women having to achieve those standards in order to be thought of as successful in our society. Women don't need to be the boss of a big firm; that's not the requirement for their liberation that's just following the traditions that men have established. It's more important that women get together - they're constantly set against each other, made to feel very threatened by other women. I don't mean, you know - all us wonderful sisters, unite and fight. But we have to find our own standards.
It really upsets me when I see a women's band who get up and play a gig, and I see them playing their guitars in a way well, you know how to play a guitar; that's all been set down by men. Who's to say that to play a guitar, though, you've got to do it like Jeff Beck? And they might get self-conscious about male macho rock guitar styles, so they play really nice twiddley bits, or nice bits of lead around minor chords which is fair enough, but it just upsets me in a way because I just think we've got to find other ways; women have to start developing new styles. I only know from my own experience that I can't play anything like that on guitar; I don't know how to play a lead break, but as far as I'm concerned what I play on my guitar is good, and who's to say I'm not a good guitar player... I think I'm fucking brilliant!'
More Au Pairs in the Leveller
The band seem to have had a strong association with the Leveller, an independent socialist magazine with a strong feminist content. They played a benefit for the magazine at Lambeth Town Hall in July 1982.
From 'The Leveller', 9 July 1982
The following review from The Leveller (5 March 1982) takes an Au Pairs gig at North London Poly as a launchpad for some musings on 'what would a feminist musical form sound like?' (note also review of The Marine Girls album).
(I've been reading back through lots of old copies of The Leveller in the 56a Infoshop archive, a great insight into late 1970s/early 1980s radical left, some of it fantastic, some of it not so good. This article and some others strike a slightly odd tone seen from my 2020s perspective with male writers judging women musicians on how feminist they are)
I used to have t-shirt with this on!
I was lucky to see the band a couple of times, once at Kent University in 1981 and at the legendary Beat the Blues festival at London's Alexandra Palace in 1980. The latter saw some of the best post-punk bands (Slits, Pop Group, Raincoats, Au Pairs, Essential Logic plus punk poet John Cooper Clarke) play to mark the 50th anniversary of the Communist Party's Morning Star newspaper. I found this picture of the band playing there on flickr from Alan Denney):
Milton Keynes Gallery has been hosting an exhibition on the famous MK club The Sanctuary (it closes on 23 January 2022).
'How did an unsuspecting Milton Keynes warehouse become one of the UK’s largest and most beloved rave venues? Sanctuary: The Unlikely Home of British Ravewill tell the story of the infamous all-night club that operated in the city from 1991-2004, drawing close to an estimated million ravers from across the country.
The exhibition, an archive project that will display original ephemera, flyers, merchandise, artefacts, footage and more, is curated by Emma Hope Allwood, a writer and former Dazed editor who grew up around Milton Keynes. “It wasn’t until I became a journalist and came across the flyer for Dreamscape 1 that I learned of The Sanctuary,” she says. “For me, this project is about doing justice to the youth culture history of MK – a place which is too often unfairly maligned as a cultural void.”
'1991. A man walks into Milton Keynes Council's offices. His name is Murray Beetson, and he wants to put on a rave. The proposed venue? An empty warehouse in Denbigh North, little more than a colossal silver shell. A licence is granted, and one night in December, thousands show up for an event that goes down in history: Dreamscape 1.
Officially opening as The Sanctuary in 1992, the club marks a new chapter in the story of British rave. The hedonistic freedom of the late 1980s acid house movement - where fields and abandoned buildings were transformed into all-night venues - has become the target of Conservative politicians and scaremongering media.
The party isn't over, it just has to adapt: emerging from the underground into licensed, legal venues.The Sanctuary is one of them. Over the following decade, hundreds of thousands make the pilgrimage there, cars of excited ravers snaking down motorways to dance until dawn to jungle, hardcore, and drum & bass in one of Britain's biggest clubs' (from exhibition).
The exhibition includes flyers for various events held there including Dreamscape and Helter Skelter, as well as some for earlier house/techno nights not far away at Rayzels in Bletchley.
Press headlines tell of the usual troubles of drug casualties, dealers and some more comic moments like the one about the 'Missing Raver' found asleep in a field.
There are also memories left by visitors
'people lying on the floor in white t-shirts having conversations and standing up filthy!'
... and an original blow horn!
The club closed in 2004 and was demolished to make way for an Ikea store. In 2008 Sanctuary veterans staged a flashmob reunion in the aisles of Ikea.
Long ago and far away (well mid 1980s Luton) there was a great punk band called Karma Sutra. I hung out with them and made a few squiggly noises on my wasp synth on one of their 1985 demo tapes. Now 35 years later said demo tape and others from that time have appeared on vinyl as an album 'Be Cruel With Your Past And All Who Seek To Keep You There' put out by Sealed Records (listen/buy it here). It comes with a great booklet with interviews and flyers. For me Karma Sutra were a portal into anarcho-punk and its associated activism, perhaps in particular hunt sabbing as I explain in the following
I’d had the Crass records, the Conflict badges, and a mohican, I’d been on a Stop the City demo too but my real initiation into the world of ‘anarcho punk activism’ didn’t come until September 1st 1984 when I went to a Hunt Saboteurs benefit gig at Luton library theatre arranged by local band Karma Sutra. Headliners Antisect from Northampton were one of the more metal tinged punk outfits, with heavy guitar riffs and gruff vocals growling “why must I die?” (The “I” in question being a laboratory animal of course).
If the extremism of
noise and content was impressive it wasn’t unexpected. What really amazed me
was what was going on off the stage. I’d been to loads of gigs where I’d steamed
in with my mates, bought some drinks, watched the bands, and left with the only
interaction with others being some slam dancing at the front. Here there were
people talking, and busy bookstalls from the Hunt Saboteurs and from Housman’s,
the London radical bookshop, with a selection of anarchist papers and other
publications (I later found out that several people from the Luton scene were
working the odd shift there, and eventually I did the same myself).
Hunt Sabs benefit at Luton Library Theatre September 1984, flyer advertising Antisect, Karma Sutra, Ring and Danbert Nobacon. Not sure if this was the actual line up on the night - in my diary I noted seeing Antisect, Karma Sutra, The Sears (from Walsall) and The Remnants (Luton punk band). The night ended up with somebody being stabbed in the hand, though not seriously injured, I think linked to skinhead trouble - earlier a skinhead had jumped on stage and given a nazi salute. As discussed below, violence from far right skinheads was an ongoing threat at this time
I chatted with someone
about hunt sabbing and within a week I was standing in a field in
Northamptonshire at 8 am in the morning at the beginning of the fox cub hunting
season. It was the start of a couple of years of intense activity, with
countless hours spent in the back of a white van hurtling between punk gigs,
hunts, demonstrations and protests. I'd been politically involved in various left wing movements before but this was a different intensity of activism.
Of course these were
tumultuous times across the world – the days of Thatcher vs. the miners, of
Reagan and the new Cold War, of uprisings against Apartheid in South Africa.
And in towns and cities across the UK, some of the most determined opposition
to the state of the world came from groups of young, invariably black-clad
punks. This article is a snapshot of one of those scenes, in Luton, but similar
stories could be told about many other places.
Punk in Luton
Thirty miles north of
London, Luton in the mid-1980s was still an industrial town dominated by the
Vauxhall car factory, as it was to remain until General Motors stopped making
cars there in 2002. There had been a punk scene in the area since the early
days: The Damned played one of their first gigs at Luton’s Royal Hotel in 1976
and the Sex Pistols played at the Queensway Hall in neighbouring Dunstable in
the same year. Luton’s first punk band, The Jets, featured on the famous Live
at the Roxy album in ’77.
The best known punk band
to come from Luton was UK Decay, formed in 1979. The band had some association
with Crass - in December 1979 they played with Crass and Poison Girls at a gig
in a tin Nissan hut at Marsh Farm in Luton, and their final record – the ‘Rising
from the Dread’ EP - was released on Crass’s Corpus Christi label in 1982. But while
UK Decay released the great anti-war track ‘For my country’, they weren’t
really part of that anarcho-punk protest scene as such. Along with
Northampton’s Bauhaus they were developing a proto-goth aesthetic, referencing
horror themes and plundering Edgar Allen Poe and Herman
Hesse for inspiration. Indeed the reference to them as ‘the face of punk
gothique’ by Steve Keaton in Sounds (February 1981) is credited as being one of
the originators of the term ‘goth’ for this emerging sound.
UK
Decay were influential stalwarts of the indie charts, and among other things
supported The Dead Kennedys on their 1980 UK tour. For a while they were
involved in a short lived punk/new wave record shop in Luton town centre,
Matrix, which closed down shortly after a party where the Kennedys and other
party goers ran amok in the Arndale Centre car park.
By
1984 UK Decay had split up, giving rise to a couple of splinter bands (Furyo
and In Excelsis) and the post-punk scene too had begun to fragment. The town’s
sub-cultural outcasts tended to congregate at one pub in particular - The
Blockers Arms in High Town Road (of which more here). Among the punky types there
were different factions, albeit overlapping and coexisting peacefully – some
slightly older first generation punks, early goths, what would later be called
indie kids, and what might be termed ‘anarcho-punks’.
Luton Marsh House Free Festival, September 1984 with Newtown Neurotics, Attila the Stockbroker, Nick the Poet, Karma Sutra, Black Mass (St Albans anarcho punk band) and Snatch - a memorable day, it poured with rain towards the end and loads of us got up on the stage for shelter and joined in singing with Attila.
There
were no strict borders between these groups - every individual had their own
combination of politics, music tastes and hairstyles - so it’s perhaps
misleading to talk of a discrete, separate anarcho-punk scene. But within this
continuum there was a definite current that was more overtly political and
musically more into the bands like Crass and Conflict.
I
don’t think most people like this would have defined themselves then as anarcho-punks
or even necessarily as anarchists, but there was a shared, loose
anti-authoritarian politics, with a strong focus on being against war and militarism
and for animal rights. People were typically vegan at a time when supermarkets barely
catered for vegetarians - these were the days of homemade houmous.
It
would be misleading too to use the term ‘Crass punks’. Crass had certainly been
very influential earlier on but they were coming to the end of their active
life, playing their final gig in 1984 – a miners’ benefit in Aberdare. At the
thrashier end of things Conflict were now the most influential band, but the
scene had become much more musically diverse. Bands like Chumbawamba with their
harmonies, Slave Dance with their situationist squat funk sound, and No
Defences with their tricky time signatures were a long way from being Crass or
Conflict copyists.
In
Luton, the house band of the scene was Karma Sutra. They had been included on
Conflict’s 1984 Mortarhate compilation ‘Who? What? Why? When? Where?’ with
their track ‘It’s our World Too’ and were later to release an album ‘The Day
Dreams of a Production Line Worker’ on their own Paradoxical Records. Another
Luton band on a similar wavelength, Dominant Patri, had already split up by
1984. The other main ‘anarcho’ band in the town at the time was Penumbra Sigh, who formed I
believe in 1985, and there were also like-minded bands in nearby towns, such as
Medical Melodies in St Albans.
I
sometimes operated the slide projector at gigs for Karma, and I occasionally
turned up at their rehearsal space with my wasp synth – you can hear it on one
of their demo tapes from the period recorded in Luton's Midland Road studio. But mostly I just travelled around with
them and others to gigs – squat gigs in London such as in the Ambulance Station
on the Old Kent Road, a pub in Brixton or a bus station by Kings Cross; gigs in
far off places like a CND benefit supporting Chumbawamba in Stockport, gigs in
nearby towns like Welwyn Garden City and St Albans; gigs with Conflict, Chumba,
Antisect, The Sears, Blyth Power, Flowers in the Dustbin, Slave Dance, State Hate, No
Defences, Sacrilege, Brigandage, Black Mass, The McTells, The Astronauts and many more. But
the music was only part of it and here I want to focus on some of the other
things we got up to.
Chumbawamba, Karma Sutra and Sacrilege, CND benefit at Scunthorpe Baths, 1 March 1985 (I remember burning my hand on the slide projector as well as some great music!)
Hunt Sabbing
‘It’s normally a
quiet Northamptonshire lane – but on this occasion it looks more like a
battlefield. Furious members of the Grafton Hunt are blocking the road with
their horses and refusing to move. Angry hunt saboteurs rev their cars, hoot
their horns and demand that the horses get out of the way… A battered van and
an assortment of old cars appeared and about 30 mainly young protestors dashed
down a track close to the wood. A genuine Cotswold hunting horn, blown by a
saboteur, did a good impression of the Grafton’s rallying horn, while the rest
of the party joined in with fake shouts and calls…There’s another whirling
confrontation and a young female saboteur is lying unconscious in a ploughed
field – knocked flat by a horse… another saboteur is thrown into a stream by
hunt followers, and there are more scuffles’ (When the hunters become the
hunted’, Alex Dawson, Chronicle and Echo, September 10 1984)
The fine art of
preventing hunters killing foxes and other animals dated back to the formation
of the Hunt Saboteurs Association in 1963. Luton had been home to a
particularly militant sabbing group in the early 1970s, from which emerged the
Band of Mercy to take direct action including sabotaging hunt vehicles. This
group, which included Ronnie Lee, was to become one of the founding cells of
the Animal Liberation Front.
The mid-1980s Luton
sabs operated across the Beds, Bucks, Herts and Northantscountryside with occasional forays further
afield. Our nearest fox hunt was the Enfield Chace, in pursuit of which we
would head out of town having scoured Horse and House magazine for intelligence
of where they were to be found of a Saturday morning.
We quite often went out
with the Northampton group, sabbing the Pytchley, Grafton or the Vale of
Aylesbury fox hunts.. There was also a group in Bedford but even though there
were some sound people in it we didn’t entirely trust them because we suspected
that their van driver had dubious fascist connections (she later ended up as a Labour councillor in Milton Keynes, I guess people can change).
The biggest events were
national and regional ‘hits’, when sab groups from across a wide area would
converge on one hunt. Sometimes these would feature spectacular clashes, with
red coated hunters on horseback, hunt followers, police and a hundred or more
brightly haired sabs scuffling and chasing each other, and sometimes a fox, across
fields and through woods. I remember being in the woods near Sole Street in Kent, disrupting the East Kent hunt with sabs from Canterbury, Thanet, Brighton and Surrey in March 1985. It felt like being in a medieval peasants revolt with sabs carrying sticks charging at the hunters deep in the trees - it was the week that Kent miners returned to work at the end of their strike and class war was in the air.
Ideally the hunt would be delayed by stopping it
moving off, or blockading the kennels where the hounds were kept. At the start
of the 1985 season for instance, around 100 sabs blockaded the kennels of the
Cambridgeshire Foxhounds, preventing the van carrying the hounds from leaving
on time [I believe the pictures below are from that day, I recognise a couple of Coventry sabs in them].
The guy on the right rode his horse straight at me, so I was knocked on the ground a couple of seconds after taking this photo!
At other times,
sometimes with as much effect, it would just be a handful of us, hardly seeing
the hunters but distracting the hounds from a distance blowing hunting horns or
spraying anti-mate on the ground to obscure the scent of the fox.
There were also less direct tactics - there were tales of some sabs doing magic rituals to protect the fox before setting out on a Saturday morning. This was the first time I had heard of such 'magical activism' and shortly afterwards I was introduced to the work of Starhawk - hanging around court while watching one of the Unilever trials (arising from a mass animal liberation league raid on a Bedfordshire laboratory) someone was reading 'Dreaming the Dark: Magic, sex and politics' which described the work of witches in the US peace and anti-nuclear movements.
Whatever the numbers out sabbing the conflict was usually uneven with the hunting cavalry facing the animal rights infantry. On my very first hunt, a sab was knocked out by a horse from the
Grafton Hunt near Slapton in Northants. On another occasion I was knocked
flying by a horse, but escaped serious injury. A few years later, in 1991, hunt
saboteur Mike Hill was to be killed by a hunt vehicle used by the Cheshire
Beagles (and indeed in 1995 Jill Phipps, who I remember meeting at that first
hunt at Slapton, was killed by a lorry during an animal rights protest at
Coventry airport).
My first time hunt sabbing - a woman lies injured after being hit by a horse from the Grafton Hunt. Her friend comforts her - note Crass patch on trousers (Chronicle and Echo, September 10 1984).
The police generally
turned a blind eye to any violence inflicted by hunt followers on sabs, and it
was the latter who tended to get arrested if there were any clashes. For
instance in March ’85, eleven sabs were arrested as we tried to stop the Old
Berkeley Beagles hunting hares near Thame in Oxfordshire.
Sometimes the hunt could not be found at all, and there would be fruitless tours of country lanes in the back of a van. Where large numbers of sabs were gathered together with nothing to do the temptation to mischief elsewhere was strong. In March 1986, a big group of sabs who had originally gathered to oppose the Warwickshire hunt headed to Leamington Spa town centre. After a sit down in McDonalds, we moved to a couple of local fur shops, The Sunday Mercury reported (16.3.1986): ‘A crowd of 70 demonstrators caused disturbances throughout the afternoon in the centre of Leamington. Some burst into Brians Specialist Furriers in Regent Street and grabbed expensive fur coats from racks before hurling them outside into the road’. 12 people were arrested including three women from Luton who were detained over the weekend - one of whom was slapped in the face by police for refusing to answer questions. A ‘Leamington Dirty Dozen Defence Fund’ was set up to support them.
Report of Leamington Spa animal rights protest from Luton Animal Rights bulletin no.2, April 1986- one person was later jailed for 6 weeks for assault
On another occasion, in November 1986, Luton sabs headed off for a national hit near Leicester with around 150 sabs from Coventry, Leamington, Birmingham, Sheffield, Northampton, Rugby, Leicester and Lincoln. After chasing after the hunt, aided by CB radios, fog stopped play and the hunt went home early without a kill. The sabs headed into Leicester to join an anti-fur demo, with one of the Luton group being arrested for ABH after a scuffle during a sit in at a fur shop.
Not all sabs were punks of course, but our group was predominantly so, as were others. As well as the sabbing itself, keeping it going involved raising funds for van hire, petrol, materials and the occasional fine. Jumble sales and benefit gigs were the main source of income, including an amazing hunt sabs benefit we put on back at the Luton Library Theatre in 1985 with Chumbawamba, No Defences and Karma Sutra. Karma also played a benefit gig for the Leamington defendants at Luton’s Cock Inn (May 1986) along with Medical Melodies, Herb Garden and Kul.
1985 Luton Hunt Sabs benefit with Chumba, No Defences, Karma Sutra and Penumbra Sigh. What a great gig that was, No Defences' mesmerising performance was fortunately recorded for posterity
Report from Luton Animal Rights newsletter no.4, December 1986 - mentions Leicester fur shop demo following national 'hit': 'We went inside the shop and staged a sit-in, some people stayed outside the shop chanting. While inside some protestors had a slight scuffle with an irate shopkeeper'
Luton hunt sabs jumble sale 1986
Report from Luton Animal Rights newsletter no.1, December 1985 - 'On November 23rd we were one of eleven van loads of sabs who went to sabotage the Pytchley, another vicious gang of fox killers who were hunting near Northampton'
The donkey-jacketed Luton Hunt Sabs march through the mud near Pulloxhill in Bedfordshire, January 1985. I think this may be the day described in diary extract below
'26th January 1985: about 12 of us went in a hired van to Pulloxhill where the Enfield Chace were hunting. When we arrived the local sherrif, sorry police officer, tried to run us out of town. He said we had no right to be there, and told us to drive home. Needless to say we ignored him'
[This is an edited extract, with newly added pictures, from my article - Neil Transpontine, Hyper-active as the day is long: anarcho-punk activism in an English town, 1984-86 in 'And all around was darkness' edited by Gregory Bull and Mike Dines, Itchy Monkey Press, 2017. The full article goes on to look at more Luton activism covering animal rights, anti-apartheid, the peace movement, Stop the City, the miners strike and more. The book is an excellent collection of participant accounts of the scene including The Mob, Crass, Flowers in the Dustbin, anarcho-feminism and Greenham Common etc. You can buy copies of it here and recommend you do if you are at all interested in this kind of stuff]
'Discos for bored teenagers have been stopped after a police raid on a Wearside club. Committee members at Thorney Close Working Men's Club [Sunderland] decided to hold regular discos in the club's concert room for their sons and daughters. About 150 youngsters attended the events but after the raid committee members decided to stop the event... A police spokesman said serious charges would be made under the Licensing Act'
The mid-1990s movement against the British Government's Criminal Justice Act, and in particular it's 'anti-rave' police powers, was one of the more exciting episodes of that time (see my Datacide article 'Revolt of the Ravers: the movement against the Criminal Justice Act, 1993-95). Naturally this movement found musical expression including a number of disparate compilation albums.
The one with perhaps the biggest names - some of them surprizing - is Criminal Justice! (Axe the Act), with tracks from Jamiroquai, Radiohead, The Shamen, Stereo MCs, Aswad, Orbital, Dodgy, Corduroy, EMF and a frankly bizarre Duran Duran cover of Public Enemy's '911 is a joke' in a Beck style. In between the tracks there's spoken work narration from Malcolm McLaren.
The 1995 release was billed as a benefit for the Coalition Against the Criminal Justice Act. Initiated by the Socialist Workers Party, the Coalition was viewed with some suspicion by many of those in the anti-CJA movement though it did manage to get various trade union branches and civil liberties groups to affiliate. I doubt whether many of the acts on this CD were being played out on free party sound systems at the time with the possible exception of Orbital, still fair play to these bands for putting their names and music to the cause.
'Taking Liberties' (Totem Records, 1994) was closer to the actual soundtrack of the movement, featuring mainly electronic/dance music acts including The Orb, The Prodigy, Loop Guru, Tribal Drift, Trans-Global Underground, System 7 (with Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy from Gong), Galliano, Fun-Da-Mental, DreadZone, Ultramarine, The Drum Club, Test Dept and Zion Train. The Shamen and Orbital feature on both this and the compilation above.
Proceeds were ear-marked for the Freedom Network and the sound systems' based Advance Party (who had jointly kicked off the grassroots anti-CJA movement), along with civil rights organisation Liberty and Squall magazine.
The cover art, reflected on the cassette tape version too, was by Jamie Reid.
'NRB:58 - No Repetitive Beats' refers to clause 58 of the initial Criminal Justice Bill which infamously defined raves as including music characterised by repetitive beats. It is basically a compilation of fairly mainstream house music of the period including a mix version by Hacienda DJ Graeme Park. It has some great mainly US/Italian tracks on it by the likes of Loleatta Holloway and The Reese Project (Kevin Saunderson), not sure if any of them specifically endorsed the campaign but there was a promise of a donation from each sale to famous Nottingham based free party sound system DiY Collective and its associated anti-CJA campaign 'All Systems No!'
'For every copy of No Reptetitive Beats sold Network will pay a royalty to DIY/All Systems No! (an advance payment of £3000 was made before the release of the album), the monies will be used by DIY/All Systems No! towards the cost of a sound system which will be on hand to replace any sound equipment seized by the police using draconian powers granted to them by the Criminal Justice Bill... Fight for your right to party'
Finally and on a real DIY tip is 'They call this Justice?' a benefit for the Freedom Network put out on cassette by Spanner in the Works, a label started by London-based Earzone zine
No famous names, but just the kind of bands you would find playing at squat/benefit gigs at this time, like Scum of Toytown, 70 Gwen Party, Electric Groove Temple, Spithead and Blind Mole Rat.
Notice of compilation from Earzone zine
'About the Freedom Network' article from Earzone, with contact addresses of various anti-CJA grops from Football Fans Against the CJA to the Hunt Saboteurs Association
[I have Taking Liberties and NRB:58 on cassette. I have never heard the other two compilations though familiar with some of the bands/tracks. Intrigued in particular by the Malcolm McLaren contributions to Criminal Justice!, would like to listen to them if anybody can help me out. Thanks to nobrightside for Earzone pictures]
